HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
When the Church gathers to "break bread," what is received? Real Presence is the belief that, in the Eucharist, the consecrated bread and wine are — not merely symbolize — the body and blood of Christ, so that the communicant truly partakes of the Lord himself. The conviction is among the oldest in Christian worship and, for most of the Church's history, went without serious challenge; the disputes that fill this page are mostly about how Christ is present, and only in the last five centuries about whether the presence is real at all.
The interpretations fall along a spectrum, which this timeline will trace as it grows:
This page presents the witnesses and the views; the arguments below weigh the disputed readings of the texts on which the doctrine rests.
Related doctrines: The Eucharist and the ministry — see also the ministerial priesthood · communion under one kind · the communion of infants
The doctrine rests on four bodies of New Testament text:
Whether this language is meant literally or figuratively is the central interpretive question; it is weighed on its own page in the Arguments below.
The witnesses are listed earliest first. This timeline is in its early stages and will be filled out as the doctrine's development across the centuries is traced.
Writing on his way to martyrdom, Ignatius is the earliest witness after the apostles. He marks out the Docetists precisely by their refusal of the Eucharist: they "abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again" (Smyrnaeans 7).4 Longing for martyrdom, he writes that he desires "the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ … and … the drink of God, namely His blood" (Romans 7).5 And he calls the one bread the Church breaks together "the medicine of immortality, and the antidote which prevents us from dying" (Ephesians 20).6
Defending Christian worship to the emperor, Justin gives the earliest surviving explicit statement that the consecrated elements are not ordinary food. Of the food "called among us the Eucharist" he writes that "not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise… the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word… is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh" (First Apology 66).7 The Incarnation is his warrant: as the Word truly took flesh, the food consecrated by his word truly is that flesh and blood. In the Dialogue with Trypho he calls "the Eucharist of the bread and the cup" the "pure sacrifice" foretold by Malachi, offered "in every place" among the Gentiles (Dialogue 41, 117)8 — the sacrificial thread weighed on the Malachi 1:11 "pure offering" argument on the ministerial-priesthood side of this cluster.
Against the Gnostics, who scorned the flesh, Irenaeus makes the Eucharist an argument for the goodness and resurrection of the body — and in doing so becomes the first father to be explicit about a change in the elements. The bread "which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection" (Against Heresies IV.18.5).9 When "the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the Word of God," he writes, "the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made," from which "the substance of our flesh is increased and supported" — so the flesh, "nourished from the body and blood of the Lord," cannot be incapable of eternal life (Against Heresies V.2.2–3).10
In The Instructor (Paedagogus), Clement treats the eucharistic cup as efficacious, not merely commemorative. "The blood of the Lord is twofold," he writes, "and to drink the blood of Jesus, is to become partaker of the Lord's immortality."11 The mingled cup of water and the Word "is called Eucharist, renowned and glorious grace; and they who by faith partake of it are sanctified both in body and soul."12 Clement writes as an allegorist — wine, water, blood, and Word are layered symbols for him — yet the efficacy he ascribes to the Eucharist (immortality, and the sanctification of the whole person, body as well as soul) is realist in force.
In North Africa, Tertullian witnesses to the church's handling of the consecrated elements. Listing the settled customs that rest on tradition rather than explicit Scripture — the baptismal renunciations, offerings for the dead, the sign of the cross — he records that the faithful receive the Eucharist "from the hand of none but the presidents" and "feel pained should any wine or bread, even though our own, be cast upon the ground" (De Corona 3). The grief at a fallen fragment is reverence owed not to ordinary food but to a holy thing — the practical corollary of a real presence, and the earliest witness here to how the elements were treated as Christ's body.13
Answering the pagan Celsus — who urged thank-offerings to the demons set over the things of this world — Origen sets against it the Christian's thanksgiving to the Creator: "we also eat the bread presented to us; and this bread becomes by prayer a sacred body, which sanctifies those who sincerely partake of it" (Against Celsus VIII.33).14 Origen is the boldest allegorist of the early fathers and elsewhere spiritualizes the eating of Christ's flesh; yet here the bread becomes — and becomes it by prayer, a consecratory act — "a sacred body" that sanctifies the worthy communicant: efficacy, not bare remembrance.
