the power of the priesthood at the expense of the rights of the laity and in plain violation of the
command of Christ: "Drink ye all of it" (Matt. 26:27).
The doctrine of transubstantiation is the most characteristic tenet of the Catholic Church of
the middle age, and its modern successor, the Roman Church. It reflects a magical supernaturalism
which puts the severest tax upon the intellect, and requires it to contradict the unanimous testimony
of our senses of sight, touch and taste. It furnishes the doctrinal basis for the daily sacrifice of the
mass and the power of the priesthood with its awful claim to create and to offer the very body and
blood of the Saviour of the world. For if the self-same body of Christ which suffered on the cross,
is truly present and eaten in the eucharist, it must also be the self-same sacrifice of Calvary which
is repeated in the mass; and a true sacrifice requires a true priest, who offers it on the altar. Priest,
sacrifice, and altar form an inseparable trio; a literal conception of one requires a literal conception
of the other two, and a spiritual conception of one necessarily leads to a spiritual conception of all.
Notes.
A few additional remarks must conclude this subject, so that we need not return to it in the
next volume.
- The scholastic terms transsubstantiatio, transsubstantiare (in Greek metousivwsi", Engl.
transubstantiation, Germ. Wesensverwand-lung), signify a change of one substance into another,
and were introduced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The phrase substantialiter converti was
used by the Roman Synod of 1079 (see p. 559). Transsubstantiatio occurs first in Peter Damiani
(d. 1072) in his Expos. can. Missae (published by Angelo Mai in "Script. Vet. Nova Coll." VI.
215), and then in the sermons of Hildebert, archbishop of Tours (d. 1134); the verb transsubstantiare
first in Stephanus, Bishop of Autun (1113–1129), Tract. de Sacr. Altaris, c. 14 ("panem, quem
accepi, in corpus meum transsubstantiavi"), and then officially in the fourth Lateran Council, 1215.
See Gieseler, II. ii. 434 sq. (fourth Germ. ed.). Similar terms, as mutatio, transmutatio, transformatio,
conversio, transitio, had been in use before. The corresponding Greek noun metousivwsi" was
formally accepted by the Oriental Church in the Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogilas, 1643, and
later documents, yet with the remark that the word is not to be taken as a definition of the manner
in which the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ. See Schaff’s Creeds
of Christendom, II. 382, 427, 431, 495, 497 sq. Similar expressions, such as metabolhv, metabavllein,
metapoiei'n, had been employed by the Greek fathers, especially by Cyril of Jerusalem, Chrysostom,
and John of Damascus. The last is the chief authority quoted in the Russian Catechism (see Schaff,
l.c. II. 498).
All these terms attempt to explain the inexplicable and to rationalize the irrational—the
contradiction between substance and accidents, between reality and appearance. Transubstantiation
is devotion turned into rhetoric, and rhetoric turned into irrational logic. - The doctrine of transubstantiation was first strongly expressed in the confessions of two
Roman Synods of 1059 and 1079, which Berengar was forced to accept against his conscience; see
p. 557 and 559. It was oecumenically sanctioned for the whole Latin church by the fourth Lateran
Council under Pope Innocent III., a.d. 1215, in the creed of the Synod, cap. 1: "Corpus et sanguis
[Christi] in sacramento altaris sub speciebus panis et vini veraciter continentur,
TRANSSUBSTAN-TIATIS PANE IN CORPUS ET VINO IN SANGUINEM, POTESTATE
DIVINA, ut ad perficiendum mysterium unitatis accipiamus ipsi de suo, quod accepit ipse de nostro.
Et hoc utique sacramentum nemo potest conficere, nisi sacerdos, qui fuerit rite ordinatus secundum
claves Ecclesiae, quas ipse concessit Apostolis et eorum successoribus lesus Christus."