It is convenient to take separately from the evidence hitherto under review the writings of Aphraates and St. Ephraim the Syrian, a correspondence between Peter Mongus and Acacius of Constantinople, and a Latin Homily of uncertain date and authorship.
1. The two Syrian writers, Aphraates and St. Ephraim the Syrian, are naturally considered in close connection with one another. Aphraates was a monk and bishop in East Syria in the first half of the fourth century. St. Ephraim the Syrian was born later than 306 and died about 373. The greater part of his life was spent at Nisibis and Edessa.
Aphraates says that the body and blood of Christ are received in the Eucharist, that Christ at the institution gave His body for food and His blood for drink, and gave His body with His hands, that He now gives the bread of life, and gives us His body, and that there is sacrifice in the Church. The passages which most distinctly connect the presence of the body and blood of Christ with the elements are the following:—
“There is one door to your house, the house that is the temple of God; and it is not seemly for thee, O man, that filth and mire should come out from the door by which the King enters. For when a man abstains from all evil deeds and receives the body and blood of Christ, he ought to guard his mouth, by which the Son of the King enters.”
“Our Lord arose from the place where He had kept the pass-over and had given His body to be eaten and His blood to be drunk; and went with His disciples to the place where He was taken. Now one who has eaten his own body and drunk his own blood is accounted among the dead. And our Lord with His own hands gave His body to be eaten, and before He was crucified gave His blood to be drunk.”
St. Ephraim the Syrian refers to the body of Christ as the means of nourishing and perfecting Christians. He regarded the consecrated elements as the means of receiving the body of Christ and as made to be His body and blood. He believed that the presence of Christ’s body was withdrawn from the elements in the event of an unworthy Communion.
“He spat on His fingers and placed them in the ears of the deaf man; and He made clay of the spittle and anointed the eyes of the blind man. So He taught us that there was defect in the ears of the deaf man, as there was fault in the eyeballs of the man who was born blind. Therefore by leaven from the body of Him who completes was that which was lacking in our frame supplied. For it was not fitting that our Lord should cut off anything from His body to supply that which was lacking in other bodies; but with what could be taken away from His body He supplied the deficiency of those who lacked, as mortals eat Him in that which can be eaten.”
“He dipped the bread and gave it to the thief.… He dipped the bread and gave it to him who was secretly dead; the bread was that from which the medicine of life had been washed away.”
“He washed away the medicine of life from the unleavened bread; He gave it to Judas as a medicine of death.”
The foregoing quotations are from works which in the judgment of Dr. Burkitt, a very severe critic, may be cited with security as by St. Ephraim; with them may be compared three other passages, containing like doctrine and referring also to the reception of the Holy Ghost in the Eucharist, the first from a work found in several MSS. the oldest of which is of the ninth century, the second and third from a work found in a MS. of the fourteenth century.
“When the leper was purified, the priest sealed him with oil, and brought him to the spring. The figure has passed; the reality has come. Behold, ye are sealed with oil; in Baptism ye are completed; ye are joined to the flock; with the body are ye nourished.”
“Jesus took in His hands mere bread at first, and blessed it, and signed it, and consecrated it in the name of the Father and in the name of the Spirit, and brake it, and distributed it severally to His disciples in His compassion. He called the bread His living body, and He filled it with Himself and the Spirit; and stretching out His hand gave to them the bread which His right hand had consecrated, saying, Take, eat ye all of this which My word has consecrated. This which I have now given to you, regard not as bread; eat this bread, and waste not the crumbs of it; that which I have called My body is really so. For the least crumb of it sanctifies many thousands, and is sufficient to give life to all who eat it. Take, eat in faith, nothing doubting that this is My body, and that he who eats it in faith eats it in fire and the Spirit. If any one eats it doubting, to him it is mere bread; but he who eats in faith the bread which has been consecrated in My name, if he is holy, his holiness is preserved, if he is a sinner, he is pardoned. But he who despises it, or slights it, or treats it with contempt, let him know that he treats the Son with contempt, who called the bread His body and actually made it so to be. Take of it, eat ye all of it, and in it eat the Holy Ghost; for it is really My body.”
“After the disciples had eaten the new and holy bread, and perceived and believed by it that they had eaten the body of Christ, Christ went on to unfold and deliver the whole Sacrament. He took and mingled the cup of wine; then He blessed it, and signed it, and consecrated it, acknowledging it as His blood which was to be poured out. Then, extending His right hand towards Simon, He gave to him first the cup, that from it he might partake of that which had been blessed; then He gave it to him who was next to Him. Then they all came near and drank from the cup, that is, eleven of them. For when Jesus had distributed the bread to the eleven without any distinction, Judas came near that he might receive as the rest of the company who had drawn near and had received, but Jesus dipped the bread in water, and washed away the blessing from it, and in this way marked out the bread for Judas. Hence it was known to the Apostles that it was Judas who was about to betray Him. Jesus dipped the bread, that the blessing might be annulled from it, and He gave it to Judas. The bread which Judas ate was not still blessed, and he did not drink from the cup of life. He was angry because the bread had been dipped, for he knew that he was not worthy of life, and wrath prevented him from drinking of the cup of the blood of Jesus; he went forth to the crucifiers, and so did not see the consecrated cup. Satan hastened to separate Iscariot from his companions so that he might not become a participant with them in the living and life-giving Sacrament.… Jesus made them drink, and explained to them that the cup which they had drunk was His blood, This is My real blood, which is poured out for you all; take, drink ye all of it, because it is the new covenant in My blood; as ye have seen Me, so shall ye do for My memorial. And behold, when ye are gathered together in My name in the Church in all quarters of the world, do ye for My memorial this which I have done, and eat ye My body, and drink ye My blood, the new and the old covenant.… I am the Son of the living Father; in this sixth period of a thousand years I came down from heaven to give the new covenant to My Church and through the memorial of My body and blood to abolish the destruction which I am bringing on the wicked who sin against Me as the men of old. Other teaching of life did our Lord deliver to His disciples in the evening when He distributed His body and made His blood to be their drink.”
