Substantially Speaking

I expected it when I had to correct Nelson Jones on this, but Damian Thompson ought to be ashamed of himself.

Far from being scientifically implausible, transubstantiation, by upholding the reality of the substance distinct from the accidents, thereby upholds the reality of the accidents distinct from the substance. Those accidents are that which is subject to scientific investigation, the philosophical validity of which is therefore upheld, against the assaults of Postmodernism, by Catholic Eucharistic doctrine. There is simply no comparison at all to simply wrong assertions about cosmology or about the history of pre-Columban America, nor to the extreme philosophical unsophistication that is polytheism.

Only Christianity, the plenitude of which is Catholicism, upholds ontology and epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, economics and politics, society and culture, art and science, as against radical pluralism’s intolerance of any but its own claim to absolute truth, as against eclecticism’s refusal of the mediation of whole systems of thought by whole cultures, as against historicism’s denial of the enduring validity of truth, as against scientism’s restriction of objective truth to the findings of the natural-scientific method (or, perhaps, of that method’s actual or supposed analogues), and as against radical pragmatism’s failure to recognise the fundamental human need to be more than pragmatic alone. This upholding safeguards natural science against the eternalism, animism, pantheism, cyclicism and astrology that always characterise the thought of fallen humanity apart from the Biblical revelation. Those precluded or arrested the rise of natural science everywhere other than in Medieval Europe, and ‘post-Christian’ culture is now visibly regressing to them.