Did Augustine Teach Transubstantiation? [Part 1]

 

Augustine is perhaps the most influential figure in Western Christianity. He is also a favorite church father among both Catholics and Protestants. During the Reformation era, he was quoted by both sides to support their positions. John Calvin quotes him more than anyone else in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Many counter-Reformation writers also cited his writings as well against Protestantism. This pattern still continues today. Reformed Protestant apologists as well as Roman Catholic apologists still cite the great bishop of Hippo in support of their theological views. 

In this series of articles, I want to take a look at Augustine's theology of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. The way I will do this is by addressing first the quotes used by Roman Catholic apologists to support their view of transubstantiation, and then I will analyze portions from the writings of Augustine which do not support transubstantiation, as well as the responses of Roman Catholic apologists to this material from Augustine. 

Exposition of Psalm 98

 ...And fall down before His footstool: for He is holy. What are we to fall down before? His footstool. What is under the feet is called a footstool, in Greek ὑ ποπόδιον, in Latin Scabellum or Suppedaneum. But consider, brethren, what he commands us to fall down before. In another passage of the Scriptures it is said, The heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Isaiah 66:1 Does he then bid us worship the earth, since in another passage it is said, that it is God's footstool? How then shall we worship the earth, when the Scripture says openly, You shall worship the Lord your God? Deuteronomy 6:13 Yet here it says, fall down before His footstool: and, explaining to us what His footstool is, it says, The earth is My footstool. I am in doubt; I fear to worship the earth, lest He who made the heaven and the earth condemn me; again, I fear not to worship the footstool of my Lord, because the Psalm bids me, fall down before His footstool. I ask, what is His footstool? And the Scripture tells me, the earth is My footstool. In hesitation I turn unto Christ, since I am herein seeking Himself: and I discover how the earth may be worshipped without impiety, how His footstool may be worshipped without impiety. For He took upon Him earth from earth; because flesh is from earth, and He received flesh from the flesh of Mary. And because He walked here in very flesh, and gave that very flesh to us to eat for our salvation; and no one eats that flesh, unless he has first worshipped: we have found out in what sense such a footstool of our Lord's may be worshipped, and not only that we sin not in worshipping it, but that we sin in not worshipping. (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801099.htm)

This is without a doubt one of the most common quotes used from Augustine by Roman Catholic apologists to support transubstantiation and in particular, eucharistic adoration and worship. However, is Augustine teaching the Roman Catholic view here?

First of all, there is an issue in translation on the phrase "no one eats it without first worshipping". Some translations say "worshipping it", thus implying a more clear sense of eucharistic adoration. Which is correct? Here is the original Latin phrase used here by Augustine:

"nemo autem illam carnem manducat, nisi prius adoraverit" (Patrologia Latina, Vol. 37, pg. 1263)

Here is the more accurate translation of this from two different sources:

"and no one eats that flesh, unless he has first worshipped…" (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801099.htm, [Catholic website])

"…and no one eateth that flesh, unless he hath first worshipped..." (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf108/npnf108.ii.XCIX.html)

Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong has the same translation in one of his articles on Augustine.

Therefore, the term subject of the passive verb "worshipped" is Christ's human flesh (which all the orthodox agree should be adored on account of its union with the divine person), not the Eucharistic symbols themselves. We also confess that during the celebration of this sacrament, the faithful communicant ought to raise his meditation to heaven and apprehend Christ's body and blood by faith, and thence partake.

So we can see that "it" is most likely an addition/mistranslation of the original Latin text of Augustine's writings here.

However, it gets worse for Roman apologists. If we read the next few sentences of this paragraph from Augustine, we see the following:

"But does the flesh give life? Our Lord Himself, when He was speaking in praise of this same earth, said, It is the Spirit that quickens, the flesh profits nothing....But when our Lord praised it, He was speaking of His own flesh, and He had said, Except a man eat My flesh, he shall have no life in him. John 6:54 Some disciples of His, about seventy, were offended, and said, This is an hard saying, who can hear it? And they went back, and walked no more with Him. It seemed unto them hard that He said, Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, you have no life in you: they received it foolishly, they thought of it carnally, and imagined that the Lord would cut off parts from His body, and give unto them....But He instructed them, and says unto them, It is the Spirit that quickens, but the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. John 6:63 Understand spiritually what I have said; you are not to eat this body which you see; nor to drink that blood which they who will crucify Me shall pour forth. I have commended unto you a certain mystery; spiritually understood, it will quicken. Although it is needful that this be visibly celebrated, yet it must be spiritually understood." (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801099.htm)

Sermon 227

"The bread which you see on the altar is, sanctified by the word of God, the body of Christ; that chalice, or rather what is contained in the chalice, is, sanctified by the word of God, the blood of Christ" (https://stanselminstitute.org/files/SERMON%20227.pdf)

This passage of Augustine has been hotly debated between Catholics and Protestants. I want to give here some reasons why I don't think Augustine is teaching transubstantiation here.

