Prospectus: History and Philosophy of Transubstantiation

One of the seven sacraments, Eucharist, is an activity of taking in consecrated bread and wine, which 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 is still a 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 Early Modern 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 fry 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?

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 spacial location as to which part of bread is Christ 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 on primarily the arguments propounded by some later medieval philosophers/theologians like Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham as well as Early Moderns such as Luther, Hobbes, Descartes, Arnauld and Leibniz, and try to make sense historically as well as philosophically how the doctrine of transubstantiation has been dealt with in the course of history of ideas.