The first Latin witness here, Cyprian argues the church's realism from a disciplinary quarrel: writing against the "Aquarians," who used water alone in the cup, he insists the mingled cup is the blood of Christ. Because "that was wine which He called His blood," it follows that "the blood of Christ is not offered if there be no wine in the cup, nor the Lord's sacrifice celebrated with a legitimate consecration unless our oblation and sacrifice respond to His passion" (Epistle 62.9).15 The Eucharist is for him a true sacrifice — "the Lord's passion is the sacrifice which we offer" — which the ordained priest re-presents: he "offers a true and full sacrifice… when he proceeds to offer it according to what he sees Christ Himself to have offered" (Epistle 62.14, 17).16
Explaining the sacraments to the newly baptized, Cyril gives the patristic realism its first sustained catechetical form. In the lecture On the Body and Blood of Christ he tells them to "consider… the Bread and the Wine not as bare elements, for they are, according to the Lord's declaration, the Body and Blood of Christ… Judge not the matter from the taste, but from faith be fully assured" (Mystagogic 4.6).17 Walking them through the liturgy, he locates the change at the invocation of the Spirit over the gifts, "that He may make the Bread the Body of Christ, and the Wine the Blood of Christ; for whatsoever the Holy Ghost has touched, is surely sanctified and changed" (Mystagogic 5.7) — an early witness to a consecratory epiclesis.18 Cyril pairs this realism with the vocabulary of "figure" and "antitype," showing that in the Greek fathers such language named the sign through which the reality is given, not a merely symbolic substitute.
In The Great Catechism Gregory gives the Greek fathers' strongest change-of-substance statement. The Body Christ took was maintained by bread and yet "transmuted to the dignity of Godhead" by the indwelling Word; "rightly, then, do we believe that now also the bread which is consecrated by the Word of God is changed into the Body of God the Word" — and changed "at once… by means of the Word," not by being eaten (ch. 37).19 He coins a verb for it — God "transelements" (metastoicheiōsis) "the natural quality of these visible things to that immortal thing" — the sharpest patristic term for a re-constitution of what the elements are, which later Western writers read as anticipating transubstantiation.
In his mystagogical sermons Ambrose gives the Latin West its sharpest early statement of a conversion of the elements: "this is not what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated… because by blessing nature itself is changed" (On the Mysteries 9.50).20 He fixes the moment and cause of the change on the words of institution: "Before the blessing of the heavenly words another nature is spoken of, after the consecration the Body is signified… Before it is consecrated, it is bread; but when the words of Christ have been spoken, it becomes the body of Christ" (On the Mysteries 9.54; On the Sacraments 4).21 It is the seed of the medieval Western account of consecration that Trent would define as transubstantiation.
The Antiochene preacher Chrysostom reaches for the most concrete language of any of these witnesses. Standing the reader before the altar in his Treatise on the Priesthood, he marvels that "He who sitteth on high with the Father is at that hour held in the hands of all, and gives Himself to those who are willing to embrace and grasp Him" (3.4).22 Preaching on Paul's "communion of the blood," he identifies the contents of the cup with the blood of the cross — "this which is in the cup is that which flowed from His side" — and asks, "what is the bread? The Body of Christ" (Homilies on First Corinthians 24).23 His realism is homiletic, in the service of awe and of worthy reception, but it is unmistakably a real, not a token, presence.
No father is claimed so evenly by both sides of the later dispute. To the newly baptized Augustine says plainly that "the bread is the body of Christ, the cup is the blood of Christ," bidding them "be what you see, and receive what you are" (Sermon 272); and expounding "fall down before His footstool" he draws the sharpest realist corollary before the medievals — the flesh given to eat is the very flesh born of Mary, so that "no one eateth that flesh, unless he hath first worshipped … we sin in not worshipping" (Expositions on the Psalms 98.9).24 Yet the same Augustine makes John 6's "eat my flesh" his textbook example of a figure — a command that, taken literally, "seems to enjoin a crime … it is therefore a figure" (On Christian Doctrine 3.16) — reads the eating as incorporation into the body of Christ, the Church ("O sign of unity … let him draw nigh, believe, be incorporated, that he may be quickened"), and tells his hearers "believe, and thou hast eaten already" (Tractates on John 25.12).25 The reconciling key is his doctrine of the sacrament — a sign in which "one thing is seen, another understood," that truly bears the reality it signifies: sacramentum and res held together, which is why realist and figurative readers alike can quote him against each other.
