THE WORLD'S GREATEST SECRET
John Mathias Haffert
table of contents
CHAPTER SEVEN
SCIENCE AND THE SECRET
In the Introduction of this
book we mentioned that a preliminary edition was used for a survey to test
whether or not the book held interest throughout and, if not, where interest
lagged. Many said they found this one chapter "difficult." By
contrast, a Teilhard de Chardin enthusiast answered that this chapter was
"the high point of the book." So we did two things: 1) We tried to
make it easier to read; 2) We asked one of the nation's top experts on the
atom, Dr. Francis J. Heyden,* to give his advice. The world's greatest secret
would be better left secret if it were to appear as ridiculous to many in the
modern world as it appeared when Christ first announced it in Capernaum,
causing thousands who had previously hung on His every word to be repulsed and
to turn away. How, for example, will those millions behind the Iron Curtain
who know a great deal of science and little about Christ, react to this
central secret of Christianity? To the believer, no explanation is necessary.
To the nonbeliever, a great deal of explanation is now possible. First, let us
remember that even after fifteen hundred years the impact of Christ's miracles
was so great that all Christians believed in the Eucharist. Even Martin
Luther,* who set in motion the world's first wave of disbelief, himself
believed. In Wider Etliche Tollen If' 17f)
2 Geister (1532), he
testified that "the whole of Christendom accepts the doctrine of the Real
Presence." In This is My Body, published in 1527, he wrote: "These
words of Christ, still stand firm against the fanatics" (See Luther, p.
286). So it must be evident to any intelligent person that apparently the
Eucharist is really credible because millions upon millions of persons -
indeed those who have given us most of our present culture - almost
unanimously believed it. And there were even geniuses among them. It is
evident that they believed primarily because, as one of the greatest
intellects of the Middle Ages concluded: "Christ told us so." After
the Fathers of the Church had explained it, one man named Psychosis Roberts
questioned it in the ninth century but never got a following. Then a man named
Berengarius, of Tours, raised a question which gave the Church its first
occasion to defend the belief in a dramatic, official manner. Berengarius made
a sincere retraction at a Synod held in Rome in 1079, and so it was not until
the time of Martin Luther, that is, until almost our own day, that this early
secret of Christians became a basis of division. Now, for the first time, the
Church found it necessary to define the belief. So the bishops of the world
were convened in Trent,* less thin-Twenty-five years after Luther nailed his
theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg. What they proclaimed was taken
almost verbatim from the Fathers of the Church: "Jesus Christ, our God
and Savior, although He offered Himself once and for all to God the Father on
the altar of the cross by His death, there to work out our eternal redemption,
yet (since His priesthood was not to end with His death) He left to His Church
at the Last Supper a visible sacrifice.
3 This sacrifice, the
Eucharist, was what our nature required. The Eucharist presents the Sacrifice
of Christ to the Father, once and for all wrought upon the cross. Through the
Eucharist, the memory of the cross will abide to the end of the world ,
Moreover, its saving power of grace will be applied for the remission of those
sins that we all fall into day by day. Declaring Himself to be a priest
forever 'according to the order of Melchisedech' Christ offered His body and
blood to God the Father under the appearance of bread and wine, and gave them
under the same appearance to His apostles. He then made these men and their
successors priests of the New Testament by the words, 'Do this in
commemoration of me.' So Christ gave the command to offer the Eucharist as the
Church has always understood and taught." The Council of Trent document,
written in 1545, then went on to say that even as the Christian community
consists of many Church members, "of this union nothing is more
strikingly illustrative than the elements of bread and wine, for bread is made
from grains of wheat and wine is pressed from many clusters of grapes. Thus
they signify that we, though many, are closely bound together by a bond of
this divine mystery and made, as it were, one body." Unbelievable! Thus
do many Christians exclaim after reading this definition of the Eucharist
formulated at Trent. It is not borne out by our senses. We moderns who fancy
ourselves scientific shy away from anything which cannot be put into a test
tube and proved by laboratory experiment.
4 We look at what we call
the Host. It seems to be bread of cracker-like consistency. Is that Christ?
