Eucharist and Church in Augustine

The Eucharistic Presence of the Body of Christ according to Augustine
American Academy of Religion
November 1998
J. Patout Burns
October 31, 1998

Although Augustine clearly asserted the bodily presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the eucharist, he did not make this the focus of his preaching and writing on the eucharist. Instead, he emphasized the connection between the presence of Jesus in the elements and in the community of the church. Three reasons can be advanced for this approach to the eucharist. First, the bodily presence of Christ in the eucharist did not play a significant role in the African understanding of the redemptive work of Christ. Second, the eucharist did serve as an essential means of salvation by establishing the unity of the church. Finally, the bodily presence of Christ in the eucharist raised problem for understanding the efficacy of the rituals performed in schism. We shall examine each of these issues.

The Eucharist and Redemption

Augustine's explanation of the method of the redemption and the sacrifice which Christ offered to free humanity form sin remained remarkably stable from its earliest presentation in de libero arbitrio⁽¹⁾ through the two discussions in de trinitate.⁽²⁾ By consenting to the suggestion of the devil, humanity had turned itself over to his power and was justly held by him in death. As a human being born free from the contagion of the common sin and as having successfully resisted all the temptations of the devil, Christ had the right not to die. The devil having fail to persuade Jesus to sin, unjustly and violently took his life. Though Christ could have prevented the attack through his divine power, he willingly suffered the injustice. In thus violating Christ's right to uninterrupted life, the devil forfeited his own right to hold other humans in subjection to himself. Thus Christ could justly forgive sin and free the Christian elect from the demonic power to which they had given themselves. After having achieved a victory through his justice on the cross, Christ exhibited his victory in power by breaking the chains of death in raising his body from the dead. Christ triumphed first by justice, a victory in which every Christian can participate by resisting the devil; only then did he exercise the divine power which his followers do not have at their disposal.

This redemption theory, based upon justice and legality, requires the human innocence of Christ as the means of victory. The divine power is brought to bear in a much more limited way: to guarantee the freedom of Christ in a death which he could have prevented, to demonstrate the humility which reverses the pride of humanity, to raise the Savior's flesh from death. The theory involves neither the physical transformation of mortal flesh by union with the incorruptible divine nature nor the overcoming of passion in animal flesh by the indwelling of the divine mind. Yet these were the themes in the Alexandrian soteriology which then used the presence and operation of Christ through the eucharistic elements to transmit the saving power of the divinity of Christ to the Christian. In contrast, Augustine did not link the immortality of the resurrected flesh to the transformative power of the divinized flesh of Jesus, present in the eucharist. Augustine's soteriology did not employ the bodily presence of Jesus in the bread and wine as a medium for bringing the body, and thence the soul, of the Christian to perfection. Instead, the resurrection of the body, in Christ and the Christian, was accomplished by the direct exercise of divine power, unmediated by the flesh of the Savior.

Unlike his understanding of much of the Christian belief and practice, Augustine's theory of the redemptive work of Christ underwent no significant development. The brief sketch presented in de libero arbitrio was elaborated but not changed in the final exposition of de trinitate.⁽³⁾ This may indicate that the legal theory of redemption was well established in the African church. This, in turn, would mean that Augustine's congregation was not accustomed to expecting an emphasis on the physical presence of Jesus in the eucharist.

The Eucharist and the Unity of the Church

Instead of looking to the eucharist as the means of physical transformation and bodily salvation, African Christians focused on participation in the eucharist as the means of adherence to the unity of the church, through which they might be saved by the divine power. The communion of the church-its sharing the eucharistic meal-as the medium of salvation is clearly evident in the literary record of the episcopate of Cyprian. His correspondence during the Decian persecution indicates concern on the part of both the clergy and the laity that no one die outside the communion. He reminded his clergy of the longstanding practice which provided baptism and the eucharist to any of the catechumens who were in danger of death.⁽⁴⁾ Under pressure from the lapsed and at the admonition of the Roman clergy, he recognized and later defended the right of penitents to be readmitted to communion before death.⁽⁵⁾ In defending the subsequent decision to readmit all the penitent lapsed, he explained that those who died outside the communion could not even be presented to Christ for judgment, so that the church might appeal for their salvation.⁽⁶⁾ Even martyrdom could not win salvation if Christ was professed in opposition to the unity of the church.⁽⁷⁾

