EUCHARISTIC ACCIDENTS. - These are the appearances of bread and wine which, remaining unchanged after transubstantiation (v.), constitute as it were a mysterious "receptaculum" of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, thus making sacramental presence possible (v. EUCHARIST).
The nature of the e. a. has been much discussed by philosophers and theologians, because, once the total conversion of the substance of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ is admitted by faith, the problem arises: what is the concrete reality of the dimensions, color, taste, and the other sensible phenomena, which keep identical the properties they had when they were united to their substance? The Cartesian theologians (Maignan, Drouven, Witasse), out of a need for system, had to answer that these are not objective realities, but modifications of the senses and of the surrounding bodies produced miraculously (a kind of docetism of the accidents). Some atomists of the 19th century (Tongiorgi and Palmieri) believed they could explain them by the force of resistance proper to bodies, which would be produced by God there where the molecules of the bread and wine exercised it. Franzelin, indulging in Leibnizian dynamism, thinks that they are the secondary forces of the bread and wine, a kind of energy (ἐνέργημα) surviving the mutation of the central nucleus and divinely conserved.
The Scholastics, on the other hand, having accepted the Aristotelian doctrine of the real distinction between accident and corporeal substance, and having admitted transubstantiation by faith, logically concluded that the appearances of the bread and wine, after the consecration, retain the same nature as before, that is, that the dimensions, color, taste, etc. are the same objective realities which previously had the substance of the bread and wine as the subject of inhesion. This inference was confirmed by the Church at the Council of Constance (1415), when, against Wycliffe (d. 1382), it maintained that the e. a., understood in the Peripatetic sense, remain without a subject (Denz-U, n. 582). This classic document is corroborated by analogous declarations of the Council of Trent (Denz-U, n. 884), of the Roman Catechism, and of the encyclical Mirae caritatis (1902) of Leo XIII. Moreover, the realistic manner in which the Fathers of the Church speak of the eucharistic species, though not susceptible of any philosophical framework, harmonizes admirably with the Scholastic conception. Finally, the experience of our senses, as trustworthy as the object of which they bear witness is proportioned to them, constitutes a further proof which St. Thomas does not hesitate to call infallible.
Granted, then, the objective reality of the accidents, it follows that they exist without any subject of inhesion. Indeed, once the original substance has been removed by conversion, they could rest only on the body of Jesus Christ or on the surrounding air, but this is impossible, because, to say nothing of other reasons, there is no proportion between the accidents of the bread and the corporeal substance of Jesus Christ or of the air. Nevertheless, while remaining without any subject, they do not lose the nature of accidents, because they retain their transcendental relation to the substance, from which they were separated by virtue of transubstantiation (and it is precisely in this relation that the formal constitutive element of the accident is found, and not in actual inhesion), nor can they fall into nothingness, because, although deprived of natural support, they are conserved by divine omnipotence, which eminently supplies the function of the substance, just as it supplied the virile influence in the virginal conception of Jesus Christ.
Moreover, one must not think that there are as many divine interventions as there are accidents, because those which by nature are devoid of dimension, color, taste, odor, etc. retain their former relation of inherence to dimensional quantity, which is directly sustained by God. If a ship, for example, were raised into the air, the condition of the ship itself would have to be called miraculous; but not that of the helmsman and the passengers; that is, the miracle would be a single one.
While conserving their objective reality, the accidents produce all the effects of which they were the cause before transubstantiation (operatio sequitur esse). Therefore, as before, they continue to act upon the surrounding bodies (actio) and to be subject (passio) to division and assimilation. To be sure, corruption and physiological assimilation cannot occur except through a common subject, upon which the forms succeed one another: now in our case, since the matter of the bread is not present as a common substrate, an intervention of God must be admitted, whereby the quantity of the bread and wine, after it has supplied for the substance in the previous mutations, is transformed into matter at the instant when a new substance is produced as the term of the assimilative process. Such an intervention is rightly considered by St. Thomas as a prolongation of the miracle of transubstantiation.
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Antonio Piolanti