Berengar in the 11th century assailed this view, which was really that of transubstantiation, alleging that there is no substance in matter apart from the accidents, and that therefore Christ cannot be _corporally_ present in the sacrament; because, if so, he must be _spatially_ present, and there will be two material bodies in one space; moreover his body will be in thousands of places at once. Christ, he said, is present spiritually, so that the elements, while remaining what they were, unremoved and undestroyed, are advanced to be something better: _omne cui a Deo benedicatur, non absumi, non auferri, non destrui, sed manere et in melius quam erat necessario provehi_. This was the phrase of Gregory of Nyssa.
Berengar in a weak moment in 1059 was forced by the pope to recant and assert that "the true body and blood are not only a sacrament, but in truth touched and broken by the hands of the priests and pressed by the teeth of the faithful," and this position remains in every Roman catechism. Such dilemmas as whether a mouse can devour the true body, and whether it is not involved in all the obscenities of human digestive processes, were ill met by this ruling. Each party dubbed the other _stercoranists_ (dung-feasters), and the controversy was often marred by indecencies.
As in the 3rd century the Roman church decided in respect of baptism that the sacrament carries the church and not the church the sacrament, so in the dispute over the Eucharist it ended, in spite of more spiritual views essayed by Peter Lombard, by insisting on the more materialistic view at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, whose decree runs thus:--"The body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread and wine respectively being transubstantiated into body and blood by divine power, so that in order to the perfecting of the mystery of unity we may ourselves receive from his (body) what he himself receives from ours." In 1264 Urban IV. instituted the Corpus Christi Feast by way of giving liturgical expression to this view.
_Communion in One Kind._--Up to about 1100 laymen in the West received the communion in both kinds, and except in a few disciplinary cases the wine was not refused. In 1099, by a decree of Pope Paschal II., children might omit the wine and invalids the bread. The communion of the laity in the bread alone was enjoined by the council of Constance in 1415, and by the council of Trent in 1562. The reformed churches of the West went back to the older rule which Eastern churches had never forsaken.