History and Philosophy of Transubstantiation

Introduction

One of the seven sacraments, Eucharist, is an activity of taking in consecrated bread and wine, which has literally become the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. This miraculous event is explained in the doctrine of transubstantiation. According to this theory, the accidental properties of the bread and wine (colour, smell, taste, and shape, etc…) remain the same but its substance is replaced by that of Christ’s. This poses an obvious problem not only for philosophers but also the Catholic Church who endorses it. For the Catholic Church adapted predominantly Aristotelian scholasticism, and Aristotle does not allow the change of substance while its accidents remain intact possible. In a word, the transfer of the substance alone, i.e. transubstantiation, is not an option. Philosophers and theologians alike in the Medieval as well as in the Early Modern period had hard time supporting this doctrine, which was now officially an article of faith. Descartes, in his correspondence with Arnauld, tried to explain the phenomena without success, Aquinas struggled to explicate transubstantiation in his Summa Theologiae, while plenty others would argue against it, leading up to the split of the Christianity into Catholicism and Reformers.

I would like to explicate the origins of the theoretical problems of this infamous doctrine in the history of Christianity, and deal with important questions such as whether transubstantiation is an instance of cannibalism, at what point in time exactly does the Host turn into the body of Christ? Does the priest have the power to conjure up God at his will? For how long does the Host remain the body of Christ after consecration? For if it remains to be the body of Christ after the initial consecration, the bread being material is subject to decay. Could the body of Christ be left alone until it starts to rot? What about the stories about ‘Breeding Host’ that many faithful believers apparently witnessed? Did the Jews really kidnap the consecrated Host from the Catholic Church so they could desecrate it and torture it? In which case, what was the method of torture? For they could not have crucified the Host, it being about 3 centimeters in length. On the other hand, if transubstantiation is not the case, is the priest guilty of idolatry for worshipping a piece of bread? What happens when a fly goes into the chalice, thereby ‘merging with’ Christ? Does any of its substance change? Do the bread crumbs fallen onto the floor constitute as the body of Christ, since Christ is supposed to be present in the whole of Host in its parts? What about those old people who have no teeth that cannot effectually chew the bread? Are they automatically denied admission to heaven? When Christ said to his disciples at the Last Supper, ‘This is my body’, did he give the part of his flesh to his disciples as well as ate it himself?

In dealing with these questions, philosophical questions such as how is it that they can claim that the body of Christ is present in the Host, while it has no spatial location as to which part of the bread Christ is in? For they claim Christ is present in the whole of the bread, yet at the same time maintains that Christ is not in a particular place. Not only their insistence on Christ’s body being present without locality questionably curious, but also how could Aristotelian scholasticism allow the change of substance while its accidents still remain intact? And even if, as Protestants have it, it is to be taken metaphorically, how is it that they could claim the Eucharist is a metaphor while claiming that the resurrection of Christ is not? For both miracles – the Eucharist and the resurrection – appeal to the senses – yet we are supposed to disregard the senses in the former case, while accepting them in the case of the latter.

I will focus primarily on the historical development of the Eucharist while touching on some of the pressing issues, both theological and philosophical, propounded by some later medieval and Early Modern thinkers, like Berengarius, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Luther, Calvin and Descartes as well as Leibniz. It is my hope to try to make at least some coherence historically as well as philosophically how the doctrine of transubstantiation has been dealt with in the course of history of ideas.

PART I: Iconoclasm and mid-Medieval debates

Material cult has played an important role as a mediator between the divine and the human since ancient times. In fact, primitive men conceived natural death as the wrath of the dead or the revenge of offended spirits. So called ‘disease-demons’ were so numerous that men had to be constantly careful not to provoke the anger of the spirits. It was natural for them to call for help on powers beyond the perceived natural order outside their social system. Cult is characteristically material, since material objects are believed to catch spiritual power and to serve as a medium of transaction. For instance, evil spiritual forces, or disease-demons, in us may be transferred onto specific objects, and burned or eaten so they can be driven away or made to disappear. On the other hand, one may wish to benefit from the divine power, but is afraid that a direct contact with it may be too overwhelming, can have material objects that are said to possess the positive force from divinity. In this way, people reasoned, the overwhelming force of divinity is also toned down by being hosted in the material stuff. In Christianity, this cultic tradition manifested itself in the forms of relics and of saints, and divinely vested living spiritual authorities, such as holy men. Material stuff, in this way, served as relics that “mediated between God and humanity, and thus allowed ordinary people access to divine power,” and in the 4^th centuries and on, by means of this model of exchange, kings and imperial powers claimed divine sanction for its power, authority and success. However, the defeat of the Roman Empire and the failure of the individual emperors to protect the Roman people suggested that the very failure of the emperors to ensure the orthodoxy of the Chosen People led them to eventually foster heresy and heterodoxy. Consequently, wandering hermits and monks practicing a wide variety of activities, such as fortune-telling and prophecy, the use of sympathetic magic, amulets and charms were condemned as a challenge to the established spiritual authority, as these offered an alternative channel through which divine guidance is obtained. This emergence of alternative ways to divinity was a clear indication that the rulers had their imperial authority weakened. One preferred means of an access to divinity was by the cult of relics, that is to say, the bodies of the saints or objects that had touched them. This was supported by following reasons: 1) because fallen humans are often attached to sensible things, it would be helpful if some of those relics pointed themselves towards “where grace, the theological virtues, the spiritual gifts, even Christ Himself are to be found,” and also because 2) humans are enslaved by various appetites and are prone to sins, commandments and cult therefore serve humans well as following them would leave us little time for vice. In this way, humans continued to rely on an intermediary to arbitrate on their behalf with Christ, and this gave rise to the cult of saints and martyrs. What differentiated Christianity from pagan religions in this respect was that these saints or relics did not heal directly, but only through Christ. Similarly, images of saints and Christ were often admired as miraculous and divine. For instance, images that were not made by human hand were especially of value. The so-called mandylion of Edessa, attested c. 590, an imprint of Christ’s face on a piece of linen as well as images of Christ also found naturally in Egypt at around 570 and in modern day Syria at the same period were believed to have salvatory power. Furthermore, in 626, another natural image of Christ is said to have saved Constantinople from Avars.

