The Eucharist
"Amen, amen, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. .... I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger and he who believes in me shall never thirst." — The Gospel According to John 6:32-35
The Eucharist was, along with baptism, the most important of the sacraments of the Christian Church from an early date. From the earliest centuries and throughout the Middle Ages, it constituted the climax of the Christian mass, and it continues to be a focal point of worship in many Christian Churches even today.
Like all the other sacraments, the Eucharist comprised an outward form that signified the conferral of an inner grace. Outwardly, the Eucharist was manifested in the form of bread and wine, which were consecrated upon the altar by a priest during the worship service and, after their sanctification, were distributed to the congregation of worshipers to eat and drink as part of the liturgy. Inwardly, the Eucharist conferred to those who received it the grace of God, including forgiveness of sins and a renewed sense of belonging to the community of the Church. At a more mysterious level, the Eucharist was associated directly with the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In what is known as the doctrine of the Real |
Presence, it was understood that Jesus was somehow, mystically, "there" in the consecrated sacrament. According to the later doctrine of Transubstantiation that took hold in the later Middle Ages (though not made official dogma until the Council of Trent in 1551), the consecrated bread and wine miraculously became the literal body and blood of Christ, though they still retained the outward appearance (what Aquinas and other would call the "accidents") of bread and wine.
In itself, the word Eucharist, of Greek origin, means "thanksgiving," and thus on one level the sacrament itself is a feast of thanksgiving to God. The origins of the Eucharist arguably can be traced to the New Testament's account of the Last Supper, the meal (perhaps even a Passover meal) that Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before his death. There, according to the three synoptic gospels, Jesus predicted his imminent death and, upon breaking the bread at the table and sharing the wine, Jesus identifies them with his body and blood. He instructs the disciples to eat and drink, and to do so "in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19). (This episode was later known in the Church as the "Institution" of the Eucharist.) The words and actions of Jesus here are admittedly rather enigmatic and opaque: he announces an act of memorializing and yet alludes at the same to the future sacrifice of his body and blood upon the Cross: “this is my blood of the new covenant, which is being shed for many unto the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). It is both a meal and yet much more than a meal. As we shall see, the rich ambiguities of this passage in all three synoptic Gospels—along with the rich imagery of bread, wine, and blood in the Gospel according to John—would generate some of the central religious practices of medieval Christianity. |
"For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of Hosts." — Malachi 1:11 |
It is not entirely clear when and in what modes the Eucharist first became a normative part of the practice of Christian worship; perhaps it was so from the very beginning, from the days of Jesus’ earliest followers. According to Pliny the Younger and other Roman and Greek sources (both Christian and pagan), the early Christians met on Sundays for community prayer, the singing of psalms of thanksgiving, and the celebration of an agape or "love-feast": the sharing of bread and wine. By the second century, these meetings may have already evolved into something more like a formal liturgy. Even as early as the late first century, some Christian writers (like Ignatius of Antioch) were urging care and reverence in the handling of the bread and wine. Certainly by the end of the third century, the Eucharistic sharing of bread and wine, accompanied by Jesus's words of Institution, stood as the high point of a more formal and coordinated liturgy, and it had become clearer that the priest was playing a key role in consecrating the bread and wine for distribution to the faithful. During this same period, the Eucharist also more clearly came to assume the character not only of an act of grateful commemoration of the life and death of Jesus Christ but also of a sacrifice, a mystical recapitulation of Christ's death upon the Cross. Week by week, and later even more frequently, this intimate sharing of Christ’s body and blood through the ingestion of the bread and wine powerfully conveyed the importance of God’s redemptive love, recalling each individual participant to the values of the Christian community.
