Was Ignatius of Antioch Roman Catholic?

He's been discussed a lot lately by various Catholics. See this recent video by Cameron Bertuzzi, for example. And Ignatius has often been cited in support of Catholicism and against Protestantism for many years. It's not just a recent development. It's been popular for a long time in Catholic circles to cite Ignatius as a major problem for Protestants, because of comments he makes about issues like the monarchical episcopate and how the eucharist is the flesh and blood of Christ.

But some Protestants believe in the monarchical episcopate and a bodily presence of Christ in the eucharist. And the sort of language Ignatius uses about the eucharist is also used by him in other contexts that aren't interpreted by anybody the way advocates of a bodily presence of Christ in the eucharist are interpreting his eucharistic comments. See my discussion here. And here are some other examples not discussed in that thread I just linked:

More Pre-Reformation Support For Reformation Beliefs Among The Lollards

I've discussed their support for Reformation views in other posts, like here and here. And here's one about a book on Lollard heresy trials in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Agnosticism On Controversial Issues Before The Reformation

Just as people are often undecided about religious issues in our day, the same was true in past generations. That category of agnosticism is often, I'd say typically, ignored in discussions of historical theology, especially pre-Reformation church history.

We'll be told that everybody before the Reformation held such-and-such a view, but the fact that some individuals were agnostic on the subject won't be mentioned. (Probably often because the person making the claim about what everybody believed isn't aware of that agnosticism.)

For example, as I've mentioned before, some individuals were agnostic about whether Mary was assumed to heaven. That agnosticism persisted even into the second millennium of church history. See, for example, the entries on Aelred of Rievaulx, Isaac of Stella, and Peter of Celle in Michael O'Carroll's Theotokos (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1988).

Another example of this kind of thing is discussed in Craig Atwood's book on the Hussites, The Theology Of The Czech Brethren From Hus To Comenius (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). On page 180, he refers to some pre-Reformation Hussites who "wanted to leave up to God the question of whether the [eucharistic] bread changed or remained bread".

We see this sort of thing frequently in our day, with predestination, eschatology, church government, and whatever else. We need to keep in mind that people were sometimes agnostic on religious issues prior to the Reformation as well. People tend to focus on opposition to a belief when thinking about an alternative to the claim that everybody held that belief before the Reformation. But we need to remember that agnosticism is another category that's relevant. The people who were agnostic about the subject shouldn't be grouped with the people who affirmed the belief in question.

Support For Reformation Beliefs Among The Pre-Reformation Hussites (Part 2)

Some of the Hussites held to "an outright denial of any notion of Christ's presence in the eucharist...In time, Tabor arrived at a eucharistic position very comparable to the symbolic teaching." (Murray Wagner, Petr Chelcicky [Scottsdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1983], 59-60) Craig Atwood compares the Taborite view to Ulrich Zwingli's (The Theology Of The Czech Brethren From Hus To Comenius [University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009], 252). Wagner summarizes:

Baptismal real presence?

We're frequently told that we should hold a highly efficacious view of baptism or the eucharist because the church fathers and other pre-Reformation sources often expressed such a view. As I've mentioned before, we also find other views among the pre-Reformation sources, so we need to take those other views into account as well. Another problem with appeals to highly efficacious language in these sources is that they also used such language in many other contexts, including contexts in which modern proponents of a highly efficacious view of baptism or the eucharist don't hold such an efficacious view of those other things. See the many examples discussed in my post here on pre-Reformation views of initiatory rites. That post cites a book by G.W.H. Lampe, and here are some other comments he made in that same book:

He [Melito of Sardis] strongly emphasizes the theory of the Spirit's presence in the [baptismal] water, which, though quite unscriptural, becomes a commonplace in the Fathers and is developed by some ancient authors into a doctrine approximating to that of a 'Real Presence' of the Spirit in the font....

Again, on the other hand, the doctrine of a sort of 'Real Presence' of the Spirit in the water of Baptism is clearly expressed in the Homily on the Blessing of Jacob [attributed to Hippolytus]...

