Personally, if there is a God, I am sure he can handle a little cracker-napping. Besides he’ll have The Body of Christ in his home! Good fortune! At least they don’t strap dynamite to themselves, tie themselves to the hood of a car and drive them selves through a brick wall just to blow up a building. I rate this outburst a 4 of 10.

But essentially (heh) this idea is that a thing’s substance is separate from its properties; those properties which are not substantial are accidents. In modern terms this is hard to understand at first, as it’s got nothing to do with atoms or molecules or energy or any of that; in Aristotelian terms, those would all be accidents. The substance of anything at all is not matter, energy, or any of its physical properties.

Thus–and again, we are getting into some pretty arid theological territory here, and one of the things the Orthodox complain about (the Western Church’s tendency of overexplaining and overanalyzing)–but the accidents of an object are any of its physical properties or appearances that people can see or detect with their normal five senses. Its substance is deeper, and in most ways beyond human understanding.

So if they’re telling you its physical properties are accidents, that’s where it comes from. Its substance is changed when it becomes the Eucharist, but its accidents, its physical properties, do not.

Make sense?

(Can you tell I studied this stuff really hard before making my leap of faith?)

Now I wonder what caused it. Bad, do you have some weird code in your headline or something?

Found it Dean, but had to eliminate Bad’s "last blog post" url (Sorry Bad) from his comment. The problem appeared to maybe be farther up, but I was able to break the chain there.

I blame the Jews.

Makes sense. I’d been curious about that, and had assumed it was some archaic double-meaning (like the term "accident" being used to refer to the physical appearance of the bread and wine).