The Science of the Real: The Christian Cosmology of Hans Urs von Balthasar
Stratford Caldecott

 

Throughout the twentieth century the "new physics" of Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg and Shroedinger has proven a congenial breeding-ground for mystical philosophies of all description. It seems that the door of science is open once again to the idea of levels of being, to ontology and final causation - elements in ancient cosmology that remain perennially valid. This possibility is important not least because of the urgent need to uncover (and treat) the deep roots of the environmental crisis, and to foster in our culture a less aggressive, more harmonious relationship with nature.

In this article I want to explore the contribution of Hans Urs von Balthasar to the conception of a contemplative science or science of "qualities" - meaning the qualities of the divine nature reflected in creation. While Balthasar thinks that modern science "has its ready-made metaphysics in Aquinas’ doctrine of order and relation", he seeks to develop Thomism in certain important respects. Balthasar’s reflections on the Christian Trinity and the drama of divine and human freedom - themselves, of course, neither uncontroversial nor "final" - offer an intriguing vision of a distinctively Christian cosmology.

 

The Rise and Fall of Mechanism

Modern science arose within a Christian milieu, bringing in its train a multitude of benefits, as well as the ecological and other crises for which Christians (therefore) must bear some considerable responsibility. That the birth of science in Europe was not a matter of mere chance but was intrinsically related to the nature of the Christian synthesis of Biblical faith and Greek philosophy has been argued persuasively by historians of science from Pierre Duhem to Stanley Jaki.

In order for anything like modern science to arise, it was necessary to believe in both the intelligibility of the cosmos, and its contingency - the fact that it made sense, and the fact that it might not have existed. Intelligibility alone would lead to the priority of deduction over induction, as in the ancient philosophies of nature where an observed reality (such as the motion of the planets) had to be conformed to a priori structures (such as the perfect circle). Contingency, or the dependence of the cosmos on the decision of a Creator to bring into existence one of many equally possible worlds, meant that a certain priority had to be given to empirical observation, in order to find out what form this particular cosmos had in fact taken. The structure and harmony of the world thus revealed could shed light on the wisdom of its Creator. Aspects of that wisdom could be known, perhaps, in no other way.

The seeds of the modern scientific enterprise were sown in the thought of Scholastics such as Albert, Thomas and Bonventure. God, who made the human eye and all that it looks out upon, did so (they believed) in order to reveal something of himself – and to prepare us for the fuller revelation he would make in Christ. The universe as observed by the naked eye is a book of symbols waiting to be read; it is an act of self-expression by God, a theophany imbued throughout with the intelligibility of the divine Logos.

To be real, to exist at all, is therefore to participate in a divine act of communication. Josef Pieper, a twentieth-century follower of St Thomas, puts it this way: "All that exists, because it exists, is ordered towards a knowing mind, even towards the finite human mind. This means, not only is the eye sun-related, the sun as well is eye-related; all that has being is mind-related in its most intrinsic core. Mind and being are interconnected." All things are therefore intrinsically "knowable". At the same time, they are unfathomable because they are rooted in God: their full truth is their nature as creatively known not by us, but by God.

The intellectual and spiritual balance evident in this attitude was not preserved. By separating real from rational entities, science from faith and God from nature, the via moderna of the nominalist philosophers destroyed natural theology and metaphysics. It effectively eliminated the "vertical" or "interior" dimension of reality - the dimension of metaphysical form, final causality and divine providence - and with that virtually the last remaining possibility of a contemplative science. The world’s rational coherence could thereafter only be maintained by supposing a strict conformity with mathematical laws, imposed from without by the Creator or else subsisting without reason (as, later, in postmodernism).

After Galileo, the consciousness of the observer could no longer be recognized as an intrinsic part of reality, and was relegated to the realm of the merely subjective, along with all those "secondary qualities" that did not lend themselves to objective measurement. Science had been transformed into a search for the mathematical models sufficient to account for the motion and transformation of matter. The divorce of faith and reason was consolidated by the Reformation, while the sense of God’s presence in nature became increasingly tenuous and ghostly with the loss of the concept of sacrament.

