95. The Sacrament of the Eucharist. (Chapter 7. Public Worship and Religious Customs and Ceremonies.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

Comp. the Literature in vol. i. 38 and 102, the corresponding sections in the Doctrine Histories and Archaeologies, and the treatises of G. E. Steitz on the historical development of the doctrine of the Lord's Supper in the Greek church, in Dorner's Jahrbuecher fuer Deutsche Theologie, for 1864 and 1865. In part also the liturgical works of Neale, Daniel, etc., cited below ( 98), and Philip Freeman: The Principles of Divine Service. Lond. Part i. 1855, Part ii. 1862. (The author, in the introduction to the second part, states as his object: To unravel, by means of an historical survey of the ancient belief concerning the Holy Eucharist, viewed as a mystery, and of the later departures from it, the manifold confusions which have grown up around the subject, more especially since the fatal epoch of the eleventh century. But the book treats not so much of the doctrine of the Eucharist, as of the ceremony of it, and the eucharistic sacrifice, with special reference to the Anglican church.)

The Eucharist is both a sacrament wherein God conveys to us a certain blessing, and a sacrifice which man offers to God. As a sacrament, or the communion, it stands at the head of all sacred rites; as a sacrifice it stands alone. The celebration of it under this twofold character forms the holy of holies of the Christian cultus in the ancient church, and in the greater part of Christendom at this day.

We consider first the doctrine of the Eucharist as a sacrament, then the doctrine of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, and finally the celebration of the eucharistic communion and eucharistic sacrifice.

The doctrine of the sacrament of the Eucharist was not a subject of theological controversy and ecclesiastical action till the time of Paschasius Radbert, in the ninth century; whereas since then this feast of the Saviour's dying love has been the innocent cause of the most bitter disputes, especially in the age of the Reformation, between Papists and Protestants, and among Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinists. Hence the doctrine of the ancient church on this point lacks the clearness and definiteness which the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, the Chalcedonian Christology, and the Augustinian anthropology and soteriology acquired from the controversies preceding them. In the doctrine of baptism also we have a much better right to speak of a consensus patrum, than in the doctrine of the holy Supper.

In general, this period, following the representatives of the mystic theory in the previous one, was already very strongly inclined toward the doctrine of transubstantiation and toward the Greek and Roman sacrifice of the mass, which are inseparable in so far as a real sacrifice requires the real presence of the victim. But the kind and mode of this presence are not yet particularly defined, and admit very different views: Christ may be conceived as really present either in and with the elements (consubstantiation, impanation), or under the illusive appearance of the changed elements (transubstantiation), or only dynamically and spiritually.

In the previous period we distinguish three views: the mystic view of Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus; the symbolical view of Tertullian and Cyprian; and the allegorical or spiritualistic view of Clement of Alexandria and Origen. In the present the first view, which best answered the mystic and superstitious tendency of the time, preponderated, but the second also was represented by considerable authorities.

I. The realistic and mystic view is represented by several fathers and the early liturgies, whose testimony we shall further cite below. They speak in enthusiastic and extravagant terms of the sacrament and sacrifice of the altar. They teach a real presence of the body and blood of Christ, which is included in the very idea of a real sacrifice, and they see in the mystical union of it with the sensible elements a sort of repetition of the incarnation of the Logos. With the act of consecration a change accordingly takes place in the elements, whereby they become vehicles and organs of the life of Christ, although by no means necessarily changed into another substance. To denote this change very strong expressions are used, like metabolhv, metabavllein, metabavllesqai, metastoiceiou'sqai, metapoiei'sqai, mutatio, translatio, transfiguratio, transformatio;1 illustrated by the miraculous transformation of water into wine, the assimilation of food, and the pervasive power of leaven.

Cyril of Jerusalem goes farther in this direction than any of the fathers. He plainly teaches some sort of supernatural connection between the body of Christ and the elements, though not necessarily a transubstantiation of the latter. Let us hear the principal passages. Then follows, he says in describing the celebration of the Eucharist, the invocation of God, for the sending of his Spirit to make the bread the body of Christ, the wine the blood of Christ. For what the Holy Ghost touches is sanctified and transformed. Under the type of the bread1 is given to you the body, under the type of the wine is given to you the blood, that you mayest be a partaker of the body and blood of Christ, and be of one body and blood with him. After the invocation of the Holy Ghost the bread of the Eucharist is no longer bread, but the body of Christ. Consider, therefore, the bread and the wine not as empty elements, for they are, according to the declaration of the Lord, the body and blood of Christ. In support of this change Cyril refers at one time to the wedding feast at Cana, which indicates, the Roman theory of change of substance; but at another to the consecration of the chrism, wherein the substance is unchanged. He was not clear and consistent with himself. His opinion probably was, that the eucharistic elements lost by consecration not so much their earthly substance, as their earthly purpose.

Gregory of Nyssa, though in general a very faithful disciple of the spiritualistic Origen, is on this point entirely realistic. He calls the Eucharist a food of immortality, and speaks of a miraculous transformation of the nature of the elements into the glorified body of Christ by virtue of the priestly blessing.

