Descartes' Bones (9 page)

All of these fears became concentrated in a single issue. It wove one of the most abstract and seemingly unworldly elements of Cartesian philosophy into individual human life, society, and worldly power. This issue was perhaps the biggest source of anxiety that Descartes himself had for his philosophy. As for the Cartesians who sat in their salons watching demonstrations of the “magic lantern” (a forerunner of the slide projector and the cinema) and witnessing experiments involving mercury, magnetism, and barometric pressure, it gave them palpable fear of a very real-world kind: of soldiers appearing at the door to lead them away. The issue concerned the truth of the Catholic sacrament of Communion.

A notion had first struck Descartes in 1630, in a seemingly innocuous way, when he was thinking about optics and color. When you break open a loaf of bread, the inside is so very white. Surely that whiteness is in the bread itself, is it not? From this mundane hook his mind wove a chain of logic that threatened the major institutions of Europe. Descartes himself would rather not have explored it further, but in 1643 he received a letter from one of the teachers at his old college of La Flèche. Père Denis Mesland had become a devotee of Descartes', and he now had some questions. In the seventeenth century, as now, the central rite of Catholicism was the Mass, and the center of the Mass—the essence of the faith—was Holy Communion, in which celebrants receive bread and/or wine: the “body and blood” of Jesus Christ. One of the chief differences between Catholicism and Protestantism—one of the spurs behind the century of bloodshed that was just then ending—involved the meaning of the quotation marks in the previous sentence. Protestants (some of them, anyway) came to hold that the bread and wine
represented
Christ's body and blood, whereas for Catholics mere symbolism did not get at the genuine nature of the sacred mystery involved. In Catholic theology (and in Catholic conviction, in the seventeenth century and now), when a priest repeats during the Mass the words Jesus spoke at the Last Supper—“This is my body . . . this is the cup of my blood”—he initiates a real conversion of substance. A century before Mesland's letter, the Council of Trent, which formed in reaction to the Protestant Reformation, had decreed that, regarding the consecrated bread and wine, “our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things.”

For the church, Christ was, and had to be, “really, truly, and substantially” present in the bread and wine. Intelligent, reasoning Catholics need not necessarily have a problem with the logic in this, thanks to their belief in mystery as a real force in the world. Indeed, the transformation could not be explained by ordinary means; this was part of the essence of the faith, just as the bodily resurrection and ascension to heaven were elements of the mysterious truth of Jesus' sojourn. As for how it was that the bread, after the priest had performed the ritual of consecration, still looked like bread and felt like bread and tasted like bread, Catholic theologians had worked it out using Aristotelian categories as adapted by Thomas Aquinas. A material object, in Aristotelian science, is comprised of accidents—color, odor, taste—and substance, the real underlying thing itself. When a priest blesses bread and wine during the Mass and repeats the biblical formula, the transformation happens at the level of substance. The underlying
substances
of the bread and wine are swapped for the substances of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Thus the term
transubstantiation,
which came into use by theologians around AD 1100. But the
accidents
of the bread and wine—which give them their appearance but which are actual components of the bread and wine—are left unchanged. This seemingly problematic bit of reality was in fact held to be a second miracle, and in the Middle Ages “proof” of the twin miracles of transubstantiation occasionally manifested itself in the world. The American philosopher Richard Watson, in writing about the Aristotelian explanation, likened the notion of accidents miraculously keeping up a faux appearance to a “shield” that covers the real substance and added, “Numerous stories were known of the shield having been dropped, so that the priest saw lying in his hand an actual piece of flesh or, more spectacularly, a tiny, perfectly formed baby.”

As far as Catholic authorities were concerned, the physics of transubstantiation had to be explained in this way. It is difficult to overestimate the multifaceted importance of the Eucharist (to give the sacrament of Communion its proper name) in Catholic Europe in the seventeenth century. Because the host actually becomes Christ's body, it has incorporated into it Christ's bodily pain, his willingness to suffer and die for humanity, and thus his love for humanity. Consuming the host is an act of recommitment to the faith, participation in his suffering, and acceptance of his divine love. To eat the bread is also to unite one's own physical body with Christ's—to become part of the body of Christ, meaning both his physical body and the body of believers. In this way, the ritual of the Eucharist was, and remains, the very essence of Catholic Christianity, tying the esoterica of faith to the essential fact of humanity: our physical, flesh-and-blood selves. Again, the point is that the act isn't symbolic but real. The Catholic host brings what Christians believe to be the historical root of the faith—that, in Jesus, God became flesh and suffered physically and died—into the here and now, over and over, every time the Mass is celebrated.