Zeno of Verona describes the baptismal water as 'aqua viva Spiritu sancto et igne dulcissimo temperata', and Gaudentius connects the miracle of Cana with the presence of the Spirit in the water and its reception by the baptized. These are, no doubt, expressions of pious rhetoric, but Cyril has a genuine doctrine of the Spirit's 'real presence' in the water, a theory amounting almost to a conception of the transubstantiation of water into Spirit, John of Damascus explains that the Spirit comes upon the water through epiclesis, and we must not ignore the significance of the common practice of dipping torches into the font

(The Seal Of The Spirit [Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004], 115, 144, 211-12)

Were Christians united about a physical presence in the eucharist before the Reformation?

It's often claimed that every Christian, almost every Christian, or some other widespread consensus believed in a physical presence in the eucharist prior to the Reformation. Sometimes it's even suggested that a physical presence is the simple, literal reading of scripture that the universal church held to before Protestantism came along. I want to discuss some evidence to the contrary.

Precedent For Metaphorically Drinking Blood And Eating God

Do a Ctrl F search for "John 6" in Glenn Miller's article here. In a video here, Steven Nemes makes a lot of good points about the eucharist and whether Christ is physically present in it. My main interest in this post, though, is his examples of precedent for viewing the eucharist in a way that doesn't involve a physical presence. We often apply the same sort of reasoning in other areas of life (when speaking of the Passover elements, when referring to how an actor is the character he represents, etc.).

If Jesus was teaching a physical presence in the eucharist, why didn't he explain it better?

Advocates of a physical presence of Christ in the eucharist often suggest that he couldn't have made the concept much clearer than he did, that he should have made some other view of the eucharist clearer if he had some other view in mind, and so forth. For example, we'll be asked what could be clearer than what Jesus said in John 6. Or if Jesus wasn't teaching a physical eucharistic presence there, then why didn't he clarify that fact, especially after people expressed their opposition to such an interpretation of his comments (6:52, 6:60) and some abandoned him (6:66)? Or what could be clearer than Jesus' words at the Last Supper? And so on.

There are a lot of problems with that sort of reasoning. I'm not going to address all of those problems here, but I want to discuss some of them. The primary issue I want to address here is that a lack of clarification from Jesus is more of a problem for the physical presence view than for views of the eucharist not involving a physical presence.

Problems With Transubstantiation In The Last Supper's Context

Mike Winger just posted a good video on the subject. And here's a post in which I discuss some other problems with transubstantiation in the earliest Christian contexts. On later sources, see here.

Apologetics Illustrated During Church Services

Church services provide some good opportunities for pastors, Sunday school teachers, parents, and others involved to teach and reinforce apologetic concepts. Since services often involve various types of repetition (e.g., regularly celebrating communion), there's more opportunity for reinforcement accordingly. For example:

- In the process of turning to a passage in the Bible, we distinguish one book from another. We distinguish among the gospels by the names of their authors. That's relevant to the popular modern claim that the gospels initially circulated anonymously. We have a lot of evidence that the gospels were distinguished from each other by means of authorship attributions from the second century onward. And continuity is more likely than discontinuity. It makes more sense that the gospels were distinguished by means of author names in the first century than that they weren't. That scenario better explains the widespread acceptance of the practice later and the absence of any comparable or better alternative. The need we have today to distinguish among the gospels in order to turn to a passage in one of them existed in the first century as well, and that provides evidence against the claim that the gospels circulated anonymously at the time.

- Baptism offers evidence for early interest in Jesus' burial and the empty tomb. We see that in Romans 6:4, for example. That's relevant to claims about the alleged lack of interest in and lack of references to the empty tomb among the earliest Christians. For further discussion, see here.

- Some portion of 1 Corinthians 11 will often be read or referred to during the celebration of communion. Verses 23-26 are valuable in some apologetic contexts. They illustrate Paul's knowledge of various details in Jesus' life, in agreement with the gospels. And these verses provide an example of Paul distinguishing between his own words and those of Jesus (verse 26 and beyond) rather than putting whatever he wanted to convey into Jesus' mouth.

These are just a few examples. Others could be added. I'd recommend mentioning concepts like these more than once. But even mentioning them only once could be enough to create an association in somebody's mind between an apologetic concept and a particular aspect of a church service. The association can then be reinforced many times over the years as that aspect of the church's services is repeated.

