My own understanding of the Anglican account of the eucharist has been fundamentally shaped by the teaching and preaching of Revd Dr Robert Crouse. I know many of you know of him and many have been influenced by his wonderful understanding of the Christian tradition, and especially of the Anglican way to articulate that tradition. I have been directly involved in trying to make something of Crouse’s teaching better known by the publication of some of his writings. I, together with two other co-editors, am in the process of assembling the papers he gave on an almost annual basis to the Atlantic Theological Conference from 1981–2007 – 25 papers all told. These papers range over a whole array of topics but generally have a common basis in what Crouse called ‘the Augustinian tradition’.
Crouse would regularly connect the theme of the Atlantic Theological Conference to Augustine, who would be presented as the culmination of patristic theology, bringing the previous four centuries to a kind of synthesis and fulfillment. But further, Crouse saw in Augustine the ground of a longer theological development often concluding with Dante, as the best realization of that Augustinian tradition. Usually central to Crouse’s reflections in any given year was not simply Augustine but more particularly the interconnected principles of the nature of God and the nature of the human soul as understood by Augustine. A central concern for Crouse was specifically the trinitarian structure of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and a corresponding image of that Trinity in the psychological powers of the soul as being or memory, intellect, and will. This trinitarian structure was, moreover, central in defining what constituted for him the Augustinian tradition. The essence of this tradition was in articulating human life as a pilgrimage of the human soul, as an image of God, to its proper likeness in returning to its principle as memoria Dei, intellectus Dei, voluntas Dei. In this Augustinian account that Crouse saw as foundational for the Latin Western tradition, the powers of the soul in their unity – in willing the known good – is love or amor, which itself is all the kinds of love that move the human soul, at once charity and desire and friendship and affection. So, the pilgrimage of the soul toward God is also the pilgrimage of human amor to union and conformity with the love that moves the sun and the other stars, as Dante concludes the Divine Comedy, illustrating the moto spiritale by which God moves both within himself and in all creation.
For Crouse, this Augustinian tradition comes to its most articulate and developed form in the High Middle Ages of Aquinas and Dante, in the artistry of Giotto or Nicolai and Giovanni Pisano. That Gothic synthesis was a beautiful, dynamic, and yet balanced integration of nature and grace, reason and revelation, secular and sacred, natural and supernatural, mediating and more and more completely interrelating and integrating the powers of the soul, so as to more deeply express and image and be united with the divine Trinity. All of this work of synthesis and reconciliation more deeply fulfills the soul’s own proper human happiness and integrity. However, Crouse described this high medieval Augustinian synthesis as ‘fragile’.1 In Crouse’s account, this synthesis is lost in various diverse and opposed ways in the late 13th and 14th centuries, whether in the voluntarism of Duns Scotus or the nominalism of William of Okham or again in the mysticism of Meister Ekhardt or the subjectivism of Petrarch – all contemporaries of Dante. Crouse argues that what were moments or aspects of the Augustinian tradition become in these moderni opposed and divided, incapable of reconciliation: faith and reason seem shorn apart by an unbridgeable gap, God’s freedom and power seems to stand apart from human comprehension and aspiration.
Crouse was perfectly aware that these new standpoints often presented themselves as Augustinian, but they did so by emphasizing one aspect of Augustine against another. In particular, the role of the human psychological Trinity as imaging the divine becomes more and more incomprehensible to these new, modern theological and spiritual developments. These new forms awaken a sense of a ‘self’ divorced from those psychological powers or established by taking up one of those powers as primary, above all in a new voluntarism. It is this modern sense of a radical self or subjectivity that expresses itself in the tensions and oppositions and spiritual uncertainties of the late-medieval or Renaissance world. It is of course this spiritual crisis that the Protestant Reformation responds to and crucially corrects.