"I am the food of grown men; grow, and thou shalt feed upon me; nor shalt thou convert me, like the food of thy flesh into thee, but thou shalt be converted into me." — Augustine, Confessions, VII, x (16) |
Although different religious thinkers placed the exact emphasis in varying places, it was clear that regular reception of the Eucharist conferred invaluable spiritual benefits; some theologians even saw participation in the sacrament of Eucharist as necessary for salvation. Such viewpoints arose, no doubt, from weekly practice, but they also drew upon biblical and patristic precedents. St Paul, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, views the sharing of bread and wine as a rite of memorial to Christ and also as a sort of confirmation of the expectation that Christ will come again; he implies as well that one should strive to be spiritually worthy in order to share in the meal, and he warns against those who would share the meal with impure hearts. For Paul, and for the emergent Christian tradition, it is clear that the Eucharistic meal was less about fulfilling the appetites of the body than the appetites of the properly disposed soul. There is at the same time in Paul also the idea—an idea that would grow more prevalent as time wore on—that the shared Eucharistic meal is an index of Christian unity: “For we being many are one bread, one body all that partake of one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17); the early bishop Ignatius of Antioch, writing at the turn of the first century, added that “There is but one chalice that you may be united in the blood of Christ.” Augustine, among many others, elaborates on the idea that the Eucharist somehow effected unity: “One bread: and what is this one bread? One body made up of many. Consider that the bread is not made of one grain alone, but of many … the Holy Spirit comes into you like the fire that bakes the dough. Be then what you see and receive what you are. Now for the Chalice, my brethren, remember how wine is made. Many grapes hang on the bunch, but the liquid which runs out of them mingles together in unity. So has the Lord willed that we should belong to him and he has consecrated on his altar the mystery of our peace and our unity.” You are what you eat: the transformation of grains into bread and of grapes into wine provides the early theologians with a potent metaphor for understanding how the celebration of the Eucharist sustains, vivifies, unifies, and, in a very real sense, creates the Church. The desire of worshipers to interact as closely as possible with the eucharistic manifestation of Jesus brings them together into a Christ-centered whole. Communion creates community: out of many, one.
By the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Eucharist had already become an established component of the mass, fully integrated into morning worship on Sundays and other feast days; as time wore on and masses were offered daily in monasteries and in the larger churches and cathedrals, the Eucharist would be celebrated more or less daily year-round, except for Good Friday. Priests, monks, and nuns could thus count on taking the sacrament regularly. Among the much larger lay population, however, access to the Eucharist was generally less frequent: lay Christians were enjoined to partake of the Eucharist at least once a year (typically, though not exclusively, at Easter), and then only after a confession of their sins; these recommendations became official after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.
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The Council's affirmation of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and its emphasis on the centrality of the Eucharist to Christian life generated a range of practical and imaginative responses. Priests were instructed to handle the consecrated Host with extreme care, and they were expected to maintain their corporeal and spiritual purity as diligently as possible. Greater care was taken in the handling and storage of the Host, and special containers were provided for it. For their part, laypeople, increasingly conscious of the salvific effects of the Eucharist, were encouraged to put more rigorous effort into making sincere confessions, hoping thereby to better merit the Eucharistic blessings; clergy, in turn, developed a more systematic apparatus for evaluating sins and for providing sinners with pastoral counsel and appropriate penances. Thus, by the later Middle Ages, the concern for keeping the increasingly venerated Eucharist from pollution by the impure and unconfessed led to the extension of ecclesiastical power into the consciences of individual Christians: only through self-examination, sincere contrition, and confession before a priest could laypersons make themselves worthy to fully experience the Church’s central sacrament.
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For the unconfessed, however, and for those who desired greater or more frequent intimacy with the presence of Jesus, many churches also began providing spaces and occasions for public viewing of the consecrated Host. Among the laity, it was generally believed that looking upon the Host, especially in a spirit of worshipful adoration, would confer spiritual benefits. In time, partly through the efforts of the canoness Juliana of Liège and of the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas, these devotional practices led to the establishment (in 1264) of the Feast of Corpus Christi. Falling in late spring or early summer (the Thursday after Trinity Sunday), the Feast of Corpus Christi provided a grand opportunity for communal celebration: the consecrated Host was often paraded down the streets of the parish, and public veneration coincided with a day of festivity and respite from labor.