By the seventeenth century science was an activity with a definite practical purpose. Its goal, as formulated by Francis Bacon, was the "recovery of Eden" through the subjugation of the whole natural realm to the service of man. Scientific method offered results of such an eminently practical kind that it appealed not only to the scientists themselves, but to the new patrons of science, namely merchants and bankers, for whom the most important reality consisted in that which could be accumulated and counted.

The last three hundred years have consequently been an increasingly empirical rather than metaphysical age: priority has been accorded to externals, to quantities, to experimental evidence (although this emphasis on the material externals masked a parallel absolutization of human consciousness as the sole source of certitude and value). Once Charles Darwin had extended the reductionistic method of the new sciences to the human and social realm, emphasizing the continuity between animate and inanimate matter, between animal and human life, the final triumph of nominalism seemed to be only a matter of time. The various animal species were merely names: nothing prevented a gradual drift from one category to another, as each new generation diverged from its predecessors. Hence the fervour with which Darwin in his correspondence with Charles Lyell defended "gradualism" against any suggestion that species might have originated by sudden mutation.

The controversy resurfaces today: Stephen Jay Gould’s "puctuated equilibrium" implies a reality to the species as distinct from the individual. Gould’s neo-Darwinist opponents, such as Daniel Dennett, view this reintroduction of the "intelligible essence" with great suspicion - even when it is couched in terms that suggest a purely material explanation for the essence itself. Faced with evidence against a purely Darwinian evolutionary process, Dennett’s strategy is to respond: "I cannot (yet) see how to refute this objection, or overcome this difficulty, but since I cannot imagine how anything other than natural selection could be the cause of the effects, I will have to assume that the objection is spurious; somehow natural selection must be sufficient to explain the effects."

Of course, this is standard scientific procedure: you cannot abandon a good working hypothesis at the first sign of difficulty. However, more lies behind his enthusiasm for Darwinism than this: it is bound up with an emotional commitment to materialist atheism. If there is a place for the great religious traditions, he writes, it is in "cultural zoos" for those who still need them. Similarly, for Richard Dawkins DNA is the bedrock of reality, and needs no ultimate explanation in terms of final or formal cause: in an abdication of reason that amounts to an unconscious parody of theology he asserts that "DNA itself just is".

The modern critics of Darwin - or at least of the reductionistic sociobiology that grew from his work - have nevertheless been able to draw strength and inspiration from recent developments in the physical sciences, and particularly from developments in the new physics. According to the view of "classical" (nineteenth-century) physics, the universe was like a giant machine. It could best be studied by analysing it into component parts, and isolating these as far as possible under controlled laboratory conditions. The scientist was supposed to be a detached observer, recording what took place in any experiment without personal bias and without interfering in any way with the result.

The twentieth century changed this picture completely. The uncertainty principle formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927 established a new paradigm for scientific knowledge. No one can establish by observation both the position and momentum of a given particle: determine location and you affect velocity. At this submicroscopic level, at least, the observer is no longer detached: he or she has become a participant in the system. The idea of "participation" now runs all the way through physics. According to quantum theory, particles are not solid objects resembling billiard balls; they may act as solids in some circumstances but like waves in others. What they are in themselves, we are now told, is not our concern, for we can know them only insofar as they participate in events with us. Matter is a form of energy; time is inseparable from space; gravity results from the curvature of spacetime by matter.

This participatory physics raises the question of "reality" in an acute form. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, physics is not concerned with a supposed underlying reality, only with hypotheses or theories designed to correlate the observed results of experiments. "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description." This interpretation was strenuously resisted by Albert Einstein, who, with colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen devised in 1935 a thought experiment to place physicists on the horns of a painful dilemma.

In the "EPR" experiment, two particles are correlated by an interaction that takes place before their separation. Thereafter, according to Heisenberg’s principle, the position of one particle canot be determined without instantly determining also the position of the other, no matter where it happens to be - even on the other side of the universe. It is as though information can fly faster than light from one particle to another, "telling" the second particle where to be. This Einstein confronted his fellow-physicists with the choice of either positing some kind of "spooky action at a distance", or abandoning the interpretation that led to it.

