Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

44 John Marenbon
longer perform their signifying function. In his De corpore et sanguine Domini
[Lanfranc, 1854; written 1061-70], Lanfranc disagreed strongly with this view,
provoking Berengar’s most substantial surviving work, where he defends his theory,
the Rescriptum contra Lanfrannum [Berengar of Tours, 1988]. There is, then, a
semantic, or rather semiotic side to the dispute [Rosier-Catach, 2004, 36-40, 355-
63], but also a more strictly logical side. Contrary to what was once held [Southern,
1948], Lanfranc seems not to have been very fond of the new Aristotelian logic,
and himself avoids the terminology of the Categories and the Isagoge when he
is discussing the Eucharist, although he is willing at times to use ideas from the
theory of topical argument [Holopainen, 1996, 44-76]. It is, rather, Berengar who
uses Porphyry and Aristotle to argue his case, and even translates Lanfranc’s
position into these terms, so as to be able most effectively to criticize it.
According to Berengar, Lanfranc wants to hold that, although the bread used
in the Eucharist is destroyed as a substance and subject for accidents when it
becomes flesh, it also remains, because its accidents remain. He accepts that this
continuity condition is necessary if the process is to fulfil its doctrinal role, since
in the Eucharist it is not a matter of one thing being replaced by another, but
of the bread and wine themselves becoming Christ’s body and blood. But he
argues, putting his opponent’s position into rigorously Aristotelian terms, that
Lanfranc’s theory cannot satisfy it. Lanfranc, he says, has two alternatives. By
the first, the substance of the bread is destroyed and in its place there is a different
substance, the body of Christ, to which bread-like accidents are attached, ones the
same as those in the original bread, but just in the sense that they are like (qualia)
them; they are not claimed to be numerically the same. This alternative, Berengar
believes, is metaphysically possible and so open to God’s power:
. . . it would be easy for God to add to the flesh (which you believe
God to make on the altar through the generation of the subject) the
same accidents as those which were formerly in the bread . . .
But the result would merely be that
. . . it could be said that it is not bread in species, but rather flesh,
made now by God through generation of the subject, which has been
given accidents like those which were in the bread, and that it is bread
because it has the colour and accidents of bread. [Berengar of Tours,
1988, 159:2140-6].
There would be something different, the flesh of Christ, replacing the bread and
made to resemble it, and so the continuity condition would not be satisfied.
The second alternative is that what replaces the bread as a substance (the body
of Christ) is informed with all or some of the very same accidents numerically as
were in the original bread. Berengar suggests that this alternative might satisfy the
continuity condition, but, as he explains, it is simply impossible metaphysically:
If . . . it happens that the bread of the altar that was taken away
through the corruption of the subject is after the consecration no longer