Against a sect who held that the consecrated Eucharist lost its power if kept and consumed on a later day, Cyril insists the presence does not lapse with time: "Christ is not altered, nor is his holy body changed, but the power of the consecration and his life-giving grace is perpetual in it" (Letter to Calosyrius). It is the realism of Irenaeus carried to its next question — not only that the bread becomes the body, but that it remains so when the assembly disperses — the premise of eucharistic reservation.26
Writing the great summa of Greek theology, John gives the Eastern tradition its most emphatic pre-medieval statement of the Real Presence — and fills the long gap in the surviving Western record between Cyril of Alexandria and the Carolingians. In the chapter "Concerning the holy and immaculate Mysteries" he teaches that "the bread itself and the wine are changed into God's body and blood," "supernaturally changed by the invocation and presence of the Holy Spirit" — the Eastern epiclesis emphasis of Cyril of Jerusalem carried forward. He denies outright that they are "merely figures of the body and blood of Christ (God forbid!) … for the Lord has said, 'This is My body,' not, this is a figure of My body"; the consecrated bread "is not plain bread but bread united with divinity." And he meets the "antitype" language of the earlier fathers head-on: when Basil and others called the elements antitypes, "they said so not after the consecration but before the consecration" (Exposition of the Orthodox Faith IV.13).27
After a long silence in the surviving Latin record — the Greek East meanwhile teaching the realism John of Damascus had just gathered up — the Carolingian West produced the first full-length Latin treatise on the Eucharist, and with it the sharpest pre-scholastic statement of the Real Presence. The abbot of Corbie, Paschasius, presses the realist tradition to a strict identity: what is received on the altar is "the true body of Christ, which was crucified and buried," made present by the priest's consecration "with the word of Christ through the Spirit" (De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, c. 831). The eucharistic flesh, he teaches, is the very flesh born of the Virgin — the Incarnation the pattern of the daily miracle. It is the seed of the medieval Western doctrine, though without the term or the Aristotelian analysis that Trent would call transubstantiation.28
At the same abbey and the same king's request, Ratramnus answered his confrere with the great medieval counter-witness. The elements are Christ's body and blood in figura, "in a figure" — the sacrament of the body, distinguished from the historical body born of Mary — received spiritually by faith; and yet they are "not mere empty figures, or naked signs." His "figure" is the Augustinian sign that truly bears its reality, not a bare token; his treatise — revived in the eleventh century and later prized by the Reformers — is the standing alternative to Paschasius's identity-realism. That two monks of one house could disagree so sharply shows the ninth-century West had no settled scholastic account to appeal to.29
Master of the school of Tours, Berengar revived Ratramnus's line and denied a material change: after the consecration the bread and wine remain, and are the "sign" or "sacrament" of Christ's body — "the reality of the sign" received by faith, not the flesh physically present on the altar. Condemned at a string of synods, he was forced in 1059 to swear an oath that the faithful "crush" Christ's body "with their teeth" — a formula so grossly physical that later theology quietly retired it — and in 1079 a milder one introducing "substantial conversion." The reaction to his denial produced the very language that would harden into the defined dogma.30
The council convoked by Innocent III gave the verb its first dogmatic, conciliar use. Its opening confession of faith professes that Christ's body and blood are "truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread being changed (transsubstantiatio) by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood" — and, in the same sentence, reserves the confecting to "the priest who has been duly ordained." It is the point at which the medieval West made the word official, a century before Trent, binding the Real Presence and the ministerial priesthood in a single dogmatic clause.31
Aquinas supplies the account of how that Lateran IV had named but left unexplained. In the Summa Theologiae (III, q. 75) he holds that the substance of the bread and wine does not remain; that "the whole substance of the bread is changed into the whole substance of Christ's body," a conversion so unlike any natural change that it must be "called by a name of its own, 'transubstantiation'"; and that the sensible accidents (appearances) remain. His Aristotelian exposition is the philosophical machinery Trent presupposes — and the reason the "medieval-innovation" thesis is half right about the philosophy and wrong about the ancient faith it formalizes.32
The Reformation breaks the long realist consensus, and Zwingli of Zürich is the fountainhead of the memorialist reading. The "is" of "This is my body," he held, means signifies: the bread and wine are signs that represent Christ's body and call his once-for-all sacrifice to mind — "those things are called the body and blood of Christ which are the symbols of the true body." Christ's true body ascended and sits at the Father's right hand, so it is received "by the contemplation of faith," not "masticated with our mouth and teeth." He made "the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63) the linchpin of his case, and at the Marburg Colloquy (1529) he and Luther agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles but split irreconcilably on this one.33