However, for Crouse, in its very recovery of an Augustinian account of the primacy of Divine grace in the work of salvation, this Reformed corrective ironically had the tendency to actually further inscribe the oppositions and separations of the late Middle Ages. Here, the tendency in Luther and Calvin to make justification by faith alone complete and sanctification a working out of that justification in a divided and hostile world only reproduces in another form the effects of the disintegration of the high-medieval synthesis. To put this another way, there is an ambivalence in Luther’s account of proper righteousness. Does the justified sinner relate to the world from which he has been freed by faith as a hostile and opposed realm of sin both without and within him in which his faith is at war – simul justus et peccator? Or does he relate to the world as the created order in which that soul is now able to realize the fruits of salvation in a life of virtue and Christian fulfillment? Further, what has happened to the world from the standpoint of this justifying faith: is it now radically and paradoxically ‘beneath’ and ‘above’ the redeemed soul? As Luther writes: ‘A Christian man is the most free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian man is most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone’.2 Here, the Neoplatonic structure of participation and hierarchy, of substantial realities that structured the high-medieval synthesis and was destabilized in the late-medieval and Renaissance periods, seems altogether dissolved into a more radical otherness. As John Donne would later put it:
Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.3
Rather than recovering the Augustinian tradition in its medieval form, this Reformation standpoint has fundamentally rewritten it through a more deeply and individuated form of salvation through the salvation by an imputed assurance or certainty in the believer. This faith or assurance is, as Luther states, not a virtue. This more radical Protestant standpoint would come to criticize Richard Hooker and the Elizabethan settlement. But for Crouse, this standpoint is not so much a true reformation as a deformation of the Augustinian Tradition. What I am suggesting is that in the writings of Crouse, whose irenic disposition tended to avoid criticizing other standpoints, there is an implicit criticism of these more mainstream Protestant formulations. While the Protestant turn to the solae of grace, faith, and scripture is a crucial corrective to the Pelagian and destabilizing tendencies of late-medieval voluntarism and mysticism, the radicality of Protestant salvation by faith alone dissolved or undermined the forms of participation that were essential to the ‘moto spiritale’ Crouse saw as fundamental to the Augustinian tradition.4 More specifically, the role of the perfecting of the powers of the Augustinian soul through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity seemed lost or fundamentally reinterpreted.
What then distinguishes the English Reformation for Crouse is that by a wonderful grace, it retains in its reforming a crucial place for those Neoplatonic and Aristotelian structures of participation in and for sanctification. For this to happen, the English Reformers, most explicitly and fully in Hooker, but implicit in the Elizabethan settlement and above all in the Book of Common Prayer, are able to unite the Reformation corrective of late-medieval voluntarism while retaining the place for a Neoplatonic structure cosmically, psychologically, and institutionally. In this, the English Reformation is able more fully than most to return to and recover the Augustinian tradition in its original meaning, even while clarifying and expanding that meaning. The Prayer Book would recover, but also universalize and clarify beyond its medieval formulations, the Augustinian tradition. This is apparent in Cranmer’s transformation of liturgical acts that previously belonged to the priest or were done privately into actions of the whole congregation. More generally, as has often been remarked, the Prayer Book in its lectionary and daily offices sought to make England a national monastery, that is to say, a national community in pilgrimage. Hooker’s Laws is the most comprehensive account of just such a corporate spiritual undertaking.
All of this is a very long-winded way of trying to justify the argument of this paper. What I want to do is to build upon Crouse’s account here: that we find in the English Reformation a fulfillment and realization of what he calls the Augustinian tradition, and that central to that tradition is the Augustinian account of the human soul. Drawing on some remarks by Crouse, I want further to suggest that the eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, as it appears in The Book of Common Prayer, can and should be read as addressing that Augustinian structure of the soul, of human personality. I am not a scholar of the Reformation and so I make this claim with some trepidation and with a great deal of reliance on Crouse’s deeper knowledge. My argument does not rely on the notion that the role of the Augustinian soul in the Prayer Book eucharist needs to be understood as intentional, but rather, because the Augustinian tradition is so deeply present to the Latin Western Church, it is in fact altogether assumed and operative in the spirituality of that Church.