The word for image in Greek is eikon, which has a much broader meaning of its modern derivative icon. Eikon would often refer to “a scared image in any medium, visual or rhetorical,” and “[a]n eikon could be a picture, but it could also represent the divine in the medium of figural and metaphorical language.” However, in most cases, images were, owing to its materiality, thought to be unfitting as referents to the divine. Material images, such as portraits, were “expressions of divine essences which were otherwise imperceptible to humankind except in through this particular form,” and religious portraits or statues were images that could point the onlookers to the divine “by means of which the celestial divinities could be grasped by the human intellect.” But the argument prevailed that material images could not possibly refer to the divine, owing to their materiality as well as to the transcendental nature of Trinity, and that the “only true image was the virtuous and pious Christian, in whose soul God and the Holy Spirit resided.” This thesis, in fact, was canonized in 306 at the Council of Elvira, where a general prohibition on portraying that which was worshipped was pronounced. However, these strict views on the imagery were not universally shared among the churchmen themselves, primarily because it was not the visual representation of what is divine that posed them a theological problem, but the epistemology of the divine was at issue. That is to say, how can we know God and in what ways could we describe God? This knowability of God inevitably concerned eucharist, and discussions ensued about what visual depictions of which participated divine were possible. Hence, the general attitude towards the eikon was this: “images of Christ were idolatrous, figments of the painters’ imagination, and blasphemous. God was uncircumscribable and incomprehensible, so visual representations of him were impossible, and the emperor is requested to destroy such images and replace them with crosses.”

Now, the problem of transubstantiation, i.e. or the physical presence of Christ, was first officially addressed in 787 at the Second Council of Nicea. According to the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, the corporeal presence of Christ was first discussed as a response to the disputes concerning the worship of images in the year 750, and the argument was that “[t]hat our Lord having left us no other image of himself but the Scarament, in which the substance of bread is the image of his body, we ought to make no other image of our Lord.” The Second Council of Nicea, then, proceeded to respond that “the Sacrament after Consecration is not the image and antitype of Christ’s body and blood, but is properly his body and blood.” In this way, Tillotson establishes that the doctrine of transubstantiation has not always been the belief held by the church, but it was rather incorporated into the article of faith at the Fourth General Council of Lateran in 1215. That is to say, before the Council of Lateran in 1215, it was okay for Christians not to have believed in the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Many had argued, following the Augustinian inspiration, for the non physical identity of the bread and wine with the body and blood of Christ, simply because it was a “grotesquely physical conception of the eucharist.” It was seen as vividly cannibalistic and blasphemous by theologians and non-believers alike. For instance, according to St. Austin, “the literal eating of the flesh of Christ and drinking his blood would have been a great impiety.” Further, a theologian and a teacher, Barengarius, spoke that “if Christ had truly died and was by the right hand of the father, then his ‘presence’ at the altar could not be hid body or blood.’” Yet, he was soon forced to make a confession of faith that recanted his earlier statement and said that “the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are not merely a sacrament after consecration, but are rather the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ – and that these are truly, physically and not merely sacramentally, touched and broken by the hands of the priests and crushed by the teeth of the faithful,” it seems evident that the literal interpretation of the Eucharist was the brief of the Holy Roman Church.

If as the Church says the literal interpretation was the case, and after the consecration the bread and wine literally are body and blood of Christ, some obvious and inevitable questions ensue. For instance, at what point in time exactly does the transubstantiation occur? During or immediately after all the words are pronounced? At the words “hoc est corpus meum [this is my body]”? or at the words “hic est calix sanguinis mei [this is the cup of my blood]”? Or do the bread and wine convert at the same time? These are serious questions, for if the hoisting of the Host is done before the conversion has fully taken place, they would be committing an idolatry, worshiping a piece of bread. Further questions to be asked is that if the conversion happens at the very last pronunciation of the words, not only would it mean that the words pronounced before the last syllable have no power whatsoever to make the conversion, but also it would mean that the conversion is dictated by the act rather than the mind, in which case, the ordained priest is endowed with the power to freely conjure up the body of Christ at his convenience. Ambrose in the 4^th century deals with this question. It is here worth quoting the relevant text from his On the Sacraments in its entirety. He says…

“at the consecration this bread becomes the body of Christ. Let us reason this out. How can something which is bread be the body of Christ? Well, by what words is the consecration effected, and whose words are they? The words of the Lord Jesus. All that is said before are the words of the priest… But when the moment comes for bringing the most holy sacrament into being, the priest does not use his own words any longer: he uses the words of Christ. Therefore, it is Christ’s word that brings this sacrament into being.”

His emphasis on the words of the Christ proves to be influential in the later periods, but for now it is simply important to note that for Ambrose, the priest does not possess free reign over transubstantiating whatever he wishes, but it happens only when God speaks through him in the Eucharist. St. Augustine, similarly, argued for the affirmation of the change in the Eucharistic rite, but he emphasized the spiritual aspect of the ritual rather than merely physical presence of Christ on the altar, for he interprets Jesus to say that “[u]nderstand what I have said spiritually. You will not eat this body that you see, nor will you drink the blood that will be shed by those who will crucify me. A sacrament is what I have given to you: understood spiritually, it will give you life. Even if it is necessary to celebrate [this sacrament] visibly, it should be understood invisibly.” By doing so, it seems as though Augustine was forestalling any ‘cannibalistic’ interpretation of the Eucharist – Christians eat and drink the Lord’s risen body and blood in a sacrament; they do not eat flesh as if from a ‘butcher shop.’