Isn't the whole idea incredible, not to say absurd? This is where modern
science comes to our aid. Now, with some understanding of the nature of
matter, the (miracle of the Eucharist (aside from the greater mystery of the
Incarnation and considering only the fact of transubstantiation)* appears
plausible. This does not mean that reason alone, aided by science, can explain
it. But it means that much of the mystery as to how transubstantiation takes
place is stripped away. Especially for those who may find the following
explanation a little difficult, we cannot overstress the fact that ultimately
one pierces through the mystery of the Eucharist only with the force of faith.
It we could understand the mysteries of God, we would be no longer merely
human; we would be what our first parents wished to be: as gods. One is
reminded of the tale told of the great "Doctor" Augustine who wanted
to write about the Trinity* and of course met great difficulty in finding
words for such ineffable truth. The more he thought the more baffled he
became. One day as he was walking along the seashore pondering his problem he
saw a little boy playing in the sand. The child was digging a hole and pouring
water into it from a tin pail. To give himself a brief respite from his vexing
thoughts, the theologian stopped to speak to the child. He asked, "What
are you doing, lad?" The boy answered, "I'm going to empty the whole
ocean into this hole." Augustine suddenly realized that it was no more
ridiculous for the child to be trying to pour the ocean into a hole than it
was for him to be trying to pour understanding of the Infinite into his human
brain.
5 While acknowledging our
inability to explain the inexplicable, we can consider some of the findings of
modern science which may have a tangential relationship to the Eucharist. If
we can understand matter itself we can perhaps understand how the Eucharistic
miracle happens. To the modern scientist, matter is nothing more than plain
energy It is as though positive electricity and negative centricity were
counterbalanced to give quantity to substance.* This is not difficult to
understand. Atomic energy has been harnessed as the direct result of this
hypothesis which is now taught as a matter of course to most school children.
, Even before the atom bomb this hypothesis was held by many scientists.
Twenty-five years before writing this book (that is, a few years before the
atom bomb), the author presumed to write in another book': What makes a table
or a wall or a stone resist pressure? We believe it to be nothing more than
positive points of force, held in-place by correlative negative points of
force. Electricity has not quantity because it is merely points of force in
the pure positive or negative state. And the proof that something without
quantity could constitute quantity is found in the fact that a bolt of
lightning can split a giant tree as though it were a mighty steel axe.
Naturally, between a positive point of force and a negative point of force
there is an electrical field. Since all the world is fundamentally constituted
of these positive and negative points of force, this field is universal.
6 The undulations of this
field constitute light and sound. Some undulations pass through most densities
of the universal field, but there are certain densities through which they
cannot pass. For example, light pass through the field that exists between the
planets, but it is 'undone,' as it were, by the field in a piece of wood.
Radio can transmit sound and television light and sound by reducing them to a
strange undulation that is not undone by most fields, and then reproducing and
undoing the original undulations in a receiving set. "We would imagine
that the five senses work similarly. It is not an electrical impulse that
rushes to the brain when a man sees something. The optic nerve is merely a
receiving set, undoing the undulation of light to which it is sensitive and
reducing it to a new undulation: the type of undulation to which the sense of
touch reduces tactile sensation ... the same undulation to which the ear
reduces sound ... the same undulation that causes all things sensed by man to
seem one sensation and to be thus the tool of his active intelligence."
So it would appear, from the apparent confirmation of this theory by radio,
television, X-ray, and finally atomic power, that matter is indeed merely
forces in juxtaposition. This suddenly opens a possibility of understanding
the mode of the Eucharist. Before this men had to accept only on blind faith
that the Body of Christ - without changing, and remaining entire - became
contained in a tiny space and under new appearance. They had to believe only
because Christ told them so (confirmed by miracles).
7 Now we can accept the
possibility that the effect of the forces of Christ's body merely become
suspended with relation to the forces of a piece of bread. Essentially this is
not much different than the miracle witnessed by hundreds of reliable persons
during one of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Saint Bernadette: the
saint's hand strayed into the flame of a lighted candle during her ecstasy,
but did not burn. After the ecstasy a doctor reached the flame again to her
hand. She cried out. It is logical to conclude that her hand did not cease to
be a hand, and the fire did not cease to be fire. But the effect of the fire
was suspended with relation to Bernadette's hand during the ecstasy. Similarly
we may presume that the effect of the "matter" or body of Christ ...
