FRQM THE LIBRARY OF
TRINITY COLLEGE
gift of friends of the Library
THE BODY OF CHRIST
AN ENQUIRY INTO THE INSTITUTION AND DOCTRINE OF HOLY COMMUNION
BY CHARLES GORE, M.A., D.D,
Of the Community of the Resurrection Canon of Westminster
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
153-157 FIFTH AVENUE
igoi
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.
133915
PREFACE.
THIS enquiry into the institution and doctrine of the holy eucharist was first announced under the title of The Breaking of the Bread ; but as it appeared that this title was already appropriated, The Body of Christ was chosen for a title, because it expresses two most important aspects of eucharistic truth. It expresses the nature of the gift presented to us in the sacrament (corpus Christi), and also the nature of the holy society of which it is the spiritual nourishment, and of which it is written, " Ye are the body of Christ."
It is important in the case of any enquiry to state what is its point of departure. I wish there fore to make it plain at starting that I assume the belief in Christ expressed in the Nicene Creed, and I assume also the substantial truth of the passages in the New Testament which bear upon the institution of the eucharist. (Thus, as a minor part of this assumption, it is taken for granted,
iv PREFACE.
though only incidentally, that however we deal with the apparent discrepancy between the synoptists and St. John, the eucharist must be allowed to have its roots, in some way, among the associations of the paschal meal.) There is of course at the present moment a most real and serious need to vindicate afresh the historical cha racter of the Gospels : and the examination into their trustworthiness, which must be the basis of any such vindication, cannot be too stringent. But the task is not attempted in this volume. I must content myself with referring to the thorough and impartial investigations of Dr. Sanday (see page 310).
I ought also to explain that I have not traversed again ground that I had gone over in a volume entitled Dissertations. I had there discussed (for instance) Tertullian's doctrine of the eucharist, and given quotations to illustrate the history of the doctrine of transubstantiation ; and I have here simply referred to these discussions and quotations.1
1 In both volumes Migne's Patrologia Grccca and Latina are referred to as P. G. and P. L. with the number of the volume and column added.
PREFACE v
In the case of a book which does not claim to be a complete treatise, I hope that the full Table of Contents, prefixed to this volume, will be found as useful as an index.
I am very well aware that to some people, more or less theologically or ecclesiastically minded, this book will seem in part too indefinite, and to others of an opposite state of mind, if they should happen to read it, by far too definite. To the former I have said what I can in the course of the argument. To the latter I would take this oppor tunity of saying, that at a certain stage of religious progress it seems to be better not to attempt to think too accurately about the Holy Communion, but to use, with what faith and devotion is possible, a sacrament of which it was said at its institution, " Do this" (not " think this ") "in remembrance of me." But when the mind has become habituated to the thought of the incarnation and of Christ's life communicated to us by the Spirit — a thought which holds so central a place in the New Testa ment — it ought to become possible, nay neces sary, for us, to exercise our minds also upon the eucharist, and to gain as great clearness of intel lectual apprehension upon this subject as upon
vi PREFACE.
any part of the divine method in the redemption of man.
I should like to add that this book is in part the result of an attempt to clear up my own thoughts on eucharistic subjects in view of the " Round Table Conference" to which I had been summoned by the late Bishop of London, whose loss the church has such profound reason to deplore ; and my best prayer in sending it out is that it may serve in some measure the object of that Conference — the promotion of mutual understanding and unity among Christians.
CHARLES GORE.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY, Quinquagcsima, 1901.
PAGE
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
§ i. The Christian sacrament ..... i the idea (Goethe) ..... 2 the primitive celebration (Justin) . . 3
§2. The eucharist among other sacrifices . . .12 root conception of sacrifice (W. R. Smith) 12 its development . . . . 15
§ 3. The fundamental idea . . . . .21 meaning of John vi. . . . . .21
(Dr. Westcott) 24
other passages of N. T. . . . .26
(Dr. Moule) 27
intellectual problem . . . . -32
§4. The sacramental principle . . . . 36
spiritualism false and true . . . 36
social meaning of sacraments . . .40
CHAPTER II.
THE GIFT AND PRESENCE IN HOLY COMMUNION.
§ i . The nature of the gift . . . . .48 (Hooker, Waterland) . -49
(Athanasius, Cyril Alex.) . . . -54
viii CONTEXTS.
PAGE
§ i — continued.
(Hilary, Augustin, Leo) . . . . 56
(Cyril J., Ignatius) ... .57
(Thomassin's summary) . . . . 58
exceptions — i. (Origen, etc.) . . -59
2. (Clement, Jerome,
Ratramn, etc.) . . 60
3. (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.j. 62 the gift of the living, glorified, Christ . 66 connection of eucharistic with baptismal
gift (Fulgentius, etc.) . . . -67 § 2. The relation of the spiritual sift to the bread and
wine . . . . . . -71
the presence objective (Mozley) . . 72
evidence — I. Treatment of elements. . 75
II. The prayer of consecration . 76
general form (Clementine). 77
exceptions —
(1) words of institution
not reckoned (Cyril J.) 80
(2) Holy Ghost not men tioned (Serapion, Irenaeus) . . .81
(3) vagueness as to what the elements become
(Ethiopic, Gallican) . 82
(4) Roman canon . . 83
(note on Troieli', d— o^et'/oa-vat, aTrtx^cuvctv) . 79
III. Language of fathers (Cyril J.,
Chrysostom) . . -87
CONTENTS. ix
PACE
§ 2. Evidence III. — continued.
localizing language . . 88 meaning of " symbol " (Har-
nack, Greg. Nyss.) . . 89 localization avoided (Op- tatus, Chrysostom). . 91 (Xewman) . . -93 conclusion on evidence . 93 reason for objectivity . . . -94 as at Pentecost . . . -95 objections —
(1) (Didache, etc.) 96
(2) absence of the worship of Jesus in
the consecrated elements . . 99 evidence of liturgies . . . 100 theologians (Chrys., Ambr., Aug.,
Cyril J., Theod.) . . . 103 explanation of this absence —
(1) Christ already present as
priest . . . .104
(2) "Jesus-worship" not yet
much developed . .106 (Hort, Talbot, Bigg, West-
cott) 106
conclusion . . . . . . .109
§ 3. Tyansubstantiation considered . . . .in
not the belief of fathers (Iren., Theod.) . 1 1 1 monophysite tendency in East (Greg.
Nyss., John of D.) 113
not so in West (Augustine) . . . 115
x CONTENTS.
PAGE
§ 3 — continued.
but later it prevails (Berengar) . . .116 superstitious period . . . . .116
scholastic reaction . . . . .118
total result . . . . . .120
§4. The gift and presence spiritual . . , .124 meaning not merely "to our spirits" (J. Taylor) . . . . . . .124
nor " non-material " ..... 125
but " that in which the purpose of the
spirit unrestrictedly dominates". . 126 the body of the risen Christ . . .127 application to the eucharistic presence . 130 consequent necessity for observing the
limits of the divine purpose . . 131 no hypostatical union of Christ with the elements . .. . . . . 133
the purpose for which the sacrament was given ... .134
risk of going beyond it . . . -136 the relation of the presence to the faith of
the recipient ..... 142
(Mozley, Aug., Orig., Cypr., Jer., Leo, Paschasius, Rupert) .... 143
objectivity in natural and spiritual world relative to persons . . . . 149
(note on degrees of presence) . . . 153 answer to objections . . . . . 153
CONTENTS. xi
CHAPTER III.
THE EUCHARIST A SACRIFICE.
PAGE
§ i. The church's sacrifices . . . . . 157 the eucharist called a sacrifice (Didache,
Justin, Iren.) . . . . . -157 note on " bloodless sacrifices " . . . 159 the Fatherson heathen and Jewish sacrifices 160 no further need for propitiation in Christian
church . . . . . . .164
but room for other sacrifices (Ep. to
Hebrews) . . . . . -165 (Clem. Rom., Orig., Iren.) . . . 169
relation of the church's sacrifice to the one
sacrifice . . . . . . . 173
§ 2. No repetition of the sacrifice upon the cross . . 174 (Aug., Chrysost., P. Lombard, Aquinas) . 175 eucharist in what sense called propitiatory
(Orig., J. Taylor) . .177
uniqueness and sufficiency of the cross imperilled —
in popular mediaeval ideas . . .178 in post-Tridentine theology . . 179 by doctrine of dead Christ in the sacrament (Rupert, Andre wes) . 181
§ 3. The connection bet ween the earthly and the heavenly
offering . . . . . . • 185
(i) earthly sacrifice accepted at heavenly
altar (Roman canon, Iren., Paschas.) 186
xii CONTENTS.
PAGE
§ 3 — continued.
(2) presence of heavenly Lamb amidst the
worshipping church . . . 192
intercessions postponed or repeated. 193 (Cypr., Cyril J., Chrys., Cabasilas,
Ambr., Bright, Wesleys) . . 194
(3) sacrifice consummated in communion . 199
(Aquinas) . . . . .201
"natural" and "mystical" body 204 (Augustine, etc.) .... 206
§ 4. Summary . . . . . . .210
note on intercession for non-Christians .211 the sacrifice an act of the whole body (P. Lombard) . . . . . .213
CHAPTER IV.
OUR AUTHORITIES.
§ i . Medieval authority . . . . . .215
its defects 217
use and abuse of ecclesiastical authority : our Lord's attitude . . . .220
appeal to scripture ..... 222
§2. Authority of the Reformation . . . .227
appeal of Anglican church to catholic antiquity ...... 227
Anglican position as to —
(1) eucharistic gift . .... 229
(2) objective presence (Keble, Arch.
Temple) ..... 230
CONTENTS. xiii
PAGE
§ 2 — continued.
(3) transubstantiation .... 235
(4) presence spiritual (J. Taylor) . . 235
(5) eucharistic sacrifice .... 236 §3. Authority of the church at large. . . . 239
the Bible and the church .... 241
§4. The test of scripture ..... 243
as to (i) the eucharistic gift . . . 243
" flesh " and " body " . . 244
(2) the objective presence . . . 246
(3) transubstantiation . . . 247
(4) presence spiritual . . . 248
(5) sacrifice (Ep. to Hebrews) . . 249
Melchizedekian priesthood . 255
St. Paul. Christ's institution . 262
note on " shewing the Lord's death " . 263
CHAPTER Y.
OUR PRESENT SERVICE OF HOLY COMMUNION.
Some subordinate doctrinal principles . . . 269
(1) community of priest and people . . 270
suppression of voice . . . .271 veiling of altar ..... 272
(2) communion of people . . . . 273
Sunday and daily eucharist . . . 275
presence of non-communicants . . 276
(3) the eucharist and "the word" . . . 278
(4) communion in both kinds . . . .278
the special gift of each kind (Raymundj 279
xiv CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER V. — continued.
Defects in our anaphora or canon .... 280
note on meaning of " oblations" . . . 280
Need to restore corporate aspect of eucharist . 286
APPENDED NOTES.
1. Justin Martyr on the cucharistic " word of prayer " 289
2. Eating Christ' s flesh explained to mean receiving His
teaching ....... 290
3. The ritual of the Roman church . . . . 292
4. 1 gnatius of Antioch on the eucharist . . . 292
5. The reverent care of the sacred elements in the early
ages 293
6. The language used by some of the fathers as to a
change in the ivatev of baptism and in the chrism, similar to the change in the eucharistic elements 294
7. Ire-nans on the invocation ..... 295
8. Victorinus Afer on an objective presence of Christ in
the eucharist ...... 296
9. Later Westerns on the spirituality of the eucharistic
presence ....... 296
10. Reservation of the sacrament, and the treatment of
it after communion ..... 298
1 1 . Ivencem on the sacrifice in the eucharist . . 300
12. Passages in the fathers where the immolation of
Christ appears to be spoken of as repeated . 302
13. Errors current in the later middle ages about the
sacrifices of masses . . . . -304
14. Some later Roman teaching on the sacrifice of the
altar ........ 305
CONTENTS. xv
PAGE
APPENDED NOTES — continued,
15. The '•'•glorious interchanges" of the encharist . 306
1 6. Presence at the encharist of non-communicants . 307
17. Effect of the Epistle to the Hebrews upon
eucharistic doctrine in Ambrose and Chrysostom 308
1 8. The four N. T. accounts of the institution . .310
19. The encharist before the passion and after . .312
20. On the sacrificial meaning of Troiiiv and dva/xv^o-ts 312
2 1 . The social aspect of the sacraments . . -316
THE BODY OF CHRIST.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
§ i. The Christian sacrament.
AT almost any point in the history of the Christian Church on which the eye rests, the worship, and in a great measure the life, of Christians is found centring upon a religious ceremony in which the chief point is the presenting before God, and blessing, and receiving in common, of bread and wine. And in spite of great differences in the ceremonial with which this sacra ment has been celebrated, in spite of varying types of teaching with regard to it, which in later times of controversy have become acutely distinguished and opposed, the religious meaning attached to the rite
B.C.
2 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
on the whole has been remarkably similar everywhere and throughout history. As Goethe said, looking at the matter sym pathetically, but, as we may say, from outside, " The sacraments are . . . the symbols to our souls of an extraordinary divine favour and grace. In the Lord's Supper earthly lips are to receive a divine reality embodied, and under the form of an earthly nourishment to partake of a heavenly. This idea is just the same in all Christian churches, whether the sacra ment is taken with more or less submission to the mystery, with more or less accommoda tion to what is intelligible ; it always remains a holy, weighty ceremony, which presents itself in the actual world in the place of [what one may call] the possible or the impossible — in the place of what man can neither attain nor do without."1
1 Goethe, A us Meinein Leben (Wahrheit and Dichtung), Th. ii. B. 7. (Bohn's trans, vol. i. pp. 245 f.) The context is a very interesting one. Goethe is emphasizing the need of habit and sequence in religion. From this point of view he is complaining of the paucity of Protestant sacraments. " Such a sacrament (as the Lord's Supper)
THE CHRISTIAN SACRAMENT. 3
But from a point of view internal to the Christian faith, we may speak more exactly. The divine thing in this sacrament, the spiritual nourishment imparted, has been almost universally understood to be, in some real sense, the flesh and blood, or .body and blood, of Christ ; and by receiving it Christians have believed themselves to be bound into one, by being all together united to God in Christ. "The cup of blessing which we (Christians) bless," St. Paul had written, " is it not a communion in the blood of the Christ ? The loaf which we break, is it not a communion in the body of the Christ ? Seeing that there is one loaf, we the many are one body : for we all partake from the one loaf."1
To make this common idea of the Christian sacrament plainer at starting, we will read the very early account of it which Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, gave
should not stand alone (in the mature life) ; no Christian can partake of it with the true joy for which it is given, if the symbolical or sacramental sense is not fostered within him."
1 i Cor. x. 16. 17. See R.V. margin.
B 2
4 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, as a part of the "apology" by which he intended to disabuse the minds of the non-Christian world of their gross misconceptions of what Christianity meant.
After describing the ceremony of baptism, he continues thus1 :—
" And after we have thus bathed the person who has become a believer and adherent, we lead him to the ' brethren,' as they are called, where they are assembled to offer up common prayers earnestly on behalf of themselves and the newly en lightened one and all others everywhere, that it may be vouchsafed to us who have learned the truth to be found also in our conduct good members of the society,2 and keepers of the commandments, that we may be saved with the eternal salvation.
1 Apol. i, 65-6.
2 The word is that of Phil. i. 27: " Let your conversation be as becometh the Gospel." — R. V. margin : "Behave as citizens worthily." " The word ... at this time," says Lightfoot, " seems always to refer to public duties devolv ing on a man as a member of a body." Cf. Phil. iii. 20 ; Ephes. ii. 19; and my Ephesians, p. 255.
THE CHRISTIAN SACRAMENT. 5
Then when we have done our prayers we greet one another with a kiss. Then there is presented to the president of the brethren a loaf and a cup of water and wine ; and he, after taking them, offers up praise and glory to the Father of all things, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and he gives thanks (eucharist) at length for these favours of God to us. And when he has ended the prayers and the thanksgiving (eucharist) the whole assistant people assent with an ' amen ' — a Hebrew word meaning ' so be it.' ' (This thanksgiving is described elsewhere as being made on behalf of the benefits of our redemption as well as our creation — for indeed "Jesus Christ our Lord gave us the eucharistic bread to offer for a memorial of the passion which He endured on behalf of the men whose souls were being cleansed from all wickedness."1) 11 And when the president has given thanks, and the whole people has assented, those who are called deacons (ministers) among us give a portion of the loaf and wine and
1 Dial. c. Tryph. c. 41.
6 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
water, over which the thanksgiving has been made, to each of those who are present, and they take it away to those who are not.
" And this food is called among us eucha- rist,1 and no one is allowed to partake of it unless he believes that what we teach is true, and has been washed in the laver for the remission of sins and for regeneration, and is living as Christ enjoined.2 For we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink, but just as Jesus Christ our Saviour, by the word of God made flesh, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so we have been taught that the food over which thanks have been given by the word of prayer which comes from Him — that food from which our blood and flesh are by assimilation nourished — is both the flesh
1 The word eucharist, " thanksgiving," came very early to be applied to the whole service, and so to mean the "service or sacrifice of thanksgiving," and also (as here) the conse crated elements themselves, which formed, as it were, the material of the sacrifice of thanksgiving.
2 We should note that the three qualifications for com munion are : (i) elementary faith in the creed ; (2) baptism ; (3) good living.
THE CHRISTIAN SACRAMENT. 7
and the blood of that Jesus who was made flesh."
The general meaning of this passage is plain. A divine word was the instrument in effecting the incarnation by which the Son of God took our human flesh and blood. And similarly in every eucharist a divine word — a word of prayer which Christ delivered — produces an analogous effect, i.e. an analogous union of the divine and the earthly. For the bread and wine — which correspond to the lower nature, the human flesh and blood, of the incarnation, and which indeed form by digestion the material of our common flesh and blood — become, when blessed and consecrated, something higher and diviner, the spiritual food of the flesh and blood of Christ.1
Then Justin continues: "For the apostles delivered, in the memoirs compiled by them, which are called Gospels, that this command was £iven to them — that Jesus took bread
o •>
1 As to what exactly Justin Martyr means by the "prayer- word which is from Christ," by which the encharist is blessed, see app. note i, p. 289.
8 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
and gave thanks and said, ' Do l this in remembrance of me : this is my body'; and took the cup likewise and gave thanks and said, ' This is my blood ' ; and imparted it to them only. And in the mysteries of Mithra the evil spirits have instituted by imitation a similar rite ; for you either know or can learn how in their ceremonies of initiation bread and a cup of water are produced with certain invocations."
Then after the first communion with the newly baptized Justin goes on to describe the ordinary Sunday service of the church, beginning with reading of scriptures, and a sermon preached by their "president," and common prayer. " And, as we said before, when the prayers are over, bread is produced and wine and water, and the president offers up prayers and thanksgivings, according to his power [the forms of prayer, we observe, were not yet fixed] ; and the people assent with the ' amen,' and the distribution and
1 Justin Martyr (alone, apparently, among early Christian writers) understands this word as meaning offer. See below,
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participation by each of the blessed food takes place, and it is sent away to those who are not present by the hands of the deacons. . . . And if all this seems to you to be agreeable to truth and reason, hold it in honour. But if it seems to you trifling, then as trifles despise it, but do not, as if we were enemies, decree death against us when we are doing no harm."