House of mirrors

Recently I was asked to comment on a Facebook post by a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. The dilemma is that his post is not for public consumption. At the time I didn't know that. I read it and had some preliminary thoughts.

I'm a little too far along in the thought process to just drop it. In addition, I generally like to post my answers to theological questions. That's a better stewardship of my time. 

So I'll try to make my analysis as anonymous as possible, summarizing the argument. The original post attempts to link Mariology to the Eucharist (and the Trinity) in John's Gospel. 

1. The Beloved Disciple represents all Christians. All Christians are commanded to take Mary home. Mary is the mother of all Christians. 

2. The Gospel has a "dwelling" motif. The mutual indwelling of the Trinitarian persons. God dwelling in Christians. Dwellings in the Father's house for the saints. The Beloved Disciple taking Mary home.

3. In the marriage at Cana, Mary is the new Eve. The new "woman". The new bride. 

The wedding symbolizes Christ as the bridegroom. Likewise, the wine symbolizes the eucharist. Indeed, the transformation of water into wine symbolizes the real presence. 

4. The sour wine offered to Jesus on the cross is a eucharistic symbol. The hyssop is a eucharistic symbol. The Bread of Life discourse has a Passover setting, making it eucharistic.

5. The blood and water from the crucified Christ is a eucharistic symbol. It links to John 7, which is eucharistic. The river/water of life represents Christ's blood. Piercing Christ in the "side" evokes the creation of Eve from Adam. 

6. The True Vine parable is eucharistic. 

You Ought To Believe In A Real Absence

Roman Catholics (and others) often criticize those who don't believe in a physical presence of Christ in the eucharist by referring to that view as "the real absence", in contrast to the real presence. They often act as though the phrase "real absence" does so much heavy lifting that they don't need to do much beyond applying that label to their opponents' view. But there's nothing wrong with absence in this context, and it actually makes a lot more sense than the alternative.

For one thing, the original backdrop to the eucharist involved the absence of a physical presence in the Passover elements:

"That the bread 'is' his body means that it 'represents' it; we should interpret his words here no more literally than the disciples would have taken the normal words of the Passover liturgy, related to Deuteronomy 16:3 (cf. Stauffer 1960:117): 'This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate when they came from the land of Egypt.' (By no stretch of the imagination did anyone suppose that they were re-eating the very bread the Israelites had eaten in the wilderness.) Those who ate of this bread participated by commemoration in Jesus' affliction in the same manner that those who ate the Passover commemorated in the deliverance of their ancestors....M. Pesah. 10:6 uses the Passover wine as a metaphor for the blood of the covenant in Ex. 24:8" (Craig Keener, A Commentary On The Gospel Of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1999], 631, n. 27 on 631)

Secondly, Biblical precedent gives us reason to conclude that no physical transformation has occurred if there's an absence of physical evidence of such a transformation. For example, in John 2, Jesus didn't change the water into wine under the appearance of remaining water. He didn't heal lepers and blind men under the appearance of their remaining leprous and blind. Physical miracles produced the sort of corresponding physical evidence you'd expect. The absence of such evidence in the context of the eucharist is most reasonably taken as implying the absence of such a physical transformation.

Lastly, scripture teaches us that Jesus is to be absent for a while (Matthew 24:23-27, Mark 14:7, John 14:2-3, 14:28, Acts 1:11, 3:21). He's still spiritually present, and you have to allow for exceptions to the generalities in the passages I just cited (e.g., Jesus' appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus, which seems to have been a physical appearance, like the other resurrection appearances). But a belief in Jesus' physical presence in the eucharist would have him physically present frequently, if not all of the time or the large majority of the time.

When discussing the eucharist, Paul refers to how it proclaims Jesus' death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). That sort of language makes more sense if Jesus is physically absent, but will return physically in the future. It makes less sense if he's continually physically present, but will also come physically in some other sense in the future. Much the same can be said about Paul's comments on being "absent from the Lord" in 2 Corinthians 5:6 (see, also, Philippians 1:23, 1 Thessalonians 4:17).