As spiritually meaningful as this concept was, it also had tremendous implications for real-world power. The whole infrastructure of the church—parishes and cathedrals, priests and nuns, real estate, art, revenue, the ability to mold and manipulate heads of state—rested on it. Only an ordained priest could say Mass, and in celebrating Communion, repeating the words “This is my body,” the priest took on the personage of Christ and became the indispensable vehicle through which Catholics participated in the mystery of Christ's bodily suffering and death and resurrection. Because the host was the real substance of the body of Christ, the church had what it believed to be the franchise on salvation. The Protestant Reformation represented an assault on transubstantiation and the real-world power it gave the Catholic Church. Father Mesland was among the first to recognize that Cartesian science was another such assault. In Descartes' reckoning of the universe there was no “real” apple or tree or butterfly lurking beneath the shield of accidental appearances of these entities. If the object in question was hard, gray, and flecked and otherwise gave every appearance of being a piece of granite, then it
was
a piece of granite. And if it looked, smelled, and tasted like bread, it was . . . bread. That was the direction Mesland saw Descartes' ideas heading, and it was a dangerous one.

Descartes responded with an assurance that his philosophy did not deny the genuine presence of Christ in the host. In fact, he believed he offered a philosophically satisfactory account of it, one that could coexist with the mechanistic view of nature. Indeed, by stressing a dualistic view of reality, by putting the ephemeral stuff of mind and soul in one category and the physical world in another, he believed he was building a wall around the fortress of faith, protecting it from the encroachments of science. At the same time, he was hoping to protect investigations of the natural world from theological interference. He had been shaken by church condemnations of scientists, particularly of Galileo (“I was so surprised by this that I nearly decided to burn all my papers, or at least let no one see them,” he wrote on learning of Galileo's conviction for publishing his heliocentric views). Descartes himself was so devout in his faith yet so certain of the legitimacy of reason-based investigations of the natural world that the division of reality into two distinct halves seemed the only logical conclusion.

While the goal was in part to protect religion, one long-term effect of Cartesian dualism—as it seeped into Western consciousness over the ensuing decades and centuries—was to drastically limit religion's scope. In the prevailing modern view, faith has no business meddling in astronomy or biology. And the logical extension of this thinking has been the very modern stance of atheism. To some extent, such an outcome was foreseen by critics of Descartes' own time, who saw his work and that of other mechanistically inclined philosophers as giving reason full sway over human reality and relegating faith to superstition. This was surely not Descartes' intention, nor was it the intention of his contemporaries. Descartes' lifelong timidity in confronting church authorities was always at odds with his ambition, and in the matter of the Eucharist he hoped to have it both ways: to lay a new foundation not only for physics but for Christian theology. He pushed Mesland, and other of his followers, to take up the challenge and bring the church's explanation of transubstantiation in line with science—that is to say, Cartesianism. Again, his immodest goal was to replace Aristotle completely as the base of all knowledge.

Descartes himself avoided direct attack over the Eucharist, but from the time of his death the matter expanded into a full-fledged controversy. His followers took up the challenge in various ways. Descartes had tried to override the whole mechanism of the Aristotelian explanation, arguing that it was a mistake to talk about transformation of substance, that instead the miracle involved the union of Christ's
soul
with the bread. In this way, there was no need for a second miracle, in which the “shield” of breadlike appearance covers the underlying substance. This explanation itself caused alarm, since it seemed only a slight variation on Protestant ideas that the host symbolized Christ's body. For the church, the soul of Christ was apparently not substantial enough to support its worldly edifice; Catholic authorities needed the body, too.

