Adoring Christ: The Bread Of Life
Editorial from the FAITH Magazine July 1994 by Tim Finigan
The development of the practice of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is one which came about, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church “as faith in the real presence of Christ in his Eucharist deepened”. (CCC 1379) This is a very welcome emphasis and contrasts sharply with the gentle hints so often encountered that suggest that the growth of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament was in fact a corruption.
Such an attitude is especially easy to engender in England where the term “medieval” can still be used as a term of abuse and where the middle ages are still characterised as “the dark ages”, a time of unmitigated social and cultural decline. This Victorian prejudice survives at least in popular history even if it may be academically discredited. Unfortunately, it is an easy way to popularise disdain for the practice of adoring the Blessed Sacrament if you can announce with a scholarly flourish that it became popular in the Middle Ages. The elevation of the sacred host at the consecration, the beginning of the practice of exposition, the feast of Corpus Christi: all these were medieval introductions. The unspoken implication is that an unlettered populace acting in ignorance of scripture, Church history and the “real” reason for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, disrupted the liturgy with an unbalanced attitude to the Eucharist and an over-emphasis on the real presence.
The Ages of Faith and the Eucharist
This distorted view neglects to consider something that British history has itself often ignored, namely the tremendous contribution of the schoolmen not only to theology but also to the general culture of the time. Fr Stanley Jaki and Dr Peter Hodgson have accomplished a great deal in demonstrating the Christian origins of science in this ferment of thought and intellectual activity made possible uniquely in Christendom. For the Christian, the middle ages were a time of great intellectual and cultural advances, not a time of ignorance and darkness.
It is against this background that we must place the development both of doctrine and practice concerning the adoration of the Holy Eucharist. If we do so, we can no more dismiss the developments of this time than the developments in Christology enshrined in the Nicene Creed. This parallel can be developed further. There was an early Church before Nicea that generally used terminology that was imprecise on the distinction between orthodox Christology and adoptionism; we would do no service to anyone to return to it now. Similarly, there was a time when Eucharistic adoration outside of Mass was not generally practised; it would be foolish to think of that as a state to which we should somehow return.
The development of adoration
Herbert Thurston, writing in the Month at the turn of the century established the history of public adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Since then, it has been generally accepted that public adoration was uncommon outside of Mass until about the twelfth century. It is probably correct to say that originally, the Blessed Sacrament was reserved primarily for the communion of the sick. Although this view is likely to be broadly correct, we may recall the view of Freeland (cf The parish church the house of God, FAITH September 1993) who suggested that the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament would always have had what he calls a sheckinistic motive. His evidence for this view is the existence of early examples of tabernacles and sacrament houses. If communion of the sick had been the only consideration, reservation in the priest’s house would have been sufficient. Nevertheless, the external signs of adoration with which we are familiar seem to date from about the early twelfth century.
There were two forces which promoted this development. One was the need to counter error. Various views about the Blessed Sacrament had developed as a result of the intense theological speculation of the period. The berengarian heresy at the turn of the millennium had led to much increased theological interest in the nature of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In a way that is analogous to the development of Christology in response to the heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the theology of the Eucharist developed in response to the views of Berengarius and later theologians who held views which were more subtly contrary to the teaching of Christ.
An example of such a later view would be that of Peter the Chanter at the turn of the thirteenth century who held that the bread was not consecrated until after the words of institution had been said over the wine also. The double elevation of the sacred species, introduced at around this time, was doubtless partly in response to this error.
Positive Eucharistic spirituality
We should not, however, make the mistake of seeing the development of Eucharistic doctrine and devotion as being solely in response to heresy. In the things of God, developments often bring good out of evil but they are not determined by evil. The development of doctrine does not operate according to a hegelian dialectic of tension between opposites. Rather, in the providence of God, the developments which should come about peacefully are delayed through our hardness of heart. The Lord uses the pressing need of opposition to promote what ought to come about in any case.
We can argue that such was the case with Eucharistic devotion. In addition to the heretical movements which denied the fullness of the real presence of Christ, there was a remarkable incidence of extraordinary graces granted to St Juliana of Liege in emphasis of orthodox teaching. Juliana spent much of her life promoting the feast of Corpus Christi after receiving visions in her early life. Liege was a place of refuge for her after she met opposition in her own convent. However, in God’s providence, the Archdeacon of Liege, James Pantaleon, was warmly sympathetic to her. She suffered “persecutions in this life” and spent the declining years of her life in exile. However, her friend the Archdeacon of Liege became Pope Urban IV and instituted the feast of Corpus Christi six years after her death.