First, I need to say something more about what Augustine’s account of the soul is and how it is foundational for what Crouse identifies as the Augustinian Tradition. To really understand what Augustine is saying and doing in his account of human personality, we need to see that account in relation to the Neoplatonism he encountered prior to his conversion to Christianity. It is absolutely crucial to hold onto the correction and departure from Neoplatonism that Augustine engages in through his conversion to properly gauge the subordinated and transformed role of Neoplatonism in what Crouse calls the Augustinian tradition and especially in the English Reformation.
My basic point of contrast is that the fundamental logical structure of Neoplatonism is that of an emanation from the One resulting in a descent into multiplicity, first through the hypostasis of nous or mind and then that of psyche or soul, the principle of the natural and sensible world. These divine principles, which are equal and co-inherent in Christianity, are, in Neoplatonism, subject to a logic of subordination through division. The basic logic of Neoplatonism is of a division or difference subsequent to unity. The basic salvational activity of Neoplatonism is a return to the One, a principle that we have forgotten in our dispersal in sensible existence. In seeking union with the One, our divisions and differences are necessarily lost in the result. As many of you know, a crucial point for Augustine in the Confessions is that moment in Book VII, when he recounts his reading of some libri platonicorum – works of Neoplatonism – that enable him to overcome a materialism and finitude in his thinking that have crucially blocked his desire for unity with eternal Wisdom. In Book VII, he describes an ascent – or perhaps two ascents – to the One, to the God of Christian revelation, except lacking ‘the Word made flesh’. So, Augustine is converted to Platonism, and he remains throughout his life within this conversion and thus a Platonist. So much of what is at work in Augustine can be seen to be Platonic in general and, to a significant degree, Neoplatonic specifically.
But I want to emphasize the point that Augustine makes about the Platonic books in Book VII of the Confessions: that he did not read the Word made flesh there. As Crouse has argued in a number of articles, we need to see Augustine’s conversion to Christianity as a conversion of intellect and will that involves a conversion of principles. I want to suggest that Crouse points to three crucial aspects that belong to this conversion. The first is that of the Word made flesh, namely, that Christianity claims a mediation that as both fully human and fully divine is able to fully resolve the alienation of the human from the divine in a comprehensive fashion, and one that is – in principle – incapable of being achieved on purely Neoplatonic terms and so exceeds any Neoplatonic ascent to the One. Second, in Augustine, the way this mediation is effected is not simply inward but also by the Word appearing outwardly in the flesh, in scripture, and in preaching, and only through this externally received Word can there be an adequate inward conversion to effect the reconciliation of human and divine. Third, as the Word is made flesh, appearing externally and historically to reconcile from without, the God so manifested is not a One or triad of divine hypostases, but inherently a trinity of coequal persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This final distinction from Neoplatonism is the most important and foundational for the other two. It is the basis of philosophical and theological conversion in principle, of which Crouse writes:
The Augustinian formulation of God as Trinity constitutes a conversion in principio of Platonic theology and that distinction shapes decisively every aspect of Augustinian thought. Thus, while St. Augustine may speak in Plotinian fashion of the procession, formation and return of creation, the doctrine is actually very different: there are no mediating hypostases, nor descending triads of unity and distinction, precisely because the creative knowledge and will of God belong immediately to the Tri-personal unity of the divine substance. There is no tension between ontology and henology, precisely because the hypostases of being, knowing and willing, co-eternal and co-equal, belong immediately and, indeed, constitute the very substance of the One who is God. There is no divine One beyond their divine unity which is the Trinity. And if such a formulation appears as a systematic ‘simplification’ of Neoplatonism, it is not because it is a reversion to an earlier and ‘similar’ Platonism, rather it is a formulation that has taken into account both the problematic of Plotinian and post-Plotinian Neoplatonic theology and the problematic of post-Nicaean Christian theology (in the Arian controversy), and found a resolution. In this sense, it might accurately (if somewhat cumbrously) be described as a post-Nicaean and post-Arian Christian Platonism.5
