Corpus Christi 2025: The Anglican Eucharistic Reality

These famous lines were penned by Queen Elizabeth I in 1554 in Woodstock Palace, some four years before she became queen.¹ The reason that they have proved popular among Anglicans through subsequent centuries is most likely that, for many, they seem to capture something of the characteristic Anglican commitment to a firm belief in respect of the Eucharistic reality on the one hand, while exhibiting a marked reticence in respect of how that reality should be understood in philosophical terms on the other. In doing this, a certain parallel can be found with Eastern Orthodoxy, which has used the Greek word metousiosis in lieu of the Roman Catholic one of transubstantiation, but does so in a deeply distinctive and far more epistemically reticent way.²

Paradoxical as it might at first seem, there may be no better time to think upon what all this means than when we celebrate Corpus Christi – a most definitely Anglo-Catholic thing to do! Upholding robustly as we do, within this ecclesial identity, the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist, we do well to ponder something of how we can understand this within the Anglican tradition, even when – as a practical matter (just as at a service of Benediction) we are likely to be moved more by its affective power than abstract ratiocination about it. 

At its heart, this liturgy invites us to dwell upon and contemplate with appropriate adoration the utterly extraordinary mystery that is presented to us in the Eucharist and the sheer enormity of what it means that Christ is present to us in it. 

As Pusey wrote, in is famous sermon on the Eucharist of 1843, the year before this parish was founded: “The Eternal Word so took our flesh into Himself, as to impart to it His own inherent life; so then we, partaking of It, that life is transmitted on to us also, and not to our souls only, but our bodies also, since we become flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bone, and He who is wholly life is imparted to us wholly.”³

These words surely bring out the profundity of what we believe, but how are we to try and understand it?  

The approach, formally proclaimed as a doctrine by the Roman Catholic Church under the term Transubstantiation, is one historically very important way of seeking to lift the veil of this mystery. It famously deploys the intellectual resources of Thomas Aquinas using the vernacular of Aristotelian language – yet in doing so, there is a deep paradox. 

The characteristically crisp words of that most robust of Thomists, Herbert McCabe OP, made this very clear when he pointed out that: “Aristotle could have made no sense of the notion of transubstantiation. It is not a notion that can be accommodated within the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy; it represents the breakdown of these concepts in the face of a mystery.” 

Nonetheless, Fr McCabe went on to say that: “This is not, in my opinion, a reason for ditching Aristotelian philosophy (there may be good reasons for doing this, but this is not one of them) for I believe that important theological ideas are invariably expressed through the breakdown of philosophical concepts. Theology is done not within a philosophical system but at its margin.” ⁴

McCabe then suggests an intriguing parallel between the mystery of the Eucharist and that of the creation, saying: “consider the proposition that God made the world. We have a special name for this making, we call it ‘creation’, but it is not difficult to see that creation names an Aristotelianly impossible kind of making, just as transubstantiation names an Aristotelianly impossible kind of change; and for approximately the same reason.  To make something, in Aristotelian terms, is to actualize the potentialities inherent in some material…”

In other words, within the world of our experience: “When something has been made, it always makes sense to ask what it is made of or what it is made out of, (words) that correspond roughly to making by accidental and making by substantial change) – i.e., what was it that had the potentiality of being this thing, what did you make a difference to in order to produce this?” But “…in these terms we can make no sense of the notion that God made the whole universe. There is evidently nothing for the universe to be made of or made out of; creation could not have made any difference to anything- there was nothing for it to make a difference to. If God created the world, he operated at a different level, or in a different dimension, from making as we understand it (in the world of our present experience).”

If we can try to keep this illustration in mind, it can help us understand the way in which the notable Anglo-Catholic, Eric Mascall, approaches the Eucharistic mystery.⁵

He seeks to have us start with what is of supreme importance as we think about the Eucharist; in that, once the elements are consecrated, they belong not only to the natural but to the supernatural order. Accordingly, “they should be understood to nourish us for the beatific vision to come and orientate us towards it.” And here we must remember that grace does not destroy nature but perfects and supernaturalizes it in subservience to the timeless eschatological reality found in God and the redemption effected by the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ.  

As Mascall put it: “Even the natural properties of the elements and the natural life of man which (the elements) nourish are now orientated to the beatific vision and subservient to it.” For “neither on the natural nor on the supernatural level are beings to be thought of as merely subjects isolated from all other beings and encapsulated in their qualities. They are the subjects not only of qualities but also of relations, and in virtue of these relations they are incorporated into the living and developing structure of the created universe.”

