Medieval Degeneration

In his Wedding Feast of the Lamb , Roch Kereszty briefly summarizes some of the ways that the Eucharist degenerated in the late medieval period: “Instead of stressing the building up of Christ’s body the church as the ultimate effect of the Eucharist, the Late Middle Ages saw the Eucharist primarily as spiritual nourishment, healing, and consolation.  The proliferation and multiplication of Mass stipends necessitated reflection on the relationship of the one sacrifice of the cross and the many sacrifices of the mass.  Duns Scotus and Gabriel Biel explained the need for the many Masses by pointing out that, while the value of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is infinite, the individual Mass is only of finite value.  The reason lies, according to them, in the difference of the subject of the sacrifice.  While it has some reference to the sacrifice of the cross, the immediate subject of the eucharistic sacrifice is the Church whom the officiating priest represents.  The priest offers Christ himself to the Father, yet the value of his offering depends on the merits of all the members of the Church at that time.  Evidently, this sum total of the members’ merits is finite at every moment of the Church’s history.”

He notes the reduction of “active participation” in the Eucharist, the unintelligibility of the Latin, the mysteriological piety reflected in the allegorical interpretations of every detail of the Mass.  In this context, he admits – Catholic though he is – that “Luther and Calvin, to some extent, revitalized eucharistic theology and piety if compared to the sterile speculations of the Late Middle Ages . . . .

“They restored the communitarian character of the celebration, emphasized the importance of frequent communion and the absolutely gratuitous gift of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.  Calvin also rightly insisted on the role of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist.”  In his view, however, their rejection of transubstantiation, eucharistic sacrifice, and adoration of the elements “compromised the eucharistic faith of the Church.”

Twentieth-century Catholic eucharistic theology, however, overcame the late medieval corruptions, and Kereszty provides a neat list of the contributions to Eucharistic theology from Casel’s conception of “mystery” to Rahner’s theology of symbol to de Lubac’s recovery of the original theology of the triple body.  On eucharistic sacrifice, he notes that recent Catholic theologians have recovered a more patristic and Thomist emphasis: “not only is the victim and principal offerer the same Jesus Christ, but every ecclesial offering of that sacrifice participates in Jesus’ one-and-the-same act of self-offering.”  The Mass is a “sacramental representation in the sense of making present here and now the one sacrifice.”