For our purposes, the most important further implication of this conversion of Platonism is in the conception of human personality that emerges in Augustine, which is really the center of Crouse’s own intellectual work. Augustine comes to see the human as inherently trinitarian, as imago Dei. The discovery of this insight is central to the whole conversion of soul worked out in Augustine’s Confessions. A way to articulate this distinction between Augustine and Neoplatonism is to see that the Confessions is not a pursuit of unity, a movement beyond multiplicity, difference, and otherness per se. Rather it is an effort to move beyond difference only insofar as it is in a form corruptive of integrity, an integrity constituted by difference, specifically trinitarian difference-in-unity. So, salvation, return to the principle, is not by a movement simply to unity (henosis) but rather, it is one of more fully integrating difference in unity and discovering unity in difference. In particular, this integrity is evidenced by human personality becoming as fully as possible the trinitarian imago Dei. So, for Augustine, what the Word made flesh specifically does is to give us, in our union with God, the fulfillment of our human nature in all its humanity. For Augustine, this is finally attained, as he brings out at the end of De Trinitate, in the soul coming to find itself to be nothing other than memoria Dei, intellectus Dei, voluntas Dei.
In the course of the De Trinitate, and also in the Confessions, we can find any number of trinities – indeed, Augustine suggests there can be an infinity of them. These can vary from trinities that structure and inform the natural world, to trinities discovered in sensible experience, to trinities internal to and informing knowledge and love. None of these does Augustine call true images of God, of the divine Trinity. Only memory, intellect, and will or, better, memoria Dei, intellectus Dei, and voluntas Dei, comprise the imago Dei. What is remarkable is that this formulation appears to be original to Augustine.
For Crouse, Augustine’s Confessions is best understood as a journey or pilgrimage of amor, moving from the disordered love of the restless heart, the soul in inner diremption and outer confusion, to the Sabbath rest of that heart in the life of the Trinity, figured most explicitly and fully in Book XIII. This pilgrimage of amor is, for Crouse, articulated in three moments or levels that correspond to the logic of ‘ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora’ (from the exterior things to the interior, from the lower things to the higher). In the first part of the Confessions (the autobiographical account of the conversion of the life of Augustine (Book I–IX)), we are concerned with external things; in Book X, Augustine moves to the interiora and describes his inner life. In Books XI–XIII, he engages in an interpretation of the opening of the Book of Genesis, moving us to the superior things in a theological reflection on the conversion of creation. Further, Crouse argues that the same pattern recurs in each of these subdivisions. These patterns of conversion (for that is what ‘ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora’ is) become over the course of the Confessions more explicitly the conversion of the psychological triad of being or memory, intellect, and will to its Divine Trinitarian source, and so converting into, in the language of De Trinitate, memoria Dei, intellectus Dei, and voluntas Dei. Or in the terms of Book XIII of Confessions, this conversion occurs when the soul, upon discovering within itself the trinitarian image of being, knowing, and willing, comes to see above itself ‘that which immutably is, immutably knows, and immutably wills’.6
As Augustine makes clear at every point in the Confessions, this pattern of trinitarian conversion and pilgrimage, this pilgrimage of amor, is only made possible by the Incarnation, the Word made flesh. One way to put this is that the conversion, the pilgrimage of amor, is – to use a phrase of Augustine Crouse was fond of citing – ‘in melius renovabimur’, we are renewed into something better. This is to say that what the Word made flesh accomplishes is not simply a restoration of what was lost in Paradise, but a more complete relation of humanity to God, figured by the Church, and pointing to the City of God as the Sabbath Rest that concludes the Confessions:
You gathered a society of unbelievers to share a single common aspiration, so that the zeal of the faithful should ‘appear’ and so bring forth for you works of mercy, distributing to the poor their earthly possessions so as to acquire celestial reward.7
So the Word made flesh, the Incarnation, is that which effects and makes possible the transformation that is the whole pilgrimage of amor, the odyssey of the heart that is the argument of the Confessions, which finally comes to rest in the Sabbath of God.
We need to grasp what is really implied in the revelation of the Word made flesh because it is not a simple conjunction of terms – human and divine – already fully known among the Platonists. Central to this is that the human and the divine are no longer understood to be determined by a structure of descent from unity into difference (as for the Platonists). Rather, both the human person and the divine are understood by Augustine under the truth of Christian revelation as trinitarian: the whole logic of what is being mediated, as well as the mediator, is in need of conversion. This is the way Crouse brings out this point for Augustine:
It is certain, however, that for him, the reform of religion depended ultimately upon knowing the true mediator, and knowing the truth of that mediator depended upon knowing the truth of the trinitarian unity of God. Only on the basis of a very fundamental conversion of doctrine could pagan Platonists move beyond the idolatry of theurgy and follow, the true ‘via ad patriam’. ‘Paucis mutatis verbis’: only a few words needed to be changed, but they were crucial words.8
All of this, I want to suggest, is very much at work in the Classical Anglican account of the eucharist, which accomplishes the movement ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora in the participation of the communicant in the complete mediation of God and man in Christ found through faith in the bread and wine.
For the fathers of the early church the doctrine of the Incarnation cannot really be separated from the whole mediating work of Jesus in his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Indeed, Augustine makes this clear in Book VII of the Confessions when he discusses what he did not read in the Platonists – not only that there was not a divine-human mediator, but also that there was not the whole work of mediation and atonement effected in and by that mediator. Augustine tells us in Book VII:
In reading the Platonic books I found expressed in different words, and in a variety of ways, that the So ‘being in the form of the Father did not think it theft to be equal with God’, because by nature he is that very thing. But that ‘he took on himself the form of a servant and emptied himself, was made in the likeness of men and found to behave as a man, and humbled himself being made obedient to death, even the death of the Cross so that God exalted him’ from the dead ‘and gave him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of celestial, terrestrial, and infernal beings, and every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord in the glory of God the Father’ (Phil 2:6–11) – that these books do not have.9
To put this in the terms of that pattern of the Confessions that Crouse points to – ‘ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora’ – Christ must enter into the inferiora and the exteriora where he is to bring the reconciliation to us. Without this inferiority and exteriority in Christ there can be no real pattern of conversion. So, in Augustine’s conversion in Book VIII, it is by turning to the external physical scriptures and finding there the Word made flesh that the Word within can be discerned and can speak within. Equally in Book X, which is in a way about what would later be called sanctification, Augustine points to his need for the presence of the Word in the bread and wine of communion. So, the Word must be made precisely flesh: inferior and exterior, that we may be able to enter into our interiority and rise from there to the God above us, and so we may undertake the pilgrimage of amor.
From the gathering of his inner life as a Christian as the life of the love of God, in Book X, Augustine then asks if he will not fall out of this love into lust and into concupiscence through temptation. He looks to Christ as the mediator who has been both subject to temptation in his humanity and remained whole as the Word made flesh, who can heal him in this terrible possibility of a return to inner diremption. And of course, this is the central work of the eucharist. What is this saying? This is what the Word made flesh crucially means: we are not saved in spite of our humanity, but in and through it. God can be fully God and fully human.
The true Mediator you showed to humanity in your secret mercy. You sent him so that from his example they should learn humility. He is ‘the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim 2:5). He appeared among mortal sinners as the immortal righteous one, mortal like humanity, righteous like God. Because the wages of righteousness are life and peace (Rom 6:23), being united with God by his righteousness he made void the death of justified sinners, a death which it was his will to share in common with them. He was made known to the ancient saints so that they could be saved through faith by his future passion, just as we are saved through faith in his passion now that it is past.10
As Crouse argues against Gustav Aulen and others, we find in Augustine and the patristic tradition as a whole an account of atonement that is at once the classic doctrine of defeating the powers of evil, the Latin doctrine of propitiatory sacrifice, and the subjective view of exemplary work.11 Equally, there is here both the objective structure of redemption as mercy fulfilling justitia, and the inward or subjective work of restoring and perfecting amor. In this our humanity is more deeply affirmed. For Augustine the ascent to God, deification, does not dissolve us or move us beyond our humanity, but rather more completely establishes that humanity in its determinateness, its created and recreated goodness. All of this is at work in the Prayer Book eucharist.
A way to think about this point in relation to God is through the resurrection and ascension of Christ or, in us, through the hope of our reincarnation. We seek our unity with God not in opposition to our individual and distinctive embodiment but in and through it. This embodied and therefore liturgical account of salvation is all implied in the conversion of the principles of Neoplatonism in Augustine, and more specifically the transformation of human personality as the trinitarian image of God redeemed in and through the transhumanizing perfecting of those powers through the grace of the Word made flesh, that is foundational for the Augustinian tradition, according to Crouse. It is through this lens that I want now to consider the Prayer Book eucharist.
The classical Anglican account of the eucharist is simultaneously a receptionist account and one that affirms real presence. The eucharist is at once an act of inner remembrance and an affirmation that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ:
The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life: Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.
And the Minister that delivereth the Cup shall say, The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life: Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for thee, and be thankful.
Article XXVIII make the same point with clarity. Denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, they affirm:
The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.
So, the ‘real presence’ of the body and blood of Christ are in and through the faith of the believer, and the bread and wine are referred to as the body and blood of Christ as they are this in faith for the believer who properly or duly receives them. It is crucial that we hold to the Reformed view that this faith is no mere human work. It is not a humanly contrived psychological state: that would be to make it a ‘work’ and as such entirely unreliable. It is not an interpretive or hermeneutical standpoint, even as it ‘interprets’ or makes present in and through the public service of the Church the bread and wine as the real presence of Christ. That is all God working in us: nothing else could make that presence real for us. Faith ‘interprets’, not we ourselves.
Now what I want to suggest is that because of the peculiar character of the English Reformation (or at least according to the account I am attributing to Crouse), it is entirely reasonable to interpret the meaning of this receptionist account of real presence through an Augustinian account of human personality, the Augustinian soul. I think if we do so, certain apparent tensions in the eucharist can be seen to actually be articulations of a coherent standpoint. Another way of putting this is to note where the real presence occurs if it is not in the bread or wine per se. It is in the faith or in the soul of the believer receiving the bread and wine and possessing at once the justification and virtue of faith granted to that soul by God’s redeeming grace – given together, as Hooker argues in his A Learned Discourse on Justification.12
For the Augustinian tradition, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity are perfections of the rational powers of the trinitarian soul. Faith is the perfection of intellect, hope is the perfection of will, and charity is the perfection of the soul as amor or as trinitarian unity: loving the known good. In this account, memory does not have a virtue relative to it, but functions as the ground or being of the active powers of intellect and will.13 And, as we have already begun to see, the language of memory and remembrance is crucial to the receptionist account of the Prayer Book eucharist.
The first point to make about looking at the eucharist through the Augustinian account of personality is that this account liberates us from a merely external and particular sense of memory as the subjective recall of past events. Indeed, as none of us living experienced the crucifixion, it is difficult to say how we can remember it. A much broader and deeper account of memory is needed even to make sense of the mere memory of recalling this past event. So, this memory is somehow the possession of the Church and of the faith in the believer. But the Augustinian account of memory so powerfully developed in Book X of the Confessions and in the final books of De Trinitate provides us with an altogether more profound sense of the soul than even this sense of a corporate or received memory. And it is this deeper Augustinian account of memory I want to suggest is assumed in the Prayer Book eucharist as a rite that brings forth in the soul the real presence of Christ out of memory as a work of divine grace in the soul of the believer. Here I want to quote some words from Crouse that help to explain this point about memory very effectively:
The conception of memory I have in mind here is the conception familiar to many of you as so marvelously worked out by St Augustine in Book X of the Confessions, and elaborated still more fully on the analogy of Trinitarian theology in his De Trinitate. This conception is obviously much more than the notion of memory as a storehouse or dustbin of assorted facts and fancies, the detritus of experience. Memory includes the very principles of knowledge, without which what we call ‘experience’ would not even be possible.14
This is the crucial point in the Augustinian account of memory as the first moment or aspect of our souls as imago Dei in the context of the eucharist. Memory is not opposed to presence, to present experience, but is its necessary ground and basis. For some the combining of the language of ‘presence’ – ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ…’ – with the language of memory – ‘Take and eat this in remembrance…’ – can appear to arise from contradictory accounts of the eucharist as either real presence or memorial. However, as Crouse argues, these are in fact two aspects of a unified, but Trinitarian Augustinian account of the soul’s relation to the eucharist, which point to its inward spiritual meaning:
For our present purposes, however, the essential point is simply this: memory is the ground of our attention in the present and our expectation of the future. The concreteness and sanity of our present understanding and judgments will depend quite radically upon the clarity and the integrity of memory. Without that dimension, we would be as those who suffer a crippling amnesia, which renders them disoriented, and (in the etymological sense of the word) idiotic.15
This Augustinian account allows us to see the eucharist as a ritual act of anamnesis. Crouse reminds us that, ‘Anamnesis (or remembrance) is the technical term: the presence of the past in all its virtue, the historical past as present reality for present understanding and adoration’.16
It is precisely such an understanding of the eucharist as anamnesis that Cranmer invokes in his account:
The priest should declare the death and passion of Christ, and all the people should look upon the cross in the Mount of Calvary, and see Christ there hanging, and the blood flowing out of his side into their wounds to heal all their sores; and the priest and people all together should laud and thank instantly the surgeon and physician of their souls.17
Crouse summarizes Cranmer’s account by stating:
That anamnesis, that looking upon Cavalry, that holy recollection, that must be the ground of our discernment in the present and our expectation of the future; for thus the Holy Spirit works to bring to our remembrance all that Christ has taught us, to show us things to come, and thus to lead us into all truth.18
Cranmer makes this same point in a number of other places, explaining and defending the inward nature of the real presence of Christ in and through the relation of memory to that presence:
In my book I have written in more than an hundred places, 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. 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.19
Or again, ‘The same flesh that was given in Christ’s last supper was given also upon the cross, and is given daily in the ministration of the sacrament’.20 ‘I do not say that Christ’s body and blood be given to us in signification and not in deed. But I do as plainly speak as I can, that Christ’s body and blood be given to us in deed, yet not corporally and carnally, but spiritually and effectually’.21 Following Eusebius and Ambrose, Cranmer speaks of ‘sacramental mutation’ and argues that
this mutation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ is a sacramental mutation, and that outwardly nothing is changed. But as outwardly we eat the bread and drink the wine with our mouths, so inwardly by faith we spiritually eat the very flesh and drink the very blood of Christ…22
‘Through grace there is a spiritual mutation by the mighty power of God, so that he who worthily eateth of that bread, doth spiritually eat Christ, and dwelleth in Christ, and Christ in him’.23
So, it is in the ground and seat of memory conceived in this capacious Augustinian sense that the past event is made spiritually but really present. Remembrance and presence are not opposed. It is in and through memory that the saving, redeeming, reconciling, and sufficient sacrifice of Christ is made present in faith. And faith here, as Hooker argues, is at once the faith of our justification and the perfection of intellect, which is for Augustine precisely the power of presence, of present knowledge, but that knowledge as transhumanized by grace.24
Cranmer’s younger contemporary and Hooker’s patron, Bishop Jewel, makes this same point about the eucharist as an act both of remembrance and of real presence simultaneously in powerful terms:
Here in a mystery and sacrament of bread is set before us the body of Christ our Saviour, and his blood in the sacrament of wine. We see one thing, we must conceive another thing … There may we see the crucifying of his body, and the shedding of his blood, as it was in a glass … There let us say, This is the ransom of the world … By this body I am no more earth and ashes: by this I am not now a bondman, but made free. This body hath broken the gates of hell, and hath opened heaven … In this body shall Christ come again to judge the quick and the dead.25
Crouse notes of this passage:
It would, indeed, be hard to imagine a more graphic expression of the Biblical and Augustinian concept of sacramentum memoriae a concept at the heart of the sacramental theology of the English Reformation, as expressed particularly in the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.26
He argues:
Crammer and his colleagues – but especially Crammer himself, in his apologetic writings, liturgies, homilies and articles – inaugurated a distinctive tradition of sacramental theology, firmly grounded in the Scripture and the ancient Fathers, which remained remarkably consistent through the theology of the Elizabethan Settlement and the Caroline Divines, so as to constitute a defining characteristic of Classical Anglicanism.27
In this ultimately Augustinian account, the external word in the sacrament awakens the internal word present through faith’s possession of the Son sitting eternally now at the right hand of the Father. So in the presencing of memory not only is the past event – Christ on the Cross in his redeeming and sufficient sacrifice once offered – made present, made now, so that the believer discerns in and through present faith Christ’s real bodily presence now, but this is at once the taking up of the soul from the temporal now into the Eternal Now of the divine presence ad superioribus. Crouse puts it this way:
Liturgy effects that dramatic conflation of temporal divisions in a special way, because it has an explicit point of reference in the ‘Eternal Now’, in which all moments are contemporary; in which, as Eliot puts it, ‘all is always one’. It has its focus in the still point on which the dance of time depends, ‘that point from which depend the heavens and the whole of nature’. Liturgy has, therefore, a deep and special sense of the contemporary, but I think that its perspective may also well serve as the ideal paradigm of all commemoration.28
This is the transubstantiation within us as through the presence effected in memory whereby the soul is united with God and grace transubstantiates or, as Dante would put it, transhumanizes our Augustinian soul by the effectual means of grace.
This real presence then effects not only memory and discerning intellect, but also our will, the third moment of Augustinian personality, by effecting in us a whole series of willed undertakings to make this liturgical moment a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and to make of our lives a sacrifice that can now be offered from out of that transformed inwardness. That will finds itself free to do this through our being taken up into our end of fellowship by being ‘heirs through hope’. As Crouse points out, hope is the theological virtue of pilgrimage, and it is to the life of the pilgrim that the eucharist orients us in our heritage of hope.29
So, we have moved from memory to intellect and from intellect to will in the eucharistic rite as the Augustinian soul receives and is the place of the real presence of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. As such, the soul is being conformed to its end as memoria Dei, intellectus Dei, and voluntas Dei. As such, the eucharist has wrought a transubstantiation of the heart, the seat of amor, now conformed and united with the love of God. So that the true presence of Christ is in the charity that is made present in the heart or soul of the believer reconciled with God and turning to good works, having received the blessing of friendship with God and neighbor. So affected and taken up, we go forth retaining the effects of that eucharistic presence through
The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts, and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ, our Lord.
My argument, very much relying on the teaching of Crouse, has been that precisely the classically Anglican account of real or true presence in the eucharist effected in and by faith in the believer is grounded in and made possible by an Augustinian account of Trinitarian personality. It is the assumption of just such an account that makes the service found in the Book of Common Prayer entirely consistent and profound, finding in the eucharist not a moment of disenchantment, but of a more deeply incorporating enchantment in which the soul of the believer is the place where the real presence of Jesus Christ effected in the eucharist affords a dynamic and effecting work of spiritual nourishment to our eternal good.