It is when we approach the Eucharistic reality, with such considerations in mind, that we can perhaps see something of an answer to the concerns so prominent during and after the Reformation, when many questioned how the living, ascended and glorified personal Christ could be identified with the lifeless impersonal objects of bread and wine. 

While there have been some post-Reformation Catholic writers who did indeed seem to hold that, in the Eucharistic elements, Christ was actually reduced to the condition of a lifeless material object, this notion cannot be correct. 

To quote Mascall again, in the consecrated Eucharistic elements: “all the natural qualities of bread and wine remain, but what is of supreme importance is that the elements now belong not only to the natural but to the supernatural order,” and that in consequence, they nourish and orientate us as faithful communicants not only to our “earthly end but to the resurrection and the beatific vision.” And he further argues that: “what is supremely important about an object, in the place which it holds and the finalities to which it is directed and the energies which it exerts in the total order of God’s creation, can rightly be called its substance,” and that in this unique instance, “It is not that any of the natural qualities or relations of either element have been lost or destroyed by the consecration; but they are no longer the supremely important aspect of it, they no longer manifest its ultimate reality, its substance.”

Here it is important to remember that, for Aquinas in contradistinction to Aristotle, “the first mover was the God of Judaism and Christianity, the creator and sustainer without whose knowledge not even a sparrow falls to the ground. Again, St  Thomas changes the Aristotelian doctrine of soul and body as respectively the form and the matter of a human being, in order to maintain the survival of the individual after death. It is not surprising, therefore, if in order to formulate a satisfactory doctrine of the Eucharistic presence, he handled the Aristotelian doctrine of substance and accidents with equal brutality.”

Perhaps an initially disconcerting illustration that Mascall offers can, in fact, be helpful. It picks up on the first point made by Fr McCabe earlier: “in virtue of the creative efficient causality of God. Whether we are to say that the consecrated host is bread is rather like asking whether a five-pound note is paper; of course it is, but that is not the really important thing about it, that is not what its status in the world is now intended to be by the Creator (in the case of the host) or the Treasury (in the case of the note).”

Mascall further addresses specifically: “what the twenty-eighth of the Anglican Articles of Religion was worried about,” which was, “that transubstantiation has often been conceived in terms of destruction instead of transformation and elevation.” He then argues that even when it is conceded that, “the Aristotelian metaphysic breaks down in spite of all St Thomas’s efforts to subject it to his purposes as a theologian” nonetheless, when, “transubstantiation is seen not as a destruction of anything that made it right to call the unconsecrated host bread, but as its elevation to a supernatural order of being in which, (while everything in virtue of which it was called bread remains,) it has received a vastly higher status, so that to go on calling it bread is not so much false as irrelevant.”

In such a perspective, awe is indeed appropriate in the face of the reality presented to us in the Eucharist as we apprehend that indeed here: “types and shadows have their ending,” and “faith, our outward sense befriending, makes our inward vision clear.”

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1 When Elizabeth was in fact being held as a prisoner by her half sister, Queen Mary, on suspicion of plotting against her.

2 The declaration of the 1672 Eastern Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem states: “When we use the word metousiosis, we by no means think it explains the mode by which the bread and wine are converted into the Body and Blood of Christ, for this is altogether incomprehensible… but we mean that the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of the Lord, not figuratively or symbolically, nor by any extraordinary grace attached to them… but… the bread becomes verily and indeed and essentially the very true Body of the Lord, and the wine the very Blood of the Lord.” (See, J.M. Neale, History of Eastern Church, Parker, Oxford and London, 1858)

3 “The Holy Eucharist A Comfort to the Penitent”, Oxford: Parker Society, 11.

4 With admirable clarity, McCabe recognises the profound difficulty that, “For better or worse, Aristotle and Aquinas have chosen to describe change in terms of potentialities that are actuated first in one way, then in another by successive actualities. What possible sense inside that tradition can we make of a change in which, as Aquinas puts it, there is no potential element? How can terms that have been devised for use in a system that calls for actuality and potentiality in all changes be used to claim that there is a change where no potential element is to be found?’ See his article “Transubstantiation: A reply to G. Egner”, New Blackfriars, Vol. 53, No. 631 (December 1972), pp. 546-554.)

5 E. L. Mascall writing in New Blackfriars, Vol. 53, No. 631, December 1972, pp. 539-546.