“This Is My Body”

The Solemnity of Corpus Christi proclaims the truth that the Incarnate Son of God, having ascended to His Father’s right hand in heaven, remains present and active in His Church “until the end of the age” (Mt 28:20).

The truth of Christ’s substantial presence in the Holy Eucharist involves two closely related, though not identical, doctrines, those of transubstantiation and of the Real Presence. Survey data tells the sad story that even many Catholics today do not believe in or understand these doctrines.

In his sermons for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, given over the course of three decades at Corpus Christi Church, London, and in his other writings on the Eucharist, Ronald Knox (1888–1957) sheds a great deal of light on these truths concerning the what St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catechism of the Catholic Church call the “Sacrament of sacraments.” Knox’s teaching is that of the Church’s Tradition, especially as expressed magisterially by the Council of Trent and theologically by St. Thomas.

Knox, one of the great preachers and apologists of the English Catholic world during the first half of the twentieth century, wrote very often on the Real Presence and transubstantiation. Knox explains the Eucharistic mystery with coherence, lucidity, warmth, and persuasion. The astounding truth of the Real Presence is always prominent in Knox’s sermons and other writings on the Eucharist. He never ceases to marvel at Christ’s condescension in coming to his people under the appearances of bread and wine. The startling and awe-inspiring fact of Christ’s presence constantly presses itself upon Knox’s imagination, and he tries in corresponding measure to share the wonders of Christ’s Eucharistic presence with his readers and hearers.

Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist

Knox accepts the doctrine of the Real Presence as part of the Church’s unbroken Tradition, guaranteed by the words of Christ himself.¹ A starting point in thinking about Knox’s understanding of the Real Presence is its distinction from the other ways in which God is present in the world. Of course, God is present everywhere, at all times.² Having created us as sensory creatures, however, God gives himself to us in a way that appeals even to our senses. “Because he knows how much we all depend on our ordinary ways of thinking, he has not been content with all the ordinary gifts which he bestows on us.” No, he has left us the Eucharist, in which Christ is present in a manner different from that in which he is present everywhere. The Eucharist allows us to say concretely and directly, “Here is God” and even, “This is God.”³

For Knox, the whole sacramental life of the Church is a continuation of the Incarnate Christ’s presence and activity in the world. The Eucharist is an even more startling act of condescension on God’s part than the Incarnation.⁴ In the Eucharist the whole Christ is substantially present: “In the sacred Host, in each sacred Host, the whole Body of Christ is present, his Body, his Blood, his Soul, his Divinity.”⁵ And this is so in all of the places where the Blessed Sacrament is throughout the world. “Christ is present; is present in space, though not under the conditions of space.”⁶ In his incarnate life, Christ assumed a full human nature, including the limitations of time and space.⁷

After his Ascension, Christ chooses to become present sacramentally in such a way that allows both for his full, substantial presence and for that presence to occur down through the ages and all over the world. Of all of the miracles Christ performed in his earthly life, the institution of the Eucharist was his greatest.⁸ It also was and remains an act of unfathomable mercy on Christ’s part: “We are not worthy of the least of his mercies, and he gives us — himself!”⁹ Knox continues in the same sermon, “And, above all, the grace of the Holy Eucharist, no transient influence of the divine mercy but God himself, is lavished upon us with reckless bounty; we have but to stoop to gather it, and it is ours!”¹⁰ In the Eucharist, Christ gives to his faithful not what is their due, since it is impossible for them to earn so great a gift, but rather he gives himself out of the greatness of his love and munificence. Christ allows for easy access to himself in the Eucharist, knowing the risks brought by familiarity and accepting them for the sake of giving himself to his people:

God forgive us, we despise his graces because he has made them so cheap for us; the heavenly bread which is offered us without money and without price we put down, for that reason, as not worth having! That is not the law of the divine economy. All the graces bestowed on our blessed Lady and the saints, all the visions and ecstasies and the power of working miracles, are not to be compared in value with what he gives us in holy communion; for that is himself. This gift, which is himself, is not for the few, but for everybody. O res mirabilis, manducat Dominum pauper, servus et humilis: we are all paupers in his sight, all slaves, all creatures of earth, and he will make no distinction between us. He only asks that we should purge our consciences of mortal sin, and so come to him, asking him to bring just what he wants to give us, just what he knows that we need. “I am he who bade this be done; I will supply what is lacking to thee; come, and receive me.”¹¹