Luther broke with Rome over much, but not over the reality of the presence. Against Zwingli he insisted the consecrated bread and wine are the true body and blood of Christ, present "in and under" the elements, on the plain force of the words of institution — "distinct, clear… words, which certainly are no trope." At Marburg he chalked Hoc est corpus meum on the table and refused the Swiss the hand of fellowship. His reading is sacramental union, not transubstantiation: he left the substances of bread and wine standing — "I do not argue whether the wine remains wine or not… let it be with the wine as God wills" — grounding the presence in the Word rather than in a change of substance.34
Calvin of Geneva took the middle road between Zwingli's memorial and Luther's bodily presence. Christ is truly received in the Supper, he taught, but spiritually: the Holy Spirit lifts the believer up to feed on the body and blood of the ascended Christ in heaven, so the elements remain bread and wine yet are no bare signs but efficacious instruments — the Supper conveys its grace "not by presenting a vain or empty sign, but by there exerting an efficacy of the Spirit." Against Zwingli the sign "truly exhibits" what it signifies; against Rome and Luther there is no local, carnal presence in the elements; and of the mode he confessed he "rather feel[s] than understand[s] it." His spiritual-presence doctrine became the standard Reformed teaching.35
Answering the Reformation, Trent's thirteenth session defines the realist line as transubstantiation — "a conversion… of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ" — and draws out its worship corollary: because Christ "the true God" is wholly present, "all the faithful of Christ may… render in veneration the worship of latria… to this most holy sacrament," reserving it, venerating it, and bearing it in procession, on pain of anathema to any who would call such adoration idolatry (Session 13, chs. 4–6 and Canon 6). It is the dogmatic terminus of the reverence-and-reservation thread that runs from Tertullian and Cyril.36
The cross-cutting disputes adduced for and against the doctrine, each weighed on its own page.
Whether the Real Presence is taught by Scripture turns on how a handful of New Testament texts are read. These four arguments weigh that question — the whole hinge, then the two central realist proof-texts taken one at a time, then the single verse most often pressed against the realist reading.
The literal-vs-figurative reading of John 6 and the Words of Institution — the hinge of the whole doctrine. The realist reading presses the escalating, scandalizing concreteness of John 6:53–58 and Paul's "guilty of the body and blood"; the symbolic reading presses Jesus' habitual figurative idiom ("I am the door," "the true vine"), the qualifier "the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63), and "this do in remembrance of me." Genuinely disputed, and strong or weak by the lights of different disciplines.37
The single sentence most often produced as the knock-down proof. Taken alone, it settles nothing: the underlying Aramaic omits the copula ("This — my body"), the Passover liturgy on the same table said "This is the bread of affliction" of symbolic bread, and Jesus habitually says "I am the vine / the door." Yet the early Church heard identity, not metaphor (Theophylact: "not … a symbolic type"). The realist reading is the better fit on the wider evidence, but its weight comes from context and reception, not the word "is" — so the copula-by-itself is the weakest, not the strongest, leg of the case, and its popular use as a self-evident knockout overreaches in either direction.38
Paul's warning that the unworthy communicant is "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord" and eats "damnation … not discerning the Lord's body" — language weightier than the abuse of a bare token would warrant, and the standing proof-text by which the Church guarded the elements (Chrysostom, Cyprian). The defeater: "discern the body" may mean discerning the Church (the divisions at the Corinthian meal), and a sacred sign can be gravely profaned too. It corroborates the realist reading — and, on any reading, tells against a bare memorialism — without settling the question alone.39
The verse Huldrych Zwingli made the linchpin of the memorialist case. But on the near-unanimous patristic reading — Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine, Theophylact — "the flesh" names a carnal manner of understanding (or the flesh considered apart from the Spirit), not Christ's eucharistic flesh; the verse bars a crude Capernaite literalism but does not touch the reality of the presence. Weak as a refutation of the doctrine, sound only as that modest caution.40
Where the arguments above turn on the New Testament words, these two turn on the ancient Church: was the realist reading really the mind of the Fathers, and is the later, precise doctrine continuous with them? The first tests the strongest alleged patristic counter-witness; the second tests the definition itself.
