The Holy Eucharist In the Early Church

The same cannot be said in any sense about the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, which did not become the subject of controversy until the ninth century. The definitive and precise formulation of the crucial doctrinal issues concerning the Eucharist had to await that controversy and others that followed even later.

This does not mean at all, however, that the church did not yet have a doctrine of the Eucharist; it does mean that the statements of its doctrine must not be sought in polemical and dogmatic treatises devoted to sacramental theology.

It means also that the effort to cross-examine the fathers of the second or third century about where they stood in the controversies of the ninth or sixteenth century is both silly and futile.

Perhaps the best illustration of such futility is the controversy that has been carried on, at least since the sixteenth century, over the eucharistic teaching of Irenaeus, especially over one passage. Since it unites the basic themes of eucharistic doctrine, this passage may serve the same function in this discussion of the Eucharist that was served by the passage from Tertullian in our summary of the doctrine of baptism.

Arguing, just as Tertullian did, against a dualistic disparagement of creation, Irenaeus used the sacramental practice and teaching of the church to refute Gnostic claims; it was over bread which belonged to the creation that Christ had pronounced his blessing and said, “This is my body.” The church had received this tradition from the apostles, and all over the world it made this offering to God: “We offer to him the things that are his own, consistently announcing and confessing the fellowship and unity of flesh and spirit. For as the bread taken from the earth, when it has received the consecration from God, is no longer common bread but is the Eucharist, which consists of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, but have the hope of the resurrection into eternal [life].”

In the light of the controversy over these words it does seem an exaggeration to say that “nothing can be more express and clear than the language of the fathers upon this point.”

Yet it does seem “express and clear” that NO orthodox father of the second or third century of whom we have record either declared the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist to be NO MORE THAN SYMBOLIC (although Clement and Origen came close to doing so) or specified a process of substantial change by which the presence was effected (although Ignatius and Justin came close to doing so).

Within the limits of those excluded extremes was the doctrine of the real presence. Fundamental to that doctrine was the liturgical recollection (anamnesis) of Christ. It was, according to Justin Martyr, a “recollection of [Christ’s] being made flesh for the sake of those who believe in him” and of “the suffering which he underwent” to deliver men from their sins and from the power of evil.

But in the act of remembrance the worshiping congregation believed Christ himself to be present among them.

That he was also present among them apart from the Eucharist, they affirmed on the basis of such promises as Matthew 18:20, which Clement of Alexandria applied to matrimony, and Matthew 28:20, which Origen cited against Celsus as proof that the presence of God and of Christ was not spatial.

Yet the adoration of Christ in the Eucharist through the words and actions of the liturgy seems to have presupposed that this was a special presence, neither distinct from nor merely illustrative of his presence in the church. In some early Christian writers that presupposition was expressed in strikingly realistic language. Ignatius called the Eucharist “the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins,” asserting the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist against docetists, who regarded his flesh as a phantasm both in the incarnation and in the Eucharist; Ignatius combined the realism of his eucharistic doctrine with asymbolic implication when he equated the “bread of God” with “the flesh of Jesus Christ,” but went on to equate “his blood” with “incorruptible love.” Tertullian spoke of the eucharistic bread as a “figure” of the body of Christ, but he also taught that in the Eucharist the flesh of the communicant fed on the flesh and blood of Christ.

Theologians did not have adequate concepts within which to formulate a doctrine of the real presence that evidently was already believed by the church even though it was not yet taught by explicit instruction or confessed by creeds.

As Irenaeus’s reference to the Eucharist as “not common bread” indicates, however, this doctrine of the real presence believed by the church and affirmed by its liturgy was closely tied to the idea of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. Many of the passages we have already cited concerning the recollection and the real presence spoke also of the sacrifice, as when in several ambiguous passages Justin contrasted the sacrifice of Judaism with the sacrifice offered up in the “remembrance effected by the solid and liquid food” of the Christian Eucharist.

One of the most ample and least ambiguous statements of the sacrificial interpretation of the Eucharist in any ante-Nicene theologian was that of Cyprian, who is also one of the earliest authorities for the sacerdotal interpretation of the Christian ministry.