Knox emphasizes that the Eucharist is a gift given by Christ to his people, “a gift surpassing all the riches of the world, himself.”¹² This truth is clear from the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. In one sermon, Knox asks his hearers to contemplate the image of Christ holding the Sacred Host and chalice at the Last Supper, depicted in so many works of art. This image offers an intimate look at the relationship between the Incarnation and Christ’s sacramental presence:

Think, for a moment, of the paradox which that involves — the figure of our Lord at the last supper. You see before you what seems to be the form of a man; that man is Jesus Christ, his body, his blood, his manhood, his divinity. You also see before you what seems to represent a round disc of bread. That which looks like bread is also Jesus Christ, his body, his blood, his manhood, his divinity. Jesus Christ, then, holds himself in his hands. Host and banquet, priest and victim, are one.¹³

Another image Knox uses is that of a looking-glass. When a person looks into a looking-glass and sees his or her reflection, the appearance is exactly that of the person looking, but without any corresponding substance. In the Holy Eucharist, the substance of Christ’s Body and Blood is present, but without the corresponding appearances.¹⁴ Knox again considers the moment when Christ held the Sacred Host at the Last Supper:

His eyes were fixed on something that didn’t look like himself but was himself. It looked like an ordinary piece of bread; but the reality wasn’t just a piece of bread. The reality was something more real than that. It was himself, who is reality. What looked like a piece of bread was, you see, a kind of supernatural mirror — not reflecting, as other mirrors do, the appearance without the reality; it reflected the reality without the appearance.¹⁵

Knox compares, rather than contrasts, the Eucharist with a looking-glass insofar as each can be broken with the effect of multiplying the reality involved. A person looking into multiple broken pieces of a mirror sees his or her reflection in each one, rather than seeing his or her once integral reflection now divided amongst the pieces. So too, with the Eucharist, when the Host is broken each part contains the whole Christ, not some part of him: “The reality has reproduced itself in each broken fragment, the whole reality, and it remains real as ever.”¹⁶

The Real Presence is the fully concentrated presence of the Lord, who in return summons our fully concentrated attention. Knox compares the Eucharistic presence of Christ with the heat of the sun: “As the rays of the sun, whose heat is present everywhere, are caught and focused in a single point by the lens of a burning-glass, so our Lord will have these celestial visitations of his focused for us, crystallized and concentrated for us under the forms of outward things, when he comes to us through his sacred humanity in the Holy Eucharist.”¹⁷

As with any such images, this one has its limitations, but Knox is making an attempt to describe a great mystery with as much truth, clarity, and vividness as possible. And he is careful to use such images with integrity, at times alluding both to the similarities and differences of the two realities he considers and not overstating their similarities for the sake of the preacher’s convenience. In this case, for example, the analogy “limps” at the point when one considers that not literally all of the sun’s heat is concentrated through such a lens, whereas the whole Christ is indeed present in the Eucharist. Yet Knox’s point here is to help people understand that while Christ in his divinity is present everywhere, he is nevertheless fully present in a distinct and special way in the Holy Eucharist. And this Real Presence by its very nature calls for the central place in the lives, minds, and hearts of men. “In a world of shifting values, there is one fixed point on which our hearts can rest, one fixed star by which our intellects can be guided,” Knox writes. “It is the personal presence of our Lord on earth, yesterday, today, and as long as the earth endures.”¹⁸

Knox on Transubstantiation

As we move from Knox’s treatment of the Real Presence to that of transubstantiation, mention should be made of a text to which Philip Caraman drew attention in an editor’s note included near the front of the volume Pastoral and Occasional Sermons. Caraman quotes a statement by Knox in his sermon, “The Divine Sacrifice,” in which Knox writes, “the outward forms of bread and wine inhere in, are held together by, an underlying reality which is the very substance of his own body and blood.”¹⁹ Caraman opines that this text “should be understood in a loose sense, and not with the precision which a theologian would give to the words. In the Eucharist, the appearances of bread and wine remain present, of course, but without a substance in which they inhere.” Caraman writes that this text was pointed out to him by someone else.