A modern reader will probably feel that this is an exceedingly interesting, ingenuous and matter-of-fact account of Christian worship — an account which, on the whole, could hardly fail to be conciliatory to the more enlightened or unprejudiced heathen. No doubt Justin repeats the phrases about eating and drinking the body (or flesh) and blood of Christ, which had been a great occasion of blas phemy ; but they would have been felt to require some mystical interpretation as remote as possible from cannibalism. And yet this idea of eating Christ's flesh and drinking His blood in the eucharist — which, we observe, Justin here puts forward without any hesitation before the heathen as the
io THE BODY OF CHRIST.
accepted Christian idea — is, for the imagina tive or speculative intellect, a very difficult one. As soon as the church began to specu late about it she found its difficulty. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the devotional unanimity on the subject of this sacrament which characterized the church for some eleven centuries, and which, even since acute controversy began, has characterized, and still characterizes, the devotional attitude or feelings of pious Christians, very much more than the antagonism of combatants would lead us to believe. At this moment in history, so far as Christians are content with believing, and feeling, and using the Holy Communion devoutly as an appointed means of grace, there is probably a surprising unanimity amongst them.
But on this, as on every other important subject, it is necessary, even at the risk of controversy, to let devout feeling pass into as much clearness of intellectual apprehen sion and expression as the case admits of; or, where we cannot gain any such clearness, to perceive at least that this intellectual
THE CHRISTIAN SACRAMENT. n
limitation is no more than must be recognized in other directions, and for similar reasons. We must at least seek to understand as well as to believe. And we will make a beginning of our attempt to understand the Christian mystery of the breaking of the bread with the considerations suggested by Justin's hint of its resemblance to one of the rites of Mithra — the consideration, that is to say, of its affinities with the customs of religion in general outside the area of the special revelation which is the basis of the Christian church. We will approach the eucharist first from outside.
§ 2. The cucharist among other sacrifices.
The sacrificial feast of Christians, — for so they conceived it from the earliest times,— has an obvious affinity with almost universal practices in other religions. Most religions have centred in sacrificial rites, which have commonly culminated in sacrificial banquets. From a variety of causes we to-day naturally associate with sacrifice the idea of giving something to some being believed to be divine, whether in order to propitiate his anger, or to maintain intercourse with him, or to recognize his claim upon his wor shippers. But recent investigation has tended to show that at least one deep root of sacrificial customs, if not the root, is the idea of communion or common sharing in a life believed to be divine. " We may now take it as made out," writes Dr. Robert son Smith,1 " that throughout the Semitic
1 Religion of the Semites (Black, 1889), pp. 327, 418 ; cp.
SACRIFICES IN GENERAL. 13
field [the group of races to which the Jews belonged] the fundamental idea of sacrifice is not that of a sacred tribute, but of com munion between the god and his worshippers by joint participation in the living flesh and blood of a sacred victim." " The one point that comes out clear and strong .is that the fundamental idea of ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and that all atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing their efficacy to a communica tion of divine life to the worshipper, and to the establishment or confirmation of a living bond between them and their God."
We must endeavour to grasp this thought. The tribe or family, or later some group of voluntarily initiated worshippers, believes some plant or animal or thing to be divine, or to be temporarily the habitation of the divine presence ; and in consuming this, the divine life is believed to pass into them
Encycl. Brit, (gth ed.) s.v. SACRIFICE, vol. xxi. p. 138, for some excellent remarks on the religions value of savage ideas.
I4 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
all in common, and to strengthen with a religious bond their social unity. As more refined ideas of the divine being make such identification of a god with anything that can be eaten or drunk more difficult, the unquenchable desire for divine communion through eating takes the form of supposing that the god and his worshippers feast together ; as, for example, when part of a sacrifice is burnt, and so rises up in a smoke believed to be acceptable to the god, and thus becomes his "bread,"1 or again is eaten by the priests as representing the god, while the residue is consumed by the worshippers, who thus feast, if not upon, yet with, their god. It is well known that in the case of the peace offerings of the Jews the greater part of the meat of the sacrifice was eaten by the worshippers ; 2 and, though it is never expressly stated, the probability is that the idea was that of communion with Jehovah.
1 Lcvit. xxi. 6, 8, 17, 21.
2 It is plain (Levit. vii. 15 — 21) that the eating was part of the sacrifice. See ver. 18, and cp. Deut. xvi. 2, 3 : "Thou shalt sacrifice the passover unto the Lord. . . . Thou shalt cat no leavened bread with it."
SACRIFICES IN GENERAL. 15
Thus the "altar" was also called the "table" of the Lord.1
On the whole, it is no doubt the case that the development of the sacrificial system among the Jews tended to bring to the front the idea of giving to God in homage and recognition, and propitiating Him by victims, at the expense of the idea of communion with Him. And the reason is most interest ing. In the old natural religions there had been little sense of the moral holiness of the god worshipped. Consequently "the rela tions of man to the gods were not troubled by any habitual and oppressive sense of human guilt." It was hardly conceivable that the god could be permanently alienated from his worshippers, for they belonged to one another naturally. The conditions for communion with him were physical and ceremonial. But the Jews were to be taught a new lesson — the awful moral holiness of Jehovah, their God, and the necessity of being morally like Him in order to approach Him. And they had to be taught this lesson
Ezck. xli. 22, xliv. 16 ; Mai. i. 7—12.
16 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
by the discipline of fear. The traditional easy-going familiarity with the tribal god was over. They were to fear Jehovah. This fear was inculcated in part by the moral law and teaching of Moses and his successors, the prophets ; in part by divine events and startling judgments ; but also in part by the way in which the ceremonial law, as it was gradually elaborated, fenced the chosen people off from God, and made them realize the awfulness of His presence.
But the closeness ol communion with God had been taken away from God's own people only to be given back on a truer and surer basis. When once they had learned to fear God's righteousness, that very righteousness was to manifest itself to them as a love com municating itself and welcoming them into closest and most indissoluble fellowship. Prophecy had anticipated this, and the New Testament is full of it. In fact, the idea of communion with God through Christ, the partaking of His life, the living in His life, is a central idea of the New Testament. There
SACRIFICES IN GENERAL. 17
are certainly some difficulties belonging to a famous passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews which speaks of the "altar" which Christians have, "whereof they have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle."1 But there can be no doubt that it is intended to point the contrast between the old covenant and the new from this particular point of view, that under the old covenant with the Jews not even the priests could eat of their great sin offering of the Day of Atonement, but that under the new covenant, of which Jesus is the mediator, that sacrifice by which atonement was made for us is also that in which we are admitted to share. Christ our propitiation is also our new life, and He can be the former in a true sense only because He is the latter. Thus we Christians do truly (in whatever sense) eat the flesh of Christ offered for us and drink His out poured blood, and are thus, through fellow ship in the manhood of Christ, made partakers of the divine nature which is also His.
1 Heb. xiii. 10.
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i8 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
From this point of view the Christian eucharist, or " bloodless sacrifice " as it was called — the presenting before God and consecrating the loaf and the wine (very commonly recognized elements of sacrifice), and then the common partaking of this consecrated food by the whole church, with the belief that in this sacrament or sacred rite a divine life was, in some mystical sense, partaken of and divine fellowship enjoyed — this Christian eucharist, I say, would, so far, have appeared an easily intel ligible rite to the well-disposed enquirers of the Roman Empire. As to its origin, indeed, it was wholly Jewish, not heathen. Any other suggestion is quite unhistorical. It was developed out of the rites and associa tions of the paschal sacrifice and meal. But the passover of the Jews, with their other sacrificial rites, was akin to religious customs which are universal. Thus both in the national religions and in the private mysteries of the Empire sacrifices more or less barbaric or refined, which consisted in or culminated in sacramental communion, were thoroughly
SACRIFICES IN GENERAL. ig
familiar.1 Their familiarity must indeed be assumed to render intelligible Augustine's repeated definition of sacrifice as " any act that is done in order by a holy fellowship to inhere in God."2 Thus, as we look back, we recognize in the eucharist, in its outward form no less than in its inward idea, the divine consecration of an instinct belonging to what, in the most historical sense, we can call natural religion. Here is something easily appreciable by all men — the sacrificial meal upon the food which symbolizes for civilized man strength and refreshment — the "bread that strengthens," and "the wine that maketh glad the heart of man." And
1 Cf. F. B. Jevons' Introduction to the Study of Religion (Methuen), cc. xii. and xxiii., which are largely based on Robertson Smith, op. cit. Among older writers see John Johnson's Unbloody Sacrifice (in the " Libr. of Anglo-Cath. Theol.") ii. pp. 43, ff. In the passage from Justin Martyr cited above, he points to the resemblance between the eucharist and the very widely-spread rites of Mithra ; but he attributes to Satanic imitation what we should attribute to a universal human instinct, inspired and used by God both under the types of the old covenant and under the sacraments of the new.
- DC Civ. x. 5, 6.
C 2
20 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
the ideas underlying the sacramental meal have shown the power which belongs to the deepest human ideas, to grow with man's growth, and not to become antiquated.
§ 3- The fundamental idea.
It is a broadly human idea, then, this which Goethe describes as " partaking of heavenly under the form of earthly nourish ment " ; and yet, in its Christian form, it is not easy to realize with any intelligence— not easy especially for the somewhat sluggish imagination of us Englishmen. What does it mean — this " eating the flesh of Christ and drinking His blood " ? Apart from any ques tion as to how we do this in the eucharist, what is the idea which the words are intended to convey to our minds ; or again, St. Paul's similar phrase, " the communion in the body and blood of Christ" ? x
On the one hand, we shall not be satisfied with any explanation of eating Christ's flesh and blood, or body and blood, which makes it a metaphor for believing in Him or receiving
1 The reasons for not making any broad distinction between "flesh" and "body" are stated below, pp. 244 ft'.
22 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
His words.1 A metaphor or parable must really illustrate what it is intended to explain. Our Lord's metaphors and parables do this pre-eminently and justly. He never, as many of His interpreters have since done, over- presses the figure. But if "eating Christ's flesh and drinking His blood" were merely a figure for believing in Him, it would be, as in sisted upon in the discourse in St. John vi., an overpressed andmisleadingfigure. Moreover, as we examine the argument of that discourse, we see that the heavenly food of the flesh and blood of Christ is not an equivalent for faith, but is the divine response to it or satisfaction of it. Faith in the Christ is the "work " that God demands of men : the true manna, the bread of life, the flesh and blood of Christ, is the divine gift given to faith, corresponding to the wages given for work. Faith admits to the gift, but is not the same thing with it. Rather, the gift satisfies the spiritual appetite of faith, as the manna satisfied the physical appetite.2
1 On this misapprehension, see app. note 2, p. 290. '2 See John vi. 27 — 29, 47 — 51, 58.
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA. 23
The flesh and blood of Christ, then, mean a gift, corresponding with the manna — a heavenly food given by God to man, which faith receives but does not create, and which it cannot do without.
On the other hand, our Lord, as reported by St. John, guarded against the disciples misunderstanding in any gross sense the meaning of His flesh and blood. He directed their attention away from the flesh and blood of His mortal and corruptible body upward to His future glory. " What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where he was before ? " l He told them that in the ordinary sense human flesh could do them no good— "the flesh profiteth nothing": that only spirit could impart true life to man, and that the flesh and blood He had been speaking of —the flesh and blood of the Son, ascended and glorified — could impart life to them only because they truly were spirit and life. Thus He lifted their minds to a high and spiritual region, where they could be in no danger of low and carnal misconceptions. He "diverts
1 John vi. 60 — 64.
24 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
them," as Athanasius says, "from a bodily conception." -1 But none the less, He plainly means them to understand that, in some sense, His manhood is to be imparted to those that believe in Him, and fed upon as a principle of new and eternal life. There is to be an "influence" in the original sense of the word — an inflowing of His manhood into ours. Nothing less than this can be meant by feeding on His flesh.2 Shall we say, then,
1 Ad Scrap iv. 19. See my Dissertations, p. 305.
'2 Cf. Westcott, Rev . of the Father, p. 40 : " Now it is easy to say that ' eating of the flesh of Christ,' is a figurative way of describing faith in Christ. But such a method of dealing with the words of Holy Scripture is really to empty them of their divine force. This spiritual eating, this feeding upon Christ is the best result of faith, the highest energy for faith, but it is not faith itself. To eat is to take that into ourselves which we can assimilate as the support of life. The phrase 'to eat the flesh of Christ ' expresses therefore, as perhaps no other language could express, the great truth that Christians are made partakers of the human nature of their Lord which is united in one person to the divine nature, that He imparts to us now, and that we can receive into our own manhood, something of His man hood, which may be the seed, so to speak, of the glorified bodies in which we shall hereafter behold Him. Faith, if I may so express it, in its more general sense, leaves us outside Christ trusting in Him ; but the crowning act of I faith incorporates us in Christ."
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA. 25
that by His flesh we understand the spiritual principle or essence of His manhood, as distinguished from its material constituents? and by His blood, according to the deeply- rooted Old Testament idea, the "life thereof" —the human life of Jesus of Nazareth in His glory ? Whether these phrases are thought to be satisfactory or no, in some sense it is the manhood which must be meant by the flesh and blood.
At the same time, it is equally evident that it is only because of the vital unity in which the manhood stands with the divine nature that it can be " spirit " and " life." It is the humanity of nothing less than the divine person which is to be, in some sense, com municated to us, and not (what would be the worst materialism) a separated flesh and blood. What the Father is spoken of as giving us is the whole Christ — the whole of
1 Levit. xvii. n, 14 (R. V.) : "The life (or 'soul') of the flesh is in the blood ; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls ; for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life. . . . As to the life of all flesh, the blood thereof is all one with the life thereof. . . . The life of all flesh is the blood thereof."
26 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
His indivisible and living self. " As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father : so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me. This is the bread which came down out of heaven."1
The glorified Son of Man, then, Christ Jesus — the Word and Son of the Father made flesh and glorified — is to impart His own life to believers, and by this alone can they hope to share in the true eternal life. This is the central idea of St. John vi. Nothing less than this can justify the startling em phasis laid in the discourse upon eating Christ's flesh and drinking His blood. And the idea is in agreement with the teaching of the last discourses of our Lord as St. John also reports them. There too it appears that the future coming of the Spirit as the substitute for Christ — the new advocate- — is to involve a coming of Christ also Himself in a new way. The Father, our Lord says, will send " another advocate," but also — " I come unto you ; " " Because I live, ye shall live also ; " "I am the vine, ye are the
1 John vi. 57.
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA. 27
branches ; " " Abide in me, and I in you." ' Plainly, all this language is exaggerated and excessive, unless this is to be a characteristic function of the Spirit in the church, to com municate and so perpetuate the life of the glorified Christ as the new life of the new society of believers.
As Dr. Moule says, u I see in them [such words as those just cited a remembrance that what the Spirit does in His free and all-powerful work in the soul which He guides into new life, is, above all things, to bring it into contact with the Son. He roots it, He grafts it, He embodies it into the Son. He deals so with it that there is a continuity wholly spiritual indeed, but none the less most real, unngurative and efficacious, between the Head and the limb, between the branch and the Root. He effects an influx into the regenerate man of the blessed virtues of the nature of the second Adam, an infusion of the exalted life of Jesus Christ, through an open duct, living and divine, into the man who is born
1 John xiv. 16 — 19, xv. i, 4 — 6.
28 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
again into Him, the incarnate and glorified Son of God."1
And that Christ did really speak language of the kind referred to by St. John, is postulated, I cannot but think, by the narrative of the institution of the eucharist in the Synoptic Gospels, and by the language which St. Paul finds ready to his hand. By the language of the Synoptic Gospels, I say, at the institution of the eucharist, for the eucharist I suppose to be the appointed means for realizing a relationship to Christ already described in St. John vi. Such unexampled language as " Take eat : this is my body . . . Drink this: this is my blood," can hardly have stood isolated and un explained ; and with the most inevitable directness of force, it implies that it is Christ's manhood of which we are to partake. And this is the idea also upon which St. Paul works.2 It appears in his writings as the revealed ground of his teaching about the
1 Moule, Vein Creator (Hodder and Stoughton), pp. 39 f. - See (in order) i Cor. xi. 23 — 26, x. 16 — 18, xii. 12, 27, Col. i. 18, ii. 19, Ephes. i. 23.
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA. 29
relation of Christ to the church which is His body. We need not stop to enquire whether in using the term "the body of Christ" for the Christian society, St. Paul had chiefly in mind the organic unity of the visible society as a body of many members, or the fact that what constituted its unity was the communicated life of Christ the head ; whether, that is to say, the metaphor, as St. Paul used it, was mainly social, as in other literature, or mainly Christo- logical. Apparently it was at different periods mainly the one or mainly the other. But it is impossible to consider St. Paul's language where he explains to us what he received "from the Lord" about the insti tution of the perpetual memorial of Christ, and emphasizes the awful sacredness of the bread and cup which are there presented to us ; ] or where he speaks of the vital unity of the church, as constituted and expressed by the communion in Christ's body and blood;- or where he speaks of being baptized
1 i Cor. xi. 23 to end. - i Cor. x. 16 — 17.
3o THE BODY OF CHRIST.
into the church as baptism "into Christ Jesus" j1 or of Christ in His glorified man hood as "life-giving spirit";2 or of the whole new life of the Church as "in Christ,"3 —it is impossible, I say, to consider all this language without feeling that what St. Paul believed in was not a bare or mere gift of a divine Spirit to the church, but a gift of the divine Spirit with this for His special function — to communicate the nature of the glorified Christ, and to perpetuate in the world His divine and human life. Christ is our example and our outward pattern : He is again our propitiation with the Father : but He is also our new life. And what makes His example practicable for us in spite of the gulfs of difference which sepa rate His sinlessness from our sinfulness and His glory from our shame, is the fact that He is not only outside us as an example in the history of the remote past, but alive and at work in us at the present moment,
1 Rom. vi. 3. - i Cor. xv. 45. 3 2 Cor. v. 17.
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA. 31
moulding us inwardly into His likeness. Again, what makes it morally possible that Christ should have acted and offered Himself vicariously for us once for all, is the fact that He who thus offered Himself as man was to become the head of a new race, and those for whom He offered Himself were to belong to His manhood and share its power and its motive. This — the propagation of Christ's manhood by the transmission of His Spirit, or Christ in us the hope of glory — is truly the culminating point of our religion, which alone explains the rest. It was felt to be so at least through all the first twelve centuries of our era.
But it will be said, Why labour this point ? — is it not universally agreed ? Among theologians, perhaps, it is a common-place, and among Christians of a certain kind. But it remains very difficult language to a great many Englishmen. And it is the lack of this fundamental conception of the life of the Son of Man imparted to His people by the Spirit, which makes it so difficult to secure a really vital belief in this particular
32 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
sacrament of Christ's body and blood. We must labour to secure for it a funda mental lodgment. We must try and get the intelligence on to its side.
