"The Supper of the Lord ... is a Sacrament of our Redemption by
Christ's death; insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with
faith, receive the same, the Bread which we break is a partaking of
the Body of Christ, and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of
the Blood of Christ.
"Transubstantiation ... cannot be proved by holy writ....
"The Body of Christ is given, taken and eaten, in the Supper, only
after a heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body
of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.
"The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance
reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped."
At the end of the communion rite the prayer-book, in view of the
ordinance to receive the Sacrament kneeling, adds the following:--
"It is hereby declared, that thereby no adoration is intended, or
ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental Bread or Wine, there
bodily received, or unto any Corporal Presence of Christ's natural
Flesh and Blood. For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in
their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored (for
that were idolatry, to be abhorred of all faithful Christians); and
the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and
not here; it being against the truth of Christ's natural Body to be at
one time in more places than one."
These monitions and prescriptions are rapidly becoming a dead-letter,
but they possess a certain historical interest.
The Helvetic Confession[10] of A.D. 1566 (_caput_ xxi. _De sacra coena
Domini_) runs as follows:--
"That it may be more rightly and clearly understood how the flesh and
blood of Christ can be food and drink of the faithful, and be received
by them unto eternal life, let us add these few remarks. Chewing is
not of one kind alone. For there is a corporeal chewing, by which food
is taken into the mouth by man, bruised with the teeth and swallowed
down into the belly.... As the flesh of Christ cannot be corporeally
chewed without wickedness and truculence, so it is not food of the
belly.... There is also a spiritual chewing of the body of Christ, not
such that by it we understand the very food to be changed into spirit,
but such that, the body and blood of the Lord abiding in their essence
and peculiarity, they are spiritually communicated to us, not in any
corporeal way, but in a spiritual, through the Holy Spirit which
applies and bestows on us those things which were prepared through the
flesh and blood of the Lord betrayed for our sake to death, to wit,
remission of sins, liberation and life eternal, so that Christ lives
in us and we in him....
"In addition to the aforesaid spiritual chewing, there is also a
sacramental chewing of the Lord's body, by which the faithful not only
partakes spiritually and inwardly of the true body and blood of the
Lord, but outwardly by approaching the Lord's table, receives the
visible sacrament of his body and blood.... But he who without faith
approaches the sacred table, albeit he communicate in the sacrament,
yet he perceives not the matter of the sacrament, whence is life and
salvation...."
The Augustan Confession presented by the German electors to Charles V.
in the section on the Mass merely protests against the view that "the
Lord's Supper is a work (_opus_) which being performed by a priest earns
remission of sin for the doer and for others, and that in virtue of the
work done (_ex opere operato_), without a good motive on the part of the
user. Also that being applied for the dead, it is a satisfaction, that
is to say, earns for them remission of the pains of purgatory."
The Saxon Confession of Wittenberg, June 1551, while protesting against
the same errors, equally abstains from trying to define narrowly how
Christ is present in the sacrament.
_Consubstantiation_.--The symbolical books of the Lutheran Church,
following the teaching of Luther himself, declare the doctrine of the
real presence of Christ's body and blood in the eucharist, _together
with_ the bread and wine (_consubstantiation_), as well as the ubiquity
of his body, as the orthodox doctrine of the church. One consequence of
this view was that the unbelieving recipients are held to be as really
partakers of the body of Christ in, with and under the bread as the
faithful, though they receive it to their own hurt. (Hagenbach, _Hist.
of Doctr_. ii. 300.)
Of all the Reformers, the teaching of Zwingli was the farthest removed
from that of Luther. At an early period he asserted that the Eucharist
was nothing more than food for the soul, and had been instituted by
Christ only as an act of commemoration and as a visible sign of his body
and blood (_Christenliche Ynleitung_, 1523, quoted by Hagenbach, _Hist.
of Doctr_. ii. 296, Clark's translation). But that Zwingli did not
reject the higher religious significance of the Eucharist, and was far
from degrading the bread and wine into "nuda et inania symbola," as he
was accused of doing, we see from his _Fidei ratio ad Carolum
Imperatorem_ (ib. p. 297).
_Original Significance of the Eucharist_.--It is doubtful if the
attempts of reformers to spiritualize the Eucharist bring us, except so
far as they pruned ritual extravagances, nearer to its original
significance; perhaps the Roman, Greek and Oriental churches have better
preserved it. This significance remains to be discussed; the cognate
question of how far the development of the Eucharist was influenced by
the pagan mysteries is discussed in the article SACRAMENT.
That the Lord's Supper was from the first a meal symbolic of Christian
unity and commemorative of Christ's death is questioned by none. But
Paul, while he saw this much in it, saw much more; or he could not in
the same epistle, x. 18-22 assimilate communion in the flesh and blood
of Jesus, on the one hand, to the sacrificial communion with the altar
which made Israel after the flesh one; and on the other to the communion
with devils attained by pagans through sacrifices offered before idols.
