Transubstantiation as an upside-down cake
23 1924. After his family moved to the south of England, he worked in an aircraft factory at High Wycombe, before joining the 70th Young Soldiers Bn of the Royal Sussex Regiment.
In 1943 he transferred to what was to become the Parachute Regiment and arrived at the Airborne Forces Depot, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. After rigorous physical training and battle drill, he carried out the required number of parachute jumps at RAF Ringway, Manchester. In September, he was posted to “A” Company, 9 Para Bn, stationed at Bulford, Wiltshire. Training included forced marches in full battle kit, sometimes at night, and tactical live-firing exercises.
After the raid on the Merville Battery, Newton and his comrades in GB Force moved to 3 Para Brigade HQ and subsequently took part in some of the fiercest fighting in the Normandy campaign. In September 1944, after the breakout from Normandy, 9 Para Bn was withdrawn to Britain to re-equip. Newton fought in the Battle of the Ardennes and the forced crossing of the Rhine before finishing the campaign at Wismar on the Baltic.
After leaving the Army in the substantive rank of corporal, in 1947 he joined the Metropolitan Police. He served mainly in west and north-west London and rose to the rank of chief superintendent, as well as becoming commandant of the Police Driving School at Hendon.
Newton was excellent company, with a great sense of humour and a fund of amusing anecdotes. Asked about his feelings on D-day, he said that his only fear was of letting his comrades down. He was a founding member of the 9th Parachute Battalion Reunion Club and its secretary for many years. On retiring in 2016, he was made chairman emeritus. In 2005, he was appointed to the Order of the Legion of Honour.
In 1953 Gordon Newton married Kathleen Worth, who survives him with their three daughters. His brother, sister, son-in-law and daughter all served in the police.
My heart leapt when I beheld last week a serious discussion of philosophy commenting reasonably on a central doctrine of the Christian faith.
It came in a review in the TLS of a gossipy volume of memoirs by Sir Anthony Kenny, the former Master of Balliol. After the gossip, the reviewer, Rupert Shortt, a respected commentator on contemporary philosophy, took space to talk about a priest-philosopher sketched in the memoirs, Herbert Mccabe (1925-2001).
In a long paragraph, Shortt considered how a modern philosopher might say something about “a widely lampooned doctrine such as transubstantiation”. In brief, he suggested that “in the new world ushered in by Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, the final significance of bread and wine in the Mass is greater than their significance in nature”.
Transubstantiation is not chemical change, he says, truly enough. Rather, “for [Thomas] Aquinas, what is meant by the ‘substance’ of something is its ultimate meaning to God. So there is a sense in which the ‘substance’ of Christ’s flesh and blood has replaced the ‘substance’ of the bread and wine in the Eucharist”. What has been “replaced”, he wants to say, is the “real significance in God’s eyes of those signs” of bread and wine.
Well, I think this is all upside down. I’m not quite sure it’s what Mccabe thought. Shortt borrows from another thinker, Timothy Mcdermott. I have seen a similar argument in a book about Thomas Aquinas by Denys Turner. I grew quite enthusiastic about that book as I read on, but was deeply disappointed when it ended up arguing that the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist was a question of trans-signification.
This may sound arcane, but there is a high doctrine here: the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist – his divinity, of course, but also his living body, blood and human soul. I fear that Prof Turner sold the pass, as has Shortt.
A modern English philosopher best known for working in the light of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein was Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001, about whom a disobliging anecdote or two from
Sir Anthony’s book figure in the review).
Writing in 1974 of transubstantiation in language a child could understand, she said the bread “isn’t there any more (nor the stuff from which it was made), but instead there is the body of Christ”. This is implicit, she adds, in the act of worship that follows the teaching.
When she comes to the idea some have had of “trans-signification” she denies that the substance of bread or wine is the meaning that they have as food and drink; instead they “are defined by the natural kinds they are made from, by wheat and grape”.
“What gets transsignified in the Eucharist,” she insists, “is not the bread and wine, but the body and blood of the Lord, which are trans-signified into food and drink. And that is the mystery.”
It certainly is. The account in St Mark’s Gospel of Jesus at the Last Supper says he “took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body”.
This is to be accepted or rejected as reality. Eating the body of Jesus has a further metaphorical meaning, as he taught when he said: “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” As Anscombe put it: “The metaphor is that of saying ‘I myself will be the nourishment of the life of which I speak.’” We literally eat his flesh, and this act symbolises living with his life, as the branches do with the vine’s.