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Published: August 5, 2007

“Subsists” is “Is” with a twist

Vatican II did not change how the Church defines herself

Notes from a Cultural Madhouse

By Christopher Zehnder

One of the difficulties of being Catholic is that our religion is not simple. This is not to say that it is impossibly difficult; for, as we all know, the Faith can be explained to children, and one doesn’t have to be an Augustin or a Thomas Aquinas to be Catholic. Yet, every proposition of the Faith hides mysteries that reduce even the greatest theologians to silent awe. Human language, to express these mysteries, often seems wholly inadequate, and for good reason. It is.

To explain the mysteries of the Faith, theologians have found it necessary to use the language of philosophy – which doesn’t necessarily make things easy for the rest of us. For instance, when we use the term “consubstantial,” or “the same substance with,” to express the relationship of God the Son to the Father, we are using the philosophical terms. Normally, when people use the word substance, they mean the equivalent of “stuff,” the material from which something is made. But, in classical philosophy, especially as expressed through Aristotle, substance has a different meaning.

Understanding the meaning of the word substance can help in understanding one of the latest words which the Church has used, seemingly, to gum up the gears of our minds. This is the word subsists, used by the Second Vatican Council to express the relationship of the Church of Christ to the Catholic Church. Some have been troubled by the use of this word in the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium: “This Church [of Christ], constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him.” [Emphasis added.] After all, even as late as Pope Pius XII’s encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi, hadn’t the Church always said that the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church is the Church of Christ? On both sides of the Catholic theological spectrum since the Council, people have seen subsists as signifying a departure from this traditional doctrine of the Church.

But it does not signify a change in doctrine, for subsists really means is, but with a twist. To understand this better, we have to look at the word, “substance” and see what it means in classical philosophy. For as we shall see, that which subsists is a substance, and a substance is that which subsists.

What is a substance? It is sub stans, in Latin; a “thing standing under” or “that which underlies.” What does it stand under? As classically expressed, a substance is that which stands under or underlies many accidents.

But, what are accidents?

Basically, accidents are things, such as color and shape, which characterize a thing but don’t make it fundamentally what it is. For instance, a sculptor could mold a hunk of clay into any number of shapes – a cube or a sphere or the shape of a man’s head and face. These shapes are accidents; that is, while they might characterize the clay for a time, they can be destroyed and replaced by another shape without the clay ceasing to be clay. We see the same thing in other contexts. If I spend too much time in the sun, my skin goes from white to flaming red; yet, even though I experience a change in myself (not only one of color but of comfort to pain), I am fairly certain that I have not changed in my fundamental being. I have undergone a change from the accident of whiteness to the accident of redness.

Accidents do characterize or describe us – for instance, some people are truly brown in skin color while others are white – yet, accidents do not define us essentially. Underlying the accident of shape is the clay. Underlying our skin or hair color, our size, girth, and other similar characteristics is the thing which essentially makes us what we are. Our humanity.

Human nature, for us humans, is our essence, our substance. It is that which underlies all our other characteristics. Someone may be white, a European, red-headed, pug nosed, intelligent, musical, thin, or any number of other things. But these, while they describe one’s individuality, do not make him fundamentally what he, or she, is – a human being.

All members of the human family, regardless of sex, race, or any other characteristic, share a common essence – human nature. But this nature, though common to all individuals called human, does not exist as a substance apart from any of them. It is not some immaterial idea floating about a philosophical universe. It is not something common to all of us because somehow we all are like it. It is common to all of us because each of us possesses it. It exists only in concrete human beings and never apart from them. Every human person is a human substance.

This brings us to the word subsists. We can say that human nature exists in each man or woman. But we can also say that whiteness or brownness and other accidental qualities exist in each person as well. The difference is that human nature exists in human persons as that which underlies other characteristics. In other words, we can say that human nature doesn’t just exist in human persons but exists in them as the thing which “exists under” all our accidents. Another way of saying this is that human nature subsists in human persons.

Yet, not only does human nature subsist in human persons, it subsists nowhere else. The word subsists indicates a peculiar way of existing, one that is unique to one kind of thing and no other -- and that because subsists indicates the existence of a substance. Dogs, cats, rocks, and flowers can be white, but they can’t be human. On the flip side, human nature cannot subsist in dogs, cats, rocks, or anything else but human persons.

So, when Lumen Gentium says the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, it is saying that it exists only in the Catholic Church. In its very substance or essence, the Catholic Church is the Church of Christ.

But in using subsists, the Council is saying something more.

As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s June 29 “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church” indicates, the Vatican Council’s use of subsists indicates the simpler is, but with this twist. Subsists, says “Responses,” “brings out more clearly” than is “the fact that there are ‘numerous elements of sanctification and truth’ which are found outside her [the Catholic Church’s] structure, but which ‘as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel towards Catholic unity.’”

In using “subsists,” the Vatican Council attempted to get at the truth of the nature of the Church of Christ in a way that takes into account the very real salvific elements found in non-Catholic groups.

“Subsists,” however, does not stop at a simple recognition of the character of non-Catholic groups. It implies an ecumenism which finds its fulfillment only in conversion. For if elements of the Catholic Church exist outside her visible confines, they do not exist in the way that Christ willed for them to exist but as broken and scattered. As “Responses” said, only in the Catholic Church do we find that essential characteristic of the Church of Christ – unity – which gathers all the elements of truth, making them part of one substance. This being so, Catholics and non-Catholics alike are impelled to seek for themselves and each other that unity which, as Lumen Gentium says, “subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him.”

This work of conversion is not one-sided. For while it certainly implies, for non-Catholics, full entrance into the Catholic Church, it demands something of Catholics as well -- the recognition of non-Catholic Christians as real, if separated, brethren and the zeal to bring our brethren home to the Church of Christ, which is, and subsists in, the Catholic Church.

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