L’unità superiore di metafisica e teologia nella comune referenza

By decree of April 1st, 1272, the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris ordered to its own members not to debate or decide any theological issues, and pointed out that if they found texts or argumentations in contrast with the truths of faith, they should consider them completely false. The analysis of the relationship between substance and accident – a philosophical issue – would not concern faith directly, yet since the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, pronouned in favour of the doctrine of transubstantiation to explain the Eucharistic conversion, philosophers and theologians had to face a new question: “is inherence in a substance part of the essence of an accident?” This paper aims to show the relationship between metaphysics and theology in the context of Duns Scotus’s considerations on the separability of an accident from its own substance, in the particular case of the Eucharist