Eucharist , from the Greek εὐχαριστία, thanksgiving : sacrament of the new law, so named because Jesus Christ, instituting it at the last supper, took bread, and giving thanks to his father, blessed the bread, broke it, and passed it to his apostles, saying, This is my body ; and this is the principal means by which Christians give thanks to God through Jesus Christ.

It is also called the Lord’s Supper because it was instituted at the last supper; communion , because it is the bond of unity of the body of Christ and the Church; Holy Sacrament , and among the Greeks, the holy mysteries par excellence , because of the signs and sacred things established by Jesus Christ it is the principal one; viaticum [for a journey], because it is particularly necessary for strengthening the faithful in the passage from this life to the next. The Greeks call it synax or eulogy , because it is the bond of the assembly of the people and the source of God’s blessings on Christians. See Communion, Sacrament, Mystery, Viaticum, etc.

Catholic theologians define the Eucharist as a sacrament of the new law which, under the two species or appearances of bread and wine, contain really, veritably, and substantially the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be the spiritual nourishment of our souls, maintaining by it the life of grace. They also consider it as a sacrifice properly so called, in which Jesus Christ is offered to God his father by the ministry of priests, and renewed in a bloodless manner the blood sacrifice he made of his life on the tree of the cross for the redemption of humankind. By this sacrifice of the new law, the merits of the death and passion of Jesus are applied to the faithful; and we offer it in the Catholic Church for the living and for the dead. See Sacrament and Sacrifice.

The material of this sacrament is wheat bread and wine; the discipline of the Latin church is to consecrate with unleavened bread; that of the Greek church is to use leavened bread; either way makes no difference for the validity of the sacrament. It is a precept of ecclesiastical tradition to mix a little water into the wine; this practice is constant among the Greeks and the Latins, and is confirmed by Saint Cyprian [1] and the other [Church] fathers. This mixture is a figure of the union of the faithful with Jesus Christ.

The form of this sacrament is these words of Jesus, for the bread: This is my body ; for the wine: This is the cup of my blood , or This is my blood , words which the priest pronounces, not in his own name, but in the name of Jesus Christ, and by virtue of which the bread and wine are transubstantiated or changed into the body and blood of Jesus. See Transubstantiation.

The bishops and priests have always been the only ministers or consecrators of the Eucharist , but in the early days, deacons distributed it to the faithful, and they could still dispense it today by order of the bishop.

Since the institution of the Eucharist , Christians have always celebrated this mystery in their religious assemblies, in which the bishops or priests blessed bread and wine and distributed them to the attendees as having become by consecration the true body and blood of Jesus. Hence the respect they have had for the Eucharist , and the adoration they have paid it, as is seen in the prayers which, in all the liturgies, follow the words of the consecration, and which are so many acts or testimonies of worship and monuments of peoples’ faith. Catechumens and penitents did not attend the consecration of the Eucharist and did not participate in its reception. Until the twelfth century, the faithful received it under the two types of bread and wine, both in the Latin church and in the Greek. The latter has retained its former practice, but the Latin church has adopted the administration of the Eucharist to the ordinary faithful only under the bread type. The suppression of the cup, or the wine type, provoked the bloodiest wars in Bohemia in the fifteenth century, and its re-establishment was proposed at the Council of Trent; [2] but ultimately the present discipline of the church in this regard prevailed. See Hussites and Taborites.

The real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist was first attacked in the ninth century by John Scot, called John Scotus Eriugena or the Irishman, who had been preceptor of Charles the Bald. This writer, whom the Protestants have tried to pass off as a great genius, was but a scholastic, very obscure in his expressions, and whose work on the Eucharist , [3] known by scarcely three or four of his contemporaries, would have remained in eternal oblivion if the Calvinists had not rescued him from it to take advantage of his authority; but fundamentally it does not in itself carry much weight, and the author’s confused style does not resolve such an important controversy.

