“This is My Body”: Some Cartesian Philosophies of the Eucharist

Abstract

The philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650) was dangerous and censored in the seventeenth century for implicitly challenging the official dogmatic explanations of the Eucharistic miracles of transubstantiation and real presence. This dissertation analyzes how Descartes and three of his readers—the seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian Robert Desgabets (1610-1678) and the contemporary philosophers Jean-Luc Marion (1946-) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) —have interpreted Cartesianism in the service of a “Eucharistic philosophy,” or as philosophical support of belief in the Eucharistic miracles. Although Marion and Nancy do not read Descartes explicitly as Eucharistic theologians, I argue that both interpret Descartes and Descartes’s place in the history of philosophy in ways that support their own understandings of the Eucharist and the “overcoming” of metaphysics as a philosophical science and subject. Building on critiques of metaphysics in the history of philosophy through German idealism, Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilism, and Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, Marion and Nancy understand this “overcoming” of metaphysics as the end of certain unquestioned assumptions about the most fundamental nature of “what is” that have limited philosophical investigation into the pre-theoretical, embodied, and historically embedded meanings of human life. The first two chapters show how Marion and Nancy challenge traditional understandings of the Cartesian dualism between mind and body and interpret Descartes as having significant insight into this primary and embodied domain of lived experience. In the context of these broader philosophical projects, Marion’s and Nancy’s interpretations of Descartes reinforce specific philosophies of history in which philosophizing well becomes possible “after” metaphysics in the analysis of inexplicable and unrepresentable embodied experiences. I argue that for Marion and Nancy, following Heidegger, the history of metaphysics has been determined by attempting to represent, objectify, and explain “what is” at the expense of describing these more fundamental worlds of lived experience that both associate with the Christian incarnation and Eucharist and read into Descartes. Yet these philosophies of history fail to historicize metaphysics itself and the various kinds and practices of philosophical and theological explanation. In the last two chapters, I argue that Descartes’s and Desgabets’s Eucharistic philosophies were serious, though historically unsuccessful, attempts to explain the Eucharistic mysteries through the use of specific explanatory strategies that raise important and understudied questions concerning the history of philosophy’s responsibility to explain and support Christian theological claims and commitments. For both Descartes and Desgabets, Cartesian philosophy was a defensible support of the Eucharistic orthodoxy of transubstantiation and the real presence of Christ on the altar. The third chapter argues that Descartes’s Eucharistic explanations should be read in the context of the function of hypothetical explanations—assumptions, suppositions, and comparisons—in his natural philosophy. In the fourth chapter, I situate Desgabets’s controversial and censored Eucharistic philosophy in his broader project of correcting Descartes’s errors and of promoting his Cartesianism as the foundation for the strongest alliance between Catholic theology and philosophy. I conclude by suggesting the importance of historicizing the demands, kinds, and possibilities of philosophical explanation of Christian theological positions and doctrines.