WHAT DOES THE MOUSE EAT?
(QUID MUS SUMIT?)
What does a mouse eat when
it eats the eucharistic bread? Does it eat the Body of Christ or only the
species? Is it possible to eat the species without thereby eating the Body of
Christ?
Nowadays, this is an
old-fashioned problem that, if anything, brings a smile to our contemporaries,
but for the medieval thinkers it was a genuine problem from both a pastoral and
a doctrinal standpoint, and its resolution brought into play all the theological
and metaphysical principles at work in their teaching on the Eucharist. The
first to raise the theological question was Berengarius of Tours in response to
his objectors. If the physicist realism inaugurated by Paschasius and professed
by Lanfranc of Bec and Humbert of Silva Candida were true, this conclusion
would follow logically: The physical presence of the Body of Christ would be
subject to the digestive processes not only of human beings but of animals and
birds.
The question was an
interesting one, and Guitmund of Aversa was the first to attempt an answer. He
says that the true Body and Blood of Christ remain in the Sacrament even when
this is eaten by an animal. He was not the only one to maintain this position,
and Gary Macy tells us of other authors of that period who held it. Stephen
Langton was the first to think that there would be a reverse
transubstantiation, that is, that the bread would return at the moment when the
mouse eats the Sacrament. The School of Laon, including William of Champeaux
and William of St. Thierry, held that the mouse would eat only the eucharistic
species and not the substance of the Body of Christ. Thomas Aquinas, on the
other hand, maintained that what the mouse eats is the Body of Christ, because
as long as the accidents of the bread remain incorrupt, they are a sign of the
substance of the Body of Christ, and where the accidents are, there the substance
of the Body of Christ likewise is (by way of the accidents).
Bonaventure held the
opposite of Thomas’s view and, adopting a completely personal position, said
that Christ is present under the species of this Sacrament only to the extent
that the Sacrament is ordered to human use. Since its eating by a mouse cannot
be described as coming under the use prescribed by Christ, it cannot be
maintained that the mouse eats the Body of Christ. Thomas rejects this view
outright as derogating from the truth of the Sacrament, while Bonaventure in
response says that whatever be the value of Thomas’s opinion, his arguments do
not prevent pious ears from refusing to listen to it being said that the Body
of Christ is in the stomach of a mouse; he asserts that his opinion is the more
common one and certainly the most appropriate and the most conformed to reason.
Bonaventure was correct in saying that the more common opinion was that the
mouse did not eat the Body of Christ; his personal contribution— the ordering
of the Sacrament to human use—was a strong theological argument in favor of
that opinion.
G. Macy calls attention to
another fact that can explain the interest of the theologians in this obscure
problem. Heretics, and especially the Cathars, used this question to prove that
the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist was erroneous. The result was the rise
of a current of thought which, in order to combat the heretics, maintained that
the Body of Christ was not eaten by the mouse and did not descend into its
stomach. In light of this finding of G. Macy we must admit that the response
given at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth was
one that met a real pastoral problem: the defense of the faith against the
Cathars.
The answers of Thomas and
Bonaventure are more properly theological solutions, derived in each case from
their systems and from the metaphysical principles on which their eucharistic
teaching is based. It is worth noting that this minor question of the mouse
enables us to see with greater clarity the difference between the eucharistic
teaching of Thomas and that of Bonaventure: the former is more objectivist and
more closely linked to the metaphysical analysis of being, while the latter is
more closely linked to a personalist perspective that is based on the
institution of the Sacrament by Christ, namely, that the Eucharist is for a
human use, namely, for eating, and that this intended purpose determines the
very nature of the eucharistic bread, inasmuch as a nonhuman use (eating by a
mouse, for example) causes the cessation of sacramentality and the return of
the substance of the bread. (Enrico Mazza, The Celebration of the Eucharist:
The Origin of the Rite and the Development of Its Interpretation [Collegeville,
Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1999], 220-22)
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