Berengar, archdeacon of Angers, provoked a bit more commotion in the eleventh century. [4] He openly denied the real presence and transubstantiation. Various councils were held in France and Italy before which he was summoned. He appeared and was convicted of errors, retracted them, and fell back into them. Finally, after different variations, he died a Catholic in 1083, if we are to believe Clavius, the author of the chronicle of Saint Martin, Hildebert du Mans, and Baltride, bishop of Dole, writers who were contemporary with him. See Berengarians.

In the sixteenth century the Protestants attacked the Eucharist but did not all go about it the same way. Luther and his followers, while recognizing the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist , rejected transubstantiation, maintaining that the substance of the bread and wine remained with the body and blood of Jesus. See Consubstantiation and Impanation.

Zwingli on the contrary taught that the Eucharist was just the figure of the body and blood of Jesus, to which was given the name of the things that were figured. See Zwinglians.

Calvin, finally, claimed that the Eucharist only contains the properties of the body and blood of Jesus, and that it is received in the sacrament only by faith, and in a wholly spiritual manner. The Anglicans adopted this latter doctrine, and you can see, in the fine history of the variations written by M. Bossuet, [5] what a division these various opinions have occasioned among the Protestants. See Calvinism and Calvinists.

To hear Calvin, his early followers, and Calvinist ministers, the doctrine of the real presence universally established in the Roman church was nothing less than idolatry manifest and sufficient to authorize the schism which separated from it a large part of Germany and all of Northern Europe; and yet, by an obvious inconsistency, that same Calvin and his followers had no difficulty communicating on religious matters with the Lutherans, who profess to believe in the real presence. See Lutherans.

Never was a dispute carried on with more passion than over the real presence. Never was a question more enveloped in subtleties on the part of the innovators, nor better and more profoundly debated on the part of the Catholics. We shall now give a summary of the principal reasons on each side.

There are two ways by which Catholics prove the truth of the real presence: the one, which they call by discussion ; and the other, which they call by prescription .

The way of discussion consists of proving the truth of the real presence with the texts of Scripture that deal with the promise of the Eucharist , its institution, and the custom of this sacrament. Those which concern the promise are Jesus’ words in John 6:54 ff.: If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you will not have my life in you; my flesh is truly meat and my blood is truly drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him . The words of the institution are these, in Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19: Take this and eat, this is my body, and this is my blood; take and drink, this is my blood or the cup of my blood. Finally, the texts having to do with the custom of the Eucharist , in the first epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, 20:16: Is not the cup which we bless the communion of the blood of Jesus Christ? And is the bread which we break not the communion of the body of the Lord?  [6] And in the following chapter, verse 27, after relating the words of institution, the apostle adds: Thus whoever eats this bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the profanation of the body and blood of the Lord .

These texts, say the Catholics, can only be understood literally and in their proper sense. That is the way the Capharnaites and even the apostles understood the words of the promise, and Jesus said not a word to disabuse them about the essence of the thing, although they were mistaken about the way in which Jesus was to give his body to eat and his blood to drink; they thought indeed that the body and blood of Jesus would be like ordinary food, and they would receive them in their natural and physical form, a thought that horrified and revolted them. But Jesus, without explaining to them the sacramental way in which he would give them his flesh as meat and his blood as drink, nevertheless promises he will really give them both; and the Calvinists agree that these passages are about the true body and true blood of Jesus.

Bread and wine are neither natural signs nor arbitrary signs of the body and blood of Jesus; and the words of institution would be void of meaning if, without preparing the minds of his disciples, the Savior had used such an extraordinary metaphor to tell them that he was giving the bread and wine as signs or figures of his body and blood. Finally, the words that concern the custom of the Eucharist are no less precise: there is mention neither of symbols, nor of signs, nor of figures, but of the body and blood of Jesus, and of the profanation of each when the Eucharist is unworthily received.

