The Rhetoric of Modal Equivocacy in Cartesian Transubstantiation

Bibliographic Data

ID4456104
AuthorsJulian Bourg (corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume62
Issue1
Pages121
Publication date2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1353/jhi.2001.0001
OpenAlexW2068659637
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited10

René Descartes's attempt to explain Eucharistic transubstantiation has long been understood as a dramatically significant moment in his tightrope walk across the medieval-to-modern divide. 2 Modeled on the Last Supper in the New Testament, the Eucharistic rite had been explained in the Catholic tradition after the twelfth century in the scholastic philosophical language of substance and accident. 3 As the Council of Trent reaffirmed in 1551, this transubstantiation was a conversion "of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the Body and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood ... the appearances [speciebus] only of the bread and wine remaining." 4 Christ was [End Page 121] held to be "truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things," under what still appeared to be bread and wine. 5

Art · Cartesian coordinate system · Epistemology · Eucharist · Geometry · Literature · Modal · Rhetoric · Rite · Supper · Theology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Philosophy and Science · History of Science and Medicine · Mathematics · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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