The Sovereign Servant: Transubstantiation as an Exercise of Christ’s Authority over Human Culture

Twenty-five years ago, Germain Grisez introduced a significant alternative to the Scholastic account of transubstantiation in terms of substance and accidents, and in particular to Aquinas’s version thereof. Although Grisez’s specific proposal fails, it exemplifies a broader type of account on which bread and wine are transformed into Christ insofar as, through this transformation, the person of Christ comes to incorporate a new sort of bodily reality. Grisez himself proposed that bread and wine are transformed into new parts of Christ’s natural body. Although his Thomistic critics have good reason to reject this proposal, they fail to disarm his objections to the Thomistic account. In contrast with both, I suggest that the Eucharist can be fruitfully understood as a divinely authoritative, metaphysically robust extension of the Incarnation from the realm of nature to that of culture, on the model of hypostatic union. So understood, it reveals the true meaning of culture by inserting into the heart of human culture an act of cultural creativity—in the mode of self-gift rather than self-assertion—that transcends the capacity of any merely human maker in such a way as to verify the doctrine of transubstantiation. This account presupposes the pervasive role of human making, and therefore of culture, in the constitution of the world. It also, however, presupposes the reality of the natural and moral orders as distinct from the cultural, and the complete dominion of the suffering and risen Christ over His own body, the goods of the earth, and all human culture.