By eating Christ's flesh is meant, as we have seen, receiving into ourselves and appropriating by faith what we can only describe as the spiritual principle of His manhood ; and by " drinking His blood," receiving and absorbing His human but God-united life. No doubt it may be said that language like this appeals rather to the spiritual imagination and feeling of believers than to their speculative intellect. No doubt also in its warmth and fulness it appeals to some more naturally than to others— to St. Paul rather than to St. James, to Ignatius of Antioch rather than to Clement of Rome; but no one can be at home in the New Testament language as a whole without being able to dwell on it and give a meaning to it ; and it may be doubted whether, when we come to examine it, the idea involves any more intellectual difficulty than is involved in the mystery of human
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA. 33
life at its inception and at every stage of itsj)ropagation.
We know that our human life is not an isolated product in each individual. We men belong to a family, to a race, to humanity: that is to say, we derive our life with all its wonderful faculties and faults — not only physical but intellectual, moral and spiritual —from our parents and ancestors, back to the beginnings of our race. We share a com mon and a transmitted life.1 The process of its transmission — the manner in which we individuals carry in ourselves not only the physical stock but the accumulated moral and spiritual heritage of the manhood to which we belong — this permeation of the individual by the race, is very mysterious. It baffles our attempts at analysis at every turn. It does not enable us fully to interpret and explain the phenomena of individuality which stand out against the fact of unity,
1 I touch here the edge of the old controversy between traducianism and creationism. But I think, however much emphasis we may lay on the individuality of each soul, something like what is stated above must be admitted.
B.C. u
34 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
still less to forecast or anticipate them. But it is a fact. It is the justifying principle of St. Paul's teaching about the "first Adam"- this fact of our natural organic unity. And we must ask whether there is really anything more mysterious or intellectually difficult in the conception of the second Adam, of the glorified Christ, healing the spiritual and moral unsoundness of the human race by infusing into it, through whatever means, the recreative influences of His own manhood. Nor will a reasonable man be surprised that he cannot subject these influences of the new manhood to analysis, for he cannot subject life to analysis at any stage, so as to find out its secret.
Thus we return and take our stand upon what the language of the New Testament involves — that Christ declared His intention to communicate to His church His own human life ; that the apostles who first fully expounded His intentions believed and taught this, and transmitted the belief to the best and deepest of Christians in all generations ; and that it is this which
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA. 35
alone makes intelligible the whole of the Christian language about the eucharist, which goes back for its certificate to the institution of Christ. This fundamental principle must be our first presupposition in approaching the doctrine of the eucharist.
D 2
§ 4- The sacramental principle.
Our second presupposition must be some adequate perception of the meaning and value of sacraments ; a condition of mind such as renders it intelligible that a spiritual gift should be communicated by God to man through the medium of a material ceremony.
There is, it must be admitted, a tendency in Protestantism, partly to be explained by reaction, towards a conception of spirituality which is certainly not completely Christian— a conception which puts the spiritual straight off in opposition to the material, so that the idea of a spiritual gift attached by divine ordinance to material conditions is rejected as unworthy of God.1 It is questionable whether those who hold such language can ever have really reflected on the conditions under which indisputably the most important
1 Cf. Mr. \V. Hay M. H. Aitken, The Mechanical versus the Spiritual (Shaw, 1899).
THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. 37
and fundamental spiritual gift given on this earth, the gift which is the necessary founda tion of all others — the gift of the human soul, capable of all spiritual activities, and destined for an immortal fellowship with God —is actually given. The production on this earth of a human soul or personality, with all its tremendous and eternal possibilities for good and evil, is by God's creative will indisputably attached to material con ditions ; and such conditions as are in experience found to be the most liable to be misused, and to become not material only but carnal. This at least gives us something to think about. It shows us something of the mind of God. This dependence of the immortal spirit --the only seat of human spirituality — upon material conditions, at its origin and throughout.its existence upon the earth, is the most convincing refutation of a great deal of language used in repudiation of the sacramental principle.
So inextricably, in fact, is the human spirit implicated in the flesh, that it is only through the perceptions of the senses that it
38 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
is able originally to act at all ; and in the relations of men to one another their life is carried on, to an extent which reflection leads us to realize more and more, upon a basis of what one may call natural sacra ments. Thus handshaking is the sacrament of friendship, and kissing the sacrament of love. And each in expressing also intensifies the emotion which it expresses. The spirit in us feeds upon the material of its own symbols. The flag again is the sacrament of the soldiers' honour, and can stimulate it to the point of uttermost self-sacrifice. And it would be easy to go on multiplying such examples. Thus there can be no doubt that, on all human analogy, a religion which, like the Christian religion, exists to realize com munion with God under conditions ol ordinary human life, and which refuses to confine its message to some select class of philosophers who may claim (though it is an idle boast) to live a life aloof from the body — such a religion for common men must have developed, apart from any ques tion of authority, sacramental ceremonies.
THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. 39
They are, as all history shows, the natural means for religion to use.
Would then the divine principles of the Christian religion hinder such use of sacra ments ? On the contrary, the religion ot the incarnation — the religion of a Christ come in the flesh — associates the lower and material nature with the whole process of redemption, and teaches us that not without a material and visible embodiment is the spiritual life to be realized either now or in eternity. The spiritual, in the New Testa ment, means not what is separated from the material or the bodily, but that in which the spirit rules, or that which expresses a spiritual meaning.1 Thus from the days when the first Christian Fathers were fighting their great battle against the false spirituality of Gnosticism, it has been the sound argu ment of Christian theologians2 that the idea of sacraments — the idea of spiritual gifts given through material means --is of a
1 See further, p. 126.
- See Ignatius ad Smyrn. 6; Irenaens c. liar. i. 21, 4, iv. 17 — 18, v. a — 3; Tertullian de res. earn. 8; Gregory of
40 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
piece with the whole method of God in the creation and redemption of man ; of a piece, to put the matter otherwise, with the two fold nature of man, in which the body is asso ciated most intimately with every spiritual faculty, and in which every spiritual emotion and capacity is made to depend upon external and physical facts.
But the argument is enormously strength ened when the social character of sacraments is had in view. I suppose that if we ask ourselves the tremendous question why God, almighty and all-loving, should have attached the production of a spiritual personality, so awfully endowed, to conditions so precarious and capable of degradation as sexual union, the most satisfactory answer is, that this is but one example of a universal law : that God has willed (in spite of all the risks involved) to bind individual beings together in social relationship. God may indeed ultimately
Nyssa cat. mag. 33 — 35 ; Chrysostom in Matt. horn. Ixxxii. 4. P. G. Ivii. 743. These passages, read in their continuity, show a remarkable unity of teaching, and it would be easy to add to them.
THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. 41
take the soul into His own absolutely equit able hands, to reconstitute it solely in view of its individual possibilities and responsi bilities ; but for this world, at least, its whole condition, spiritual as well as material, is, to a degree which it is not easy to exagge rate, dependent upon the society which is responsible for it, whether it be family, tribe or nation. That the individual is to be the product of the society, not indeed wholly, but mainly and in most cases, is, I say, the lesson which universal nature bears upon its face.
And this law passes unchanged into the kingdom of redemption. There, also, the individual Christian is to be what he is, and to become what he can become, by relations to the divine society, the church. And it is in the method by which he is first brought into "the household," and then fed there, that this is apparent. That is to say, the sacra ments, which are means of personal grace, are also social ceremonies: ceremonies only possible among members of a society.1 The attachment of the particular spiritual gifts,
1 See more at length app. note 21, pp. 316 ft.
42 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
by divine institution, to sacraments — that is, to social ceremonies — is the divine provision against spiritual individualism. Thus our new birth into Christ is attached to a washing of water. This is the "bath of regeneration," the being " baptized into Christ." But it is also our introduction into the society; "by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body." Again, our confirmation, or " unction " by the Holy Ghost, which is the completion of our baptism, is attached to the laying-on of the hands of the chief pastor of the society ; and while it is the enriching of our personal life, it is also our investiture with a kingship and priesthood, which imply the full privi leges and obligations of membership in the society. Once more, the fullest personal fellowship with Christ, the eating His flesh and drinking His blood, is attached to the pre-eminently social sacrament — that is to say, to " the breaking of the bread," the fraternal sharing of bread and wine.
At first the social aspect of the eucharist was unmistakable. As when it was insti tuted at the last supper, so when it was
THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. 43
celebrated in the first clays at Corinth, it was the crowning event of a special social meal— the " Lord's supper."1 It thus extended its consecrating influence over all meals which were " sanctified by the word of God and prayer."' But human weakness very soon made such a mode of celebrating it undesirable. The Corinthians by their selfishness and greediness treated the supper as "their own" and not "the Lord's." Thus very early the eucharist had to be detached from the love-feast, and pursued its own independent development. In our day we could not wish it otherwise. Such a convivial background to the highest
1 See i Cor. xi. 20. The " Lord's supper" appears to have been a name current for the meal, of which the eucharist formed a part. As a name for the eucharist alone it does not occur till much later — first in St. Basil. It must be remarked, that St. Paul's tremendous language (i Cor. xi. 27 — 30) makes it impossible to suggest that — so far as the apostolic teaching went — the spiritual meaning of the eucharist was in any way imperilled by its social setting. But in the Didache we probably have an example of a half- Christianized church where this was the case.
- i Tim. iv. 4, 5. There are many indications in early days how the consecration spread itself from the " Christian sacrifice " over all Christian meals.
44 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
spiritual acts could only be maintained in societies which are kept at a very high level by the moral cost involved in joining them. But the social symbolism of the " breaking of the bread " was still apparent in Justin Martyr's days and later on,1 especially in the dignified ritual of the Roman church. For there the primitive custom survived into the middle ages of taking the elements for consecration out of the offerings of the people ; and also the special solemnity of the " fraction " of the consecrated bread, and the sending of portions from the bishop's mass to the other city churches, gave vivid expression to the unity of the body.2 And even where the social symbolism of the
1 The idea is ritually expressed by the breaking of the one loaf and the drinking of the one cup. Also, as Cyprian explains it to us, by the addition of water (representing us men) to the wine (of Christ's humanity). Might we not nowadays have a compromise in the Church of England by which one side should abandon the wholly unsymbolical practice of separate wafers in favour of the one bread, in some form leavened or unleavened ; and the other side should accept the mixture of the chalice — indisputably a quite primitive custom ?
'- See app. note 3, p. 292.
THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. 45
ritual was less pronounced, still in all parts of the world the teaching of the church gave to the idea more or less of emphasis.
We ought to remember that a great deal is lost — more than can be easily calculated— if at any period this great idea of fraternity is allowed to fade out of the eucharistic language or ritual of the church. A system hardly deserves the name of Christian at all, which does not impress upon its worshippers that communion with God is no otherwise to be realized than in human brotherhood.
The more we dwell on the social meaning of sacraments, the more profoundly satisfying an answer does it supply to the difficulties raised by such a false spiritualism as resents the attachment of spiritual gifts to outward conditions. On the other hand, there is here no disparagement of the claim which Christianity makes upon the individual will and heart and intellect. Our social opportunities, whether they be political or religious, are only realized by the response of the individual will — by the reaction of the man upon his surroundings. For example,
46 THE BODY OF CH RI ST.
the greater the birthright which belongs to an Englishman because of the circumstances of his birth, the greater the responsibility in which he is involved, and the more mani fest the failure if he is apathetic or worse. Similarly also the greater the spiritual opportunities of our baptism, the deeper the requirement upon the faith of the individual to claim and use them ; if need be, to be converted or "turn," and use them.1 And the higher the gift which mere outward participation in the sacrament of the holy communion puts at our disposal, the more certain it is that only according to our faith will it be done to us. For faith only can appropriate and make our own a spiritual gift. But there will be further opportunities for reflecting upon this side of the truth when we come to speak of the presence in the eucharist as a spiritual presence.
And again, this doctrine of sacraments seeks to impose no restrictions on God,
1 The true teaching is expressed by Gregory of Nyssa in few words in cat. mag. c. 36. Our salvation in its beginning is by " faith and water."
THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. 47
whether for this life or beyond it. God is not tied by His own ordinances, but can give where and as it pleases Him. We do but declare that the sacramental method is the stated and normal law of His kingdom, and therefore the law to which we at least are bound, alike in prudence and in love, to conform our practice and our expectations.
We are now in a position to give closer attention to the exact nature of the gift or presence in the eucharist, on the basis of these two presuppositions : (i) that a central and essential feature of the Christian reli gion is the communication to believers by the Spirit of the life of the Christ, divine and human, or, as we may call it, the spiri tual principle and virtue of His manhood ; (2) that the communication of this spiritual life to us by means of a material and social ceremony is quite analogous to the whole of what we know about the relation of the human spirit to bodily conditions, about the relation of the individual to the society, and about the principles of the pre-eminently human and social religion of the Son of Man.
CHAPTER II.
THE GIFT AND PRESENCE IN HOLY COMMUNION.
§ i. The nature of the gift.
Now we are in a position to examine somewhat more definitely the nature of the gift given in Holy Communion. And at once we realize that on this — the most important matter — there has been compara tively little controversy. It is as to the relation of this divine gift or presence to the outward elements of bread and wine that controversy has raged in one form or another since the eleventh century with not much in termission. In England since the Reformation the question has chiefly been — Is the spiritual presence in the bread and wine indepen dently of reception ? or is it simply that a spiritual gift, as in baptism, accompanies a symbolical act — in this case an act of
THE NATURE. OF THE GIFT. 49
feeding ? This question will come forward for consideration immediately. At present we are only interested in the prior question —what is the spiritual gift given in Holy Communion ; and about this there has been, as was said just now, comparatively little controversy. The gift of the eucharist is precisely that gift of the flesh, or body, and blood of Christ, — the spiritual principle and life of Christ's manhood, inseparable from His whole living self — the meaning of which, apart from all question of ho\v or when we receive it, we were just now considering.
To prove a high degree of agreement on this point, I will proceed to cite a few typical witnesses. And as Richard Hooker stands specially for the attempt to decline or shelve what he describes as the only controverted question — that of a presence in the elements independently of reception — let Hooker first bear his witness as to the nature of the gift given, according to what he calls " the general agreement."1
1 Eccl. Pol, V. Ixvii. [3!.
50 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
Christ in the sacrament, he declares, "im- parteth Himself, even His whole entire per son, as a mystical head, unto every soul that receiveth Him. . . . What merit, force or virtue soever there is in His sacrificed body and blood we freely, fully and wholly have it by this sacrament ; " and " because the sacrament being but a corruptible and earthly creature must needs be thought an unlikely instrument to work so admirable effects on man, we are therefore to rest our selves altogether upon the strength of His glorious power who is able and will bring to pass that this bread and cup which He giveth us shall be truly the thing He promiseth." Again he says, " The Sacra- mentaries " [that is, the schools of Zwingli and Calvin] "grant that these holy mys teries . . . impart to us in true and real though mystical manner the very person of our Lord Himself, whole, perfect and entire."1
Waterland, again, is a cautious and cold theologian of the eighteenth century,
1 L.c. [7] and [8].
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 51
who is specially identified with the positive repudiation of any presence of Christ in the elements: but as to the spiritual effect of the act of communion his language is precise. It is a union with Christ's flesh and blood, i.e., His manhood, and so it is " a mystical union with Christ in His whole person." l And he speaks of " fixing the economy of man's salvation upon its true and proper basis, which is this : that in the sacraments we are made and continued members of Christ's body, of His flesh and of His bone. Our union with the Deity rests entirely upon our mystical union with our Lord's humanity, which is personally united with His divine nature, which is essentially united with God the Father, the head and fountain of all. So stands the economy ; which shows the high importance of the principle before men tioned. And it is well that Romanists and Lutherans, and Greeks also, even the whole
1 Doctr. of the Euch. (Oxford, 1880), p. 192. Water- land considers St. John vi. to refer to a divine gift, not exclusively but specially bestowed upon us in the eucharist.
E 2
52 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
East and West, have preserved it, and yet preserve it." }
It would indeed be hard for English churchmen to speak otherwise, the lan guage of the Prayer Book being so con stant and imperative as to the reality and character of the gift conveyed through the partaking of the bread and wine. But the point needs to be made emphatic, because with the holding of this doctrine, in such real sense as admits of its being deliberately and calmly stated and insisted upon, all real intellectual difficulty about the eucharist ought to be over. Beyond this we may seek to conform our apprehension and our statements as exactly as possible to the general mind of the church and the lan guage of the New Testament, and to avoid errors and corruptions of which history warns us, but the chief point of difficulty is already past.
Both Hooker and Waterland are laying down in these passages what they conceive to be the point of agreement even among the
1 L.c., p. 520,
'THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 53
various schooLs of Christians who adhered to the Reformation. No doubt there were already Zwinglians or Socinians who made of the Holy Communion only a symbolic repre sentation of the death of Christ and of the benefits which we receive thereby : only an occasion when we solemnly eat the broken bread and drink the outpoured wine and in connection with these speaking symbols mentally realize our union with our crucified Lord. And it does not, I suppose, admit of doubt that in the Protestant and Evangelical bodies of the Continent and of England this purely figurative view has since their day obtained the widest diffusion — as far as theory goes; though the practical devotional attitude of believers towards the sacrament has, we may well believe, habitually reached a higher level. But Hooker and Waterland could appeal, not to the Lutherans only \vith their (reputed) consubstantiation, but to the re modelled doctrine of Calvin, when he had separated himself from Zwingli and asserted in the strongest language the actual and substantial communication to us in the
54 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
sacrament of Christ's body and blood, His life and self, to be our spiritual food.1 This was the substantial point of agreement, as the outcome of all the controversies of the Reformation, between the divided portions of the ancient church, and nearly all the Reformed bodies.
And this belief did but carry on the tradi tion of the church from the days before the controversy about transubstantiation, which so painfully confused the intellectual issue. This is specially apparent in the teaching of the great theological fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. Athanasius is set to vindicate the true godhead of Christ and the unity of His person; and thus he explains that the reason why we become partakers of the divine nature (or, as he says, " are deified ") by partaking of the body of Christ, is because what we receive is not " the body of some man, but the body of the Lord Himself."2 And in regard to the "eating
1 See, for a collection of passages from Calvin, Paget's Introduction to Hooker B. v. (Clarendon Press, 1899), pp. 180 ff.
2 Ep. Ixi. 2 (P. G. xxvi. 1085).
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 55
Christ's flesh," according to St. John vi., he would have us remember that it is indeed the flesh that Christ was wearing of which He spoke, but that flesh as spiritualized and raised to the heavenly region, and therefore to be not '" corporally" but spiritually con ceived, as it is also for a spiritual nourishment that it is distributed.1 It is plain what Athana- sius' belief was both as to the reality and as to the spirituality of the eucharistic gift ; as to its being truly the body and the blood, but the body and the blood of the whole living and divine person, spiritually con ceived and spiritually imparted.
