Marilyn McCord Adams - Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham

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(p.v) To Terri and Tim, Elizabeth and Rachel,

Connor, Elliott and Betsy,

with thanks for eucharistic camaraderie!

Pange lingua

Book projects incur debts. Mine are first to Oxford University and to Christ Church, the institutions between which my appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity and residentiary canon was split. Thanks are due to them for three terms of sabbatical (Michaelmas 2006, Michaelmas 2008, and Hilary 2009), during which this project was conceived and completed. I am likewise grateful for the generous hospitality of the Philosophy Programme at the Australian National University in Canberra, where I was a visiting fellow in JulyDecember 2006. Their tradition of lively philosophical engagement, their remarkably wellstocked modern library, and the terrific IT support created a wholesome environment for fruitful work. My friend and colleague Francesco del Punta generously supplied me with a copy of Giles of Rome's Theoremata de Corpore Christi years ago, and more recently went above and beyond the call of the housesitter's duty in sending me some Scotus books that I had neglected to bring. My third term of sabbatical leave (Hilary 2009) was underwritten by an AHRC grant, which I could not have received but for the willing help of Dr Alexandra Lumbers, who compensated for my lack of computer literacy by uploading my application. I am also grateful to the readers for Oxford University Press, whose comments provoked some improvements in the manuscript. Thanks of another kind are due to those parishes where I have attended and/or celebrated many eucharistic liturgies. Years of experience have allowed me to reflect on many questions, as it were, from the inside.

M.M.A.

Feast of Corpus Christi, 2009

This book is driven by twin passionseucharistic piety and an appetite for philosophical analysispassions that I share with the medieval authors on whom I focus. It is a work of historical theology and history of philosophy, which aims to analyze and clarify the views of certain medieval thinkers, not to develop constructive theories of my own. Because many who pick up this book will resonate to one and not the other of my motives, I have tried to write it in a way that will allow readers to select what is most useful and enjoyable for them.

For the thirteenth and fourteenthcentury authors on whom I mostly concentrate, the eucharist is one of seven Christian sacraments (the others being baptism, confirmation, ordination, penance, matrimony, and extreme unction) and arguably their consummation. If other sacraments single out people for participation in worship and fit them for Christian living and dying, the eucharist offers the risen and ascended Christ keeping His promise to believers to be with them always to the end of the age (Matt.28: 20). In the eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ come to be really present on the altar, giving faithful participants an opportunity for communion with Him in the here and now.

Because thirteenth and fourteenthcentury Christian philosophical theologians believed this to be true, they felt obliged to try to reconcile it with what else they held to be truenot only with surrounding faith commitments, but also with their metaphysical convictions and with then uptodate theories in natural science. The core of this book (Part ) with a sketchfor the benefit of students and scholars less familiar with Aristotelian thoughtof some of the distinctive conceptual machinery on which my authors draw. Specialists may wish to skip this chapter, but equally some may find it a welcome review.

Historians may wonder why I do not widen my scope to include indepth treatments of earlier (ninth and eleventhcentury) eucharistic controversies. My answer is thatwithout leaving earlier thinkers entirely out of accountmy interest is in what happens to philosophy and theology when core doctrines are subjected to rigorous analytical attention. Before the reintroduction of Aristotle's wider corpus, philosophers and theologians did not have the analytical tools needed to give their discussions the precision that such a project requires. Some would object that sacramental theology does not call for scholastic distinctions, but a posture of contemplation that trades in types and symbols. They regret the emphases and the subsequent influence of the authors I have chosen. My response is that, while philosophical analysis is a different activity from contemplation, so much so that it may not be possible to engage in both at once, analysis is not the enemy of contemplation. Human theorizing itself requires both analysis and imagination: the latter to furnish the model and the former to spell out its meaning. For Aristotle, vigorous analytical work culminates in the enjoyable contemplation of the understanding at which it arrives. For Bonaventure, analytical results not only inform contemplation, but can be juxtaposed in ways that provoke it by boggling the mind.