Unfortunately for Einstein, not only was "non-locality" eventually established (by Bell’s Theorem) as an intrinsic feature of the quantum world at a theoretical level, but in the early 1980s it was proved by Alain Aspect and others that such "spooky" correlations do in fact occur - moreover the design of the experiment eliminated the possibility that this could be the result of the particles having a definite position before they were measured. Apparently, before being measured a particle was "neither here not there": it was in what came to be called a "superposition" of states, and only the act of measurement "collapsed" the probability wave into one state or the other.

The absurdity of this is illustrated by another thought-experiment, the Cat Paradox devised by Erwin Schroedinger. If the life of a cat is made dependent upon the decay of an atomic nucleus, but that nucleus exists in a superposition of states, then the cat itself must be in a superposition of states - neither alive nor dead - until it happens to be observed.

The Catholic mathematician Wolfgang Smith (following a lead given by Heisenberg) has recently traced these extreme examples of so-called "quantum strangeness" to the loss of the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between form and matter - and more fundamentally to that between actuality and potency. Like Whitehead, he attributes the shipwreck of modern thought to the Cartesian bifurcation between subjective and objective, between res cogitans and res extensa.

This took the place of St Thomas’ subtler metaphysical distinction, and the result was a physical reductionism quite simply incompatible with reality. The incompatibility reveals itself both in the various quantum paradoxes and in the need to construct ever more bizarre ontologies to escape from these. Smith believes that the paradoxes in question simply disappear once we realize that the "physical" world - by which he means the quantitative world, as conceived and measured by the physicist - is mere potentiality in relation to the "corporeal" world perceived in human consciousness. (It occupies an intermediary position between that world and Aristotle’s "prime matter".) "The cat collapses its own state vector, one might say, by the fact that it exists on the corporeal plane."

In this account, the act of measuring - of course basic to modern science - is itself not somehow "neutral" but a creative act and a determination of reality. For the physicist must always employ a corporeal instrument that is "in act" to decide which of two possible states or positions of a particle obtains. In so doing he necessarily collapses what was merely potential into a single definite outcome. Every such collapse of probability into actuality echoes by analogy the divine act of creation in principio - that ultimate discontinuity which forever grounds the unity of the two ontological domains.

Our participation in this "open" universe reflects, in its own way, the creative involvement of God in its creation and conservation. Indeterminacy is resolved in favour of "vertical causation" in place of randomness. Indeed, Smith suggests, quantum discontinuity "can now be understood by analogy to the phenomenon of artistic production" (96). Given a further distinction between ontological realms "below" and "above" the corporeal, Smith thinks that the denial of bifurcation would lead to the recovery of the concept of (non-mathematical) substantial forms in science, and thus a renewed appreciation of the role of "qualities" in the generation of order and design.

In general terms we may say that in the new physics the world is increasingly compared to an organism, rather than a machine. That is to say, it is a pattern of relationships, preserving itself in a meaningful homeostasis or equilibrium in the midst of change, while the matter of which it is composed is in constant flux. The development of the sciences of organization - cybernetics and General Systems Theory - established a conceptual framework for the study of systems as such: that is, of wholes whose properties depend not just on the sum of their parts but on their interrelationships.

But this in turn made theoreticians increasingly aware of the need for some kind of metaphysics; hence the various attempts to find illumination from Eastern religious philosophy, Western hermeticism and German Romanticism. It led also, in a few cases, to the re-application of certain key ideas from the European tradition of St Thomas. But St Thomas is used differently by his various interpreters. It is what Balthasar does with the metaphysics of St Thomas that I intend to explore in the section that follows, before concluding with some reflections on the possible implications of all this for modern physics.

 

A Trinitarian Cosmology

Hans Urs von Balthasar regards the so-called "real distinction" of Thomas between essence and existence in all that is not God as the very centre and criterion of an authentically Christian worldview. Lacking this distinction, Aristotle had taught the eternity of the world; with it, Aquinas was able to make sense of the doctrine of God as Creator - even if the world he creates is without a beginning in time (which Aquinas thought would have been entirely possible if not excluded by Revelation). It was St Thomas, in fact, who gave the clearest philosophical expression to the idea of God as creative principle. Created things only exist because the God in whom they participate is Existence (the actus essendi) and communicates existence to them.