These points are repeatedly asserted by Cyril of Alexandria.'2 "When we celebrate the bloodless worship in our churches and approach the mystic gifts, and are sanctified by becoming partakers of the holy flesh and the precious blood of our common Saviour Christ, it is not as common flesh that we
1 Ep. ad Scrap, iv. 19 (P. G. xxvi. 665). I have given the passage in Dissertations, p. 305.
5 See Dissert, p. 306, and Ep. xvii. (ad Nest) P.G. Ixxvii. 113. I have used compression in translating.
56 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
receive it, God forbid ! or as the flesh of a man in however close relation to God : it is as being truly life-giving flesh that we receive it, because it is His own flesh who is the Word and Himself the Life." Or again, " We receive within us the Word of the Father, incarnate for our sakes, and both life and life-giving." l
The same thoughts and arguments are familiar in the western fathers, Hilary and Augustine.2 And when Leo is emphasizing the counter aspect of the truth about our Lord to that which had occupied Athanasius and Cyril — when he is emphasizing the per manence and reality of our Lord's manhood, — there is still an argument to be drawn from the familiar belief in the eucharist. " Can they," that is his opponents, he asks, " lie in such depths of ignorance as not even to have heard of what is so familiar in every one's mouth in the church of God, that not even infants' lips are silent about the truth of the body and blood of Christ in the sacraments
1 In Luc. Ixxii. ig,P.G. Ixxii. 908. 3 See Dissert, p. 306.
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 57
of communion ? For this is what is given, this is what is taken, in that mystical distri bution of spiritual sustenance ; that receiving the virtue of the heavenly food, we should pass into His flesh who was made our flesh."1
I will make only one more quotation from a theologian of this period — St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 345). "Therefore," he says, "with full assurance let us partake of the bread and wine as being the body and blood of Christ. For in the figure of bread is given thee the body, and in the figure of wine is given thee the blood, in order that by partaking of the body and the blood thou mayest become of one body and one blood with Him. For it is thus also we become Christ-bearers, His body and His blood being distributed over our limbs.2 Thus, according to blessed Peter, we become partakers of the divine nature."
This same belief (only, as would be
1 Ep. lix. 2 ; cf. serin, xci. 3 (/'. L. liv. 452, 868).
- Or " having received of His body and blood into our members." Catcch. xxii. 3. See, on reading and meaning, Dr. Gifford in Nicene and Ante-Niccne Fathers, Cyril of Jerusalem, pp. xxxvii. ff. ; and below, p. 63.
58 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
expected, less explicitly stated) runs back to the beginning,1 with certain exceptions, to be mentioned directly. It is heard first of all, outside the New Testament, in Ignatius of Antioch. " The false teachers [who denied the reality of our Lord's manhood] abstain from eucharistand prayer because they do not acknowledge that the eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, which by His goodness the Father raised up." " Take care then to frequent but one eucharist (i.e., to avoid schism) ; for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup for unity in His blood ; one altar, as there is one bishop with the presbyters and deacons." " Breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote that we should not die, but live in Christ Jesus for ever." 2
This is really, then, the catholic faith about the eucharistic gift --so much so that Thomassin, a theologian who has the widest and profoundest knowledge of the
1 Cyprian de doinln. oral. 18 is very explicit. - On Ignatius see app. note 4, p. 292.
THE NATURE OF THE GIET. 59
fathers, can find no other phrase to sum marize his massive quotations from them on the subject than by speaking of the eucharist as " the extension of the incar nation " —the instrument for extending the incarnate life. " The incarnation," he says, " gaped, as it were, incomplete and sus pended, until in all its parts and elements it was fulfilled through the eucharist."
But there are three modifications which must be given to any statement as to the catholicity of this faith, before it can be regarded as approximately complete.
(i) There was a tendency in the earlier school of Alexandria, by a process of intel lectual refinement, to explain — I must say to explain away — the body (or flesh) and blood of Christ as meaning no more than His word or His spirit ; and thus even to make the eucharist not much more than an occasion for mystical contemplation. This tendency was really influential, and not heretical or schismatical, for it clung to,
1 Thomassin Theol. Dogm. " DC Incarn." lib. x. cap. xxii. § 4.
60 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
even while for its own purpose it refined upon, the common belief and the com mon worship. But it came to be judged, and surely with justice, as an inadequate mode of belief. For it is not merely the Spirit for our spirits, or the teaching for our intellects, that we ask for and receive, but the whole Christ for our whole selves.1 Nothing less than this, as we have already seen, can satisfy the language of the New Testament.
(2) There is a sporadic tendency — as in Clement of Alexandria, Jerome, Ratramn and some of his contemporaries,2 in our
1 For Origen's own tendency of belief the clearest pas sages are in Matt, comment, scr. 82, 85 ; in Johan. xxxii. 16 ; cf. Bigg Christian Platonists (Oxford, 1886), pp. 219 — 222. He witnesses that his was not the common faith: " Let the bread and the cup be conceived by the simple according to the commoner acceptation of the eucharist ; but by those who have learnt to hear with a deeper ear, according to the divine promise, even that of the nourish ing word of the truth." In fact Origen's depreciation of the " flesh " goes with his depreciation of the historical sense. It is part of his allegorism. The tendency described above mostly accompanies, whether as cause or effect, the misunderstanding of St. John vi. 62. See app. note 2, p. 290.
' Quoted in Dissertations, p. 239.
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 61
own English Aelfric (probably taught by Ratramn) and in some later Anglicans, such as John Johnson — to distinguish the eucharistic body and blood of Christ from that in which He was born and suffered and died, as being " spiritual," and not "natural" or "real," and thus a different body. The exact meaning of this language is not always easy to fix. But (except perhaps in the case of Clement, who would be under the same influences as Origen) what they mean is only what has been expressed, and better expressed, by Athanasius and the church generally, in saying that the eucharistic body and blood are the very body and blood in which Christ lived and died and rose and ascended, only bestowed on us in a spiritual and heavenly manner ; the same body, only not now in its material particles, but in its spiritual principle and virtue. This, I say, is a better mode of statement than that which speaks of different bodies or different kinds of blood, because St. John vi. would plainly intimate to us that that with
62 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
which we are fed as the bread of life is nothing else than what Christ is — Himself in His manhood glorified.
" In the explication of this question," says Jeremy Taylor, "it is much insisted upon that it be enquired whether, when we say we believe Christ's body to be ' really ' in the sacrament, we mean, that body, that flesh, that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified, dead and buried. I answer, I know none else that He had or hath : there is but one body of Christ natural and glorified ; but he that says that body is glorified that was crucified, says it is the same body, but not after the same manner ; and so it is in the sacrament ; we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ that was broken and poured forth : for there is no other body, no other blood of Christ ; but though it is the same which we eat and drink, yet it is in another manner." l
(3) There was an early tendency- opposite to that of the Alexandrians—
1 Jer. Taylor, Real Presence, § i, n.
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 63
apparent in Irenaeus and, somewhat
differently, in Tertullian, and later in Cyril
of Jerusalem and more plainly in Gregory
of Nyssa,1 to lay a one-sided emphasis on
the idea that the eucharist was given to
cleanse our bodies and nourish them for
the life immortal : it was to impart the
11 antidote of immortality " to the perishing
flesh. Pursuing this line of thinking, the
fathers mentioned above seem to identify
the body and blood of Christ with the
bread and wine considered as physical food.
These, as enriched by the divine Word or
Spirit with life-giving powers, are called,
and indeed become, Christ's body and blood
(Gregory postulates even a physical change
in the elements), and, as eaten or drunken,
nourish the human body with an immortal
life and divine fellowship with God. It
would be unjust to commit men, who
1 For Irenaeus see c. liar. iv. 18, 5, v. 2, 3. On Tertul lian see Dissertations, pp. 308 ff. On Cyril see above, p. 57, and Gifford's note referred to ; also Cat. xxii. 5. For Gregory Cat. Mag. 37. Gregory makes baptism with faith the salvation of the soul, and the communion of the body and blood the salvation of the body.
64 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
were making the first attempt to express mysterious truth, to all that their words sometimes seem to imply. Indeed the first use of theological language on any subject, before it has been rigorously cross- questioned from outside, is, except in the case of the specially inspired authors, very seldom accurate. But the tendency we have been describing naturally makes these fathers think of the eucharistic gift almost exclu sively as a bodily gift — a gift of body for body, without thought for the wholeness of Christ's person ; and represents therefore a divergent tendency, similar to what has been noticed in the Alexandrians though in the opposite direction, and, like theirs, on maturer reflection unacceptable.
For though in the Holy Communion our body is sanctified through the sanctification of our spirit, and transformed and endowed, in subtle and secret ways which pass our comprehension, with capacity for the life immortal ; yet it is through the spirit and not directly. Primarily the gift of Christ's body and blood is a spiritual gift for the
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 65
spirit. Faith alone is the instrument which can receive it, and not the mouth of the body. The gift accompanies the material bread and wine, but is to be distinguished from it. And inasmuch as the body and blood are spiritual, they are indistinguish able or inseparable from the living person, the whole Christ. " He that eateth me, even he shall live by me."
Already we shall have seen that it was no easy matter for the church to express its common faith and feeling about the eucharist in intellectual formulas. There were more or less marked divergent theo logical tendencies — though there was little consciousness of their divergence — especially in the second and third centuries. But the only formulas in which the faith of the church in general could ever find adequate expression are such as declare that the gift communicated to us in the eucharistic feast is verily and indeed that of the flesh or body and blood of Christ according to a spiritual and heavenly manner ; that is to say the gift of Christ Himself, in His whole person,
B.C. F
66 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
given to us for the sanctification of our whole persons, that He may dwell in us and we in Him.
It stands to reason that if there be thus, as the Christian church so constantly believed, a real communication to us of the flesh and blood of Christ, it must be the "flesh" and "blood" of the glorified Christ, for no other exists. These mysterious things are given to us in the eucharist under conditions which recall a past state — the state of sacrificial death. It is our Lord as dying that faith recalls : it is His death for us that we "proclaim till He come"1 in the breaking of the bread. But those very words of St. Paul, "till He come," suggest that He is no longer dead, that He is alive and in heaven. The person who now feeds us with His own very life, divine and human, is He who is set before us in a vision of the Apocalypse as a " Lamb as it had been slain," but alive for evermore in the heavenly places.2
1 i Cor. xi. 26.
2 See below also, p. 181.
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 67
There is only one other point that needs touching upon at this stage of the argument, and that is the special sense in which this gift is connected with the eucharist. It may be said — What does this eating the flesh of Christ and drinking His blood mean that is not meant also by being baptized " into Christ" and being " His members"? You would admit that this eating does not mean a consuming of any material atoms or elements of Christ's body : it means absorbing the spiritual forces of His humanity : but this is what is also meant by membership of Christ. Do we not, therefore, in the true sense eat Christ's flesh and drink Christ's blood also in baptism ?
This question is not sufficiently answered with the simple negative. When Fulgen- tius of Ruspe (A.D. 507) was confronted with the question how, if the eating of Christ's flesh and drinking His blood was necessary to eternal life, could a baptized person, who without fault of his own had died after baptism without having received the Holy Communion, obtain salvation, he gave the
F 2
68 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
not perhaps very adequate answer, that such an one had already eaten Christ's flesh and drunk His blood by the very fact of becoming a member of His body ; and he claimed for this answer the authority of "the fathers," and especially of St. Augustine.1 The answer is not morally adequate, for it fails to recognize that God is free to give His gifts of spiritual life to all "men of good will," apart from any sacraments ; but it suggests an element of truth which it is important to acknowledge. It is one and the same spiritual process which is described as being made a member of Christ or being baptized into Christ, and also as eating His flesh and drinking His blood : it is one and the same process which is described as being regene rated by the Spirit in baptism and as receiv ing Him in confirmation. And the process is
1 Ep. xii. 24 — 26 (P. L. Ixv. 590 — 592). St. Augustine in the passage he quotes does not do more than indi rectly imply the answer ; but it is more clearly implied in the language used by him and by Pope Innocent : see Aug. Epp. clxxxvi. 28 — 29, clxxxii. 5 ; and also a citation from Augustine, on Bede's authority, in Thomas Aq. 5. Th. p. iii. qu. 73, 3.
THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. 69
a vital thing, which cannot be wholly sun- dered into parts, and in which we cannot draw sharp lines. We cannot say simply that the inward gift of the eucharist (or of confirm ation) is not given in baptism.1 What we can say is that the fellowship in the ever- continuous supply of the new life is, for the needs of our nature, given to us in stages and by degrees of growing intensity and power; and that each stage of the communi cation is identified with a separate sacrament which is thus positively characterized only in a certain way.
Thus baptism is our regeneration, or our incorporation into the new manhood by the Spirit, and involves that deep breach with the past which is expressed by the forgiveness of sins : confirmation is the bestowal of the unction of the Holy Spirit of Christ for the full equipment of the personal life, both for individual strength and social service : the
1 Except indeed by using the negative, as it is often used in Scripture, when what is exactly meant is " not to the same degree," or " not in the same sense." This use of the negative is admirably noted and explained by Berengar. See Dissertations, p. 257.
yo THE BODY OF CHRIST.
eucharist is the full and repeated communion in His all-powerful manhood — the eating His flesh and drinking His blood — and through His manhood, the perfect communion with God. Throughout it is the same gift, minis tered by the same Spirit : but it is the same gift in different stages of completeness : and it is the completest degree of participation in Christ's manhood which, in the language of the New Testament, is identified with Holy Communion. This is the truth which was expressed by the African Christians when they called baptism u salvation " and the eucharist "life."1
1 See Augustin etc pecc. iner. et rein. i. 34.
§ 2. The relation of the spiritual gift to the bread and wine.
But if the gift given in Holy Communion is continuous with that given in baptism and cannot be sharply separated from it, how is it with the outward and visible sign or sacramental channel ? In baptism the spiritual gift is attached to an act of bathing or washing defined by certain accompany ing words.1 In the " breaking of the bread" is the spiritual gift merely, in the same way, attached to the act or process of eating and drinking?
Such has certainly not been the mind of the church from the first. It has believed that, by consecration of the portions of bread and wine which have been solemnly
1 This is the meaning of the technical word " form " applied by theologians to the sacred sacramental words. They define or give form to the "matter" of an external action which in itself is quite vague in its significance.
72 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
set apart or offered, the spiritual gift of Christ's body and blood is, in some way, attached to these elements (however the rela tionship is to be described) before they are eaten and drunken, and independently of such eating and drinking. As Dr. Mozley says— and he was not a thinker who would be prone to exaggerate this aspect of the question— 11 Certainly the ground taken by the e^rly church with respect to the spiritual part of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper — the body and blood of our Lord — was not that that spiritual part was only an internal matter, a moral effect of the act of partici pation upon the mind. The Lord's body and blood was regarded as a reality external to the mind, even as the bread and wine was ; it was considered as joined to the bread and wine, and so existing with it in one sacrament. ' The eating and drinking of it in the sacrament,' Thorndike says, ' pre supposes the being of it in the sacrament . . . unless a man can spiritually eat the flesh and blood of Christ in and by the sacrament, which is not in the sacrament
THE OBJECTIVE PRESENCE. 73
when he eats and drinks it, but by his eating and drinking of it comes to be there.' The language of the early church on the subject is so well known, and so large a body of it meets us in the writings of the early ages, that we need not dwell long upon this characteristic of early teaching on the subject of the eucharist."
Dr. Mozley proceeds to modify this state ment by a counter-statement, that as the gift was a spiritual gift, so faith only could recognize or receive it. Some such counter-statement — some statement of the " relativity" of the presence — is most neces sary, and will give us matter for serious consideration. But for the present we are concerned only with part of the question— the consecration of the elements themselves to become sacramentally identified with the body and blood of Christ.
This is what is called the doctrine of an objectively real presence in the eucharist. Of course this phrase might express equally well the reality of the spiritual grace imparted
1 Lectures and Theol. Papers (Longmans), p. 202.
74 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
in baptism. For .that too is objective ; in the sense that it is not the product of the receiver's mind, but is a real gift from God, given and received ; and that it must be conceived as given irrespective of the state of mind or condition of faith of the receiver ; so that an unconscious infant is regenerated, and even a bad man really receives the spiritual endowment of his nature which he only ignores, or misuses to his greater hurt. In this sense all who are sacramental believers would admit the gift in the holy eucharist to be objective — that is, to be a real divine gift communicated m the act of eating and drinking. The word however is generally used in a further sense in which it is not applicable to baptism ; and its use in this sense is so valuable for purposes of distinction that it had better be retained. "It expresses the belief that prior to reception, and independently of the faith of the indi vidual, the body and blood of Christ are made present "under the forms of" bread and wine, or in some real though undefined way identified with them.
THE OBJECTIVE PRESENCE. 75
That this was the belief of the early church generally, as Dr. Mozley asserts, may be shown by evidence of three kinds.
I. There is the evidence of the reverence displayed towards the consecrated elements —not in the way of what is now called eucharistic worship, as of the divine Christ present under the forms of bread and wine, of which, as will appear, the evidence is ambiguous ; but of scrupulous care that no fragment of the consecrated bread or drop of the wine should fall. There is very early evidence l of such care from Alexandria, Africa, Jerusalem, and perhaps Rome : so that it must represent an universal and primitive Christian tradition of reverence. Now it has nothing corresponding to it in the case of the water of baptism. Indeed an early method was to baptize in run ning water. This is important, because occasionally the language of early Chris tian writers about the consecration of the water in baptism, or of the chrism, would suggest that the water or oil itself
1 *See app. note 5, p. 293.
76 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
was changed.1 But (to go no farther) the difference between the treatment of the water or oil and the treatment of the bread and wine points to a difference in what was believed with regard to them : it indicates that the particular portions of bread and wine consecrated were regarded as having become in themselves holy and sacred things. II. The language of the eucharistic con secration explains this belief. What we may call the normal form of consecration consists of three parts : there is (a) the recitation of the narrative of the institution, including the words which in the West have come to be recognized as the instrument of consecration, but which originally only formed a part of the great "giving of thanks," the solemn commemoration of the divine glory and goodness as shown in nature and in the whole history of redemption, and specially in the passion and death of our Lord, and in His institution of the eucharist in remem brance of Himself. Next (b) there is a
1 This identity of phraseology has been much exaggerated : see app. note 6, p. 294.
THE OBJECTIVE PRESENCE. 77
solemn oblation of the elements in accord ance with Christ's institution — "wherefore we, remembering His passion, death and resurrection, etc., here offer and present." Thirdly (c) there is an invocation of the Holy Ghost, a prayer that God would send down the Holy Ghost — whose special function it is to communicate the life of Christ to the church1 — to make the elements to be the body and blood of Christ for the reception of the faithful. Here is a specimen of such a consecration prayer from the directory of worship known as the Apostolical Con stitutions.
(a) " Calling therefore to remembrance those things which He endured for our sakes,
1 This scriptural principle explains the instinct of the church to invoke the Holy Ghost upon the elements. Thus St. Cyril finds in the eucharistic invocation an instance of the general principle that " every grace and every perfect gift comes upon us from the Father through the Son by the Holy Ghost" (in Luc. xxii. 19). See E. S. Ffoulkes Primitive Consecration of the Eucharistic Oblation (Hayes, 1885), pp. 13, ff. Mr. Ffoulkes is right at any rate in his contention that the church for many centuries both in East and West attributed the consecration of the elements to the action of the Holy Ghost invoked by the church.