Moreover, they add, how did the fathers over nine centuries understand these words, not in polemical writings or in works of controversy, but in their catecheses or instructions to catechumens, in their sermons and homilies to the people? How, over the same length of time, did the faithful understand these texts? What did they believe? What did they think? When, in the frequent celebration of the sacred mysteries, the priest or deacon presented them with the Eucharist , saying: Corpus Christi, here or this is the body of Jesus Christ , they responded, Amen, it is true ; if, as the Calvinists suppose, neither the ones nor the others believed in the real presence, the language of the fathers and of the people was only an evidently false and illusory language. Pastors, as the author of the perpetuity of the faith quite rightly observes, [7] would constantly have been using expressions precisely and formally designating the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist to teach only a figurative and metaphorical presence; the people for their part, intimately convinced that Jesus Christ was not really present in the Eucharist , would have conceived their profession of faith in terms that formally designated the reality of his presence. This double absurdity is inconceivable in practice.

The way of prescription consists in proving that from the birth of the Church until the time when Berengar began to dogmatize, the Greek and Latin churches constantly and unanimously professed faith in the real presence, and still professed it between Berengar and Calvin and from Calvin down to us: this is what our disputants have proven by the uninterrupted tradition of the fathers of the Church, the decisions of councils, all the liturgies of the churches of East and West, by the confession even of sects which have separated from the Church, such as the Nestorians, the Eutychians, etc. They have brought the Calvinists to this point. We know the time of the birth of your error on the real presence: you borrowed it from the Vaudois, the Petrobrusians, the Henricians; you go back to Berengar, or at most to John Scottus. Therefore, you came to disrupt the Church in its possession. And what right have you to contest it? See Henricians, etc.

The Protestants reply, 1 ^st that the evidence drawn from Scripture is not decisive, and the texts alleged by Catholics can also be taken in a metaphorical sense, like these: Genesis 46:2: The seven fat kine and the seven full stalks are seven years of abundance ; [8] and in Daniel 22:28 the prophet explaining to Nebuchadnezzar the meaning of the colossal statue he had seen in a dream, says to him: You are the golden head ; [9] or what Jesus says in the parable of the chaff in Saint Matthew 22: He who sows the good grain is the Son of man; the field is the world; the good seed is the children of the kingdom; the chaff are the wicked; the enemy who sowed it is the devil; the harvest is the consummation of the centuries; the harvesters are angels ; [10] and Saint Paul, speaking of the stone from which flowed the springs of water to quench the thirst of the Israelites in the desert, says in I Corinthians 10:4: And that stone was Christ . All these expressions, they add, are obviously metaphorical, therefore, etc.

We answer them with good reason that the disparity is extremely perceptible, and is drawn from the nature of the circumstances, the disposition of minds, and the rules of language established and recognized among all sensible men. Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar were asking for the explanation of a dream: the first was asking Joseph what was meant by those seven fatted kine and seven full stalks which he had seen in his sleep; therefore, he could only take Joseph’s reply in a figurative and signifying sense. The same is true for Nebuchadnezzar with respect to Daniel: the monarch would have abandoned common sense if he had imagined he was really the golden head of the statue he had seen in a dream; but he understood at once that the head could be a figure of his own person and his empire, as the other portions of the same statue, composed some of silver and others of brass, these of iron, those of clay, were symbols of various other princes and their monarchies. Jesus was proposing and explaining a parable in which the body was allegorical, and which included necessarily a meaning of application. No one could have mistaken that. Finally, Saint Paul was developing a figure of the Old Testament for the faithful. Minds were sufficiently disposed not to take the sign for the thing signified. But such is not the case with the words Jesus addressed to his apostles: This is my body; this is my blood . Bread and wine are not natural signs of body and blood; and if Jesus had then made signs of institution or convention, the ordinary rules of the language and good sense would not have allowed him to substitute one of these terms for another that would have had only an arbitrary or institutional relation. For example, one does not say that the vine is wine, because it becomes, by the convention and institution of men, a sign of wine to sell; one does not say that an olive branch is peace, because, following conventional ideas, it is the sign of peace. The apostles were in no way prepared; Jesus had prepared their minds by no preliminary explanation or convention; they necessarily had therefore to understand his words in the sense in which he pronounced them, in other words in the proper and literal sense. These reasons, which are simple enough for everyone to understand, did not seem so simple to a writer who, after living a long time among Catholics, and thought like them, has since retired among the Anglicans, all of whose errors he has espoused. He calls the book Perpetuité de la foi [ Perpetuity of the Faith ], which contains these arguments and many other similar ones, the triumph of dialectic over reason . Let the reader judge the appropriateness of this application.

