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The overthrow of the Aristotelian tradition, even in places where Cartesianism was rejected and the community maintained Aristotelianism, forced the academic community in Europe to reconsider and defend the Aristotelian mosaic in ways that had never before been encountered. Though the dialectical approach to scholarship throughout the medieval period saw scholars constantly questioning various aspects of the Aristotelian worldview, Descartes’ wholesale rejection of huge swaths of the mosaic and its central concepts were unprecedented. Theories like hylomorphism, which had been a given in the mosaic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and had endured through multitudes of adjustments, reconciliations, and dialectic criticism, but had never before faced complete overhaul that Descartes's mechanical natural philosophy threatened. Although Descartes' theories would eventually be supplanted by those of Newton, he made the critical first steps to replacing the Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]]

|Criticism=Descartes’ ideas saw widespread criticism in his time and shortly after from all manner of sources, including Scholastic vanguards, religious authorities, and other philosophers. One common early criticism was that his new views were threatening to the Catholic and Christian faith.[[CiteRef::Jolley (1992)]] In 1663, his works were placed on the Catholic Church's ''Index of Forbidden books'', and in 1671 his conception was officially banned from schools in the Catholic world. In the early modern period, theological propositions and natural philosophical propositions were not seen as belonging to separate domains, but rather formed parts of an integrated [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific mosaic]]. Aristotelian natural philosophy had been carefully adapted to render it consistent with Catholic faith. Descartes' novel natural philosophy introduced many inconsistencies that needed to be [[The Zeroth Law|reconciled]] before his theories could be [[Theory Acceptance|accepted]]. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 190-196]]

One specific theological criticism of Cartesian natural philosophy had to do with the Catholic sacrament of the holy Eucharist, in which bread and wine are said to be transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The dogma of the ''Real Presence'' maintained that in this sacrament, Christ is really (as opposed to metaphorically or symbolically) present in the bread and wine. Centuries earlier, the Catholic saint, Thomas Aquinas(1225-1274)had posited an Aristotelian explanation for the ''Real Presence'' which had become the accepted Catholic ''doctrine of transubstantiation''. The doctrine held that in the Eucharist, the Aristotelian substance of the bread and wine were replaced by the body and blood of Christ, while their forms (that of bread and wine) remaining unchanged. In Descartes' corpuscularism, bread and wine differed from flesh and blood because they had a different arrangement of corpuscles. There is no obvious way that one could appear as the other. The Anglican church, the state church of England following its break with the Catholic papacy in the 1530's did not accept the ''doctrine of transubstantiation''. Thus Cartesianism did not face objections based on it, and became accepted at Cambridge University by 1680. Catholic Paris didn't accept it until 1700. Many solutions reconciling Cartesianism and the ''Real Presence'' had, by then, been proposed. Barseghyan speculates that the one accepted by the Parisian community was that proposed by Antoine Arnauld(1612-1694)in 1671, in which Christ's presence in the Eucharist was due to a miracle beyond human comprehension, and outside the ordinary course of nature described by Cartesianism.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 194]]