RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Transmigration Tran substantiation
the consecration, are the body and blood of Christ. The latter doctrine is evidently consubstantiation; the first, or theory of transformation, is the one widely held in the Greek Church; while the combination of the second and third (the annihilation doctrine), scarcely to be identified against the second, unmistakably represents, virtually, the doctrine of transubstantiation. Peter Lombard refrains from criticizing only the third, which doubtless holds the mystery forbidding investigation, but it is uncertain whether he accordingly does not dare to venture for conciseness upon the term transubstantiation, or that term had not yet appeared as available for the conception. Peter of Poitiers expressly introduces the term transsubstantiatio for the outlined conception, with the apology that no adequate term was previously afforded.
A new epoch in eucharistic doctrine had its inception with Paschasius Radbertus (q.v.), who, surpassing his predecessors in the earnestness and thrust by which he asserted the identity of the historic body of Christ with the Eucharist, without any intentional innovation on his part, furnished the impulse for a scientific theological treatment of the eucharistic problem by his De car-pore et sanguine Domini '(MPL, cxxi. 125 sqq.). His work was the first monograph in the West on the Eucharist, preceded only by the homily of Faustus of Riez (q.v.), De corpore ■ et sanguine 2. Early Christi (MPL, xxx. 271 sqq.). At Medieval bottom the Christological and so- Develop- teriological problem was at stake, ment. which at the outset of the dogmatic development was thus afforded a symptomatic interest beyond mere formal speculation. The first real eucharistic controversy of the West was that conjured up against Berengar of Tours (q.v.) by his opponents, practically the authors of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Of these there were four: Hugo, bishop of Langres, Tractatus de corpore et sanguine Christi (c. 1048; MPL, cxlii. 1325 sqq.) ; Durand of Troarn (q.v.), De corpore et sanguine Christi (MPL, cxlix. 1375 sqq.) ; Lanfranc, De corpore et sanguine Domini (1069 or 1070; MPL, cl. 407 sqq.); and Guitmund, later archbishop of Aversa, De corporis et sanguinis Domini veritate in Eucharistia (between 1073 and 1078; MPL, cxlix. 1427 sqq.). ;; Lanfranc was the first to teach that the body of'Christ is received also by the unworthy, a view essentially implying the reality of the change of the bread. He appareatly wavers, however, when he affirms that in the sacrament the flesh of Christ is daily sacrificed, distributed, and eaten, notwithstanding that according to another mode of speech the whole Christ is eaten, i.e., when he is longed for as eternal life by spiritual desire.) Both kinds of communion he deems essential, the""physical and the spiritual, though the latter is impossible without the former. Most important was the work of Guitmund, amended by Anselm and compiled and further developed by Alger of Liege (d. 1132) in his De sacramentis corporis et sanguinis Dominici (MPL, clxxx. 743 sqq.). The latter stated: '/in the sacrament, the substance, not the form, "being changed, the bread and wine do not become new flesh and new blood, but
the existing substance, both of bread and wine, is changed into the coexisting substance of the body of Christ. 1 He holds that " the whole host is so the body of Christ that, nevertheless, each separate particle is the whole body of Christ." In this latter statement are contained four axioms of subsequent theologians: (1) not a part of the body of Christ (as the flesh), but the whole body, the whole Christ, is present in the Eucharist in virtue of the change;
(2) the whole body, the whole Christ, is not only in the entire host, but no less entirely in each part ;
(3) even though a thousand masses are celebrated simultaneously at different places, the whole body of Christ is present in each individually and entirely in all; (4) by the breaking of the host and its crushing by the teeth the indivisible body of Christ is not divided. The views of Guitmund were further systematized by Peter Lombard (d. 1064 or 1060 ?), Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), Hugo of St. Victor (d. 1141), and Robert Pulleyn (d. about 1150); and by these pushed to their logical conclusions. Anselm, in De corpore et sanguine Domini (MPL, clix. 255), denied that with the blood only the soul of Christ is received and with the body only the body, but maintained that the entire Christ, both God and man, is received in each. Henceforth it was a standing formula that " the entire Christ exists and is received under either species," and though the conception of the Eucharist as spiritual sustenance prevailed later, yet the argument was repeatedly recalled. Guitmund also made an advance in a closer determination of the process in the sacrament. Of four alternative species of change (mutatio) the one in which one thing becomes another that already exists, like the sacramental bread changed into the body of Christ existing already in heaven, pertains exclusively to the Eucharist. Raising the question how this is possible, Alger of Liege, declining the view that this takes place by flight from heaven through space, affirmed that the human nature now exalted was capable by virtue of omnipotence to remain undivided and substantial where it is and at the same time to be at every other place where it will. Guitmund applied the logical categories of substance and accident to the Eucharist, in so far as he termed the surviving sense qualities of the changed substance accidents, and Alger further deduced the consequence that God made the accidents to continue without a subject. Both affirmed that as the substance of the bread was no longer present, any disturbance of the inherent substance (the body) was not only impossible but a disturbance of the accidents was merely illusory. The latter, however, seemed to their successors, Hugo, Robert, and Thomas, to impair the verity of the sacrament, and it was assumed that much could occur to the accidents not affecting the body in which they inhere, being not, according to Anselm and the rest, spatially circumscribed, gnawed by mice, or taken into the abdomen like the elements. A loose integration of the substance of the body and the accidents of the bread was thus postulated, yet it is to be taken as the first expression of a thought which was to remain an integrating factor in the Roman dogma. Radbertus had already represented the bread and wine as types or figures of
Tran substantiation