After St Thomas the world is conceived as having a reality which is more than simply that of the "ideas" in the mind of God, even if what it is remains entirely the expression of those ideas. Its reality, its deepest substance, the energy of its existence, its "to be", is continually received from God: its nature is that of a freely given gift. It receives from God even its capacity to receive. (And yet at the same time it does truly receive. It is not simply a mode of God’s knowledge of himself, but a nature in its own right, albeit one which exists perpetually in dependence upon God.) Balthasar writes: "The metaphysics of Thomas is thus the philosophical reflection of the free glory of the living God of the Bible and in this way is the interior completion of ancient (and thus human) philosophy. It is a celebration of the reality of the real, of that all-embracing mystery of being which surpasses the powers of human thought, a mystery in which creatures have access to participation in the reality of God, a mystery which in its nothingness and non-subsistence is shot through with the light of the freedom of the creative principle, of unfathomable love."

Balthasar believes, however, that in the end the full majesty of Being and the gift-nature of creation is revealed fully and can be preserved only in a religion that possesses the doctrine of the Trinity. His emphasis on the importance of "difference" within God as the basis for the reality of the created order resolves a dilemma that has long dogged the Latin tradition. The mystics have always tended to stress the nothingness of creation in comparison to God.

The theologians, on the other hand, have focussed on the power of God to create a world other than himself (indeed, containing creatures endowed with sufficient independence to be able to choose eternal damnation). The first tendency leads to pantheism; the second to dualism. The second is undoubtedly more orthodox, but it leaves a lingering sense that a deeper truth has not yet found expression. Furthermore it has been alleged that the ecological crisis is partly bound up with the failure adequately to grasp the sense in which the world exists "in" God - in other words, to find a way out of this dilemma that does justice both to the requirements of orthodoxy and to the mystics’ experience of union. Balthasar argues that the otherness in unity of love is the only basis for the created otherness from God of things which exist by participation.

The paradoxical inclusion within the godhead of both unity and difference implies, for Balthasar, that the distinction of one person from another deepens in direct proportion to their unity in love (that is also their unity in will and knowledge). "The ‘not’ which characterizes the creature - it is ‘not’ God and cannot exist of itself - is by no means identical with the ‘not’ found within the Godhead. However, the latter constitutes the deepest reason why the creaturely ‘not’ does not cause the analogy of being between creature and God to break down. The infinite distance between the world and God is grounded in the other, prototypical distance between God and God."

In other words, an absolute Monad could not make a world other than itself. The world would have no "place" to be. But because there are Persons in God there can be a world that participates through personhood - and specifically through the personhood of the Incarnate Son - in the very otherness-in-unity of those divine Persons, and the history of that world will be a drama of love, of divine and human eros.

For Balthasar, then, the Incarnation of the Son and the paradoxical Trinity-in-Unity of the Godhead is a mystery revealed only within the Christian tradition, and equivalent neither to the Hindu Trimurti nor to the Plotinian Hypostases which may superficially resemble it. Trinity and Incarnation are bound up together in a way that must - when fully grasped - transform both the metaphysical conception of God and our conception of Being. On this basis Balthasar is able to claim that "the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics for our time."

He certainly intends to "save" whatever may be saved from among the insights of the religions and ancient paganism. But he saves by assuming and transforming those insights. The world may be a symbol and a picture of God to the pagan, but in Christ it becomes his very Body. "The Christians of today, living in a night which is deeper than that of the later Middle Ages, are given the task of performing the act of affirming Being, unperturbed by the darkness and the distortion, in a way that is vicarious and representative for all humanity: an act which is at first theological, but which contains within itself the whole dimension of the metaphysical act of the affirmation of Being." This affirmation of being includes the cosmic hierarchy of forms and meanings that have now become the receptacle of divine glory.

