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The Heart of Matter

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The Physics and Metaphysics of Transubstantiation

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Abstract

In the concluding chapter, we return with a new perspective on the main principles, themes, and concepts of the previous six chapters. Past critiques of QMT, Nothingness, creation, death, transubstantiation, and the Eucharist are highlighted. Holo-cryptic metaphysics gives us a way to envision how a physical being’s essential identity is a holo-somatic or holographically based construct. Thus, a way to understand how the believing person relates to the person of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is accorded a new observational point of reference. To this end, a way presents for me to make an argument for a Eucharistic person who benefits from what is often taken as its enemies—the findings of Post-Newtonian physics, postmodern philosophy, radical theological visions, and a theory of information.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, 54.

  2. 2.

    Ibid., 165.

  3. 3.

    See Tegmark, The Mathematical Universe, 8.

  4. 4.

    Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1962), 55.

  5. 5.

    See Lothar Schäfer, “Non-empirical Reality: Transcending the Physical and Spiritual in the Order of the One,” Zygon 43, no. 2 (May 2008): 343.

  6. 6.

    TL 1, 192.

  7. 7.

    Werner Heisenberg, “Uber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” Z. Physik 43: 172–198 (1927), 197, Translated in John A. Wheeler and W. H. Zurek, Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). See also Gordon Belot, Primitive Ontologies, 73–74. https://doi.org/10.1007S13194-011-0024-8.

  8. 8.

    Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1962), 55.

  9. 9.

    On the poetic and philosophical origins of Badiou’s thought on this issue see Theory of Subject, 76–77 and 184.

  10. 10.

    On the quantum duality of vacuum polarization or the so-called Lamb shift see Silvan S. Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 86–87.

  11. 11.

    See Void, 111–113, 125–127 and Peter. W. Milonni, The Quantum Vacuum: An Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1994).

  12. 12.

    See Void, 112–117.

  13. 13.

    De ver., 2, 3, resp. 16.

  14. 14.

    Walter Kern, “God-World Relationship,” in Sacramentum Mundi, online, General Editor Karl Rahner, S.J. Consulted online on 23 June 2023 <http:11dx.doi.org/10.1163-483X_smuo_COM_00168>. First published online: 2016.

  15. 15.

    See Augustine, “Ac per hoc ne ineabilis quidem dicendus est Deus quia et hoc cum dicitur, aliquid dicitur,” See On Christian Doctrine, NPNF2, Book 1, 6. 

  16. 16.

    Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, NPNF2, vol. 5, Translated and Introduced by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., and Henry Wace, D.D., (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), 437. See also ST. I-II, 1, 8. 

  17. 17.

    See ST. I, 104, 1. 

  18. 18.

    See Polarity, 46 and Paul Davis, The Mind of God (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992) and George Ellis, The Far-Fetched Universe (Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation, 2002).

  19. 19.

    See Homo Abyssus, 449.

  20. 20.

    See De ver., 10.2 and resp. 5 on memory’s role in knowing.

  21. 21.

    After God, 322.

  22. 22.

    Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, 1.1 in The Complete Works Translated by Colm Luibheid (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1987).

  23. 23.

    See Graham Ward, The Beauty of God, 50.

  24. 24.

    Logics of Worlds, 323. Badiou can be seen to invert what we take to be Balthasar’s understanding of Jesus’ interior-exterior relations that authorize finite consciousness, freedom, and ultimately fidelity to the Transcendent God.

  25. 25.

    The conflating of the ontological and logical, the mathematical and the logical in Badiou’s theory of mathematical ontology demands further investigation beyond what can be provided in this study.

  26. 26.

    See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Translated by Louise Burchill (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 52.

  27. 27.

    Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago, IL: Open Court Press, 2005), 75–76.

  28. 28.

    See Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, 97.

  29. 29.

    Colossians, 35.

  30. 30.

    Colossians, 40.

  31. 31.

    The neologism “henology” here assumes Plotinus’ view that the Transcendent remains beyond all finite conceptual or material confinement.

  32. 32.

    Homo Abyssus, 338.

  33. 33.

    Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, Book 2, chapter 31, Edited by Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D, and James Donaldson, LL.D., (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981).

  34. 34.

    See Athanasius, Against the Arians, NPNF2, vol. 4, Translated and Introduced by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., and Henry Wace, D.D., (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), 381. 

  35. 35.

    On the a-temporal nature and totality of Christ’s mission, see MP, 173 and 189.

  36. 36.

    The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 67.

  37. 37.

    Lucy Gardner and David Moss, “Something Like Time; Something like the Sexes—and Essay in Reception,” in End of Modernity, 109. On how the spatiotemporal relates to the Passion, see ST., III, 47, 3 and TL 3, 266–273.

  38. 38.

    The visio mortis never denies Jesus’ beatific vision see GL 7, 209 TD 5, 146 and MP, 175.

  39. 39.

    See Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, 56. See also ST. III, 73, 1, 3.

  40. 40.

    See ST. III, 73, 3, 5. 

  41. 41.

    TD 5, 264. See also ibid., 265.

  42. 42.

    Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 191.

  43. 43.

    See AE, 73.

  44. 44.

    See TL 1, 80.

  45. 45.

    See Fourth Lateran Council (1213–1215).

  46. 46.

    See AE, 155, on the “meta” definition of a being.

  47. 47.

    See AE, 208, on the fundamental structure of a being.

  48. 48.

    TL 1, 37–38.

  49. 49.

    See Henri de Lubac S.J., Catholicism: Christ and Common Destiny of Man, Foreword by Christopher Butler and Translated by Lancelot C. Sheppard (London, UK: Richard Clay and Company, LTD for Burns & Oates Limited, 1962), 30.

  50. 50.

    See GL 1, 29.

  51. 51.

    See Mystery of the Eucharist, 205.

  52. 52.

    TL 2, 70.

  53. 53.

    ST. III, 7, 11.

  54. 54.

    TD 3, 231.

  55. 55.

    GL 5, 218.

  56. 56.

    John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, (London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2001), 7.

  57. 57.

    See Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History, reprint (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press/Communio Press, 1994), 17.

  58. 58.

    See Angelo Scola, Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Theological Style (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Group, 1995), 10.

  59. 59.

    The Pillar and The Ground of the Truth, 20.

  60. 60.

    See Louis Lavelle, La Présence Totale (Paris, France: Aubier aux Éditions Montaigne, 1934), 11. See also TL 1, 180–185.

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    Mark P. Fusco

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Fusco, M.P. (2023). The Heart of Matter. In: The Physics and Metaphysics of Transubstantiation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34640-8_7

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