78 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
we give thanks unto Thee, 0 God Almighty, not as we ought, but as we are able, and fulfil His institution. For in the same night that He was betrayed, taking bread into His holy and immaculate hands, and looking up to Thee, His God and Father, and breaking it, He gave it to His disciples, saying, This is the mystery of the New Testament ; take of it ; eat ; this is My body, which is broken for many for the remission of sins. Like wise, also, having mingled the cup with wine and water, and blessed it, He gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it ; this is My blood which is shed for many for the remis sion of sins ; do this in remembrance of Me, for as often as ye eat of this bread, and drink of this cup, ye do shew forth My death till I come.
(6) " Wherefore having in remembrance His passion, death, and resurrection from the dead, His return into heaven, and His future second appearance, when He shall come with glory and power to judge the quick and the dead, and to render to every man according to his works : we offer to
THE OBJECTIVE PRESENCE. 79
Thee, our King and our God, according to His institution, this bread and this cup, giving thanks to Thee through Him, that Thou hast thought us worthy to stand before Thee, and to serve as priests unto Thee.
(c] "And we beseech Thee that Thou wilt look graciously on these gifts now lying before Thee, O Thou all-sufficient God, and accept them to the honour of Thy Christ ; and send down Thy Holy Spirit, the witness of the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, on this sacrifice, that He may make1 this bread the body of Thy Christ, and this cup the blood of Thy Christ, that all who shall partake of it may be confirmed in godliness, may receive remission of their sins, may be de livered from the devil and his' wiles, may be
1 Or "declare" (inrotf>-!i i/??). This word, with the similar cbniSei/ci/tWi (or avaSfiKvvvai), is sometimes used indistin- guishably from iroif ?»/, " to make to be." But as used in the liturgies it carries with it probably not only the idea of making the elements to be what they were not before, but also the idea of revealing or declaring what they have become to the faithful. " He shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you." no(*<V, a,iro$tiKyvycu, avaSfiKvi/vai are all found in the eucharistic invocation, and the language of the fathers in describing it, more or less indiscriminately.
8o THE BODY OF CHRIST.
filled with the Holy Ghost, may be made worthy of Thy Christ, and may obtain ever lasting life, Thou, O Lord Almighty, being reconciled unto them."
This is from an ideal rather than an historical rite, but it is typical or representa tive of the form common to the Greek litur gies, which must go back along many lines to very early days. It is just such a form that St. Basil regards as derived from the apostles by unwritten tradition.1
Not that it is in all its parts to be regarded as essential or universal. Thus—
(1) St. Cyril of Jerusalem in his detailed account of the liturgy2 of his church and age is strikingly silent about any commemora tive recitation of the ' ' words of institution ' ' ; and this at least shows, what he elsewhere makes plain, that he did not attribute im portance to them as a necessary part of the form of consecration.
(2) There is not always explicit mention
1 De Spir. Sand. 66.
2 Cat. xxiii. 7; cf. Brightman Liturgies (Oxford, 1896), p. 469.
THE OBJECTIVE PRESENCE. 81
of the Holy Ghost. Thus in the prayers for the eucharist ascribed to Bishop Serapion (c. 350) the invocation is, "0 God of Truth, let Thy holy Word come down upon this bread, that the bread may become the body of the Word, and upon this cup, that the cup may become the blood of the Truth ; and make all who communicate to receive the medicine of life for the healing of all sickness and the strengthening of all progress and virtue."1 We know that such a form was exceptional, and that the Holy Ghost was generally invoked in Egypt in the fourth century ;2 but in earlier days — in Irenaeus' time (c. 1 80) — all we can be sure of is that there was some invocation of God to act in His divine power upon the oblations. " The bread from the earth," says Irenasus, " re ceiving the invocation of God is no longer
1 Journal of Thcol. Stud., Oct. 1899, p. 106. Previously there is a prayer : " Fill this sacrifice, O Lord, with Thy power and the participation of Thee, for we have offered Thee this living sacrifice, this bloodless offering."
2 See the language of Peter of Alexandria, Athanasius' successor, in Theodoret E. H. iv. 19 ; and of St. Theophilus in Jerome Ep. xcviii. 13.
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common bread but eucharist, made up of two realities (things), an earthly and a heavenly"; and twice elsewhere, "The bread and the mixed cup, receiving upon themselves the word of God, become eucharist, that is the body and blood of Christ."1
(3) The prayer was not always explicit as to what was the effect desired by consecration. Thus the "anaphora" or prayer of obla tion, of the Ethiopic Church, which appears to be very ancient, runs: " We beseech Thee that Thou wouldest send Thine Holy Spirit on the oblation of this church : give it unto all them that partake together for sanctification and for fulfilling with the Holy Ghost and for confirming true faith."2 And in the Gallican rites (which, whatever their origin, represent the worship of the greater part of the West for a long period, at least from the fourth century) the invoca-
1 C. liacr. iv. 18. 5, v. 2. 3: sec app. note 7, p. 295.
- Brightman I.e. p. 190 (cf. p. 287). Just below, after invocation, occurs a prayer for those who receive " of the holy mystery of the body and blood of Christ the Almighty Lord our God," p. 191.
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tion-prayer is equally vague: "We pray Thee that Thou wouldest bless with Thy benediction this sacrifice, and water it with the dew of Thy Holy Spirit, that it may be to all those who receive it a legitimate eucharist."1 This vague phrase is described by Duchesne as "characteristic" of the Gallican rites. But there is no doubt that the Gallican or Spanish writers of the period to which it belongs would have interpreted it precisely in the sense of the more explicit Greek prayers. Their belief did not fall below that of St. Ambrose of Milan, who speaks of the " sacraments " or sacra mental elements as being "by the mysterious action of the sacred prayer [elsewhere de scribed as an invocation of the Holy Ghost] transfigured into the flesh and blood of the Lord."2
(4) The Roman canon stands apart in having, or having had, no invocation. In Africa there is evidence that the Holy Spirit
1 Neale and Forbes' Ancient Lit. pp. 4, n, 15, etc. Duchesne Origincs dit Cultc Chretien, Paris, 1895, p. 208. - DC fule iv. 124, de S. S. iii. 114.
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was formally invoked, for Optatus of Milevis (c. 368) speaks of the altars as places "where God Almighty is invoked ; where the Holy Spirit descends at the church's prayer," and afterwards as "the seat of the body and blood of Christ."1 Now Africa got its eccle siastical system from Rome, and it is there fore, as well as for other reasons, probable that the same was the case in the early Roman church. But when the fixed Roman canon was framed in Latin (possibly in the fourth century), the place commonly occupied by the invocation of the Holy Spirit was taken by the prayer " that the oblations might be carried by the hand of God's holy angel to the heavenly altar, in the sight of His divine majesty, that as many as received by participation from the altar the holy body and blood of His Son, might be filled with all heavenly grace."2 In the canon indeed as it exists at present there is at an earlier
1 De schism. Don. vi. i., P. L. xi. 1065.
2 There is a somewhat similar prayer in the Clementine liturgy and in the liturgies of St. James and St. Chrysostom, but after, and independently of, the invocation or consecra-
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point the prayer "that this oblation may become to us the body and blood of Thy dearly beloved Son" : but it does not belong to its original form.1
In the church of Rome then a prayer, couched in rather imaginative language, for the carrying up of the earthly elements to the heavenly altar to be returned to earth again as the life-giving body and blood, takes the place of the normal prayer for the descent of the Holy Spirit to consecrate the elements visibly lying on the earthly altar. And there is, consequently, much less emphasis in the original Roman canon on what the elements become by consecration, apart from reception. Meanwhile however the teaching at Rome was not uncertain. " The elements," writes Gelasius2 (A.D. 480),
tion : see Brightman op. cit. pp. 23, 58, 390. The right interpretation of the prayer in the Roman canon is very uncertain.
1 I.e. as quoted in the de sacramentis, see Duchesneo/>.a7. p. 170.
a See quotation in Dissert, p. 275, and cf. the phrase in the Leonine Sacrameritary (Christmas mass, P. L. Iv. 147) : " By the operation of the Holy Ghost, our sacrifice is now the body and blood of the Priest Himself."
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" pass into the divine substance by the action of the Holy Spirit, remaining at the same time in the propriety of their own nature." And this Roman substitute for the invocation is isolated and exceptional. The invocation of the Holy Spirit or of the divine power upon the elements, to make them Christ's body and blood in order that they might be received by the worshippers to their spiritual profit, was the earlier form, and best represents the earlier teaching. Certain evidence of this lies in the statements, anterior to any of the liturgical documents, of the fathers of the second century — Justin and Irenseus — already quoted.1 And I will add the witness of Origen : " Let Celsus, then, who knows not God, render his thank-offerings to demons ; while we, giving thanks to the maker of the universe, eat also, with thanksgiving and prayer over what has been given us, our oblations of bread, which on account of the prayer become a certain holy body that also makes those holy who partake of it with a sound disposition."1
1 See pp. 6 ff, 81 f. 2 C. Cels, viii. 33.
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III. We may further illustrate the belief of the ancient church in the objectivity of the eucharistic gift by the language of theologians. Justin, Irenasus and Origen have been already cited to prove that in the second and third centuries the bread and wine were believed to become by consecration —for the reception of the faithful, no doubt, but yet in themselves to become — the body and blood of Christ. And in the fourth century this belief gains more abundant expression.
It is chiefly among the Greeks however that a strong devotional enthusiasm developed itself for the eucharist, such as is apparent in St. Cyril of Jerusalem's lectures on the mysteries, and in St. Chrysostom's sermons and writings. The special purpose for which the sacred presence is given — -sacramental communion — is always full in view ; indeed, Chrysostom, as is well known, strongly protested against Christians being present without communicating. But before com munion, through the consecrating action of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine,
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of which these fathers speak with such rapt devotion, Christ's body and His blood become present, and Christ Himself is there, our high-priest, our king, and our sacrifice, in the midst of the worshipping church. Occasionally this presence is spoken of in language which represents precisely the modern phrase — u the whole Christ made present in " or " under the form of bread and wine";1 as when Cyril speaks of the communicant " receiving the King in his right hand" ;2 or when Chrysostom speaks of the priest " continuously manipulating the common Lord of all," and of " Him who sits with the Father, giving Himself to be held in the hands of all."3 But more often the language is such as is suggested by the words " symbol " or " type."
1 See Pusey Real Presence from the, Fathers (Parker, 1855), pp. 131 ff . : "The term 'in' as used by the Fathers does not express any local inclusion of the body and blood of Christ ; it denotes their presence there after the manner of a sacrament." He compares " Christ dwells in onr hearts by faith," "God dwelleth in us," " the Hoi)- Spirit dwelleth in us," none of these phrases expressing local inclusion.
- Cat. xxiii. 21.
:< De sacerdot. iii. 4, vi. 4 (P. G, xlvii. 642, 681).
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"What is nowadays understood by ' symbol,' " says Harnack, " is a thing which is not that which it represents ; at that time [i.e., the early Christian centuries] symbol denoted a thing which, in some kind oi sense, really is what it signifies ; but, on the other hand, according to the ideas of the period, the really heavenly element lay either in or behind the visible form without in vesting itself with it. Accordingly the distinction of a symbolic from a realistic conception of the Supper is altogether to be rejected."1
The symbol, or "outward and visible sign," then, is the evidence to the senses of a divine reality actually present. It is for this reason that the visible gifts and altar are called " mystical " or " spiritual." For as surely as with the outward eye you behold the bread and wine lying on the table, so
1 Harnack Lehrbuch dcr Dogmeng- i. p. 360 [Eng. trans. (Williams and Norgate) ii. p. 144 — in this case not quite trustworthy] ; cf. i. p. 149 : " The symbolic for that period is not to be thought of as the opposite of the objective or the real : but it is the mysterious and divinely-enwrought which stands out against the natural or profanely clear."
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surely with the eye of faith you are to behold heaven opened and brought down to earth, and the angels worshipping, and the eternal living priest exhibiting to you His once offered sacrifice in His body and His blood, and coming to you to feed you with the life- giving food. Certainly the theologians of that period, though they are highly rhetorical and occasionally use language which could not be rigidly justified, as a whole suggest to us not precisely an image of a Christ con tained in or under veils of bread and wine. There can be no doubt that their theology led them to shrink from any such formulation of their belief as suggested a Christ sub jecting Himself to limits of space. They preferred the language which suggests the breaking away of material limits before the eye of faith. Thus, when Gregory of Nyssa, in discouraging people from going on pilgrimages, suggests that their own land is thicker than Palestine with holy places, because it has so many more altars " by means of which our Lord's name is glorified" ; the phrase which the eucharistic altar
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suggests to him is that of " inferring God's presence from visible symbols."
I do not think it can be denied that these fathers would have shrunk front any formu lated teaching of " Christ made present on the altar under the forms of bread and wine." They would rather say " The bread and wine are types of spiritual realities really present. As surely as you see the consecra tion of the elements by the human priest with your outward eyes, so surely with the eye of faith you are to see the divine Christ present amid the worshipping angels, Himself the consecrating priest2 as Himself the sacrifice - present to feed you with the spiritual food of His body and blood in the earthly food of bread and wine."
It is a suggestive fact that they frequently introduce into the immediate neighbourhood of some particularly definite or local phrase with reference to our Lord's eucharistic presence, another of a vague character which takes the edge off the seemingly
1 De peregin. (P. G. xlvi. 1012).
2 On this point Chrysostom and others continually insist.
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local definition. Optatus, the African, for example, when protesting against the viola tion by the Donatists of catholic altars, speaks of them, in a phrase already quoted, as " the seat of the body and blood of Christ," " where His body and His blood used to dwell for certain moments of time." But in the immediate context he adds, "whereon the prayers of the people and the members of Christ are borne,"1 which destroys the exactness of the previous phrases, for the "members of Christ" (the church) do not, in any local sense, lie upon the altar any more than their prayers. Or again, when Chrysostom has told the people that they can see Christ on the altar, as the Magi saw Him in the manger, that " here, too, will the Lord's body lie" —he adds, " not wrapped in swaddling clothes, but encircled all round by the Holy Ghost;" and goes on to speak of the altar as "full of spiritual fire," like a fountain of flame. " Do not therefore approach it with straw or wood or hay, lest the conflagration become greater
1 Optatus dc schism. Don. vi. i. (P. L. xi. 1065 — 6).
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and consume the soul which partakes."1 In this way they habitually blunt the edge of their more definite or quasi-local expressions about the eucharistic presence.
Now it has been a matter of general agreement even in the later western church that the presence of Christ in the eucharist is not really local. " Our Lord," wrote Cardinal Newman, " neither descends from heaven upon our altars, nor moves when carried in procession. The visible species change their position, but He does not move."2 But there has often been very considerable need to carry out this admission of theologians into the current and popular teaching of the church. And the fathers, who were popular teachers, may be our guides in doing this. They escaped the perils of localization by a rich variety of language.
But I do not think it is disputable that the church from the beginning did, as a whole, believe that the eucharistic elements
1 Chrys. de beat. Philog. 3, 4 (P. G. xlvii. 753, 756). " See Via Media (Pickering, 1887), ii. p. 220.
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themselves in some real sense became by consecration, and prior to reception, the body and blood of Christ in the midst of the worshipping assembly; and that the body and blood thus made present objec tively, in undefinable identification with the bread and wine, were the same body (or flesh) and blood as the faithful hoped to receive — that is, the flesh and blood of the living and glorified Christ, the flesh and blood which are spirit and life, and are quite inseparable from the living person of Christ Himself.
Nor does it seem to me difficult to suggest a reason, both practical and spiritual, why, if the loving purpose of Christ was to communicate to us the spiritual food of His most blessed body and blood, He should, on the institution of His sacrament, have vouchsafed the gift, first of all, as an objective presence in the church, and not conveyed it directly to the individual worshippers in connection with an act of eating bread and drinking wine. For even if the members of the church ate and drank
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all together at the same meal, yet the act of eating is separate to each individual, and the divine gift would thus have taken the character of an individual communication. But the presence vouchsafed amongst them emphasizes unity; as apparently the divine Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, when He came to make the church one, symbolized His coming in a fire which appeared first as one and then divided and distributed itself in fiery tongues.1 In each case that which was to be distributed to all was given first as one object, to make evident the unity and unifying effect of the divine gift.2
So can we give its most natural force to the language of St. Paul about the one loaf making us as we partake of it one body, because breaking and eating the bread we are partaking of Christ's body, as also drinking of the cup we are partaking of His blood.3 So, again, can we most naturally interpret the words of Ignatius already
1 Acts ii. 3 : " There appeared to them tongues like as of fire, dividing (or R. V. marg. ' distributing '), themselves." " See app. note 8, p. 296. :i i Cor. x. 16, 17.
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referred to, and all the stream of Christian language which has flowed out of those words, "There is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup for unity in His blood."
But, reserving for the present the indis putable fact that the objective presence was given, not absolutely, but for the church and for the purpose of communion, even so there are objections to the doctrine just stated which demand consideration.
(i) The doctrine was not quite universal. The practical, devotional, attitude, we may say, was universal, but there are doctrinal explanations of particular fathers or schools of theologians of a divergent kind. I leave out of sight that somewhat mysterious document, the Didache^ because, so far as appears on the surface of that primitive manual, the eucharist is simply a social meal, touched with a certain breath of mysticism, but no more. The familiar language about the body or flesh and blood of Christ — the language of all the Gospels
1 See however The Church and the Ministry (Longmans) app. note L., pp. 377 f.
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and of St. Paul, and of the church as a whole — is not there : nor, to go farther back, is there any such teaching about Christ's person or sacrifice to be found there as would make this language intelligible. If the DidacJic is to be taken as it stands, as a more or less complete document speaking without deliberate reserve, we must suppose that it emanates from some only half-Christian community. But it need not be considered here, because what is absent from it is the whole language about the body and blood of Christ which has given its meaning to the Christian sacrament, and which comes, we believe, from our Lord's own lips. It is this language, and not any thing short of this, which is the starting point of explanation.
But there are other writers, as has been already mentioned, who use the common Christian language, and yet explain it dif ferently from the church in general. Thus some would almost have explained away " body " or " blood " into doctrine or spirit ; while others, with a one-sided
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tendency of an opposite sort, so fastened their attention upon the divine grace com municated by the eucharist to the human body, as to think only of what is bodily or for the body in the eucharistic gifts, and almost ignored the whole Christ there present for our whole manhood ; others, again, spoke of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist as a different body to that which really exists in heaven. Now on these types of teaching something has been already said justifying their rejection. But with reference to the last it may be further pointed out that the divine presence which is bestowed upon the earthly elements at the altar — and all the advocates of this view believed in an objective presence of some sort on the altar —is bestowed simply in order that it may be received. Therefore we must never distin guish the objective presence in the elements from the gift that is communicated to us. And if the gift as received by us is the gift of the flesh and blood of the living Lord inseparable from Himself, the same must be the spiritual reality which co-exists
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with the consecrated symbols of bread and w*ine.
These are discarded types of doctrine, which we may leave with the simple recogni tion that they existed, and were rather found inadequate than condemned as heretical.1
(2) More cogent than the argument derived from the exceptional positions of these theo logians is the general absence of evidence in the patristic period of the later tendency to worship Christ in the sacrament.