No father is claimed so evenly by both sides. Augustine's "figure" rule, his sacramentum/res distinction, and "believe, and thou hast eaten" give the memorialist a first-rank patristic voice; yet the same Augustine says the bread is the body and that the eucharistic flesh must be worshipped. Neither pole can enlist him flatly — both strands are really there, which is itself evidence that the texts do not settle the question by grammar alone.41
The substance/accidents apparatus and the word transubstantiatio are demonstrably medieval — coined in the eleventh century, dogmatized at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and elaborated by Aquinas — yet the realist change of the elements they formalize is asserted by Gregory of Nyssa and Ambrose centuries earlier. The thesis is right about the philosophy and weak about the faith it formalizes; which of the two "transubstantiation" names is the whole dispute.42
The Muraresku thesis — that the Supper began not as a christological rite but as a drugged visionary wine inherited from the Eleusinian Mysteries and later suppressed by the Church. The narrow premise (that some ancient pagan rites may have used psychoactives — the ergot reading of the Eleusinian kykeon, one real ergot find in an Iberian shrine) is a live minority possibility; but the load-bearing claim it is marshaled for — that the Christian Eucharist was one such rite — has no direct archaeochemical support, and its one Christian-adjacent text (Irenaeus on the Gnostic Marcus reddening a cup) is a hostile polemic against a fringe sect, not the apostolic Supper; the thesis is rejected by specialists in both Greek mystery religion and biomolecular archaeology, and reads a pharmacology into sources that frame the rite by the body, the blood, and the Incarnation. Weak: a conjecture built well beyond the evidence, with the narrow pagan sub-claim the more defensible remainder.43
John 6:48–58; John 6:63 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; Luke 22:19–20 (KJV). ↩
Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 7 (shorter recension; cf. New Advent). ↩
Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Romans 7 (shorter recension; cf. New Advent). ↩
Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians 20 (shorter recension; cf. New Advent). ↩
Justin Martyr, First Apology 66 (trans. ANF vol. 1; cf. New Advent): "not as common bread and common drink do we receive these… [but] the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh." See the detail page. ↩
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 41 (the Eucharist of bread and cup as the "pure sacrifice" of Malachi 1:10–11); repeated at Dialogue 117 (cf. New Advent). ↩
Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies IV.18.5 (cf. New Advent). ↩
Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies V.2.2–3 (cf. New Advent). ↩
Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor (Paedagogus) II.2, "On Drinking" (cf. New Advent). ↩
Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor (Paedagogus) II.2, "On Drinking" (cf. New Advent). ↩
Tertullian, The Chaplet (De Corona) 3 (trans. S. Thelwall, ANF vol. 3; cf. New Advent): "We feel pained should any wine or bread, even though our own, be cast upon the ground." ↩
Origen, Against Celsus (Contra Celsum) VIII.33 (cf. CCEL, ANF vol. 4; New Advent). ↩
Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 62 (to Caecilius), On the Sacrament of the Cup of the Lord, §9 (ANF vol. 5; = Ep. 63 in the Migne/CSEL numbering; cf. New Advent): "that was wine which He called His blood. Whence it appears that the blood of Christ is not offered if there be no wine in the cup." Cf. §2. See the detail page. ↩
Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 62.14 (the priest "offers a true and full sacrifice… according to what he sees Christ Himself to have offered"); cf. §17 ("the Lord's passion is the sacrifice which we offer"). ↩
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 22 (Mystagogic 4), On the Body and Blood of Christ, §6, 9 (NPNF Series II, vol. 7; cf. New Advent). See the detail page on the "figure"/"antitype" vocabulary and the disputed Cyril-vs-John-of-Jerusalem authorship. ↩
