The Role of Thomism in Herbert McCabe’s Eucharistic Theology

Much has been written about the influence that some twentieth-century thinkers, first and foremost Ludwig Wittgenstein, exerted on Herbert McCabe’s Eucharistic theology, especially on his article "The Eucharist as Language" («Modern Theology» 15, 2 (1999), pp. 131-141). However, this insistence, although well-founded, has overshadowed the fact that McCabe’s Eucharistic theology (in particular his doctrine of transubstantiation) is, originally and mainly, a dialogue with Thomas Aquinas. This article, focusing on the short text in which McCabe expounds Aquinas’s conception of transubstantiation, "Eucharistic Change" («Priests & People» 8, 6, 1994, pp. 217-221), aims to do justice to the original and profound Thomism that pervades McCabe’s Eucharistic theology, concentrating on the two aspects highlighted by the author. The first is the opposition to a reading of transubstantiation as change: for McCabe, Aquinas understands transubstantiation as the breakthrough of transcendence into immanence, the inauguration of a new and radically deeper way of being of the Eucharistic species and, indirectly, of the religious community nourished by them, a creative event therefore, irreducible to a simple change. The second aspect is the role of ‘accidents’ (in the Aristotelian-Scholastic language), or of ‘appearances’ (in McCabe’s language) of the Eucharistic species in the process of transubstantiation. In particular, McCabe believes that for Aquinas, while before transubstantiation they represented only attributes of material substances, following it they become the signs which, far from hiding the Eucharistic mystery to prevent it from manifesting itself in all its unsustainable intensity, effectively introduce to it. Moreover, this article intends to show how, starting from the interpretation of Aquinas’s views, McCabe develops in his Eucharistic theology an innovative proposal of what it means to participate in the Eucharistic mystery and, consequently, in the communion of the Church.