An especially significant passage in this context is Mark 14:7. The surrounding context involves the Passover and the Last Supper. Jesus is anointed by a woman and makes the comment in verse 7 about how they won't always have him around to do good to him as that woman did, whereas they'll always have the poor around to do good to them. The passage refers to how the woman has anointed his body, and he refers to how she's prepared him for burial. The focus is on the physical, especially Jesus' body. What comes between Mark 14:7 and the burial? The events commemorated in communion. So, those events are included in how the woman has done good to Jesus. In fact, as I've documented elsewhere, Jesus' burial was a prominent theme in early Christianity, often referred to in gospel summaries, baptism, etc. The implication of Jesus' comment in Mark 14:7 is that doing good to him bodily in that context isn't something they'll always be able to do. Yet, that's what Catholics claim to do frequently in communion. They honor Jesus' body in communion in various ways, with altars, monstrances, church services, etc., worship him in that context, and so on.

If the physical presence of Christ in the eucharist is as significant as Catholics make it out to be, and they experience it as often as they claim to, then it's harder to make sense of these New Testament references to the absence of Jesus. And keep in mind that the issue isn't whether it's possible to reconcile these passages with the Catholic view. Rather, the issue is which view makes the most sense of the evidence.

There's no shame in believing in a real absence. In fact, that view is more consistent with the original context of the eucharist, the physical evidence we have pertaining to the eucharist and how that evidence relates to the history of Biblical miracles, and the Biblical affirmation of the absence of Jesus.

Quantum transubstantiation

Our Episcopal church in Waco used leavened bread for communion. One day, the bread was particularly dry, and so it was crumbling as people were receiving communion with crumbs falling on the ground. People ignored the crumbs that were accumulating on the ground; some crumbs may have even been walked on by people. The crumbs remained there until the end of the service. After the service, Lindsay, a friend of ours, and I went up and picked up the crumbs. We weren't sure if Christ was really present in the full sense at that point, but we thought that if he was, then just leaving him on the ground to be walked on was irreverent. From this experience, I could see that the Anglican and Episcopal lack of clarity on the nature of the eucharist had important practical ramifications. I was, for that reason, attracted to the Catholic Church's claim that God has provided a clear teaching on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and a corresponding clear standard for how the Eucharist should be treated. Faith and Reason: Philosophers Explain Their Turn to Catholicism (Ignatius 2019), 237. 

Although he uses that as an argument for Catholicism, it generates a conundrum for transubstantiation. It isn't just a 1-1 match between Jesus and the wafer, but Jesus and each particle composing the wafer. By that logic, how far down does the fissioning process extend?

Wafer = Jesus

Crumbs = Jesus

Molecules = Jesus

Atoms = Jesus

Quarks = Jesus

A Path from Rome

In this post I'll be quoting some passages from Anthony Kenny's intellectual autobiography, A Path from Rome (Oxford 1986). He's a former priest who left the priesthood due to intellectual doubts. He later became an important philosopher. As a gifted young man he received a topnotch Catholic education, by the standards of the day. And I daresay the standards were probably more rigorous back then than they are today, for prospective priests:

Any violation of the Catholic sexual code was, of its nature, a mortal sin; a sexual sin could be venial only if there was some lack of knowledge or consent involved. This meant that a voluntary dwelling on a sexual fantasy put one in danger of Hell if not promptly repented and confessed. It became an agonizing question whether one had, on a given occasion, "consented" to the fantasy; and consent seemed such an ethereal, elusive event, difficult for even the most intrepid introspection to pin down with certainty. 

