Wyclif deeply loathed not merely the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation which was now standard within the Western Church, but the whole notion of divine bodily presence in bread and wine. He regarded the doctrine as a clerical deception developed during the Church’s eleventh-century usurpation of worldly power – so his philosophical realism had led him in a completely different direction from Aquinas’s Aristotelian realist arguments.
