“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and
giveth life unto the world.”
In the spring of 1983, Marilyn and I were in Florence for the Feast of Corpus Christi. We processed around the cathedral with the Sacrament, singing Martin Luther’s great hymn ‘Ein’ Feste Burg’, before attending Mass. More than just an ecumenical moment it conveyed a deeper sense of the larger meaning of the catholic faith.
The Feast of Corpus Christi goes back to the 13th century and became ‘universal’, at least in the West, in the 14thcentury. Through the influence of “Blessed Juliana of Liege,” at whose insistence the institution of the feast is attributed (c. 1240), and along with the Eucharistic devotions of Thomas Aquinas, which have become associated with the Feast, the celebration of Corpus Christi belongs to a Western Christian interest in the question about our participation in the saving work of Christ.
The Feast emerges out of the cauldron of controversy about the meaning of the Holy Eucharist as the central act of Christian worship. Celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, it relates back to the “Institution of the Holy Eucharist” on Maundy Thursday but without the overwhelming concentration on the Passion during Holy Week. In this Feast, the institution of the Holy Eucharist is looked at from the standpoint of our being continually sustained by the fruits of his Passion through the divinely ordained means of our participation by grace in the divine life itself.
The Reformers did not retain this feast in their various calendars of commemoration. Why? Because, in my view, at the time of the Reformation the Feast had become associated with a particular theory about the action of the Mass, namely, “transubstantiation,” albeit in a form hardly recognizable as deriving from Thomas. Cranmer and the subsequent English Reformers were countering what Fr. Crouse called “a superstitiously materialistic notion of the Presence, popularly associated … with a debased idea of transubstantiation”, and one which undermined the Chalcedonian sacramentalism to which classical Anglicans were committed as constituting an important aspect of essential catholicism.
Cranmer says “That we receive the self-same body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified and buried, that rose again, ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty: and the contention is only in the manner and form how we receive it.” The insistence on the Real Presence did not mean subscription to a theory of transubstantiation. Later in the 17th century, John Bramhall would point out that there were numerous theories of transubstantiation arising out of late medieval scholasticism. Which one were you supposed to believe? What was at issue was the attempt by the Council of Trent to make subscription to transubstantiation de fides,a matter of essential faith; in effect, adding to the consensus fidelium of the universal and catholic faith new doctrines as essential to salvation.
As Cranmer puts it,
For I say (as all the old holy fathers and martyrs used to say), that we receive Christ spiritually by faith with our minds, eating his flesh and drinking his blood; so that we receive Christ’s own very natural body, but not naturally nor corporally.
In short, spiritually, not corporally, not carnally. This way of thinking belongs to the sacramental theology of the English Church expressed in the classical Books of Common Prayer. Bramhall recognized a hundred years after Cranmer that it was really a matter of theological opinion and not something that required subscription as a matter of essential faith. Some of the theories were spectacularly silly such as Deus est panis, ‘God is bread,’ which illustrates rather nicely Augustine’s point about taking literally what is meant to be understood figuratively or spiritually.
What was of uttermost importance was maintaining the Christological paradigm articulated in the Chalcedonian Doctrine about the distinction and unity of the divine and human in the person of Christ. As Crouse puts it, “characteristic of that conception is the insistence that the natural element, the outward and visible sign, retains always its natural integrity [grace does not destroy nature], while it becomes the instrument of a supernatural presence [the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament]; thus exemplifying the basic Augustinian and Thomistic theological principle, that grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.”
In general, the Reformers wanted to preserve the same insights as Thomas, captured, for instance, in the words of his hymn Tantum Ergo, “faith our outward sense befriending makes the inward vision clear”. We participate in something divinely instituted which is an effective sign of the grace of God for us in our lives. Against a carnal understanding of the Eucharist, the Reformers wanted to emphasize the spiritual nature of communion. Our English Reformers, for the most part, did not want to go as far as Ulrich Zwingli in asserting a bare or empty memorial; hence the critical language of the Articles which stresses that the sacraments are “effectual signs,” namely, that they effect what they signify. Whatever they are operatur operatum, they are intended for the effect of grace in the soul of the receiver without falling into the fatal trap of making the individual faith of the receiver the measure of the effectiveness of the sacrament.
Richard Hooker, for instance, talks about a transubstantiation in us as belonging to the purpose or the intent of the Sacrament. The insight of the Reformers, again in general and as expressing an important outlook related to the beginnings of early modernity, is to recognize that the individual receiver must take hold of the grace that is given, taking hold subjectively of what is presented objectively. Hooker again argues that something has to be effectively and objectively there in order for it to take shape effectively and subjectively in us.
The Feast itself did not appear in Anglican practice until the 19th century Catholic Revival, resulting in the establishment of Propers for the feast in the various Anglican Missals. While not a “Prayer Book Feast” per se, it nonetheless belongs to the “Anglo-Catholic” tradition within Anglicanism, a kind of catholic extra, as it were. On the other side, in the 19th century and beyond, among those of an Evangelical persuasion there was a repugnance against the Feast because of its Romanist associations. In my view, this is an essentially negative position: defining oneself by virtue of not doing what Rome does. Of course, one could argue that Anglo-Catholics have observed it on the basis of doing what Rome does.
Perhaps both positions can be safely set aside by concentrating on what is a more pressing and necessary consideration and one which lies at the heart of the institution of The Feast of Corpus Christi, namely, the recognition of a desire to consider the ordained means of our participation in the life of God opened to view through the sacrifice of Christ. The Feast of Corpus Christi should not mean the assertion of a particular theory of the Eucharist. The insistence of Article XXV about the sacraments as “effectual signs of grace” or, as Hooker puts it, “instruments of salvation unto eternal life,” belongs to a Reformed and Catholic emphasis on the complementary nature of Word and Sacrament. The strong objectivity of the Word proclaimed and the serene objectivity of the Sacraments celebrated are precisely the things that are needed to be stressed and emphasized now and always.
Anglicans should acknowledge this Feast simply as a “liturgical extra,” optional not mandatory, and as such for the sake of “tender consciences.” Equally, it provides a wonderful opportunity to teach about the central importance of the Eucharist with respect to the Doctrine of the Trinity. We participate in nothing less than the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. What we are born into at baptism we are sustained and grow into more fully through the faithful reception of the Sacrament of the Altar.
From a Prayer Book perspective or, at least, one which wants to honour the essential catholicism of the Common Prayer tradition, the Feast can provide a wonderful occasion to give thanks for the ordained means whereby we are given by grace to participate in the saving work of Christ for us and, in the very life of God which his sacrifice affords. It also provides a special sense of appreciation for the significance of the sacramental life of the Church which the exhortations to Communion (so rarely read or heard, see BCP, pp. 88-92) convey.
At a time when there is much controversy and talk about who is in communion with whom, perhaps we need to focus on the primary form of communion, namely, our communion with God in the blessed communion of the Trinity, the only love without which all our loves are, indeed, nothing worth. In charity, we may forbear a great many things, including the forms of impaired communion among various Christians, by being recalled to the primacy of our communion with God. “Behold,” John tells us in his Revelation, “a door has been opened in heaven” through which we are privileged to participate in the divine life. We do so through the sacramental life of the Church despite the failings and sinfulness of the churches and our own sins.
Fr. David Curry
2005, revised 2007 & 2026