HistoricalChristian.Faith

Augustine's sign and figure: was he a symbolic witness against the Real Presence?

Type: interpretive argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — Augustine's "figure" and sign language is genuine and first-rank, so he cannot be enlisted flatly for a crude physical presence; but it is held together with equally plain realist statements (the bread is the body; the eucharistic flesh must be worshipped), so he cannot be enlisted flatly for the memorialist either. Both traditions quote him fairly because both strands are really there · the symbolic-Augustine reading advanced by Ratramnus of Corbie, Berengar of Tours, Wycliffe, and the Reformers (Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer).

Related arguments: the patristic witness — see also Is transubstantiation a medieval innovation, or the patristic realism made precise?

The question

No father is quoted more often on both sides of the eucharistic dispute than Augustine. The memorialist tradition rests a large part of its patristic case on him: he makes "eat my flesh" his textbook example of a figure, distinguishes the outward sacramentum from the inward res, and tells his hearers "believe, and thou hast eaten already." If the greatest of the Latin fathers read the discourse figuratively, the claim that the early Church was uniformly realist collapses. So: does Augustine's sign-and-figure language make him a witness against the Real Presence — a proto-memorialist — or is that a misreading of what he means by a "sacrament"?

The figurative strand — the evidence for a symbolic Augustine

The "figure" rule, applied to John 6. In On Christian Doctrine Augustine lays down a hermeneutical rule and turns it on the very verse the realists prize: a saying that "seems to enjoin a crime or vice … is figurative. 'Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man,' says Christ … This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should have a share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us."¹

Believing, not chewing. In the Tractates on John he makes the eating that gives life a matter of faith: "This is then to eat the meat, not that which perisheth, but that which endureth unto eternal life. To what purpose dost thou make ready teeth and stomach? Believe, and thou hast eaten already."²

Sacrament versus the thing itself. His most characteristic move distinguishes the sign from the reality: the unworthy communicant "may press the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ carnally and visibly with his teeth" and yet not truly eat Christ's flesh, because to eat it is to "dwell in Christ" — to be a living member of his body. The res of the sacrament, he says, is "the society of His body, and His members, which is the Church": "O sacrament of mercy, O sign of unity, O bond of love! Whoso wishes to live, let him draw nigh, believe, be incorporated, that he may be quickened."³ This is a real, first-rank figurative-spiritual strand, and it is why Ratramnus of Corbie, Berengar, Wycliffe, and the Reformers could all rest their reading on Augustine and cite him fairly.

The realist strand — why the symbolic enlistment overreaches

But the same Augustine speaks with equal plainness on the other side, and a memorialist Augustine has to suppress half his corpus.

"The bread is the body of Christ." To the newly baptized he says without qualification: "what your faith demands to be instructed, the bread is the body of Christ, the cup is the blood of Christ … Be what you see, and receive what you are" (Sermon 272); and again, "That bread which you see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ" (Sermon 227).⁴

The flesh that must be worshipped. Expounding "fall down before His footstool," he draws the sharpest realist corollary of any father before the medievals: Christ "gave that very flesh to us to eat for our salvation; and no one eateth that flesh, unless he hath first worshipped … we sin in not worshipping."⁵ One does not command the adoration of what one takes to be a bare sign.

The sign that bears the reality. The resolving key is Augustine's own definition of a sacrament — a sacred sign in which "one thing is seen, another understood," and in which the sign genuinely conveys the reality it signifies. For Augustine "figure" is not opposed to "reality" but is the vehicle of it; a text can be "a figure" and still deliver a true presence. This is exactly why he can, in the same breath, call the eucharistic flesh a thing to be worshipped and gloss "the flesh profiteth nothing" as a rebuke only of the carnal (Capernaite) way of understanding, not of the flesh itself — "they indeed understood the flesh, just as when cut to pieces in a carcass … not as when it is quickened by the Spirit."⁶ His sign-theology qualifies how Christ is present and received — spiritually, by faith, unto incorporation into the Church — but it does not deny that he is present.

Adversarial assessment

Where the symbolic reading is right. Augustine really does supply the strongest patristic material for a figurative-spiritual eucharist. The sacramentum/res distinction, the "figure" rule, "believe and thou hast eaten," and the ecclesial reading of the eating are all authentically his, and they tell decisively against a crude, physical, "chewed with the teeth" presence. A realist who cites only Sermon 272 and the Psalms footstool passage, as though Augustine knew nothing of sign and figure, distorts him.

Where it overreaches. But the memorialist who makes Augustine a proto-Zwinglian has to explain away the bread that "is the body of Christ," the flesh that must be worshipped on pain of sin, and a definition of "sacrament" on which the sign bears — does not merely replace — the reality. Augustine is not a symbolist who happens to use realist-sounding rhetoric, nor a realist who happens to use figurative rhetoric; his governing category, the sacrament as a sign that truly conveys what it signifies, generates both strands at once. To force him onto either pole is to flatten a position that is deliberately both/and.

Assessment

Contested. Augustine cannot be made a clean witness for either side, and the honest finding is that both readings capture something real in him and neither captures all of him. His sign-and- figure language is genuine and load-bearing, so the enlistment of him for a crude physical presence fails; his realist statements — the bread that is the body, the flesh that must be adored — are equally genuine, so the enlistment of him for memorialism fails too. That the single most-cited father stands on both sides at once is itself strong evidence that the New Testament does not settle the question by grammar alone — which is why this argument feeds directly into the parent hinge, Is the Real Presence taught by the New Testament, or is the language symbolic? (assessment: contested). Readers wanting the two strands set side by side in full should see the Augustine detail page.

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