It is the inclusion of the cosmic hierarchy within a christocentric cosmology that finally distinguishes Balthasar’s project from that of the Protestant theologian Colin Gunton, whose account of the "modern", and whose conclusion that we need to integrate modern science within a Trinitarian ontology, are otherwise remarkably parallel. (Coleridge plays a role in his thought analogous to that of Goethe in Balthasar’s.) For Gunton, as for Balthasar, "All particulars are formed by their relation to God the creator and redeemer and to each other. Their particular being is a being in relation, each distinct and unique and yet inseparably bound up with other, and ultimately all, particulars". But Gunton continues, "Their reality consists, therefore - and this is the crucial difference from other theories of substance - not in the universals they instantiate, but in the shape of their relatedness with God and with other created hypostases" (my emphasis). The failure of the medieval synthesis is due to Augustine’s "replacing of christology by Platonic universals" (55), so that when this doctrine "collapses" under the impact of Ockham and others we are left with a world of abstract particulars lacking real relations, held together by the will of God.

Gunton therefore locates himself more in opposition to Aquinas and the Augustinian tradition than Balthasar who, for all his strictures against "Platonism", does in fact present us with a kind of christocentric Platonism, within which the classical tradition may be retrieved: "If we call the incarnate Son God’s primal Idea in creating the universe... (Col. 1:16), this all-embracing primal Idea contains the (primal) ideas of the individual creatures. In the one, exemplary, primal Idea, the incarnate Son, raised from the dead (1:18), all creatures, especially those endowed with freedom, have their own exemplary idea".

Through the Church, the world becomes the "body" of a God who takes up into union with himself all the forms of creation in their ordered hierarchy - as the Church Fathers saw clearly - and brings them to unexpected perfection through his death and Resurrection. "If the cosmos as a whole has been created in the image of God that appears - in the First-Born of creation, through him and for him - and if this First-Born indwells the world as its Head through the Church, then in the last analysis the world is a ‘body’ of God, who represents and expresses himself in this body, on the basis of the principle not of pantheistic but of hypostatic union."

 

A New Science of Living Nature?

What we are considering in this essay is the possibility of what C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls "a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the ‘natural object’ produced by analysis and abstraction [Smith’s "physical" as distinct from "corporeal" world] is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction". "I hardly know what I am asking for," he says. "The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself.

When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation." Balthasar aims to unite the aesthetics of St Thomas with the "gentle empiricism" of Goethe. He believes that a "true science of living nature as, for instance, Goethe strove for in his morphology" is possible; it would "combine the cool precision of scientific research with a constant awareness of the totality apparent only to the eye of reverence, the poetic-religious eye, the ancient sense for the cosmos."

There can be no question of theology dictating to physics (or biology) what it will find. Physical theories cannot be deduced from the data of Revelation: faith cannot take over from reason, or muscle it aside. Nevertheless, theology may not be written off by science as having no bearing on its own methodology, or its conception of an objective world. As David Schindler puts it: "an anticipation of the truth of something like an organismic understanding of the cosmos is already given in our christological faith".

The whole point of the perspective described here is that the connection between subjective and objective is no longer arbitrary (as for Cartesian science) but intrinsic: knower and known, while eternally distinct, belong to one single reality, and the meaning at the centre of that reality is the Person of the Logos. The unity-in-distinction of the Trinity is the basis for an analogy that runs right through creation as a kind of watermark: the analogy of "spousal" union between subject and object, self and other. The life of love revealed in Christ promises to each of us no mere absorption into the Beloved, but our own integrity and fulfilment in the very measure we give ourselves away.

The cultural implications of this principle are endless. In particular, it guarantees the legitimate autonomy of reason, and of scientific research, even as it overcomes the separation between science and religion. If love is the deepest meaning of the objective universe, the scientist and the mathematician are fully vindicated in their intuition that beauty (or "elegance") must somehow be the signature of truth. Central to Balthasar’s thought is the Gestalt that enables a recovery of the notion of substantial form, and it is this which makes beauty possible. In the first volume of The Glory of the Lord, he writes: "every created thing is a manifestation of itself (the more intensively the higher it ranks): the representation of its own depths, the surface of its own ground, the word from its essential core; and upon this essential movement of being (from its interior to its exterior) are founded the good, the true, and the beautiful."

