VII

A lecture on The Holy Eucharist delivered sometime between 1871 and 1877 by Dr. J. B. Mozley, then Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, and included in the posthumous volume Lectures and Other Theological Papers, was an attempt to estimate the result of the “review of the doctrine of the Eucharist” by the Church of England “at the Reformation”. According to Dr. Mozley’s view, the Church of England at the Reformation accepted the position that “the undefined form of the doctrine” was “the designed form,” and that “incompleteness was intended”; and “restored the doctrine to its original and more undefined state”. Adopting the attitude of the Church of England as he understood it, he maintained that by consecration a virtue is joined to the elements through which they become to the faithful recipients a means of participation in the body and blood of Christ; that the body and blood are received by faith in the soul; that they are not received by the wicked; that Christ is to be adored in the rite through His body and blood but not under the elements; and that the Eucharist has a sacrificial virtue borrowed from the sacrifice of the cross. He expressed his agreement with the contention of Hooker that the fundamental truth is the assertion of the participation of the body and blood, and that the question whether the Sacrament is the body and blood before reception does not concern necessary belief.

“Our Church … at the Reformation rejected Transubstantiation, and fell back upon the earlier and more indefinite idea of a change in the elements, as a change, namely, which was true and real for all the purposes of the Sacrament, by which the elements became, from being mere physical food, spiritual food.”

“The ground taken by the early Church with respect to the spiritual part of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the body and blood of our Lord, was not that that spiritual part was only an internal matter, a moral effect of the act of participation upon the mind. The Lord’s body and blood was regarded as a reality external to the mind, even as the bread and wine was; it was considered as joined to the bread and wine, and co-existing with it in one Sacrament.”

“The body and blood of Christ is not a natural, but a spiritual substance. It can only therefore be eaten spiritually. To suppose that a man’s natural mouth and teeth can eat a spiritual thing would be a simple confusion of ideas. The eating of it must be wholly in the sense of, and correspond to the nature of, the food. It is in a spiritual sense alone that a spiritual substance can be eaten. Although, then, the natural mouth and teeth can eat the bread and wine, which is the sign of the body and blood, and the sign to which it is by divine ordinance joined, the natural organs cannot eat the body and blood of Christ, which is wholly spiritual. Only the soul or spirit of man can take in and feed upon a spiritual nutriment. Faith, therefore, as being the spiritual faculty in man, must in its own nature be the medium by which the body of Christ is eaten; and that body, though present in the Sacrament, must remain uneaten by the partaker of the Sacrament unless he has faith. Without faith it can only be eaten sacramentally, by eating the bread which is the sign or Sacrament of it.”

“To partake of our Lord’s body and blood implies union with our Lord; it implies the fruition of Him, it implies a cognateness of the eater to the food. The body and blood of our Lord are not spiritual food in the immaterial sense only, but they are spiritual food in the moral sense, as being moral aliment and nutrition, the goodness and holiness of our Lord infusing itself into the human soul. But to eat what is in this sense spiritual requires a state of mind which is spiritual in this sense.… The wicked then cannot eat them spiritually, but the spiritual is the only way in which they can be eaten; the wicked therefore cannot eat them at all.”

“It is not, however, to be inferred, because the wicked do not eat the very body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament, that therefore they only eat common bread and wine. They eat consecrated material elements, to which the mysterious property has been imparted that the faithful receive and eat in them the body and blood of Christ. Common bread has not this property imparted to it, but the bread in the Sacrament has. When the wicked eat the sacramental bread, then, though they do not eat the Lord’s body, they eat bread which is in a certain intimate and mystical relation to our Lord’s body.… The wicked eat that to which a divine virtue is joined, even the property of becoming to the faithful the body of our Lord. This virtue is joined to the consecrated bread independently of our faith, and the wicked who eat it eat it with this virtue attaching to it, which cannot leave it, namely, that the very same bread, if eaten by the faithful, would be spiritual nourishment to them, which common bread could not be.… The material symbols are ever accompanied by a divine virtue and property, which adheres to them by the very nature of the Sacraments, and … therefore, even when the wicked eat and drink them, that virtue still belongs to and accompanies them, the invisible part is still joined to the he visible, but it does not imply that the wicked eat the thing signified itself, that they eat the body and blood which is the inward part of the Sacrament.”

