THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
Orig-enistic i Doctrine.
life — and made it fit his own mental processes by a theory of the " consecration " of the elements, somewhat as Justin had done before him. He does not lessen the significance of the traditional belief by his theory, but enforces it by words which have a very material sound (" nourished with the body of the Lord and with his blood ") without observing that his unsatisfying explanation of the received designation of the elements does not really fuse the two thoughts combined by him.
This peculiarity of Irenaeus' view will appear more clearly when it is compared with that of the Alexandrian school. Clement need not here be considered; his view is practically the same as that found in a more developed form in his pupil Origen. The latter reproduces the same traditional belief discovered in Irenaeus (In Num. horn. xvi. 9; In Matt. ser. lxxxvi.; In Exod. horn. xiii. 8. The 3. jn ps xxxvii. horn. ii. 6). And ! here also, more intelligibly than in Irenaeus, this traditional belief is put in the light of a mysterious consecration (In Exod. horn. xvi. 9; Contra Celsum, viii. 33; In Lev. horn. xiii. 5, 6). The difference is that in Origen scarcely anything but the mere words of tradition remain. The spiritualism of Origen was unable to conceive the notion of either the " body and blood " of the ascended Lord, or of eating unto life everlasting, or, in fact, of the resurrection of the flesh. Thus he says: " even if [Christ] was a man, at any rate he is no longer man " (In Jer. xv. 6); " he has ceased to be man " (In Luc. horn, xxix.) : the material belongs only to this transitory world, and perishes with it; eating and drinking have nothing to do with the spiritual life; in the resurrection, the material will disappear more and more from us, until in us too the word is fulfilled, " he who shall have followed Christ will be no longer man " (In
Luc. horn. ix. 11). Origen does not attempt to conceal the divergence of his view from the commonly received one; and he states with sufficient clearness what the eating of the body of Christ and similar liturgical expressions mean to him — the " body " in the Eucharist is a " typical and symbolic body," only pointing to the " true food," the Logos, the living Bread. We drink his blood " when we receive his words, in which is life," just as, when we read the words of his apostles, who also shed their blood " and attain unto life from them, we drink the blood of their wounds " (In Num. horn. xvi. 6). Accordingly, the eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ are not confined to the Eucharist; the only preeminence which it has over other hearing of the word of God is in the fact that here the symbol is added to the word. In this spiritualism it is not alone the traditional Christian conception that disappears; there is really nothing left of the thought — more Greek than Christian — that the elements acquire a "helping power" (In John, xxxii. 16) by consecration.
These, then, are the two views of the Lord's Supper which have the greatest importance in the history of eucharistic doctrine — the spiritualism of Origen, and the realism of Irenaeus. The most radical difference between them is that to the spiritualist everything is spiritual, and the Eucharist a
food for the soul only; while Irenaeus, though not excluding the spiritual effect, yet lays his emphasis on the imparting of immortality to the " body, made fit for the Spirit " by means of the Lord's Supper. But neither was realistic in the Roman Catholic or Lutheran sense. The realistic view of Irenaeus was only realistic-dynamic.
The spiritual-dynamic view became the prevailing one with the theologians of that period. None of the great Fathers who followed Origen was, it is
true, as extreme a spiritualist as he; ? ,* none of them allowed the divergence Sacrificial °^ *^e spiritualist view and the re- View, ceived designation of the elements to
appear as freely as he did; and even the most decided spiritualists among them, since they accepted the resurrection of the flesh, attributed to the faithful reception (following John vi. 54) a secondary significance also for the body. But Eusebius of Caesarea, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Macarius the Elder must, in their treatment of this subject, be classed as Origenists. Athanasius, whom Steitz places wholly with them, was, it is true, strongly influenced in his eucharistic views by Origenistic conceptions, but Irenasus had a still greater influence on him. One term is of importance in the study of the Eastern doctrine because its meaning does not seem to fall under either of the two divisions adopted above, but rather points to a third view which was not without its effect on the later development. This is the expression employed by Gregory Nazianzen for the consecrated elements, " antitypes of the body and blood of Christ." Eusebius (Demonstratio evangelica, i. 10) uses the equivalent term " symbols " only in relation to the idea of sacrifice; and in Gregory too a reference to the sacrifice may lurk in the background. As objects of the " bloodless and reasonable sacrifice " (Eusebius, Demonstratio evangelica, ut sup.) or the " sacrifice without blood " (Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio iv. 52), the elements are symbols or antitypes of the real, historic body of Christ; as objects of reception, neither Eusebius nor Gregory could have called them by this name, since, in their view, the actual body and blood of Christ have nothing to do with the reception. Eustathius of Antioch, on the other hand, sees in Prov. ix. 5 a reference to the " antitype to the members of Christ's body," and thus must have found the elements as objects of reception antitypes of the actual body of Christ. In this use of the term Steitz and Harnack have seen a transference of the sacrificial idea to the sacramental. In connection with the latter, as soon as the thought of " offering the memorial of the great sacrifice " had taken the shape of " offering the body," a reference to the actual body of Christ was inevitable even for the Origenists. Thus the designation of the elements as " antitypes of the body and blood of Christ " might be taken as a spiritualistic reservation; and so it might well have been originally Alexandrian. But it is scarcely probable that Eustathius, who was a vigorous opponent of both Origen and Eusebius, would have taken up and developed an Alexandrian term; and there is no evidence of its use on definitely Alexandrian ground