Erasmus (Ἐράσμιος) and Desiderius are the debased Greek and Latin forms of the name of the great scholar of the early part of the Reformation period, the illegitimate son of Gerhard Roger, whom his mother called Gerhard Gerhardsohn. He was born at Rotterdam in 1465 or a year or two later. Largely through pressure of various kinds he took the monastic vows among the Augustinian canons of Stein when he was about eighteen; and in 1492 he was ordained priest. In later years he was released from the obligations of his vows by Pope Leo X. For the age he travelled widely, and visited France, England, and Italy. He resided for a time at Oxford and at Cambridge; and during one of his three visits to England he taught both divinity and Greek at Cambridge. After a life devoted to learning he died in 1536. He was a man of letters rather than a theologian, though his work touched theology at many points, and the revival of learning which so greatly affected the theology of the Reformation period owed much to him. In the controversies of the time he was distrusted and attacked by both sides, partly because of certain elements of indecision in his character, but still more because of his love of peace and the sensitive judgment which made him sadly conscious of the faults and mistakes both of the Reformers and of their opponents.
The genius of Erasmus and his cautious and tentative position in matters of theology give to a few references to the Eucharist contained in his writings an interest which they would not of themselves possess. He appears to have felt the attraction of views which represented the Eucharistic elements merely as symbols of spiritual gifts bestowed on the soul, but to have been influenced by Scripture and the authority of the Church and some general considerations to retain his belief that the consecrated bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ.
In his Paraphrase on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, published in 1517, Erasmus wrote:—
“Does not that sacred cup, which we receive and consecrate with thanksgiving for a memorial of the death of Christ, show our fellowship, that we have been alike redeemed by the blood of Christ? Again, that holy bread, which we divide among ourselves by the example and command of Christ, shows the covenant and the close fellowship which we possess as having been initiated by the same Sacraments of Christ. The bread is so made up of countless grains that they cannot be distinguished. The body so consists of different members that they are all inseparably united. Since then we are all sharers of the same bread, we declare that, however many we may be in number, yet in the consent of our minds we are one bread and one body.”
“Christ willed this feast to be a commemoration of His death and a symbol of the eternal covenant.… Mystic is the bread, of which all ought to partake alike. Holy is the cup, which belongs to all alike, made ready not to assuage the thirst of the body but to represent a hidden thing, that we may not forget by what price we were redeemed from the sins of our former life. Therefore, as often as you come together to eat this bread and to drink from this cup, you are concerned with no affair of the belly, but you represent in a mystic rite the death of the Lord Jesus, that His abiding memory may keep you in your service until He Himself comes again to judge the world. Therefore, whoever shall eat this bread or drink of the cup of the Lord unworthily makes himself guilty of a serious crime, since he has treated the body and blood of the Lord otherwise than the Lord Himself commanded it to be treated.… Though the thing itself is the health-giving body and blood of the Lord, yet whoever eats or drinks unworthily, for him it is turned into plague and destruction, because he has approached so great a mystery irreverently and with an unwashed soul, not sufficiently pondering with how great awe the body of the Lord ought to be received.”
In the Paraphrase on the Gospels, published in 1522, he wrote:—
“In this Last Supper, which Jesus kept with His disciples before His death, He instituted this most holy symbol of His death, that there might be preserved among them an abiding reminder of His boundless love, whereby He did not hesitate to give His life to redeem our mortal race, and that our minds might never lose the remembrance of that divine sacrifice by which the most pure Lamb, the new and true Passover, offered Himself on the altar for us to God the Father, whose wrath towards us He propitiated by His blood, Himself for our offences paying the penalties which were due to our sins.… This sacrifice, this covenant, He willed to commend to the minds of His disciples before He was offered, that they might understand His death to be no common or ineffectual thing, but an efficacious sacrifice for the expiation of the sins not only of the Jews but also of all nations and ages. But, since the death of Christ was not to be repeated, to prevent men forgetting so great a benefit and the most holy covenant once entered and the Author of their salvation, He ordained that by the frequent Communion of the holy bread and cup the memory might be kept fresh among the professors of the Gospel Law. And He willed this most holy sign to be among His soldiers, and therefore to be reverenced, that, as much divine grace should be added to those who should receive the body and blood of the Lord purely and worthily, so those who should receive unworthily should take to themselves great condemnation.”
