I

An instance of teaching in which stress is laid both on the reality of the presence and on the spiritual character of the gift, both on the substantial identity and on the mystical distinctness of the body born of the Virgin and the body present in the Eucharist, may be seen in two letters of Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres, who died in 1029. In one of these letters Fulbert says:—

“Let us now go on to the venerable Sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord, which is so terrible to speak of as the mystery is not of earth but of heaven, not to be weighed by human understanding but to be wondered at, not to be discussed but to be reverenced.… Pitying the failure of our weakness, He provided for us against the daily offences of our frailty the remedy of the appeasing sacrifice, so that, because a little later he was going to take away from our sight into heaven His body which He once for all offered for us for our ransom, lest we should be deprived of the present help of His ascended body, He left to us the healthful pledge of His body and blood, no sign of an empty mystery but the real body of Christ, which in daily worship through the uniting force of the Holy Ghost the unseen power invisibly brings to be under the visible form of the creature in the holy rites.… when we receive the Communion of His body and blood, we boldly say that we are united to His body and that He abides in us. I say He abides in us, not only through unity of will but also through the reality of united nature. For, if the Word was made flesh, and we really receive the word made flesh in the food of the Lord, how can we fail to think that Christ abides in us in His nature (naturaliter)?… Though the elements a little before bear the likeness of a simple nature, Yet later they have a heavenly nature, when through the gift of consecration the true majesty is poured out, and that which appeared outwardly as the substance of bread and wine now becomes within the body and blood of Christ.… From the faith of the inner man comes the power of tasting the divine sweetness, when of a surety through the reception of the healthful Eucharist the soul of the communicant within is entered by Christ, whom the heavenly mind in its chaste sanctuary receives in that form whereby in the memorial of the mystery by the revelation of the spirit it beholds Him present as an infant or sacrificed on the altar of the cross or resting in the tomb or rising from conquered death or raised on high above the heavens in the glory of the Father.… It were impious to doubt that, by the equal power of Him at whose command all things suddenly out of nothing came to be, the earthly matter in the spiritual Sacraments, transcending the merit of its nature and being, is changed into the substance of Christ.”

In the other letter Fulbert quotes, and makes his own, an answer once received by him from a bishop in reply to an inquiry which had brought up the question of the possibility of any difference between the reserved Sacrament given to priests at their ordination for their Communion on forty subsequent days and the Sacrament consecrated in an ordinary Mass. In this answer of the bishop it is said:—

“The bread consecrated by a bishop and the bread hallowed by a priest are transformed into one and the same body of Christ by virtue of the unseen power of the one operative force. But in a certain kind of way there is said to be one thing; which, after the flesh had been taken in the Virgin’s womb, bore the injury of the cross, and rising from the tomb appeared to the disciples, the memorial of which the bishop is seen to celebrate in the bread given to the priests; another thing is celebrated in mystery, when the bishops and all the priests on the Table of the altar in the Sacrament of the communicated flesh are seen to consecrate the holy bread daily by the secret prayer, which pertains to that which the newly ordained priests consecrate and receive with the pontifical offering. For that body of the Lord, raised from the dead and placed in heaven, dieth no more, while this of the Sacraments to us dies daily, to us rises daily, appears and is consumed. But neither in regard to this ought the mind of the faithful to incur the scandal of doubt on hearing that Christ, after once for all tasting death, will die no more, and also that the flesh of the taken manhood is seated in the glory of the Father, and also that the bread consecrated on earth is called the real body of Christ, since both that which was taken from the Virgin and that which is consecrated from the material and virginal creature is transformed into the substance of real of flesh by the unseen action of one and the same Spirit in His working; that is, not the flesh of any one but really that flesh of Christ of which He said, ‘Except ye shall have eaten My flesh, ye will not have life in you’.”