The schismatics in Carthage, who admitted the lapsed to communion upon profession of repentance without waiting through the extended period of penance required by Cyprian and his colleagues, likewise manifested the essential role in the process of salvation which African Christians assigned to participation in the eucharistic ritual.⁽⁸⁾ The Novatianists' insistence upon the purity of the eucharistic fellowship likewise reflected their reliance upon it as a medium of salvation. They apparently believed, however, that penitents dying outside the communion could appeal to the mercy of Christ and be forgiven when they appeared before his tribunal.⁽⁹⁾ This view never won support in Africa, perhaps because it contradicted the dominant assumption that salvation could not be attained outside the church's communion.

Cyprian's treatise On the Unity of the Catholic Church and the subsequent correspondence of the African bishops on the subject of baptism performed outside laid a solid theoretical foundation for the African Christian belief that the eucharistic communion was an essential means of salvation. He argued that schismatic bishops could not effectively baptize and cleanse from sin precisely because they worked outside the communion of the church.⁽¹⁰⁾ In responding to objections, Cyprian even asserted that participation in the eucharist within the unity of the church would substitute for the defect of an improperly performed baptismal ritual.⁽¹¹⁾

Cyprian clearly believed in the bodily presence of Jesus in the eucharistic bread and wine. He asserted that sharing in Christ would strengthen and empower the Christian to imitate his martyrdom.⁽¹²⁾ The principal function of the eucharist in Cyprian's thought, and apparently in that of the African Christianity of his day, however, was to establish the unity of the church, itself the necessary means for gaining access to the kingdom of heaven.⁽¹³⁾

Cyprian shared Novatian's concern that the eucharistic fellowship might spread sin as well as holiness. Unlike Novatian, however, he restricted the source of pollution to the office of bishop. Idolatrous laymen who had been readmitted to communion would not harm their fellows, even if they had not truly repented of their evil. He warned his colleagues that failing to break communion with an apostate bishop, even an apparently penitent one, could make other bishops share in his sin. He urged the laity to flee the ministry of such a bishop, should he refuse to relinquish his office.⁽¹⁴⁾ This seed found fertile soil in African Christianity; it grew to become the Donatist Church.

The Donatists were, as Cyprian had been, concerned that a bad bishop could spread contagion through the eucharistic fellowship. When the overseas churches refused to accept the truth of their charges against Caecilian, the bishop of Carthage, they asserted that all who entered into communion with the apostate shared his sin and thus lost the power of sanctification. The Donatists seem to have developed Cyprian's notion of eucharist fellowship to reach beyond the local celebration of the ritual along the lines of mutual recognition of bishops, to join widely separated communities into a single fellowship. The contamination of idolatry which Caecilian had incurred from his consecrator, Felix of Aptunga, had passed in turn to the Bishop of Rome and thence, along the lines of episcopal communion, to all the churches of the world. Only in Africa had a pure communion free of the taint of idolatry survived. It had to be carefully guarded, since a single apostate bishop could ruin the whole union of churches and thus cut off access to the kingdom of Christ for the members of each local eucharistic fellowship.

In Augustine's hands, the theology of church unity based upon the sharing of the eucharist was turned in a more positive direction. Like Paul, he focused on the connection between the body of Christ in the eucharistic bread and wine and the Christian community as the body of Christ. A repeated analogy in his sermons on the eucharist addressed to the neophytes on Easter day, compared the preparation of bread through the grinding of wheat, the moistening, kneading and bakeing of flour to the preparation of the catechumens to become the body of Christ though fasting, washing, anointing. He then exhorted them to recognize themselves in the bread and wine they received, to allow it to turn them into itself, so to live that they would always belong to the Body of Christ.⁽¹⁵⁾ In preaching to the faithful, Augustine returned to this theme: that the church is offered with Christ on the altar; that the eucharist builds the Body of Christ within the church.⁽¹⁶⁾

Augustine exploited the Donatist concern with the world-wide church: as the many loaves on a single altar were in fact one loaf, so the many loaves being offered throughout the world were one loaf; that one loaf, shared by the many local communions made them into a single body of Christ.⁽¹⁷⁾