II. To the chain of tradition that is cited against them, the Protestants object that there is no or almost no father who did not depose in favor of the figurative and metaphorical meaning, and say that the Eucharist even after the consecration is a figure, sign, antitype, symbol, bread , and wine . But all the cavils that the Calvinists have rehashed in a thousand ways fall apart easily by means of this single solution: that as the Eucharist is composed of two parts, one outer and palpable, the other inner and intelligible, it is not surprising that the fathers should use expressions which are appropriate for this sacrament only according to its outer aspect, as we say endless numbers of things about men which are only applicable to their clothing. Thus the Eucharist being at the same time, though in different ways, figure and truth, image and reality, the fathers do not fail to name the symbols, even after the consecration, bread and wine and image and figure , since, on the one hand, these names ordinarily following the outer and palpable appearance, the nature of the language usual among men inclines us not to change them when those appearances are not changed; and on the other, by the words image and figure they do not understand an empty image and figure, but a figure and an image that really contain what they represent. Indeed, when the fathers explain themselves on the inner and intelligible part of the Eucharist , in other words on the essence and nature of the sacrament, they express themselves in a manner so clear and so precise that they leave no room to doubt as to whether they have accepted the real presence. They teach, for example, that the symbols having been consecrated and made Eucharist by the prayers which the Word of God has taught us, [11] are the flesh and blood of that same Jesus who was made man for the love of us . (Saint Justin, ii apology .) [12] That the lamb of God who washes away the sins of the world is present on the sacred table; that he is sacrificed by the priests without bloodshed, and that we genuinely take his precious body and precious blood. (Gelasius of Cyzicus, according to the first council of Nicaea.) [13] That Jesus Christ having said of the bread: This is my body, who henceforth will dare to doubt it? And himself having said: This is my blood, who would dare entertain a doubt, saying that it is not his blood? He once changed water into wine in Cana of Galilee: why would he not deserve to be believed when he changes the wine into blood? (Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical letters , iv). [14] That by the word of God and the orison the bread is changed immediately into the body of the Word by the Word, according to what was said by the Word himself: This is my body . (Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical orations ) [15] That the creator and master of nature, who produces bread from the earth, then makes his own body from that bread, because he can do so and promised to do so; and he who from water made wine also makes his blood from wine . (Saint Gaudentius, Bishop of Brescia, in Exod. tract. ii ). [16] That the Holy Spirit makes the common bread proposed on the table become the body itself which Jesus Christ assumed in his incarnation . (Saint Isidore of Damietta, epistle cix. ) That the Eucharist is the body and blood of the Lord, even for those who eat it unworthily, eat and drink their judgment . (Saint Augustine, book V of baptism against the Donatists, chapter viii. ) That we believe that the body which is before us is not the body of a common man like us, and the blood likewise, but that we receive it as being made into the very body and very blood of the Word who animates all things . (Saint Cyril of Alexandria, explication of the second of his anathemas ). [17] That the invisible priest (J. C.) changes by a secret power the visible creatures into the substance of his body and his blood by saying: Take and eat, this is my body. (Saint Eucherius or Saint Caesarius, homelitics v on Easter. ) That the Holy Spirit being invisibly present by the good pleasure of the Father and the will of the Son, makes this divine operation, and by the hand of the priest he consecrates, changes, and makes the proposed gifts (in other words the bread and the wine), the body and blood of Jesus Christ . (Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, in his theory of the mysteries. ) That the bread and the wine are not figures of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but the deified body itself of Jesus Christ; Our Lord having told us, not This is the figure of my body, but This is my body, and likewise not having said This is the figure of my blood, but This is my blood . (Saint John of Damascus, On the orthodox faith, book IV, ch. xiv ). It would not be difficult to accumulate similar passages from the fathers, councils, ecclesiastical writers, and theologians up to the sixteenth century to form a series of constant tradition, and to show that all have held that the symbols are to be changed, transmuted, trans-elemented, transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus. After that, to say that these fathers and writers spoke only by metaphor, or, like the author we have cited above, that there is none of these passages about which one could not debate, is rather to love debate than to propose the search for truth, and to contest that it is light at midday. The doctrine and the language of the fathers on the real presence can appear equivocal only to minds prejudiced and determined to find figures in the simplest declarations.

