"What is the physical substance of the bread after it is blessed by a priest?"

Question from a Protestant that I am trying to give the correct answer to. The key is "physical". I am trying to explain the real and substantial presence as it relates to sacramentum et res. Anyone have a good, clear, orthodox answer?

Physical substance is a meaningless term.

Can you explain why, Father?

I'm trying to get across how the Church has defined "physical" as opposed to how most Protestants, (including this one.), use the term, concerning this issue. Pope Paul VI I believe, used the term "physical reality" in defining how Christ whole, including His physical body, becomes the eucharist, but I'm just not sure how to put it clearly in a specific answer to his question. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Physical is an equivocal term. The question is even more confusing. What is the physical substance of a man after the man doesn't exist anymore. That would be an equivalent question. Even apart from the "of the bread" referring to a nonexisting thing, what does it mean to say the physical substance of bread, or the physical substance of a man. The bread is a substance, the man is a substance. He doesn't have substance, he is one, well at least in the sense that substance is traditionally used.

So does he mean by substance what? Matter, essence? And what does he mean by physical? Some merely mean "material, tangible reality" Then they mean the same thing by substance, so what is the material matter of bread...

It might be easier if you explained that these terms have multiple meanings and you are not sure which one he means, and ask him what he means.

Thank you. I will do just that if the conversation continues.

This is not a good way to put it.

Please do check out precisely what Pope Paul Vi wrote, since he expressly rules out what most people would think of by “physical.”

This is what I had looked at...

"As a result of transubstantiation, the species of bread and wine undoubtedly take on a new meaning and a new finality, for they no longer remain ordinary bread and ordinary wine, but become the sign of something sacred, the sign of a spiritual food. However, the reason they take on this new significance and this new finality is simply because they contain a new "reality" which we may justly term ontological. Not that there lies under those species what was already there before, but something quite different; and that not only because of the faith of the Church, but in objective reality, since after the change of the substance or nature of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, nothing remains of the bread and wine but the appearances, under which Christ, whole and entire, in His physical "reality" is bodily present, although not in the same way that bodies are present in a given place."- Pope Paul VI in Mysterium Fidei

I have done some reading regarding St. Thomas Aquinas regarding his assertion that Christ is not "locally" physically present in the Eucharist. Is this what Paul VI was referring to when he stated, "not in the same way that bodies are present in a given place."

Yes.

Now I only need to read the St. Thomas text about 20 more times and I might just understand it!

I also struggle with this very much.

I read Aquinas and I am just entirely unclear on the way he is using certain words.

But, I am able to take this away from my "studies" so far:
What are the essential parts of Christ? What makes Christ, Christ?
Whatever the answer to those questions, that is the consistency of the Eucharist.

(someone correct me if I am wrong)

Christ doesn't have essential parts.

Ott, 'The Blessed Eucharist and Human Reason' 12-Apparent contradictions between reason and the Eucharistic dogma.

That is helping me...

cough...Abbot Vornier's Key to Understanding of the Eucharist...cough

I thought that was the best exposition of some of the more nuanced matters here while remaining accessible. Doesn't address, at least explicitly every possible question (like what exactly happens when a host turns to mold...even Aquinas couldn't answer that to his own satisfaction though!)

Oh, that looks good. Sounds like his would be a sort of Thomistic treatise on the subject that I could understand. I've never heard of him, but it's on my buy list, on my next trip to the Catholic bookstore. Thanks!

From Wikipedia...

Eastern Christianity

The Eastern Catholic, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches, along with the Assyrian Church of the East, agree that in a valid Divine Liturgy bread and wine truly and actually become the body and blood of Christ. They have in general refrained from philosophical speculation, and usually rely on the status of the doctrine as a "Mystery," something known by divine revelation that could not have been arrived at by reason without revelation. Accordingly, they prefer not to elaborate upon the details and remain firmly within Holy Tradition, than to say too much and possibly deviate from the truth. However, there are official church documents that speak of a "change" (in Greek μεταβολή) or "metousiosis" (μετουσίωσις) of the bread and wine. "Μετ-ουσί-ωσις" (met-ousi-osis) is the Greek word used to represent the Latin word "trans-substanti-atio",[65][66] as Greek "μετα-μόρφ-ωσις" (meta-morph-osis) corresponds to Latin "trans-figur-atio". Examples of official documents of the Eastern Orthodox Church that use the term "μετουσίωσις" or "transubstantiation" are the Longer Catechism of The Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church (question 340) and the declaration by the Eastern Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem of 1672:

"In the celebration of [the Eucharist] we believe the Lord Jesus Christ to be present. He is not present typically, nor figuratively, nor by superabundant grace, as in the other Mysteries, nor by a bare presence, as some of the Fathers have said concerning Baptism, or by impanation, so that the Divinity of the Word is united to the set forth bread of the Eucharist hypostatically, as the followers of Luther most ignorantly and wretchedly suppose. But [he is present] truly and really, so that after the consecration of the bread and of the wine, the bread is transmuted, transubstantiated, converted and transformed into the true Body Itself of the Lord, Which was born in Bethlehem of the ever-Virgin, was baptized in the Jordan, suffered, was buried, rose again, was received up, sits at the right hand of the God and Father, and is to come again in the clouds of Heaven; and the wine is converted and transubstantiated into the true Blood Itself of the Lord, Which as He hung upon the Cross, was poured out for the life of the world.


I consider myself a Byzantized Latin...

It does make your head hurt less.