From the beginning of Christianity, the Eucharist had always been considered in relation to the Church. The “communion of the body of Christ” of which St. Paul spoke to the faithful of Corinth was their mysterious union with the community, by virtue of the sacrament: it was the mystery of one Body formed by all those who shared in the “one Bread.” In the same way, from that time on the Church had never ceased to appear linked to the Eucharist. If, for example, we open the Glossa on St. Paul, it is not, as might be supposed, with reference to the account of the Last Supper, but with reference to the metaphor of the body, applied by the Apostle to the Christian community, that we read this sentence: “This is the sacrifice of Christians, so that the many might be one body in Christ.”
This mutual bond, long perceived as essential, explains the sense of mystical body applied to the Church. It is noticeable that it was with reference to the Eucharist that the Church was first given this description; so much so that, in order to study the expression, one hardly has to leave the Eucharistic context. However, later theologians, who were able to base their teaching on one or two passages from St. Thomas Aquinas, thought that in this case mystical was more aptly opposed to natural. According to them, it would be more correct to say that “mystical body” was used in contrast to “physical” or natural body. This would appear to be the explanation offered by the Roman Catechism. In itself, this was no mistake; because once the expression was acquired, it is clear that this opposition immediately presented itself, in the way that the mystical sense of Scripture is opposed to the literal sense. But a temptation developed here, in the case of the Church, precisely as in that of Scripture: the temptation of no longer seeing anything in this metaphor except the metaphor itself, and of considering “mystical” as a watering-down of “real” or of “true.” To a greater or lesser extent, many fell victim to it. According to some, “mystical body” was merely the same as expressions such as “the fellowship of Catholics” or “the congregation of the faithful.” From that time onwards there was no group that could not be given this description: that is how Antoine de Rosiers comes to distinguish five principal mystical bodies, because within the assembly of humankind he counts a hierarchy of five societies. Some who remembered that St. Augustine and St. Gregory spoke of a demonic body had no difficulty in speaking in their own turn of a demonic mystical body. It is true that other theologians resisted the temptation and protested against such an extensive use of the word, which they considered an abuse. This was the case, in the eighteenth century, with Noel Alexandre; it is the case in our own day with Fr. Prat’s interpretation of St. Paul. They do not want the mystical body of Christ to be confused with any sort of “moral entity.” There is no doubt that they are right, given that ancient tradition, the faithful interpreter of Scripture, offers us so many ultra-realist statements concerning the ecclesial body. But the temptation itself would have had nowhere to take hold, had we been more careful to preserve the original sense of the word that gave rise to this quarrel.
When it was applied to the Eucharist, the mystical body meant the body in mystery, immediately connected to a mystery of the body. From then on it can be understood that during a whole initial period, it seemed natural to distinguish the sacramental body from the historical body, the crucified body: that was to distinguish the sacrament of the Passion from the Passion itself; it did not mean denying the profound identity that it was the sacrament’s purpose to affirm. When the author of the Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum wrote with reference to the vessels on the altar, “in which not the true body of Christ, but the mystery of his body is contained,” he was not, in his manner of underlining a contrast, giving an exact interpretation of traditional belief. Through the stages that have been described, the expression mystical body passed from the Eucharist to the Church: and once again there was, in an analogous sense, a mystery of the body. The mystical body was the mystery that described this ecclesial body by means of the sacrament, and, in its radical meaning, it could strictly speaking be described as being “contained” in the Eucharist. Then, from the mystery of the body it developed into being a body in [the] mystery; from the signification itself to the thing signified.
Thus the Church is the mystical body of Christ: that is to say, quite simply, that it is the body of Christ signified by means of the sacrament. Mystical is a contraction of mystically signified, mystically designated. That is the sense that clearly emerges from the first statement offered to us on the subject in the work of Master Simon: “In the sacrament of the altar there are two (bodies): that is, the true body of Christ and also that which it signifies, his mystical body, which is the Church.”
Is this not a true definition of mystical? The generation that preceded Master Simon’s had still not reached the definitive version, but there was a definition which heralded it and in some sense called it into being. This is what we find in Gregory of Bergamo. In chapter 18 of his Treatise, after quoting St. Paul on the one body formed by all those who share in the one Bread, Gregory writes:
That we, though many, are one body, through the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, is designated mystically by this sacrament, and it was clearly expressed in these words by the Apostle.
