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This chapter sets out three proofs that Christ is not corporeally present in the Sacrament. The first lies in the distinction drawn between sacramental and spiritual eating; the second is an exposition of Hebrews 10 against Thomas, and the third is the proposition that the body of Christ cannot be in a plurality of places, and being in Heaven it cannot be in the Eucharist. For this last proposition he relies upon Cyril of Alexandria; for the first two almost exclusively upon Augustine.

First proof: Sacramental and spiritual eating according to Peter Lombard and Hugh of St. Victor is contrary to that as defined by Augustine. According to the

transubstantiationalists sacramental eating is the physical reception of the Sacrament, in which both the faithful and the wicked eat of the body of Christ. Spiritual eating is a non-physical activity, not necessarily related to the reception of Holy Communion ‘when there is no contempt of religion, sufficient without sacramental manducation’. (Hugh of St Victor.)170Augustine, says Forbes, understands sacramental and spiritual eating differently. ‘He contrasts sacramental with true and real manducation; visible with invisible: but spiritual manducation alone he terms invisible, true, real; while those who do not eat spiritually, but only sacramentally, eat only the visible

sacrament—the outward part, but do not truly and really eat the flesh of Christ, like this who ate the manna in the wilderness and are dead’.171

Second proof: ‘We will vindicate first, the words to the sacred text to the Hebrews (10 :1) to which Thomas attaches a foreign sense…that according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Old Law contained the shadow , but not “the very image” of the good things to come, …so the sacrifice of the New Law should contain Christ himself crucified, not only in signification and figure, but in the truth of the thing’.172

Forbes first turns to Chrysostom, according to whom the good things are ‘the sacrifice’ and ‘the forgiveness’. Forbes writes, ‘That is the offering of the Incarnate

170

Ibid., p. 87.

171_{Ibid., p. 87.} 172_{Ibid., p. 90.}

Christ for us in his Passion, being now finished is not to be repeated…’.173So he says also write Theodoret and Oecumenius. He then turns to Augustine inContra Faustum,

for a thorough examination of the Promises of the Old Testament unveiled in the New, ‘…in the Old the grace of the New was veiled: in the New the obscurity of the Old was unveiled’.174‘From these it is evident’, says Forbes, ‘that the passage to the Hebrews makes nothing for the corporal presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For it is not the Eucharist that is treated of there, but the bloody offering of Christ himself once made’. He adds, ‘And of this Eucharist, albeit commemoration, yet not iteration’.175

Forbes engages in a long argument against Bellarmine, who states in hisde Eucharistia,Book I, that those who drank of the rock in the Wilderness drank of Christ as God. Forbes’ argument is that as the Israelites in the wilderness drank the water from the rock, and ate the manna, they received Christ in sign,‘From these it is clearly evident that the Rock, according to the mind of Augustine, and the water flowing from the material rock were a sacrament of Christ signifying to the

understanding the same thing as the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, although another thing in visible species, and that those believing Fathers [of Israel] drank the sameres sacramenti, the inward thing signified, as we, that is the true flesh and blood of Christ’.176Forbes also quotes Chrysostom to the same effect.

In this same proof Forbes argues against Bonaventure who suggests that the words of Jesus in St. Matthew 28, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world’, as being understood as the corporal presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the

Eucharist.177He quotes Augustine ‘…according to that which was born of the Virgin, according to that… which was laid in the sepulchre, which was manifested in his Resurrection, “Me you have not always”. Wherefore? Because… He ascended into Heaven and is not here, for he sitteth at the right hand of the Father; and He is here; for the presence of His Majesty (His Godhead and grace) did not depart’.178

‘Augustine’, Forbes wrote, ‘ does not reserve an invisible corporal presence on

173_{Ibid., p. 90.} 174_{Ibid., p. 91.} 175_{Ibid., p. 92.} 176 Ibid., p. 93. 177_{Ibid., p. 94.} 178_{Ibid., p. 94.}

earth…he argues from the Ascension into Heaven that that He may take away all expectation of corporal presence and eating, “And so,” [Augustine] says, “a

Sacrament is commended to us to be eaten indeed carnally, but to be understood not carnally but spiritually”’.179

Thethird proof: ‘The body of Christ is not in a plurality of places at the same time; therefore being in Heaven, it is not substantially present in the Eucharist’. With the exception of a few brief quotations from other Fathers, the entirety of the argument is drawn from Cyril of Alexandria.