Whether the hymns for the office and Mass of the day can all be attributed reliably to St Thomas Aquinas or not, they certainly comprise a masterpiece of doctrinal statement and devotional content unequalled before or since. To look upon the scholastic refinement of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the production of such superb liturgical texts as the Pange Lingua and the Lauda Sion and the enormous growth of popular devotion to the Eucharist as a kind of corruption that must be purged so as to return to a supposedly purer previous state is surely archaeologism of the worst sort.
Need for Eucharistic adoration today
The development of Eucharistic adoration did not remain static from the time of the thirteenth century. In particular, the place of reservation of the Blessed Sacrament became more clearly central in the parish Church. As we have argued before (FAITH September 1993) the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in a tabernacle on the high Altar came about through reconciling the conflicting demands of security and popular devotion. The people wanted the hanging pyx visible to all in the centre of the Church. Those responsible for discipline were concerned for the security of the Blessed Sacrament in such an arrangement. The positioning of a solid secure tabernacle on the High Altar was the perfect solution. Now that we usually separate the main Altar of the Church from the East wall, it is possible also to overcome the objection of placing the tabernacle actually on the altar itself. The tabernacle can be in the centre of the Church, visible to all, the focus of devotion and prayer.
From the arrangement of a highly visible central tabernacle which rapidly spread throughout the Church during the counter-reformation, the practice of devotional “visits” to the Blessed Sacrament came to be encouraged and popularised more widely (although the practice had begun to develop earlier). It was always the most pastoral of saints, such as St Alphonsus, who encouraged this practice and it is worthwhile to reflect on the reasons for this.
After the breakdown of Christendom in the West, there was no longer a reliable backdrop of Catholic life in society. What has now become a total collapse of faith and morality did not suddenly happen in the twentieth century. The seeds of it were sown at the close of the scholastic period with the rise of nominalism. The disaster of the protestant reformation disrupted both Church and society. The advent of modernism and secular humanism is only the fuller development of those seeds of destruction sown centuries earlier.
Return to early Christian values
Where the return to early Christian values is most necessary is in the devotio and the pietas which characterised those early saints and martyrs in the Roman tradition. They saw the need to remain untarnished by “the world” and had the respect of Saint John the Divine for that enemy. For the post-reformation Catholic, there was once again a need for crystal-clear teaching and a strong devotional life nourished daily. The visit to the Blessed Sacrament is an ideal means, in the providence of God, for the nourishing in practice of those who were now to have to fight not only the spiritual warfare within but also the increasingly hostile world outside.
The need for such spirituality is more evident than ever today. The parish Church for many is a refuge from the bombardment of anti-Christian propaganda (increasingly anti-Catholic in our own news media) and from the spiritual breakdown which is such a sad part of so many families. Even the “good Catholic families” will be exceptional if they escape the heartbreak of at least one member losing the faith, and ending up with “problems”. It is in these situations that it is still possible, contrary to the glib assumptions of so many cynics, to “see how these Christians love one another”. The patience and forgiveness of many good Christian mothers and fathers in the face of utter betrayal is the sort of unsung heroism that has kept the Church afloat down the centuries.
For such people to be able to visit the Blessed Sacrament, to pour out their hearts to Christ whom they know to be truly present, is a tremendous consolation and source of grace. It is certainly no coincidence that the upsurge of all-night vigils, perpetual adoration and other eucharistic devotions in some places is at the heart of many unusually healthy “growth areas” in the western Church.
Need for development in theology
However, the popular devotions of the faithful have always called for the support of those who are able to do the necessary theological work. The body of Christ is made up of many parts and each must carry out its own task. We desperately need solid, intelligent theologians who will come to the aid of the people when their sense of the truth is challenged. The people need those who will answer the intellectual challenges and do so without fear of the loss of their career prospects. We need, in other words, the modern counterparts of Ignatius Loyola, Philip Neri, Francis de Sales and Alphonsus Liguori to risk vilification, jealousy, opposition and demotion as champions of the ordinary people of the Church.
In the case of the Eucharist, we need to develop the doctrine of transubstantiation against the background of modern science and its understanding of reality. We do not need to “do away” with transubstantiation. It is possible to offer a development in the understanding of reality in which the doctrine of the Eucharist itself is made clearer.