Soon it would be altogether natural to call this body mystically signified by means of the Sacrament a “mystical body.” Others were to say signified body, and it would mean the same thing. By virtue of the law operating in the transference of idioms, the adjective that described the Eucharist as signifying could pass to the Church as signified—from the sacred sign to the sacred secret. If we wanted to interpret some intention of restrictive nuance within this new usage, it would only consist in saying that while the particular body of Christ is present “in truth” in the sacrament, the ecclesial body is only present “as a mystery.” But we are not dealing here with a restriction relating to the affirming of its reality. Moreover, even when all reference to the Eucharist had disappeared, the expression would continue to be adapted to its object because, as Cardinal du Perron expressed it, “the word mystical is not always used by writers to exclude the reality of the thing, but to exclude imputing to it evidence and comprehensibility.” The Church, the body of Christ, is a mystery and, against the flat notion of it conceived in the Enlightenment and repeated by a few followers of liberal Protestantism, it should be maintained that a mystery is what continues to remain obscure, hidden and “mystical,” even once it has been described, signified and “revealed.”
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Eucharistic realism and ecclesial realism: these two realisms support one another, each is the guarantee of the other. Ecclesial realism safeguards Eucharistic realism and the latter confirms the former. The same unity of the Word is reflected in both. Today, it is above all our faith in the “real presence,” made explicit thanks to centuries of controversy and analysis, that introduces us to faith in the ecclesial body: effectively signified by the mystery of the Altar, the mystery of the Church has to share the same nature and the same depth. Among the ancients, the perspective was often inverted. The accent was habitually placed on the effect rather than on the cause. But the ecclesial realism to which they universally offer us the most explicit testimony is at the same time, and when necessary, the guarantee of their Eucharistic realism. This is because the cause has to be proportionate to its effect. The authors of Perpétuité put it most effectively when they said:
One hundred passages from the Fathers only contain the one doctrine, which is that the body of Jesus Christ, being received by the faithful, effects among them a sort of union, which is not only moral, but physical and natural, since it consists in the real union of our body with that of Jesus Christ; by virtue of which it can be said that all these bodies with which Jesus Christ is united by means of the Eucharist form only one body, because they only have one individual body, which is the body of Jesus Christ. Thus these passages are worlds away from contradicting the real presence, on which, on the contrary, they are founded, because the faithful are only united among themselves in one body because the Eucharist, which is the body of Jesus Christ, is united to them.
By virtue of the same internal logic—and this counter-experience has its price—those in modern times who water down the traditional idea of the Church as the Body of Christ find themselves also watering down the reality of the Eucharistic presence. This is how Calvin made efforts to establish the same notion of a “virtual presence” of Christ in his sacrament and among the faithful. The reason behind it is the same in both cases: “because he is in heaven and we are here below on earth.” And the pastor Claude, when wanting to set aside the testimony that apologists had extracted from the Fathers in favor of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, found himself obliged to contest the implications of their texts concerning the Church. How, indeed, could the Church be truly built up, how could its members be gathered together in a truly united body by means of a sacrament that only symbolically contained the One whose body it was meant to become, and who alone could bring about its unity? St. Augustine himself becomes incomprehensible, and his entire mysticism, so full of meaning as it is, evaporates into hollow formulations if, on analyzing the implications of his doctrine, we refuse to recognize within it the faith of the common tradition. For him, the Eucharist is far more than a symbol, because it is most truly that sacrament by which the Church is bound together in this age, since the water and the wine of the sacrifice, like the water and the blood that flowed down from the cross, are themselves the sacraments from which the Church is built. It is a real presence because it makes real.
This link of causality and of reciprocal guarantee between the two mysteries of the Church and the Eucharist cannot therefore be too highly stressed, not only in order to understand the dogma in itself, but also to understand the Christian past. If our theologians sometimes have difficulty—as they loyally admit—in finding the “real presence” in one or other Eucharistic doctrine from antiquity, it is perhaps because they are looking too hard. If they were more simply to ask themselves, without worrying about anything else, what this doctrine was, they would undoubtedly be more successful in seeing that the real presence was implicit in it. But while they are seeking it without finding it, they are failing to pay sufficient attention to certain other essential characteristics, which are precisely those that would reveal that presence to them. They even manage, through an unconscious tactical error, to minimize those characteristics, affecting to see in them only chance considerations, some sort of “morality” without dogmatic significance, whose terms it would be inappropriate to insist on, and which are not even worth keeping. They make great efforts to find excuses for the great Doctors who were implicated in this, and seem not to notice that this flowering of dogma that they so disdain has its solid and vigorous roots in Scripture itself.
