Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Latin Tradition of Logic to 1100 45
the individual bread that was placed on the altar, it is completely
clear that it is not the bread according to some of its accidents which,
because they were in no other place than in it, when it was taken away
through the removal of the subject, could in no way not be taken away
themselves.
If the bread and wine ceased to exist when they have been removed
from their original essences (a pristinis essentiis), nothing which had
been in them as subjects could have survived. [Berengar of Tours,
1988, 158:1388-1405; 159:2138-40].
Although Berengar does not explicitly give the reason why it is impossible that
the accidents should be numerically the same between the bread and the body of
Christ, his position suggests that he considers accidents to be individuated by the
substances they inform: they can only persist as those particular accidents so long
as their subject persists.
If so, then Berengar not only shows that he has thoroughly absorbed the main
ideas of the Categories, but also that he has arrived at a view on the relation
between substances and accidents, quite plausible as an interpretation of Aristotle,
but different from what Abelard and other twelfth-century thinkers would propose.
5.2 Peter Damian
([Resnick,1992; Holopainen, 1996, 6-43; Marenbon, 2007, 116-8])
Peter Damian (1007-72) would probably be horrified to find himself commemorated
in a History of logic. He was an ascetic, who thought it was wrong for
monks to spend much time studying logic or other secular subjects. But, within
the theological context of his On Divine Omnipotence (De divina omnipotentia)
[Peter Damian, 1972], he provides a more sophisticated discussion of modality
than any previous medieval author and, although he does not make a display of
his knowledge, he seems to have read On Interpretation and probably Boethius’s
second commentary, as well as knowing some of Boethius’s teaching on hypothetical
syllogisms and on topical argument. His discussion is provoked by a comment
of Jerome’s that might seem to restrict God’s power. ‘God can do everything’,
said Jerome, ‘But he cannot restore the virginity of a woman who has lost it.’
One way Jerome’s comment might be taken is that it denies God’s capability to
perform a miracle by physically restoring the virginity of a woman who has lost it
by making the ruptured hymeneal tissue whole again. Not surprisingly, Damian
rejects it if it is understood in this way: he has no doubt that God can produce
such miracles [Peter Damian, 1972, 402-6].
Jerome can also be understood, however, as denying, not that God can perform
a physical miracle, but that he can change the past: he cannot make it so that the
woman in question never lost her virginity. Damian wants in some way to reject
Jerome’s comment even on this interpretation and so to claim that, in some sense,
God can change the past. He does not, however, just want to assert this extreme