“There are … two wholly different kinds of statements mixed together in the general language relating to adoration of our Lord in the Eucharist. One of these kinds of statement expresses only an adoration accompanying the act of receiving, the other expresses an adoration of Him as contained in some sense in that which is received: one denotes only the worship of Christ as generally present in and at the Eucharistic rite; the other signifies a worship of Him as specially present under the species of bread and wine. Of these two kinds of statement one, as I have just said, has no real bearing upon the particular question of adoration in the Eucharist, as that phrase is understood in controversy. All Christians, of whatever Church or party, would admit the adoration of our Lord in this general sense in the Eucharist, namely, that, when a man partakes of the Eucharist, he does worship Christ. But this is not worshipping Him as present or in any way contained in the bread and wine.… The body and blood in the Sacrament is not the object of the worship, but only the occasion of it.… There is a great difference of course between a general presence of Christ in the act of Communion, and a particular presence united to the bread and wine. Separating this general language then from that particular body of language which asserts an adoration in special connection with the material elements, we find in the first place that in all earlier language, and in the language of our own divines which represents the earlier ages, adoration is addressed to the body and blood of our Lord, and that that, and that only, is the object to which it is addressed. Our divines, indeed, when speaking of the partaking in Communion, speak of Christ simply being received, not making any distinction between the body and blood and the divinity of Christ; nor is such an extension of the res sacramenti other than natural, nor can any injurious consequence follow it, in connection with the Sacrament as spiritual food; the boundaries and limitations of mystical language are not to be very accurately restricted where no practical danger can ensue. But as regards the adoration in the Eucharist, the act of adoration has been assigned specially to the body and blood of Christ as its object, that being the strict and proper res sacramenti, and not to the divinity of Christ, which is not properly or strictly the res sacramenti or united with the material elements. The whole language of antiquity establishes the body and blood as that which is in sacramental connection with the bread and wine. The divinity is not represented as placed in this sacramental union with the material elements. It is quite true indeed that wherever the body and blood of Christ are, there by strict reasoning must be the human soul and the divinity of Christ; it is impossible to separate what are in their own nature united. But it must be remembered that this is a mystical subject, and that in mystical doctrine we cannot proceed in this way by logical steps. In mystical doctrine we must take the form of statement which is given to us, and not exceed it; because if the truth is given in a certain form and measure, and with certain limits and confines, we must assume that it is intentionally so given, and for a divine purpose. Earlier writers and our own divines then adhere cautiously and faithfully to Scripture in speaking of the body and blood of Christ as the res sacramenti in the Eucharist, and in assigning the act of adoration in the Eucharist to the body and blood. It was therefore a qualified and conditioned kind of adoration which patristic theology connected specially with the Eucharist. For the body and blood of Christ are not in themselves objects of divine adoration and worship; they only admit of a worship which is paid to them indirectly by reason of their intimate connection with that which is an object of direct adoration, namely, the divinity of Christ; they can only receive that reflected divinity which comes from the Person of Christ, and consequently only a secondary worship.… The reverence … that is paid to sacred signs and symbols, and to all objects which are associated with the divine majesty, is a worship or adoration in a secondary sense; and a fortiori may our Lord’s body and blood, as being joined not by association but by the truth of nature with His divinity, receive that worship. But the worship given specially in the Eucharist was such subordinate worship, worship paid to that which was intimately connected with divinity, not to the divinity itself. The mind of the worshipper was necessarily carried indeed to the direct worship of the divinity of Christ, but in so doing it went out of the area and limits of the Sacrament, and worshipped the God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, by whom all things were made. But, when later theology took up the subject of the adoration in the Eucharist, it instituted a very different kind of adoration. In later theology, in the first place, the res sacramenti was not only the body and blood of Christ, but was the whole Christ, body, soul, and Godhead.… But, the inward part of the Sacrament being thus denned, when it came to the adoration of the res sacramenti, that adoration necessarily became, not the indirect worship of what was in natural conjunction with the divinity, but the direct adoration of the Godhead itself existing under the species of bread and wine. But, without entering into the question of the criterion by which we define idolatry, or at all asserting that the worship of the true God, though under an unauthorised material form, is idolatry, we must still see that this express adoration of the Godhead, as subsisting under the visible material form of bread, holds a place very distinct from, and is divided by a great interval from, the primitive adoration of the body and blood.”

“There are two distinct senses in which an act may be said to be propitiatory. The act of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross had an original propitiatory power, that is to say, it was the cause of any other act, or any act of man, or any rite, being propitiatory, that is, appeasing God’s anger, and reconciling Him to the agent. We may allow that in common language a man may do something which will reconcile God to him, and restore him to God’s favour; but then all the power that any action of man can have for this end is a derived power, derived from Christ’s sacrifice, from which any other sacrifice, the Eucharistic one included, borrows its virtue, and without which it would be wholly null and void. There is, then, an original propitiation and a borrowed propitiation, a first propitiation and a secondary one.”

“Our Church at the Reformation recalled the doctrine of the Eucharist to its proper proportions, and corrected the errors and extravagances into which later theology had been led. She relieved the change in the elements from the interpolation of Transubstantiation, and from that false, rigid completeness and system which the schools of the middle ages had given it. She restored faith as the medium by which the body of Christ is eaten. She restored the true limits of the adoration in the Eucharist, and of the sacrifice of the Eucharist.”

“Amid the various explanations of the manner in which the mystery of the Sacrament is to be expressed, the mode of change, the kind of change, the relation of the material element or sign to the inner part or thing signified, the relation of the whole Sacrament to the mind and faith of the partaker, one central truth remains, retaining which we retain the true substance of the doctrine of the Eucharist, namely, that it is a true participation of the body and blood of Christ, which are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in that Sacrament. Various degrees of importance may attach to circumstantial points, to Transubstantiation in the Romanist’s view, to Consubstantiation in the Lutheran, and different ideas may be entertained among ourselves as to the sense in which the body and blood are contained in the Sacrament, or the Sacrament transmuted into them, antecedently to the participation of the receiver. I do not by any means intend to say that upon this latter question there is not a grave truth and a grave error; but I must say with Hooker that the question does not relate to necessary belief in regard to the doctrine of the Sacrament, and that a true participation of the body and blood of Christ is the fundamental truth of the Eucharist.”