c. Refutation by Others of the Objection

316. One might in one way say here [Henry of Ghent] that transubstantiation is a change precisely between positive terms, such that two privative terms and two changes will not, as in the case of generation and corruption, be givens there; but just as, according to the Philosopher Physics 5.1.225a8, some change is ‘from subject to subject’, namely a change that has something positive for both per se terms, so does this transubstantiation have precisely two terms, and both are positive. And so one is not to suppose here that the destruction is a sort of per se change formally, and that it would be distinguished in genus from the beginning of the body here of Christ, but that there is only a single transition of this positive term into that positive term.

317. Against this way: it is manifest that ‘the non-being of the bread’ is not formally ‘the being of the body here of Christ’, nor conversely; for it would be possible for the bread not to be and for the body here not to be posited, and conversely; similarly, the ‘non-being of the body here of Christ’ and ‘the being of the bread’ are not formally here the same. So we have the per se terms ‘the being of bread’ and ‘the non-being of bread’, and ‘the being of the body here of Christ’ and ‘the non-being of the body here of Christ’. Likewise, ‘the non-being of the body here of Christ’ and ‘the being of the body here of Christ’ are not the same but opposite terms; so we can have two transitions quidditatively distinct, each of which has two terms of its own. And then the whole of the difficulty remains that was touched on in the case of generation as distinct from corruption [n.316], and in the case of the per se formal distinction of the destruction [of the bread] as it is distinct from the positing of the body here of Christ.