In modern books of popular devotion, such as proceed from circles in which the doctrine of the real presence is accepted, a prominent feature is the stress laid on the worship of Christ, as, in virtue of consecration, made present upon the altar, as upon a throne. Thus going to the eucharist (apart from the question of communion) is spoken of as going to meet Jesus. He is said to be " coming " in the earlier part of the service : after consecration He has "come," and the
1 It is important to remember that Origen's view at least did not claim to represent the common faith, but to be a refinement of it for select natures.
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faithful must devoutly adore Him — Jesus present in His manhood but very God.
Now it is an admitted fact that this worship of Jesus in the sacrament is absent from the liturgies, almost entirely. Where it exists, and so far as it exists, (i) it certainly represents no original feature ; (2) it generally does not correspond to the requirement of modern sacramental worship. Thus it makes per haps its first appearance in connection with the solemn " entrance " of the unconsecrated elements, which is treated as the entrance of Christ, the King of kings, into the world (and again and again "in a mystery" into the church) accompanied with the angelic hosts, to be offered and to become the food of the faithful ;T and the bread and wine are accordingly hailed already at their entrance as the body and blood of Christ.- Or again, in the present Mozarabic liturgy, just before the act of consecration there is a
1 Lit. of St. James, Brightman, p. 41.
- Brightman, p. 267 : " The body of Christ and His precious blood are upon the holy altar " (Nestorian) ; cf., for the Gallican rites, P. L. Ixii. 92, 93, and Duchesne, P- 195-
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prayer to Christ to be present as among His disciples in the upper chamber, and Himself to consecrate the gifts.1 Or Pope Sergius (c. 700) introduces the Agnus Dei, the appeal to Christ, as Lamb of God, in connection with the " breaking of the bread " just before communion.2 But these acts of worship addressed to Christ are not to the point. Even the Agnus Dei, which is comparatively late, does not immediately follow the con secration. And when these are set aside there is very little left, and certainly nothing original.3
Thus, whatever unimportant exceptions are to be allowed, the main fact is unmistak able. The structure of the liturgy represents first a great act of worship and sacrifice — a sacrifice of praise made in connection with visible gifts of bread and wine — offered to the
1 " Adesto, adesto, Jcsu bone pontifcx." /'. L. Ixxxv. 55°.
- See Duchesne Liber Ponlificalis, pp. 376, 381.
:i See prayers in the Coptic and Armenian Liturgies, Brightman, pp. 180, 185, 438, 448. Among the Syrian Jacobites, the sacrifice is offered to the Son, pp. 87 f., cf. pp. 99, 102 : cf. Freeman Principles of Divine Service (Parker, 1872), vol. ii. Introd. pp. 181, 182.
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Father, or in part to the Holy Trinity, in the mediation of the Son and in commemoration of His passion ; and then a response of the Father^ who, as it were, restores to the worshipping church their symbolic gifts of bread and wine raised to a higher power by the agency of the divine Spirit, and made to be and[ to convey the life-giving body and blood of the heavenly Christ for the spiritual nourishment of the faithful. In the litur gies, then, we have the highest expression of Christian worship — the worship of the thrice-holy, Father, Son, and Spirit, one God, and the worship of the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. And we find in them constant and emphatic commemoration of the Son as incarnate, because it is as man that He has redeemed us by His sacrifice and become our mediator to give us access to the heavenly courts, and because it is as man- through His flesh and blood --that He is become the bread of life. But there is no separate worship of the incarnate Christ as specially made present on the altar in virtue of consecration. The idea of Jesus coming to
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be amongst us on His altar throne and of our coming to meet Him (otherwise than in receiving Him) is conspicuously absent. The mind of the ancient church in general is represented in the canon of the African Council, " When we stand at the altar, let the prayer always be directed to the Father."1 If we seek to supplement the liturgies from the writings of the great fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, we find remarkably little to our purpose. St. Chrysostom continually speaks in glowing words of the eucharistic presence and gift, but very rarely does he bid us adore or pray to Christ present to the eye of faith upon the altar.2 Only once St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, each in inter preting the phrase in the ggth Psalm, " Fall down before (adorate) His footstool," speak of worshipping Christ or the flesh of Christ
1 Hippo, A.D. 393 ; cf. Hefele, Eng. trans, iii. p. 398. To make the words of the canon exact we should add " or to the Holy Trinity."
- In I. Cor. Horn. xxiv. 5, xli. 4 (P. G. Ixi. 204, 361). The latter passage speaks of " beseeching the Lamb who lies there (in the mysteries), who took the sin of the world " on behalf of our departed friends.
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in the sacrament.1 Besides, Cyril of Jeru salem and Theodoret each once allude to the sacramental body and blood as to be " wor shipped." These passages do indeed prove a belief existing which might have been developed ; but their rarity, considering the whole bulk of the literature, proves that it had not been developed in fact.
How is this phenomenon to be accounted for — that in the ancient church the consecra tion of the bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ, inseparable from Christ Himself, was not thought of as a special occasion for adoring Christ thus really made present ?
In part probably because Christwas believed to be already present, and that too (in some sense) in His manhood, as high-priest. Where two or three should be gathered together in His name, He had promised to be in the
1 Ambrose de S. S. iii. 79: "The flesh of Christ which to this day we worship (adoramus) in the mysteries." Aug. Enarr. in Ps. xcviii. g : " No one eateth that flesh unless he hath first worshipped."
" Cyril Cat. xxiii. 22 (rpuTry irpoffKuv!](rf<as Kal <re;3a<ryUaTOs) ; Theod. Dial, ii., P. G. Ixxxiii. 168 (wpoirKuvelTai,.
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midst of them. This was specially true in the breaking of the bread — the memorial service of His own appointment. Thus, whatever was done in the eucharist in His name, He was believed to be present and the doer of it. He was there to speak the words and consecrate the gifts. This belief in Christ already present as unseen minister anticipated and so weakened the emotion following upon the consecration. What that brought about was not the presence of Christ —He was already there — but His adoption of the church's gifts to become His body and His blood. Henceforth an attention and a worship already given to Christ as present among the worshippers was more or less focussed upon these holy symbols and instru ments. But if the ancients associated His " coming" with any moment in the service, it was with the first solemn entrance of the elements, and the whole order and ritual of the service fell in with this conception.
Now Catholics with one consent still believe that Christ is in some special sense present in the whole eucharistic service, as
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the invisible celebrant and consecrating priest; and the more this belief is realized the less can His coming and presence be represented to the imagination as merely the result of consecration. The difference is not one of doctrine, but of practical emphasis on different parts of truth.
But also the absence of the worship of Jesus in the sacrament can only be rightly appreciated when it is viewed as part of a larger fact: viz., that what Dr. Hort has called "Jesus-worship"1 as a whole — the distinctive feature alike of Protestant evan gelicalism and Catholic sacramentalism— is not at all prominent in the theology of the first five or six centuries. The phrase "Jesus-worship" must not be misunderstood. Christ in the ancient church was believed in as God, the Son of the Father, the revealer of the Father, the divine redeemer, the new life of humanity — He was believed in and worshipped, very God and very man, the second person of the Holy Trinity. But
1 Life and Letters of F. J. A. Hurt (Macmillan), vol. ii. p. 50.
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the separate and distinctive worship of Jesus in His manhood, with all the specially tender associations of His human name — the wor ship which gives its special sentiment to so much mediaeval and modern devotion — was but very little developed. Origen may be said to have given an impulse to it in his commentary on the Canticles,1 and of course it existed in germ and principle from the first. L> But it received apparently very little expansion even in popular devotion.
We cannot moreover conceal from our selves that this type of devotion, whether among Catholics or among Protestants, whether in mission hymn-singing or in sacramental worship, has belonged to the emotional and devotional part of our man hood, rather than to the moral or rational.3
1 Bigg Christian Platonists (Oxford, 1886), p. 188.
2 Liddon Divinity of Our Lord, pp. 406 ff.
:t Cf. Bishop of Rochester The Holding of the Truth (Rivington, 1900), p. 10 : " Devotion to His (Christ's) person may be familiar and sentimental unless we feel through Him the touch and presence of the awful, infinite, all-holy God."
"Is it too much to assert that the graver danger has more than once been perilously near at hand, that the
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It has belonged to that element in the religious nature which has most strangely showed its power not only to reinforce the moral will, but also to divorce itself from it. This divorce of devotion from morality has been a familiar feature both of mediaeval and modern life. Perhaps the severe moral and ethical tone of the earlier Christianity — the tone which the danger of persecution enabled the church at first to maintain — held it in check. And with the severer ethical tone there went concurrently a severer theology, which lasted on after the restraints of persecution were gone. The danger of divorcing the human from the divine aspect of Christ was prevented by concentrating worship upon
Father has, in appearance at any rate, been obscured behind the Son, as the Son in turn behind the Virgin and the Saints ? " Bigg I.e.
" The tender devotion of Francis [of Assisi] to the Lord's manhood became the occasion of grievous error. Everything that is compassionate in the character of the Lord was separated from His sovereign righteousness, and then these attributes of tender love were transferred to His mother, who seemed to be more within the reach of rude and simple minds." Westcott Social Aspects of Christianity (Macmillan, 1877), p. in.
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God, the Holy Trinity, and upon the Father through the Son by the Holy Ghost, rather than on Christ alone, much rather than on Christ as represented in His human name or His human blood.
But we are not here really concerned to estimate the legitimacy of a change in the colour of devotion. The point is only that we must treat the worship of the early church as a whole. We cannot reasonably separate the worship of Jesus in the sacra ment from our whole attitude towards Him. If the early church had been in the constant ! habit of singing such hymns as " Jesus, | Lover of my soul," is it not very likely it would have also sung, "Jesus, I adore Thee on Thy altar throne " ?
For it is not possible to argue that they did not think of adoring Jesus in the sacra ment because, though they spoke of the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, yet they did not believe this to be the body and blood of the risen and glorified Christ, very God and very man ; or because they tended to conceive of the body and blood
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as separate from the whole person. The evidence (with the exceptions already spoken of) is strongly the other way. Certainly Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, Chrysostom, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, Leo, believed that what was present in the eucharist, in some not easily definable relation to the bread and wine, was the body and blood of the glorified Christ, indiscerptible from His whole self. " Christ is in that sacrament, for it is the body of Christ."1
1 Ambrose de mysteriis ix. 58. On the ancient treatment of the consecrated elements, outside the service of communion, see p. 299.
§3- Transubstantiation considered.
The words of our Lord, " This is my body : this is my blood," interpreted in the light of the general mind of ancient Christendom, must be taken to mean that the elements in the eucharist become by the operation of the Holy Ghost something mys terious and holy that they were not before, but without ceasing to be in all material respects exactly what they already were. The words of Irenaeus express this most simply: "The bread which is of the earth receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread, but eucharist made up of two things, an earthly and a heavenly." This very simple statement about the eucha rist is introduced by Irenaeus as an element in his general argument against the Gnostics, or false spiritualists of his time — that is to say, as one point among many to prove that there is no contradiction between the
ii2 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
spiritual and the material : that as they are from the same divine Creator and Lord, so they are compatible the one with the other. The spiritual does not interfere with or over throw the natural. " This opinion," he truly says, " is consonant with the eucharist, and the eucharist again confirms our opinion."1 Irenaeus thus instinctively emphasizes the permanent reality of the natural elements, as he would emphasize the reality of Christ's natural manhood ; though in each case, in one manner or another, the natural thing is used as an instrument or vehicle of what is supernatural, spiritual and divine, and in view of this higher use to which it is put may be said to be changed. This prin ciple, in all its applications, represents the best and deepest and most truly philosophical mind of Christendom. This it was that guided the church aright in the fifth century, when the belief in Christ's manhood was really imperilled by a false supernaturalism or " irreligious solicitude for God." And at the period of this struggle the truth of
1 C. haer. iv. 18, 5.
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the incarnation again consciously finds its analogy in the Christian belief about the eucharist : for there, too, the natural sub stance is not overthrown, though it has become something which it was not before. So Theodoret argued : " The bread and wine do not depart from their proper nature ; for they remain in their former substance and shape and form." So the author of the de sacramentis : " They are what they were, and they are changed into something else." l Nothing can be plainer than these expres sions of the fathers and many others.
But the monophysite tendency— that is, the tendency to absorb and annihilate the human in the divine, the natural in the supernatural — which Christian instinct, or divine inspiration in the church, checked in regard to Christ's person, so that the security of dogmatic formula was added to keep out
1 See quotations in Dissertations, pp. 230, 274 ff. As I have argued the whole matter there at length and quoted authorities, I am only presenting it here in summary. See also Pusey op. cit. note G., pp. 75 ff., and note Q. pp. 162 ff. (on words implying change in the elements used by the fathers).
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ii4 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
the invading heresy, was unfortunately suf fered to prevail in the secondary region of the sacramental presence. We cannot help perceiving how easily this might have been prevented if into one of the dogmatic letters or decrees of the fifth century the familiar analogy between Christ's person and the eucharist had been introduced. But in fact the check was not provided, and the strong monophysite tendency in the theology of the Greeks went on its way in the direction of what later was called transubstantiation.
It may be said to make its first appearance in the somewhat materialistic theory of Gregory of Nyssa, that the bread and wrine are, by a process analogous to that by which Christ's mortal body was sustained, i.e., by a process analogous to digestion, con verted into the substance of His glorified body in order that we may partake of it for the nourishment within us of a physical principle of immortality. But the first evidence of its having gained a clear position is to be found in by far the most influential of the later Greek-writing theo-
TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 115
logians — John of Damascus (c. 750). For, in spite of the indisputable habit of the ancients,1 he will not allow the elements after consecration to be called types or symbols of the body and blood.2 Such they were in their natural selves before consecra tion. After consecration they have become the things they typified in such sense that they have no longer the reality necessary for a symbol. For a symbol is a real thing witnessing to something beyond itself.
But while this one-sided intellectual process was going on in the East, St. Augustine was dominant in the West, and maintaining as he did a profoundly spiritual and in the truest sense sacra mental doctrine of the eucharist, he long held the false or one-sided tendency in check. Not till about the ninth century did the flood from the East begin to prevail
1 See quotations in Pusey, pp. 94 ff. and above, p. 8cj.
3 Dissert, p. 231 ; cf. a very interesting i4th cent. Greek writer, Nicolas Cabasilas, Lititrg. Exposit. c. 27, P. G. cl. 425. In the decrees of Trent (sess. xxii. c. i), however, "under the symbol" is used as equivalent to " under the species."
I 2
n6 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
in the West, and not till the eleventh century, in the famous controversy aroused by Berengar, did it successfully overcome the older tradition. Berengar, there can be no doubt, believed in a real and objective, but spiritual presence. But he contended also for the permanence of the natural elements, and that on principle. " The bread and wine are, as all scriptures attest, by conse cration turned into Christ's flesh and blood, and it is certain that whatever is consecrated or blessed by God is not absorbed or taken away thereby or destroyed, but remains and necessarily becomes something better than it was."1
But such language was no longer tolerable. For at that period the mono- physite tendency from the East coalesced with an almost brutally superstitious dis position in a very dark age of the West. Thus transubstantiation2 in its first form,
1 Dissert, p. 256.
- St. Peter Damian (c. 1072) appears to have been the first to use the term, P. L. cxlv. 883. For the formula (without the term) subscribed by Berengar, see Dissert. P- 257-
TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 117
as for example the weak and unhappy Berengar was forced by the dominant power in the church to subscribe to it, was indeed a gross and horrible doctrine :—
" I assent to the holy Roman and apostolic see, and with mouth and heart I profess to hold as to the sacrament of the Lord's table the faith which the Lord and venerable Pope Nicolas and this holy synod, with evangelical and apostolical authority, has given me to be held and has confirmed to me : namely, that the bread and wine which are placed upon the altar are after consecration not only a sacrament but the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and sensibly (scnsu- alitcr), not only in a sacrament but in reality, are handled by the hands of priests and broken and bruised by the teeth of the faithful."
Most of the contemporary writers against Berengar assert that the body and blood of Christ are to be eaten and drunken "with the mouth of the body as well as the mouth of the heart"; and, like some
nS THE BODY OF CHRIST.
of the earlier Greeks, they deny that the elements after consecration retain their natural properties of nourishing or becoming corrupted or being digested. The nature of the bread and wine was understood to be destroyed in everything but appearance. Miracles were recklessly postulated, and it was sufficient objection to any more reasonable treatment of the mystery that in diminishing the difficulty of belief it reduced the merit of faith. Certainly the atmosphere in which the doctrine of tran- substantiation grows into a dogma is cal culated to send a shiver through one's intellectual and moral being.1
But the rising scholasticism, or perhaps the evidence of facts,2 very quickly corrected this extreme tendency. The use indeed of the distinction of substance and accidents, for the purpose of assisting the doctrine of transubstantiation, was already familiar
1 Dissert, p. 258.
- Painful mischances to the consecrated hosts appear to have been very common — " negligentia ininistrorum evenire solet," says Abelard : see Dissert, p. 260.
TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 1 1 9
to Berengar, and he excellently combats the proposed use of it, denying that accidents can exist apart from their substance (or "subject"), or apart from that of which they are attributes. But the later scholastics used the distinction with a more laborious pre cision to formulate the doctrine. By the act of consecration the substrata or sub stances of the bread and the wine were changed into the substances of the body and blood of Christ : but the accidents or qualities of bread and wine — all that we are cognizant of in our experience of bread and wine — remained with all their natural properties and defects ; remained (in the compassion of God) as veils under which the awful realities should be screened.1 In later days a still further refinement has led Roman theologians to say that the re maining species or accidents of the bread and \vine constitute a real object — "something
1 Not, however, as accidents of the new substances of the body and the blood, but as accidents inhering in no substance. This is declared to be defide, and Roman writers, modern as well as mediaeval, exult in the numerous viola tions of the natural order involved in transubstantiation.
i2o THE BODY OF CHRIST.
objectively real." But this is in fact to explain away the doctrine and the phrase. Plainly modern philosophy of all schools recognizes no distinction between substance and accident — knows no substance other than that "something objectively real" which is constituted by the qualities or relations under which alone any object is known in experience. Thus the modern Roman theologians allow to the consecrated bread and wine all the reality which any one believes any bread and wine to possess, or, in other words, explain away trarisubvStantia- tion, till it remains as little more than a verbal incumbrance due to an inopportune intrusion into church doctrine of a temporary phase of metaphysics. In its original and more natural meaning, tran- substantiation — the overthrowing of the natural substance by the spiritual — is truly contrary to a fundamental Christian philo sophy, and really " overthroweth the nature of a sacrament."
