I would have liked to write an essay on the ideas of transubstantiation and Real Presence for this week’s class, which was on the Eucharist. What I’ve realized, though, is that to try to describe real presence in the terms of philosophy is almost a denial of it. Perhaps it is a mark of how much has changed that I prefer to leave this sacrament, along with the others, a mystery.

Some might point out that if I am averse to scholasticism (which may well have gotten us in this mess by trying to apply a concept of substance found in Aristotle’s too-many-times-translated lecture notes), the Roman Catholic Church is not exactly the place to be. Perhaps, but Protestantism is even more reliant on reason: having rejected the authority of the Church to teach (what’s known as the Magisterium), Protestants hold their doctrine together solely on the basis of reason. I’ve written elsewhere against reason, or rather rationalism, which is the position that reason, by itself, can completely describe everything there is to know about reality, so I won’t go into that here.

One of the things I am still trying to figure out is the role of reason. Although I reject the rationalism inherent to Protestantism, I can’t go as far as some former evangelicals (like Franky Schaeffer) as to join the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, which tends to be even more mystical than the Roman Catholic Church. Yet many of Rome’s doctrines that I find bothersome (birth control and priestly celibacy, for instance) are based on natural law (i.e., reason). I’ve been talking to a lot of Catholics about this. Fayth, I think, had the best explanation for why we need rational doctrines, which is that they can protect us from error. In other words, truth ought to be answerable to reason, yet reason cannot be used to define God or even physical reality.

I see that I’ve strayed into the exact sort of metaphysical discussion that I hoped to avoid. The bottom line, however, is that I refuse to look at something as important as the Eucharist in a linear, rationalist way. When Christ said, “This is my body, broken for you,” the this was so many things: the specific piece of bread he was breaking, the action of breaking the bread and sharing it, the Passover symbol of bread, and even the very idea of food. Let the theologians and geometers squabble over whether is is symbolic or not: I want to let the living God speak to me.