Negligence of ecclesial symbolism or minimization of ecclesial realism: these are two faults that often go hand in hand. As has already been established, the general evolution of doctrine tended towards this. The consequences of the controversy with the protestants contributed to making it worse. This is how Bellarmine comes to say nothing about the relationship with the Eucharist. This silence is in such stark contrast with his learning, that, in the numerous texts that he quotes, he would seem to be systematically avoiding the repetition of any sentences in which this relationship might be mentioned. At one point nevertheless forced to allude to it, in connection with several passages of St. Augustine put forward by his adversaries, he is only prepared to examine these passages in order to use them as objections, and he finally concludes that Augustine was only trying to conceal the truth in them: “Let us reply . . . that Augustine with devoted labor disguised the question and proceeded to moral exhortation!” Du Perron argued in the same vein. In his view, the ecclesial doctrine developed by the Fathers in speaking of the Eucharist is only an “oblique, secondary and accessory doctrine,” that dwindles into “hyperbolic and allegorical” language. All that they say about it can be compared to a shadow in relation to a body, an echo or “counter-voice” in relation to a voice. Its entire aim is to “recreate the minds of those who read it through the pious cheerfulness and ingenious inventiveness of these allegorical allusions and applications.” And if anyone is surprised when the “counter-voice” is sometimes the only one to be heard, or the shadow is so prominent that the body itself does not always appear, du Perron, like Bellarmine, finds an explanation for it in a fact analogous to what would soon come to be called the “arcane discipline.” Someone addressing catechumens cannot yet reveal to them the heart of the mystery:
St. Augustine, out of concern for the Catechumens, interprets the words that our Lord uses in speaking of his body and blood, not as his true and real flesh and his true and real blood, . . . but as the moral and political body of Christ, which is understood as the society of his Church. . . . This is a moral and secondary understanding, which St. Augustine uses and sustains in order to satisfy the curiosity of the Catechumens, waiting until they are capable of coming definitively to the proper, direct and immediate understanding of these words.
Once more according to du Perron, the same must also be said of works addressed to pagans: within them the Fathers “disguised and masked what they were saying . . . with cloudy ambiguities, in order to keep their profane readers or audience in a state of suspense and incertitude about the true purpose of the Church.” However, there exist sermons addressed to the baptized that are not any more explicit. Would true doctrine still remain hidden from those who are already members of the Church? Perpétuité does not think so; but, in the sense given there, we are dealing with “moral” discourses, not “dogmatic” discourses. Supposing that his audience “were well-informed about the substance of their faith,” the preacher would attempt “only to edify their devotion.” Supposedly, therefore, the Fathers were almost always addressing an audience that they still had no right to instruct, or that they presumed were already well instructed! As we have already seen, there were parts of Perpétuité that were better inspired than this.
Several more recent historians follow a similar path. They cheerfully divide up the ancient texts relating to the Eucharist into two groups: the first group is made up of “realist” texts, while all the “allegorized” texts are lumped into a second group, which is abandoned. But the so-called “realist” texts are not always as realist as these historians would have us believe, and by abandoning these “allegorized” texts, they sometimes deprive us of the most effective testimony to authentic realism. The fear of “symbolism” proves a poor counsellor here. For example, we find written: “the allegorism of some of the Fathers, whereby the body of Christ is presented as his mystical body or the Church, or again its doctrine, or its teaching, does not permit us to consider those who taught it as partisans of Eucharistic symbolism.” How true! In fact it is often quite the contrary. But it is therefore doubly deplorable that, through a desire to escape a negative “symbolist” interpretation, we should deliberately be deprived of an essential part of the Eucharistic doctrine of our forebears. It is also deplorable that a theology that sets out to be strictly historical and “positive” should sometimes commit the historical nonsense of lending its own state of mind to an age where a quite opposite state of mind pertains. Ontological symbolism holds in the history of Christian thought—and in Christian thought itself—too important a place to remain unknown or neglected with impunity—particularly in sacramental theology.
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It now seems fairly clear how and why mystical body passed from Eucharistic usage to ecclesial usage, and what precise significance ought not be attributed to it in one and the other case. Nevertheless, the total significance of the change that ensued can only be fully understood by insisting on the following observations. Of the three terms—historical body, sacramental body, and ecclesial body—that were in use, and that it was a case of putting into order amongst each other, that is to say simultaneously to oppose and unite them to one another, the caesura was originally placed between the first and the second, whereas it subsequently came to be placed between the second and the third. Such, in brief, is the fact that dominates the whole evolution of Eucharistic theories.