The Calvinist ministers have only too well sensed this, and to elude the weight of such authority they have imagined different systems that all tend to prove that belief in the real presence was not the faith of the primitive church or of antiquity. Some, like Blondel in his clarification on the Eucharist , [18] have had the opinion of transubstantiation arising long after Berengar; others, like Aubertin, the minister de la Roque, and M. Basnage, [19] have gone back to the seventh century, where they have contended that contrary to the faith of the first six centuries, Anastasius Sinaita had been the first to teach that what we receive in the Eucharist is not the antitype but the body of Jesus; [20] that this innovation was embraced by Germain, patriarch of Constantinople, in 720, by Saint John of Damascus in 740, by the fathers of the second council of Nicaea in 787, by Nikephorus, patriarch of Constantinople, in 806; that the same language went from east to west, as it appears from the books that Charlemagne had the council of Frankfort make in 794. All it takes to appreciate the absurdity of this system is to recall that since Saint Ignatius the martyr and Saint Justin, all the Greek fathers, of whom we have quoted a few, had constantly taught that the Eucharist was the true body and blood of Jesus; that the Orient was full of the works of these fathers, and of the liturgies of Saint Basil and Saint Chrysostom, in which the real presence is so clearly enunciated. Thus Anastasius Sinaita introduced nothing new by using precisely the same language as the authors who had preceded him.

As for the West, Aubertin, forgetting that he had attributed to a numerous and famous council, such as that of Frankfort, the introduction of the doctrine of the real presence, gives it a still more recent origin. He claims that Paschasius Ratbertus, first a monk, then abbot of Corbie, in a treatise on the body and blood of the Lord which he composed about 831 and dedicated to Charles the Bald in 844, [21] rejected the figurative sense, accepted until them by all the faithful, and substituted for it the reality, fruit of his imagination; that this innovation took hold so rapidly in under two centuries that when Berengar wanted to return to the figurative meaning, they cited against him as immemorial the consent of the whole Church decided for the literal meaning. But first, since the point was to establish the precedence of one or the other of these two opinions, was Berengar, who lived in the eleventh century, so far away from the ninth and so uneducated that he could not protest against the innovation of Paschasius Ratbertus, and even prove it? In all the councils before which he appeared, did he ever defend himself otherwise than by metaphysical subtleties? Did he ever allege the fact of Ratbertus to Lanfranc [22] and his other adversaries who cited perpetual antiquity against him? That would have been a means as short as it was simple for deciding this important question.

