ABSTRACT
Anyone acquainted with the brilliant pages of Descartes' Discourse of Method and with his Treatise on the Passions of the Soul, but not, as often happens, with his reply to the Fourth Set of Objections to his Metaphysical Meditations would at first find it hard to believe that the acclaimed father of modern philosophy, the 'rationalist' Descartes, had ever seriously dealt with one of the fundamental dogmas of the Catholic Counter-Reformation: the Eucharistie transubstantiation. What has the truthful God of Descartes to do with the Man-God Jesus Christ, miraculously present in the Eucharist? Is it not true that Pascal - who revered the mystery of the hidden God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - had denounced with Christian acrimony, once and for all, Descartes' unforgivable desire virtually to eliminate God's intervention in the universe and in history? Does not Descartes' mechanistic and antitheological physics - as Leibniz was to define it - look back to Democritus and Epicurus, by aprioristically excluding both Providence and miracles? And is he not the first philosopher to clearly separate faith and reason, theology and philosophy, thus anticipating Spinoza on a path that, in the twentieth century, the Catholic philosophers Blondel, Laberthonnière, and Maritain were to deplore? As recently pointed out by Kolakowski,1 it is necessary to distinguish
L. Kolakowski: 'How good a Christian was Descartes', The Times Literary Supplement, 18 August 2000, p. 26. All quotations from Descartes' Correspondance and Œuvres are taken from Adam-Tannery Edition, Nouvelle Presentation, ed. by Beaudé-
between the historical Descartes and the import of his work in founding a science that, in a short lapse of time, was to eclipse the until-then unquestioned hegemony of Christianity in the Western world. Whatever interpretation has been, or may be, given of Descartes' physical and metaphysical thought, it is undeniable that very early in his career he confronted himself, on several occasions, with the dogma of the Eucharist. Any scholar who has read all his works - from his Meditations to the Reply to the points which may cause difficulty to Theologians - and has thus come across his explanation of transubstantiation, would make a gross mistake if he regarded it as the result of a skilful improvisation. The philosopher, in fact, did not mean to make his physics compatible with the Eucharistie dogma because he was directly stimulated by the theologian Antoine Arnauld. Descartes' letters reveal that he was interested in developing a radically new formulation of the natural and physical world in accordance with the Eucharistie dogma long before his Metaphysical Meditations, and Galileo's condemnation. As a matter of fact, his interest dates back to his stay in the Netherlands, as is proved by his letter to Mersenne of 25 November 1630. He there announced that he would soon send him a Treatise on light - which anticipates his Dioptrics, at that time in progress - and that he wished to explain in his own terms the nature of colours. In fact he felt compelled to 'explain how the whiteness of the bread remains in the Blessed Sacrament' (AT, I, 179; PhW, III, 28) once the bread has been consecrated. Mersenne was very intrigued by experimentation, music, geometry, optics, and mechanics, but apparently not by the Eucharistie topic, about which he did not make any further enquiry. However, it becomes evident that Descartes was in primis interested in his own solution of the transubstantiation problem when, after publishing his Discourse on Method, he wrote to the Reverend Father Noel: 'I have reason to thank God that the views which, from my reflection on natural causes, seemed to me most true in physics were always those which are the most compatible with the mysteries of religion' (AT, I, 456; PhW, III, 75). He then wrote to another Jesuit, F. Vatier, restating this assumption even more forcefully. He there affirmed that the Christian faith should not feel threatened by his own philosophy; on the contrary, Doctor angelicus or subtilis should be at peace, because his religious tenets had never been so strongly supported by human reason. Descartes' conclusion was utterly triumphant: 'Transubstantiation, in particular, which the Calvinists regard as impossible to explain by the ordinary philosophy, is very easily explained by mine' (AT, I, 564; PhW, III, 88).