The Donatist churches held the sacrament, the sign of the body of Christ; they failed to achieve the body itself, however, because they rejected the unity of the church. To seek the sign of unity while rejecting the unity was, Augustine argued, to eat judgment and drink condemnation against themselves.⁽¹⁸⁾ Indeed, in his eucharistic theology he followed the line which he had developed in his reflections on the reception of baptism in schism. Outside the church, the schismatics might have the sacrament but never the reality it symbolized, the eucharistic ritual but not the living presence of Christ. Once again, he drew a parallel between the schismatics outside the visible church and the unconverted Christians within it: neither shared the Spirit of Christ, neither received the reality of his body which the bread and wine symbolized, neither belonged to that body.⁽¹⁹⁾

The connection which Augustine established between the physical and the ecclesial bodies of Christ and the distinction which he introduced between the visible church (which included sinners) and the invisible society of saints within it, when taken together allowed him to direct Christian attention to the role of the eucharist in building the church. The eucharistic bread and wine were the sacramentum whose res was both the physical and the ecclesial body of Christ. He identified the ecclesial body of Christ not with the visible church but with the invisible society of saints, whose unifying and animating principle was the Holy Spirit. Thus the sharing of the physical and ecclesial bodies of Christ was focused on transforming the recipients into the ecclesial body, rather than the physical body of Christ. Christians could be exhorted to become what they received in a most literal sense-the ecclesial body of Christ. While being part of the visible body of Christ was a necessary condition for salvation, participating in the invisible body was constitutive of salvation. Those and only those who shared the Spirit of Christ would enter his kingdom. Conversely, those who rejected the ecclesial body of Christ through schism could not hold neither it nor the physical body of Christ in the eucharistic elements.

Augustine's emphasis on the connection between the eucharistic and the ecclesial body of Christ, in which the church is offered with Christ on the altar and the participation in the altar assimilates the Christians to Christ and thereby joins them into a single communion spread over the world, this focus arose not simply out of a careful reading of Paul but from the long African tradition of taking the eucharist as the ground of unity within the church. This connection enabled him to establish a disconnection between the celebration of the eucharistic ritual, the sign of unity, and the Donatist communion, a rejection of unity.

The Eucharist in Schism

Augustine developed a solution to the problem of the efficacy of the ritual of baptism performed in a schismatic church. He explained that the minister acts not through the presence of the Spirit which he has received through ordination in succession to the apostles or as initiation into the episcopal college but rather as the agent of Christ and through the power of the Spirit which dwells in the saints who form a holy communion within the unity of the church. If the bishop is within the visible unity of the church and the invisible unity of the society of saints, then the sacramental power resides in him. If the bishop is himself sinful but acts within the visible unity of the church, then he acts as agent of Christ and of the society of saints. If the bishop is in schism, he acts as the agent of Christ alone. A person baptized in true faith and repentance within the unity of the church receives the gift of the Holy Spirit and is joined into the unity of love established among the saints. A person baptized within the unity of the church but without true conversion or a person baptized in schism from the church does not retain the indwelling of the Spirit. In this case, the Spirit either enters and is immediately lost because of the continuing evil will of the initiant or never enters the person. If such a person subsequently repents within the church or abandons the schism and joins the church, the gift of the Spirit is conferred through the agency of the bishop and the prayers of the saints. Through this theory, Augustine was able to explain that the ritual of baptism was effective and did not have to be repeated; outside the communion of the church, however, the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit was either totally absent or fleeting and transient. Within the communion of the church, the Spirit dwelt among the saints and not in sinners.

Augustine drew upon elements of this theory, as has been seen above, to explain the efficacy of the eucharist. The invisible society of saints within the unity of the church was symbolized by the bread and wine on the altar; this was the body of Christ offered in sacrifice. When the faithful received the elements, they were exhorted to become what they received: by love and good life to be incorporated into the union of the saints. The Spirit of Christ was, he explained, the very soul of the holy body formed by the saints. Outside the unity of the church, the Spirit and thus the ecclesial body of Christ were absent. The Donatist had only the symbol but not the reality of the body of Christ. They ate and drank to their condemnation, just as they bore the mark of Christian baptism to their shame rather than salvation. Because the ecclesial body of Christ was not present in the schismatic community, the eucharistic ritual was an empty symbol.