2 ^nd , supposing for a moment that Berengar was not educated, or did not want to make use of all his advantages, the system of Aubertin and the ministers is not less absurd: for the change they suppose, introduced by Ratbertus into the belief of the universal Church in the Eucharist , took place quickly and all at once, or quietly and progressively. Now these two suppositions are equally false. In the first place, it requires little understanding of the men, their passions, their character, and their attachment to their opinions in religious matters, to propose that an individual with no authority such as a simple religious could all at once, and, so to speak, from one day to the next, change the public belief of the whole world for nine centuries on a point of the greatest consequence and of such a general practice, as routine for the people as for the scholars, without the former rising up, the others protesting, the bishops and pastors resisting the torrent of error. This is a pretension contrary to the experience of all eras. How much blood was spilled in the East for the infinitely less important dispute over images? And what wars and carnage in the sixteenth century when the Lutherans and Calvinists wanted to make their opinions triumph! The men of Ratbertus’s century would have been a most singular species, and totally different from the men who preceded and followed them. Once more, it would take knowing them very little to propose that they let themselves be upset more tranquilly in the possession of their opinions than of their property. In the Calvinist hypothesis, Paschasius Ratbertus was a definite innovator, and yet this innovator was protected by princes, believed by peoples on his word, cherished by the bishops with whom he had attended several councils, respected by the scholars who remained silent before him. Luther and Calvin, who, according to the ministers, brought the truth back to earth, and who were greeted very differently, would themselves have been most embarrassed to explain this wonder to us.

It thus remains to say that the opinion of Paschasius, combatted at first by a few persons, seduced the multitude quietly and progressively, abetted by the darkness of the tenth century, which has been called the century of lead and iron . But at first these adversaries of Paschasius who are so trumpeted come down to John Scottus, whom we have already mentioned; to a certain Heribald, a very obscure writer; to an anonymous writer, to Raban Maur; and to Retramne or Bertramne; and these last three, who recognized the real presence as expressly as Paschasius, debated with him only over some consequences of the Eucharist , one factual error, and a few misunderstood words on all sides which did not affect the essence of the question; whereas Paschasius had for him Hincmar, archbishop of Reims; Prudence, bishop of Troyes; Flore, deacon of Lyon; Loup, abbot of Ferrières; Christian Drutmar, Walfridus, the best known prelates, and the most accredited writers of those times. The ninth century, which the Calvinists take pleasure in disparaging, was even more fecund in great men instructed in the true doctrine of the Church and capable of defending it. They include in Germany St. Unny, archbishop of Hamburg, apostle of Denmark and Norway; Adalbert, one of his successors; Bruno, archbishop of Cologne; William, archbishop of Mainz; Francon and Burchard, bishops of Worms; St. Udalric, bishop of Augsburg; St. Adalbert, archbishop of Prague, who brought the faith to Hungary, Prussia, and Lithuania; and Saint Boniface and Saint Bruno, who preached it to the Russians. In England we find Saint Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury; Aethelwode, bishop of Winchester, and Oswald, bishop of Worcester; in Italy, popes Stephen VIII, Leo VII, Marinus, Agapetus II, and a large number of learned bishops; in France Stephen, bishop of Autun; Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, Saint Mayeul, Saint Odon, Saint Odilon, the first abbots of Cluny; in Spain, Gennadius, bishop of Zamora; Attilan, bishop of Asturia; and Rudesind, bishop of Compostella; and this under the reign of emperors and princes zealous for the faith. Now to maintain that so many great men, most of whom had lived in the ninth century and could have been witnesses or known the witnesses of the innovation introduced by Radbertus, had favored it in the minds of their peoples, is to mock the credulity of readers.

A final consideration that shows that the Protestants came to trouble the Church in its possession is that if the latter had innovated in the faith or the Eucharist in the ninth century, the Greeks who separated from it about that time would not have failed to reproach it for its defection. But they never did that. For soon after Leo IX had condemned Berengar’s heresy, Michel Ceralius, patriarch of Constantinople, published several writings in which he left out nothing that could make the Latin church odious: he attacked it heatedly on, among other things, the question of unleavened bread, which has no bearing on the essence of the mystery, and alleged the diversity of opinions of the two churches on that point as one of the principal reasons for the schism, failing to utter a word about the real presence.

