§ 95. THE 8ACEAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST. 495
But closely as these and similar expressions verge upon the Roman doctrine of transubstantiatioii, they seem to contain at most a dynamic, not a substantial, change of the elements into the body and the blood of Christ. For, in the first place, it must be remembered there is a great difference between the half-poetic, enthusiastic, glowing language of devotion, in which the fathers, and especially the liturgies, speak of the eucharistic sacrifice, and tlie clear, calm, and cool language of logic and doctrinal definition. In the second place, the same fathers apply the same or quite similar terms to the baptismal water and the chrism of confirmation, witliout intending to teach a proper change of the substance of these material elements into tbe Holy Ghost. On the other hand, they not rarely use, concerning the bread and wine, tutto?, avrirvira, Jigura, signum, and like expressions, which denote rather a symbolical than a metabolical relation of them to the body and blood of the Lord. Finally, the favorite comparison of the mysterious transformation with the incarnation of the Logos, which, in fact, was not an annihilation of the human nature, but an assumption of it into unity with the divine, is of itself in favor of the continuance of the substance of the elements ; else it would abet the Eutychian heresy.
II. The symbolical view, though on a realistic basis, is represented first by Eusebius, who calls the Supper a commemoration of Christ by the symbols of his body and blood, and takes the flesh and blood of Christ in the sixth chapter of John to mean the words of Christ, which are spirit and life, the true food of the soul, to believers.' Here appears the influence of his venerated Origen, whose views in regard to the sacramental aspect of tlie Eucharist he substantially repeats.
But it is striking that even Athanasius, " the father of or-
panem, de pane rursus, quia et potest et promisit, efficit proprium corpus, et qui de aqua vinum fecit, facit et de vino sanguinem." But, on the other hand, Gaudentiua (bishop of Brixia) calls the supper a figure of the passion of Christ, and the bread the figure (figura) of the body of Christ (p. 43). Comp. Riickert, 1. c. 4*77 f.
' Demonstr. evang. 1, c. 10; Theol. eccl. iii. c. 12, and the fragment of a tract, De paschate, published by Angelo Mai in Scriptorum veterum nova collectio, voL i. p. 247. Comp. Neander, 1. c. i. 430, and especially Steitz, second r-tic e (1865), pp 07-106.
4S6 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
thodoxy," recognized only a spiritual participation, a self- comniunication of the nourishing divine virtue of the Logos, in the Bvmbols of the bread und wine, and incidentally evinces a doctrine of the Eucharist wholly foreign to the Catholic, and very like the older Alexandrian or Origenistie, and the Calvinistic, though by no means identical with the Jatter.' By the flesh and blood in the mysterious discourse of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John, which he refers to the Lord's Supper, lie understands not the earthly, human, but the heavenly, divine manifestation of Jesus, a spiritual nutriment coming down from above, which the Logos through the Holy Ghost communicates to believers (but not to a Judas, nor to the unbelieving).' With this view accords his extending of the participatioL of the eucharistic food to believers in heaven, and even to the angels, who, on account of their incorporeal nature, are incapable of a corporeal participation of Christ.^
Gregory Nazianzen sees in the Eucharist a type of the incarnation, and calls the consecrated elements symbols and antitypes of the great mysteries, but ascribes to them a saving virtue.'
■ To this result IT. Voigt comes, after the most thorough investigation, in his learned monograph on the doctrine of Athauasius, Bremen, 1861, pp. 170-181, and since that time also Steitz, in his second article, already quoted, pp. 109-127. Mohler finds in the passage Ad Serap. iv. 19 (the principal eucharistic declaration of Athanasius then known), the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Supper (Athanasius der Gr. p. 560 ft".), but by a manifestly strained interpretation, and in contradiction with passages in the more recently known Festival Letters of Athanasius, which confirm the exposition of Voigt.
"^ So in the main passage, the fourth Epistle to Serapion (Ad Serap. iv. 19), which properly treats of the sin against the Holy Ghost (c. 8-23), and has been variously interpreted in the mterest of different confessions, but now receives new light from several passages in the recently discovered Syriac Festival Letters of Athanasius, translated by Larsow, Leipzig, 1852, pp. 59, 78 sqq., 153 sqq., and especially p. 101.
' In the Festival Letters in Larsow, p. 101, Athanasius says: "And not on.y, my brethren, is this bread [of the Eucharist] a food of the righteous, and not only are the saints who dwell on earth nourished with such bread and blood, but also in heaven we eat such food; for even to the higher spirits and the angels the Lord ia imtriment, and lie is the delight of all the powers of heaven ; to all He is all, and over every one He yeanis in His love of man."
* Orat. xvii. 12; viii. 17; iv. 52. Comp. Ulliiiann's Grcgor. v. Naz. pp. 488-488 Neander, 1. c. i. p. 431 ; and Steitz in Porner's Jahrbiiciier for 1865, pp. 133-141 fiteitz mai^ea Gregory an advocate of the syml)olical theory.