If you are overly concerned with arcane Aristotelian concepts you ought to reject St . John’s use of the word Logos too. The word Epiousious is a hapax legomenon and was never used before Matthew 6:11 and is used in no other context in Greek literature. Had Jesus meant simply bread He would have said “artos”.
While it is good to look to the Early Church Fathers guidance in determining what was meant by the Gospels citing a single writing of a single Early Church Father is not conclusive proof. Rest assured that St. John Chrysostom did believe in the Real Presence. Here is but one example from one of his homilies:
“We behold in the Eucharist the one who is beheld in heaven.
Christ gave his flesh to eat in order to deepen our love for him. When we approach him there should be a burning within us a fire of live and longing. This food strengthens us; it emboldens us to speak freely to our God; it is our hope, our salvation, our light and our life. If we go to the next world fortified by this sacrifice we shall enter sacred portals with perfect confidence, as though protected all over by armor of gold.”
“But why do I speak of the next world? Because of this sacrament earth becomes heaven for you. Throw open the gates of heaven – or rather, not heaven, but of heaven of heavens-look through and you will see proof of what I say. What is heaven’s most precious possession? I will show you it here on earth. I do not show you archangels, heaven or the heaven of heavens, but I show you the very Lord of all these. Do you not see how you gaze, here on earth, upon what is most precious of all? You not only gaze on it but touch it as well. You not only touch it, but even eat it and take away with you to your homes. It is essential therefore when you wish to deceive this sacrament you cleanse your soul from sin and to prepare your mind.”
Additionally, many of St. John Chrysostom’s contemporaries taught similarly:
"Give us this day our supersubstantial bread. The bread which is of the common sort is not supersubstantial. But the Bread which is holy, that Bread is supersubstantial, as if to say, directed toward the substance of the soul. This Bread does not go into the belly, to be cast out into the privy. Rather, it is distributed through your whole system, for the benefit of body and soul." – St. Cyril of Jerusalem
"He (Jesus) called it bread indeed, but He called it epiousion, that is, supersubstantial. It is not the bread that passes into the body but that bread of eternal life, which sustains the substance of our souls. Therefore, in Greek it is called epiousios." St. Ambrose -Bishop of Milan from 374 to 397
“”If Jesus Christ, yielding to your prayer, grants me the favor and it is His will, I shall, in the subsequent letter which I intend to write to you, still further explain the dispensation which I have here only touched upon, regarding the New Man Jesus Christ--a dispensation founded on faith in Him and love for Him, on His Passion and Resurrection. I will do so especially if the Lord should reveal to me that you--the entire community of you!--are in the habit, through grace derived from the Name, of meeting in common, animated by one faith and in union with Jesus Christ--who in the flesh was of the line of David, the Son of Man and the Son of God--of meeting, I say, to show obedience with undivided mind to the bishop and the presbytery, and to break the same Bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote against death, and everlasting life in Jesus Christ. St. Ignatius of Antioch
If you study the writings and teachings of the Early Church Fathers that immediately followed the Apostles and those that preceded St. John Chrysostom you will find that they all unanimously believed in the Real Presence
Peace be with you.
1. On Logos.
Actually, “logos” as it is used in John 1:1 is probably more a creature of Heraclitus than Aristotle. But I do agree, it is one of the most interesting double meanings in Scripture. God reveals himself through His word and His Word. Yet the Greek usage had elevated the term to also express the idea of the rational principle that governs the universe. What a great way to introduce the human race to Christ the Creator of all.
However, there are differences between that and the problem with transubstantiation. Logos teaches us who Christ is, and it was clearly a part of the enscripturated Gospel message from the beginning. Transubstantiation is a tortured way to explain a physical miracle that gives no evidence of its occurrence, that came very late in the evolution of doctrine, and that is the basis of anathematizing those who should still be brothers and sisters in a common faith. It is therefore inherently schismatic.
And Aristotle wouldn’t like what Aquinas did with his categories either, reversing the sense of substance and accidence as he did. In the end, transubstantiation per se explains nothing. It is a complete muddle. It baffles me to see someone as intelligent as Aquinas get caught up in his own version of epicycles. But we are all products of our own times, so I should probably be more generous.
