Discussions of how the eucharist builds the church community and promotes social justice are fashionable and intellectually undemanding. In this incisive study, James Arcadi takes up the tools of analytic theology to address the consequent lack of attention by theologians to the elements and their metaphysical status. He justifiably assumes that the eucharist entails the presence of Christ not in human form but in or through the elements. In John's Gospel, the farewell discourse sets the Last Supper in the context of presence notwithstanding future absence, while at Emmaus, Christ is recognised in the breaking of bread but then immediately disappears. Adopting a declarative approach, Arcadi wishes to conceive how a Christian believer may best understand the statements ‘This is my body’ and ‘This is my blood’, given that their meaning can't be read directly out of scripture. Part of the first chapter (pp. 14–23) offers a lucid summary of ten different theories of Christ's mode of eucharistic presence. This historically roots the ensuing discussion, and Arcadi homes in on and defends his own preferred theory in the chapters that follow.
The principle that divine presence is active rather than mere passive occupancy is central. Via speech–act theory, Arcadi focuses on the words of consecration, which he understands as renaming the bread and wine as Christ's body and blood through intentional speech by a person with appropriate authority within the hearing of their community. Naming is real predication. Of course, people and objects may go by more than one name (such as the apostle in scripture who, in different places, is more or less randomly called Simon, or Peter, or Simon Peter) in syntactically equivalent acts of naming. However, if both names are to hold simultaneously, rather than to contradict, these acts must be epistemically inequivalent.
Central to Arcadi's thesis is his view that Christ's mode of eucharistic presence is the same as his mode of incarnational presence, as understood in Chalcedonian terms. Following Sarah Coakley, he views these as regulative rather than exhaustive, leaving open a range of stances that combine unity and duality, adding (with George Hunsinger) asymmetrical ordering of the earthly by the divine as a third principle. Importantly, Arcadi adopts a three-part, concrete-compositional christology, with the divine Word taking into the hypostatic union with the instance of human nature who is Jesus the whole natural union of body and soul.
His preferred theory of eucharistic presence is impanation. This has sometimes been taken as directly identifying the elements of bread and wine with Christ's organic flesh and blood as manifested in the earthly Jesus. However, both hypostatic impanation, by which Christ becomes literally reincarnate in the eucharist, and natural impanation, in which the elements enter a natural union with Christ's soul, are refuted. Instead, Arcadi espouses sacramental impanation. A private instrumental union exists, he avers, between Christ's body and the bread, which is analogous to that of the incarnation: only Christ's body, not any other bodies, may elect to use or own the bread this way. A second key motif is extension: the bread and wine form extended, externalised parts of Christ's body that enable a particular kind of divine interaction with the world. Importantly, this is an artefactual body rather than an enfleshed body, similarly to how a prosthetic limb is a distinct part of a human body. Christ's eucharistic body is additional to the original body, but nevertheless comes to be incorporated into that body as part of it, although not the whole of it, enabling the body to act and appear differently. Although, unlike the prosthetic limb, Christ's body acts remotely, immediate action from a distance via the Spirit is standard fare in Calvin, even if not part of his account of the Lord's Supper.
Arcadi defines his enquiry with care, demarcating a manageable field for discussion. However, the liturgical or historical theologian may wish to contest some assumptions. The consecration of the elements has sometimes been regarded as occurring later than the words of institution, while eucharistic orders such as Addai and Mari lack any words of institution, with consecration instead effected by the epiclesis of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the metaphysical equivalence of the bread/body and wine/blood is assumed throughout. Yet as medieval Franciscan expositors recognised, if the bread is identified with Christ's resurrection body, while the wine is identified with the blood that flowed out of Christ's wounds and may therefore not have been assimilated into his resurrection body, such equivalence cannot be assumed. Nevertheless, this is a fabulous study that brings welcome clarity to a perennial theological question.