The eucharist, however, presented a challenge which baptism did not. The invocation of the Spirit over the water of baptism did not make that water the bodily presence of the Spirit in the church. In some instances, the baptismal water was treated with great respect; it was drained into a separate cistern and gradually allowed to leach out into the soil rather than being dumped into the common sewer. The bread and wine of the eucharist, in contrast, became the living presence of Christ in the community. Augustine affirmed this presence in his preaching.⁽²⁰⁾ The faithful recognized a power in the consecrated bread similar to that of the bones and dust from the bodies of martyrs: it could cure disease and expel demons.⁽²¹⁾ The eucharistic bread and wine were a presence of divine, sanctifying power on earth.

Thus the question must have been pressed forward: when the Donatists celebrated the eucharist, did the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ? The African bishops, Augustine among them, recognized the ordination of the Donatist clergy. Augustine argued that they had taken from the church not only the sacrament of baptism but that of orders as well, the power to confer baptism. In seeking to reestablish the unity of the church, the African bishops decreed that reunited Donatist bishops could succeed to the presidency of the Catholic community upon the death of its bishop.⁽²²⁾ They did not, and indeed, could not grant the Donatists the power to administer baptism but deny them the power to offer the eucharist. Thus the question: did the bread and wine offered in the Donatist church become the bodily presence of Christ?

Augustine regularly passed up the opportunity to address this question. He never hesitated to elaborate the parallel between baptism conferred and received by bad Catholics and by Donatist. In dealing with the eucharist, however, he usually referred explicitly only to bad Catholics and implied a parallel among the Donatists.⁽²³⁾ In one instance, he avoided an explicit reference to the Donatist celebration.⁽²⁴⁾ Augustine's regular practice, however, was to confine his reflections to baptism and not to discuss the eucharist.⁽²⁵⁾

The problem of the presence of the body of Christ among the Donatist could not have been simply ignored by Augustine. It seems rather to have exercised an influence just below the surface of his preaching and writing. Thus when preaching on the eucharist, he regularly affirmed the presence of the individual body of Jesus but then moved in his interpretation to the ecclesial body. This in a sermon on Easter to the neophytes, a perfect time for speaking of the glorified body of Christ, he said:

I haven't forgotten my promise. I had promised those of you who have just been baptized a sermon to explain the sacrament of the Lord's table, which yo can see right now, and which you shared in last night. You ought to know what you have received, what you are about to receive, what you ought to receive every day. That bread which you can see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ. That cup, or rather what the cup contains, sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ. It was by means of these things that the Lord Christ wished to present us with his body and blood, which he shed for our sake for the forgiveness of sins. If you receive them well, you are yourselves what you receive. You see, the apostles says, We, being many, are one loaf, one body (1 Cor 10.17). That's how he explained the sacrament of the Lord's table; one loaf, one body, is what we all are, many though we be. In this loaf of bread you are given clear to understand how much you should love unity. I mean, what that loaf made from one grain? Weren't there many grains of wheat? But before they came into the loaf they were all separate; they were joined together by means of water after a certain amount of pounding and crushing. Unless wheat is ground, after all, and moistened with water, it can't possibly bet into this shape which is called bread. In the same way you too were being ground and pounded, as it were, by the humiliation of fasting and the sacrament of exorcism. then came baptism, and you were, in a manner of speaking, moistened with water in order to be shaped into bread. But it's not yet bread without fire to bake it. So what does fire represent? That's the chrism, the anointing. Oil, the fire-feeder, you see, is the sacrament of the Holy Spirit. ⁽²⁶⁾

Augustine seems determined to avoid dwelling on the physical body of Christ and to direct attention to his ecclesial body.

By linking the physical body and blood of Christ, offered on the cross, to the ecclesial body, realized among the saints within the church, Augustine was able to imply that in refusing to accept the ecclesial body, the Donatists lost the physical body as well. Their eucharist ritual would be an empty symbol, a sacramentum without its corresponding res.

Conclusion

Augustine's focus on the eucharist as the presence of the ecclesial body of Christ was facilitated by the absence of a physical transformation of the individual believer through union with the glorified body of Christ in North African soteriology. This understanding was mandated by the centuries of conflict in North Africa over the unity and purity of the church. Augustine himself opened the way for developing the link between the church as the body of Christ and the presence of Christ in the eucharist by his understanding of the true church as the invisible society of saints. Finally, the problem of explaining the physical presence of Christ in the Donatist celebration of the eucharist encouraged Augustine to link this element of eucharistic theology to the ecclesial presence, which could be denied to the Donatists.