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 23 (Mystagogic 5), On the Sacred Liturgy and Communion, §7 (cf. New Advent). ↩
Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism (Oratio Catechetica Magna) 37 (NPNF Series II, vol. 5; cf. New Advent): "the bread which is consecrated by the Word of God is changed into the Body of God the Word… at once… by means of the Word"; God "transelements the natural quality of these visible things." See the detail page. ↩
Ambrose of Milan, On the Mysteries (De Mysteriis) 9.50, 52 (NPNF Series II, vol. 10; cf. New Advent). ↩
Ambrose of Milan, On the Mysteries 9.54; On the Sacraments (De Sacramentis) 4. ↩
John Chrysostom, Treatise on the Priesthood (De Sacerdotio) 3.4 (NPNF Series I, vol. 9). ↩
John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 24 (on 1 Cor 10:16–17; NPNF Series I, vol. 12; cf. New Advent). ↩
Augustine of Hippo (realist strand): Sermon 272 (to the newly baptized, on the sacrament: "the bread is the body of Christ, the cup is the blood of Christ"; "Be what you see, and receive what you are"); cf. Sermon 227; and Expositions on the Psalms 98.9 (on Psalm 99:5, NPNF §8; Vulgate Enarr. in Ps. 98.9): "no one eateth that flesh, unless he hath first worshipped … we sin in not worshipping." See the detail page. ↩
Augustine of Hippo (figurative/sign strand): On Christian Doctrine III.16.24 ("Except ye eat the flesh … seems to enjoin a crime … it is therefore a figure"); Tractates on John 25.12 ("Believe, and thou hast eaten already"), with 26 (the sacrament vs. the thing signified; "O sign of unity … be incorporated") and 27.5 ("the flesh profiteth nothing … as they understood it"). See the detail page. ↩
Cyril of Alexandria, Letter to Calosyrius, Bishop of Arsinoe (= Letter 83, CPG 5383; his tract Against the Anthropomorphites), §6. Greek: P. E. Pusey, ed., S. Cyrilli… in D. Joannis Evangelium, vol. iii (Oxford, 1872), pp. 603–607 (passage at pp. 605–606) = Patrologia Graeca 76, 1075–76. English translated in full as Letter 83.6 in J. I. McEnerney, St. Cyril of Alexandria: Letters 51–110 (Fathers of the Church 77, 1987), p. 111: “Christ is not altered, nor is his holy body changed, but the power of the consecration and his life-giving grace is perpetual in his body.” The rendering quoted above (“perpetual in it”) is Henry Wace, A Dictionary of Christian Biography (s.v. “Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria”), the same wording quoted by the U.S. bishops' The Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist (2001). See the detail page. ↩
John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (De Fide Orthodoxa) IV.13, "Concerning the holy and immaculate Mysteries of the Lord" (NPNF Series II, vol. 9; cf. New Advent): "the bread itself and the wine are changed into God's body and blood"; "supernaturally changed by the invocation and presence of the Holy Spirit into the body and blood of Christ"; "not merely figures of the body and blood of Christ (God forbid!) … for the Lord has said, 'This is My body,' not, this is a figure of My body"; "not plain bread but bread united with divinity"; and, on the "antitype" language, that Basil and others "said so not after the consecration but before the consecration." See the detail page. ↩
Paschasius Radbertus, De Corpore et Sanguine Domini (c. 831; recension for Charles the Bald c. 844), as translated in Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology (St. Louis: Concordia, 1968), p. 156, reproduced at bobcornwall.com: "the true body of Christ, which was crucified and buried… divinely consecrated by the priest above the altar with the word of Christ through the Spirit." The identity of the eucharistic flesh with the flesh born of Mary (De Corpore 4, 7) is summarized in "Paschasius Radbertus," Catholic Encyclopedia. See the detail page. ↩
Ratramnus of Corbie, De Corpore et Sanguine Domini (c. 843, for Charles the Bald), in the parallel Latin/English edition Bertram, or Ratram, concerning the Body and Blood of the Lord (Oxford, 1687): the elements are "not the True Body of Christ, but the Figure, or Sacrament of it… and yet not mere empty figures, or naked signs." See the detail page. ↩
