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The Eucharist in Early Franciscan Tradition 307 MarciaL.Colish The Eucharist in Early FranciscanTradition Abstract: This paper considers threequestions on the Eucharist treated by Alexander of Hales in his Quaestiones disputatae antequam esset frater and Glossa on the Sen- tences of Peter Lombard, and then by William of Melitona in his Quaestiones de sac- ramentis and,asthe acknowledgedauthor or complier of Book 4ofthe Summa Ha- lensis,inthat text in its Cologne, 1622 edition: 1. Transubstantiation as the full substantial changeofbread and wine on the altar into the bodyand blood of Christ as opposed to the remanescenceand annihilation theories, the other two orthodox alternatives; 2. How two bodies can occupy the same spaceatthe sametime, al- though one of them, the glorified bodyofthe resurrected Christ,isnot held to be sub- ject to the laws of physics governing natural bodies; and 3. How the accidents of bread and wine can survive in the consecrated elements, since they are no longer subtended by the substance of bread and wine. Along with standard authorities, Alexander and William draw on some distinctive sources. Theseinclude Peter Lom- bard’s Collectanea,not always distinguished from the biblical Glossa ordinaria by Alexander’sand William’seditors;the semantic theory of Prepositinus of Cremona; and Innocent III’streatise on the Mass, which defends the Real Presenceastransub- stantiation in awork otherwise devoted to the liturgy of the Mass. The paper empha- sizes the shifting analyses givenbyAlexander across his twotreatments of these questions, as well as thosealtered by William—moving from semantic to physical to mathematical argumentation—in support of positions on the Eucharist which they shared, but which the Summa Halensis does not adopt. Eucharistic theologyhas receivednolack of attention from historians of scholasti- cism. Accenting philosophicalexplanations of the Real Presencedoctrine after 1250,they tend to devalue earlier accounts as technicallydeficient or as confined to divine miracle. This studyofAlexander of Hales, William of Melitona, and the Summa Halensis proposes arevaluation of earlyFranciscan contributions to two major Eucharistic debates.Theologians in their dayoffered three alternative theories to explain Christ’sReal Presence in the Eucharist.Alexander,William, and the au- thorities on whom they relyall support the transubstantiation theory and reject re- manescenceand annihilation. This position affected their approach to the second issue, accidentswithout asubject in the consecrated species.Sources available to Alexander and William in Latin, and their own ingenuity,informed the usesthey make of the artes and philosophy. This paper will focus on the modes of argument they applytothese twocontroverted doctrines. The characterization of earlyFranciscans as disinclined to applyrational expla- nations to the Eucharist can be found even in studies that valorize learning in that OpenAccess. ©2020 Lydia Schumacher,published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110685008-018 304 Marcia L. Colish order.Bert Roest begins with Bonaventure,¹ as does David Burr.Burr’searlyFrancis- cans join Eucharistic theologians whose view of their job ‘was not to provethe un- provable or explain the unexplainable’.² While noting that,by1330, the Franciscan defenseofaccidents without asubject had become ‘an immovable givenofmetaphy- sics’,³ William Duba givesnosense of its development before Duns Scotus.Marilyn Adams begins her survey with Aquinas, and is likewise uninterested in earlyscho- lastics on the topics she treats.⁴ As is well known, before and after the definition of the Real Presenceastransub- stantiation at Lateran IV in 1215,threetheories wereproposed to describeit. All were regarded as tenable within the western orthodoxconsensus.⁵ Historians have flagged the shift from alargely anti-heretical defense of the Real Presencetoits reframing in Aristotelian terms. Indeed, it was the controversy launched by Berengarius of Tours in the 11th century thatnormalized the languageofmatterand form, substance and accident,inthis context,⁶ Aristotelian terminology accessed by wayofBoethius. A standard author in the Latin school curriculum, Boethius remained amajor source for the philosophical arguments of Alexander and William as well, along with Bert Roest, ‘“Franciscan Augustinianism”:Musings about Labels and LateMedieval School Forma- tion,’ in Bert Roest, Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission, c. 1226–1650: Cum scientia sit donum Dei, armaturaaddefendendamsanctam fidem catholicam…,The Medieval Franciscans,10(Leiden: Brill, 2016), 111–3, and this despiteRoest’svigorousdefense of the acceptability of learningfrom Francis of Assisi onwardinBertRoest, ‘Francis of Assisi and the Pursuit of Learning,’ in Franciscan