In this instance, eucharistic theology seems to have been directly dependent upon the role which the ritual had been called upon to perform in the practice of the church.

1. lib. arb. 3.10.31.

2. The first in trin. 4.13.16-17 and the second in trin. 13.14.18-15.19.

3. In de trinitate 4.13.16, the divinity of Christ is put forward as a guarantee of the voluntary character of his death; in 13.11.15, Augustine added the observation that since Father and son share a single will, the Father cannot be angry while the Son loves humanity. In 13.14.18, the victory in power through the resurrection was added to the victory in justice on the cross.

4. ep. 18.2.2.

5. The Roman admonition is in ep. 8.3.1; Cyprian agreed in ep. 20.3.2; he defended the decision in ep. 55.13.1, 17.3.

6. Epp. 55.29.2, 57.1.1.

7. Ep. 55.29.3.

8. In ep. 55.15.1, Cyprian observed that if the lapsed were refused the opportunity for repentance, they would join the schismatics.

9. Cyprian seems to be representing and rejecting the Novatianist position in ep. 55.28.1-29.2.

10. Thus for example, epp. 71.1.2, 72.1.1.

11. Ep. 73.23.1

12. Epp. 57.4.2, 63.

13. This is aptly expressed in his explanation of the mixing of wine and water in the eucharistic cup and the union of many grains to make the one loaf; ep. 63.13.1-4.

14. Epp. 65.4.1-2, 67.3.1-2.

15. Serm. 227, 272, Guelfr. 7, Denis 3.3-4.

16. Serm. 57.7, Tract in ev. Jn. 26.13, civ. dei 10.6.

17. Serm. Denis 3.3; Guelfr. 7.

18. C. litt. Pet. 10.108.247; ep. 185.11.50.

19. Ep. 185.11.50.

20. Serm. Denis 3.2, Guelfr. 7.1.

21. civ. dei 22.8; CCL 48:820.192-199.

22. C. ep. Parm. 2.13.28.

23. The most explicit passage is in de baptismo 5.8.9 where he says: corpus enim domini et sanguis domini nihilominus erat etiam illis quibus dicebat apostolus: qui manducat et bibit indigne, iudicium sibi manducat et bibit. non ergo quaerant in catholica haeretici quod habent sed quod non habent, id est finem praecepti, sine quo multa sancta haberi possunt, sed prodesse non possunt. BA29.338-340

24. In the sententiae of the bishops gathered with Cyprian to judge the baptism performed outside the church, one of the bishops referred explicitly to the schismatics' celebration of the eucharist:

Caecilius a Bilta dixit: ... ad haec omnia accredit et illud malum, ut artistes diabili audeat eucharistiam facere.

[Augustine commented] et antistites diabolic, quia fraudi et auaritiae quae est idololatria seruiunt.

de baptismo 6.7.8-8.9, BA 29:423-424.

25. Thus En Ps 103.1.9 does not actually say that the Donatist eucharist is valid. It says that the sacraments are common to good and evil but that charity is not. When it does speak of eucharist, it mentions only Simon Magus.

bapt 3.17.22-23 refers to the unity of the dove which makes sacraments effective. there is no actual reference to the eucharist.

CEpPamr 2.11.24 and bapt 1.10.14 refer only to baptism.

26. Serm 227.1; trans Hill 6:254. The parallel in Sermon 272 shows that this was Augustine's regular way of thinking:

What you can see on the altar, you also saw last night; but what it was, what it meant, of what great reality it contained the sacrament, you had not yet heard. so what you can see, then, is bread and a cup; that's what even your eyes tell you; but as for what your faith asks to be instructed about, the bread is the body of Christ, the cup the blood of Christ.

So if you want to understand the body of Christ, listen to the apostle telling the faithful, You, though, are the body of Christ and its members (1 Cor 12.27). So if it's you that are the body of Christ and its members, it's the mystery that means you. It is to what you are that you reply Amen, and by so replying you express your assent. What you hear, you see, is The body of Christ, and you answer, Amen. So be a member of the body of Christ, in order to make the Amen true.

Hill 7:300-301.