It has been justly remarked of the Pauline view, that--
"The union with the Lord Himself, to which those who partake of the
Lord's Supper have, is compared with the union which those who partake
of a sacrifice have with the deity to whom the altar is devoted--in
the case of the Israelites with God, of the heathen with demons. This
idea that to partake of sacrifice is to devote oneself to the deity,
lies at the root of the ancient idea of worship, whether Jewish or
heathen; and St Paul uses it as being readily understood. In this
connexion the symbol is never a mere symbol, but a means of real
union. 'The cup is the covenant'" (Prof. Sanday in Hastings'
_Dictionary of the Bible_, 3, 149).
Paul caps his argument thus:--"Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and
the cup of demons: ye cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the
table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger
than he?" And these words with their context prove that Paul, like the
Fathers of the church, regarded the gods and goddesses as real living
supernatural beings, but malignant. They were the powers and
principalities with whom he was ever at war. The Lord also is jealous of
them, if any one attempt to combine their cult with his, for to do so is
to doubt the supremacy of his name above all names. Both in its inner
nature then and outward effects the Eucharist was the Christian
counterpart of these two other forms of communion of which one, the
heathen, was excluded from the first, and the other, the Jewish, soon to
disappear. It is their analogue, and to understand it we must understand
them, not forgetting that Paul, as a Semite, and his hearers, as
converted pagans, were imbued with the sacrificial ideas of the old
world.
"A kin," remarks W. Robertson Smith (_Religion of the Semites_, 1894),
"was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what
must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of
one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one
living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh and bones, of which
no member could be touched without all the members suffering." "In later
times," observes the same writer (_op. cit._ p. 313), "we find the
conception current that any food which two men partake of together, so
that the same substance enters into their flesh and blood, is enough to
establish some sacred unity of life between them; but in ancient times
this significance seems to be always attached to participation in the
flesh of a sacrosanct victim, and the solemn mystery of its death is
justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred
cement be procured, which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union
between the worshippers and their god. This cement is nothing else than
the actual life of the sacred and kindred animal, which is conceived as
residing in its flesh, but specially in its blood, and so, in the sacred
meal, is actually distributed among all the participants, each of whom
incorporates a particle of it with his own individual life."
The above conveys the cycle of ideas within which Paul's reflection
worked. Christ who knew no sin (2 Cor. v. 21) had been made sin, and
sacrificed for us, becoming as it were a new Passover (1 Cor. v. 7). By
a mysterious sympathy the bread and wine over which the words, "This is
my body which is for you," and "This cup is the new covenant in my
blood," had been uttered, became Christ's body and blood; so that by
partaking of these the faithful were united with each other and with
Christ into one kinship. They became the body of Christ, and his blood
or life was in them, and they were members of him. Participation in the
Eucharist gave actual life, and it was due to their irregular attendance
at it that many members of the Corinthian church "were weak and sickly
and not a few slept" (i.e. had died). As the author already cited adds
(p. 313): "The notion that by eating the flesh, or particularly by
drinking the blood, of another living being, a man absorbs its nature or
life into his own, is one which appears among primitive peoples in many
forms."
But this effect of participation in the bread and cup was not in Paul's
opinion automatic, was no mere _opus operatum_; it depended on the
ethical co-operation of the believer, who must not eat and drink
_unworthily_, that is, after refusing to share his meats with the poorer
brethren, or with any other guilt in his soul. The phrases "discern the
body" and "discern ourselves" in 1 Cor. xi. 29, 31 are obscure. Paul
evidently plays on the verb, _krino, diakrino, katakrino_ ([Greek:
krino], [Greek: diakrino], [Greek: katakrino]). The general sense is
clear, that those who consume the holy food without a clear conscience,
like those who handle sacred objects with impure hands, will suffer
physical harm from its contact, as if they were undergoing the ordeal of
touching a holy thing. The idea, therefore, seems to be that as we must
distinguish the holy food over which the words "This is my body" have
been uttered from common food, so we must separate ourselves before
eating it from all that is guilty and impure. The food that is _taboo_
must only be consumed by persons who are equally _taboo_ or pure. If
they are not pure, it condemns them.
The "one" loaf has many parallels in ancient sacrifices, e.g. the Latin
tribes when they met annually at their common temple partook of a
"single" bull. And in Greek _Panegureis_ or festivals the sacrificial
wine had to be dispensed from one common bowl: "Unto a common cup they
come together, and from it pour libations as well as sacrifice," says
Aristides Rhetor in his _Isthmica in Neptunum_, p. 45. To ensure the
continued unity of the bread, the Roman church ever leaves over from a
preceding consecration half a holy wafer, called _fermentum_, which is
added in the next celebration.
With what awe Paul regarded the elements mystically identified with
Christ's body and life is clear from his declaration in 1 Cor. xi. 27,
that he who consumes them unworthily is guilty or holden of the Lord's
body and blood. This is the language of the ancient ordeal which as a
test of innocence required the accused to touch or still better to eat a
holy element. A wife who drank the holy water in which the dust of the
Sanctuary was mingled (Num. v. 17 foll.) offended so deeply against it,
if unfaithful, that she was punished with dropsy and wasting. The very
point is paralleled in the _Acts of Thomas_, ch. xlviii. A youth who has
murdered his mistress takes the bread of the Eucharist in his mouth, and
his two hands are at once withered up. The apostle immediately invites
him to confess the crime he must have committed, "for, he says, the
Eucharist of the Lord hath convicted thee."