At the council of Florence where reunion with the Greeks was discussed, [23] the emperor of Constantinople and the bishops his subjects argued about all the questions over which they were divided, and in particular the one that concerned the words of consecration; but no mention was made of the words transubstantiation or real presence. The Greeks and Latins were therefore of this common persuasion, that in both churches no innovation had been introduced on that subject; for in the disposition of minds which had prevailed for over three hundred years, had that innovation begun with the Greeks with Anastasius Siniata, or with the Latins with Paschasius Ratbertus, they would not have failed mutually to accuse each other. Shall we say that for the good of peace and in order to stifle at birth any sect opposed to the doctrine of the real presence, the two churches agreed in concert on this point? But in the first place, the reunion less concluded than projected in Florence was not durable, and Mark of Ephesus, Cabasilas, and the other Greek bishops who were first to break the agreement, far from contesting the real presence, support it openly in their writings, as do the most enlightened of the Protestants, and among others William Forbes, bishop of Edinburgh, in chapter iv of the first book of his Considerationes æquæ et pacificæ controversiarum hodiernarum de sacramento Eucharistiæ [Equal and pacific considerations of today’s controversies about the sacrament of the Eucharist ]. [24] In the second place, if the Greek church had been able to form some accusation in this respect against the Roman church, could it seize a more favorable occasion to acquire new defenders for this imputation than the birth of the heresy of the sacramentarians? In vain did these [heretics] attempt in 1570 to extort from Jeremias, patriarch of Constantinople, some testimony favorable to their error. He responded distinctly to them: We are told on this point several things by you which we cannot in any way approve. The doctrine of the holy Church is therefore that, in the holy supper, after the consecration and benediction, the bread is changed and passed into the very body of Jesus, and the wine into his blood, by virtue of the Holy Spirit; and next the proper and true body of Jesus Christ is contained in the species of the leavened bread. The same thing is attested by Gaspard Pucerus, celebrated historian and physician; by the Englishman Sandius, in his Mirror of Europe , chapter xxii; [25] by Grotius, in the Examination of the apology of Rivet ; [26] but what the good faith of Jeremias had refused to the theologians of the confession of Augsburg, the avarice of one of his successors, Cyril Lucaris, granted to the generosity of an ambassador of England or Holland at the Porte. [27] He dared to have published a profession of faith compatible with the errors of the Protestants on the real presence. This piece was condemned in a synod held in Constantinople in 1638 by Cyril of Veria, successor to Lucaris, and in another held in 1642 under Parthenius, successor to Cyril of Veria. The Greek church again gave new evidence of its conformity with the Latin church on the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist by the councils held in Jerusalem and in Bethlehem, the first in 1668 and the other in 1672. Their acts are deposited in the library of Saint Germain des Prés and printed in the first two volumes of the great work of abbé Renaudot entitled The Perpetuity of the Faith , [28] where one also finds all the testimonies of the Maronites, the Armenians, the Syrians, the Copts, the Jacobites, the Nestorians, and the Russians: in a word of all the sects that have separated from the Roman church or which still dispute some points with the Greek church, which they nonetheless recognize as their stock.

Scholars will easily perceive that we have merely abridged here and proposed in outline the principal arguments of our controversists and the most specious objections of the Protestants. The end of this analysis is to suggest this reflection to those of our readers who have never delved into this subject. It is a matter here of a mystery: what has been believed in all times and in the society established by Jesus Christ to determine the views of Christians in religious matters? Then it comes down to a pure question of fact, easy to decide through the documentation that we have just indicated; for if one wants to make reason alone the arbiter of the basis of this dispute, we concede that it is an abyss of difficulties, and we write neither to renew them nor to multiply them. See Bellarmino, cardinals du Perron, Richelieu, M. de Vallembourg, M. Bossuet, Histoire des variations , exposition de la foi, avertissement and instruction pastorale , [29] Arnauld, Nicole, Pelisson, and The Perpetuity of the Faith .