As a child I had been puzzled by the catechism's denunciation of "the irregular motions of the flesh"; with the onset of puberty, I became a little clearer about what it was that the sixth commandment existed to stop me doing. However, though there were frequent exhortations to purity, clear information about what sex was and what it was for played no part in the syllabus. (That is not quite correct: sex instruction was imparted, along with the relevant part of moral theology, to 23-year-old divines the year before their ordination)…I remained ignorant of the nature of human reproduction until I was about fifteen. Then, one day during the vacation, I confessed to my parish priest that I had sinned by reading a pious book on the Virgin Birth for an unworthy motive, namely  to discover about birth and conception. The priest, a mild, unconventional and very erudite Benedictine, was not as shocked as I expected. He gave me a very thorough explanation of the mechanics of sex and reproduction in a concrete but unprurient manner. I was much luckier than several of my companions at Upholland who remained ignorant of sex until eighteen or later…

Most people who have never heard confessions imagine that it must be an enthralling experience to listen to people confiding their most shameful secrets. In fact the hearing of confessions consists of hours of tedium occasionally relieved by embarrassment. Interestingly wicked people never go to confession at all; most of those who go do not realize what their real sins are. So most confessions are repetitions of short catalogues of unimportant and humdrum sins. The moments of embarrassment most frequently occur in connection with the confession of sexual sins. The priest is obliged to satisfy himself that every mortal sin has been confessed specifically; it will not do , for instance, for the sinner to accuse himself of being unchaste, he must specify whether he is guilty of adultery, fornication, &c. Consequently, if a penitent says "I did something dirty", the confessor must embark on a series of questions to elicit the nature of the sin. 

I did indeed become depressed and worried about the prospect of continuing my studies for the priesthood. More and more of what I was taught seemed either muddled or incredible. The proofs we were offered for the existence of God all seems to contain serious flaws; many of the philosophical theories we were taught seemed implausible constructions invented to shore up particular theological doctrines. 

All material bodies, we were told, were made up of substance and accidents; the substance appeared to be an invisible metaphysical core around which the accidents clustered like wrapping…the metaphysics we were taught appeared to save the coherence of transubstantiation only at the cost of calling in question our knowledge of every ordinary material object. For all I could tell, my typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli transubstantiated; since all I could see were mere accidents, and I lacked any metaphysical eye to see through to the real substance. 

In ways like this the philosophy we were learning came to seem less and less credible, and its incredibility connected directly with specific Catholic dogmas…The implausibility of the philosophy did strain the student's faith in the dogmas themselves; if they needed support from such a ramshackle philosophy, how could they be sound in themselves?…I was also full of foreboding about the life I was committing myself to; I began to realize what misery could lie in a life devoted to the spread of doctrines in which one only half-believed. 

So when the Council of Trent says that the substance of the bread and wine turns into the substance of Christ's body and blood, it simply means that the bread and wine turns into the body and blood. But why does the notion of turning into crop up at all? There is no mention of it in Scripture. It was introduced by Aquinas as the only possible explanation of the presence of Christ's body under the appearances of bread and wine after the consecration: Christ is there because something which was there has turned into him. But, Aquinas insists, and after him the Council of Constance, the accidents which remain, the whiteness and roundness, do not inhere in Christ; if they'd, then Christ himself would be white and round. But the principle that the accidents inhere in no substance, however, leaves one problem: among the accidental categories of Aristotle is the category of place. "…is on the altar", for instance, is an accidental predicate. But if the accidents which once belong to the bread do not inhere after consecration in the substance of Christ's body, then it appears that it by no means follows from the presence of the host on the altar that Christ is present on the altar. Thus the doctrine of transubstantiation appears in the end to fail to secure that for which alone it was originally introduced, namely the real presence of Christ's body under the sacramental species. 

It was an essential part of having the virtue of faith, without which neither charity nor salvation was possible, that one should believe all the defined doctrines; one could not pick and choose. To fail to believe even one was not only sinful in itself, it called in question one's belief in all the other doctrines: for one could not be believing them with the correct motive, namely that they were revealed by God through Christ and his Church. That is why, for a Catholic, a doubt about any doctrine is, in a manner, a doubt about every doctrine.

The whole account of faith given by the Church troubled me…to accept something as an arcticle of faith one had to accept a number of historical facts: as that the article had been defined by the Church, that the authority claimed by the Church had been conferred on it by Jesus in well-known passages of the Gospels, that the Pope was the successor of St Peter and spoke with the  authority given to him. Now these historical assertions were vulnerable to the progress of history and exegesis, and many of them were hotly controverted by scholars of standing. And if these "preambles of faith" could not be objects of irrevocable assent, how could the faith which rested on them be irrevocable?