Chrysostom likewise, though only incidentally in his homilies, and not in the strain of sober logic and theology, but of glowing rhetoric, speaks several times of a union of our whole nature with the body of Christ in the Eucharist, and even of a manducatio oralis.

THE Latin fathers, Hilary,1 Ambrose,1 and Gaudentius ( 410) come nearest to the later dogma of transubstantiation. The latter says: The Creator and Lord of nature, who produces bread from the earth, prepares out of bread his own body, makes of wine his own blood.

But closely as these and similar expressions verge upon the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, they seem to contain at most a dynamic, not a substantial, change of the elements into the body and the blood of Christ. For, in the first place, it must be remembered there is a great difference between the half-poetic, enthusiastic, glowing language of devotion, in which the fathers, and especially the liturgies, speak of the eucharistic sacrifice, and the clear, calm, and cool language of logic and doctrinal definition. In the second place, the same fathers apply the same or quite similar terms to the baptismal water and the chrism of confirmation, without intending to teach a proper change of the substance of these material elements into the Holy Ghost. On the other hand, they not rarely use, concerning the bread and wine, tuvpo, ajntivtupa, figura, signum, and like expressions, which denote rather a symbolical than a metabolical relation of them to the body and blood of the Lord. Finally, the favorite comparison of the mysterious transformation with the incarnation of the Logos, which, in fact, was not an annihilation of the human nature, but an assumption of it into unity with the divine, is of itself in favor of the continuance of the substance of the elements; else it would abet the Eutychian heresy.

II. The symbolical view, though on a realistic basis, is represented first by Eusebius, who calls the Supper a commemoration of Christ by the symbols of his body and blood, and takes the flesh and blood of Christ in the sixth chapter of John to mean the words of Christ, which are spirit and life, the true food of the soul, to believers. Here appears the influence of his venerated Origen, whose views in regard to the sacramental aspect of the Eucharist he substantially repeats.

But it is striking that even Athanasius, the father of orthodoxy, recognized only a spiritual participation, a self-communication of the nourishing divine virtue of the Logos, in the symbols of the bread and wine, and incidentally evinces a doctrine of the Eucharist wholly foreign to the Catholic, and very like the older Alexandrian or Origenistic, and the Calvinistic, though by no means identical with the latter. By the flesh and blood in the mysterious discourse of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John, which he refers to the Lord's Supper, he understands not the earthly, human, but the heavenly, divine manifestation of Jesus, a spiritual nutriment coming down from above, which the Logos through the Holy Ghost communicates to believers (but not to a Judas, nor to the unbelieving). With this view accords his extending of the participation of the eucharistic food to believers in heaven, and even to the angels, who, on account of their incorporeal nature, are incapable of a corporeal participation of Christ.

Gregory Nazianzen sees in the Eucharist a type of the incarnation, and calls the consecrated elements symbols and antitypes of the great mysteries, but ascribes to them a saving virtue.

St. Basil, likewise, in explaining the words of Christ, I live by the Father (John vi. 57), against, the Arians who inferred from it that Christ was a creature, incidentally gives a spiritual meaning to the fruition of the eucharistic elements. We eat the flesh of Christ, he says, and drink His blood, if we, through His incarnation and human life, become partakers of the Logos and of wisdom.

Macarius the Elder, a gifted representative of the earlier Greek mysticism ( 390), belongs to the same Symbolical school; he calls bread and wine the antitype of the body and blood of Christ, and seems to know only a spiritual eating of the flesh of the Lord.

Theodoret, who was acknowledged orthodox by the council of Chalcedon, teaches indeed a transformation (metabavllein) of the eucharistic elements by virtue of the priestly consecration, and an adoration of them, which certainly sounds quite Romish, but in the same connection expressly rejects the idea of an absorption of the elements in the body of the Lord, as an error akin to the Monophysite. The mystical emblems of the body and blood of Christ, says he, continue in their original essence and form, they are visible and tangible as they were before [the consecration];1 but the contemplation of the spirit and of faith sees in them that which they have become, and they are adored also as that which they are to believers.

Similar language occurs in an epistle to the monk Caesarius ascribed to Chrysostom, but perhaps not genuine;1 in Ephraim of Antioch, cited by Photius; and even in the Roman bishop Gelasius at the end of the fifth century (492-496).

The latter says expressly, in his work against Eutyches and Nestorius: The sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, which we receive, is a divine thing, because by it we are made partakers of the divine-nature. Yet the substance or nature of the bread and wine does not cease. And assuredly the image and the similitude of the body and blood of Christ are celebrated in the performance of the mysteries.