Nevertheless, the Cartesians pushed their arguments. Rohault offered a defense of the Cartesian view of the Eucharist. Claude Clerselier, Rohault's father-in-law, wisely refrained from including the exchange of letters between Descartes and Mesland in his publication of Descartes' correspondence, but he sent copies to influential parties. Robert Desgabets, a Benedictine monk with a penchant for science who had never met Descartes but had become entranced by his philosophy, was one of the recipients of the letters. Desgabets journeyed to Paris to join Cartesian salons, and—rather dramatically demonstrating the close link the Cartesians saw between philosophy and medicine—lectured on how one might perform a blood transfusion while also offering his own support for a Cartesian view of transubstantiation.

After Desgabets left Paris, he toured Benedictine abbeys in the countryside to spread the gospel of Cartesianism. Desgabets eventually published a text whose title spelled out the central matter pretty clearly:
Considerations on the present state of the controversy touching the Very Holy Sacrament of the host, in which is treated in a few words the opinion which teaches that the matter of the bread is changed into that of the body of Jesus Christ by its substantial union to his soul and to his divine person.
Together with his other activities, this little text got Desgabets branded as a heretic, with the result that his work was suppressed and his name largely forgotten by history. Meanwhile, Father Mesland, for his persistence in pursuing the question, was eventually banished to Canada.

This then was the climate of increasing danger in which the Cartesians operated. Still, some—Rohault among them—continued to argue that their principles could be put in the service of both the ruling civil and spiritual authorities. Far from being a threat, they claimed, the new philosophy could be the protector of the faith. Descartes himself had taken this line. There were many in power who were intrigued by the idea of this strange and dimly understood new tool actually becoming part of the arsenal of the church or state. The climate alternated between curiosity and fear. The situation of the Cartesians in the late seventeenth century thus mirrors in some way that of the early Christians in the catacombs of ancient Rome. They were alternately tolerated, suspected, then persecuted—and of course eventually triumphant in the spread of their philosophy.

There were other parallels that existed in the seventeenth century between Descartes and Jesus. Many of the early Cartesians were themselves Catholic priests. In some sense the new philosophy was to be a replacement for Christianity as the foundation of Western culture, and indeed the Cartesians referred to themselves as “disciples of Descartes.” Their physics collided with Catholic views about the body of Christ, and they were about to use the material body of Descartes, or what remained of it, to promote their philosophy. Then there was the fact that during his life Descartes had seemed to believe that he could somehow override death's dominion—the irony being that his “eternal life” idea rested on scientific rather than religious beliefs.

Also like the early Christians, the Cartesians believed devoutly in their cause. Some held it in almost mystical regard. They were keepers of a legacy and carriers of a flame that they believed would light the future of the world. They knew that what they were about was dangerous, and that it required knowledge not only of the intricacies of philosophy and science but of how power worked. In order to survive and advance their cause they needed to employ tools of persuasion. And now, at the turning of the year 1667, a new tool was about to arrive.

I
T WAS IN THE COLD
of January, three months after they had set out, that the two Frenchmen, l'Epine and du Rocher, arrived at the outskirts of Paris. Long as the journey had been, as with any modern road trip, reaching the metropolis would have meant slowing down further. Paris was still largely a medieval city, with dirt roads that were only beginning to be paved and streets in an irregular tangle. It was bigger, noisier, and dirtier than London, and the large-scale improvements that Louis XIV's chief adviser, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had recently begun—driving through wide boulevards, clearing away crumbling parts of the old medieval walls, constructing the colonnade of the Louvre—at this stage merely added to the congestion. People complained, but the king stayed mostly at his Versailles palace, visiting Paris only a few times a year and otherwise keeping it out of mind. The most noticable change from the last time Descartes had visited the city in life was visible in the streets. Early in the century, transportation was either on foot or on mule. By now a revolution had occurred: vehicles of every description, thousands of them, from simple rickshawlike contraptions pulled by men known as “baptized mules” to gilt carriages with glass windows and shock absorbers, clogged the streets, so that the wagon carrying Terlon's parcels, including the remains of the philosopher, would have had to weave a contorted passage. They would have come through one of the two crumbling medieval gates at the north end of the city, the Porte St.-Martin or the Porte St.-Denis, made their way across the fashionable neighborhood of Le Marais, and come to stop, finally, at a stately residence in the midst of bureaucratic Paris, just north of the Seine.