Should a recovering alcoholic receive the communion wine?

If Jesus is really present in the Eucharist then does that make it safe for a recovering alcoholic to receive the consecrated wine, given that the wine is no longer actually wine but the “blood of Christ”? To answer that question it’s necessary to defend the intelligibility of the doctrine of the real presence, and to assess its implications for those of us who, were actual wine to pass our lips, would end up back on that familiar spiral of despair known as “relapse”.

There is a significant point of schism between the Catholic and Protestant traditions concerning what is actually happening at the Eucharistic celebration. Is the re-enactment of the Last Supper symbolic or literal?

Scripture first, and then the metaphysics.

In the very strange Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to himself as the bread of life. He goes on to clarify:

“My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me. And I in him.”  (John ,6, 55-56).

There are persuasive scriptural reasons for believing that Jesus meant this literally, not least because many of his followers deserted him at this point, appalled at an apparent invitation to cannibalism. As the theologian Robert Barron has pointed out, it was quite clear when Jesus was offering a metaphor, and equally obvious when he wasn’t. His correction of Nicodemus over what it meant to be “born again” being a case in point.

And, of course, at the Last Supper, the strangest dinner party in history, Jesus doubles down and initiates the Eucharistic institution. He offers himself as the sacrificial lamb of God, and announces that the bread at the meal is his body and that the wine is his blood, poured out for the many for the forgiveness of sin. How is a literal reading of this defensible? Well, if you are a theist there is no problem at all. And to claim that Our Lord was offering mere symbolism is in fact to implicitly claim that he was not God but, as CS Lewis would say, therefore either mad or bad.

The Oxford philosopher JL Austin wrote about speech acts. He pointed out that language has a performative as well as a descriptive function. There are times when we say things that don’t merely describe the world but fundamentally change it. When a police officer says “you are under arrest” then, simply because he has used those words, the world changes and you are not going home. When a groom says at his wedding “I do”, then his world is transformed, occasionally for the better (so I am told, wasn’t true in my case – or hers either come to that).

How much more transformational could a speech act be when it is God doing the speaking? The first two chapters of Genesis itemise a sequence of divine speech acts. “And God said…”. And the first chapter of John tells us that in the beginning was the Word…

God did not set the world up and then back off to watch. God speaks the world into existence now and he sustains it from moment to moment. He is more of a narrator than an architect. So, when God, in the form of Jesus Christ, speaks the bread into his flesh and the wine into his blood, then by that act of speech these things are made true. And when the priest at Mass, acting in persona Christi, repeats the Eucharistic initiation then the Last Supper is moved into the present moment. The wine becomes quite literally the blood of Christ.

What does “quite literally” mean? As with all things sacramental the answer is to be found in the defining theology of St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas offered to the church a modified Aristotelian metaphysics. Central to this is a distinction between substantial and accidental form. The substantial form of something is, roughly, its essence. What it is to be a cat is to be a member of a species. The accidental form might be the colour of the cat. Some cats are ginger, some are black. Some are arrogant, some are intolerably arrogant. What happens in the Mass is transubstantiation: a change in substantial form conjoined with a preservation of accidental form. The bread and the wine are transformed, essentially, into the body and blood of Christ. But they retain their contingent, accidental properties: they still look like bread and still taste like wine.

So, should I drink the wine or not?

My PhD supervisor was a Berkleyan idealist, which is to say that he didn’t believe in the existence of matter. He argued that what we think of as “solid material objects” are no more than collections of experiences, held together in the mind of God. So, technically, he did not believe in the existence of his own body. This did not prevent him from being a hypochondriac. And on one occasion when I was driving him from Liverpool to Oxford he told me that I was too close to the car in front. When I asked him why he was so concerned given that the car in front didn’t materially exist he replied: “the phenomena are just as risky”.

I’ve decided I will not be taking the communion wine because even though it is in substantial form the blood of Christ, the accidental form is – to a recovering alcoholic – still pretty risky.

And, with all due respect to Our Lord, I know for a fact that its accidental property of “how it tastes” is pretty obnoxious.