Pints With Aquinas - Is the Eucharist a SYMBOL?! | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: February 17, 2024

Fr. Pine shows that the Eucharist is the Real Presence by examining the component parts of the Sacrament. 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work as an assistant director for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pines of the Aquinas. Sometimes when we are debating, like faith or doctrine, we feel like we have to react and say something contrary to whoever we're disagreeing with. So say like you're Catholic and you're engaged in debate with a Protestant and a Protestant says, we're justified by faith.

You think to yourself, wait a second, we disagree. So maybe we're justified by something else. And then you pipe up and say, we are justified by works. Or maybe you're debating a Protestant on something of sacramental theology. And this Protestant individual says, faith, excuse me, sacraments are symbols. And you think to yourself, wait, we disagree on this. So I have to say something contrary. Sacraments are not symbols. Okay, in situations like that, when we take our cues from reaction or contrioty, oftentimes

we stumble into untruths or we stumble into falsities. Because as it turns out we are justified by faith, but a faith breathing forth love. That is to say a faith informed by charity, which charity is made manifest and communicable in works, but ultimately we're justified by faith and charity. Or when it comes to the sacraments, as it turns out the sacraments are symbols. It's just that they are not mere symbols. They are symbols, that is, signs, which cause what they signify. They affect a change in our lives

by the work having been worked, by the power of God alone, and through the instrumental causality of our Lord's sacred humanity. So in this year of Eucharistic revival here in the United States, I thought that one way in which to encourage deeper Eucharistic communion is in the United States, I thought that one way in which to encourage deeper

Eucharistic communion is to look at the various signs that are at work in the Eucharistic liturgy because it's precisely in and through those signs that Christ is sacramentally and substantially present for our worship and reception and eventual transformation. So let's take a look at the principal signs of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Here we go. Alright, when St. Thomas talks about the sacraments, he first advances a kind of general sacramental theory and then against that backdrop he specifies how each of the individual seven sacraments signify and cause. Okay, so with respect to the general sacramental theory, he says that each of the sacraments

brings to bear something from the past, something from the present, and something from the future. With respect to the past, he has in mind the deeds and sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because when you think about it, there's a kind of great chain of sacramental being. God is the protagonist of these sacramental works. He acts in and through the sacred humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, who deploys his various deeds and sufferings as ways in which to establish his solidarity with us in human flesh, and also as ways to kind of exercise our humanity and salvation as he spins out salvation in various ways.

And then the sacraments as those sacred signs which both commemorate his deeds and sufferings, reaching back to the past, and then apply the various graces and virtues, gifts and fruits of those sacraments. Okay, so with respect to the past, they bring to bear the various deeds and sufferings of Christ and especially his passion. Why? Well, because it's the summit of salvation. Because our Lord intended to live a whole human life and he intended that that life mounts to Calvary. Because it's on Calvary where he tells forth his love

in most excellent fashion which love becomes transparent to the divine love the divine mercy which reaches to us in our miserable state and alleviates the misery of that state drawing us into the divine communion so the passion especially and then with respect to the present the sacraments bring to bear various graces and virtues. So you know when we talk about grace, sometimes we're talking about sanctifying grace, which is like habitual grace of the whole person, or sometimes we're talking about actual grace,

which is kind of like punctual graces, which equip us at a particular time. But we might also be talking about sacramental graces, which are particular graces which equip us for a certain work. So each of the sacraments has a grace that is kind of earmarked, or a grace that is kind of set aside as peculiar to that saving action, as equipping us for a particular aspect of human life, corresponding to a particular aspect of human healing, or growth, or formation, or maturation, whatever it is. Okay. So we think about it specifically in terms of grace and virtue.

And then with respect to the future, the sacraments in general bring to bear something of eternal life. Because these sacraments, they're sacred signs of a new covenant, a new covenant which is meant to take us by the hand and lead us into the fullness of life. So it's meant to lead us onto the end times, onto the eschaton in which Christ will be all in all. So then, against the backdrop of that general sacramental theory, then St. Thomas goes ahead and identifies the features of the Eucharist which kind of fit within this schema. And he'll link it to particular signs. So we're gonna focus on the signs of exsanguination,

which is to say the two-fold consecration, which commemorates our Lord shedding of blood for love of us. And then nourishment, the fact that we receive under, you know, the species of bread and wine, which we associate with nourishment. And then, out of many grains, one loaf. under the species of bread and wine, which we associate with nourishment. And then, out of many grains, one loaf. Out of many grapes, one chalice.

