Hi, Contarini,
I have enjoyed reading your posts - they have been most informative.
I have a little knowledge of St. Augustine and would think it best to identify him as a very busy man who spent a lot of time putting out the fires of mischief caused by the various heresies of his time. My understanding is that the Real Presence was not under direct attack at the time, so he spent most of his time on other doctrines.
Here is a cut 'n past from The Rock concerning this issue:
Volume 16 Issue 3 Quick Questions
Q:“ A Protestant friend said that Augustine did not believe in transubstantiation. Is this true?
”A: Augustine wrote about the symbolic character of the Eucharist as a sign of unity, but this does not discount the Real Presence.
Augustine clearly believed in transubstantiation. Here are some things he wrote about the Eucharist:
“Christ was carried in his own hands when, referring to his own body, he said, ‘This is my body’ [Matt. 26:26]. For he carried that body in his hands” (Explanations of the Psalms 33:1:10 [A.D. 405]).
“I promised you [new Christians], who have now been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the sacrament of the Lord’s table. . . . That bread that you see on the altar, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ. That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ” (Sermons 227 [A.D. 411]).
“What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. This has been said very briefly, which may perhaps be sufficient for faith; yet faith does not desire instruction” (ibid., 272).
“Nobody eats this flesh without previously adoring it” (Explanation of the Psalms 99).
“He took flesh from the flesh of Mary . . . and gave us the same flesh to be eaten unto salvation. . . . We do sin by not adoring” (ibid).
Hope this helps.
God bless
James O’Connor has a pretty good discussion of this subject in
The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist (Ignatius, 1988, 2005), pp. 51ff (available on Google Books). I’d grant a bit more to your side of the argument than O’Connor does, but he points out several facts that you have to take into account:
- Neither Augustine nor anyone else at the time ever noted any difference between Augustine and Ambrose on this point. (This is not decisive, since it is possible that people just weren’t as attentive to possible differences in Eucharistic theology as we are. But it’s a point worth considering in combination with other factors.) That Ambrose taught a “realist” view, substantively indistinguishable from transubstantiation, is pretty hard to deny, I think.
- Augustine is the source for the trope of Jesus “carrying himself in his own hands.” He does not explain this away as a simple metaphor.
- Most importantly, I think, Augustine says that the Sacrament should be adored. That is a decisive difference between Augustine and the Reformed theologians who would later claim him as an ancestor.
- It’s also worth noting that Augustine spoke of the Eucharist as a sacrifice (as did nearly all the Church Fathers).
I think there’s no denying that Augustine made a distinction between the sign and the thing signified that is rather different than the way the Catholic tradition would later speak of the Sacrament. Whether it is actually incompatible with later Catholic theology I’m less sure (with one exception)–and it is certainly quite different from later Protestant theology on the questions of adoration and sacrifice.
The one point where I think Augustine clearly does differ from the position considered orthodox among Catholics since the 13th century is the question of whether unbelievers receive the Body of Christ or not. If Gary Macy is to be believed, even the scholastics of the 12th and early 13th centuries did not believe that you could receive the Body of Christ without faith.
Edwin