By the early 9^th century, however, the issues were not only theological concerns about the Eucharist, that is, simply dealing with the source of the change as in the words of Jesus or in the Spirit, but also became philosophical. Let us now look at some of the primary opposing arguments in the Early-Mid-Medieval periods.

In 831, a monk and a theologian, Paschasius Radbertus, published a treatise entitled De Corpore et Sanguine Domini (“On the Body and Blood of the Lord”), where he represented “the first attempt to deal with the eucharist in a systematically doctrinal way.” Paschasius insisted on the realism of Christ’s presence by claiming that there was no difference at all between the Eucharistic body of Christ and the historical body of Christ born of the Virgin, for he says, “just as the true flesh [of Christ] was created, without intercourse, from the Virgin through the Spirit, so through the same [Spirit], the same body and blood of Christ is mystically consecrated from the substance of bread and wine.” This realism of his attributed to a sort of mystical cannibalism especially evident when he spoke of ‘bleeding host,’ recounting a story of a sceptic old man who did not believe in the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. According to the mystery, this old man was approached by two young monks who took him to the church on Sunday at Mass, and during the sacrament, he saw a young child on the altar. As the priest broke the bread, an angel of the Lord descended with a knife in hand and sacrificed the child, pouring his blood into chalice. When he stepped forward to receive the communion in his hand, he clearly saw a piece of bread soaked in blood. He then cried out “Lord, I believe that the bread which is placed on the altar is your body, and the cup is your blood.” Then the flesh in his hand immediately became bread. Paschasius also reminds us that “[n]o one who reads the lives and deeds of saints can remain unaware that often these mystical sacraments of the body and blood have been revealed under the visible form of a lamb or the actual color of flesh and blood.” These claims sound dangerously close to saying that the faithful are literally ‘tear the flesh’ or ‘crush the bones’ of Christ when participating in the Eucharist, and his more refined theology clearly rejected so called the ‘butcher-shop theology.’ For although he was clear about the distinction between image and truth being perceived only through faith and suggested that external signs such as figures and images of the Eucharist only contribute as a triggering effect in the believers to see the spiritual truth of the sacrament, his theology that there is no difference between the Eucharistic body of Christ and the historical body of Christ, and that the appearances of the bread and wine remain merely “because God knows that human nature cannot bear to eat raw flesh was repulsive to many.

In an attempt to redefine what Eucharist is, yet another monk by the name of Ratramnus felt the need to express his concern in his work ingeniously entitled as the Body and Blood of the Lord. In his treatise, he emphasized the fact that the Eucharistic body of Christ and the historical body of Christ are not identical. Instead, he argued that in the manner which the body of Christ is in the bread is only sacramental, i.e., it is present in a spiritual manner. For him, Christ’s presence in a natural mode of flesh and blood would destroy the very notion of a sacrament, for he says that, a mystery would no longer be called a mystery if it is celebrated under no figure at all. The Eucharist is properly a mystery because it manifests itself externally to the sense as one thing, whereas at the same time it internally demands recognition from the minds of the faithful as something different. Unlike Paschasius whose concern was with the actual presence of Christ’s natural body, Ratramnus emphasized the importance of sacrament and the necessity of faith for the proper perception of sacramental signs. For Ratramnus, the Eucharistic sacrament is both a material food to feed the body and spiritual nourishment for the souls. The historical body of Christ is not literally or physically re-created in the sacrament, but only is a true sacramental body. That is to say, he insisted that the eucharist is a true ‘mystery’ of the flesh of Christ, but it is not a physical recreation of the natural body of Christ.

II: Transubstantiation in the 11^th century

Before moving on to the philosophical debates in the 11^th century onwards, in order to understand how popularly the doctrine of transubstantiation was believed in general, it may be worthwhile to go over some common theological problems and customs regarding the Eucharist in this period. If you recall, we have seen the old sceptic who had doubts about the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament. He received the communion in his hand, but this tradition began to change in the 9^th century. Ordo Romanus Bk. X, which described the manners in which the Mass was performed, implied that “[l]et not the eucharist be put in the hand of any lay man or woman, but only in the mouth,” and further in the 10^th century, “all persons who are not at least in deacons’ orders must be communicated in the mouth, not in the hand.” Why did it change? Some of the examples of the abuse of sacrament are abundantly reported in medieval stories. For instance, it is reported that one woman used the eucharist as an aphrodisiac, and another woman laid the consecrated bread in a beehive in order to cure sickness. In yet another story tells us the Host [i.e., bread] was often kidnapped by the Jews for the purpose of desecration or torture. In England and France, “people claimed that Jews would steal consecrated host wafers and torture them… to reenact Jesus’ crucification. But could it have been possible at all to crucify the host? Just how large was the host, really? According to the extant molds, made of iron, from the 13^th century through the 17^th century, it provides us with the information about the shape, size and imprints of what the Host looked like. “Hosts were round and thin, easily broken into three pieces to symbolize the Trinity,” though they ranged in size depending on the purpose. Those for consumption by the clergy was small, as little as twenty-nine millimeters, whereas those that were elevated for the laity better to see the miracle of transubstantiation was larger, fifty-four millimeters in one instance. It looked white, round, nearly transparent in thinness, and visible at a distance. It hardly sounds likely that such events as torturing the hosts took place. However, it is a historical fact that this accusation against the Jews brought thousands of them at stake, “[e]ven when such an accusation was supported only by the testimony of a thief… or some one having a grudge against the accused Jews.” They were condemned and burned on the basis of a confession exacted by torture, sometimes with all the other Jews in the city. According to these accusations, “[t]he Jews were alleged to steal the host or to acquire it by purchase or bribery, to break it or seethe it, and to stick needles into it or transfix it, whereupon it began to bleed.” But the Jews were not said to have destroyed the hosts, after piercing it. The story has it that it was because “[t]he Jews, frightened on seeing the blood, endeavoured to hide the host, but while doing so miracles happened which aroused the attention of the Christian population and led to the discovery of the crime,” for instance, “[t]he blood from the host was said to have splashed the foreheads of the Jews, leaving an indelible mark that betrayed them,” or “the pierced host had once whimpered and cried like an infant.” These accusations of the desecration of the host only came to be reported after the Fourth General Council of Lateran, where Pope Innocent III recognized the doctrine of transubstantiation and made it an article of faith, i.e. whoever does not believe in the physical transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ will be deemed heretic and executed. It was only after this council in 1215 that the public and general worship of the consecrated bread became popular. Particularly in narratives of Host desecration, these stories served as an affirmation of the doctrine of transubstantiation in public arena as well as to expose  those who had betrayed the Host and to effect, qua miracle, led to the conversion of other Jews and non-believers. Not surprisingly, it was after 1215 the doctrine of transubstantiation came to be subject to rigorous philosophical debates.

