The Novelty of Transubstantiation: The Presence of Christ in the Eucharist | Fr. James Brent, O.P. (duplicate?)
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
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🗓️ 13 January 2021
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
This lecture was delivered to the William & Mary chapter on October 5, 2020. Fr. Brent's lecture concludes around 35:05. The rest of the recording is a Q&A session with students from the William & Mary Thomistic Institute chapter.
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About the speaker:
Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P. was born and raised in Michigan. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Saint Louis University on the epistemic status of Christian beliefs according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He has articles in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Natural Theology, in the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas on “God’s Knowledge and Will,” and an article forthcoming on “Thomas Aquinas” in the Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. He earned his STL from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, and was ordained a priest in the same year. He taught in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America from 2010- 2014, and spent the year of 2014-2015 doing full time itinerant preaching on college campuses across the United States.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. |
| 0:03.3 | For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org. |
| 0:11.1 | So we're going to go through a series of questions about the Eucharist and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. |
| 0:20.0 | And let's begin with a place that's maybe the most natural, |
| 0:24.6 | and that is with the change that takes place in the bread and the wine on the altar at the mass. |
| 0:34.2 | Okay, there's a change that takes place during the Eucharistic liturgy. And that change is called |
| 0:41.2 | by St. Thomas Aquinas transubstantiation. And the church has taken over that word and that language |
| 0:48.0 | and has used it ever since. And he describes transubstantiation as a kind of change that's totally unique. It's unlike |
| 0:59.1 | anything else that takes place in nature. It's not the same as creation, but it's also not the |
| 1:05.7 | same as any of the species of change that Aristotle identifies as happening in things around us. |
| 1:13.1 | It's not a locomotion. It's not a substantial change or corruption, certainly not of the |
| 1:19.4 | natural kind, for reasons we'll see why. It's not just a change of qualities. It's not just a change |
| 1:25.8 | of quantities. And it's not a change of place. |
| 1:30.3 | Okay? It's a totally unique kind of change called transubstantiation. |
| 1:36.3 | Why is it unique? Here's how we can understand it. |
| 1:40.3 | The substance of the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Christ, while the accidents of bread and wine remain. |
| 1:51.3 | So we need to be clear on what the terms substance and accidents means. |
| 1:56.1 | What do those terms mean? |
| 1:57.1 | In the philosophy of Aristotle, the substance is what a thing is. |
| 2:01.6 | It's, you could say it's essence, or you might say it's natural kind. |
| 2:05.6 | So the substance of the, your dog, phyto is going to be dog, or maybe a more specific |
| 2:12.6 | kind of dog, like German Shepherd. That's what the animal is. And then there are the accidents, which are the |
... |
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