To understand each individual organism or “thing” in the world as a simple unit with its own matter and form is made difficult by modern physics. The evolution of living things certainly poses the greatest problems but the evolution of the galaxies is no less a conundrum. It is impossible to sustain a concept of matter in which each individual “thing” has its own unvarying substance and accidents. Through nuclear processes, some of which can even be crudely reproduced by us, the original “things” were very much in a state of flux. Yet this need not mean that we abandon all meaning and intelligibility in the material universe. The ordered development both of the galaxies and of the evolution of living things is itself evidence of a mind and a plan or law which gives meaning and intelligibility to even the smallest parts of the process.
The “substance” of any part of the universe would be relative to the overall law and wisdom of God which controls and directs the whole development of the material universe. There would not, on this view, be a substance “hiding behind” the accidents of bread and wine. Rather, the whole reality of the bread and wine are changed so that they become the whole reality of Jesus Christ. All that remains is the appearances of bread and wine. These are not some continuing accidental reality of bread and wine but the external manifestation of the human nature of Jesus Christ.
Reviving Corpus Christi, not Berengarius
Without such an understanding, it is almost impossible to avoid falling into a modern version of the error of Berengarius. Hymns speaking of Christ as “with us in the bread and wine” are not really harking back to the consubstantiation of Luther but to the more basic questions which exercised the minds of the scholastic theologians. Even a youngster who has dropped science early will be unimpressed with an approach which depends on the theory that in bread, there is normally an unchanging essence of breadness hidden behind the accidental reality of the bread. To defend the doctrine of transubstantiation, we must update it, though without losing its content.
We can offer an approach based on a concept of reality as created through evolution and in all its parts relative to the source of being himself in the wisdom of his plan. We might then hope to attract even the critically aware youngster to stay behind and “hear more of these things”.
The Spirit which gives life
What we will be offering is a life worthy of the human person and the full meaning of his place within the universe. Christ our Eucharist will himself be the one in whom our own reality is defined. We will, in other words, find our meaning and fulfilment in him and nowhere else. To make it possible to visit that very Christ, truly present in the Holy Eucharist, is to offer the perfect solacium because it is not simply an answer to a problem but the very meaning of our lives created for Christ the Son of Man. It will indeed be a “medieval” practice if by that we mean that it will help us to recover the sense of discovery and awe at the wisdom of God in all his works which inspired St Thomas, the Blessed Duns Scotus and their contemporaries. Were they alive today, they would expect us to be at the task.
Editorial from the FAITH Magazine July 1994 by Tim Finigan
The development of the practice of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is one which came about, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church “as faith in the real presence of Christ in his Eucharist deepened”. (CCC 1379) This is a very welcome emphasis and contrasts sharply with the gentle hints so often encountered that suggest that the growth of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament was in fact a corruption.
Such an attitude is especially easy to engender in England where the term “medieval” can still be used as a term of abuse and where the middle ages are still characterised as “the dark ages”, a time of unmitigated social and cultural decline. This Victorian prejudice survives at least in popular history even if it may be academically discredited. Unfortunately, it is an easy way to popularise disdain for the practice of adoring the Blessed Sacrament if you can announce with a scholarly flourish that it became popular in the Middle Ages. The elevation of the sacred host at the consecration, the beginning of the practice of exposition, the feast of Corpus Christi: all these were medieval introductions. The unspoken implication is that an unlettered populace acting in ignorance of scripture, Church history and the “real” reason for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, disrupted the liturgy with an unbalanced attitude to the Eucharist and an over-emphasis on the real presence.
The Ages of Faith and the Eucharist
This distorted view neglects to consider something that British history has itself often ignored, namely the tremendous contribution of the schoolmen not only to theology but also to the general culture of the time. Fr Stanley Jaki and Dr Peter Hodgson have accomplished a great deal in demonstrating the Christian origins of science in this ferment of thought and intellectual activity made possible uniquely in Christendom. For the Christian, the middle ages were a time of great intellectual and cultural advances, not a time of ignorance and darkness.
It is against this background that we must place the development both of doctrine and practice concerning the adoration of the Holy Eucharist. If we do so, we can no more dismiss the developments of this time than the developments in Christology enshrined in the Nicene Creed. This parallel can be developed further. There was an early Church before Nicea that generally used terminology that was imprecise on the distinction between orthodox Christology and adoptionism; we would do no service to anyone to return to it now. Similarly, there was a time when Eucharistic adoration outside of Mass was not generally practised; it would be foolish to think of that as a state to which we should somehow return.
