The Eucharist in Early Franciscan Tradition

This paper considers three questions on the Eucharist treated by Alexander of Hales in his Quaestiones disputatae antequam esset frater and Glossa on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and then by William of Melitona in his Quaestiones de sacramentis and, as the acknowledged author or complier of Book 4 of the Summa Halensis, in that text in its Cologne, 1622 edition: 1. Transubstantiation as the full substantial change of bread and wine on the altar into the body and blood of Christ as opposed to the remanescence and annihilation theories, the other two orthodox alternatives; 2. How two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time, although one of them, the glorified body of the resurrected Christ, is not held to be subject 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. These include Peter Lombard’s Collectanea, not always distinguished from the biblical Glossa ordinaria by Alexander’s and William’s editors; the semantic theory of Prepositinus of Cremona; and Innocent III’s treatise on the Mass, which defends the Real Presence as transubstantiation in a work otherwise devoted to the liturgy of the Mass. The paper emphasizes the shifting analyses given by Alexander across his two treatments of these questions, as well as those altered 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 theology has received no lack of attention from historians of scholasticism. Accenting philosophical explanations of the Real Presence doctrine after 1250, they tend to devalue earlier accounts as technically deficient or as confined to divine miracle. This study of Alexander of Hales, William of Melitona, and the Summa Halensis proposes a revaluation of early Franciscan contributions to two major Eucharistic debates. Theologians in their day offered three alternative theories to explain Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. Alexander, William, and the authorities on whom they rely all support the transubstantiation theory and reject remanescence and annihilation. This position affected their approach to the second issue, accidents without a subject in the consecrated species. Sources available to Alexander and William in Latin, and their own ingenuity, informed the uses they make of the artes and philosophy. This paper will focus on the modes of argument they apply to these two controverted doctrines. The characterization of early Franciscans as disinclined to apply rational explanations 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 Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110685008-018 order. Bert Roest begins with Bonaventure,1 as does David Burr. Burr’s early Franciscans join Eucharistic theologians whose view of their job ‘was not to prove the unprovable or explain the unexplainable’.2 While noting that, by 1330, the Franciscan defense of accidents without a subject had become ‘an immovable given of metaphysics’,3 William Duba gives no sense of its development before Duns Scotus. Marilyn Adams begins her survey with Aquinas, and is likewise uninterested in early scholastics on the topics she treats.4 As is well known, before and after the definition of the Real Presence as transubstantiation at Lateran IV in 1215, three theories were proposed to describe it. All were regarded as tenable within the western orthodox consensus.5 Historians have flagged the shift from a largely anti-heretical defense of the Real Presence to its reframing in Aristotelian terms. Indeed, it was the controversy launched by Berengarius of Tours in the 11 century that normalized the language of matter and form, substance and accident, in this context,6 Aristotelian terminology accessed by way of Boethius. A standard author in the Latin school curriculum, Boethius remained a major source for the philosophical arguments of Alexander and William as well, along with  Bert Roest, ‘“Franciscan Augustinianism”: Musings about Labels and Late Medieval School Formation,’ in Bert Roest, Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission, c. 1226– 1650: Cum scientia sit donum Dei, armatura ad defendendam sanctam fidem catholicam..., The Medieval Franciscans, 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 111–3, and this despite Roest’s vigorous defense of the acceptability of learning from Francis of Assisi onward in Bert Roest, ‘Francis of Assisi and the Pursuit of Learning,’ in Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission, 1– 18; Bert Roest, ‘The Franciscan School System: Re-assessing the Early Evidence,’ in Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission, 19–50; and Bert Roest, ‘Religious Life in the Franciscan School Network (13 Century),’ in Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission, 51–82. The anthology De causalitate sacramentorum iuxta scholam franciscanum, ed. Willibrord Lampen (Bonn: Petrus Hanstein, 1931) is not of use in this paper; while the editor’s selections begin with the Summa Halensis (ascribing its authorship to Alexander) they do not treat the Eucharistic topics here discussed.  David Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 74/3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 6–7.  William O. Duba, The Forge of Doctrine: The Academic Year 1330–31 and the Rise of Scotism at the University of Paris, Studia Sententiarum, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 150–3; quotation at 153.  Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).  Hans Jorissen, Die Entfaltung der Transsubstantiationslehre bis zum Beginn der Hochscholastik, Münsterische Beiträge zur Theologie, 28/1 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1965), 11– 154, 156; Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament according to the Theologians, c. 1080-c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 3–5; Gary Macy, ‘Berengar’s Legacy as a Heresiarch,’ in Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 59–80, Gary Macy, ‘The “Dogma of Transubstantiation” in the Middle Ages,’ in Treasures from the Storeroom, 82– 120; Paul J.J.M. Bakker, La raison et le miracle: Les doctrines eucharistiques (c. 1250-c. 1400): Contribution à l’étude des rapports entre philosophie et théologie, 2 vols. (Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1999), 1:156–66; Bakker begins his account with William of Auxerre.  Jorissen, Die Entfaltung, 25–44, 156. 304 Marcia L. Colish