"A being appears, it has an epiphany: in that it is beautiful and makes us marvel. In appearing it gives itself, it delivers itself to us: it is good. And in giving itself up, it speaks itself, it unveils itself: it is true". Beauty unites not only truth with goodness, but also observer with observed - and knowledge in its full sense is found only in this marriage or compenetration of knower and known. Beauty is what makes the true attractive to us; what draws the will towards it. But this means that it is a function of love, a response of love called forth by what is received in the given by one who is disposed to gratitude.

This implies a restoration of the sense of natural interiority, of the metaphysical "depth" to all things, by which the Giver is in the Gift. The world must be given back this sacramental quality, its dimension of mystery, which was too hastily stripped from it by the successors of nominalism. All identities - from that of numbers in mathematics to that of corporeal objects such as apples and pears, and above all human persons - are fundamentally identities-in-relation, existing as gifts one to another, and ultimately as gifts from one divine Person to another. Such a reorientation, he thinks, would spell the final demise of mechanism as the paradigm of cosmic order: the end of seeking to understand a thing by breaking it into parts and reassembling these in a purely extrinsic order.

"We have to feel our way back," he writes; "we have to overcome a certain blindness to the primal value of being. This sick blindness is called Positivism, and it arises from regarding reality as raising no questions, being ‘just there’ - for the phrase ‘the given’ already says too much, since there is no one who ‘gives’. In fact [from a Positivist point of view] the only question that arises is: what can we do with this material?"

Thus the secular conception of the world culminates no longer in contemplation, but in technology, and with the whole gamut of problems caused by the Baconian will to power. Against the "sick blindness" of positivism Balthasar projects the possibility of a visionary science in which empirical observation and quantitative description would be integrated within a metaphysics of gift. The attitude of a science that takes this insight seriously would have to be completely changed; fascination with technology need not usurp the place of contemplative wonder. The power granted to such a science would be no longer the power to degrade and destroy, but the power of beauty to heal and unite.

 

APPENDIX: Transubstantiation?

It is an essential part of Catholic belief that, once the words of consecration have been pronounced in the Mass the substances on the paten and in the chalice cease to be bread and wine and become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. The modern Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats the words of the Council of Trent four hundred years earlier when it refers to the "change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of his blood", and adds, "This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation" (para. 1376).

Neither the Council nor the Catechism define what exactly is meant here by "substance", and thus it cannot be said that the Church has canonized a particular philosophy of being. Nevertheless, it is generally understood that St Thomas Aquinas has come closest to expressing the Catholic mind on this subject, and that his formulations influenced the Council of Trent in its decision to endorse the term transubstantiation. But is that philosophy fully convincing? In particular, can it convince today, after so much progress in the physical sciences?

In order to explain the real change in the elements of the Eucharist, despite the evident lack of change in the appearances of bread and wine, Aquinas has to base himself on an adapted form of the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident. As I understand it, everything between the pure Act of Existence (God) and pure Potency is a kind of mixture of existence and essence. First and in a sense closest to God comes the realm of created Forms (eide, logoi or "archetypes"). This is the world of Intellect and Intelligences (angels, pure spirits). Next comes the realm of corporeal reality, as we observe it by the senses: the world of "accidents" and appearances, the world of the soul, the world of imagination, memory and perception.

After that comes the realm of what Aquinas refers to as "measure", the world of quantity. Let us call this the "physical" as distinct from the corporeal or sensory world. This is the world that modern science began to penetrate with Galileo, for whom it was the realm of "primary" qualities ("secondary" qualities being corporeal attributes such as colour, tone, smell and so on). Deeper than this, and as close as anything can come to pure Potency, is the level of materia prima, which is nothing but the mere possibility of substance.

Form is an act. As Etienne Gilson explains (for example in The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas), the Form of a substance is the act which constitutes the substance as such. The union of a Form with prime matter (the capacity to receive the Form) creates a substantial Form, which is in turn the metaphysical "subject" of the accidents that make up the corporeal being we perceive. Normally, therefore, the corporeal things we see around us are held in existence through their connection with a substantial Form that is "in act" within them, and which raises them from potentiality to actuality.

