Re: MD Transubstantiation

From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Mon Apr 25 2005 - 17:59:02 BST

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    Anthony, DMB,

    I should point out that, as I said in my first response to Anthony, I do not
    hold with the doctrine of transubstantiation, so I'm not trying to defend
    it. My only point in this discussion was to say that science has no bearing
    on it. Both of you, in using such words as "literally" or "actually" are
    using these words the way a materialist would to interpret the doctrine. The
    Catechism does not use the word "literally", but it does use "real". But of
    course, the "real" to a Catholic is not just the material, and science can
    only be concerned with the material.

    So the larger issue here is that you and the Catholic are speaking different
    languages. This is most obvious when David says:

    "Catholics have their own definition of the word "substance"? Well, ok but
    if we are going to have a discussion I'm going to insist that we speak
    English. You're certainly free to express Catholic "ideas", but you're going
    to have to express them in the only common language we have because I, for
    one, do not speak Catholic."

    Two replies to this are obvious: (1) if you don't speak Catholic, then you
    don't understand Catholicism, so what gives you the right to criticize
    Catholicism?, and (2) since the word "substance" is the trunk of the word
    "transubstantiation", you are not going to understand the doctrine without
    using the word "substance" in the way Catholicism did when it coined the
    word.

    But more generally, the Catholic use of the word "substance" is the usual
    philosophical meaning of the term. Descartes spoke of two substances: mental
    and extended, for instance. The materialist, in this vocabulary, is the one
    who says there is only one substance, matter, and from the domination of the
    materialist outlook, the word "substance" came to mean, in the popular mind,
    matter. Unfortunately, Pirsig only appears to know this popular meaning,
    mistakenly assumes that that is the philosophic meaning, and so David gets
    confused.

    Or as Anthony says:
    "as far as transubstantiation is concerned, the priest in a Roman
    Catholic Church after blessing the bread and wine, doesn't qualify, for
    instance, the statement "this bread is the body of Christ" with the words
    "but only in the sense of a being a non-scientifically known substance". He
    simply states "this bread is the body of Christ". It is publicly given as a
    literal truth in the Catholic mass."

    Well, he also doesn't go into the tortuous teaching of what "triunity" means
    when he says "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost". The mass is a ritual, not a
    classroom. But anyway, what I want to focus on here is the phrase "literal
    truth". As mentioned, the Catholic teaching of the doctrine of
    transubstantiation does not use the word "literal". The doctrine was
    developed before the materialist era, and it is only recently that "literal
    truth" came to mean "physically true". In the Middle Ages, the physical was
    still seen as participating in spirit. Hence a sacrament was where the
    connection between the physical and spiritual was especially celebrated. The
    modern age can be defined as the period (which we are still in) when the
    physical came to be considered as autonomous, as "just there". For
    science -- as opposed to scientism -- *it doesn't matter* whether one
    thinks of the physical as autonomous or not, it just studies it, and that is
    why there is no conflict. The language of the doctrine stems from the
    pre-modern meanings of "physical" and "substance". In that language,
    "substance" of the physical was the ultimate meaning (or value) of the
    physical, which was seen representationally. Hence when the substance is
    changed, the non-physical meaning is what gets changed -- it is not a change
    from one physical form to another, and hence science has no bearing on the
    doctrine. Thus you are seeing a conflict because you have mistranslated
    "change in substance" to mean "change in physical form", but that is not its
    meaning.

    One might note in this regard how the liberal Protestant theology of the
    nineteenth century bought into this materialist meaning of the word
    "literal". One reaction to that was the rise of fundamentalism in the early
    years of the 20th century, which in a kind of "in your face" attitude
    claimed that the Bible had to be taken literally in this modernist
    materialist sense. Thus this kind of literalism results both in the flatland
    of scientific materialism and in the flatland of fundamentalist religion.
    The problem here is that the criticisms you and others are making of theism
    are coming out of this flatland vocabulary. Until you can recover to some
    extent the pre-modern vocabulary in which the doctrines of theism developed,
    you simply don't understand them, and without that understanding, have no
    business criticizing them.

    This is not to say they shouldn't be criticized. One of the issues between
    Protestantism and Catholicism, after all, was this doctrine. But it is a
    mistake to see this criticism as coming from science. It is a very different
    thing to claim that intellect and theism are in conflict than it is to say
    that science and theism are in conflict.

    - Scott

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