Learning,Preaching and Mission,1–18;BertRoest, ‘The Franciscan School System:Re-assessing the EarlyEvidence,’ in Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission,19–50;and Bert Roest, ‘Religious Life in the Franciscan School Network (13th Century),’ in Franciscan Learning,Preaching and Mission, 51– 82. The anthology De causalitate sacramentorum iuxta scholam franciscanum,ed. Willibrord Lampen (Bonn: PetrusHanstein, 1931) is not of use in this paper; whilethe editor’sselections begin with the Summa Halensis (ascribingits authorship to Alexander)they do not treat the Euchar- istic topics herediscussed. David Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-CenturyFranciscan Thought, Transactionsofthe American Philosophical Society,74/3(Philadelphia: American Philosophical So- ciety,1984), 6–7. William O. Duba, TheForge of Doctrine: TheAcademicYear 1330–31 and the Rise of Scotism at the University of Paris,Studia Sententiarum,2(Turnhout: Brepols,2017), 150 –3; quotationat153. Marilyn McCordAdams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist:Thomas Aquinas,Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus,and William of Ockham (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press,2010). Hans Jorissen, Die Entfaltung der Transsubstantiationslehrebis zumBeginn der Hochscholastik, Münsterische Beiträgezur Theologie, 28/1 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1965), 11–154,156;Gary Macy, TheTheologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: AStudy of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament according to the Theologians,c.1080-c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 3–5; Gary Macy, ‘Berengar’sLegacyasaHeresiarch,’ in Treasuresfrom the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN:Liturgical Press, 1999), 59–80,Gary Macy, ‘The “Dogma of Transub- stantiation” in the Middle Ages,’ in Treasures from the Storeroom,82–120; Paul J.J.M. Bakker, La rai- son et le miracle: Les doctrines eucharistiques (c. 1250-c. 1400): Contribution àl’étude des rapports entre philosophie et théologie,2vols. (Nijmegen: KatholiekeUniversiteit Nijmegen, 1999), 1:156–66; Bakkerbegins his account with William of Auxerre. Jorissen, Die Entfaltung,25–44,156. The EucharistinEarly Franciscan Tradition 305 more recent Latin sources and translations. Before continuing, let us note thatthe investigation in this paper will be limited to printedsources, including, perforce, the uncritical earlymodern edition of Book 4ofthe Summa Halensis. Another limi- tation is that we will not draw systematicallyonbiblical exegesis as asource, al- though the scholastics did so. And, despite the terms preferred by some modern scholars,⁷ we will follow our medieval authorsinnaming the three Real Presence theories: remanescence, annihilation, and transubstantiation. Proponents of remanescenceheld that the substance of bread and wine remains in the consecratedspecies, at least in part,inorder to provide asubstrate in which the accidents of bread and wine can inhere. Proponents of annihilation held that the bread and wine are totallyannihilated by the consecration; God then replaces them with newlycreated species that contain both Christ’sbodyand blood and the acci- dents of bread and wine. Both annihilationists and proponents of the completesub- stantial changeofbread and wine into the bodyand blood of Christ,called transub- stantiation since the earlytwelfth century,had to account for the inherenceofthe accidents of bread and wine in species that no longer contain the substance of bread and wine. They agreed that such was the case; what they debated was if, and how,itcould be explained,beyond the reiteration of biblical and patristic asser- tions and the appeal to miracle. Alexander of Hales is rightlyhailed for making the commentary on Peter Lom- bard’s Sentences arequirement for incipient university theologians.⁸ Yet, it is remark- able how little attention has been paid to the Lombard’sown teachingsonthe Eu- charist as asourcefor Alexander’s. In Peter’s Collectanea (first redaction 1139/41, second redaction 1157/58), his commentary on 1Cor.11:23–24 defends the transub- stantiation theory and formulates aposition on accidents without asubject that res- onates later. He invokes the Aristotelian languageofsubstance and accidents. ‘It is believed’,heobserves, that[the bread and wine] ‘changeinto the substance of [Christ’s] bodyand blood’ (credatur transire in substantiam corporis et sanguinis). Re- garding the consecrated species,hemaintains thattheir ‘color,taste, shape, and weight,which wereaccidents of their substance before, ( … )may exist without a subject, even as they do in asubject’ (color,sapor,forma, pondus, quae prioris sub- Macy, ‘Dogma of Transubstantiation,’ 83 and passim substitutes ‘coexistence’, ‘substitution’,and
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