First, I will discuss the theological and philosophical debates leading up to the Lateran Council in 1215, and then discuss more philosophical problems dealt with by later medieval scholars. The 11^th century marked a crucial point in the history and philosophy of transubstantiation. As we have seen earlier, Berengarius attacked the realistic account of Eucharist. His Eucharistic theology was constructed on three levels. First is to ask ‘what real presence means’ and how the bread and wine can be said to become Christ’s body and blood. Second, what it means to speak of the Eucharist as a sacrament, and if something is a sacrament, whether it is real or merely a sign or image of something else. Third, what it is that a Christian receives in Eucharistic communion. Here, once again, we need to look at what he concluded after his condemnation at Rome in 1059. He says, “whoever affirms that the body of Christ, in whole or in part, is touched by the hands of the priest at the altar, or broken, or crushed, by the teeth – except insofar as this pertains to the sacrament – speaks against the truth and against the dignity of the teaching of Christ.” Here, Berengarius is clear that “the nature of bread and wine remains unchanged in the eucharist” and that “they do not ‘become’ something else.” For him, the only rational explanation was to speak of a change in terms of the sacramental signs, and to insist upon physical change in the bread and wine would be contrary to the principles of nature. His argument was also Christological – it should be noted, he believed, that having conquered death, the body of Christ is no longer subject to suffering and morality, and that “the risen and glorified Lord cannot therefore be injured by a priest’s hands or a Christian’s teeth.” In other word, he appealed to the impassibility of Christ after the resurrection as a glorified body. The glorified body of Christ is indeed spiritual in nature insofar as it does not occupy the same dimension as we do – the distinction which will be important in later theology – and to think such a body can be physically broken by the hands of a priest would be to doubt the truth of Christ’s resurrection. His argument from the Eucharist as a sacrament also supports his thesis that the change in the bread and wine is not physical. He argued, like St. Augustine, that “[a] sign is something beyond the outward appearance which the senses perceive; by doing one thing it brings something else to mind.” Therefore, he argued, it is obvious a sign appeals to the human intellect or mind rather than senses. Since visible signs point to what is signified and invisible, if the bread and wine physically turned into the body and blood of Christ, a sacrament would lose its significance since there would not be anything for the physical signs to point to. He thus concludes that Eucharist “[a]s sacrament and sign, [it] has nothing to do with physical change in material realities, [and that w]hat lies on the altar after the consecration is not the flesh and blood of Christ, but the [sacramental signs] of that flesh and blood.” As for what we receive in communion is clear from this that although Berengarius did believe that Christians truly partake of Christ’s body and blood, as signaled by the sacrament, it also did not mean we are eating Christ’s body merely in a spiritual sense. For Berengarius, the body of Christ is not an illusion or a mere apparition, but it actually does signify the historical body of Christ, which is now in heaven, and “through signification of sacraments, puts us spiritually in touch with Christ in his authentic humanity.” Unfortunately for him, many of his contemporaries did not agree with his distinction between physical sign and the truth it signifies. Even though Berengarius tried to show that visible sign and invisible truth are intrinsically related, his opponents interpreted his view as a denial of the reality or “truth” of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Against his ‘sacramentalism’, theologians argued for crude realism, “insisting that the bread and wine are not only changed, but physically converted into the flesh of Christ, ‘broken by the hands of the priest and crushed by the teeth of the faithful.” One such theologian was Lanfranc, who wrote The Book on the Body and Blood of the Lord in 1063 as a response to Berengarius’ sacramentalism. Just as Berengarius revived the sacramentalism of St. Augustine, Lanfranc resurrected an insight from Ambrose’s On Sacrament. Berengarius had claimed, apparently quoting Ambrose, that “[t]hrough consecration at the altar, bread and wine become a sacrament of religion – but they do not cease to be what they were.” To this, Lanfranc responded that Berengarius deliberately misquoted Ambrose. In fact, Lanfranc was right and Berengarius’ quotation was faulty. What Ambrose actually said was “before the consecration it was not the body of Christ, but after the consecration I tell you that it is now the body of Christ. He spoke and it was made, he commanded and it was created.” This testimony not only proved Berengarius was an unreliable scholar but also affirmed that God’s power can change bread and wine into the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Lanfranc’s conviction that God’s infinite power can cause the Eucharistic conversion to happen consequently led him to reach radically different conclusions from those of Berengarius’ about real presence, sacrament and communion. He argued that in the Eucharist, “through the ministry of the priest, the earthly substances on the Lord’s table are… changed into the essence of the Lord’s body, even though the appearances of earthly elements remain.” By introducing the distinction between outward appearances and hidden truth, a theme that would become of a central importance in later scholastic theology, he is said to be the first to use Aristotelian concept of substance and accidents. Contrary to what Berengarius said about sacramental significance, i.e. sacraments are visible signs and visible signs point to something invisible, Lanfranc believed that without hidden truth, i.e. Christ’s body and blood actually present in it, the entire meaning of the eucharist is destroyed. To recapitulate each of their argument, for Berengarius, the sacrament is destroyed if bread and wine are changed into something else, whereas for Lanfranc, if bread and wine are changed into something else, the sacrament is destroyed. For Berengarius, the reality of body and blood signified by the sacramental signs of bread and wine must remain independent of those signs, while for Lanfranc, the signs must be changed into that very reality. As you can see, they are opposed on all points – further, Lanfranc insisted upon the distinction between the flesh of Christ and the body of Christ. One of the largest issues was how it was possible for the body of Christ, which is impassable, to be physically cut into pieces. By making a distinction between the body, which is impassable, and the flesh of Christ, which is not impassable, he was able to be consistent with the Christology. For Lanfranc, the outward appearances are bread and wine, while the hidden truth under the substances is flesh and blood of Christ. Flesh can be broken into pieces as long as the body of Christ remains in heaven, glorified and impassable. Lanfranc’s contribution to the debate did not end there. He also defended how it is possible for the flesh of Christ to be eaten every day, yet his body still remains in heaven in its entirety. He did it in quoting the passages from the Bible that “[n]o one doubts that the widow of Serepta ate oil from the jar which the prophet Elijah miraculously filled; yet scripture testifies that the jar never ran dry, even after the widow and her son had eaten from it for a year. This is the case with the eucharist as well: we eat Christ’s flesh and blood daily, yet the body of Christ remains whole and intact in heaven.”

