While the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) dogmatised Transubstantiation, the exact meaning of what that entailed and the question of what exactly happens to the bread itself was a question that was debated both before and even after the council. Innocent III (reign as pope: 1198-1216) himself noted:
. . . three different answers [that] had been give: the bread remains there together with the really present Body of Christ (the “coexistence” theory, later sometimes called “consubstantiation” because the one substance remains together with the other substance); the bread does not remain and is not converted but ceases to exist, whether by annihilation or being resolved into its matter, and/or corrupted into something else; the bread is transubstantiated into the Body of Christ. (Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 146, comment in square bracket added)
Commenting on the theory of “Coexistence” (Consubstantiation), Adams writes:
The Case for Coexistence. Advocates of the coexistence theory begin with a methodological premiss. Like all philosophical and theological theories, theological formulations should aim at intelligibility. Other things being equal, when there is a theoretical choice, one should take the option that involves the fewest difficulties, that does not require positing primitives, making ad hoc exceptions, or undertaking radical conceptual overhauls. In theology as in physics, plurality should not be posited without necessity: no more miracles than absolutely necessary! Not only does violating this rule make for non-optimal theories. It is bad apologetics, because it makes Christian faith unattractive to those who govern their beliefs by natural reason.
The philosophical advantage of coexistence over transubstantiation is that it does not have to posit accident existing without a subject. If the bread substance is there before and after consecration, the bread accidents can continue to exist in it. Multiple Location and Size problems are no greater if the bread remains, because they arise, not from the presence or absence of bread substance, but from the continuing presence of the bread quantity. Nor is the absence of bread substance salient in any of the salutation canvassed so far . . . the explicit pronouncements of the Scriptures or the Church and/or evident inferences from them furnish further data that the theologian’s formulation must hold fixed. Here again, adherents claim that coexistence enjoys a positive advantage, because it seems to be required by evident inference from the explicit statements in John 6:51 (“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread . . . “) and I Corinthians 10:16 (“the bread which we break, is it not a sharing of the Body of Christ?”). Fraction and reception occur after the consecration; for bread to be broken and eaten after the words of institution, it must still be there! (Ibid., 146-47)
Interestingly, as Adams notes, such was an acceptable theological position within the Catholic Church for a very long period of time, even if, during the time of Aquinas (1225-1274), it fell out of favour and he condemned such as "heresy"(!):
Up through Albert the Great, coexistence was treated as a tolerable and tolerated if also dwindling minority report. Aquinas contends, on the contrary, that coexistence is problematic, impossible, and heretical. (Ibid., 147)
I bring this up as some Catholic apologists have a naïve view of the development of the dogmas of the Mass, and believe that what Rome has dogmatically proclaimed at the Fourth Lateran Council, Trent, and other councils and sources were always believed. History shows this not to be the case.
For more articles wherein I interact with various biblical and patristic arguments, see:
