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On the Sacraments
St Ambrose of Milan, tr. Thompson, 1919
Book 6, The Reality of the Gift of Christ’s Flesh and Blood in the Sacrament is Shown and…
As our Lord Jesus Christ is the true Son of God, not after the manner of men, through grace, but as a son of the essence of his father, so it is true flesh, as he himself said,1 which we receive, and his true blood is our drink.
But perchance thou mayest say, what the disciples of Christ also said then when they heard him saying: Unless a man eat my flesh and drink my blood, he shall not dwell in me, nor shall he have eternal life2—perchance thou mayest say: “How are these things real? I who see the likeness, do not see the reality of blood.”
First of all, I told thee of the word of Christ, which acts so that it can change and alter the appointed forms3 of nature. Then when the disciples of Christ endured not his saying, but hearing that he gave his flesh to eat and gave his blood to drink, they turned back; but Peter alone said: Thou hast the words of eternal life, and how shall I withdraw from thee?4 Accordingly, lest others should say this, feeling a shrinking from actual blood, and that yet the grace of redemption might remain, therefore thou receivest the sacrament in a similitude, but truly obtainest the grace and virtue of the nature.5
I am, says he, the living bread which came down from heaven.6 But flesh did not come down from heaven, that is to say, he took flesh of the Virgin on earth. How then did bread come down from heaven, and that, too, living bread? Because our Lord Jesus Christ is alike a sharer both in divinity and body. And thou who receivest his flesh partakest of his divine essence in that food.
Notes
- Jn. vi. 55.
- The quotation is a conflation of Jn. vi. 53, 54, 56.
- genera instituta. Some MSS. read “genera et instituta” (so Lanfranc). Erasmus has instituta generalia, “the general ordinances.”
- Jn. vi. 68 (quoted freely).
- The meaning is that, though the communicant receives the body of Christ “in a similitude” (i. e. under the forms of bread and wine), yet he no less truly receives the virtue of the reality, i. e. the body of Christ. The outward appearance of the bread is a “symbol,” or “similitude,” but it is a symbol of a “grace” and “virtue” which are truly received. The author, who has hitherto expressed himself in such realistic terms as to the conversion of the elements into the Body and Blood of Christ, here falls back upon the earlier language current in East and West and represented in the prayers of the Canon quoted by him in iv. 5. 21 (“the figure (figura) of the body and blood of Christ”). See Introd. pp. xviii, xxxvii.
- Jn. vi. 51. Cf. de Myst. viii. 47.