Category: Christology

 I have been reading Frithjof Schuon off and on since the mid-'70s.  But this is my first weblog entry that mentions him. I don't expect it will be my last.

The orthodox, Chalcedonian, view of Christ is that he is at once fully divine and fully human, true God and true man, and thus one substance (hypokeimenon, suppositum) in two natures. The doctrine presents quite the challenge to the discursive intellect: how can one thing have two natures, when each nature includes attributes logically incompatible with attributes included in the other nature? For example, how could one individual substance be both omnipotent and not omnipotent, impassible and passible, immortal and mortal, necessary and contingent, and so on?

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that on the underlying Aristotelian general-metaphysical framework, the natures in question are individual natures; they are not universals.  This has to be the case with respect to the divine nature since this nature cannot be multiply exemplified. (A universal, by definition, is multiply exemplifiable.) God cannot possibly be an instance of the universal, Godhood, or a Platonic participant in Godhood.  If he were, then God would be dependent on something other than himself to be what he is, contrary to the divine aseity. The divine substance is (identically) his nature. Something analogous holds for Socrates and  Plato as well, despite their non-aseity. Neither exemplifies or participates in a universal Manhood; each is in some sense identical to his individual nature.  When we come to Christ we have two radically different individual natures that are somehow both one with each other and one with the substance of which they are the two natures. How make sense of the double duality in this unity and the unity in this double duality?  

The various Christological heresies may be viewed as good-faith attempts to make sense of the two natures conundrum. Fides quarens intellectum, and intellectum, understanding, does not abide logical contradictions or what appear to be such. Eager to avoid contradiction, theologians fell into heresy. The monophysites solved the problem by maintaining that Christ has only one nature, the divine nature.  And now we come to a brilliant observation of Schuon that had never occurred to me:

The justification of the monophysites appears, quite paradoxically, in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: it seems to us that it would be appropriate to apply to the Eucharistic elements what is affirmed dogmatically of Christ, namely, that he is "true man and true God"; if this is so, one could equally admit that the Eucharist is "true bread and true Body" or "true wine and true Blood" without compromising its divinity. To say that the bread is but an appearance is to apply to the Eucharist the doctrine —- judged heretical—of the monophysites, for whom Christ is, precisely, only apparently a man since he is really God; now just as the quality of “true man” in Catholic and Orthodox doctrine does not preclude Christ from being “true God”, so should the quality of “true bread” not preclude the host from being “true Body” in the minds of theologians, all the more so as both things — the created and the Uncreated — are incommensurable, which means that the physical reality of the elements does not exclude their divine content, any more than the real corporeality of Christ prevents the presence of the divine nature. ("The Mystery of the Two Natures" in The Fullness of God, 145-146)

What Schuon is telling us is that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is structurally similar to the monophysite heresy.  Now what the monophysites actually maintained is a matter of debate among scholars; so to keep this discussion manageable I will just assume that monophysitism is the doctrine Schuon says it is, namely the doctrine that (i) there is one physis, one nature, in Christ and that this nature is the divine nature, and that consequently (ii)  Christ is only apparently a man.  The orthodox consider this view heretical because the orthodox line is that Christ is true God and true man. He is really divine and really a man, as opposed to really divine and only apparently a man.

What Schuon is telling us, then, is that if you reject the monophysite Christology, then "it would be appropriate to" also reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist,  and if you accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, then "it would be appropriate to" also accept the monophysite Christology.  I now turn to the details.

The Eucharistic elements are bread and wine.   If the bread at the moment of consecration in the mass becomes the body of Christ, what happens to the bread? And if the wine becomes the blood of Christ, what becomes of the wine? According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the bit of bread and the quantity of wine cease to exist: they are converted into the body and blood of Christ. The conversion is a substantial, not an accidental, change. A substantial change occurs when a thing, an individual or primary substance (prote ousia), either comes into or passes out of existence. An accidental change occurs when a substance, self-same over time,  alters in respect of one or more accidents.  Transubstantiation is so-called because one substance (a bit of bread) is converted into and replaced by a numerically different substance, a bit of flesh.  The accidents, however, remain the same through the conversion: what was bread and is now, after the consecration, the body of Christ,  continues to look, smell, taste, etc. like ordinary bread, and similarly for the wine. The sensible qualities, the accidents, remain the same while the underlying substances are different. 

Transubstantiation is a difficult doctrine, to put it mildly, and I may in subsequent entries set forth some of the perplexities. For now I am merely reporting on Schuon's suggestion.  I take him to be saying that if the real presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements is understood in terms of transubstantiation, according to which the Eucharistic elements after the consecration merely appear to be ordinary bread and wine, then one may and perhaps should say the same thing about the real presence of God the Son in the flesh-and-blood man, Jesus Christ: he is really of only one nature, the divine, and he is only apparently a man. 

Corrigendum (6/3)  I wrote above, "Transubstantiation is so-called because one substance (a bit of bread) is converted into and replaced by a numerically different substance, a bit of flesh." But that's not quite the right way to put it. The numerically different substance that replaces the bit of bread is not a bit of flesh, but the glorified body of Christ in heaven.  And as emerged in the comment thread, this glorified body of Christ possesses a human soul and is one with the Second Person of the Trinity.  But of course this correction only adds to our difficulties in understanding the Transubstantiation doctrine. What the doctrine implies is that the process of transubstantiation is not the transmutation of a physical primary substance, the communion wafer, into a numerically different physical primary substance, but into a meta-physical, super-natural substance  which is, nonetheless, not wholly spiritual because Christ in heaven retains his earthly body, but in a glorified, spiritualized form!