In summary, not only Berengarius forced the Latin theologians to confront the inadequacies of crude realism in the Eucharist, but also Lanfranc’s philosophy paved the way for later thinkers like Aquinas in dealing with more subtle issues of the Eucharist. By insisting that the Eucharistic body and the historical body of Christ are essentially the same, only differing in appearances, Lanfranc was able to reconcile the 9^th century disagreement between Paschasius and Radbertus. In the Eucharist, that is, Christ’s flesh appears hidden by forms of bread and wine, but his historical body remains whole and intact in heaven. In this way, Christian theology explained the eucharist is real without being crudely realistic, and symbolic without being unreal.

Now, before we move on to the core issue of transubstantiation in the 13^th century onward, we need to be familiar with one more aspect of the doctrine of transubstantiation, that is, when exactly it happens. As has been mentioned earlier, one primary concern was this problem of idolatry – after all, it was the initial concern when the Eucharist came to be seen somewhat problematic. The fact that this issue concerned the clergies and theologians alike is obvious from the clerical debates on the moment of consecration long before 1215. From roughly 1160 to Lateran IV, the major debate was at what point in time exactly the bread became the body. The process of consecration is nothing but a combination of the words of Institution from the Gospel texts and specified gestures of the celebrant. This question directed concerned the elevation of the host upon consecration, a practice popular by the 12^th century. In 1208, Pope Innocent III, before he called for the Lateran IV, affirmed the separate consecration of each element, but also the unity of the whole action. This resolution was issued to address the danger of idolatry and the people’s desire to see the Host, and determined that the bread became the body of Christ only after the words, “Hoc est corpus meum,” and the celebrant should elevate the Host after the last word has been pronounced. It was also at this time that a small bell, specifically designed for the purpose of being rung at the moment of consecration, signaled the miracle of transubstantiation, “and calling the congregation to turn fully their attention, their eyes and their devotion, to the now present body of Christ, held aloft by the priest.” Soon, by the late 13^th century, the larger church bell rang immediately after the smaller bell of the elevation of the Host so that people outside the church could also pause and turn to the church in devotion to the body of Christ.

Now, the resolution offered by Pope Innocent III clearly did not suffice to satisfy philosophers and theologians alike, especially when the belief in transubstantiation now concerns with whether they can be true Christians. Again, this issue would also be taken up by the later medieval thinkers like Aquinas and Duns Scotus, but here in order to appreciate the later philosophical debate on this issue more, let us be acquainted with what their predecessors had to say about it. In doing so, we will look at two major players, namely Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Peter the Singer, a French Roman Theologian, at the very end of 11^th century.

Stephen Langton was in favour of the view that the consecration of the bread and wine happen separately, claiming that the Church should literally imitate the actions of Jesus, that is, first consecrating and distributing the bread, and then the wine. On the other hand, Peter the Singer insisted that if a priest were to stop after the words ‘This is my body,’ the consecration would not take have taken place. His reasoning was that since a true body cannot exist without blood, and there is no blood in this sacrament until the wine too is consecrated, the bread cannot possibly be consecrated until the entire formula for both species has been said by the priest. His argument was that “the two clauses of the consecratory formula are so interdependent that one is not effective without the other.” This was important to recognize because Christians would be guilty of idolatry if they adored the bread before the wine gets consecrated. The synod convened at Paris in the early 12^th century recognized the significance of these objections and stated that when the consecration of bread happens, the blood is necessarily present, since it is true that a body cannot exist without blood. Hence, Christ’s blood is “concomitantly or consequentially present as soon as the bread is consecrated.”

Part III: Aquinas and Duns Scotus on Transubstantiation

We will now be discussing several of the issues that were promulgated in the later Medieval Ages. Let me here deal with three specific issues that pestered medieval thinkers. First, in dealing with the problem of how transubstantiation is possible, I will look at the problems unique to the Eucharist, and argue that theological impossibility of transubstantiation. Second, moving onto philosophical issues, when in time exactly the conversion happens by St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Giles of Rome. Third, which is philosophically most important is how the substance alone can be said to change while its accidental qualities remain intact in the realm of Aristotelian Scholasticism. This last problem is and would remain to be the core issue for philosophers for centuries to come. In dealing with these issues, I shall also touch little on the vulnerability of the consecrated bread and wine, i.e. what happens if a fly goes into the consecrated wine, hence affecting the quality of the blood of Christ? What about when mice take the bread crumb away and eat it? And further, the body of Christ being corporeal in the theory of transubstantiation, how long does it last for a safe consumption? What happens when the bread starts to mold? Does that mean Christ’s body too becomes moldy?