It is remarkable that Augustine, in other respects so decidedly catholic in the doctrine of the church and of baptism, and in the cardinal points of the Latin orthodoxy, follows the older African theologians, Tertullian and Cyprian, in a symbolical theory of the Supper, which however includes a real spiritual participation of the Lord by faith, and in this respect stands nearest to the Calvinistic or Orthodox Reformed doctrine, while in minor points he differs from it as much as from transubstantiation and consubstantiation. He was the first to make a clear distinction between the outward sign and the inward grace, which are equally essential to the conception of the sacrament. He maintains the figurative character of the words of institution, and of the discourse of Jesus, on the eating and drinking of his flesh and blood in the sixth chapter of John; with Tertullian, he calls the bread and wine figurae or signa corporis et sanguinis Christi (but certainly not mere figures), and insists on a distinction between that which is visibly received in the sacrament, and that which is spiritually eaten and drunk, or between a carnal, visible manducation of the sacrament, and a spiritual eating of the flesh of Christ and drinking of his blood. The latter he limits to the elect and the believing, though, in opposition to the subjectivism of the Donatists, he asserts that the sacrament (in its objective import) is the body of Christ even for unworthy receivers. He says of Judas, that he only ate the bread of the Lord, while the other apostles ate the Lord who was the bread. In another place: The sacramentum is given to some to life, to others to destruction; but the res sacramenti, i.e., the thing itself of which it is the sacramentum, is given to every one who is partaker of it, to life. He who does not abide in Christ, undoubtedly neither eats His flesh nor drinks His blood, though he eats and drinks the sacramentum (i.e., the outward sign) of so great a thing to his condemnation. Augustine at all events lays chief stress on the spiritual participation. Why preparest you the teeth and the belly? Believe, and you have eaten. He claims for the sacrament religious reverence, but not a superstitious dread, as if it were a miracle of magical effect. He also expressly rejects the hypothesis of the ubiquity of Christ's body, which had already come into use in support of the materializing view, and has since been further developed by Lutheran divines in support of the theory of consubstantiation. The body with which Christ rose, says he, He took to heaven, which must be in a place.... We must guard against such a conception of His divinity as destroys the reality of His flesh. For when the flesh of the Lord was upon earth, it was certainly not in heaven; and now that it is in heaven, it is not upon earth. I believe that the body of the Lord is in heaven, as it was upon earth when he ascended to heaven. Yet this great church teacher at the same time holds fast the real presence of Christ in the Supper. He says of the martyrs: They have drunk the blood of Christ, and have shed their own blood for Christ. He was also inclined, with the Oriental fathers, to ascribe a saving virtue to the consecrated elements.

Augustine's pupil, Facundus, taught that the sacramental bread is not properly the body of Christ, but contains the mystery of the body. Fulgentius of Ruspe held the same symbolical view; and even at a much later period we can trace it through the mighty influence of Augustine's writings in Isidore of Sevilla, Beda Venerabilis, among the divines of the Carolingian age, in Ratramnus, and Berengar of Tours, until it broke forth in a modified form with greater force than ever in the sixteenth century, and took permanent foothold in the Reformed churches.

Pope Leo I. is sometimes likewise numbered with the symbolists, but without good reason. He calls the communion a spiritual food, as Athanasius had done before, but supposes a sort of assimilation of the flesh and blood of Christ by the believing participation. What we believe, that we receive with the mouth.... The participation of the body and blood of Christ causes that we pass into that which we receive, and bear Christ in us in Spirit and body. Voluntary abstinence from the wine in the Supper was as yet considered by this pope a sin.

III. The old liturgies, whose testimony on this point is as important as that of the church fathers, presuppose the actual presence of Christ in the Supper, but speak throughout in the stately language of sentiment, and nowhere attempt an explanation of the nature and mode of this presence, and of its relation to the still visible forms of bread and wine. They use concerning the consecrated elements such terms as: The holy body, The dear blood, of our Lord Jesus Christ, The sanctified oblation, The heavenly, spotless, glorious, awful, divine gifts, The awful, unbloody, holy sacrifice, &c. In the act of consecration the liturgies pray for the sending down of the Holy Ghost, that he may sanctify and perfect the bread and wine, or that he may sanctify and make them the body and blood of Christ,1 or bless and make.

IV. As to the adoration of the consecrated elements: This follows with logical necessity from the doctrine of transubstantiation, and is the sure touchstone of it. No trace of such adoration appears, however, in the ancient liturgies, and the whole patristic literature yields only four passages from which this practice can be inferred; plainly showing that the doctrine of transubstantiation was not yet fixed in the consciousness of the church.

Chrysostom says: The wise men adored Christ in the manger; we see him not in the manger, but on the altar, and should pay him still greater homage. Theodoret, in the passage already cited, likewise uses the term proskuvnei'n, but at the same time expressly asserts the continuance of the substance of the elements. Ambrose speaks once of the flesh of Christ which we to-day adore in the mysteries, and Augustine, of an adoration preceding the participation of the flesh of Christ.

In all these passages we must, no doubt, take the term proskunei'n and adorare in the wider sense, and distinguish the bowing of the knee, which was so frequent, especially in the East, as a mere mark of respect, from proper adoration. The old liturgies contain no direction for any such act of adoration as became prevalent in the Latin church, with the elevation of the host, after the triumph of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the twelfth century.