The development of adoration
Herbert Thurston, writing in the Month at the turn of the century established the history of public adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Since then, it has been generally accepted that public adoration was uncommon outside of Mass until about the twelfth century. It is probably correct to say that originally, the Blessed Sacrament was reserved primarily for the communion of the sick. Although this view is likely to be broadly correct, we may recall the view of Freeland (cf The parish church the house of God, FAITH September 1993) who suggested that the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament would always have had what he calls a sheckinistic motive. His evidence for this view is the existence of early examples of tabernacles and sacrament houses. If communion of the sick had been the only consideration, reservation in the priest’s house would have been sufficient. Nevertheless, the external signs of adoration with which we are familiar seem to date from about the early twelfth century.
There were two forces which promoted this development. One was the need to counter error. Various views about the Blessed Sacrament had developed as a result of the intense theological speculation of the period. The berengarian heresy at the turn of the millennium had led to much increased theological interest in the nature of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In a way that is analogous to the development of Christology in response to the heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the theology of the Eucharist developed in response to the views of Berengarius and later theologians who held views which were more subtly contrary to the teaching of Christ.
An example of such a later view would be that of Peter the Chanter at the turn of the thirteenth century who held that the bread was not consecrated until after the words of institution had been said over the wine also. The double elevation of the sacred species, introduced at around this time, was doubtless partly in response to this error.
Positive Eucharistic spirituality
We should not, however, make the mistake of seeing the development of Eucharistic doctrine and devotion as being solely in response to heresy. In the things of God, developments often bring good out of evil but they are not determined by evil. The development of doctrine does not operate according to a hegelian dialectic of tension between opposites. Rather, in the providence of God, the developments which should come about peacefully are delayed through our hardness of heart. The Lord uses the pressing need of opposition to promote what ought to come about in any case.
We can argue that such was the case with Eucharistic devotion. In addition to the heretical movements which denied the fullness of the real presence of Christ, there was a remarkable incidence of extraordinary graces granted to St Juliana of Liege in emphasis of orthodox teaching. Juliana spent much of her life promoting the feast of Corpus Christi after receiving visions in her early life. Liege was a place of refuge for her after she met opposition in her own convent. However, in God’s providence, the Archdeacon of Liege, James Pantaleon, was warmly sympathetic to her. She suffered “persecutions in this life” and spent the declining years of her life in exile. However, her friend the Archdeacon of Liege became Pope Urban IV and instituted the feast of Corpus Christi six years after her death.
Whether the hymns for the office and Mass of the day can all be attributed reliably to St Thomas Aquinas or not, they certainly comprise a masterpiece of doctrinal statement and devotional content unequalled before or since. To look upon the scholastic refinement of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the production of such superb liturgical texts as the Pange Lingua and the Lauda Sion and the enormous growth of popular devotion to the Eucharist as a kind of corruption that must be purged so as to return to a supposedly purer previous state is surely archaeologism of the worst sort.
Need for Eucharistic adoration today
The development of Eucharistic adoration did not remain static from the time of the thirteenth century. In particular, the place of reservation of the Blessed Sacrament became more clearly central in the parish Church. As we have argued before (FAITH September 1993) the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in a tabernacle on the high Altar came about through reconciling the conflicting demands of security and popular devotion. The people wanted the hanging pyx visible to all in the centre of the Church. Those responsible for discipline were concerned for the security of the Blessed Sacrament in such an arrangement. The positioning of a solid secure tabernacle on the High Altar was the perfect solution. Now that we usually separate the main Altar of the Church from the East wall, it is possible also to overcome the objection of placing the tabernacle actually on the altar itself. The tabernacle can be in the centre of the Church, visible to all, the focus of devotion and prayer.
From the arrangement of a highly visible central tabernacle which rapidly spread throughout the Church during the counter-reformation, the practice of devotional “visits” to the Blessed Sacrament came to be encouraged and popularised more widely (although the practice had begun to develop earlier). It was always the most pastoral of saints, such as St Alphonsus, who encouraged this practice and it is worthwhile to reflect on the reasons for this.
After the breakdown of Christendom in the West, there was no longer a reliable backdrop of Catholic life in society. What has now become a total collapse of faith and morality did not suddenly happen in the twentieth century. The seeds of it were sown at the close of the scholastic period with the rise of nominalism. The disaster of the protestant reformation disrupted both Church and society. The advent of modernism and secular humanism is only the fuller development of those seeds of destruction sown centuries earlier.