First, let me emphasize in what manner the Eucharist is seen as special, that is, distinct from all the other sacraments. There are seven new-law sacraments: baptism, confirmation, penance, eucharist, ordination, matrimony, and extreme unction. Among them, the holy eucharist stands out as unique. There is a distinction to be made between sacraments whose efficacy depends on the beliefs and motives of the participants (i.e. those that work ex opere operantis) and those whose efficacy depends only on the performance of the outward rite (i.e. those that work ex opere operato). The other sacraments are perfected in their use, i.e. when someone is baptized, etc, and require participants, for instance, “[o]fficiating clergy can go through the preliminaries, but there will be no baptism unless there is someone to be baptized!” But the Eucharist involves a double layer in that first, the bread and wine change into the body and blood of Christ, and then they are received. In other words, in the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ would be there even if no one received the host or chalice, that is to say, even if the priest has a heart attack and died just as he has finished the prayer of consecration and no communicants were around. The bread and wine would become the body and blood of Christ even if those who receive the sacraments are indisposed, perhaps because they are non-believers or their mortal sins are not yet absolved. This is because the effect of the Eucharistic prayer, i.e. the real presence of Christ’s body and blood, does not exist in the souls of the receivers, but exists independently under the appearances of bread and wine. In the Eucharistic consecration, the body and blood of Christ “come to be really present on the altar, whether we are ready or not, and whether we recognize it or not,” and “[t]his sacrament can be somehow perfected independently of worthy reception.” The Eucharist is special in that the true body of Christ is always present when the rite is performed, whereas the other sacraments depend upon the disposition of the receiver and do not outlast their use or the performance of the rite. In the Eucharist alone is the effect produced before the use of the bread and wine, that is, before their being received. Not surprisingly, questions like the following were asked: what happens if mortal sinners eat the bread or whether an immoral priest could take into his stomach the true body of Christ, to which a number of anecdotes tell us that the Host actually disappears when the consecration is performed by immoral priests or the Host turns into stone or ash when taken in by mortal sinners. Also popularly asked were whether eating of the flesh of Christ only to be disposed as excrement is blasphemous or whether subjecting the body of Christ to the horror of digestive process is as cruel a torture as crucification. It does indeed seem abominable to believe that the body of Christ is capable of corruption, and oftentimes eaten by worms, weasels, rats, and mice, and so on… further, when a Pope of Rome by the name of Victor III was poisoned by the transubstantiated wine, did this have anything to do with Christ? Or when the Emperor Henry VII was also poisoned by eating a little round consecrated and transubstantiated Host, was it without substance when it caused him to die? The Catholic belief in transubstantiation further encouraged skeptics and other theologians to doubt and generated related questions such as whether old people with no teeth can be admitted into heaven, because they cannot effectually chew the bread. It was also seen theologically incorrect to make Christ descend from heaven onto the altar and return his body in flesh and bones every single time when the Eucharist is performed, even though he said he would only be back once in his Second Coming. Moreover, when Jesus Christ admonished his Apostle saying that “they were the Salt of the Earth, did he therefore transubstantiate or convert them into Statues or Pillars of Salt”? As is well known, Christ often spoke in parables, so why take one instance literally while other instances as mere metaphors? John Tillotson, a theologian in Early Modern period, framed the issue well. The Eucharist is often said to be a miracle performed by God, since it happens but is not easily explained by reason. But, Tillotson points out, that the way in which we can be assured that something is a miracle is because it depends upon the certainty of sense. This is also evident in numerous passages in the scripture, for instance, when Moses turned rots into serpents or Jesus turned water into wine. In both miracles, they appealed to senses. From instances in the scripture where miracles are said to be performed, he induces that there are two conditions necessary for a miracle. First, there must be a supernatural effect, and second, its effect must be evident to senses. So if a miracle occurs but does not appeal to senses, there can be no testimony or proof of anything and “it self stands in need of another Miracle to give testimony to it and to prove that it [happened].” Here, I would like to quote another argument against the veracity of transubstantiation posed by Tillotson in its entirety, as the way in which it is phrased is both illuminating and straightforward; here is what he says,

“I would like to ask what we are to think of the Argument which our Savior used to convince his Disciples after his Resurrection that his Body was really risen, and that they were not deluded by a Ghost or Apparition. *And he said unto them, why are ye troubled? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I my self; for a Spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. But now if we suppose with the Church of Rome the Doctrine of Transubstantiation to be true, and that he had instructed his Disciples in it just before his death, strange thoughts might justly have said to him; Lord, it is but a few days ago since [you taught] us not to believe our senses, but directly contrary to what we saw, i.e., that the bread which [you gave] us in the Sacrament, though we saw it and handled it and tasted it to be bread, yet was not bread but [your] own natural body; and now you appealed to our senses to prove that this is [your] body which we now see. If seeing and handling be an unquestionable evidence that things are what they appear to our senses, then we were deceived before in the Sacrament; and if they be not, then we are not sure now that this is [your] body which we now see and handle, but it may be perhaps bread under the appearances of flesh and bones, just as in the Sacrament, that which we saw and handled and tasted to be bread was [your] flesh and bones under the form and appearance of bread.” *Luke 24:38-39.