2. On Epiousion
As you pointed out, epiousion is a word that only occurs in the context of the bread petition of the Lord’s Prayer. But if you’re a lexicographer, that’s not a good thing, that’s a bad thing. A one-off word is extraordinarily difficult to translate. The context of a broader literature is completely missing, and the ordinary apparatus for deriving a meaning must be replaced with a process that analyzes the components of the word in hopes of finding some combination of templates that when taken together make sense.
BTW, I used Chrysostom in my previous post, not to prove usage definitively, but to only show that there is some early testimony to the simple rendering of “daily” bread in Matt 6:11. I might have also cited Origen, who was less definite, but did not go the direction of Jerome’s “supersubstantial” notion, which has the problem that it is only one of several possible arrangements of the term’s components.
There are a number of theories concerning the meaning of epiousion. I feel the technical issues are somewhat beyond my range of skill, so I would direct you to an incomplete list of resources that I found helpful (I am still vetting some other possible sources):
Epiousion as a term of measurement, the daily ration of bread:
http://www.metrum.org/measures/epiousios.htm
The notion of bread as doctrine and “eating” messiah already active in Talmudic sources:
http://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/lightfoot-new-testament/john/6.html?p=3
Epiousion as a more specialized form of “daily” expressing the arrival of the new day. Note especially the potential re-division of the adjective into ep’-iosa, which has multiple testimonies in participial form elsewhere in Scripture, which would remove the cloud of hapax legomenon, and apparently is drawing some attention among scholars:
http://www.rededicate.org/archives/UploadMarriage/fourthpetitionLP.html
My own conclusion thus far is that these words may have been rich with multiple meanings when Christ first spoke them. Through the ages how many of God’s little children have wondered where their next meal would come from. They could look to this gentle prayer and see that the Creator of all things knew of their need and would provide for them, one day at a time, just as he said elsewhere. In this sense, the bread of the dawning day is perfectly a sensible thing to pray for in the darkness of the early morning hours.
But God is the God of all wisdom, and would certainly have a message to his people Israel embedded in everything Jesus publically taught, yet in parables, so that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not hear, as he again shrewdly divides between the self-wise and the innocently child-like. The people have called him “the prophet,” the one foretold by Moses, the new Moses. He has preached about the manna from Heaven, and given food in abundance to the 5000, as a miracle sign to Israel that he is indeed their Messiah. They start to get it. He is the provider of the new miracle bread from Heaven.
But they are still materialists. They really don’t get it. They know he could be the one sent by God, but even the miracle bread, the new manna they seek from him, is only for the satisfying of their physical needs. They don’t understand that he does not speak to them in physical terms, but in spiritual terms, as he said in John 6:63.
And yet, for those who can hear it, he is more than the provisioner of food for the belly. He is the bread of life itself. Not in the sense of physical miracles involving invisible transformation of physical objects, but in the sense of offering himself on the cross for our sin, his body in place of our body, his blood in place of our blood, which offerings would be the perfect satisfaction to God for all our sin. In that sense, he is the bread of life, the miracle bread from the hand of God, for the people of God. It is him, and it is his word, his life, his doctrine, upon which we feed, not in any material sense, but as he said, his words are spirit, and they are life.
Conclusion:
So while I do not claim to have completely solved the puzzle, I do sincerely wish to avoid the “Giant Spaceship Behind the Sun” fallacy (GSBS). GSBS is where you boldly assert there is a giant spaceship behind the Sun because the other guy can’t prove there isn’t one, for now. GSBS is particularly bad when you start basing your life on belief in the alien craft, and start anathematizing those who are, shall we say, reserving judgment for stronger evidence.
Likewise, endowing epiousion in Matt 6:11 with a super-technical, theologically sophisticated meaning that won’t show up in full form till nine centuries later flies in the face of cautious logic. The assertion cannot be falsified, at least not until we can send a probe to the other side of the Sun. Of course then the giant ship could engage its cloaking device … but I digress. :)
Peace,
SR