Saturday, December 10, 2022

Lawrence Feingold on Concomitance

  

Concomitance

 

The words of consecration directly make Christ’s Body present under the species of bread and His Blood present under the species of wine.  However, since Christ’s Body after the Resurrection is now inseparably united to His Blood and to His soul, these also are made present in the Eucharist by a natural accompaniment, or “concomitance.” This means that the Body is necessarily accompanied by the Blood and the soul that the precious Blood is necessarily accompanied by the Body and the soul.

 

Furthermore, Christ’s divinity is inseparably united to every part of His sacred humanity by the hypostatic union. This union of the divinity with Christ’s Body and Blood was not interrupted even in His death. The dead Body in the tomb was still the dead Body of the Second Person of the Trinity, and His separated soul was likewise still united to his divine Person. At the moment of his death on the Cross, Christ’s Body and Blood were physically separated from each other and from His soul, although they all remained united to His divinity. In the moment of His glorious Resurrection, however, Christ’s Body was again united to His Blood, and both were again animated by His human soul, and all three—Body, Blood, and soul—remain inseparably united to His divinity.

 

Therefore, the words of consecration, “This is my body,” are not limited to producing this one effect by divine fiat—to make Christ’s Body present—but they also indirectly make His Blood, soul, and divinity present, [49] because these are now inseparable from Christ’s glorified human Body. The same thing occurs in the separate consecration of the wine. Although the power of the words is directly ordered to making Christ’s Blood present, they also indirectly make His whole Body, soul, and divinity present in every drop of the consecrated species of wine.

 

St. Thomas holds that if Holy Mass had been celebrated on Holy Saturday before the Resurrection, while Christ’s physical Body was still in the tomb, the words of consecration would have made Christ’s inanimate Body present, separated from His soul and from His Blood but still united to His divinity. Likewise, the words of the consecration of the species of wine would have made only His Blood present, separated from His Body and from his soul but still united to the divinity. [50]

 

After the Resurrection, however, until the end of time, Christ’s physical Body and Blood have been reunited to one another and to His soul, and all three are inseparably united to His divinity. Therefore, the words of consecration in every Mass makes Christ’s entire reality as it currently exists—present under every part of the consecrated species. (Lawrence Feingold, The Eucharist: Mystery of Presence, Sacrifice, and Communion [Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Academic, 2018], 282-84)

 

Notes for the Above

 

[49] See ST III, q. 76, a. 1, ad. 1:

 

Because the change of the bread and wine is not terminated at the Godhead or the soul of Christ, it follows as a consequence that the Godhead or the soul of Christ is in this sacrament not by the power of the sacrament, but from real concomitance. For since the Godhead never set aside the assumed body, wherever the body of Christ is, there, of necessity, must be the Godhead be; and therefore it is necessary for the Godhead to be in this sacrament concomitantly with His body. Hence we read in the profession of faith at Ephesus (P. I., ch. 26): “We are made partakers of the body and blood of Christ, not as taking common flesh, nor as of a holy man united to the Word in dignity, but the truly life-giving flesh of the Word Himself.”

 

[50] See ST III, q. 76, a. 1, ad. 1: “His soul was truly separated from His body, as stated above (III, q. 50, a. 5). And therefore had this sacrament been celebrated during those three days when He was dead, the soul of Christ would not have been there, neither by the power of the sacrament, nor from real concomitance. But since ‘Christ rising from the dead dies now no more’ (Romans 6:9), His soul is always really united with His body. And therefore in this sacrament the body indeed of Christ is present by the power of the sacrament, but His soul from real concomitance.” 

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