263. Real Presence: “Body and Blood, soul and divinity”
263. REAL PRESENCE: “BODY AND BLOOD, SOUL AND DIVINITY”
What are the limitations on Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist? Is it perhaps just His divinity that is present? Or just His humanity? Or just His Body? Or just His soul?
It is absolutely necessary to confess according to the Catholic Faith that the entire Christ is in this sacrament. . . . [W]herever the Body of Christ is, there of necessity must the Godhead be. . . .
On the other hand, His soul was truly separated from His body (when He died). And therefore had this sacrament been celebrated during those three days when He was dead, the soul of Christ would not have been there . . . But since Christ rising from the dead dieth now no more (Rom 6:9), His soul is always really united with His Body. And therefore in this sacrament the Body indeed of Christ is present by the power of the sacrament, and His soul by real concomitance (III,76,1).
“The entire Christ” is present in the Eucharist.
His divinity existed without His humanity before the Incarnation, but ever since the Incarnation His humanity is joined forever to His divinity. His Ascension was not the undoing of His Incarnation. And since the Eucharist is after His Ascension, His humanity is always fully present in it as well as His divinity.
His humanity never existed without His divinity, so it does not exist without His divinity in the Eucharist either.
His body and soul, like ours, existed together, as the matter and form of His humanity, rather than as two separate substances, as Descartes’ anthropology mistakenly describes human nature. But death unnaturally separates the body and the soul; and He really died; therefore St. Thomas says that “had this sacrament been celebrated during those three days when He was dead, the soul of Christ would not have been there” because His body was there and the soul was not in the body. (How concrete and realistic St. Thomas is!)
His human soul did not exist before His human body was conceived in Mary’s womb. Some people confuse His soul either with a pure spirit, which could exist in Heaven before the Incarnation, or with His divinity. But a soul is just as created, as natural, as human, and as finite as a body. In fact a soul is the life of a body. It is not a pure spirit, like an angel. Christ was never an angel. Before the Incarnation He had neither a human soul nor a human body. After the Incarnation He had both a human soul and a human body at every moment and forever. When He died, His human body was still His human body, in the tomb; and His human soul was still His human soul, when it went to the realm of the dead and preached to the Old Testament saints who were waiting there. (See 1 Pet 3:18-20.)
His body and blood were separated whenever he bled, beginning with His circumcision. At His death, His blood was separated from His body in a fatal way. The Eucharist has two elements, bread and wine, not just one, in order to signify this death, by the separation of His Body and His Blood.
Nearly all ancient cultures so connect “life” with either “blood” or “breath” or both that the same word in most ancient languages means both “life” and “blood” or both “life” and “breath” (ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek). Ancient peoples noticed that without blood a body dies, so they naturally connected the blood with the life, or the soul, of the body. (Remember that “soul” means not “pure spirit” but “the life of a body”.) They also connected the breath with the life, for the same reason. It was not bad science because it was not science at all, it was a common—sense concrete identification which was more than just symbolic (if a body loses its blood or its breath it really does literally die) but less than scientific.
So how much of Christ is present in the Eucharist? What do we receive when we receive Him there? (1) His divinity as well as His humanity. (2) Within His humanity, both His Body and His soul. (3) And within His Body, both His Body and His Blood, in the two elements of the sacrament, which remain hidden behind the appearances of bread and wine when they are transubstantiated.