But even in its minimized sense tran- substantiation does not remain onlv as an
T R A X S U B ST A X T I AT I O N . 121
incumbrance in terminology, witnessing to a mistake in the dogmatic action of the mediaeval church: for its really materialistic and unspiritualizing effects cannot be done away. As soon as the accidents or species have reached a certain stage in the process of being digested by the communicant, or of being destroyed in some other way, it is felt to be irreverent to imagine that they can still be veils of the divine substances. Thus a reversal of the process of transubstantiation is postulated, by which the supernatural substances are withdrawn, and the natural substances (of bread and wine in process of digestion or corruption) are restored, and the accidents have again "asubject toinhere in." } But the result of so materialistic a way of conceiving the relation of the spiritual gift to the outward part of the sacrament is that the corruption of the material elements involves the withdrawal of the divine gift. Thus the coming of Christ to the Christian through Holy Communion is in Roman
1 See Dissert, p. 270, 271. and J. R. Milne Doctrine and Practice of the Holy Euch. (Longmans, 1895), p. 67.
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theology and books of devotion spoken of as a temporary visit which, though certain fruits may remain, is yet in its primary sense, as an indwelling of Christ, over when the digestion of the material food begins— it is suggested after a quarter of an hour. " This day," so devotion is taught to express itself, " my Lord
" Came to my lowly tenement And stayed awhile with me."
Or
"Oh, when wilt Thou always
Make our souls Thine own ? We must wait for heaven, Then the day shall come."
Now such an idea of a temporary visit of Christ to the soul is in most marked con tradiction to the teaching of the undivided church. " He is held for a moment in your hands, but He is wholly resolved into your heart," says Chrysostom. " What you see " in the sacrament, says Augustine, " passes away, but the invisible thing signified does not pass away but remains."1 The whole
1 Chrys. Hem. in Ephes. iii. 4 (P. G. Ixii. 281) : Aug. Serm. 227. Similar language is used by later Western
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teaching of the fathers on the subject seems indeed to be a loving commentary upon our Lord's words about His abiding in us and we in Him.
Enough has probably been said. Apart from the degree of authority which transub- stantiation has obtained in the West, and to a certain extent in the East, there is truly on the grounds of antiquity, or Scripture, or reason, nothing to be said for it. And we cannot admit the weight of an authority which fails in these supports.1
theologians : e.g. Raymund of Sabunde Theol. Nat. tit. 285 (in the i5th cent.) speaks of Christ as the spiritual food of the eucharist converting the Christian gradually and permanently into Himself. This implies an abiding union. But the doctrine stated above is, I believe, now accepted in the Roman church. 1 See also below, p. 220.
§ 4- The gift and presence spiritual.
It is the general assertion of the church that the presence of Christ, or of His body and blood, in the eucharist is spiritual— "not bodily but ghostly," as our English Archbishop Aelfric so earnestly contended.1 And I may assume at this stage that the word spiritual as applied to the eucharistic presence means something more than presence " to our spirits.1''2 It describes a certain condition of the thing given, in itself; though its relation to our spirits belongs, as will appear, to its very essence. What then is it that is to be understood in this connection by the word " spiritual " ?
Of course it expresses not what is unreal, but what is profoundly real. The things that are not seen, of which the whole of
1 For his position and teaching, see Hunt Hist, of the Engl. Church to 1066 (Macmillan, 1899), pp. 375 f. - So Jeremy Taylor, see below, p. 235.
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visible nature is in a manner the symbol and the sacrament, are for the Christian the supremely real and actual and present things. In whatever sense then we approach and receive the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist as spiritually present, it is certain that they are in the deepest sense real and really present.
Beyond this it is easy enough to say that by calling them spiritually present we mean that they are present in such a way as is to be quite dissociated from any idea of the movement of material particles — a spiritual presence is a non-material presence. And this may well be perfectly true — though the more the modern physicist investigates the ultimate nature of matter, the more he breaks down all the supposed barriers between matter and spirit ; but it is not in any case the most important truth. It is possible to maintain a profoundly unspiritual view of the presence of Christ, and still to erect a supposed safeguard by asserting that He is present under the form of bread and wine, in His body indeed, but after the manner
i26 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
of spirit and without any interference with material law, and not locally or materially as in heaven. Certainly if the spirituality of Christ's presence means this, it means also something more positive and more moral : something more on the lines of the scriptural use of the word spiritual.
Any thing or process then, whether material or no, is, according to the New Testament use of the word, spiritual in which the Holy Spirit, or generally spiritual pur pose, effectively manifests itself, and which it effectively controls. Isaac was born " after the Spirit" by contrast to Ishmael,who was born " after the flesh,"1 not because he was less materially born, but because the divine Spirit was specially evident in the circum stances of his birth. Thus even Christ's mortal body we should call in one sense spiritual, because it acted according to a controlling spirit of holiness, and all He did in the body He did spiritually. It was " in eternal spirit " that He offered Himself with out spot to God. But, on the other hand, the
1 Gal. iv. 29.
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grossness of our earthly nature, the likeness of the flesh of sin, still — except so far as He was miraculously exempted from its restric tions --more or less limited Him. "All authority " was not yet "given Him in heaven or in earth." " The Spirit was not yet given, because Christ was not yet glorified." He had a baptism to be baptized with, and how was He " straitened till it was accom plished."1
Thus the risen body fo Christ was spiritual in a very different sense ; not because it was less than before material, but because in it matter was wholly and finally subjugated to spirit, and not to the exigencies of physical life. Matter no longer restricted Him or hindered. It had become the pure and transparent vehicle of spiritual purpose. He rose from the dead (as is apparently implied in the narrative of St. Matthew),2 leaving the gravestone undisturbed. The angel rolled it away to show that He was risen. He
1 Matt, xxviii. 18 ; John vii. 39; Luke xii. 50.
" He is not here," the angel says, "for he ruse " (yyepQii). Matt, xxviii. 6. This the fathers insist upon : Pusey I.e. p. 56.
128 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
appeared immediately, and apparently in familiar form, to the faithful women, and later in the day " in another form " to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus — un recognizable by their yet carnal eyes. His outward appearance, as St. Gregory remarks, was relative to their inner mind ; l and sub sequently, when " their eyes were opened, He vanished out of their sight." Immediately after, He is present in Jerusalem among the apostles without any opening of their closed doors, but yet to exhibit to them the attributes even of the mortal body, by eating with them as of old. Henceforth, during the forty days, He never lived with them in the life of earth, but was manifested from time to time as His spiritual purpose required.
Now, from the physical point of view, such spiritualization of matter as is involved in this conception of a spiritual body, is becom ing perhaps — I will not say more imaginable, but more and more conceivable : less out of
1 " Hoc egit foris Dominus in oculis corporis quod apud ipsosagcbaturintusin oculis cordis." Hum. in Ei-ung. xxiii. i. P. L. Ixxvi. 1182.
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analogy with our ultimate conceptions of matter. But the important point to notice is that the spirituality of the risen body of Christ lies not so much in any physical qualities as in the fact that His material presence is absolutely controlled by His spiritual will. The disciples, for example, could no longer argue with any approach to security that He was where they had last seen Him, until they had evidence that He had left that spot. All such subservience to conditions of space was over for ever. His manifestations were manifestations to special persons — i.e., those whose faith He willed to rekindle — under special forms for special purposes.
And if all subjection to conditions of space was over for the body of the resur rection, even more certainly was it over for the glorified body (if any distinction is to be drawn), the body in which He through His whole person hasbecome "quickening spirit," and even His flesh and blood are " spirit and life." As to what the "body of glory" is, silence is our best wisdom. We feel sure
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indeed that He retains " all things appertain ing to the perfection of man's nature " ; and with St. John we believe that He not only has come, but also is to come again in the flesh.1 But it is not in the flesh and blood of our present conceptions, which " cannot inherit the kingdom of God" ; nor have we any faculties to conceive the glory of which even our material nature in Him is suscep tible. It is enough for us to know that in the perfection of our nature, but in glory incon ceivable, He still exists ; and it is out of this glory that He feeds us with the flesh and blood which are spirit and life.
Once more then what do we mean by the spirituality of this gift or presence of Christ in the eucharist ?
It is commonly asserted both by Romans2 and Anglicans that His presence in the eucharist is different in manner from His presence in heaven : that He is not present in the eucharist materially, nor after the
1 i John iv. 2—3, 2 John 7. "Cometh" means "is to come again." See Westcott in loc. - See app. note 9, p. 296.
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manner of a body, nor strictly locally— though no doubt the Anglican would be clearer and more unimpeded in these denials than the Roman. As was remarked above, our notions of what materiality fundamentally means are becoming increasingly vague. But at any rate the presence is " after a spiritual and heavenly manner," of which we can learn nothing by scientific analysis.
But it is of much more importance that in claiming spirituality for Christ's presence we claim for it that, though He condescends to use material means, the. sacramental elements, yet He is never subject to them. As in the risen and glorified body in itself, so in its sacramental application to our necessities, spiritual purpose dominates everything with an absolute freedom. The presence is con trolled by the purpose. And in a matter where the evidence of the senses is denied us, our only right to be confident that the presence abides with us, depends on our remaining under the shelter of the purpose.
Thus it seems to me to be illegitimate and insecure to argue that because the presence,
K 2
132 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
admitted to be spiritual, is vouchsafed to us (so to speak) under conditions of bread and wine, therefore I am justified in assuming that it abides under those conditions so long as the bread subsists, or till I am informed to the contrary. For such an argument is wholly based on the limiting and restricting conditions of material existence — on con ditions of existence to which Christ was subjected in His mortal body, but not in His resurrection body ; and still less (if the two are distinguishable) in His body of glory. If the disciples could not with any degree of security argue after His resurrection that He must still be in Jerusalem or in Galilee, or in such and such a spot, for He was seen there and they had no reason to believe that He had stirred — much less is it open to us to argue that His presence under conditions of bread and wine abides till we have reason to believe it is removed. The bread and wine are instruments of His will which He can at pleasure use or discard ; and to which He is in no subtlest way subjected. The only secure argument is that the gift was given
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for a certain purpose, and so long as that purpose is observed we have absolute reason to trust that His promise will not fail us. So long as that which controls our actions is His "name," and that means in part His will and purpose, so long, and so long only, can we be sure that He is " in the midst of us."1 And if this condition applies to His presence in all assemblies of the church for worship, it applies specially to His special presence in the holy eucharist.
It may be worth while in this connection remarking that we have no right to carry out the analogy of the incarnation and the eucharist so far as to say that the union of the supernatural and the natural elements is an indissoluble union in the latter case as in the former. It is not indissoluble, just as also it is not personal, or " hypostatical " as the technical phrase goes. There is in fact an analogy in fundamental principle between the incarnation and the sacraments, but it does not admit of being carried out in detail.
A spiritual presence in the eucharist then,
1 Matt, xviii. 20.
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whatever else it may mean, means this : like the appearances after the resurrection, it is a presence to certain persons for certain purposes. What then, we proceed to ask, is the purpose of the gift and presence ?
It is plain that the purpose for which the divine gift in Holy Communion is given is indicated by the symbolism of bread and wine — it is that we may (in Goethe's words) partake of a heavenly under the form of an earthly nourishment. The sacrament was instituted in order to be eaten. It was not " by Christ's ordinance," or in accordance with any expressed intention of His, " re served " (except so far as the reserving is necessary for the communion of sick or absent brethren),1 " lifted up, or worshipped " —con stituted, that is to say, an external object or centre of worship here on earth. And, indeed,
1 Of reservation for the purposes of communion, such as the ancient church practised, I do not think it can with any fairness be denied that it falls inside the scope of Christ's revealed intention ; though no doubt also it falls within the competence of any part of the church to decide how the sick or absent are to* be communicated : see app. note 10, p. 298.
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the intention with which the bread and wine are consecrated to become for the church the body and blood of Christ is constantly expressed in the liturgies. With one consent the church in her prayers of consecration has prayed that the elements of bread and wine may by the power of God be made or declared to be Christ's body and blood for a certain purpose, yiz., "in order that those receiving them may be confirmed to holiness ; may obtain remission of sins and . . . eternal life," l " for the remission of sins and eternal life to them that receive," 2 " that as many of us as by participation from the altar shall have received the holy body and blood of Thy Son, may be fulfilled with all heavenly benediction and grace,"3 "that it may be a legitimate eucharist for all those who receive it."4 The same restricted intention is con stantly and almost without exception illus trated in the language of the fathers. They
1 Clementine, Brightman I.e. p. 21 ; so the Lit. of St. James, p. 54; of St. Mark, p. 135, cf. p. 180, etc. - Syrian Jacobites, p. 89. :! Roman canon. 4 Gallican: Neale and Eorbes up. cit. p. 4.
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but expressed Christ's words : " Take, eat ; this is my body : drink ye all of it ; for this is my blood."
Thus admittedly the gift of the body and blood are given to the Church under the forms of bread and wine, in order to be received. What we are to "do in remem brance of Him " includes, as its chief feature, the taking and eating the bread and wine which are declared to be His body and blood. Even the sacrificial efficacy of the eucharist depends, as will appear, upon reception ; and the adoration of Christ's body and blood in the sacrament occasionally spoken of by the fathers is so spoken of mostly as a prepara tion for the act of communion — " no one receives without first adoring."
This being the clearly-expressed original and catholic idea of the sacrament, we can not fail to be struck with the apparently light-hearted security with which this obvious intention of the sacrament according to the mind of Christ has been enlarged in later practice. Communion of the people in
1 See p. 104.
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western Christendom came to be an occa sional and exceptional feature in the celebra tion of the eucharist, or an additional service. The sacrifice and the worship were largely divorced from the communion. But more than this : the wholly legitimate reservation of the consecrated elements, that the absent sick folk might be communicated from the one altar and the one loaf, became — what was quite unknown to the ancients, and remains alien to the customs of the orthodox East — a reservation of the sacramental body in order that, inasmuch as with His body Christ is present in His whole person, the church might have a permanent external presence of Christ in the midst of her in a parti cular spot in the church. Thus the sons of faith might go to be near Him and adore Him, for His "delight is with the sons of men"; and His loving condescension has made Him the "prisoner of the tabernacle," and leads Him to give Himself to be "exposed" for worship, and in the service of Benediction to bless His people with a blessing like that of His uplifted hand,
138 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
behind the veil, so to speak, of the enshrining wafer.
No doubt the theologians of the Roman church have had an uneasy conscience about these developments. They have not been developments of theological science, properly so-called ; they have been developments of popular devotion which, because they could not be restrained, theological authority has more or less reluctantly sanctioned. Yet in effect the sanction has been given. This devo tion to the sacrament in the modern Roman church is, I do not say the most real, but the most conspicuous form of Christian devotion, or has no rival except that to the mother of our Lord. Yet it is a most serious lowering of the level of Christian devotion if a permanent external presence of Christ amongst Christians comes to be the most usuallv entertained idea of the manner of
J
His "abiding with us," instead of the only sort of abiding which the New Testament suggests — the indwelling of Christ in the members of His body, of which it is the glory of the sacrament to be the earthly
THE PRESENCE SPIRITUAL. 139
instrument. This institution of an external shrine of the divine presence among Chris tians, with its subtle but profound influence on Christian thought and language and devotion, is, I repeat, a tremendously bold development in view of Christ's institution. It ought to raise in all minds a deep ques tioning of the authority of the Church to innovate so freely upon His intention : but also it cannot but raise in many minds the question whether, where the purpose of the sacramental presence is so vitally changed, we have the right to feel secure of the permanence of the presence itself.
Does not the conception of a spiritual presence, with its absolute independence of its material vehicles, with its unshackled liberty from moment to moment to be or not to be at the will of Him whose presence it is, lead us to believe that fidelity to the declared purpose for which it is given is the sole security for its permanence ? Does not any other standard of security really reduce the presence to material conditions — to conditions, that is, of attachment to
140 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
physical nature such as belonged to Christ only in His mortal body ?
I know it is said by some practical persons, Is it not a pity to argue the question ? What real difference does it make whether there be in fact any presence in the tabernacle other than exists anywhere else ? Is not God everywhere present ? Is it not true of the whole Christian life that we " are come unto Mount Zion, and to the heavenly Jerusalem . . . and to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling" ? What if the truth be that the little flickering lamp and the tabernacle do but enable the worshipper to realize what, after all, in the tabernacle and out of it, is, apart from theological refinement, substantially true ? To which the answer seems to be : it may matter very little in the case of this or that individual at this or that moment. But the devotion as a whole has a general ten dency, and the general tendency is hardly that of enabling one to realize the universal presence of God in the world, or the constant presence of all Christians, at all times and in
THE PRESENCE SPIRITUAL. 141
all places, to the heavenly things, or the indwelling of Christ in the soul of the individual and in the living church. The indisputable tendency of this devotion, and of the theology which reduces even the gift of communion to a temporary visit, is towards a conceiving of Christ's presence with the church as local and external — a conceiving of it which becomes more and more remote from St. Paul's or St. John's or St. Augustine's.
And if uses of the sacrament other than those strictly covered by the divine intention are, in a high degree, alluring and comforting and popular, we must remember that the easiest sort of Christian devotion is not always the truest. Christian worship may be, nay must be, meant to involve spiritual effort. It is God's intention that we should be spiritually lifted up to realize that Christ's presence with us now is a presence in the church, as the life of the body, not amongst Christians as in an outward shrine ; and that nearness to Him, or remoteness from Him, is a matter of faith and holiness, and not of place.
The eucharistic presence then, because it is
142 THE BODY OF CHRIST.
spiritual, is a presence for a certain divinely- defined purpose ; and (as a consequence of this) it is a presence to certain persons— that is, the sons and daughters of faith. So the risen Christ appeared only to those who had faith, or in whom it could be reawakened, and He appeared, according to His will, differently to different people.
In other words — the eucharistic presence, because it is spiritual, is relative to the faith of the church, and presupposes "holy per sons" to receive " holy gifts."
This appears in the prayers of the liturgy. Thus in the Roman mass the prayer runs "that this oblation may become to us (jiobis] the body and blood of Thy dearly beloved Son " : and in Greek liturgies there is a prayer for the consecration of the communicants as well as the gifts, "that the Holy Spirit may come upon us and upon these, gifts " : and the solemn cry just referred to, which invites to communion, is " the holy things for the holy persons."1
1 Cf. Brightman op. cit. pp. 59, 135, "329, and St. Cyril's
comment on ra. ayia TO'II ayiois. Cat. X.xiii. 19.