Forbes begins his discussion with a number of penetrating quotations from Cyril’sOn the Gospel of St. Johnfrom which he draws the following four points. 1) ‘The Flesh of Christ is life to partakers of the Eucharist’. Those who approach unworthily do not eat the flesh of Christ. 2) ‘This comes to pass, not by the virtue of the flesh, as the flesh, but by virtue of the Deity, to which the flesh is hypostatically united, and our salvation and all the wonderful effects belonging to it, are also attributed to the glory of the Deity’. 3) ‘For the effecting of these things the corporal presence of the flesh is not required, nor to be desired’. 4) ‘These things Christ effects by the power of his Deity, his flesh being absent from us but the ineffable power of his Deity being present with us’.180

Forbes’ point from Cyril is that Christ was present in human flesh to enable humanity to have salvation through him, but that salvation was not through the human flesh of Jesus; it was through the divine action of the Word hypostatically united with him. When Christ was with his disciples, it was his Godhead, not his flesh of itself, who saved them. Now absent from them, it is still his Godhead who saves them, no less now than then. And that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit interpenetrate each other so that we will not be separated from any person of the Trinity anymore that any other, and as he penetrates all things, and that there is nowhere he is not, the Father in the Son is everywhere present by the Holy Spirit. After Christ’s Ascension he is no less present in his Godhead by the Holy Spirit, than he was before his Ascension.

179_{Ibid., p. 96.}

The point to which Forbes is moving with Cyril is that it is through the Holy Spirit in whom life in Christ is lived, he quotes Cyril again fromOn the Gospel of John, ‘The Holy Spirit by his divine operation joins us to the flesh of Christ and to the Deity, and we are joined to both spiritually, so that through the flesh, or human Mediator, access may be given us to God’.181Forbes comments, ‘But he understands that the

communion of the flesh of Christ which is inseparably conjoined with participation of the Holy Spirit; but this is communion, not by bodily eating, but by spiritual, as has been often shown above’.182

Forbes notes that Cyril calls the spiritual and sacramental reception of the body and blood of Christ ‘corporal and substantial’, but he goes on to observe, ‘by this corporal and natural union, [Cyril] says, ’that all believers who are members of the body of Christ, are united with Christ the head, and with one another. Although in bodies and souls were so separate from one another, that each subsists and is bounded separately. For that the Church is the body composed of individual men as members, and that its head is Christ, so that we are all fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ’. Forbes follows, ‘Whence it is manifest that Cyril does not require for our bodily conjunction with Christ that the body of Christ should be at the same place with our bodies; for to this mystical union of body, distance of place and absence of bodies from one another and separate existence offer no hindrance…But it suffices that all are made partakers of the one heavenly bread, we are all made one body in Christ, and have all been made to drink into one Spirit’.183

One of Forbes’ themes throughout Book XI is that the Body and Blood of Christ are not partaken by the wicked or the unbelieving. He often draws upon Augustine for support, but here he looks to Cyril. ‘[Cyril] says…that this society of the body and members of Christ, by the participation of the one food is the Holy Church in His predestinated and called and justified and glorified and faithful ones. Therefore that corporal conjunction which Cyril says we have in Christ through the sacramental

181

Ibid., p. 105.

182_{Ibid., p. 106.} 183_{Ibid., p. 107.}

blessing belongs to the elect, who spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and are sacramentally and spiritually incorporated in Christ’.184

The rest of the chapter is a refutation of Bellarmine’ use of CyrilOn the Gospel of St. Johnto support the Tridentine position that the Body and Blood of Christ are eaten by the wicked as well as the righteous. Forbes accuses Bellarmine of wilfully distorting Cyril’s text in the manner of a heretic, ‘truncating sentences and suppressing those thing that would lay bare his fraud’,185and sets forth Cyril’s exposition of the Vine and the Branches at length to show that Cyril allows that only the faithful in Christ eat the Body and Blood. In the passages quoted, Cyril does not expressly teach that those who receive the bread and wine of the Eucharist in bad faith, do not receive the Body and Blood of Christ, yet he teaches in such positive terms about the benefits of faithful reception, that Forbes’ point is the clear implication.186

Chapter XIII Fifth Argument from the Fathers: It is even eaten by bad people,