IX

Peter Abelard was born at Pallet near Nantes in 1079 and after a career of strange and varied vicissitudes died at the Abbey of St. Marcel near Chalons-sur-Saone in 1142. A man of great genius and intellectual subtlety, he was one of the most famous philosophical teachers of his time. As a theologian he was held in ill repute, and some of his opinions were condemned at councils held at Soissons in 1121 and at Sens in 1140 and afterwards by Pope Innocent II. In his treatise Christian Theology he says incidentally that “it is not yet clear that there has been an end of that supreme controversy concerning the Sacrament of the altar, whether the bread which is seen is only a figure of the Lord’s body or is also the reality of the substance itself of the Lord’s flesh”. In the book entitled Yes and No he arranged statements of earlier Christian writers on 158 subjects with the intention of showing that there had been wide diversities in Christian thought, and placed a large number of passages under the heading “Concerning the Sacrament of the Altar, that it is essentially the reality itself of the flesh and blood of Christ, and the contrary”. In the Epitome of Christian Theology—which, if not by Abelard himself, probably represents his opinions—there is a chapter entitled “Concerning the Sacrament of the altar”. It contains statements that the Sacrament was instituted to keep Christians in mind of the passion and death of Christ; that after consecration the bread is the “real body of Christ, or rather Christ Himself”; that at the institution and at subsequent celebrations the gift to each communicant is of the whole and unbroken body of Christ; and that “many are of Christ’s body who do not receive this Sacrament, while many receive it who are not His members”. There is a brief reference to the question whether the body which our Lord gave to the disciples at the institution was in the passible or the impassible state; and it is said that on this point there is nothing defined by authority, and that Christ “gave it such as He willed; for, if He willed to give it to them in the immortal state, He could well even at that time assume impassibility”. In regard to the fraction of the Sacrament the words are:—

“Concerning that fraction which is there seen a doubt is sometimes raised whether the body of Christ itself, as it is really there, so also is broken in reality. But we say that as there seems to be bread and is not, and as there seems to be wine when nevertheless there is not wine, so the body of Christ seems to be broken, though it undergoes no breaking and suffers no division. Neither is it the case that this appearance is a phantasm, because its object is not to promote deception or an error of faith, but to bestow the Sacrament.”

This somewhat obscure statement was probably meant to express the same opinion as that held by Hugh of St. Victor and others, that, when the Sacrament is broken, the fraction is not of the body of Christ but of the species.

A different, and apparently more unusual, view was maintained in a book called On the Fraction of the Body of Christ by Abbaud, the abbot of an unknown monastery, which is thought to have been published about 1130. Abbaud contends that it is involved in the reality of the presence of the real body of Christ that it is really broken in the Sacrament on earth, though it abides whole and unbroken in heaven. In reply to the objection that such a position is self-contradictory, “since it predicates of one and the same body that it abides unbroken and that it is broken,” he dwells on the marvellous capacities of Christ’s body and on the power of God:—

“The weakness of man is not able to set the bounds of the power of God, though rash attempts to do so are made. For the things which are impossible with men are possible with God. Is this the only thing which is asserted about the body of Christ that is contrary to human reason, and impossible according to the law of human bodies? Is it not asserted of the same body that in the mystery of His birth He came forth to the eyes of men from the closed womb of the Virgin, and in His resurrection entered in to His disciples when the doors were shut, and showed Himself to them as susceptible of touch and also incorruptible? Lo, here are three marvels, that this one may not be alone but may be a fourth of those which reason grasps not, while faith allows them to the power of God. Let others think as seems well to them; but to me it is devout and good to think that the body which the great and incomprehensible height of Deity willed to make its own very far excels not only mortal bodies but even immortal and heavenly bodies by a certain ineffable and unique and divine power. To wish to reason about that body according to the law of other bodies is to seek the living among the dead.”

“As with God in regard to time a thousand rears are as one day, and one day is as a thousand years, so also in regard to place it is truly said that a thousand places or as many as you will or even all places are with God as one place. For Him, who is always and everywhere wholly present, local absence can make nothing absent, local distance can make nothing distant, local division can divide nothing. That then which is broken with us, because it is locally divided, remains unbroken with God, to whom all places are one place.”

A book against the teaching of Abelard in general, entitled Disputation against Peter Abelard, was written by William of St. Thierry, who was a native of Liège, became Abbot of the Cluniac Monastery of St. Thierry near Reims in 1119, resigned that office and joined the Cistercian Order in 1134, and died at Signy in 1148. One chapter of it refers to the doctrine of the Eucharist. In this chapter a view ascribed to Abelard, that on the conversion of the substance of the bread and wine into the substance of the body and blood of Christ “the accidents of the former substance remain in the air,” is rejected, and it is suggested that the accidents of the bread and wine

“are in the body of the Lord, not forming it but by the power of the wisdom of God working in them fitting and shaping it, so that according to the rite of the mystery and the way of a Sacrament it may be able to be moved and handled and tasted in a different form, which could not happen in its own form, the accidents working outwardly so that it may be handled and taken bodily, and grace working inwardly so that it may be taken incorruptibly and may have a savour to the believer and may spiritually quicken and nourish him who has love.”

