From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Mon Apr 25 2005 - 17:59:02 BST
Anthony, DMB,
I should point out that, as I said in my first response to Anthony, I do not
hold with the doctrine of transubstantiation, so I'm not trying to defend
it. My only point in this discussion was to say that science has no bearing
on it. Both of you, in using such words as "literally" or "actually" are
using these words the way a materialist would to interpret the doctrine. The
Catechism does not use the word "literally", but it does use "real". But of
course, the "real" to a Catholic is not just the material, and science can
only be concerned with the material.
So the larger issue here is that you and the Catholic are speaking different
languages. This is most obvious when David says:
"Catholics have their own definition of the word "substance"? Well, ok but
if we are going to have a discussion I'm going to insist that we speak
English. You're certainly free to express Catholic "ideas", but you're going
to have to express them in the only common language we have because I, for
one, do not speak Catholic."
Two replies to this are obvious: (1) if you don't speak Catholic, then you
don't understand Catholicism, so what gives you the right to criticize
Catholicism?, and (2) since the word "substance" is the trunk of the word
"transubstantiation", you are not going to understand the doctrine without
using the word "substance" in the way Catholicism did when it coined the
word.
But more generally, the Catholic use of the word "substance" is the usual
philosophical meaning of the term. Descartes spoke of two substances: mental
and extended, for instance. The materialist, in this vocabulary, is the one
who says there is only one substance, matter, and from the domination of the
materialist outlook, the word "substance" came to mean, in the popular mind,
matter. Unfortunately, Pirsig only appears to know this popular meaning,
mistakenly assumes that that is the philosophic meaning, and so David gets
confused.
Or as Anthony says:
"as far as transubstantiation is concerned, the priest in a Roman
Catholic Church after blessing the bread and wine, doesn't qualify, for
instance, the statement "this bread is the body of Christ" with the words
"but only in the sense of a being a non-scientifically known substance". He
simply states "this bread is the body of Christ". It is publicly given as a
literal truth in the Catholic mass."
Well, he also doesn't go into the tortuous teaching of what "triunity" means
when he says "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost". The mass is a ritual, not a
classroom. But anyway, what I want to focus on here is the phrase "literal
truth". As mentioned, the Catholic teaching of the doctrine of
transubstantiation does not use the word "literal". The doctrine was
developed before the materialist era, and it is only recently that "literal
truth" came to mean "physically true". In the Middle Ages, the physical was
still seen as participating in spirit. Hence a sacrament was where the
connection between the physical and spiritual was especially celebrated. The
modern age can be defined as the period (which we are still in) when the
physical came to be considered as autonomous, as "just there". For
science -- as opposed to scientism -- *it doesn't matter* whether one
thinks of the physical as autonomous or not, it just studies it, and that is
why there is no conflict. The language of the doctrine stems from the
pre-modern meanings of "physical" and "substance". In that language,
"substance" of the physical was the ultimate meaning (or value) of the
physical, which was seen representationally. Hence when the substance is
changed, the non-physical meaning is what gets changed -- it is not a change
from one physical form to another, and hence science has no bearing on the
doctrine. Thus you are seeing a conflict because you have mistranslated
"change in substance" to mean "change in physical form", but that is not its
meaning.
One might note in this regard how the liberal Protestant theology of the
nineteenth century bought into this materialist meaning of the word
"literal". One reaction to that was the rise of fundamentalism in the early
years of the 20th century, which in a kind of "in your face" attitude
claimed that the Bible had to be taken literally in this modernist
materialist sense. Thus this kind of literalism results both in the flatland
of scientific materialism and in the flatland of fundamentalist religion.
The problem here is that the criticisms you and others are making of theism
are coming out of this flatland vocabulary. Until you can recover to some
extent the pre-modern vocabulary in which the doctrines of theism developed,
you simply don't understand them, and without that understanding, have no
business criticizing them.
This is not to say they shouldn't be criticized. One of the issues between
Protestantism and Catholicism, after all, was this doctrine. But it is a
mistake to see this criticism as coming from science. It is a very different
thing to claim that intellect and theism are in conflict than it is to say
that science and theism are in conflict.
- Scott
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