Edmund Bishop made an interesting comment that during the Middle
Ages, “the Blessed Sacrament reserved was commonly treated with a kind
of indifference which at present would be considered to be of the nature
of ‘irreverence,’ I will not say indignity.”
This is
perhaps understandable: the Eucharist, and what we consider to be the
“Real Presence” of Christ in the Eucharistic species, could be somewhat
taken for granted considering the established place of Eucharistic
theology from the early patristic though the early medieval periods. For
about a thousand years after the post-apostolic teachings of Ignatius
of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus,
2 few seriously
questioned that the Eucharist was the Body and Blood of Christ, as the
Lord himself said. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem gives a typical, simple, and
eloquent affirmation of this:
Do not, then, regard the eucharistic elements as ordinary
bread and wine: they are in fact the body and blood of the Lord, as he
himself has declared. Whatever your senses may tell you, be strong in
faith. You have been taught and you are firmly convinced that what looks
and tastes like bread and wine is not bread and wine but the body and
the blood of Christ.
There was little formal or systematic theology behind such utterances,
other than the real theology of taking the words of Christ at their face
value. Only after that could they be considered as typology, anagogy,
tropology, or allegory. In time, the conventional understanding was
challenged, first by a ninth century monk named Rathramnus and later
(more famously) in the eleventh century by Berengarius of Tours. In
response, the Scholastics developed the Eucharistic theory of
transubstantiation, with which they robustly defended the words of the
Lord. That doctrine was formally articulated for the Latin Church by the
Fourth Lateran Council (1215 AD), and subsequently reaffirmed against
the Protestants at the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century.
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