In Letters written in 1525 and 1526 Erasmus wrote:—
“A new opinion has arisen that in the Eucharist there is nothing but bread and wine. John Oecolampadius has made it most difficult to refute this, for he has fortified the view with so many proofs and arguments that even the elect seem able to be seduced.”
“The opinion of Oecolampadius would not displease me, if the consent of the Church was not an obstacle to accepting it. For I do not see what good a body not discernible by the senses does, or that it would accomplish any good if it could be discerned, provided spiritual grace be present in the symbols. And yet I cannot depart, and I never have departed, from the consent of the Church.”
“In certain matters concerning the Eucharist I as being too little learned should hesitate unless the authority of the Church held me fast. And by the authority of the Church I mean the consent of Christian people throughout the world.”
“I allowed this to your opinion that it seems to me more simple thus to avoid manifold labyrinths of difficulties, if it could be right for a Christian man to dissent from that which the authority of the councils and the consent of all Churches and nations have approved for so many ages. I have always denied that I could bring my mind to this, especially as the words in the Gospels and of the Apostles so plainly speak of the body which is given and the blood which is poured out, and since moreover it agrees wonderfully with the ineffable love of God towards the human race that those whom He has redeemed by the blood and body of His Son He has willed to feed in a certain ineffable way with the flesh and blood of the same Son, and to console them with this hidden presence of the Son as a pledge till He shall come again in glory for all to behold. These considerations would incline me to the belief of the Catholic Church even if nothing had ever been defined this way or that. Now what madness it would be if I should not shrink from saying that there is nothing there but bread and wine! It is my custom together with learned friends, especially when those who are weak are absent, to discuss all kinds of things freely from love of inquiry and for the sake of tests and also for intellectual pleasure; and perhaps in this I am more simple than I ought to be. But I would acknowledge that I am guilty of parricide if any mortal ever heard me say either in earnest or in jest that there is nothing in the Eucharist but bread and wine, or that the real body and blood of the Lord are not there.… Up to the present time together with all Christians I have adored in the Eucharist Christ who suffered for me. Nor do I now see any reason why I ought to abandon this opinion. By no human reasons can I be induced to depart from the agreement of the Christian world.”
Thomas de Vio was born at Gæta about fifty miles north of Naples in 1469. His baptismal name was James; the name Thomas was assumed by him as a mark of his devotion to St. Thomas Aquinas. He is usually known as Cajetan from the name of his birthplace. He entered the Dominican Order at the age of sixteen; he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo X. in 1517; he died in 1534. He was much less a scholar and man of letters than Erasmus, with whose life his was almost exactly contemporary; but he was not uninfluenced by the New Learning. He was an active opponent of Luther, and, though some of his statements have not escaped censure, one of the most eminent of the papal theologians. His philosophical and theological writings were many and elaborate, and include a commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. His positive Eucharistic teaching may be best seen in his commentaries on the New Testament. He defends the doctrine of Transubstantiation, maintains that the body of Christ is actually received by communicants, lays stress on the need of receiving the Sacrament worthily if there is to be spiritual partaking of Christ, and closely follows the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas that the Eucharist is a sacrifice as being the memorial of a sacrifice.
“The Church is compelled to confess the Transubstantiation of the bread into the body of Christ; for it could not happen in any other way than by Transubstantiation that this substance is the body of Christ; for, if Transubstantiation does not take place, it is not true that this which was indicated when Christ spoke the pronoun ‘This’ (that is, the substance which the pronoun denoted when He uttered it) is the body of Christ; but this substance, which was then indicated, if it remains at the end of the consecration what it was before, is not the body of Christ but bread; and, if it is annihilated, it is neither bread nor the body of Christ, but nothing.”
“That they may not understand Him to speak of a mystical or metaphorical body, He shows that it is His real and natural body by saying, ‘which is given for you,’ that is, it is the very same body which is given to the death of the cross.”
