What about the Wedding at Cana?
What about the Wedding at Cana?
That miracle was not that of bread and wine being changed into flesh and blood for someone to physically consume before they were saved, as no spiritual benefit was linked to it. Meanwhile likening it to transubstantiation is a common mistake
. For as with all miracles of physical change, this not the same as transubstantiation, as the wine looked, tasted and would chemically test to be real wine, while since this does not occur with the Cath. wafer and wine, a novel Aristotelian type explanation had to be devised.
From a RC monk and defender:
Neoplatonic thought or at least conceptual terms are clearly interwoven with Christian theology long before the 13th century...
The doctrine of transubstantiation completely reverses the usual distinction between being and appearance, where being is held to be unchanging and appearance is constantly changing. Transubstantiation maintains instead that being or substance changes while appearance remains unchanged. Such reversals in the order of things are affronts to reason and require much, not little, to affirm philosophically. Moreover, transubstantiation seem to go far beyond the simple distinction between appearance and reality. It would be one thing if the body and blood of Christ simply appeared to be bread and wine. But I don’t think that is what is claimed with “transubstantiation.”
Aristotle picked up just such common-sense concepts as “what-it-is-to-be-X” and tried to explain rather complex philosophical problems with them. Thus, to take a “common-sense” concept like substance–even if one could maintain that it were somehow purified of Aristotelian provenance—and have it do paradoxical conceptual gymnastics in order to explain transubstantiation seems not to be not so anti-Aristotelian in spirit after all...
That the bread and wine are somehow really the body and blood of Christ is an ancient Christian belief—but using the concept of “substance” to talk about this necessarily involves Greek philosophy (Br. Dennis Beach, OSB, monk of St. John’s Abbey; doctorate in philosophy from Penn State; http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2010/05/30/transubstantiation-and-aristotle-warning-heavy-philosophy)
Edwin Hatch:
...it is among the Gnostics that there appears for the first time an attempt to realize the change of the elements to the material body and blood of Christ. The fact that they were so regarded is found in Justin Martyr. But at the same time, that the change was not vividly realized, is proved by the fact that, instead of being regarded as too awful for men to touch, the elements were taken by the communicants to their homes and carried about with them on their travels. (Hatch, Edwin, 1835-1889, "The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church;" pp. 308-09 https://archive.org/stream/influenceofgreek00hatc/influenceofgreek00hatc_djvu.txt)
In Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship, Bernhard Lang argues that, “When in late antiquity the religious elite of the Roman Empire rethought religion and ritual, the choice was not one between Mithraism and Christianity (as Ernest Renan suggested in the 19th century) but between pagan Neoplatonism and Neoplatonic Christianity.”
“In the third century CE, under the leadership of Plotinus, Plato’s philosophy enjoyed a renaissance that was to continue throughout late antiquity. This school of thought had much in common with Christianity: it believed in one God (the “One”), in the necessity of ritual, and in the saving contact with deities that were distinct from the ineffable One and stood closer to humanity. Like Judaism and Christianity, it also had its sacred books–the writings of Plato, and, in its later phase, also the Chaldean Oracles. In fact, major early Christian theologians–Origen, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus–can at the same time be considered major representatives of the Neoplatonic school of thought.” - (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cosmostheinlost/2014/04/08/early-churchs-choice-between-neoplatonism)
What about it?