This evolution should not be imagined as a rupture or a sudden deviation, any more than as a rectilinear development or a simple explanation. It should rather be compared to a circular movement that was no more precipitate or more rigid at any one particular point of its life. Through the effect of this movement, viewpoints were continually but almost imperceptibly changing. Some new aspect would be discovered, which would continue being confused with the one that preceded it, until that one disappeared. New habits of thought came into being, to all extents and purposes without being noticed. The wheel carried on turning, as inexorably, if not as regularly as time itself, and under the influence of whatever mentality was then prevalent, it was the problems, far more than their solutions, that changed. Naturally there resulted a series of interferences, and also a series of misunderstandings between those minds that remained more attached to the past and those that looked more to the future. Discussions arose, that were often more lively than was warranted by any real distance that lay between the positions of those who were more attentive to new needs, and therefore eager to detect error in any form of antiquarianism, and those who, on the contrary, had a confused sense that in the abandonment of ancient viewpoints, great riches were in danger of being lost. This is the origin of the double phenomenon of traditional formulations that perpetuated themselves by changing, or mostly that changed gradually in spirit while remaining unchanged in the letter. Furthermore, a real doctrinal continuity is maintained here. It is very rare that an innovation, even a slight one, cannot claim authority from some earlier text, and the syntheses elaborated from it all have their roots in the furthest reaches of the past. Between one era and another, as between one Doctor and another, it is often no more than a question of a simple difference of emphasis—admittedly all the more irreducible because they escape the rules of logical discussion. It may be the evolutions, oppositions, and awkwardnesses are therefore often rather forced; to those familiar with the entire collection of texts it may even seem that to comment on them is to be over-scrupulous, perhaps even arbitrary. It was difficult to avoid this trap altogether in my Corpus Mysticum: but was it not necessary to emphasize somewhat fleeting characteristics in order to grasp them more clearly?
The most serious misunderstanding that arose from such an evolution was certainly, from an historical perspective, the one to which St. Augustine’s thinking fell victim. As time went on, it proved fatal that it became more misunderstood, and we see as the centuries go by those who claim to be his partisans dividing into two opposite camps, representing two contradictory interpretations each of which is nearly always equally false. We have encountered various examples of this above. One of the most typical cases is found in Augustine’s teaching on reception of communion by the unworthy. These approach the holy table and receive the sacrament. What does the Lord do meanwhile? Not what he did at the Last Supper, where he ate the Passover with his disciples with such delight. He does what he did on the Cross when, having tasted the bitter drink that was offered to him, he refused to drink it. He does not admit them into his body. This should be translated as: “he does not incorporate them into himself.” This is the habitual perspective of Augustine, who always sees the ecclesial body as an extension of the Eucharist. But once we have in some sense divided the ecclesial body from the sacramental body, by a shift in the caesura, the problem of the interpretation of texts of this sort becomes insoluble. The to be received by Christ and the to receive Christ being from now on separated, it would seem that Augustine, who distinguished them with the most subtle of nuances, by denying the first thus also denied the second. The problem, for Augustine, was that of the fruitfulness of the sacrament, that of its spiritual fruit (being transformed into the body of Christ); what happens is that this is made into a problem of validity, a problem of sacramental presence. It was indeed a question of communion; but it would primarily become a question of the effect of the consecration. According to these new perspectives, the reading of Augustinian texts became distorted. They were searched for a response that they could not provide. Do schismatics, heretics, and the excommunicated truly receive the sacrament? Do they truly have the Body of our Lord on their altars? This is the question posed from the eleventh century onwards. No, replied a certain number of theologians, such as Gerhoh of Reichersberg: is the Catholic Church not indeed the only place of true sacrifice? “Who could imagine that heretics, especially self-declared heretics and those under a ban of excommunication or interdict, could have Christ present in their liturgies?” Yes, would reply partisans of the doctrine that was to emerge triumphant, while others thought they had found a solution through better distinguishing between the cases that Gerhoh was aiming at and the case of those who were simply unworthy . . . The two extremist parties could claim Augustine for their own, as well as the third; but if the second is certainly much more justified in doing so, nevertheless it makes equally little sense in each case.
We should not conclude, from all this, that evolution was a negative thing in itself. It was normal and therefore good. Furthermore, it was needed in order to remedy error and to offer a response to the questions inevitably raised by progress in understanding. Preserving the status quo in theories and viewpoints has never been and can never be an adequate means of safeguarding the truth. In the present case, many misunderstandings that the ensuing changes brought about were the sorts of inconvenience that all good brings in its wake. But this cannot be said for the mutilations that actually accompanied it in many cases. Could Eucharistic realism not have been safeguarded without the virtually total abandonment of symbolism? What ruination heresy accomplishes here, even when it is vanquished! “Woe to those,” we could say, with apologies to Pascal, “who have led the defenders of faith to turn from the foundation of religion,” in order to direct speculation about the Eucharist towards external problems of apologetics! These should not have been set aside, but they ended up by absorbing the entire effort of reflection. More scientific than religious, the syntheses that ensued could in no way be definitive. However, rather than in their inevitable fragility, the damage lay in the abandonment that they appeared to sanction. The eighteenth century, as we have seen, had used the stones of our ancient inheritance to build new structures. But evolution was not slow in coming, and if some formulations lasted, they remained all too often nothing but formulations. The Magisterium, from far off, recalled the essence: theology, without contradicting it, did not always listen to it, or merely proved itself its feeble echo.