2. A correspondence between Peter Mongus, the Monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria from 477 to 490, and Acacius, the Monophysite Patriarch of Constantinople from 471 to 489, exists in an Armenian MS. in the library of the Armenian Fathers of St. Anthony now at Stamboul, which was at Rome until 1871. In this correspondence the Eucharist is repeatedly called a sacrifice and is said to be offered; a vision is described of “our Lord Jesus Christ in the form of a youth,” “clad in a white tunic of linen,” having “the sign of the nails,” “upon the disk and paten which were laid upon the holy altar”; and the consecration is spoken of in the following terms:—
“The Holy Spirit shall hear you and shall come down upon your sacrifice, and with His own divine power shall sanctify you who are priests, as well as the heavenly hosts that stand around you, and who aforetime stood around you, as well as all the priests and all the congregations who live in consequence of your prayers. For the Holy Spirit, that is equal in power and authority with the Father and the Son, rests upon them. The same Holy Spirit by the might of God shall come down and fill the entire sanctuary; I mean the holy altar upon which Christ is being sacrificed by you, the priest, and is dispensed to them that are called and chosen. The Holy Spirit Himself will then descend along with you, the chief priest, and will overshadow and cover the entire sanctuary with His great power and might, and change and convert the bread into the body of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. As also the cup in which the wine is poured out shall be changed and converted by His divine authority into the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, the blood, I mean, which was poured forth from the divine side for the forgiveness and remission of sins. For in this divine blood we have been washed and hallowed and saved, and His Catholic Apostolic Holy Church He rules even to the ends of the earth. In this wise shall we who are priests of the Lord Almighty receive with true faith and orthodoxy the spotless and pure body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
3. A remarkable Homily of uncertain date and authorship, which probably belongs to some part of the period under consideration in this chapter, is best placed by itself. It is the Homily on the body and blood of Christ which was traditionally ascribed to Eusebius, who was Bishop of Emesa in Syria from about 340 to about 360, which has of late been thought more probably to be the work of Faustus, the Bishop of Riez in Provence, who died about 492. Some special interest beyond that which it has in itself attaches to it because of the frequency with which parts of it are quoted by the writers of the mediæval Church and by some of the reformers. In it the Eucharist is described as an abiding offering of the sacrifice of Christ; the elements are said to be converted and changed at the consecration into the substance of the body and blood of Christ; this conversion is said to be parallel to the work of God in creation and at Baptism; the reception of the body of Christ is spoken of as a spiritual act in the power of grace; and Christ is said to be wholly present in that which each communicant receives. The whole Homily is of great interest; the parts of chief doctrinal importance are the following:—
“Because He was about to remove from our sight the body which He had taken, and to raise it to heaven, it was needful that He should consecrate for us on this day the sacrament of His body and blood, so that what was once offered for a ransom might in the mystery (per mysterium) lawfully be worshipped continually, and so that, because the redemption for the salvation of men was of daily and unwearied power (quotidiana et indefessa currebat), there might be also an abiding offering of the redemption, and that eternal (perennis) Victim might live in memory and be ever present in grace.… The visible priest by the word of Christ with unseen power converts the visible creatures into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, saying, ‘Take and eat, this is My body,’ and with repeated consecration, ‘Take and drink, this is My blood’. Therefore, as at the nod of the Lord’s command the heights of heaven and the depths of the sea and the expanses of earth suddenly existed out of nothing, so His might gives equal power to words in the spiritual Sacraments and accomplishes its effect. How great and how wonderful are the results of the power of the blessing of God, and how it ought not to seem new and impossible to you that earthly and mortal things are changed into the substance of Christ, ask yourself, who have already been regenerated in Christ.… As, therefore, without any bodily perception your former vileness was laid aside, and you were suddenly clad with new dignity, and, as it was not shown to eye or sense that God healed in you what was wounded and removed what was diseased and cleansed what was stained, so, when you approach the sacred altar to be fed with heavenly food, behold the holy body and blood of your God, honour it, wonder at it, grasp it with your mind, receive it with the hand of your heart, and most of all inwardly drink it.… For recognising and perceiving the sacrifice of the real body of the Lord, let the power itself of the Consecrator strengthen you; and let Him who of old lay hid prefigured in the manna now be manifested to you in grace.… When this bread is taken, each individual has no less than all together; one receives the whole, two receive the whole, a greater number receive the whole without any diminution; because the blessing of this Sacrament knows how to be distributed, but knows not how to be destroyed in the distribution.… As the grains that are united in the making of the bread cannot be separated, and as the waters which are mixed with the wine cannot again return to their own substance, so also the faithful and wise who know that they have been redeemed by the blood and passion of Christ ought in such a way to be joined to their Head as inseparable members by keeping of the faith and most earnest religious life that they cannot be separated from Him, by will or by any necessity, or by any ambition of earthly hope, or even be divided from Him by death itself. Nor should any one doubt that the excellent creatures at the nod of the power of God by the presence of the supreme majesty can pass into the nature of the body of the Lord, when he sees that man himself is made the body of Christ by the operation of the heavenly mercy of Christ. And, as whoever comes to the faith of Christ is still in the chain of his old sin before the words of Baptism, but when these have been said is freed from all the filth of sin, so when the creatures that are to be blessed by the heavenly words are placed on the holy altar, before they are consecrated by the invocation of His name, the substance which is there is bread and wine, but after the words it is the body and blood of Christ.”