While I’m on the topic of transubstantiation, I may as well go all out and bring in Philip K Dick and VALIS, since that’s the reason I got started thinking about it in the first place. He’s got this whole idea of “fake fakes” which basically ties into this thing about how what “God” does is that he turns things that are “fake” into things that are “real”. God becomes a sort of alchemist who goes about the universe transmuting lead into gold.

In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

From this perspective then, the transubstantiation is even more primary as a sacrament, because it literally represents this alchemical process of transformation into the spiritually “real” that God is performing throughout the entire universe.