There is, in fact, another text in the same volume to which Caraman does not allude but which makes the same point. In his sermon “One Body,” Knox writes, “For here, beyond the furthest reach of our earth-bound imaginations, the accidents of bread and wine inhere in a substance not their own, the very substance of our Lord’s body and blood.”²⁰ Both St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catechism of the Council of Trent teach that after transubstantiation the accidents of bread and wine depend upon the power of God and do not inhere in a substance, since the substances of bread and wine do not remain and it is impossible for the appearances of bread and wine to inhere in the substance of Christ’s Body and Blood.²¹ Caraman writes that Knox, “were he alive, would doubtless wish to clarify” his meaning about the relationship between substance and accidents in the Holy Eucharist. The context of Knox’s whole teaching on transubstantiation and the Real Presence, as well as his unfailing deference to the Magisterium and the orthodox theological tradition, give good grounds for Caraman’s defense. It seems doubtful that Knox radically misunderstood the metaphysical question involved. Perhaps this was an imperfect attempt on his part to offer more than a merely a negative description of the relationship between the Eucharistic substance and accidents. Perhaps it was an attempt to explain in some positive terms what it means to say that the Body and Blood of Christ are present under the appearances of bread and wine, in a way his hearers and readers could understand.

This difficulty aside, Knox speaks often of transubstantiation in his sermons in ways that would have been illuminating and edifying to his hearers. Knox’s consideration of two of Christ’s miracles provides a good example of his ingenuity in explaining transubstantiation. How the Real Presence comes to be is “a miracle and a mystery”.²² Knox asks two questions in this context: first, “Can God really turn a thing into something else altogether?”; and secondly, “Can God multiply his own Body’s presence, so that it is equally present in all the million Hosts of the world?”²³ Knox immediately answers that God can do these things, invoking two well-known miracles Christ performed during his public ministry: the miracle at the wedding feast at Cana (Jn 2:1–11) and Christ’s multiplication of loaves (Jn 6:1–14). These miracles demonstrate, respectively, Christ’s power to change one substance into another and to multiply something’s quantity.

In the miracle at Cana, “Our Lord changed water into wine; he didn’t annihilate water, and then create wine.”²⁴ Knox also refutes the idea that only an accidental change took place, and that what Christ produced remained substantially water, with only the accidents of wine.²⁵ Scripture testifies that what the wedding guests drank was, indeed, true wine. The miracle involved a “total change” of both substance and accidents, from those of water to those of wine. Positing anything less would call into question the authority of Scripture and suggest a form of deceit, since the reality would be something less than what is suggested by the accidents.²⁶ In the case of transubstantiation, Christ brings about a change of substance, this time without changing the accidents. Why is this not a deception? Because “a deception is something that is less real that it looks; but the holy Eucharist is just the opposite; it is something actually more real than it looks.”²⁷

The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves is the “exact correlative” of the miracle at Cana, Knox suggests, since at Cana Christ changed everything except the quantity of liquid when he changed water into wine, whereas in the feeding of the five thousand he changed nothing except the quantity of the bread and fishes. “In one case there is change without multiplication; in the other multiplication without change.”²⁸ It is by this power of multiplication that an otherwise quantitatively limited reality (the Body and Blood of Christ) can become present under the appearances of bread and wine in countless times and places where transubstantiation takes place. Together, these miracles possess “a kind of sacramental significance.” They have the “special purpose” of confirming Eucharistic faith.²⁹ Knox frequently calls transubstantiation a miracle, and so it stands to reason that certain miracles Christ performed in his public ministry should point to this greatest of his miracles.³⁰

