LATE MEDIEVAL EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY: A HELPFUL GLOSSARY

Accident: A property, or characteristic, of a thing. As distinct from the category of substance, an accident requires the existence of another being for its own existence, as ‘this white’ requires for its existence ‘this bread.’ The nine Aristotelian accidents include: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, State, Action, Passion. Most basically, these would be the “sense data” of an object, that is, anything out- wardly perceptible about a thing.

Accidental being: A manner of existence requiring the existence of a substance. In medieval eucharistic theology it pertains to all the prop- erties or characteristics of the elements—color, dimensions, weight, smell, appearance—that remain unchanged at consecration.

Accidental form: The structure, or organization, according to which the accidents of a thing are arranged. For example, the accidental form of the quantity of a thing is that by which the thing weighs a given amount, how the weight is distributed, and how the thing is able to be divided into pieces.

Accidents, Extrinsic: Where, when, state, action, passion, position which, according to Giles of Rome, are united to substance through the mediation of the intrinsic accidents. Relation is an Intermediate Accident, by which the extrinsic accidents are related to the intrinsic accidents.

Accidents, Intrinsic: Quantity and Quality. These accidents are united to a substance directly in Giles of Rome’s account of how quantity can serve as proxy for substance during Eucharistic change. Richard of Richard of Middleton calls these Absolute Accidents, for which exis- tence without a subject does not entail a contradiction. He contrasts them with Respective Accidents, which have the status of a relation of some kind, such as place, action, and relation. They are also con- trasted with Mixed Accidents, which are combinations of Absolute and Respective accidents. Neither of the latter can exist without inher- ence in some subject. 620 late medieval eucharistic theology: a helpful glossary

Annihilation: The absolute destruction of a thing, by which it goes from having being to lacking being. Nothing can be said of an annihilated being, precisely because it does not exist. In the case of the Eucharist this means that the substance of the bread is reduced to nothing as it is succeeded by the substance of Christ’s body. Annihilation was rec- ognized as one of three possible explanations for eucharistic change, along with Remanence and Transubstantiation.

Azyma: Unleavened Bread. The Roman Catholic Church used unleav- ened bread in the Eucharist, whereas the Eastern Orthodox used leavened bread. This was a matter of some controversy between the Churches. Although Thomas Aquinas believed that the use of unleav- ened bread is more reasonable, he maintained that Christ’s body can be confected from both.

Concomitance: The body and blood of Christ are fully present in each of the consecrated elements, meaning that a communicant receiving only the wafer nevertheless receives both body and blood at once. Because the body and blood of Christ cannot be separated, they are both present even though the bread is transubstantiated only into the body of Christ and the wine only into the blood of Christ.

Consubstantiation: The doctrine that, following consecration, the sub- stance of Christ’s body exists along with the substance of the bread. This doctrine, together with the annihilation and conversion theories, was considered orthodox deep into the thirteenth century, but was generally rejected in later centuries.

Diaphaneity: That which experiences the change when fire is generated from the air, which Peter Auriol gives as an example of the being of a ‘symbolic form.’ The term is synonymous with transparency, and Auriol holds that the whole of the air’s transparency is transmuted to the fire, without the substance of the air remaining. This is opposed to the kind of change that involves the continued being of a subject, as with the condensation of a gas into a liquid, where the being of the sub- ject remains. The symbolic form is what holds constant in the change of transubstantiation, moving from the substance of the bread to the body of Christ. It is a logical symbol, arising from the presence of accidents in a substance extended in time and space, such that there can be a ‘this perceptible something’ that experiences the eucharistic change.