Descartes: A Biography

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The Principles of Philosophy() 

the spiritual presence of Christ in what is apparently bread and wine.

Descartes summarizes his conclusion as follows:

The whole miracle of transubstantiation...consists in this...that the soul [of

Christ] informs the particles of bread and wine...by the power of the words of

consecration....This explication will no doubt shock those initially who are used to

believing that, in order for the body of Jesus Christ to be present in the Eucharist,

it is necessary for all parts of his body to be there with their same quantity and

shape....nothing like that has been decided by the Church....the soul of Jesus Christ

informs the matter of the host. (iv.–)

Descartes thinks that this avoids the obvious difficulty of claiming that the

body of Christ, which Christians believe was assumed into Heaven three

days after his crucifixion, is present at each Mass in the same way that

Christ’s body was present on Earth during the first century..

Descartes returned to this topic on a number of occasions in later corre-

spondence. He wrote to Mesland again, after he had been sent to the Jesuit

missions in Canada, expressing the hope that he would return to Europe

atsome stage and that his talents might not be wasted on the relatively

unsophisticated residents of that foreign land. He repeated the suggestion

that the identity of a human body does not depend on the matter of which

it is composed but on the fact that, despite changes in the body, it remains

joined with the same soul.His further thoughts on how a host could

have been consecrated successfully during the period when Christ’s body

was in the tomb helps illustrate the intractability of the position adopted

by Trent rather than the limitations of Descartes’ ingenuity.

However, Descartes also replied, in response to a query about transub-

stantiation from Clerselier in,asifheaccepted the traditional account

of transubstantiation. On this occasion he suggested that God could sub-

stitute one piece of matter for another – for example, a piece of gold for

a piece of bread or one piece of bread for another piece of bread – and

that such changes would involve merely transferring the ‘accidents’ (i.e.,

the nonessential properties, such as its size, shape, etc.) from the original

piece of matter to its substitute. In theory, that would mean that a piece

of gold would look like a piece of bread, or that one piece of bread would

assume the characteristics of a different piece for which it was substituted.

‘However, there is something else in the Holy Sacrament; for, besides the

matter of the body of Jesus Christ, which is placed under the original

dimensions of the bread, the soul of Jesus Christ – which informs this