which scientific experience tells us may be pure force... is suspended with
relation to the absolute accidents* of bread and wine. Can we state positively
that Christ's physical presence under the appearance of bread and wine would
mean that the points of force in His physical quantity were present but their
effect was withheld by divine power? We can say this much: The energy concept
of matter is accepted today as a working fact, and that seems to make the
mystery of the Eucharist, though still supernatural and miraculous, not quite
so covered with misty clouds. Indeed, in the pre-Einstein era, when the energy
concept of matter (E = mc') was still no more than an exciting but much
shakier hypothesis, Dr. J. Pohle, the celebrated Professor of the University
of Breslau, Germany, wrote in his book Lehrbuch der Dogniatik: "Assuming
a real distinction between force and its manifestations, between energy and
its effects, it may be seen that under the influence of the First Cause, the
energy (substance) necessary for the essence of bread is withdrawn by the
virtue of conversion, while the effects of the energy (accidents) in a
miraculous manner continue.
8 "' (Emphasis ours.)
Conversely, according to Pohle, when Christ becomes present in the Eucharist
it is merely the effects of His physical energy (impenetrability, visibility)
which are suspended. This explanation, at least in the opinion of some,
adequately explains away the most apparent contradiction of the whole Christ -
in the fullness of His manhood and of all His human and divine faculties
contained in such small space. If the effect of "points of force" of
any body could be suspended, the body could be contained in almost
inconceivably small space. This is what our new discoveries about matter must
lead us to believe. Even long before help from modern science, geniuses of the
Middle Ages began to shed great light upon the Christian "Secret"
through the development of rational ,,philosophy. Even some early Greek
philosophers (as though anticipating the discovery that matter might be
,,energy) drew a fine distinction between "modal" and ~'
absolute" accidents. Modal accidents were those which could not be
separated from their substance without in evolving -a metaphysical
contradiction like the form and motion of a body. On the other hand, absolute
accidents were those accidents which could be separated from sub stance
without involving metaphysical contradiction. Size (quantity of a body) they
considered an absolute accident. Aristotle, one of the greatest pre-Christian
philosophers, taught essentially this. He defined substance as the head of
matter; accidents as the modifications of matter. The accidents of the
Eucharist are bread whiteness bread taste and bread size; the substance is
Christ.
9 The
physical reality of the whiteness, of the taste and of the size of the
Eucharist cannot be questioned. In other words, philosophers could reason that
Christ does no destroy the accidents of the bread and replace it with i mirage
suddenly created at the moment of transubstantiation. Aristotle also taught
that quantity is not a corpora-, substance, but only a phenomenon of
substance.' This is precisely what the scientists are trying to prove today in
using the working hypothesis that matter is merely contained energy. However,
despite new evidence from centuries of thought and discovery, matter (or
substance) is especially difficult to understand when it becomes alive, and I
for many is understandable only on the basis of authority and supernatural
providence. What, for "ample, causes a tiny speck in a woman's womb to
grow into a being so complex that we produce, more scientific books on this
one subject than on any other, and still have not scratched the surface of
understanding? What is that "something" contained in a uterine speck
so small that it is invisible to the naked eye, yet it multiplies millions of
times to the complexity of man? We give it a name. We often call it entelechy)
* Yet giving it a name does not help us to understand' all that follows the
moment of conception: an intricate unfolding of modifications of energy to
fill out the "substance" of man.
10 In any event, when we
realize that a man is potentially contained in a tiny cell, it no longer seems
quite so difficult to believe that Christ could be wholly, substantially
present in a wafer consecrated for us to consume. Yet if He had not told them
so, if they had not heard it from His lips or read His own words in the Bible,
and if the testimony of two thousand years of Christian experience did not
confirm it, how could Christians ever believe it? Faith alone conquers all
objections like that of the little girl in the story. Her father gave her a
crucifix and asked: "What's the difference between the figure on the
cross and the Host held up at the Consecration of the Mass?" The child
did riot hesitate. She answered: "I look at the figure on the cross and I
see Jesus, but He's not there. When I look at the Host, I don't see Jesus, but
He is there." We who lack the simple faith of children feel the need J to
know all we can because this secret of primitive Christianity is also a secret
of life. So far its ultimate discovery by all Christians in the modern sweep
of ecumenism must take us back to the words written by Christ's own disciples:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
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