Return to early Christian values
Where the return to early Christian values is most necessary is in the devotio and the pietas which characterised those early saints and martyrs in the Roman tradition. They saw the need to remain untarnished by “the world” and had the respect of Saint John the Divine for that enemy. For the post-reformation Catholic, there was once again a need for crystal-clear teaching and a strong devotional life nourished daily. The visit to the Blessed Sacrament is an ideal means, in the providence of God, for the nourishing in practice of those who were now to have to fight not only the spiritual warfare within but also the increasingly hostile world outside.
The need for such spirituality is more evident than ever today. The parish Church for many is a refuge from the bombardment of anti-Christian propaganda (increasingly anti-Catholic in our own news media) and from the spiritual breakdown which is such a sad part of so many families. Even the “good Catholic families” will be exceptional if they escape the heartbreak of at least one member losing the faith, and ending up with “problems”. It is in these situations that it is still possible, contrary to the glib assumptions of so many cynics, to “see how these Christians love one another”. The patience and forgiveness of many good Christian mothers and fathers in the face of utter betrayal is the sort of unsung heroism that has kept the Church afloat down the centuries.
For such people to be able to visit the Blessed Sacrament, to pour out their hearts to Christ whom they know to be truly present, is a tremendous consolation and source of grace. It is certainly no coincidence that the upsurge of all-night vigils, perpetual adoration and other eucharistic devotions in some places is at the heart of many unusually healthy “growth areas” in the western Church.
Need for development in theology
However, the popular devotions of the faithful have always called for the support of those who are able to do the necessary theological work. The body of Christ is made up of many parts and each must carry out its own task. We desperately need solid, intelligent theologians who will come to the aid of the people when their sense of the truth is challenged. The people need those who will answer the intellectual challenges and do so without fear of the loss of their career prospects. We need, in other words, the modern counterparts of Ignatius Loyola, Philip Neri, Francis de Sales and Alphonsus Liguori to risk vilification, jealousy, opposition and demotion as champions of the ordinary people of the Church.
In the case of the Eucharist, we need to develop the doctrine of transubstantiation against the background of modern science and its understanding of reality. We do not need to “do away” with transubstantiation. It is possible to offer a development in the understanding of reality in which the doctrine of the Eucharist itself is made clearer.
To understand each individual organism or “thing” in the world as a simple unit with its own matter and form is made difficult by modern physics. The evolution of living things certainly poses the greatest problems but the evolution of the galaxies is no less a conundrum. It is impossible to sustain a concept of matter in which each individual “thing” has its own unvarying substance and accidents. Through nuclear processes, some of which can even be crudely reproduced by us, the original “things” were very much in a state of flux. Yet this need not mean that we abandon all meaning and intelligibility in the material universe. The ordered development both of the galaxies and of the evolution of living things is itself evidence of a mind and a plan or law which gives meaning and intelligibility to even the smallest parts of the process.
The “substance” of any part of the universe would be relative to the overall law and wisdom of God which controls and directs the whole development of the material universe. There would not, on this view, be a substance “hiding behind” the accidents of bread and wine. Rather, the whole reality of the bread and wine are changed so that they become the whole reality of Jesus Christ. All that remains is the appearances of bread and wine. These are not some continuing accidental reality of bread and wine but the external manifestation of the human nature of Jesus Christ.
Reviving Corpus Christi, not Berengarius
Without such an understanding, it is almost impossible to avoid falling into a modern version of the error of Berengarius. Hymns speaking of Christ as “with us in the bread and wine” are not really harking back to the consubstantiation of Luther but to the more basic questions which exercised the minds of the scholastic theologians. Even a youngster who has dropped science early will be unimpressed with an approach which depends on the theory that in bread, there is normally an unchanging essence of breadness hidden behind the accidental reality of the bread. To defend the doctrine of transubstantiation, we must update it, though without losing its content.
We can offer an approach based on a concept of reality as created through evolution and in all its parts relative to the source of being himself in the wisdom of his plan. We might then hope to attract even the critically aware youngster to stay behind and “hear more of these things”.
The Spirit which gives life
What we will be offering is a life worthy of the human person and the full meaning of his place within the universe. Christ our Eucharist will himself be the one in whom our own reality is defined. We will, in other words, find our meaning and fulfilment in him and nowhere else. To make it possible to visit that very Christ, truly present in the Holy Eucharist, is to offer the perfect solacium because it is not simply an answer to a problem but the very meaning of our lives created for Christ the Son of Man. It will indeed be a “medieval” practice if by that we mean that it will help us to recover the sense of discovery and awe at the wisdom of God in all his works which inspired St Thomas, the Blessed Duns Scotus and their contemporaries. Were they alive today, they would expect us to be at the task.