I was assigned to treat the topic of development of doctrine. Catholics were taught that revelation had ceased with the death of the last Apostle, and that the Faith was unchanging. How was this to be reconciled with the manifest variation in the theological beliefs recorded during the long history of the Church?…It was easy to say the doctrine of the Church could change only in accidental matters not in essential ones. For it look as if only after the event could we tell which elements at a given time were essential. If so, something now regarded as essential, e.g. the wrongness of contraception, might turn out with hindsight to have been accidental. If a doctrine is defined, then it must be definable. And if definable, it must be contained–whether we should ever have guessed this for ourselves or not–in Scripture and tradition. For revelation ceased with the death of the last Apostle. If we accept these criteria, then no difficulty can be brought against the doctrine of the immutability of faith. The only trouble is, that our criteria render the doctrine impregnable only at the cost of making it vacuous. For we say–in order to avoid Modernism–that the Church teaches only those doctrines that are contained in Scripture and tradition. Then we ask: which doctrines are contained in Scripture and tradition? In order to avoid both the inadequacy of private judgment and the difficulties of Church history, we reply: those doctrines are contained in Scripture and tradition which the Church teaches. We have come round in a circle. 

"Mere" symbolism

To my knowledge, the standard Baptist position takes a Zwinglian view of the Lord's Supper. This is often characterized as "mere" symbolism. 

"Mere" is an interesting adjective because, depending on context, it can either have a neutral or pejorative connotation. On the one hand, it can simply be used to establish a point of contrast between opposing views. On the other hand, consider some synonyms for "mere": "trifling, meager, bare, trivial, paltry, basic, scant, scanty, skimpy…"

Suppose I said "elected officials are merely public servants, not dictators". That's a good thing, right? We don't want elected officials to be dictators, do we? (Admittedly, secular progressives are dictatorial.)

"Mere" can be used in a slighting way, as if that indicates something defective. Suppose I have pictures of my kids on my office desk. Suppose a client said, "Those are merely photographs!"

That would be a strange thing to say. The adjective would be gratuitous. Yes, they're just photos. What else are they supposed to be? That's all they're supposed to be. That's the purpose they serve. 

Suppose someone told me "your girlfriend is merely a woman". That would be an odd thing to say. What else is she supposed to be? Is there something deficient about having a female girlfriend? As opposed to what? In fact, in the age of transgender propaganda, that needs to be accentuated, not minimized. 

Suppose you told a carpenter that his screwdriver is merely a screwdriver. But isn't that the function of a screwdriver? Is it a design flaw if a screwdriver is a poor tool for pounding nails? 

Suppose we said circumcision is merely a covenant sign. Yeah. So what? 

The use of "mere" or "merely" can be prejudicial, by gratuitously recasting the Zwinglian view as if that's a weakness. But that's a tendentious way to frame the alternatives. 

Communion wafers

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vvaeyb/the-surprisingly-cutthroat-business-of-communion-crackers

Yucarist

Another potential rumpus in Catholicism: 

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/proposal-at-vatican-to-change-eucharist-would-create-a-new-religion

Because Catholic piety centers on externals (rites and rituals), this is all-important. (According to the latest news, that proposal has been shelved.)

I actually don't think there's a problem with substituting cornbread, yucca bread, or rice cakes/crackers in countries that don't grow wheat. Likewise, substituting an indigenous drink for wine if they don't produce wine. Yet this would be the last straw for some Catholics, who idolize the Eucharist. 

The "evangelical book club"

A friend drew my attention to this discussion, they draw an invidious contrast between the "evangelical Bible club" and the Mass, around the 1:11-13 min. mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0B5nyWeuK4

i) On the one hand you can know a lot about a person from a book (e.g. biographies, autobiographies, letters, diaries). In fact, you can know a lot more about a person through those sources than a direct encounter, because we have a public persona that conceals a great deal about ourselves. 

ii) On the other hand, transubstantiation is just a Catholic projecting belief onto bread and wine. It's all in his imagination. They can't tell the difference between consecrated and unconsecrated communion elements. 

iii) And even if transubstantiation was true, how is eating someone a form of fellowship? If we're going to put it in these terms, don't I have a more dynamic relationship with my pet dog by walking my dog rather than eating my dog?

