I’m still slowly making my way through the Confessiones as my Latin reading text, usually at the pace of one little section a day (2-3 pages). I don’t think this gives me any special insight into the text; in fact, I’m sure that what I’m about to say is pretty obvious.
It strikes me that the category of substance is really central to Augustine’s inner struggle in the Confessiones — at times it seems like the only thing that is keeping him from becoming a Christian is his inability to get at what kind of “substance” God is. It is very difficult for me to get inside this kind of mindset. My spontaneous attitude toward the idea of substance is that there just isn’t anything there — the “substance” is nothing but the accidents regarded as an assemblage.
Thus, even though I know that this isn’t what the Schoolmen thought they were saying, I can’t get past the view that transubstantiation means that, at bottom, we call the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ and treat it as such. That’s why it makes sense for “Hoc est enim corpus meum” to be the “trigger,” rather than the epiclesis — the priest is saying that from this point forward, as long as the elements survive qua bread and wine, we are going to designate and treat them as the body and blood of Christ (hence the care with which they are handled, stored, etc.).
This mental block is doubtless due to some fault in my education up to this point — I probably need to take a decade or so and immerse myself in Aristotle. (A sidenote: one of my favorite passages in the Confessiones is when Augustine says that he can see absolutely no benefit in reading Aristotle’s “Categories.”) In any case, when I was in Marion’s class on the De Trinitate, he placed a very heavy emphasis on the concept of substance and encouraged people to write papers about it — now I understand better why he had that emphasis, since he was implicitly reading the De Trinitate through the lens of the Confessiones.
Yet another moment when I curse my parents’ lack of foresight in not giving me a proper classical education!