Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/648

 EUCHARIST

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EUCHARIST

(petra spirilalis), which in the Person of the Word in an invisible manner ever accompanied the Israelites in their journeyings and supplied them with a spiritual fountain of waters. According to this explanation the copula would here retain its meaning "to be". A nearer approach to a parallel with the words of Institu- tion is found apparently in the so-called "sacramental expressions": "Hoc est pactum meum" (Gen., xvii, 10), and "est enim Phase Domini" (Ex., xii, 11). It is well known how Zwingli by a clever manipulation of the latter phrase succeeded in one day in winning over to his interpretation the entire Catholic population of Zurich. And yet it is clear that no parallelism can be discerned between the aforesaid expressions and the words of Institution; no real parallelism, because there is question of entirely different matters. Not even a verbal parallelism can be pointed out, since in both texts of the Old Testament the subject is a cere- mony (circumcision in the first case, and the rite of the paschal lamb in the second), while the predicate in- volves a me^-e abstraction (covenant, Passover of the Lord). A more weighty consideration is this, that on closer invebtigation the copula est will be found to re- tain its proper meaning of "is" rather than "signi- fies". For just as the circumcision not only signified the nature or object of the Divine covenant, but really was such, so the rite of the paschal lamb was really the Passover {Phase) or Pasch, instead of its mere repre- sentation. It is true that in certain Anglican circles it was formerly the custom to appeal to the supposed poverty of the Aramaic tongue, which was spoken by Christ in the company of His Apostles; for it was maintained that no word could be found in this lan- guage corresponding to the concept "to signify". Yet, even prescinding from the fact that in the Aramaic tongue the copula est is usually omitted and that such an omission rather makes for its strict meaning of " to be". Cardinal Wiseman (Hor» Syriaca-, Rome, 1 828, pp. 3-73) succeeded in producing no less than forty Syriac expressions conveying the meaning of "to signify " and thus effectually exploded the myth of the Semitic tongue's limited vocabulary.

A second group of Sacramentarians, with (Ecolam- padius, sliifted the diligently sought-for metaphor to the concept contained in the predicate coi-piis, giving to the latter the sense of "signum corporis", so that the words of Institution were to be rendered: " This is a sign [symbol, image, type] of my Body". Essen- tially tallying with the Zwinglian interpretation, this new meaning is equally untenable. In all the lan- guages of the world the expression "my body" desig- nates a person's natural body, not the mere sign or symbol of that body. True it is that the Scriptural words "Body of Christ" not unfrequently have the meaning of "Church", which is called the mystical Body of Christ, a figure easily and always discernible as such from the text or context (cf. Col., i, 24). This mystical sense, however, is impossible in the words of Institution, for the simple reason that Christ did not give the Apostles His Church to eat, but His Body, and that "body and blood", byreasonof their real and logical association, cannot be separated from one an- other, and hence are all the less susceptible of a figura- tive use. The case would be different if the reading were: "This is the bread of my Body, the wine of my Blood ". In order to prove at least this much, that the contents of the Chalice are merely wine and, conse- quently, a mere sign of the Blooci, Protestants have recourse to the text of St. Matthew, who relates that Christ, after the completion of the Last Supper, de- clared: " 1 will not drink from henceforth of this fruit of the vine [genimen inlis]" (Matt., xxvi, 29). It is to be noted that St. Luke (xxii, 18 sqq.), who is chrono- logically more exact, places these words of Christ be- fore his accoimt of the Institution, and that the true Blood of Christ may with right still be called (conse- crated) wine, on the one hand, because the Blood was

partaken of after the manner in which wine is drunk, and, on the other, because the Blood continues to exist under the outward appearances of the wine. In its multifarious wanderings from the old beaten path, being consistently forced with the denial of Christ's Divinity to abandon faith in the Real Pre.sence also, modern criticism seeks to account for the text along other lines. With utter arbitrariness, doubting whether the words of Institution originated from the mouth of Christ, it traces them to St. Paul as their author, in whose ardent soul something original sup- posedly mingled with his subjective reflections on the value attached to "Body" and on the "repetition of the Eucharistic banquet". From this troubled foun- tain-head the words of Institution first found their way into the Gospel of St. Luke and then, by way of addition, were woven into the texts of St. Matthew and St. Mark. It stands to reason that the latter as- sertion is nothing more than a wholly unwarrantable conjecture, which may be passed over as gratuitously as it was advanced. It is, moreover, essentially un- true that the value attached to the Sacrifice and the repetition of the Lord's Supper are mere reflections of St. Paul, since Christ attached a sacrificial value to His Death (cf. Mark, x, 45) and celebrated His Eu- charistic Supper in connexion with the Jewish Pass- over, which itself had to be repeated every year. As regards the interpretation of the words of Institution, there are at present three modern explanations con- tending for supremacy — the SJ^nbolical, the paraboli- cal, and the eschatological. According to the sym- bolical interpretation, corpus is supposed to desig- nate the Church as the mystical Body and sanguis the New Testament. We have already rejected this last meaning as impossible. For is it the Church that is eaten and the New Testament that is drunk? Did St. Paul brand the partaking of the Church and of the New Testament as a heinous offence committed against the Body and Blood of Christ? The case is not much better in regard to the paraboli- cal interpretation, which would discern in the pouring out of the wine a mere parable of the shedding of the Blood on the Cross. This again is a purely arbitrary explanation, an invention, unsupported by any objec- tive foundation. Then, too, it would follow from analogy, that the breaking of the bread was a parable of the slaying of Christ's Body, a meaning utterly in- conceivable. Rising as it T\ere out of a dense fog and labouring to take on a definite form, the incomplete eschatological explanation would make the Eucharist a mere anticipation of the future heavenly banquet. Supposing the truth of the Real Presence, this con- sideration might be open to discussion, inasmuch as the partaking of the Bread of Angels is really the fore- ta.ste of eternal beatitude and the anticipated trans- formation of earth into aeaven. But as implying a mere symbolical anticip: tion of heaven and a mean- ingless manipulation of uaconsecrated bread and wine, the eschitological mterj retation is diametrically op- posed to the text and finds not the slightest support in the life ind charicter of Christ

Concenmu thp entire in itter ste Hehv Die Einsetzung des Ahmdn I J I } (} I Wi.rzburg, 1900);

Bernin / / ihrer urspnmg-

bchin / \ I / lamenll. Abend-

mahUh, r \ f I ing in Tiibinger

Theol Qii irl(ils(hrni {[ lUy pp -iUsqq -^KEBERG, Das Abend- maht imAeuen Testament (Berlin lyOj) also LoOFs, AbendmaM in Realencjjklopddic fur prot. Theot.; Zotz, Die Abendmahls- frage in ihrer gcschichtl. Entwickelung (Leipzig, 1904),

(b) Proof from Tradition. — As for the cogency of the argument from tradition, this historical fact is of decided significance, namely, that the dogma of the Real Presence remained, properly speaking, unmo- lested down to the time of the heretic Berengarius of Tours (d. loss), and so could claim even at that time the uiiiiitiTn.pted possession of ten centuries. In the course of the dogma's history there arose in general