Desecration of the Host

687. – After showing the dignity of this sacrament, the Apostle now rouses the faithful to receive it reverently. First, he outlines the peril threatening those who receive unworthily; secondly, he applies a saving remedy (v. 28).

688. – First, therefore, he says, Therefore, from the fact that this which is received sacramentally is the body of Christ and what is drunk is the blood of Christ, whoever eats this bread or drinks the cup in an unworthy manner will by guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. In these words must be considered, first, how someone eats or drinks unworthily. According to a Gloss this happens in three ways: first, as to the celebration of this sacrament, namely, because someone celebrates the sacrament in a manner different from that handed down by Christ; for example, if he offers in this sacrament a bread other than wheaten or some liquid other than wine from the grape of the vine. Hence it says in Lev (10:1) that Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, offered before the Lord “unholy fire, such as he had not commanded them. And fire came forth from the presence of the Lord and devoured them.”

689. – Secondly, from the fact that someone approached the Eucharist with a mind not devout. This lack of devotion is sometimes venial, as when someone with his mind distracted by worldly affairs approaches this sacrament habitually retaining due reverence toward it; and such lack of devotion, although it impedes the fruit of this sacrament, which is spiritual refreshment, does not make one guilty of the body and blood of the Lord, as the Apostle says here. But a certain lack of devotion is a mortal sin, i.e., when it involves contempt of this sacrament, as it says in Mal (1:12): “But you profane it when you say that the Lord’s table is polluted and its food may be despised.” It is of such lack of devotion that the Gloss speaks.

690. – In a third way someone is said to be unworthy, because he approaches the Eucharist with the intention of sinning mortally. For it says in Lev (21:23): “He shall not approach the altar, because he has a blemish.” Someone is understood to have a blemish as long as he persists in the intention of sinning, which, however, is taken away through penitence. By contrition, indeed, which takes away the will to sin with the intention of confession and making satisfaction, as to the remission of guilt and eternal punishment; by confession and satisfaction as to the total remission of punishment and reconciliation with the members of the Church. Therefore, in cases of necessity, as when someone does not have an abundance of confessors, contrition is enough for receiving this sacrament. But as a general rule, confession with some satisfaction should precede. Hence in the book on Church Dogmas it says: “One who desires to go to communion should make satisfaction with tears and prayers, and trusting in the Lord approach the Eucharist clean, free from care, and secure. But I say this of the person not burdened with capital and mortal sins. For the one whom mortal sins committed after baptism press down, I advise to make satisfaction with public penance, and so be joined to communion by the judgment of the priest, if he does not wish to receive the condemnation of the Church.”

https://dhspriory.org/thomas/english/SS1Cor.htm#117

i) A basic problem with his interpretation is that, in context, the sin resulting in mortal illness isn't desecration of the Host but dishonoring fellow Christians at the agape feast. 

ii) That doesn't mean it's impossible to commit sacrilege. If you immerse a crucifix in urine, that's sacrilegious, not because a crucifix is intrinsically holy, but because there's the intent to express contempt for Christianity by using a symbol that represents the Christian faith. 

Conversely, when priests trample on the crucifix (or icon of Christ) in Silence (2016) to spare Japanese Christians from torture, that's not sacrilegious because it's just a symbol, and their intention is not to profane the faith, but to save the innocent from brutalization. 

iii) We might also draw a distinction between sacrilege and desecration. If Crusaders use a mosque as a latrine, that's a deliberate act of desecration, but unless Islam is true, it's not sacrilegious–for it doesn't profane the true God. 

Real spiritual presence

Lydia McGrew

Full disclosure: I'm a believer in a spiritual Real Presence, not in transubstantiation.

Apparently we have to be able to believe in some sort of special divine presence in particular physical locations in Old Testament passages. For example, the Holy of Holies.There was "something about it" so that only the High Priest could enter. The Ark of the Covenant. If the wrong person handled it, he would die. The Shekinah. So such statements as, "God is especially present in this box [the ark]" cannot literally be meaningless, or these OT passages wouldn't make any sense.

