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 liUCHARIST

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EUCHARIST

the case, which demand that He did not, in a matter of such paramount importance, have recourse to mean- ingless and deceptive metaphors. For figures enhance the clearness of speech only when the figurative meaning is obvious, eitlier from the nature of the case (e. g. from a reference to a statue of Lincoln, by saying: " This is Lincoln") or from the usages of common parlance (e. g. in the case of this synecdoche: "This glass is wine "). Now, neither from the nature of the case nor in common parlance is breail an apt or possible symbol of the human body. Were one to say of a piece of bread: "This is Napoleon", he would not be using a figure, but uttering nonsense. There is but one means of rendering a symbol improperly so called clear and intelligible, namely, by conventionally set- tling beforehand what it is to signify, as, for instance, if one were to say: " Let us imagine tiiese two pieces of bread before us to be Socrates and Plato". Christ, however, instead of informing His Apostles that he intended to use such a figure, told them rather the contrary in the discourse containing the promise: " the breail that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world" (John, vi, 52). Such language, of course, could be used only by a God-man; so that belief in the Real Presence necessarily presuppo.ses belief in the true Divinity of Christ. The foregoing rules would of themselves establish the natural meaning with cer- tainty, even if the words of Institution, "This is my body — this is my blood", stood alone. But in the original text corpus (body) and sanguis (blood) are followed by significant appositional additions, the Body being designated as "given for you" and the Blood as "shed for you [many]"; hence the Body given to the Apostles was the selfsame Body that was crucified on Good Friday, and the Chalice drunk by them, the selfsame Blood that was shed on the Cross for our sins. Therefore the above-mentioned apposi- tional phrases directly exclude every possibility of a figurative interpretation.

We reach the same conclusion from a consideration of the concomitant circumstances, taking into account both the hearers and the Institutor. Those who heard the words of Institution were not learned Ra- tionalists, possessed of the critical equipment that would enable them, as philologists and logicians, to analyse an obscure and mysterious phraseology; they were simple, uneducated fishermen, from the ordinary ranks of the people, who with childlike natvetr hung upon the words of their Master and with deep faith accepted whatever He proposed to them. This child- like disposition had to be reckoned with by Christ, particularly on the eve of His Passion and Death, when He made His last will and testament and spoke as a dying father to His deeply afflicted cliildren. In such a moment of awful solemnity, tlio only appropri- ate mode of speech would be one which, stripped of unintelligible figures, made use of words corresponding exactly to the meaning to be conveyed. It must be remembered, also, that Christ as omniscient God-man. must have foreseen the shameful error into which He would have led His Apostles and His Church by adopt- ing an unheard-of metaphor; for the Church down to the present day appeals to the words of Christ in her teaching and practice. If then she practises idolatry by the adoration of mere bread and wine, this crime must be laid to the charge of the dod-man Himself. Besides this, Christ intended to institute the Euchar- ist as a most holy sacrament, to be solemnly cele- brated in the Church even to the end of time. But the content and the. constituent parts of a sacrament had to be stated with such clearness of t( rminology as to exclude categorically every error in liturgy and wor- ship. As may lie gathered from the words of conse- cration of the Chalice, Christ established the New Testament in His Biood, just as the Old Testament had been established in the typical blood of animals (cf. Ex., xxiv, 8; Heb., ix, 11 sqq.). With the true

instinct of justice, jurists prescribe that in all debat- able points the words of a will must be taken in their natural, literal sense; for they are led by the correct conviction, that every testator of sound mind, in drawing up his last will and testament, is deeply con- cerned to have it done in language at once clear and unencumbered by meaningless metaphors. Now, Christ, according to the literal purport of His testa- ment, has left us as a precious legacy, not mere bread and wine, but His Body and Blood. Are we justified, then, in contradicting Him to His face and exclaiming: " No, this is not your Body, but mere bread, the sign of your Body!"

The refutation of the so-called Sacramentarians, a name given by Luther to those who opposed the Real Presence, evinces as clearly the impossibility of a fig- urative meaning. Once the manifest literal sense is abandoneil, occasion is given to interminable contro- versies about the meaning of an enigma which Christ supposedly offered His followers for solution. There were no limits to the dispute in the sixteenth century, for at that time Christopher Rasperger wrote a whole book on some 200 different interpretations: " Ducentse verborum, 'Hoc est corpus nieum' interpretationes " (Ingolstadt, 1577). In this connexion we must re- strict ourselves to an examination of the most current and widely known distortions of the literal sense, which were the butt of Luther's bitter ridicule even as early as 1527. The first group of interpreters, with Zwingli, discovers a figure in the copula est and rend- ers it: " This signifies (c.s(=si'(/tti7!caO my Body". In proof of this interpretation, examples are quoted from Scripture, as: "The seven kine are seven years" (Gen., xli, 26) or: "Sara and Agar are the two cove- nants" (Gal., iv, 24). Waiving the question whether the verb "to be" {esse, ehai) of itself can ever be used as the "copula in a figurative relation" (Weiss) or express the " relation of identity in a metaphorical connexion" (Heinrici), which most logicians deny, the fundamental principles of logic firmly establish this truth, that all propositions may be divided into two great categories, of which the first and most compre- hensive denominates a thing as it is in itself (e. g. " Man is a rational being"), whereas the second designates a thing according as it is used as a sign of sometliing else (e. g. "This picture is my father"). To determine whether a speaker intends the second manner of ex- pression, there are four criteria, whose joint concur- rence alone will allow the verb "to be" to have the meaning of "signify". Abstracting from the three cri- teria, mentioned above, which have reference either to the nature of the case, or to the usages of common par- lance, or to some convention previously agreed upon, there remains a fourth and last of decisive significance, namely: when a complete substance is predicated of another complete substance, there can exist no logical relation of identity between them, but only the rela- tion of similarity, inasmuch as the first is an image, sign, symbol, of the other. Now this last-nanieil cri- terion is inapplicable to the Scriptural examples brought forward by the Zwinglians, and especially so in reg.ard to their interpretation of the words of Insti- tution; for the words are not: "This bread is my Body ", but indefinitely: " This is my Body ' '. In the history of the Zwinglian conception of the Lord's Supper, certain "sacramental expressions" {loculiones sacramentides) of the Sacred Text, regarded as parallel- isms of the words of Institution, have attracted con- siderable attention. The first is to be found in I Cor., .X, 4: " .\nd the rock was [signified] Christ". Yet it is evident that, if the subject rock is taken in its material .sense, the metaphor, according to the fourth criterion just mentioned, is as apparent as in the analogous plira.se: "Christ is the vine". If, however, the word rnck in this pas.sage is stripped of;dl that is material, it may be understood in a spiritual sense, because the Apostle himself is speaking of that "spiritual rock"