CHRISTOPHE GRELLARD, How Can We Believe in Transubstantiation? Moral Certainty and Its Social Foundations According to John Mair

SUMMARY

This essay provides an inquiry into John Mair’s use of the notion of moral certitude. Dealing with some classical cases linked to the real presence in the Eucharist, and the capacity of the faithful to know it, John Mair argues for a kind of skepticism. This skepticism is solved through the notion of morale certitude, borrowed to Buridan and Gerson. But John Mair goes further than these two thinkers by giving a more social interpretation of this kind of certitude.