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Thank you very much for the effort.

Again, probably, short of reading Aristotle, I don't see how a serious inquirer can avoid reading the relevant parts of the Summa. I linked to transubstantiation in post to metmom above.

Strangely, what TA (as we affectionately call him) has to say about angels is a fun way to get into the relationship of substance to matter. (ST, First Part, Q. 50 ff)

It is interesting, in my decrepitude, to have it suggested that I may have a vested interest in Aristotle/Thomas. I came to them kicking and screaming! I cordially loathed Aristotle (except for the cordial part) in college. I liked Thomas, but mostly because of his combination of reasonableness and chutzpah. (”Hold my beer and watch this. I will now explain everything. Pay attention.)

The closest I came to a sort of passionate interest was Dante, whom I first encountered in the epigraph to Eliot's. Prufrock.

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

As to that lady euch site, that's the sort of thing that gets me to checking the action on my AR. I've heard priests say it. But they often say silly things.

Articles 5 and 6 of Q 75 talk about substance, form, species, and matter. I see the section from which you quoted considers a range of "substances" from God himself (" ... that Substance, whose very being is His essence") down to ... for my following exercise ... a marble and, of course, lower still.

(winging it here.)

A marble is spherical and hard. As objects intended to be marbles vary in those aspects, we have good or bad marbles. A cubic object would be a bad marble. A dodecahedron would be better, an icosahedron better still. A pancake would be so bad we wouldn't say it qualified as a marble at all.

A foam rubber sphere wouldn't do, Styrofoam wouldn't either. An unfired clay sphere might qualify, ceteris paribus. But good strong glass or, um, marble (!) or agate would work. IF, therefore, there is a "substance" called marble, matter would seem to be an aspect of it. An incorporeal marble? Can't be, can it? The whole idea of a marble is that you can hold it, shoot it, hit other marbles with it. On the other hand, except perhaps in the "minds" of God and the angels, the idea would be empty if there weren't some small, roundish, hard things.

We can get lost in the weeds pretty easily here!

BUT you can't hold, shoot, or hit other marbles with the IDEA of a marble! Nor can glass, marble, or agate in any old shape work as the marble we need so that Johnny down the street can take all of ours and leave us dejected. You need "matter" chosen and formed to approximate a shape, density, and other "species" -- or "appearances."

When we consider the human body (or that of other "higher") animals), As I said above, we encounter a range of shapes and characteristics from the one celled zygote to the adult in his or her prime. So can't we say that while the idea of body requires instantiation, and that instantiation requires "matter" (as Aristotle and the Scholastics -- Hey! That would be a great name for a rock band! Okay, maybe not -- would use the word) clearly neither curly-hair, green eyes, nor limbs nor organs -- are of the esse of human body.

So, sacramentally at least, we HAVE a material instantiation. To all the normal instantiations a miracle gives us another. SO, to the extent that the "substance" of human body, by definition, requires hyle or matter, that requirement is satisfied in the Sacrament.

(But, of course, the Resurrection muddies up the question of whether the human body requires "matter", especially as modern empiricists and materialists use the term. But"normally" human bodies need some "stuff".)

Wow.This is too long! In any case, as Aquinas says, the "presence" we are discussing is a very special case. You can see him virtually throwing up his hands in the reply to Objection 3, Article 1, Q. 75.

Enough!

I won't take too long on this (yeah, riiight). I am going over the ST questions you recommended, 75-77, annotating them with my further objections, of which so far there are several. I expect this to take some time, so I do not want to hold things up as you wait for a response that may take weeks. So at this point I'm just going to reiterate that I seriously do not see how he overcomes the sheer confusion of "real accidents."

(BTW, yes, I agree his response to objection three under Q75.1 was pathetically inconclusive, which I find to be helpful to my analysis).

By way of an alternate demonstration, consider this example from object oriented programming. We create a class called "marble." It is capable of accepting a wide range of shape-defining parameters, covering a full range of efficiencies, from very good to very bad marbles. But there are some criteria it must meet to function as a marble. We have defined the idea of "marble."

Now we create an instance, an actual marble. But by a miracle, we delete the defining class. Now the instance has no definer. No instance of an idea can survive the deletion of the idea. This is not the stuff of miracles, but the abandonment of God-given reason. It is an internal error in the logic.

So lets try another form of the experiment. In terms of Christ, we can I am sure agree He is Himself an instance, and therefore more than an idea. So we have deferred the problem by creating an intermediate stage. The idea of Christ is expressed in one and only one instance, Jesus. This instance has all the properties required by the defining class, including human physicality, a design requirement that is not negotiable.

Now we create an instance of bread. This bread instance is based on the defining class for bread. The attributes required by the definition that give bread it's "what-ness" are all present. The formless stuff that could have been anything else (matter) is now assembled as an instance of bread.

Now we delete the defining class for bread, but, by a miracle, retain all the "what-ness" of bread, yet without it being physical. But, as a physical object, being physical is part of it's "what-ness." It was in the defining class that this kind of bread, the kind we can eat physically, has to be physical. So now we have a dire contradiction. What is the solution?

If I understand your proposal, you are saying that the instance of Christ, i.e., Jesus, whose defining class also has a "body-ness" requirement, just like the bread, meets that requirement by borrowing the orphaned "body-ness" accidents of the bread. There are a number of defects to this solution:

1) As already noted, an instance cannot survive the deletion of the idea it expresses. That is simply irrational. We can interpose an intermediate stage where the general definition for bread survives, and we derive a secondary definition, with presumably more detailed definitional attributes, that define our local instance, and then delete that derived definition, and we would still have a master class defining general "bread-ness" and our local instance could survive that, sort of, but it would lose whatever disappeared with the loss of the secondary definition, such as a specific location in space-time. This would make it very difficult to eat. Just sayin' ...

2) As noted in my earlier post, even if we could suppose a way to orphan the accidents that express the bread's substance, according to Aquinas, they do not acquire Christ as a new subject or new substance, but have as their referent precisely nothing. They are subjectless. Apparently, in this state, they exist to create the perception of bread that isn't really there, as well as obscure that the whole Christ is there. Therefore they do not meet the "Christ class" requirement of being "accidents of body" to Christ. They cannot be referentless and have a referent at the same time in the same way. Law of non-contradiction.

As for any "express denial" of cannibalism, I have no doubt that the intent of Aquinas' project was in part to preserve a sense of sacramental realism while at the same time creating plausible deniability against the charge of an overly crude realism, the sort of thing the Eucharistic miracles of the period might tend to reinforce in the minds of the rank and file. In shorter form, it was an effort to have it both ways.

And our point here is that we do not think that project succeeded. My evangelical compatriots may be expressing it in different terms, but the intuition is the same. It is as if to say a defendant could be absolved of any crime simply by making an explicit denial. If that were true, we would have no one in our prisons. The question is not whether there is a claim of innocence, but whether the proposed solution demonstrates that innocence. We contend it does not.

All of this is tempered, of course, by the fact that I am still looking at the Summa in the areas you suggested. My preliminary review did not turn up any exculpatory evidence so far, but I'm interested in making sure I've done due diligence to a level that you would consider satisfactory. With that in mind, I hope you will give me some time to digest the material and get back to you with further thoughts.

(BTW, just as a quick footnote, ST Part 1 Q50 on angels notwithstanding, I do not think you can dismiss the ordinariness of the physicality of the resurrected Jesus without sliding rapidly toward docetism. I am not sure why that approach would be useful to you. If anything, it would, at least to me, suggest another good reason to distrust transubstantiation, if indeed that is where it leads, and a reason I had never considered before our conversation.)

Peace,

SR