Bodies Behaving Badly: The Eucharist and the New Philosophy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cardinal Bellarmine's defense of Roman Catholic eucharistic doctrine in his Disputationes de controversiis huius temporis focuses not on transubstantiation but on such questions as whether one body can simultaneously occupy two places or two bodies a single place. The Protestants to whom he is replying (Calvin and Peter Martyr) seem similarly invested in such matters. These are topics central to early modern philosophy, but Bellarmine and his respondents predate Descartes by decades, so why, in the sixteenth century, are theologians debating the physics (rather than metaphysics) of the Eucharist?