As we have seen, Knox refers to transubstantiation both as a miracle and as a mystery. God’s wondrous work in the Eucharist transcends the human capacity for thought: “He has broken into the very heart of nature, and has separated from one another in reality two elements which we find it difficult to separate even in thought, the inner substance of things from those outward manifestations of it which make it known to our senses.”³¹ And yet faith and reason may work together to appreciate and understand this great mystery ever more deeply. Knox even preached an entire sermon on transubstantiation at a time when the concept was highly controverted in England and Catholics needed to understand their faith in order to defend it.³²

Transubstantiation effects a total change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.³³ God in his limitless creative and miraculous power “can create and can annihilate, can also change this into that.” He has chosen to employ these powers in the Eucharistic change in a unique way: “In the Blessed Sacrament it is his will that the change should be supra-sensible, and that the substance which is truly present should be only seen, only tasted, by faith.”³⁴

At one point Knox takes up what he calls the “blasphemous suggestion” of a contemporary Anglican bishop, who had proposed that a consecrated Host be subjected to a chemical analysis to test its reactions compared to those of an unconsecrated host. Not only does Knox find curious the bishop’s faith in science’s ability to penetrate to the “innermost secrets of physical reality,” but he also clarifies that the idea that such analysis could disprove transubstantiation is impossible. “However far Science may progress . . . it is not possible that it should ever arrive at the point of separating accidents from their substance, since the distinction here, albeit real, is a metaphysical and not a physical distinction,” Knox writes. “Whatever tests Science proposes must necessarily report, in the long run, to our senses; such are their terms of reference. Whereas the change that takes place in transubstantiation is, as I have said, suprasensible, and cannot submit to the award of any physical test whatever.”³⁵

In his sermon “Peace in Ourselves,” Knox addresses the relationship of substance and accidents after transubstantiation in a way that helps balance off his less clear references to inherence, which we have seen above. Reflecting upon the Holy Eucharist as a sacrament of unity, Knox notes that it is typically substance that acts as the “single principle of unity” for the various accidents of that substance. Substance is “the linch-pin which holds them all in place.” Remove the linchpin of substance, and one would normally expect the dissolution of the accidents. In transubstantiation, something unique and wonderful happens: “Take away the substance, and, by a miracle, so stupendous that our minds can hardly conceive it, the accidents do not fall apart; they remain there to be the garment and the vehicle of a quite different and a far greater substance, that of our Lord’s own body and blood.”³⁶

Only the power of God can do this. In a passage that speaks to the divine power at work in transubstantiation and draws out an important implication with regard to the unity of the Church, Knox writes of the persisting unity of the Eucharistic accidents:

His word upholds them; the same word which prayed, at the last supper, that the apostles might remain one; might remain one even when their Master, the focus of loyalty by which their fellowship maintained itself, was taken away. The unity which unites three persons in one Godhead, the unity which preserves in being a set of accidents which have lost their substance — that is the unity we Christians pray for, and claim as our own when we gather round our Father’s table at the Holy Eucharist.³⁷

Conclusion: Mysterium Fidei

Faith alone allows access to this sublime mystery, in which Christ becomes fully and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine. He does so, even at the risk of exposing himself to the scorn of the faithless.³⁸ Many more texts could be produced demonstrating Knox’s affirmation of the truth of transubstantiation and the Real Presence. It suffices to summarize, however, by saying that Knox taught that the words of consecration bring about a total change of the substances of bread and wine into the substances of the Body and Blood of Christ, and that in the Holy Eucharist Christ remains present in a unique and utterly complete way, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.

To perceive these truths requires faith, and Knox himself was a man of strong Catholic faith, from before the time of his reception into the Catholic Church in 1917. Again and again, Knox expresses his amazement at God’s love and generosity towards his people in giving them such a great Gift. At a time when Modernism was exercising a deeply corrosive power in biblical studies and theology, Knox offered the Church’s traditional teaching with great clarity, learning, eloquence, and the persuasive force of a seasoned apologist. His writings on the Eucharist and a host of other topics deserve the attention of today’s Catholics, facing as they do the relentless attempts of society to marginalize the Faith and to bring about the eclipse of God. This generation needs new defenders of the truth that the Son of God remains with his people, giving them strength, drawing them to himself, and inspiring their witness to a world that often fails to welcome him simply because it does not know he is here, knocking at the door of each human heart.