Characteristics of the Eucharist

[JW55]

Some time ago I remember either reading or hearing someone say that during the Eucharist, receiving the consecrated host represented the healing of the spirit and the consecrated wine represented the healing of the body. I have not been able to find any support or denial of this. Does anyone know if there is anything in tradition that either supports or rejects this idea?

 

[FCEGM]

Some time ago I remember either reading or hearing someone say that during the Eucharist, receiving the consecrated host represented the healing of the spirit and the consecrated wine represented the healing of the body. I have not been able to find any support or denial of this. Does anyone know if there is anything in tradition that either supports or rejects this idea?

Sacred Tradition rejects this pious notion precisely because it is a denial of a tenet of the Faith that the whole Christ is present in either/both species.

 

[bpbasilphx]

Some time ago I remember either reading or hearing someone say that during the Eucharist, receiving the consecrated host represented the healing of the spirit and the consecrated wine represented the healing of the body.

**There was a mediaeval devotional theory (echoed in the classical Book of Common Prayer) that the Body was instituted for the body, and the Blood for the soul (exactly backwards from how you posted it), but this was never dogma.

It was never more than a pious opinion.**

 

[japhy]

There was a mediaeval devotional theory (echoed in the classical Book of Common Prayer) that the Body was instituted for the body, and the Blood for the soul (exactly backwards from how you posted it), but this was never dogma. It was never more than a pious opinion.

It is echoed, although not explicitly, in one of St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymns for Corpus Christi, Verbum Supernum (the last two verses of which form O Salutaris Hostia):
Quibus sub bina specie
carnem dedit et sanguinem;
ut duplicis substantiae
totum cibaret hominem.

To them He gave, in twofold kind,
His very Flesh, His very Blood:
of twofold substance man is made [that is, body and soul],
and He of man would be the Food.
Aquinas is not directly relating one species (of the Eucharist) to one substance (of man), but saying that the sacrament was instituted under two species because of the two-fold substance of man.