RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Transubstantiation
virtue of the sacramental change but of natural concomitance. And because living body and blood are inseparable the concept of real concomitance affords the conclusion that blood is under the bread and body under the wine as well, or the entire body of Christ is under each. This, too, became a fixed tenet of scholasticism, receiving very full elaboration at the hands of Biel. That the body of Christ may be present under the species of the host, the substance of the bread must cease to be and only its accidents remain. Scholasticism could not, therefore, avoid the problem whether these accidents could continue to exist without their subject. Thomas affirmed such possibility, proposing as analogous proof that the divine omnipotence as the first cause could sustain the effect of a terminated second cause, and assuming that after the substance of the bread had ceased the accidents continued inhering in the dimensive quantitativeness of the bread as a quasi-subject. The validity of this view was denied by Duns and specially by the nominalists, who answered Thomas that such quantitativeness, after the change, belonged to the accidents themselves; and they found less difficulty on their theory in presuming the accidents to be self-subsisting after the change. It may be said that accidents that may subsist without a subject can have but a very lax connection with the body after consecration. They do not inhere in or affect the body, and the latter may not be accessible to transactions affecting the accidents, such as the breaking of the bread, where the body as a whole or as entirely in each and every part is not affected.
The question of how long the body of Christ is
present in the host was not answered conclusively
by the older scholasticism. Thomas maintained
that the presence continued in the species so long
as they would not undergo such change
3. Dura- as would alter the substance of the tion of bread and wine were that substance
Presence, existent. This view was repeated by Biel, who supplemented it by the conclusion of Occam, that when the body of Christ ceased to be present in the host, its place was taken either by the returning substance of bread or by some new substance, thus giving rise to the paradox that " from non-substances," the substanceless accidents, " substance may arise." When the process of digestion begins, the presence of the body of Christ in the accidents ceases, and its place is taken, by an absolute act of God, by a surrogate which has the nutritive power lacking to the accidents as such. The question likewise arose how the words, " this is my body," were to be interpreted. The followers of Berengar explained them, like Zwingli afterward, as representative; Richard of St. Victor substituted the future for the present; Bonaventura paraphrased the words into, " this which is as yet present under these species as bread will be transubstantiated into my body"; Alexander of Hales paraphrased the words as " this which is designated by the symbol is my body "; Thomas, followed by Biel and Bellarmin made hoc refer to a substance qualitatively undetermined, but considered present under the species, and then more closely defined by the predicate as the body of Christ. The proof of transub- XI— 33
stantiation is drawn from the hoc; for if the substance of bread had remained, Christ would have said, " Hie panis est corpus meum."
The most difficult question concerned the quantity of the eucharistic body and its relation to the host. Since the celestial body of Christ is in all points the same as it was on earth save its impassibility and immortality, it must quantitatively fill a certain amount of space in " dimensive " or " circumscriptive " fashion, so that the whole occupies its entire allotted room or space, and each part its specific exclusive space; and apparently this heavenly body as such can not be present in the host. This objection could be met only by the 4. Unity doctrine that the sacramental body of of Celestial Christ, though one and the same with and Sacra- his celestial body, has another mode mental of existence in the sacrament; name- Body, ly, without quantitativeness. The earlier realistic scholasticism attributed to quantitativeness, like other absolute accidents, a real existence independent of substance and of qualities, holding that through the union of quantitativeness with unquantitative substance or quality the latter first become quantitative things gaining definite area and capacity. This quantitativeness was, according to realism, thus separable from material things without alteration to their real entity. Realists could therefore affirm, as some did, that the accident of quantitativeness existed only in the celestial body of Christ, not in the sacramental body. As to how this would be it was proposed that God can provide that one part of the body is entered by another, and this in turn by another (subintrare) , so that each exists not under or beside but only in the other, and the whole has the smallest imaginable natural quantity. This was the subintration theory, and was objectionable; because if non-quantitative in the Eucharist, the body can not be living and organic and therefore not identical with the celestial body; or as Albert and Duns questioned, without collateral parts there was no form and consequently no real soul-possessing body in the Eucharist. The problem now assumed the shape of proving quantity without spatial extension not self-contradictory, as Bonaventura assumed. The first to attempt a dialectic solution along these lines was Thomas on the basis of transmutation and concomitance. The former has for its termini not dimensions, but substances, and accordingly only the substance of the bread is changed into the substance of the body of Christ. Since, however, the body of Christ is present in the sacrament as it exists in heaven, its dimensive quantity must also be present. But since this is in the sacrament only " concomitantly " and somewhat as an accident, it is present only according to the mode of substance, i.e., the body is present not as a dimensive quantity in dimensive space, but like a substance under its own dimensions. Accordingly, the nature of the substance is contained wholly in the entire body and wholly in each part, analogous to the air. To the objection that the spatial capacity of the species would thus be conceived as empty, he asserted that such was occupied only by the species of bread retaining:, after the
Transubstautiation