First of all, we should note the wider context of the passage:

"The bread which you see on the altar is, sanctified by the word of God, the body of Christ; that chalice, or rather what is contained in the chalice, is, sanctified by the word of God, 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 apostle 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....What you can see passes away, but the invisible reality signified does not pass away, but remains. Look, it's received, it's eaten, it's consumed. Is the body of Christ consumed, is the Church of Christ consumed, are the members of Christ consumed? Perish the thought!"(https://stanselminstitute.org/files/SERMON%20227.pdf)

Here is what three scholars have said on this issue:

"For Ratramnus, although Paschasius's second sense is not excluded – indeed it is even mentioned explicitly – there is another aspect which is dominant. For him, the Eucharist is above all a mystical body in that it symbolizes, as Saint Augustine so often repeated, the body of Christ which we ourselves are, or should be: the 'body of the people that believes', the 'body of the people that receives', the 'body of the people reborn in Christ', 'the body of believers'. (PL, 121, 167-9, 159) It is, reproduced on the altar, the mystery of ourselves" (Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, pg. 71, source)

"Augustine did not conceive of real presence in strictly ritual terms. His thinking admitted no sharp fissure between the real presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and the real presence of Christ within the Christian community." (William Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, pg. 376, source)

"Here [Sermon 227] the Pauline thought of the relation of eucharistic body and ecclesial body is deepened and made the principle of the doctrine of the eucharistic sacrament. Augustine understands that the eucharistic elements, especially the bread, are images of the whole Christ: head and body. The baptized, who live by faith and love, are the body of the Christ and participate more deeply in what they are through the symbolic realities of the eucharistic sacraments. Therefore the Eucharist does not afford, precisely, an 'encounter' with Christ, as in the case of Ambrose's teaching, but a deepening of one's being in Christ. In the Eucharist we do not so much receive Christ; rather, he receives us and grafts us more deeply into his body...Later on, the early medieval interpretation of Augustine progressively downplays his eucharistic spiritual interpretation of the sacraments of the body and blood. That Augustine's eucharistic theology could be interpreted spiritually is obvious..." (Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, pgs. 25-27, here)

Thus it is seen that Augustine conceives of the Eucharist as signifying Christ's mystical body as well, which, just as bread is made up of many grains, so this mystical body of Christ is made of many members. Yet who would dare say that there is a proper change of substance into all of the faithful?

Exposition of Psalm 33

" And was carried in His Own Hands: how carried in His Own Hands? Because when He commended His Own Body and Blood, He took into His Hands that which the faithful know; and in a manner carried Himself, when He said,This is My Body. Matthew 26:26" (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801034.htm)

To answer this, I would point to Augustine's second exposition on the same passage:

"In the light of this, what is the meaning of he affected? It means he was full of affection. What could ever be as full of affection as is the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in consideration of our infirmity accepted temporal death amid such violence and degradation, to free us from everlasting death? He drummed because a drum can be made only by stretching a skin across a wooden frame, so David's drumming was a prediction that Christ was to be crucified. He drummed on the doors into the city; and what else are the doors into the city but our hearts, which we had shut against Christ? But from the drum of his cross he opened the hearts of us mortals. He was carried in his own hands; how was this possible? Because when he entrusted to us his very body and blood, he took into his hands what the faithful know about, and so in a sense he was carrying himself when he said, This is my body." (John E. Rotelle,, The Works of Saint Augustin: A Translation for the 21st Century - Expositions of the Psalms, 33-50, III/16, p. 24)

"The psalmist wants to speak openly now about the sacrament that the Lord held in his hands." (ibid., pg. 33)

Furthermore, the refutation of the Roman Catholic claim regarding this passage from Augustine can be found in the passage itself:

" And was carried in His Own Hands: how carried in His Own Hands? Because when He commended His Own Body and Blood, He took into His Hands that which the faithful know; and in a manner carried Himself, when He said,This is My Body. Matthew 26:26" (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801034.htm)

Augustine says that Christ carried Himself "in a certain manner". What was that manner? Augustine tells us: it was when Christ said "This is my body".

I will finish my analysis of this quote from this smart and amusing quote from William Goode:

"But surely, even without going further, the symbolical character of what our Lord held in his hands would be sufficient to indicate a sense of the words more reasonable than that our Lord, when his body was sitting at the table with his disciples, also held his body in his hands, and multiplied it so as to give it twelve times!" (William Goode, The Nature of Christ's Presence in the Eucharist, pg. 510, source)