This coming together of the community around the display of the Eucharistic Body of Christ may have encouraged fellowship and a communitarian spirit in the local parish, but it also could make Christians more acutely aware of who did not belong to their community of faith: the later Middle Ages saw a troubling uptick in ill-feeling, antagonism, and |
sometimes violence against non-Christians: heretics, infidels, and especially Jews. Christians—maybe especially but not exclusively members of the clergy—imagined that witches and other non-believers would steal bits of the Eucharistic bread for use in a variety of magic spells. This belief doubtless arose from the increased emphasis on the spiritual powers of the consecrated host. At the same time, as the celebration of the sacrament in the later Middle Ages became more and more focused on the physical torments endured by Christ’s body and the shedding of his blood upon the Cross, hostility toward Jews also increased, as Jews were more and more often blamed for Christ’s death. Many acts of violence, great and small, against Jews in the late medieval period were thus construed as retaliation for the pains suffered by Christ. Surely the public display of Christian unity during the Corpus Christi celebrations, alongside this renewed emphasis on Christ’s physical sufferings, contributed to delusional Christian perceptions of Jewish villainy: Jews were accused of defacing the consecrated host, or even of using the blood of murdered Christian children for use in the baking of unleavened bread—a macabre mockery of eucharistic symbolism. Imaginatively, such antisemitic fantasies reached a fever pitch in the English legends of Hugh of Lincoln, in the various tales of wicked Jews compiled in texts like Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria, and, more prosaically, in the stereotyped vicious stage Jews of medieval religious drama. While the causes of medieval antisemitism are multiple—political, economic, theological—surely the intensification of devotion to the Eucharist in general (and perhaps its public celebration at the Feast of Corpus Christi in particular) contributed greatly to what is surely one of medieval Christendom’s ugliest legacies to the modern world.
On the face of it, the increased emphasis on the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages fortified the position of priests in particular and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in general: the institutional Church, after all, was the means by which bread and wine brought worshippers into contact with the body and blood of Christ. At the same time, paradoxically, Eucharistic devotion also had a certain diffusive force. As Carolyn Walker Bynum and others have noted, devotion to the Eucharist, even meditation on the Eucharist, became useful modes of female spirituality in the late medieval period, modes by which women could claim a power and sanctity denied them by the institutional Church. But even beyond anchoresses and small communities of religious women, the Eucharist promised a more direct, and often even personal, relationship with Jesus, with his sufferings, and with his redemptive power. Laypersons of all walks of life could engage in adoration of the consecrated host in a chapel without the mediation of a priest. Contemplation of the Eucharist was a large part of many lay spiritual movements (such as the beguines and the beghards) and it was crucial as well to the devotio moderna movement of the later Middle Ages, culminating in Thomas à Kempis’s classic, The Imitation of Christ. In a very real sense, these forms of personal piety constituted a requisite component of the success of both the Protestant and Catholic reformations of the sixteenth century.
Given the sacrament’s centrality to medieval Christian religious life, it is not surprising that the Eucharist had effects far beyond the strictly religious domain. Art historians speculate that the very visual dynamics of looking at the consecrated host either during mass, or as a more private adoration, or in the Corpus Christi processions may have had an inestimable effect on European visual culture, leading perhaps even to the development of visual perspective. In the realm of literary fiction — in Charlemagne romances, in Breton lais and elsewhere — the ability to partake of the Eucharist becomes a useful means of establishing a character’s virtue or humanity; cannibalism, in marked contrast, designates inhumanity, and seems a particular characteristic of giants, werewolves, and other monstrous semi-humans. The plots of Marie de France’s Yonec and Bisclavret, for instance, pivot on this distinction, as does Gerald of Wales’s encounter with the werewolves of Ossory in his Topography of Ireland. Yet perhaps the most notable literary manifestation of the
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Eucharist arrives in the concept of the Holy Grail, which eventually dominated the cycle of Arthurian legends. By the early thirteenth century, the Grail — previously a magical object of unclear origin and powers — became identified with the cup that caught the blood of Christ during the Crucifixion, a relic of unparalleled sanctity. The quest to find the Holy Grail becomes both the highest achievement of the Arthurian civilization embodied in the Knights of the Round Table and also the harbinger of its demise, an apt warning of the latent incompatibility of religious and secular values.
