TRANSMIGRATION
230TRANSMIGRATION. Also called
metempsychosis, the transmigration of
souls is a belief held by many different
cultures and religious groups. It is a belief
in a soul’s ability to pass from a person to
another person, animal, or other object
after death. Australian Aboriginal people
believe the souls of their ancestors enter
into newborns, so that the soul is repeat-
edly reborn. Hinduism believes the soul’s
rebirth is determined by its moral behav-
ior in the past. Pythagoras was a believer
in the transmigration of souls, which is
where Plato obtained some of his ideas on
metempsychosis.
TRANSUBSTANTIATION. Transub-
stantiation is a way of expressing the Real
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist settled
upon in medieval Western Christianity
and presently held by the Roman Catho-
lic Church. Assertions or suggestions that
Christ was present in the Eucharist can
be found in ancient Christian thinkers,
but theological reflection at that time
focused on baptism as the rite of initia-
tion and salvation. The first controversy
on the Eucharist to provoke treatises on
the subject occurred in the ninth century,
when Paschasius Radbertus argued that
Christ’s body and blood were physically
present in the Eucharist, against the idea
that Christ was present in divine power.
Radbertus prevailed and was widely cited
when another controversy broke out in the
eleventh century. At that time, Berengar of
Tours insisted that the body of Christ in
the Eucharist could not be the same body
born from Mary and raised to God’s right
hand; instead, Christ’s body and blood
became present with the bread and wine
in a mysterious way comparable to the
incarnation. His opponents drew on the
common view that the mass participates
in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross to say
that Christ—and Christ alone—must
therefore be physically present at the
sacrifice. In the twelfth century, as philo-
sophical vocabulary became more precise,
the term “transubstantiation” was intro-
duced to describe the conversion of
bread and wine into Christ’s body and
blood without changing their appearance.
(The unchanged appearance was seen
as a challenge to Christians’ faith and a
way to avoid the horror of cannibalism.)
The term appeared formally in 1215
in the Fourth Lateran Council’s first
constitution.
In the Reformation, different views on
the presence of Christ in the Eucharist
were proposed: it was a memorial
(Zwingli); it was a spiritual rather than
physical conveyance of the power of
Christ’s body (Calvin); it was a physical
presence that didn’t replace the bread and
wine but was there with them, sometimes
called “consubstantiation” (Wyclif ). Only
in 1551 did the Roman Catholic Church
formally define its doctrine of the Eucha-
rist at the 13th session of the Council of
Trent: there, the complete conversion of
the substance of bread and wine into the
substance of Christ’s body and blood
at the consecration was “fittingly called