The damage equally affected the domain of the Eucharist and of the Church. Indeed at one level the constant build-up of Eucharistic piety became more easily oriented towards an overly individualistic devotion, and sometimes proved poorly defended against certain sentimental excesses. This is how one of the most magnificent examples of progress afforded by the history of Christian life was prevented from bearing some of its finest fruit. As for the Church, insofar as, by defending itself against internal and external attack, it managed to give itself or to define for itself the characteristics of its exterior constitution, by that very fact a good many theologians developed an idea of it that was less and less realist, because less and less mystical. The Thomist synthesis, still so nourished on tradition and so highly organized, was too quickly abandoned in favor of theories which were of quite different orientation and too dependent on controversy. Except among a few isolated thinkers, such as Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century, this is how the “mystery” of the Church disappeared from the horizons of thought, as if there necessarily had to be a conflict between the perfection of the “visible society” and the intimate solidity of the “Body of Christ”! It seems that it would therefore be of great interest, we might even say of pressing urgency, given the present state of what remains of “Christendom,” to return to the sacramental origins of the “mystical body” in order to steep ourselves in it. It would be a return to the mystical sources of the Church. The Church and the Eucharist are formed by one another day by day: the idea of the Church and the idea of the Eucharist must promote one another mutually and each be rendered more profound by the other. By the food and blood of the Lord’s body let all fellowship be bound together!
I am certainly not so naïve as to think that this living synthesis was never realized in its perfect state in the thinking of the Doctors or the practice of the people of any century. The periods from which I have to cull most of the material for my explorations were, as any other, troubled times, eras where disunity and hypocrisy ruled . . . If the tragic needs of our time plead for us in some sense to reinvent in its first vigor the doctrine whose loss is being the death of us, such an effort at reinvention no more consists in “taking mental refuge in an idealized past” than in “building for ourselves some imaginary refuge” in a future painted according to the whims of our imagination. We must, however, recognize or rediscover the genuine riches bequeathed to us by the Christian past. We need to relearn from our Fathers, those of Christian antiquity and also those of the Middle Ages, to see present in the unique Sacrifice the unity of the “three bodies” of Christ. Such an assessment seems to impose itself all the more because without it the very strength of the corporate aspirations which can currently be felt at the heart of the Church, and which are in particular driving the liturgical movement, cannot be without peril. Here or there, it could degenerate into a naturalist impulse. Indeed there is always a risk of forgetting: it is not the human fact of gathering for the communal celebration of the mysteries, it is not the collective exaltation that an appropriate pedagogy succeeds in extracting from it that will ever in the very least bring about the unity of the members of Christ. This cannot come about without the remission of sins, the first fruit of the blood that was poured out. The memorial of the Passion, the offering to the heavenly Father, the conversion of the heart: these, therefore, are the totally interior realities without which we will never have anything but a caricature of the community that we seek. But the Eucharist does not offer us some human dream: it is a mystery of faith. In order to meditate on this mystery of faith, which also encapsulates the whole mystery of salvation, we can finish by borrowing once more one of the voices of antiquity, from Rupert of Deutz:
To the one and only Son of God and Son of Man, as to their head, all the members of the body are joined, all those who are received in the faith of this mystery, in the fullness of this love. Thus it is one single body, it is one single person, one single Christ, the head with its members, who raises himself up to heaven, and in his gratitude cries out, presenting the Church in its glory to God: “Here is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!” And, demonstrating that he and the Church are joined in a true unity of persons, he says again: “and they will be two in one flesh.”
Yes, this is indeed a great mystery. The flesh of Christ which, before his Passion, was the flesh of the only word of God, has so grown through the Passion, so expanded and so filled the universe, that all the elect who have been since the beginning of the world or who will live, to the very last one among them, through the action of this sacrament which makes a new dough of them, he reunites in one single Church, where God and humankind embrace one another for all eternity.
This flesh was originally nothing but a grain of wheat, a unique grain, before it fell to the earth in order to die there. And now that it has died, here it is, growing on the altar, coming to fruition in our hands and in our bodies, and, as the great and rich master of the harvest is rising up, he raises with him to the very barns of heaven this fertile earth at whose heart he has grown.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted with permission from Corpus Mysticum : The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