In those passages it may be that we can't go any farther in defining it than something like this: God had so ordained that he would specially interact with human beings in various ways (good and bad) in relation to that physical object or location. 

That's not really apophatic, but it is something of a surd. That's just how it is. You do this, you die. You do this, the walls fall down. You do this, you've offered a sacrifice of atonement for the people for another year. Why? Because God has set it up that there's something special--some special manifestation of his power or grace--in relation to this physical thing. And that can be referred to as "presence" despite the fact that God is omnipresent.

I think that that could be applied to the spiritual Real Presence in the Sacrament as well. In any event, the OT examples are a "proof of concept" that we can't rule it as per se meaningless to say that some object or location on earth "has" the "presence" of God in a way that other places or objects don't.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/03/apophatic-sacramentalism.html?showComment=1552002724694#c4288716035029626027

i) Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, Lutherans, and Eastern Orthodox affirm that the consecrated communion elements are the True Body and Blood of Christ (whatever that means). At the other end of the spectrum is the Zwinglian position. Then you have Christians who try to stake out a mediating position: spiritual presence. This provokes the scorn of Catholics, Lutherans et al. 

ii) One issue is exegetical. If you don't think the stock prooftexts for the real presence (e.g. Jn 6) in fact refer to the eucharist, then there's no pressure to explain in what respect Jesus is presence in the eucharist.

iii) Another issue is metaphysical. In classical theism, God is separate from time and space. On that view, God can't physically or literally occupy time and space. That's a question of philosophical theology rather than exegetical theology, although some biblical passages may point to classical theism in that regard.

iv) I expect that in the background of Lydia's discussion is 1 Cor 11:30: 

That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.

That's analogous to the effect of profaning the ark of the covenant. In the Mosaic covenant, there's a concept of sacred space and cultic holiness. Does that mean God is present in holy objects associated with the tabernacle? Another example is the tree of life and tree of knowledge.

Rather than presence, I'd say these are examples in which God assigns a beneficial or harmful effect to the use or misuse of certain physical objects. That's not inherent in the nature of the object. They're not poisonous or radioactive. The object doesn't cause that reaction. Rather, God institutes an extrinsic correlation.

v) However, we might explore different models of presence. Consider the notion of indirect presence. Take a love letter. The lover can't be with the beloved, so he writes her a letter. The letter is a stand-in for the lover. It says on paper what he'd say in person if he was there.

Photographs of loved ones are another example of indirect presence. Sometimes these are photos of the living, but sometime these are photos of the dearly departed. 

In the modern era, phones are another example of indirect presence. Likewise, it's now possible to see the person you are talking to. 

In that respect, there are degrees of indirect presence. To hear someone's voice has greater immediacy than reading their words. To see them talking to you via a computer screen has greater immediacy that merely hearing their voice.

vi) To take a different example, suppose a woman is a gardner. Everyday she puts fresh cut flowers on the dining room table. Suppose, at bedtime, her husband moves the flowers to her nightstand. Suppose her husband dies. Everyday she continues her routine of putting fresh cut flowers on the dining room table. 

Suppose, when she returns from errands, she doesn't see the flowers on the dining room table. When she goes into the bedroom she finds them on her nightstand. Suppose that happens every so often.

She's sure no one broke into the house while she was out. Moreover, the position of the flowers has coded significance. Something only the widow and her late husband were in a position to appreciate.

So she concludes that while she was out of the house, her husband's ghost moved the flowers, as a symbolic way of indicating his continued existence and enduring love for his wife. Changing the location of the flowers, in a way his wife would remember and cherish, is a mode of indirect presence. An oblique way to make contact. She never sees an apparition of her husband, but a token of his presence. 

vii) A related example is an unmistakable answer to prayer. It's not like a theophany or Christophany. But events arrange themselves in such an unlikely yet discriminating and auspicious way as to point beyond the observable events to the hidden hand of providence. 

vii) Another category is psychological presence. Take a premonitory dream in which a mother dreams that her grown son, who's far from home, is in grave danger. She wakes up and prays for him. The next day he phones her and tells her about he narrowly eluded death the day before.