Berengar of Tours, De Sacra Coena adversus Lanfrancum (ed. Beekenkamp, 1941, p. 158), translated in "Berengar of Tours," New Catholic Encyclopedia: we receive "the body of Christ in sign… in the holy bread of the altar, which belongs to the temporal order." The 1059 oath ("crushed by the teeth of the faithful") and the 1079 "substantialiter converti" oath are in Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV, §98. See the detail page. ↩
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Canon 1 (Firmiter credimus), Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: "the bread being changed (transsubstantiatio) by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood… And this sacrament no one can effect except the priest who has been duly ordained." See the detail page. ↩
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 75 ("Of the change of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ"), a. 4, respondeo (Fathers of the English Dominican Province translation): "the whole substance of the bread is changed into the whole substance of Christ's body… with a name of its own, it can be called ‘transubstantiation.’"; the accidents remain (a. 5), the substance of the bread does not (a. 2). See the detail page (his account of who may consecrate, Summa III, q. 82, is on the ministerial-priesthood side). ↩
Huldrych Zwingli, An Account of the Faith of Huldreich Zwingli Submitted to the Roman Emperor Charles (the Fidei Ratio, 3 July 1530), trans. S. M. Macauley, in The Latin Works and the Correspondence of Huldreich Zwingli vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Heidelberg Press, 1922), pp. 49–55, at University of Oregon: "the true body of Christ is present by the contemplation of faith"; the body is not "masticated with our mouth and teeth"; "those things are called the body and blood of Christ which are the symbols of the true body"; "'The flesh profiteth nothing'… eaten naturally, but eaten spiritually it profits much." The est = significat reading is stated in his Letter to Matthew Alber (1524), trans. Pipkin, Huldrych Zwingli Writings vol. 2, p. 139 (steadfastlutherans.org). See the detail page. ↩
Martin Luther, The Large Catechism (1529), "Of the Sacrament of the Altar," at CCEL: "It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, in and under the bread and wine…"; "It is the Word… which makes and distinguishes this Sacrament." The "no trope" insistence and the "let it be with the wine as God wills" line are from the Confession Concerning Christ's Supper (1528), Luther's Works vol. 37 (wording verified at Detroit Catholic); the Marburg "This is my body" exchange is in the Marburg Colloquy transcript (PDF). See the detail page. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.17 (trans. Henry Beveridge), at CCEL: the "two faults" to avoid (IV.17.5); "not by presenting a vain or empty sign, but by there exerting an efficacy of the Spirit… he truly exhibits and performs it" (IV.17.10); the Spirit as the "channel" and the sursum corda (IV.17.12, 36); "I rather feel than understand it" (IV.17.32). See the detail page. ↩
Council of Trent, Session 13 (11 Oct. 1551), Decree and Canons Concerning the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, chs. 4–6 and Canon 6, trans. J. Waterworth, at Hanover Historical Texts Project — transubstantiation defined (ch. 4); "the worship of latria, which is due to the true God," rendered "to this most holy sacrament" (ch. 5); reservation retained (ch. 6); adoration affirmed under anathema (Canon 6). ↩
Is the Real Presence taught by the New Testament, or is the language symbolic? — argument page. ↩
"This is my body": does the copula establish a Real Presence, or is "is" a figure of speech? — argument page. ↩
"Guilty of the body" and "not discerning the Lord's body" (1 Corinthians 11:27–29): an independent witness to the Real Presence? — argument page. ↩
Does "the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63) refute the realist reading? — argument page. ↩
Augustine's sign and figure: was he a symbolic witness against the Real Presence? — argument page. ↩
Is transubstantiation a medieval innovation, or the patristic realism made precise? — argument page. ↩
Was the earliest Eucharist a psychedelic sacrament continuous with the pagan Mysteries? (Muraresku) — argument page. ↩