Augustinian Eucharist

David Aers and Sarah Beckwith argue that Augustine’s interpretation of John 6 cannot be understood in a Zwinglian or Wycliffite sense (essay in Cultural Reformations, 153). Augustine does say “Believe and you have eaten,” but Augustine’s framework for saying this is corporate and ecclesial.

As evidence, they summarize Augustine’s commentary on John 6:41-49: “Once again he emphasizes the act of faith and eating: ‘For to believe in Him is to eat the living bread. He that believes eats’ (26.1). Thinking of the spiritual rock that was Christ (I Corinthians 10:1–4), he observes that ‘the virtue of the sacrament’ is received by one who eats in heart, ‘not who presses with his teeth’ (26:12). But this is neither individualistic nor simply inward activity: ‘Believers know the body of Christ, if they neglect not to be the body of Christ. Let them become the body of Christ, if they wish to live by the Spirit of Christ. None live by the spirit of Christ but the body of Christ’ (26:13)” (154).

They continue, “Characteristically Augustine recalls St Paul’s teaching that ‘we being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread’ (I Corinthians 10:17). And having done so, having foregrounded the ecclesial and communitarian assumptions of his version of saving faith, he responds ecstatically: ‘O mystery of piety! O sign of unity! O bond of charity!’ (26:13). The sacrament is the collective act of the community of believers responding to the divine-human mediator, past, present, and future. Christ, says Augustine, ‘would have this meat and drink to be understood as meaning fellowship of His own body and members, which is the Holy Church’ (26:15). In this meal, ‘Christ has pointed our minds to His body and blood in those things which from being many are reduced to some one thing. For a unity is formed by many grains forming together; and another unity is effected by the clustering together of many berries’ (26:17)” (154).

For Augustine, “participation in the Church, participation in the sacrament and participation in Christ are inextricably bound together in acts at once single and collective, outer and inner.” And that means that the questions that plague medieval and post-medieval discussions of the Eucharist cannot even be asked: “The consecration could not be extracted from reception so in an Augustinian theology it made no sense to ask such characteristic medieval questions as to whether a priest could ‘consecrate all the bread in the marketplace or all the wine in the cellar’, questions addressed by such medieval luminaries as Bonaventura and Aquinas. Nor could an Augustinian theology of Eucharist invent, legitimize, and normalize discussions about what exactly happens when a mouse eats a consecrated (therefore transubstantiated) host—we recall Aquinas’s argument that the consecrated host could be ‘extracted from the mouse’s stomach and appropriately used’ (154).