Since the Resurrection is the truth upon which Christian religion is based, the Eucharistic Sacrament cannot possibly be interpreted literally. And if it were to be interpreted literally, we must also interpret it thoroughly with consistency. That is, when he said ‘This cup is the new Testament in my blood, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of Sins,” it must mean that it is not the wine that gets transubstantiated but the cup, and not into the blood of Christ but into the new Testament or new Covenant in his blood. Further, it this Sacrament were to be interpreted literally, it would mean that Christ was giving his own flesh and ate it himself. That this could not be possible is evident from the fact that the Disciples “saw him alive at the very time and beheld his body whole and unpierced,” and surely no Disciples would have thought that “our Savior did literally hold himself in his hand, and give away from himself with his own hands.” All of which are beyond absurdity, not to mention sheer madness. And “to impose [this] belief upon the Christian World under no less penalties than of temporal death and Eternal damnation” seems irrational, to say the least.

Origen wrote a commentary on Matthew15:17, which says “That food which is sanctified by the word of God and prayer, as to that of which is material, goes into the belly and is cast out into the draught.” And there he says it is not the matter of the bread, but the word which is spoken over it, which profits him that worthily eats the Lord; and this he had spoken concerning the typical and Symbolical body.” Indeed, may theologians thought “it is impious to understand the eating of the flesh of the Son of man and drinking his blood literally.” Hence, the Arabic philosopher, Averroes, also criticized Christianity when he said, “I have traveled over the world, and have found divers Sects; but so sottish a Sect or Law I have never found as is the Sect of the Christians; because with their own teeth, they devour their God whom they worship.” Tillotson believes that “the Christian Religion was never so horribly exposed to the scorn of Atheists and Infidels, as it has been by this most absurd and senseless Doctrine” of Transubstantiation, which says ‘Let us make a God that we may eat him.’ From all these points raised, namely, that it is not to be counted as a miracle, it is impious to speak of God as being cast out into the draught upon digestion, and the contradictions that will arise if we take Christ’s words in the Sacrament literally rather than figuratively, it seems evident that the transubstantiation cannot be explained theologically.

Can it, then, be explained philosophically? Some of the primary theologico-philosophical debates in the later Medieval period included the timing problem. Since the Eucharist involves strings of spoken words, in order not to waste any of God’s power to effect the change in the sacrament, each word and each syllable must have some kind of effecting causal power. If the power to transubstantiate rests on only the last pronounced word, for instance, then there is no need to speak the entire sentences but only spell out the last word or the last syllable of the sentence to effect the change. One major figure theologian in the 13^th century, St. Thomas Aquinas, engages in the discussion about this problem of the timing of the consecration by reasoning that the syllable is endowed with partial power, and it is only when all the words, i.e. ‘This is my body,’ have been spoken does the bread transubstantiate into the body of Christ. His opponents, however, argued that “the last syllable of the sacramental formula does [not do] the causing, since that syllable itself takes time,” and “even if it did not, it would follow that the other syllables were superfluous and not instrumentally active in producing the disposition for grace.” Nor is it the case that “the last syllable acts on the preceding syllables” in the same way the “last drop of water breaks through the rock in the power of all the others that went before it.” This is because in the case of the water drops, each drop has left some disposing effect in the rock, but this is not the case with the syllable – if it does, then it would mean that the each power by itself has no sufficient power to produce any effect. Also it poses a further problem that if indeed each syllable has temporally distributed power, would the power so distributed be the same power in each syllable? If it were the same power existing in each syllable, it would mean that an accident would migrate from subject to subject, i.e. existing first in syllable and then moving on to the next syllable. Moreover, if it were the same power existing in each syllable, why would all the syllables be needed? Why not just say ‘…body’ instead of having to complete the sentence with ‘This is my body’? But since accidents are dependent on the subject in which it inheres, i.e. accidents cannot exist without the substance, the migration of the power from subject to subject would imply that the accident would not have depended its existence on that subject after all. On the other hand, if different powers were distributed to each syllable, then “the sacrament consisting of the whole speech would not have any one power, but an aggregate of powers.” But since the power defines the sacrament, this would necessarily compromise the unity of the sacrament. Not only do the spoken words take time, but even after the last syllable has been pronounced, it takes time for the vibration of the air to be propagated from the region of the celebrant’s mouth to the bread. So the spoken words cannot possibly play a causal role, because if it did, “the bread would not be transubstantiated for some time after the celebrant had finished speaking.” Unfortunately, Aquinas was not clear about these points. Furthermore, somewhat related to the timing problem is that where in the bread this power is said to exist. Since sacraments are spatio-temporally extended corporeal things, if the body of Christ were to exist in the Host, it would have to exist either whole in the whole and each in each part of the Host, or whole in the whole and whole in each part of the Host. It cannot be the former, because grace-producing power of Christ’s body is spiritual, and what is only spiritual has no parts, nor can it be extended in space. So it must be the case that Christ exists whole in each part of the bread, where the bread is not broken into parts, but rather it is broken into whole.

