EUCHARISTIC ACCIDENTS. – These are the appearances of bread and wine which, transubstantiation (v.), constitute, as it were, a mysterious « receptaculum » of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, thus making his sacramental presence possible (v. EUCARISTIA).
The nature of the eucharistic accidents has been much debated by philosophers and theologians, because, once the total conversion of the substance of 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, colour, taste, and other sensible phenomena that preserve intact the properties they possessed when they were united to their substance? The Cartesian theologians (Maignan, Drouven, Witasse), for reasons of system, had to answer that these are not objective realities, but modifications of the senses and of the surrounding bodies miraculously produced (a kind of docetism of the eucharistic accidents). Certain atomists of the nineteenth century (Tongiorgi and Palmieri) believed that they could explain them by the force of resistance proper to bodies, which would be produced by God wherever the molecules of the bread and wine had exercised II. Franzelin, yielding to Leibnizian dynamism, thinks that they are the secondary forces of bread and wine, a kind of energy (ἐνέργημα) surviving the alteration of the central nucleus and divinely preserved.
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 bread and wine, after consecration, retain the same nature as before; that is, the dimensions, colour, taste, etc., are the same objective realities which previously had the substance of bread and wine as the subject of their inherence. This inference was confirmed by the Church at the Council of Constance (1415), when, against Wicleff (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 corroborated by analogous declarations of the Council of Trent (Denz-U, no. 884), of the Roman Catechism, and of Leo XIII’s encyclical Mirae caritatis (1902). Moreover, the realistic manner in which the Fathers of the Church speak of the eucharistic species, although incapable of being fitted into any philosophical framework, harmonizes wonderfully with the Scholastic conception. Finally, the experience of our senses, as trustworthy as the object to which they bear witness is proportionate to them, provides a further proof which St Thomas does not hesitate to call infallible.
Once, then, the objective reality of the accidents is admitted, it follows that they exist without any subject of inherence. For, since the primitive substance has been removed by conversion, they could rest only upon the body of Jesus Christ or upon the surrounding air; but this is impossible because, apart from other reasons, there is no proportion between the accidents of bread and the corporeal substance of Jesus Christ or of the air. Nevertheless, although they remain 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 constituent of the accident is found, not in actual inherence). Nor can they fall into nothingness, because, although deprived of natural support, they are preserved by divine omnipotence, which eminently supplies the function of the substance, just as it supplied the male influence in the virginal conception of Jesus Christ.
Nor should one think that there are as many divine interventions as there are accidents, because those which by nature are without dimension, colour, taste, odour, 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 call the condition of the ship miraculous, but not that of the helmsman and the passengers; that is, the miracle would be one only.
By retaining their objective reality, the accidents produce all the effects of which they were the cause before transubstantiation (operatio sequitur esse). Thus, as before, they continue to act upon surrounding bodies (actio) and to be subject (passio) to division and assimilation. Certainly, corruption and physiological assimilation can occur only through a common subject upon which forms succeed one another. Now, in our case, since the matter of the bread is not present as a common substratum, one must admit a divine intervention whereby the quantity of the bread and wine, after having supplied for the substance in the preceding changes, is transformed into matter at the instant when a new substance is produced as the term of the assimilative process. This intervention is rightly regarded by St Thomas as a prolongation of the miracle of transubstantiation.