Berengar in the 11th century assailed this view, which was really that of transubstantiation, alleging that there is no substance in matter apart from the accidents, and that therefore Christ cannot be corporally present in the sacrament; because, if so, he must be spatially present, and there will be two material bodies in one space; moreover his body will be in thousands of places at once. Christ, he said, is present spiritually, so that the elements, while remaining what they were, unremoved and undestroyed, are advanced to be something better: omne cui a Deo benedicatur, non absumi, non auferri, non destrui, sed manere et in melius quam erat necessario provehi. This was the phrase of Gregory of Nyssa.
Berengar in a weak moment in 1059 was forced by the pope to recant and assert that “the true body and blood are not only a sacrament, but in truth touched and broken by the hands of the priests and pressed by the teeth of the faithful,” and this position remains in every Roman catechism. Such dilemmas as whether a mouse can devour the true body, and whether it is not involved in all the obscenities of human digestive processes, were ill met by this ruling. Each party dubbed the other stercoranists (dung-feasters), and the controversy was often marred by indecencies.
As in the 3rd century the Roman church decided in respect of baptism that the sacrament carries the church and not the church the sacrament, so in the dispute over the Eucharist it ended, in spite of more spiritual views essayed by Peter Lombard, by insisting on the more materialistic view at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, whose decree runs thus:—“The body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread and wine respectively being transubstantiated into body and blood by divine power, so that in order to the perfecting of the mystery of unity we may ourselves receive from his (body) what he himself receives from ours.” In 1264 Urban IV. instituted the Corpus Christi Feast by way of giving liturgical expression to this view.
Communion in One Kind.—Up to about 1100 laymen in the West received the communion in both kinds, and except in a few disciplinary cases the wine was not refused. In 1099, by a decree of Pope Paschal II., children might omit the wine and invalids the bread. The communion of the laity in the bread alone was enjoined by the council of Constance in 1415, and by the council of Trent in 1562. The reformed churches of the West went back to the older rule which Eastern churches had never forsaken.
Mass.—The term mass, which survives in Candlemas, Christmas, Michaelmas, is from the Latin missa, which was in the 3rd century a technical term for the dismissal of any lay meeting, e.g. of a law-court, and was adopted in that sense by the church as early as Ambrose (c. 350). The catechumens or unbaptized, together with the penitents, remained in church during the Litany, collect, three lections, two psalms and homily. The deacon then cried out: “Let the catechumens depart. Let all catechumens go out.” This was the missa of the catechumens. The rest of the rite was called missa fidelium, because only the initiated remained. Similarly the collect with which often the rite began is the prayer ad collectam, i.e. for the congregation met together or collected. The corresponding Greek word was synaxis.
After the catechumens were gone the priest said: “The Lord be with you, let us pray,” and the service of the mass followed.
In the West, says Duchesne (Origines, p. 179), not only catechumens, but the baptized who did not communicate left the church before the communion of the faithful began (? after the communion of the clergy). In Anglican churches non-communicants used to leave the church after the prayer for the Church Militant. Ritualists now keep unconfirmed children in church during the entire rite, through ignorance of ancient usage, in order that they may learn to adore the consecrated elements. For this moment of homage to material elements ritually filled with divine potency may be so exaggerated as to obscure the rite’s ancient significance as a communion of the faithful in mystic food.
Ideas of Reformers.—The 16th-century reformers strove to avoid the literalism of the words “This is my body,” accepted frankly by the Roman and Eastern churches, and urged a Receptionist view, viz. that Christ is in the sacrament only spiritually consumed by worthy recipients alone, the material body not being actually chewed. This is seen by a comparison of other confessions with the Profession of Catholic Faith in accordance with the council of Trent, in the bull of Pius IV., which runs thus:—
“I profess that in the Mass is offered to God a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice, for the living and the dead, and that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there is truly really and in substance the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that there does take place a conversion of the entire substance of the bread into the body, and of the entire substance of the wine into the blood, which conversion the Catholic Church doth call Transubstantiation. I also admit that under one of the other species alone the entire and whole Christ and the true sacrament is received.”
The 28th Article of Religion of the Church of England is as follows:—