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This follows indeed from considerations already entertained ; for the gifts are given to be eaten, and while the outward elements are received by the lips and eaten like other food, it is plain that no physical organs can appropriate the accompanying spiritual in ft. Plainly u the means wherebv it is
O J *f
received " must be faith. Thus Mozley when, in the passage already quoted,1 he has emphatically asserted that the fathers held " the objectiveness, as we now call it, of the inward part or thing signified in the sacrament," yet continues : " We see at the same time, upon examination of their language, that this objectiveness was held with a very important modification, which gives a double aspect to the doctrine of the fathers. The modification was this, that the body and blood of Christ could not be eaten except by faith, which was the medium by which this spiritual food had any operation or function as food. Although, therefore, the body and blood itself followed an external test of presence, as being the concomitants of the
1 Sec above, pp. 72 — 3.
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material elements, the eating of this body and blood followed an internal test, and was the concomitant entirely of the state of mind of the recipient." . . . " To suppose that a man's natural mouth and teeth can eat a spiritual thing would be a simple confusion of ideas." This is the point of Augustine's celebrated phrase " Believe and thou hast eaten."1
There is, indeed, in patristic language on this subject a certain ambiguity, as in the original language of Scripture. In St. John vi. the eating Christ's flesh and drinking Christ's blood is plainly regarded as possible only for those who thereby " have eternal life " —who " abide in Christ and Christ in them " : the wicked and such as are void of a lively faith plainly are excluded from this eating. On the other hand, our Lord said, " This is my body," simply, and St. Paul talks of the evil-disposed "not discerning the [Lord's] body " —not appreciating, that is to say, what at the
1 In. Jo. xxv. 12 : Quid paras denteset ventrem ? Crede et manducasti.
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same time he received like the others.1 This ambiguity continues in the fathers — some saying that the same gift is received to profit or to condemnation, or with varying degrees of profit according to the pro portion of faith ; others using language such as definitely implies that without faith there is no reception of the spiritual realities. Thus Origen writes about " the Word who became flesh and the true food, which whoso eateth shall certainly live for ever, no bad man being able to eat it. For if it were possible for a man while he remains bad to eat the Word who was made flesh and the living bread, it would not have been written that ' he that eateth this bread shall live for ever.' ' And Cyprian records a miracle — how a defaulter from Christ attempted to eat the holy body of the Lord and found a cinder in his opened hand ; and this he takes for "proof by a single instance that the Lord with-
1 There is a similar ambiguity in the N. T. language about baptism : for St. John always speaks of "him who is begotten of God," i.e., the regenerate, as if he must be living accordingly : see i John iii. 9 — 10, v. 4, 18.
2 In Matt. torn. xi. 14.
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draws when He is denied, and that which is received is of no profit to salvation to those who do not deserve it, since the Holy One fleeing away,1 the saving grace is turned to a cinder." And Jerome says : " All who are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God ... do not eat the flesh of Jesus nor drink His blood."2 And Leo the Great warns his hearers against doubting the reality of the body of Christ in the sacrament, because " it is what you believe with your faith that you receive with your mouth ; and in vain that they say A-men who argue against what is received."3 And Augustine repeatedly : " He who abides not in Christ and has not Christ abiding in him, without a doubt neither eats His flesh nor drinks His blood, but rather eats and drinks to his judgment the sacrament of so great a thing." " It is as if Christ said : He who does not abide in Me and in whom I do not abide, must not say or imagine that he eats My body or drinks My blood."4
1 De laps. 26 : sancto (a. I. sanctitate) fugiente. - In Isai. Ixvi. 17 (torn. iii. p. 506, Paris, 1706). 8 Serin, xci. 3. 4 In Jo. xxvii. 18 ; de civ. xxi. 25. Cf. Dissert, p. 234.
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Elsewhere, however, both St. Jerome and St. Augustine express themselves as if the faith of the recipient made no difference to the thing received. " It was none the less the body of the Lord and the blood of the Lord even to those to whom the apostle said, He that eateth unworthily eateth and drinketh judgment to himself." l There is, in fact, an ambiguity in their language like the ambiguity of the Scriptures on which they comment. The gift on the one hand is what it is by divine conse cration, and on the other hand it is what it is for faith ; and it requires faith not / only to appreciate but to entertain and receive it.
This question whether the wicked receive the body or flesh of Christ in the Holy Communion long remained an open one. Paschasius Radbert in the ninth century speaks with great ambiguity.- Rupert of Deutz (c. 1130) uses almost contradictory
1 Aug. de bapt. c. Donat. v. 9. Cf. Jerom. adv. Jovi::. ii. torn. iv. pars ii. p. 218). " DC corp. ct sung. vi. 2.
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phrases.1 At some subsequent date — later than the twelfth century — the solution arrived at was that the wicked receive the " res sacramenti " (the body and blood), but not the "virtus" or beneficial effects. The English church in the 2Qth Article returns to the earlier and more ambiguous language of Augustine.
In fact, if we hold on the one hand with the ancient church the obj'ectiveness of the gift, and on the other hand not only that men can derive no benefit from sacraments except so far as they receive them well, but also that the eating of Christ's flesh and blood is (in St. John vi.) a spiritual act of which only those who have a living faith are capable, the remaining differences can only really be verbal. We cannot really define what occurs when a personal gift of God
1 See P. L. clxix. 470. where he says : " The bread once consecrated never afterwards loses the virtue of its conse cration, or ceases to be the body of Christ ; but it does not profit an unworthy person." But see also clxx. 40, where he says : " Into him who has no faith nothing of the •sacrifice can enter except the visible species of bread and
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which is meant for faith, is presented to some one totally without faith or the desire of it— totally without fellowship in the faith of the Church. The question is only one stage removed from the question of what would occur if the sacrament were eaten by an animal without reason — to which the Master of the Sentences replies, " God knows."
And it is of real importance that we should recognize that faith — the common faith of the church — probably plays the same part in actually constituting the spiritual reality of the sacrament as the com mon reason of man does in constituting the objects of the natural world : that is to say, we should expect spiritual objectivity to
1 Peter Lombard Sententt. lib. iv. dist. 13. The deter minations of St. Thomas Aquinas on these points (S. Th. iii. qu. 80, art. 3) — in which he disowns " some of the ancients" — are plainly based upon considerations involved in transubstantiation which really subject Christ to material conditions. Dr. Pusey I.e. p. 37, says : "The belief in the real presence may indeed be maintained without it [the belief that the faithless eat the body of the Lord] , if it be held that God withdraws that presence in such cases." So Cyprian seems to have held, and Ephrem Syrus and others are quoted in the same sense.
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follow the same law of relation as natural objectivity.
No doubt to hold that the faith of the church goes to constitute the spiritual reality of the presence, so that for one who is altogether outside that faith the spiritual reality cannot be said to exist — to hold this, some men would say, is equivalent to denying its objective character. But they would say this in their haste ; because it had not fallen in their way to study metaphysics, which is the science of first principles of reality as known to us.
Metaphysical study makes us conscious how much the mind (the perceptive or intel lectual faculties in us as distinct from the moral or spiritual) has to do with actually constituting the objects of the outward world — the trees, the animals, the persons. Mind, as it is in me and in all men, not only perceives these things as ready-made, but also has to do with making them to be. God, we commonly say, creates things in nature, and He creates mind. But in fact the two creations are inseparable. The
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things have no existence apart from the minds which know them, for it is only as held together by the mind of the observer that all the sensations of colour, taste, hardness, softness, shape, etc., coalesce into an object held together in relations to the whole orderly world. Relations are the work of mind, and relations are necessary to make objects. On the other hand, it is only the sensations given from outside which enable the mind to perceive and know, and so to become a mind at all. This is a per plexing and irritating conclusion perhaps, but it is apparently inevitable if one likes to think. And it would be of a piece with this if we are to suppose that a similar rela tion exists between the spiritual presence of Christ in the eucharist and our corre sponding faculties of spiritual perception :— if we are to suppose that, though it is God who makes the bread to be the body of Christ and not man (as it is God who makes the objects in the natural world and not man), yet He makes this spiritual reality to exist relatively, not absolutely : in such
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sense as to exist only for faith, the iaith of the believing and worshipping Church, just as He creates the world relatively, not absolutely, that is, to exist for rational beings and by the action of thought.
And we observe that this doctrine of relativity makes the reality of objects, neither in the sphere of nature nor of the spiritual world, to depend upon the precarious state of mind of any individual. The trees and flowers do not depend on my mind for their existence, but on the action of that common reason in which all men more or less effectively share, but which, at the bottom, has its origin out of the divine reason. Upon mind in general, however, the exist ence of the world as we know it does depend ; and for irrational creatures — such as in no way share in reason — it cannot in any real sense be said to exist ; for existence on analysis proves to mean a relation to mind. So the spiritual presence of Christ in His body and His blood (and all that goes with it) rests not on the precarious faith of any individual, but is so relative to
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the faith of the church as a whole — that common faculty which rests at bottom on the activity of the Holy Ghost — as that apart from faith, or for one who in no way shares it, it can no more in any intelligible sense be said to exist than the beauty of nature can be said to exist for what is quite without reason. For here again existence proves to mean a relation to a consciousness —only now it is not mere rational sensibility, but spiritual faith.1
A few words in conclusion may be said to those who will feel a lack of definiteness in the account of the real presence just given. You have asserted, they will say, an objective presence but at the same time have pleaded against phrases being exclusively or freely used which suggest a localized presence. You insist that the presence is not physically
1 It is interesting to reflect how any right doctrine of the spirituality or relativity of the divine presence enables us to recognize that there can be degrees of divine presence, such as are postulated in St. Matt. v. 34-5 and in many other places. Degrees of divine presence are possible in proportion as it expresses divine purpose and is relative to human faith.
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attached to the elements, but is secure only in proportion as we abide under the shelter of the purpose for which it is given. You claim that it is a presence for faith in such sense that it may be said only to exist in relation to faith. But by making these and the like qualifications you are taking away the sharp outline of the Catholic belief and leaving it hazy and dim. To which the reply, I think, is threefold.
First, some such qualifications are found in almost all careful theological statements on this subject — such as the statement already quoted from Cardinal Newman. Surely it takes the edge off the later western way of regarding the sacrament, if Christ does not descend from heaven upon our altars, and does not move when the host is carried ? And if this is the accurate truth, it needs surely to make its influence felt on the popular faith — perhaps, as the fathers seem to have felt, by the simultaneous use of different kinds of metaphors for the presence, more or less neutralizing one another.
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Secondly, and more generally, there is a kind of clearness of statement which suits material objects but which simply does not apply to spiritual things, and it is plain that such clearness is, both in the Bible and the fathers, avoided as a danger. Nothing is in fact more striking than the constant anxiety of the fathers to make men feel that human language can but dimly adumbrate, and not fully or precisely define, divine mysteries. They continually appear to shrink from being too clear-cut in their explanations. In our days we seem greatly to need the reminder of Hooker (applicable to other parts of the revealed truth besides the incarnation) that " because this divine mystery is more true than plain, divers having framed the same to their own conceits or fancies are found in their expositions thereof more plain than true."
Thirdly, I should like to suggest that it is a shallow rationalism and intellectual indo lence, rather than the simple faith of the poor (or poor in spirit), which crave for clearness of statement beyond the measure allowed to
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us who " see through a glass, darkly " ; and the craving must be gratified only with great reserves. We have admirable examples of ancient teaching — about the sacraments, among other things. Who ever taught a town congregation of average intelligence better than St. Chrysostom, or simple people better than St. Augustine? And they use great plainness of speech without material izing truth or brushing aside the atmosphere of mystery which blunts the too sharp edge of doctrinal statement.
CHAPTER III.
THE EUCHARIST A SACRIFICE.
§ i. The church's sacrifices.
THERE can be no question that from the earliest days the Christian church thought of the eucharist as a sacrifice.1 This is implied by Clement of Rome when he sees in the eucharistic worship of the church, and the " offering of the gifts," a continua tion under new conditions of the ordered sacrificial worship of the old covenant.2 And the word is plainly used of the eucharist (however inadequately conceived) in the Didache : " On the day of the Lord come together and break bread and make your eucharist, after having first confessed your transgressions that your sacrifice may be pure."3 And Justin Martyr speaks
1 Harnack Dogmeng. Bd. i. 152, n. '.
'2 Clem. Rom. ad Cor. 40—44. 3 Did. xiv. i.
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repeatedly of "the sacrificeswthrough* His name, which Jesus the Christ delivered to us to make — that is at the thank-offering (eucharist) of the bread and of the cup " ; and of " the bread of the eucharist which for a memorial of His passion Christ our Lord delivered to us to offer."1 Finally, to go down no farther than the second century, Irenaeus is emphatic that it is not that sacri fices are abolished under the new covenant, but only that their character is changed ; for Christ "took the bread which is of this (lower) creation and gave thanks, saying, ' This is my body ' : and likewise the cup . . . and confessed it to be His blood, and taught the new oblation of the new covenant which the church receiving from the apostles offers to God over the whole world."' There was no doubt about it. The eucharist was a sacrifice. It was the eucharist which the prophet foretold when he said, from God,
1 Justin dial. c. Trypli. 41, 117. The word "eucharist" passed from meaning simply thanksgiving to mean the specially ordained thank-offering of the Christians as above ; and then the consecrated elements : see above, p. 6.
- Iren. C. haer. iv. 17, 5.
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" In every place . . . shall be offered unto my name . . . a pure offering."1 And the eucharist was specially called the "spiritual" (or " rational ") and " bloodless " sacrifice : spiritual — a worship "in spirit and in truth" none the less because it was a visible and corporate act, offered in connection with visible symbols ; and bloodless — in the first sense, no doubt because the symbols were bread and wine and not the flesh and blood of animals, but also because these clean and less gross elements had been asso ciated already with spiritual conceptions of worship.2
The fathers used this sacrificial language, we must remember, while at the same time the Greek and Roman world was looking upon them as eccentric for holding a religion
1 Didachc xiv. 3 ; Justin, Irenasus, Clement, Tertullian, etc.
- " Bloodless " is used by Philo, of the meal offerings (de anim. sacrific. ed. Mangey, ii. 250), but also of inward as opposed to outward worship (de ebreit. i. 370 ; cf. ii. 254). Similarly it is used in the Test, of xii. Pair. (Levi, 3) of the worship of the angels, " a rational odour of sweet savour and a bloodless offering." There is an obvious ambiguity which remains in the earliest Christian use of the word.
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without altars and temples, as well as with out images.1 And indeed they are constantly proclaiming that (in the sense of the heathen) they had none of these. For they interpreted their sacrifices to mean, as in fact in their origin they did, that God had physical appe tites and needed animal or material suste nance. " They sacrifice fat victims to God as if He were hungry, and pour out wine as if He were thirsty."2 But the Christians knew that God does not stand in need of any material offering — of blood or sweet savours. He made all things and needs none of them.3 "We offer Him (what alone He asks) a bloodless sacrifice and the rational service." " We approach Him only with pure prayer." The purified heart and the acceptable prayer are the only sacrifices He asks for, and sanctified hearts and bodies the only temples in which He will dwell.4 This is
1 Origen c. Cds. viii. 17 ; Minucius Felix Octav. 10.
- Lactantius, Divin. Instil, vi. -z.
a Justin M. ApoL i. 13; Athenagoras Lcgatio, 13; Tertullian Scap. 2.
4 Clem. Alex. Strom, vii. 3, 14 ; Greg. Naz. Unit. ii. 94—95-
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the constantly reiterated Christian protest against heathendom.
And it must be borne in mind that the fathers of the first four centuries mostly took a low view of the sacrificial system of the Jews, which they regarded as not directly ordered by God, seeing it had its origin from " Gentile grossness," but as something which God at the best tolerated among them to avoid worse things, or even laid on them for a punishment;1 so that on this side also they are anxious to separate themselves from fellowship with a sacrificial system as commonly understood.
But all this language of disparagement of material sacrifices still leaves them on their own ground recognizing that the worship in spirit and in truth is not a mere inward and individual approach to God, but a corporate and therefore outward thing— a worship which publicly acknowledges God in all His
1 See Lux Mundi (small ed.), p. 241, n. J; and Freeman, Principles, vol. ii. p. 56. In spite of Augustine's influence, the view appears still in Rupert of Deutz Dial. int. Christ, et Jitd. ii. (P. L. clxx. 581-2) : " Deus legem illam non jussit sed admisit; non voluit sed permisit."
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gifts, though He needs them not;1 and a worship which finds its central expression in the eucharist, in which, according to the ordinance of Christ, bread and wine are presented to the Father, in the name of the Son, and in memorial of His passion, with the adoration and prayer and thanksgiving of sons, and blessed by the Holy Spirit to become the Lord's body and blood, and partaken of by the worshippers that they may be bound all together in Him. That was for the Christians the chief and central expression of rational service and bloodless sacrifice.
Now we must examine somewhat more closely what the eucharistic sacrifice does and does not mean, on the background of the New Testament teaching, but post poning for the moment the question of the witness of the New Testament to the eucha rist in particular.
Whatever may have been the original and
1 Iren. C. haer. iv. 18, 6 : " For we offer to Him, not as if He needed ought, but giving thanks to His supremacy and sanctifying the creature."
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fundamental meaning of sacrifice, it had come among the Jews to mean especially something given to God in homage and recognition, or to recover His favour. The prophetic teaching, which especially in fluenced the early Christian church, had already purged this practice of offering material gifts from the notion that God in any sense needed material things for Himself. " I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he-goats out of thy folds. For every beast of the forest is mine. . . . The world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God the sacrifice of thanksgiving." Thus it had become plain to any thoughtful Jew of the later period that, if God required sacrifices, that was because of what they represented -- the obedient will and spirit; the private, and still more the corporate, acknowledgment of God as the source of all blessings; the desire to hold communion with Him ; above all the desire to recover His favour where it had been lost by sin. For this idea of propitiation
M 2
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had come to predominate among all the possible conceptions of sacrifice.
But here was a chief point of contrast between Jew and Christian. For when the Jewish passed into the Christian church, it became a first principle that there was no more need for propitiating God. God, without any co-operation from the race He was redeeming, had provided His own pro pitiation. He had sent His own Son, in our flesh, and " given Him up " to be the voluntary victim of human sin, and thereby also the expiation for it. By His willing offering of Himself as Son of Man, in a perfect obedience through life and unto the shedding of His blood, He had made repara tion in man's name for man's sin. He had done, spiritually and effectually, once and for all, what the one inaugural sacrifice of the old covenant and the annually recurring day of atonement had done symbolically, but outwardly only and ineffectually : He had set the redeemed humanity, the church of the redeemed — His own body — on a new basis with God. They, as associated with
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Himself, had in Him been once for all effectually reconciled to the Father ; and so long as they retained their hold on Christ by faith, and the obedience which springs of faith, they were accepted " in the beloved."
For the Christian, therefore, there was no more need of any propitiation. Christ, their effective propitiation, was triumphant and alive at the right hand of the Father in all- powerful intercession. It remained for them only and in all ways to make thankful com memoration of His victorious passion and resurrection, by their whole bearing " to proclaim the Lord's death till He should come again," and to intercede and plead in fellowship with His intercession - - in His name and in the power of "the blood of sprinkling," the " blood of the eternal covenant."
But the abolition of any further need for propitiation was not equivalent to the abolition of sacrifice. Those sacrifices of the old covenant to which in the Epistle to the Hebrews Christ's sacrifice is chiefly
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compared, are, we should notice, the inaugural sacrifice at which Moses spoke the words " This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you,"1 and the sacrifice of the great day of atonement. And these were not simply two among many sacrifices ; they held a position of their own. The one inaugurated a whole covenant of worship, and the other (in the fully developed ritual system) maintained it in being by annually purging first the priesthood, and secondly the holy place, the altar and the whole tabernacle, from the uncleanness of the people.2 Thus the purpose of the ritual of the day of atonement was to purge and renew the whole sphere of sacrifice, and enable the various offerings of the year following to be made without offence.
All this, according to the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, was an ineffective shadow, but a real shadow of what was to come. Christ Jesus, our great high priest and victim, self-sacrificed upon the cross
1 Exod. xxiv. 8: cf. Hebr. ix. 15 — 24; Matt. xxvi. 28. - Levit. xvi. n, 16, 18, 20.
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and self-presented in the heavenly place, has for those who belong to Him by faith made all things