ABSTRACT
Consider the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. For centuries the theological insistence that it really is the body and blood of Christ was a scandal to enlightened philosophical Westerners-an even greater scandal than it was to other world religions. How could bread and wine be body and blood? Voltaire, for instance, is scathing; attributing his own scorn to the Protestants, he says:
may well be on Voltaire. The atoms that made up Jesus’ body would quickly have become distributed, by the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles, throughout the Earth’s biosphere, and would certainly have done so by the time the Church gave its final Tridentine definition of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Roughly eighty tons of matter would have cycled through Jesus’ metabolism during his lifetime, made of precisely the elements of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. that are least likely to be sequestered, and join most actively in the volatile circulation of the ecosystem. Indeed, every wafer of communion bread does indeed contain several million at-
oms that were once part of Christ’s body. The disciples at the Last Supper would have actually have been consuming live skin cells sloughed off Christ’s hands as he broke the bread. On a more fundamental level of physics, if matter is made of energy, and energy is a field distortion of space-time, and all fields in the universe are in harmonic resonance with one another-and are thus partly constitutive of one another, as contemporary physics maintains-then every subatomic particle of the communion wafer is partly constituted of the body of Christ. The Eucharist is, in fact, not a mystery at all in the strict factual sense.