“This saying [that is, ‘Except ye have eaten the flesh of the Son of Man and drunk His blood, ye have no life in you’] has a threefold sense. The first is concerning faith in the death of Christ. This sense is, Except ye have used the death of the Son of Man as food and drink, ye have not the life of the spirit in you.… The second sense is concerning faith in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which is the memorial of the death of Christ.… For the chalice and the host signify the actual separation of the flesh and blood which took place on the cross. And the sense is, Except ye have spiritually eaten and drunk the Sacrament of the Eucharist, ye have no life in you. And this is a true sense in itself, since spiritually to eat and drink the Sacrament of the Eucharist, so far as the thing of the Sacrament is concerned, is nothing else than for one to abide in Christ and for Christ to abide in him, without which abiding it is clear that the life of the spirit cannot be. But whether this is intended is not plain; nay, if the question is considered clearly, it appears that the formal saying is not concerning the Sacrament, but concerning the thing of the Sacrament and the fountain of the Sacrament.… The third sense is concerning the sacramental eating, yet the eating worthily. The sense is, Except ye have eaten the flesh of the Son of Man in the Sacrament of the host, and have drunk His blood in the Sacrament of the chalice, ye have not the life of the spirit in you. So an argument is derived from this sense that not only the Sacrament of Baptism but also the Sacrament of the Eucharist in both kinds is necessary to salvation. From this sense has recently arisen the Bohemian sect who communicate even infants in both kinds. This sense is contradicted by the custom of the Church, which does not communicate infants and does not communicate the people in both kinds. And not only the custom but also the doctrine, since the Church teaches that it is sufficient for salvation to communicate under the species of bread.… The actual separation of the flesh and blood of Christ in the Sacrament is only after a representative fashion; but in the death of Christ it was in fact.… That it is a bad application of this passage to assert the necessity of giving Communion to all is shown by the fact that to eat the Sacrament presupposes natural eating, as to be born sacramentally presupposes to be born naturally.… Infants, therefore, who still cannot eat … are wrongly included under this precept, it being allowed for the sake of the argument though not acknowledged that the text speaks about the eating of the Sacrament.… It is clear that the literal sense of the saying is not concerning eating and drinking the Sacrament of the Eucharist, but concerning eating and drinking the death of Jesus.… To feed on the death of Jesus is to have eternal life.”
“He does not say, It signifies the Communion, but, It is the Communion; because there is really a Communion of the blood of Christ (not of wine) to those who partake of the chalice.… To those who receive sacramentally only, there is a Communion of the blood of Christ sacramentally only; and to those who receive both sacramentally and spiritually, there is the sacramental and spiritual Communion of the blood of Christ.… One and the same thing, that is, the real body of Christ, not the substance of bread, is communicated to all who eat, for whom it is broken.”
“Here it is clearly said that the Eucharist is a sacrifice; for he explicitly enumerates the sacrifices of the Jews and the sacrifices of the Gentiles for no other purpose than to show that one cannot partake both of the sacrifice of Christians and of the sacrifice of Gentiles.”
“In commanding the Eucharist, He not only orders ‘Do this,’ but adds, ‘for My memorial,’ that we may understand that there is command for not only a Sacrament but also a sacrifice, since offerings and sacrifices are those things which are done for a memorial.”
“From this theologians take the distinction between sacramental and spiritual eating or drinking. And hence it is rightly held that some eat and drink sacramentally only, which Paul calls to eat or drink unworthily; while others receive both sacramentally and spiritually, who are here called those who eat or drink worthily.”
“The will of God is the will to cleanse us from sins; and this cleansing was not effected by the ancient sacrifices but was effected by the offering of the body of Christ Jesus on the cross, which was not repeated, or to be repeated, but was once for all.”
“The direction of the writer’s argument is that from the fact that in the new law remission of sins has been accomplished through the offering of Christ, there remains now no offering for sin. For this would be an injury to the offering of Christ as insufficient. Nor are you who are a novice to wonder on this account that the sacrifice of the altar is daily offered in the Church of Christ; for this is not a new sacrifice, but that which Christ offered is commemorated, as He Himself commanded, ‘Do this for My memorial’. For all the Sacraments are nothing else than applications of the passion of Christ to those who receive them. Now it is one thing to repeat the passion of Christ, and another thing to repeat the commemoration and application of the passion of Christ.”
“The Christian altar is the altar of the body and blood of Christ; for this is the only altar which we have.”