So too out of many Christians, one mystical body. Okay, so we're going to focus on these three main signs. Let's turn first to this first sign of exsanguination. We notice that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, there is a two-fold consecration. First the consecration of the bread, and then the consecration of the wine. Now you've probably heard people, like when describing the sacrament of the Eucharist, refer to it as a sacrifice. So a sacrifice, in this case a kind of unbloody sacrifice or an unbloody immolation of a host is some change visited upon an offering

whereby to affect communion. So it might be in the setting of a meal or a benediction, but here we see it in the offering of a host. So our Lord is both priest and victim. He offers himself to the Father for our salvation. And in the Eucharist we commemorate or re-present that sacrifice. So it's the same priest, the same victim, the same God to whom, the same people for whom, and it's done in union with, by these ritual gestures, by these ritual words, it's done in union with the sacrifice of Calvary. So it commemorates that sacrifice and it also applies that sacrifice. So by this two-fold consecration, which we can refer to by the word exsanguination, there

is a reaching back to the past, specifically to the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, His sacrifice on Calvary, so as to bring it to bear here in the present. Alright, so that's the first. The second is, with respect to the present, what about the present is brought to bear? We said this is grace and virtue and we've identified it as somehow bound up with these, you know, kind of nourishing things. So wine we associate with kind of common table fellowship, we associate it with sustenance, we associate it with kind of simple family fare. So in many cultures

those who haven't gone through a kind of ketosis craze or those who have easy access to grains of this sort, bread is just omnipresent. That's something that you eat at every meal and sometimes it's all you eat for a meal. I lived in Switzerland for a time and at night I basically just ate bread and cheese and it was awesome because the cheese there was dynamite. But so yeah, when we think of bread we think of sustenance, we think of common table fellowship, we think of the meal that brings a family together. But then when we think of wine, we think something similar but we also think of like courage,

refreshment, delight, hilarity, festivity. Okay? So we're talking about the types of things which bring satisfaction to men's souls but also joy to men's souls. And so what is it about these signs that makes grace and virtue... well they signify these spiritual effects and then they bring these spiritual effects to bear in our life. And so what are the graces and virtues principally associated with the Eucharist? Well, charity, right? So charity is the love of God poured into our hearts whereby we cry Abba Father, right? So it incorporates us into the divine communion.

It makes us kind of partake of this heavenly table fellowship. But it doesn't make charity where charity is not, it just fans into flame the ember of charity, or it kindles into flame the kind of smoldering charity which might already be present. So it doesn't make where there is not, but it does increase where there is, or it does kindle where there is a charity already existent. And in the process it kind of burns up venial sin or hindrances or obstacles to the activation of charity such that we might participate that grace more fully, more promptly, and that it might extend to more facets or features of our human life. Okay. Third and finally, we observed that in using bread and wine there's a way in which

the elements, by virtue of their constitutions, show something of the heavenly reality that awaits. So we said, out of many grains, crushed, milled, and then mixed with other ingredients baked, you get one loaf. And then out of many grapes, so vines planted, grapes gathered, crushed, fermented, you fill one chalice. So there's a sense, out of many, one. Now, there's a sense in which these Eucharistic elements signify and in signifying they affect the change which awaits us as the final fruit of the sacrament. So the final fruit of the sacrament, the Eucharist, is the union of the mystical body. So sometimes people will say the church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the church. It's a trope repeated often enough in the 20th century, but there's

a real profundity to that observation because the Eucharist, in fanning into flame the charity of those members of the mystical body, it knits us more closely together as a church, right, because it makes us to function within the setting of said mystical body according to our proper role or according to our proper, you know, status so that we might be yet more perfectly head and members of the one worshipping Christ unto the praise of God's glory. So then the Eucharist has these three principal signs, namely twofold consecration or exsanguination, bringing to bear the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ from the past, signs of sustenance,

nourishment, delight, festivity, joy, right? Which bring to bear these graces and virtues of the present, namely the grace and virtue of charity and the way in which it fans that charity into flame and then burns up obstacles to its exercise. And then with respect to the future, right, we have, "...out of many grains one loaf, out of many grapes one chalice, so too out of many Christians one mystical body, because by this sign value the Eucharist affects our union in Christ." Making us yet more perfectly that one worshipping body of Christ. Alright, so you can see that there is a sign value at work in the Eucharist because the Eucharist is a sacrament.

It makes our Lord Jesus Christ present sacramentally and substantially because the words of institution signify not only that He is at work but that He is present so, for that reason, it's peculiar among the sacraments. It's the summit of the sacraments, and it's that in which all the sacraments are meant to terminate. So, while the person whom you're debating might say, it's a symbol, you shouldn't so much say it's not a symbol as not only is it a symbol, but it's also a sacrifice.

And I can show you, based on the tradition, which relies on the Church's scriptures, how this this is so and how it conduces to the fullness of faith and the fullness of love. So that's what I prepared I hope it's a benefit to you. This is Pius of the Aquinas if you haven't yet please do subscribe to the channel if you're on YouTube push the bell and get sweet email updates when other things come out. In addition I contribute to a podcast called God's Plaining. And a little while back we had like a five or six part series on the Eucharist. You can look up God's Plaining Eucharist and maybe profit from some of that content

as well. And then I'm writing a book about the Eucharist and hopefully it's going to come out soon and maybe it's going to get published. But just pray for me because I'm struggling on the last chapter right now and I think all of it is kind of bloodless and uninteresting. So pray for an infusion of goodness and for a two-fold spirit of zeal. I'd appreciate that mightily. Okay guys, know my prayers for you, please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.