If the Form of a thing were to be altered or destroyed (assuming that were possible) the appearances and physical reality of the thing would collapse back into potentiality, into materia prima, and lose their actual existence. In the Eucharist, however, the connection with the Forms of bread and wine is severed by the words of consecration, yet the accidents and their underlying "measures" remain. What has happened here, according to Aquinas? God, who is pure Act, maintains them in existence without an intermediary Form in order to establish the Sacrament. God now causes the accidents of bread and wine to inhere simply in the "physical" substrate (what Aquinas calls the "quantity tending to measure", e.g. in SCG Bk 4, Ch. 65), rather than in any substantial Form of bread or wine.

For the accidents cannot be regarded as accidents of the Body and Blood of Christ – which have their own accidents or corporeal reality in heaven. At the same time, the Forms of bread and wine have not simply been destroyed: for in that case, what would be the connection with the Body and Blood of Christ? They have been converted into the Body and Blood – hence the word transubstantiation.

I do not find any conflict here with the findings of modern science, for the findings and hypotheses of science cannot help us discern metaphysical realities that necessarily transcend sensory experience. It may be that the Thomistic account can be questioned on other grounds - but equally it may be deepened by bringing in other considerations.

In the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Thomistic/Aristotelian distinctions seem to have been transformed by a closer integration with Trinitarian theology. Whereas "substance" had previously signified "that which inheres in itself" (contrasted with the "accidents" which inhere in another subject), now the definition of substance becomes more dynamic and relational.

The notion of "substance" as Balthasar uses it is related to that of "figure" or Gestalt - the German word referring to an inner unity or meaning of which some set of phenomena are an expression. The supreme prototype of the revelation of Form (and therefore of Substance) is the Incarnation, the divine Person shining forth in the human nature of Christ. Balthasar discovers the source of this relationship between form and appearance first of all in the dramatic interplay of inner-divine and divine-human freedom; that is, in the Trinitarian Act which is God understood as self-giving love.

The Father lovingly pours out the fullness of his own nature upon the Son and the Holy Spirit. (Here Balthasar’s theology is influenced by that of the modern Orthodox writer Sergii Bulgakov.) The being of the Son is therefore the gift of the Father, and the being of creation is analogously a gift, an expression of the love of the divine persons one for another. Everything that exists in the world is in its deepest essence what God is trying to give in that thing - to give to the Son, to give to the Father. That is its meaning, its essence, the word or logos of which its appearance in the world is an expression. That, in fact, is its substance.

A substance exists within a relationship of persons; it has need of a Creator; it does not "stand alone" but actually consists of the process of giving. In the Mass, Christ’s intention, expressed in the words of consecration (not forgetting that these take their meaning from the context of the whole liturgical action, which is not only a meal but an act of sacrifice), is to give himself to us in the form of food. What is given in the bread and wine - their "substance" - must therefore change.

This is no mere "transignification" but truly transubstantiation, because although it is brought about by a change in meaning (signification) according to Christ’s intention, it is also an objective change in the elements themselves at their deepest level, where they emerge as gifts from the creative will of God. It is God who makes things what they are, God who with his Word determines their true substance, and Jesus Christ is God. Yet the appearances of bread and wine remain, because it is in the shape of food, indeed of bread and wine (not of flesh and blood), that Christ wishes to give himself. On the other hand, in sacrificing himself in this way Christ holds nothing back.

Thus the bread and wine, which are now Christ, contain in a real sense everything that belongs to him, including his living body, in whatever state it currently exists (and it is certainly not "less" than material). So we say that the human body of Christ is present under the species of bread and wine, even though in itself that body remains "at the right hand of the Father", and as such will not return to earth before the end of time.

This way of speaking has several advantages over the more scholastic formulation, while not directly contradicting it. No doubt there are many important issues still to be addressed, but it seems to me to have the potential to make much clearer the relationship between the accidents of bread and wine and the "substance" (or substantial Form) of the Body and Blood.

It helps to explain the Church’s preference for the term "transubstantiation" by shifting the emphasis of the doctrine to the change in divine intention. It also protects against any tendency to reduce the Real Presence to something less than the dynamic self-giving of Jesus in the sacrificial meal.

This is the revised version of an article that appeared in Communio, Fall 1998