If then, the body of Christ is present in the whole in each part of the Host, it follows that whenever bread crumb falls onto the altar or onto the floor, it is the body of Christ that has fallen and gone waste. Christ’s body is there for you to receive grace, not for insects and animals to eat. In addition to philosophically complex topics like the moment of conversion and Christ’s physical presence, Aquinas also dealt with genuine theological concerns such as what would happen if a mouse or a dog were to eat the consecrated Host. The general opinion at the time was that the body of Christ would cease to exist as soon as it has been consumed by non-human agents, and reverts back itself to the substance of bread. To this, Aquinas answers that the body of Christ would still remain even if it were eaten by animals. This is because he grants somewhat unique view of corporeality to the substance of Christ. He says in Part III of Summa Theologica that “as long as the species last [of the bread], Christ’s body does not cease to be under them… [and] the species [of the bread] last so long as the substance of the bread would remain, if it were there.” In this way, he grants Christ’s physical presence in the bread species until the bread substance would have ceased had it been there. So it seems the best before date for consuming the body of Christ is as same as that of the bread substance. By the same reasoning, it could be said that when the bread gets moldy, it is not the body of Christ that gets moldy, but the species of the bread, as if it had its own substance. Further, Aquinas sees no problem whatsoever if a mouse or a dog eats the body of Christ, because the irrational animals do not eat Christ’s body sacramentally, that is to say, to recognize it as the body of Christ for receiving grace. Hence, Aquinas argues, they eat Christ’s body [only] accidentally. Having dealt with the bread incident, he then responds to what happens when a fly or a spider goes falls into the chalice, or if it is found out that the wine has been poisoned, both before and after the consecration. In the case of unexpected incidents before the consecration takes place, Aquinas concedes there is no problem to deal with – all the priest has to do is to empty the chalice and pour in the new wine again. The problem occurs when these incidents happen after the consecration. Aquinas has a very thorough way of dealing with these incidents, for he says “the insect should be caught carefully and washed thoroughly, then burned, and the ablution,” i.e. washing of yourself, and throwing ashes into the drain. And the priests who do not keep proper custody over the sacrament, if a mouse or other animals consume it must do forty days penance” and “he who loses it in a church, or if a part fall and be not found, shall do thirty days’ penance.” In the case of discovering poison in the wine, the priest is advised not to receive or administer the wine to others, and “in order that the sacaremnt may not remain incomplete, he ought to put other wine into the chalice, resume the mass from the consecration of the blood, and complete the sacrifice. If a drop falls onto the board which is fixed to the ground, the priest is to take up with the tongue and scrape the board. If however a drop falls from the chalice onto the altar, the priest must “suck up the drop, and do penance during three days; if it falls upon the altar cloth and permeates to the second the altar cloth,” he will do four days’ penance. Further, Aquinas discusses what to do in case when a priest is stricken by death or grave sickness both before and after the consecration. As is excepted, there is no conceivable problem if a priest dies before the consecration, other than the death of the priest. But when he becomes suddenly unable to continue the consecration, for instance, when the body has been consecrated but blood has not yet been consecrated, then the celebration of the mass ought to be finished by someone else. Aquinas then mentions that this same rule applies for when a priest, during the consecration, suddenly remembers that he has been excommunicated or has committed a mortal sin. I am not sure how to make of this statement, since why would any priest is unaware that he has been excommunicated and proceeds with his daily duties?

Victor Robinson, Medicine in the Stone Age, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Alexandria and Rome (USA: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 3.

Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist (NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31.

Ibid., 32.

Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680-850 (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15. See also, 33, “The cult of relics began in the mid-4^th century and was well developed by the 5^th.”

Ibid., 29.

Ibid.

Adams, Medieval Theories of the Eucharist, 42.

Ibid.

Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, 32. The earliest attested example of a relic, however, dates in 336 (or more plausibly in 357 or 360). See 34-35.

Ibid., 35-36. Avars were Eurasian nomadic people that conquered parts of Central and South Eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages.

Ibid., 40-41.

Ibid., 41.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 43.

Ibid., 44. Also ‘cross’ was defended as an object of Christian devotion and images, and for some reason it was granted throughout the history. See, 45.

John Tillotson, A Discourse Against Transubstantiation, 1685, 21.

Ibid., 21-22.

That is, “Christians eat and drink the Lord’s risen body and blood in a sacrament; they do not eat flesh from a ‘butcher shop’” Augustine was specifically concerned with the importance of understanding the eucharist spiritually, i.e. sacramentally.

James F. McCue, “The Doctrine of Transubstantiation From Berengar Through Trent: The Point at Issue” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968): 386. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1509156 (accessed October 20, 2011).

Tillotson, A Discourse Against Transubstantiation, 17.

Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incornation and Liturgy (USA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21.

Nathan Mitchell, Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass (USA: Pueblo Publishing Company, Inc., 1982), 137.

Adams, Later Theologians, …

Quoting Ambrose from Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 56.

Quoting Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos 98.9, from Cult and Controversy, 45.

Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 45.

Ibid., 74.

Quoting Paschasius’ De Corpore in Cult and Controversy, 75.

Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 79.

Ibid., 75.

Ibid., 78-79.

Ibid., 82.

Ibid., 81-82.

Ibid., 82.

Ibid., 87.

Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, 26.

Ibid., 38.

Parker, Phillip M. Transubstantiation ~ Webster’s Timeline History 1062 – 2005 (USA: ICON Group International, Inc., 2009), 5.

Wandel, the Eucharist in the Reformation, 33.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7906-host-desecration-of accessed Feb 3, 2012.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, 38.

Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 140.

Ibid., 141.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

The notion of ‘glorified body’ becomes significant in later medieval and early modern debates on transubstantiation.

Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 142.

Ibid., quoting Augustine, 142.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid, 144.

Ibid.

Ibid., 145.

Ibid., 146.

Ibid.

Ibid., quoting Ambrose, 146.

Ibid.

Ibid., 146-147.

Ibid., 147.

Ibid., 147-148.

Ibid.

Ibid., 149.

Ibid., 150-151.

Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, 37.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 152.

Ibid., 152-153.

Ibid., 153.

Ibid., 158.

Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist, 42-43.

Ibid., 48.

Ibid., 49.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 49-50.

John Tillotson, A Discourse Against Transubstantiation, 13.

Anon, The Anatomy of Transubstantiation (1680), 11.

R.A., A Brief History of Transubstantiation (1674), 5.

Anon, The Anatomy of Transubstantiation (1680), 10.

Ibid., 17.

Tillotson, A Discourse Against Transubstantiation, 31.

Ibid., 40-41.

Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 9-10

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 3.

Ibid., 15-16.

Ibid., 11.

Ibid., 34.

Ibid.

Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist, 62.

Ibid., 64.

Ibid.

Ibid., 63.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part III, Q80, 2482.

Ibid.

Ibid, 2482-2483.

Ibid., 2518.

Ibid., 2520.

Ibid., 2519.

Ibid., 2518.