It has been necessary to consider at such length St Paul's account of
the Eucharist, both because it antedates nearly by half a century that
of the gospels, and because it explains the significance which the rite
had no less for the Gnostics than for the great church. The synoptists'
account is to be understood thus: Jesus, conscious that he now for the
last time lies down to eat with his disciples a meal which, if not the
Paschal, was anyhow anticipatory of the Millennial Regeneration (Matt.
xix. 28), institutes, as it were, a blood-brotherhood between himself
and them. It is a covenant similar to that of Exodus xxiv., when after
the peace-offering of oxen, Moses took the blood in basins and sprinkled
half of it on the altar and on twelve pillars erected after the twelve
tribes, and the other half on the people, to whom he had first read out
the writing of the covenant and said, "Behold the blood of the covenant
which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words."
But the covenant instituted by Jesus on the eve of his death was hardly
intended as a new covenant with God, superseding the old. This
reconstruction of its meaning seems to have been the peculiar revelation
of the Lord to Paul, who viewed Christ's crucifixion and death as an
atoning sacrifice, liberating by its grace mankind from bonds of sin
which the law, far from snapping, only made more sensible and grievous.
This must have been the gist of the special revelation which he had
received from Christ as to the inner character of a supper which he
already found a ritual observance among believers. The Eucharist of the
synoptists is rather a covenant or tie of communion between Jesus and
the twelve, such as will cause his life to survive in them after he has
been parted from them in the flesh. An older prophet would have slain an
animal and drunk its blood in common with his followers, or they would
all alike have smeared themselves with it. In the East, even now, one
who wishes to create a blood tie between himself and his followers and
cement them to himself, makes under his left breast an incision from
which they each in turn suck his blood. Such barbarisms was alien to the
spirit of the Founder, who substitutes bread and wine for his own flesh
and blood, only imparting to these his own quality by the declaration
that they _are_ himself. He broke the bread not in token of his
approaching death, but in order to its equal distribution. Wine he
rather chose than water as a surrogate for his actual blood, because it
already in Hebrew sacrifices passed as such. "The Hebrews," says
Robertson Smith (_op. cit_. p. 230), "treated it like the blood, pouring
it out at the base of the altar." As a red liquid it was a ready symbol
of the blood which is the life. It was itself the covenant, for the
genitive [Greek: tes diathekes] in Mark xiv. 24 is epexegetic, and Luke
and Paul rightly substitute the nominative. It was, as J. Wellhausen
remarks,[11] a better cement than the bread, because through the
drinking of it the very blood of Jesus coursed through the veins of the
disciples, and that is why more stress is laid on it than on the bread.
To the apostles, as Jews bred and born, the action and words of their
master formed a solemn and intelligible appeal. It belongs to the same
order of ideas that the headship of the Messianic _ecclesia_ in Judea
was assigned after the death of Jesus to his eldest brother James, and
after him for several generations to the eldest living representative of
his family.
To the modern mind it is absurd that an image or symbol should be taken
for that which is imaged or symbolized, and that is why the early
history of the Eucharist has been so little understood by ecclesiastical
writers. And yet other religions, ancient and modern, supply many
parallels, which are considered in the article SACRAMENT.
Authorities.--Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_; Goetz, _Die
Abendmahlsfrage_; G. Anrich, _Das antike Mysterienwesen_ (Goettingen,
1894); _Sylloge confessionum_ (Oxford, 1804); Duchesne, _Origins of
Christian Culture_; Funk's edition of _Constitutiones Apostolicae_;
Hagenbach, _History of Doctrines_, vol. ii.; Geo. Bickell, _Messe und
Pascha_; idem. "Die Entstehung der Liturgie," _Ztsch. f. Kath. Theol_.
iv. Jahrg. 94 (1880), p. 90 (shows how the prayers of the Christian
sacramentaries derive from the Jewish Synagogue); Goar, _Rituale
Graecorum_; F.E. Brightman, _Eastern Liturgies_; Cabrol and Leclercq,
_Monumenta liturgica, reliquiae liturgicae vetustissimae_ (Paris,
1900); Harnack, _History of Dogma_; Jas. Martineau, _Seat of Authority
in Religion_, bk. iv. (London, 1890); Loofs, art. "Abendmahlsfeier" in
Herzog's _Realencyklopaedie_ (1896.) Spitta, _Urchristentum_
(Goettingen, 1893); Schultzen, _Das Abendmahl im N.T._ (Goettingen,
1895); Kraus, _Real-Encykl. d. christl. Altert_. (for the
Archaeology); art. "Eucharistic"; Ch. Gore, _Dissertations_ (1895);
Hoffmann, _Die Abendmahlsgedanken Jesu Christi_ (Koenigsberg, 1896);
Sanday, art. "Lord's Supper" in _Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible_;
Th. Harnack, _Der christl. Gemeindegottesdienst_. (F. C. C.)