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I was posting Aquinas not as authority to be swallowed whole least of all by people who don’t believe in, well, a whole bunch o’ stuff.

So the point is that he addresses the issue. It feels a little ridiculous to have to mention this, but I think Aquinas may have looked in a Bible once or twice.

I think the protasis is important in your problematic text. (Do you know what it’s a quote from?) Aquinas also thinks that prime matter is made of the four elements. And he didn’t think the “conceptus” was human until weeks after conception. (He was still against abortion.)

I do not agree with either of these thoughts of his. But they were excommunicating heretics, and running them out of town and/or killing them long before and long after him. We don’t kill forgers and most malefactors these days either. And nobody had started doing real chemistry, and he didn’t have the knowledge of embryology that we have.

I don’t see the relevance of these things to his usefulness in working out transubstantiation.

I am left wondering just you posted Aquinas in the first place unless it was to "justify" the Catholic teaching that all the elements were present in either the bread or the wine.

Yes, Aquinas in all probability did look at a Bible every now and then. Please enlighten me as to where he found anything where it is suggested that either the bread or the wine were seperately interchangeable in the Comunion.

I suggest your "working out" transubstantian is based on extra-Scriptural "tradition".

In the command, "Do this for my anamnesis," what is the antecedent of "this?" What, exactly? I submit there is o unarguable or self-evident Scriptural answer.

Of course there is no explicit development of what happens in the Eucharist in the Bible. God wanted to make sure that theologians of later centuries could get work, so he left stuff for them to dope out.

I'm tired. That's the best I can do for right now.

I am left wondering just you posted Aquinas in the first place unless it was to "justify" the Catholic teaching that all the elements were present in either the bread or the wine.

I keep forgetting that reason doesn't count at all sometimes.When the Sola Scriptura folks argue, they seem to think that they have no philosophical underpinning to their arguments. That's not true. What they have is incoherent and unexamined underpinnings to their arguments.

AND I'm impressed with a theme, pejorative adjectives are merely descriptive, not restrictive. That is "vain repetition" is taken to mean that all repetition is vain, despite the repetition of Psalm 136.

Similarly it is urged that all philosophy is a bad thing because Paul says,"See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ."

The construction of this verse that condemns all philosophy does spare the construer of the difficult work of careful thought. But it cannot spare him from philosophy. He will just not know how to use the tool he insists on using, like the person who thinks that substance means matter and still says that after 5 new handles and 2 new heads, he has had only one ax all his life, and doesn't realize how incoherent he's being.

It seems to me clear that God doesn't come in parts. The argument to get there has been posted in this thread, and I saw no effort to contradict it.

If God does not come in parts,
If Jesus is God,
If Jesus is present in the Blessed Sacrament,

Then ALL of Jesus is present in each fragment, however small, of the sacrament.

The chief benefit of the sacrament is participation in Jesus, all other "spiritual" benefits derive from that.

So someone who receives a very small bit or "only under one 'kind'" receives all the benefit he is capable of receiving from the Sacrament.

It would seem to be the VERY sort of legalism of which we are too often unjustly accused for us to insist on reception all the time in two kinds despite any difficulties and problems attendant on that insistence.

If trying to think coherently and clearly is a tradition of men, whose tradition is it to think incoherently and unclearly?