1. Cyprian (c. 200–258), bishop of Carthage.

2. Nineteenth ecumenical council, 1545–1563, called to address the crisis in the Catholic Church brought about by the Protestant Reformation.

3. John Scottus Eriugena (c. 800-c. 877). This work has not survived, but is reputed to have stressed the symbolic meaning of the sacrifice.

4. Berengar of Tours (c. 999-1088), who served as archdeacon of Angers.

5. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Histoire des variations des Églises protestantes (1688). Here is a later, eighteenth-century edition; for an English translation : The History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (Dublin, 1836).

6. I Cor. 10:16.

7. Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld, La perpétuité de la foi de l’Église catholique touchant l’Eucharistie , 1669. Here is an eighteenth-century edition.

8. Genesis 41:2 and 5.

9. Daniel 2:28.

10. Matthew 13:24–30.

11. Le Verbe de Dieu , “The second person of the Trinity” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ).

12. Justin Martyr, 2 ^nd century, Apologia .

13. In 325 CE.

14. Cyril (c. 313–386) wrote a series of twenty-three Catechetical Letters .

15. Gregory of Nyssa, 4 ^th -century bishop, Catechetical Oration .

16. Gaudentius of Brescia (died in 410), author of many tractates.

17. Cyril wrote twelve Anathemas in his Third Epistle to Nestorius.

18. David Blondel (1590–1655), Esclaircissemens familiers de la controverse de l’Eucharistie (1641).

19. Edme Aubertin (1595-1652) wrote several works on the Eucharist, including Conformité de la créance de l’Eglise et de S. Augustin sur le sacrement de l’Eucharistie [The Conformity of the belief of the Church with St. Augustin on the sacrament of the Eucharist] (1626) and L’Eucharistie de l’ancienne Eglise (Geneva, 1633); Mathieu de Larroque (1619-1684) was the author of Histoire de l’eucharistie (Amsterdam, 1669); Jacques Basnage (1653–1723), French pastor, historian, political figure, and controversialist who emigrated to the Netherlands in 1685 and became the director of the French church in The Hague, was the author of, among other works, Histoire de l’église depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à présent (1699).

20. Anastasius Sinaita (c. 630-c. 700), Abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai and the author of a polemic against various heresies.

21. Paschasius Ratbertus (785–865), De corpore et sanguine domini. Here is a nineteenth-century English translation.

22. Italian jurist, French monk, later archbishop of Canterbury, died in 1089.

23. Seventeenth ecumenical council, 1431–1449.

24. This text by William Forbes (1585–1634), is included in a posthumous edition of his writings on various controversies: Considerationes modestae et pacificae controversiarum, de justificatione, purgatorio, invocatione sanctorum et Christo mediatore, eucharistia (London, 1658), pp. 370-466.

25. Christophorus Sandius (1644–1680); the work mentioned has not been identified. Born in Königsberg and died in Amsterdam, he was not, however, an Englishman.

26. André Rivet (1572–1651), Calvinist author of Apologia pro sanctissima Virgine Maria , 1639, skirmished for several years with Grotius, one of whose responses was called Rivetiani Apologetici Discussio .

27. I.e., the Sublime Porte, capital of the Ottoman empire.

28. See note 7. La Perpétuité de la foi was by Nicole and Arnaud, but Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720) very much wrote in its wake a work in 2 vols. named Liturgiarum orientalium collectio (Collection of Eastern liturgy, 1715–1716)

29. See note 5. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Histoire des variations des Églises protestantes (1688) and Exposition de la doctrine de l’église catholique sur les matières de controverse (1671); Bossuet issued several Avertissement[s] aux protestants and Instructions pastoraux in his function as bishop of Meaux. Others to whom Mallet refers here are Cardinals Roberto Bellarmino (1542-1621), Jacques Davy Duperron (1556-1618), Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke de Richelieu (1585-1642), and perhaps one of the brothers, Adrien and Pierre de Vallembourg, both of whom were bishops.