Did Augustine Teach Transubstantiation? [Part 3]

 

What the Church Historians and Patristic Scholars Say

"It is incorrect, therefore, to attribute to Augustine either a scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation or a Protestant doctrine of symbolism, for he taught neither or both - and both were able to cite his authority" (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine - The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, pg. 305)

By "Protestant doctrine of symbolism", I assume that Augustine means mere symbolism (a traditional fundamentalist Baptist sort of view, which I do not hold to). I personally hold to the view of the Eucharist known as the "spiritual presence". For a good exposition of this view, see The Lord's Supper as a Means of Grace: More than a Memory by Richard C. Barcellos.

Roman Catholic apologists often quote the following paragraph from J.N.D. Kelly to support their view:

"There are certainly passages in his writings which give a superficial justification to all these interpretations, but a balanced verdict must agree that he accepted the current realism. Thus, preaching on 'the sacrament of the Lord's table' to newly baptized persons, he remarked,1 'That bread which you see on the altar, sanctified by the Word of God, is Christ's body. That cup, or rather the contents of that cup, sanctified by the word of God, is Christ's blood. By these elements the Lord Christ willed to convey His body and His blood, which He shed for us.' 'You know', he said in another sermon,:z 'what you are eating and what you are drinking, or rather, Whom you are eating and Whom you are drinking.' Commenting on the Psalmist's bidding that we should adore the footstool of His feet, he pointed outJ that this must be the earth. But since to adore the earth would be blasphemous, he concluded that the word must mysteriously signify the flesh which Christ took from the earth and which He gave to us to eat. Thus it was the eucharistic body which demanded adoration. Again, he explained4 the sentence, 'He was carried in his hands' (LXX of 1 Sam. 21, 13), which in the original describes David's attempt to allay Achish's suspicions, as referring to the sacrament: 'Christ was carried in His hands when He offered His very body and said, "This is my body . " ' One could multiply texts like these which show Augustine taking for granted the traditional identification of the elements With the sacred body and blood. There can be no doubt that he shared the realism held by almost all his contemporaries and predecessors." (Early Christian Doctrines, pgs. 446-447)

However, they forget to quote the following from JND Kelly on the next page(s):

"This leads us to the vital question how he conceives of the eucharistic body. There is no suggestion in his writings of the conversion theory sponsored by Gregory of Nyssa and Ambrose; there is indeed no reason to suppose that he was acquainted with either the Oratio catechetica or the De mysteriis. His thought moves, as we should expect, much more along the lines laid down by Tertullian and Cyprian. For example, he can speak of 'the banquet in which He presented and handed down to His disciples the figure (figuram) of His body and blood'. But he goes further than his predecessors in formulating a doctrine which, while realist through and through, is also frankly spiritualizing. In the first place, he makes it clear that the body consumed in the eucharist is not strictly identical with Christ's historical body, and represents Him as saying, 'You must understand what I have said in a spiritual sense. You are not going to eat this body which you see or drink that blood which those who will crucify me are going to shed.' The historical body ascended in its integrity to heaven. In any case, the eucharistic flesh is not like 'flesh rent asunder in a corpse or sold in the meat-market'.  This crude idea was characteristic of the Capharnaites. Secondly, and more positively, the gift which the eucharist conveys is a gift of life. This is a spiritual gift, and the eating and drinking are spiritual processes. The eucharistic body is not the sensible flesh; rather we receive the essence of this flesh, viz. the spirit which quickens it.  Sometimes he carries this spiritualizing tendency to its limits, as when he says,'Why make ready your teeth and your belly? Believe, an:d you have eaten'; or again, 'To believe in Him is to eat living bread. He Who believes eats, and is invisibly filled, because he is reborn invisibly.' His real point, however, is that Christ's body and blood are not consumed physically and materially; what is consumed in this way is the bread and wine. The body and blood are veritably received by the communicant, but are received sacramentally or, as one might express it, in figura." (Early Christian Doctrines, pgs. 448-449)

Here is more material:

"It is remarkable that Augustine, in other respects so decidedly catholic in the doctrine of the church and of baptism, and in the cardinal points of the Latin orthodoxy, follows the older African theologians, Tertullian and Cyprian, in a symbolical theory of the Supper, which however includes a real spiritual participation of the Lord by faith, and in this respect stands nearest to the Calvinistic or Orthodox Reformed doctrine, while in minor points he differs from it as much as from transubstantiation and consubstantiation. He was the first to make a clear distinction between the outward sign and the inward grace, which are equally essential to the conception of the sacrament. He maintains the figurative character of the words of institution, and of the discourse of Jesus, on the eating and drinking of his flesh and blood in the sixth chapter of John; with Tertullian, he calls the bread and wine “figurae” “or “signa corporis et sanguinis Christi” (but certainly not mere figures), and insists on a distinction between “that which is visibly received in the sacrament, and that which is spiritually eaten and drunk,” or between a carnal, visible manducation of the sacrament, and a spiritual eating of the flesh of Christ and drinking of his blood" (Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 3, pgs. 498-499)