In the course of a discussion of liturgical problems, Cyprian laid down the axiom: “If Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, is himself the chief priest of God the Father, and has first offered himself a sacrifice to the Father, and has commanded this to be done in commemoration of himself, certainly that priest truly discharges the office of Christ who imitates that which Christ did; and he then offers a true and full sacrifice in the church to God the Father, when he proceeds to offer it according to what he sees Christ himself to have offered.”

This was based on the belief that “”the passion of the Lord is the sacrifice which we offer.”

The sacrifice of Christ on Calvary was a complete offering; the sacrifice of the Eucharist did not add anything to it, nor did it “”repeat” it, as though there were more than the one sacrifice.

But as the sacrifice of Melchizedek the priest “”prefigured the sacrament of the sacrifice of the Lord,” so the eucharistic sacrifice of the church was performed “”in commemoration” of the sacrifice of Good Friday and in “”celebration with a legitimate consecration.”

In other liturgical discussions, too, Cyprian made it clear that “”sacrifice” was an appropriate way of speaking about the Eucharist; but he also insisted that “”the sacrifice of a broken spirit” was ‘”a sacrifice to God equally precious and glorious.”

Another prominent theme of eucharistic doctrine was the belief that participation in the Lord’s Supper would prepare the communicant for immortality. Perhaps the most familiar statement of this theme came in the words of Ignatius, describing the bread of the Eucharist as “the medicine of immortality, the antidote against death, and everlasting life in Jesus Christ.”

The much-debated words of Justin about the ‘”transmutation [metabole]” taking place in the Eucharist may be a reference either to the change effected in the elements by their consecration or to transformation of the human body through the gift of immortality or to both.

Irenaeus explicitly drew a parallel between these two transformations when he declared that the bodies that had received the Eucharist were no longer corruptible, just as the bread that had received the consecration was no longer common.

On the other hand, it is not self-evident that every echo of this theme was an explicit reference to the Eucharist. When Clement of Alexandria spoke of “the medicine of immortality” as “magnificent,” there does not seem to have been any eucharistic overtone in his words.

And when Origen, interpreting the petition of the Lord’s Prayer for “supersubstantial bread [ho artios ho epiousios],” defined it as “that [bread}which is most adapted to the rational nature and is akin to its very substance, bringing to the soul health and well-being and strength, and giving to him that eats of it a share of its own immortality,” it is not obvious that he was describing the effects of consuming the eucharistic bread.

Perhaps his added comment that “the Logos of God is immortal” may serve to explain his language about immortality through the “supersubstantial bread” and much of the language about sacrifice in such writers as Justin, for both themes were ultimately derived from the teaching that Christ the Logos was the true sacrifice and the true gift of immortality.

Both themes, moreover, seem to presuppose the teachings of the church and its liturgical practice. Liturgical evidence suggests an understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, whose relation to the sacrifices of the Old Testament was one of archetype to type, and whose relation to the sacrifice of Calvary was one of “re-presentation, just as the bread of the Eucharist re-presented the body of Christ.

It would also seem that the spiritualization of just as the bread of the Eucharist re-presented the body of Christ. It would also seem that the spiritualization of material reality in the theology of Clement of Alexandria and Origen went as far as it could without verging on Gnostic heresy; therefore their noneucharistic use of such eucharistic notions as “medicine of immortality” and “bread that confers immortality” would seem to suggest how prominent such notions were in the doctrine that was being expressed by the liturgy and piety of the church.

They were spiritualizing what seem to have been prevalent modes of describing the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. Those modes of speaking, prevalent in widely scattered remains of the literature, are more important for the development of church doctrine than the spiritualization that was dependent upon them.

Great theological refinement was needed before these modes of speaking could be built up into a eucharistic theology; above all, the doctrine of the person of Christ had to be clarified before there could be concepts that could bear the weight of eucharistic teaching.

But even with concepts that bent under the weight, the church went on celebrating and believing, teaching and experimenting with metaphors, defending and confessing. In its doctrine as in its liturgy, it recalled One who was present in its celebration, and in its corporate experience it was united to that sacrifice by which the promise of eternal life became real.