**Eucharistic Accidents.** — These are the appearances of bread and wine, which, remaining unchanged after transubstantiation (q.v.), constitute a mysterious “receptacle” of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, thus making possible His sacramental presence (q.V. EUCHARIST).
Much discussion has taken place among philosophers and theologians regarding the nature of these accidents, since, once the total conversion of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ is accepted by faith, the question arises: what is the concrete reality of the dimensions, color, taste, and other sensible phenomena that retain the same properties they had when united with their substance? Cartesian theologians (Maiqnan, Drouven, Witasse), compelled by their system, had to respond that these are not objective realities but modifications of the senses and surrounding bodies produced miraculously (a kind of most learned illusion of the accidents). Some atomists of the 19th century (Tongiorgi and Palmieri) believed they could explain them by the inherent resistance of bodies, which God would produce where the molecules of bread and wine exerted II. Franzelin, leaning toward Leibnizian dynamism, thinks they are the secondary forces of bread and wine, a kind of surviving energy (εἰνέργημα) after the mutation of the central nucleus and divinely preserved.
The Scholastics, however, accepting the Aristotelian doctrine of the real distinction between accident and corporeal substance, and admitting transubstantiation by faith, logically concluded that the appearances of bread and wine, after consecration, retain the same nature as before, that is, the dimensions, color, taste, etc., are the same objective realities that previously had as their subject the substance of bread and wine. This illusion was confirmed by the Church at the Council of Constance (1415), when, against Wycliffe (d. 1382), it maintained that the eucharistic accidents, understood in the Peripatetic sense, remain without a subject (Denz-U, no. 582). This classic document is supported by similar declarations of the Council of Trent (Denz-U, no. 884), the Roman Catechism, and the encyclical *Mirae caritatis* (1902) by Leo XIII. Moreover, the realistic manner in which the Fathers of the Church speak of the eucharistic species, though not susceptible to any philosophical framework, harmonizes wonderfully with the Scholastic conception. Finally, the experience of our senses, as reliable as their object warrants, constitutes a confirmation that St. Thomas does not hesitate to call infallible.
Assuming, then, the objective reality of the accidents, it follows that they exist without any subject of inherence. Indeed, once the original substance is removed by conversion, they could only rest on the body of Jesus Christ or the surrounding air, but this is impossible, for, to say nothing of other reasons, there is no proportion between the accidents of bread and the corporeal substance of Jesus Christ or of air. Nevertheless, remaining without any subject, they do not lose their nature as 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 of the accident is found, not in actual inherence), nor can they fall into nothingness, because, though deprived of natural support, they are preserved by divine omnipotence, which eminently supplies the function of substance, just as it supplied the virile influence in the virginal conception of Jesus Christ.
It must not be thought, moreover, that there are as many divine interventions as there are accidents, because those which by nature lack dimension, color, taste, odor, etc., retain their former relation of inherence to dimensional quantity, which is directly sustained by God. If, for example, a ship were lifted into the air, one would have to say that its dimensions are miraculously sustained, but not those of the helmsman or passengers; the miracle, that is, would be singular.
By preserving their objective reality, the accidents produce all the effects of which they were the first cause before transubstantiation (operatio sequitur esse). The five forms continue to act upon surrounding bodies (actio) and to be subject (passio) to division and assimilation. Certainly, corruption and physiological assimilation cannot occur except through a common subject upon which the forms act in turn: now in our case, since there is no matter of bread as a common substratum, we must admit a divine intervention by which the quantity of bread and wine, after having supplied the substance in previous changes, is transformed into matter at the instant in which a new substance is produced as the term of the assimilative process. This intervention is rightly considered by St. Thomas as a prolongation of the miracle of transubstantiation.
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