Tractatus de apostasia

XVI INTRODUCTION.
the Scholastic theory of quantity. According to him, it may be
remembered, actual extension was the very essence of bodily substance,
and the idea of absolute accidents seemed as absurd to him as it does
to Wyclif. In his celebrated Reponses aux objections de M. Arnauld,
he gives several arguments very like those employed in De Apostasia,
and concludes thus: "Therefore, if I may here speak my mind truly
and simply, I venture to hope that a day will come when the opinion
admitting real accidents will be banished by theologians as suspicious
in faith, revolting to reason, and quite incomprehensible; while mine
will be received in its place, as indubitably certain". His opinion,
briefly stated, is as follows: The existence of a bodily substance is
known to us only through the continual movements of its surface,
which proceed from the underlying substance and produce sensation
in us. Now, the surface belongs as much to the surrounding substance
as to that which is surrounded. (A vacuum, according to Descartes,
is absolutely impossible). Suppose therefore that Transsubstantiation
consists I st in the taking away (whether by annihilation or otherwise)
of the bread-substance; 2 nd in the conservation of the surface with
all the movements that would have been imparted to it, had the bread
remained; 3 rd in the real presence of Christ below that surface; and
you have an explanation which is intelligible to the mind,
which does
not contradict the belief that the bread disappears, nor the opinion
held by most Fathers, that aliquitas panis, something of the bread,
remains. For the surface is the same.
There are several other theories; but I may now sum up the
principal, four in number,
heretical;
at least I believe not.
none of which have been condemned as
with Aristotle that
I st That of St. Thomas, who, believing
the esse of an accident is, and is only,
in the substance, seems
to admit the production of a new entity, by which quantity would
exist alone, and could not do so otherwise; which he calls, not
Pars, qu. 77,
art. 1.
substance, but subsistence (Sum. Th. 3 a ;
Ad 4 m dicendum . . . . ; and Com. in Sent. 1. 4, dist. 12, qu. 1,
art. 2). This opinion is the nearest to Wyclif's, though not identical;
for the one imagines a new subsistence coming to uphold the
accidents; and the other conceives them as still upheld by
substance.
the old