Because of its centrality to medieval Christian worship and to the medieval Christian imagination, the Eucharist not surprisingly became a touchstone of religious dissent in the wake of Martin Luther and other sixteenth-century religious Reformers. Protestants in general rejected the medieval Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, though Lutherans (and eventually the Church of England) retained the doctrine of the Real Presence, noting the power of the sacrament to effect the forgiveness of sins and to inspire spiritual strength. For other Protestant groups, the Eucharist was less central, a symbol or memorial of Christ’s sacrifice rather than a manifestation of his direct presence. Across the board, Protestants made the celebration of the Eucharist a less frequent element of worship, emphasizing instead the sermon as the focal point of Sunday worship. In contrast, the Catholic authorities in the sixteenth century redoubled their emphasis upon the centrality of Eucharist to Christian devotion. It became a de rigeur part of the Catholic mass, and, the Council of Trent in 1551 finally affirmed Transubstantiation as official Church dogma. In a very real sense, then, differing theories and practices of the Eucharist became a critical mark of distinction between the increasingly varied forms of Christianity in the emerging modern world.
Because of its centrality to medieval Christian worship and to the medieval Christian imagination, the Eucharist not surprisingly became a touchstone of religious dissent in the wake of Martin Luther and other sixteenth-century religious Reformers. Protestants in general rejected the medieval Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, though Lutherans (and eventually the Church of England) retained the doctrine of the Real Presence, noting the power of the sacrament to effect the forgiveness of sins and to inspire spiritual strength. For other Protestant groups, the Eucharist was less central, a symbol or memorial of Christ’s sacrifice rather than a manifestation of his direct presence. Across the board, Protestants made the celebration of the Eucharist a less frequent element of worship, emphasizing instead the sermon as the focal point of Sunday worship. In contrast, the Catholic authorities in the sixteenth century redoubled their emphasis upon the centrality of Eucharist to Christian devotion. It became a de rigeur part of the Catholic mass, and, the Council of Trent in 1551 finally affirmed Transubstantiation as official Church dogma. In a very real sense, then, differing theories and practices of the Eucharist became a critical mark of distinction between the increasingly varied forms of Christianity in the emerging modern world.
Further Reading
- A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, eds. Ian Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Brill, 2012)
- Ann Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2016)
- Carolyn Walker Bynum, "The Blood of Christ in the Later Middl Ages," Church History 71 (2002): 685-714
- Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, rev. Andrew Louth (Penguin, 1987)
- John Freccero, "Bestial Sign and Bread of Angels: Inferno XXXII and XXXIII," in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Harvard University Press, 1986)
- Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church, trans. John J. Hagen (Brill, 1979)
- Thomas M. Izbicki, The Eucharist in Medieval Canon Law (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
- Lanfranc of Canterbury, On the Body and Blood of the Lord, trans. Mark G. Vaillancourt, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation series (Catholic University of America Press, 2009)
- Marcel Metzger, History of the Liturgy: The Major Stages, trans. Madeleine M. Beaumont (The Liturgical Press, 1997)
- Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, rev. ed,. (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
- Miri Rubin, "Eucharist," in Medieval Folklore, eds. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow (Oxford University Press, 2002)
- Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Harold C. Gardiner (Image Books, 1955)
- André Vauchez, The Spirituality of the Medieval West: The Eighth to the Twelfth Century, trans. Colette Friedlander (Cistercian Publications, 1993)
- Roger S. Wieck, Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art (Scala Art Publishers, 2014)