William adds that anything which may befal the Sacrament through carelessness or ignorance happens to the accidents and not to the body of Christ; and that the body of Christ is far removed from the possibility of any such injury.

William of St. Thierry also wrote a treatise On the Sacrament of the Altar addressed to Rupert of Deutz in protest against one element in his teaching about the Eucharist. William asserts with the greatest explicitness against Rupert that the substance of the bread is wholly changed into the substance of the body of Christ; that, though the species remain, the bread ceases to be bread; and that the accidents of the bread and wine are without a substance of their own in the consecrated Sacrament. The most prominent parts of the treatise are those in which William writes on the manhood of our Lord, and on the need of receiving the Eucharist worthily if there is to be the spiritual and profitable partaking of that body of Christ which is taken in Communion. From these parts the following quotations mat be made:—

“In considering the flesh of Christ in the mysteries we ought not to be wise after the flesh. For ‘though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more’. And again we ought not so to lessen the reality of the flesh by a kind of spiritual search as by a sort of reasoning to seem to destroy His nature which was united to the Word of God but yet was not changed into the Word. For ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever’; and He glorified that nature, in which He partook of flesh and blood so as to be made like unto His brethren in all things as a merciful High Priest, in such a way that He did not destroy it; He advanced it in such a way as not to empty it. For the body of God must be thought of as it is, of our nature but of another glory. For, if the body of our lowliness will be made glorious and spiritual in the resurrection, inasmuch as it will be dignified be spiritual power and incorruption and glory, how much more is that body in which dwells bodily all the fulness of Godhead glorious and spiritual, the body of Him who rose the first fruits from the dead, even Christ? If in us it will hereafter be, that whatever is mortal will be removed from our life, and whatever is human will be changed to a better state of its own nature, so that what is now spirit and soul and body will then be all spiritual or spirit, how much more did He, who from the natures united together is the substance (res) of both natures, lacking neither, being Christ God and Man in both, When by the power n His resurrection He made an end of those things in Him which belonged to the passible and mortal man, advance that form which was to be enriched with the increase of so great glory to such a point in Himself that, as the Apostle says, He exalted it and gave it ‘the name which is above every name’. … If the power of authority and the devotion of faith have made it credible that that body entered in and passed out through ways that were closed, I do not see what can make it incredible that that body has been and is capable of other things which are beyond the nature of bodies.… Why is it difficult to believe that the nature of flesh, which is so united to that supreme nature that the possessions of the one belong to the other, is able through divine power especially after the glorifying of the resurrection to be in different places at a not different time?… Although His bodily elevation, whereby that nature was raised above the heavens, is undoubtedly to be believed, yet the exaltation, whereby He is believed to have been exalted above the heaven of heavens, is to be understood as so great a verity that He be believed to be glorified in dignity and glory and power above all heavenly beings. For He has sat down, as the Apostle says, ‘on the right hand of the majesty on high, having become by so much better than the angels as He hath inherited a more excellent name than they’. Now this right hand is to be understood in no other way than those better things which that majesty possesses. Yet I do not say that that nature of the Lord’s body is everywhere, because there is no need for it to be except where He wills, and where by a fixed Sacrament of the faith He accomplishes the work for which it was taken and glorified, namely the mystery of the salvation of men.… God alone is necessarily everywhere, because, since all things consist in Him, nothing could be where He was not, and therefore there is an inevitable necessity that the presence of His substance and power is everywhere.… At one moment the Lord Christ, while He was resting in the tomb, was in heaven and on earth and everywhere, but according to His Godhead; at the same moment of time He was resting in the tomb, but according to the flesh alone; at the same time He was in Hades delivering His own, but according to the soul alone; at the same time He was sitting in heaven at the right hand of the Father, but according to the Godhead alone; and, if we should ask about any one of these things, it must be plainly answered that the Lord Christ did it, but according to the peculiar nature of each substance. But the present question is not about this presence of His body. According to that presence of which we had begun to treat, the Lord is present at one time in different places in His body, by an incomprehensible and indescribable way made certain to faith, wherever the need of human salvation requires.”

From His flesh He brings to our souls so great resources for loving Him, and supplies them with great and wonderful and living nourishment. We take this nourishment with eager feeding when we sweetly remember and hide in our memory what Christ did and suffered for us. And this is the banquet of the flesh and blood of Jesus, from which be who partakes of it has life abiding in him. And we partake of it when with burning faith which works through love we lay on the Table of the Lord such things as we have received thence, namely, that, as He gave Himself for our salvation without any necessity constraining Him, so we commit our selves wholly to His faith and love as our salvation demands.… The good guest of Christ abides in Christ through the affection of devout love, and has Christ abiding in him through the effect of the holy rite.… The more one loves, the more he eats this food; and again by loving more he eats more and more, and loves more and more, though of this love in this life we only receive a pledge, waiting for the fulness of it as the reward in the future world. Lo, this is to eat that flesh of which Jesus says, ‘He that eateth My flesh abideth in Me, and I in him’. … Without doubt the body of the Lord always become present on the Table of the altar when that solemn rite is duly celebrated; but He does not always come to those through whom He comes.… Not all who eat bodily are filled spiritually with that heavenly blessing and grace.”