The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

"The Savior" by Juan de Juanes

    It’s so hard for us to fully accept that the Infinite God of the Universe could fully inhabit a human body, and be both True God and True Man. I used to find myself confronting this thorny paradox in a very vivid way when I discussed the Christological Heresies with my adolescent religion students.  The Arians could accept the human Jesus, but not his Divinity; the Docetists had no problem with Christ the Son of God, but they were sure his Humanity was just a show; the Monophysites could understand that Jesus was both man and God, but insisted that he had only one, Divine, nature . . . and so on.  

    These and numerous other incomplete answers to the puzzle presented to our finite minds by the Incarnate Second Person of the Trinity have been with us from the earliest days of the Church to the present day.  The Council of Chalcedon gave a definitive answer in A.D. 451, when it declared that Christ is

made known in two natures without confusion [i.e. mixture], without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures being by no means removed because of the union, but the property of each nature being preserved and coalescing in one prosopon [person] and one hypostasis [subsistence]--not parted or divided into two prosopa [persons], but one and the same Son, only-begotten, divine Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.

    As hard as it is to accept that Jesus Christ is both fully God and a true man with a human body, however, we Catholic Christians are asked to accept an even harder teaching: that the same body is truly present in the Eucharistic bread and wine offered up at every Mass.  Furthermore, as Christ Himself tells us,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.  For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. (John 6:55-57)

Many of his disciples found this teaching too hard to accept, and went away.  Today’s Solemnity of The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ reminds, however, as Peter points out (John 6:68), that we have nowhere else to go, and only by eating the Body and Drinking the Blood of the God-Become-Man can we share in his eternal life.  

    There’s the wonder.  Christ has a human body, and so the Infinite God shares in our humanity; not only that, He shares that body with us in the Eucharist, and thereby lets us participate in His divinity.  No wonder we call it “Gospel”, that is, “Good News.” Yes, it is hard to believe, but, as today’s feast reminds us, it is, quite simply, The Truth.

"Panis Angelicus" - Friar Alessandro Sings St. Thomas

Today, January 28th, is the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas 

   When I posted a clip of St.Thomas Aquinas’ well-known hymn Pange Lingua previously [here], I remarked on his ability to express theological truths in poetic form.  Today we have another example in the hymn Panis Angelicus, which is familiar even to secular audiences in 19^th century composer Cesar Franck’s lovely musical setting.  In the clip below Franck's version is beautifully sung by a young Franciscan known as Friar Alessandro, upon whom God has apparently bestowed, as he did on his spiritual father St. Francis, the gift of song.

     St. Thomas wrote Panis Angelicus as part of an entire liturgical cycle (both Mass and Divine Office) for the feast of Corpus Christi (literally, “Body of Christ”, today formally known as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ).  Pange Lingua was part of this same cycle.  As is appropriate for a celebration of the Lord’s gift of His own Body, Panis Angelicus (literally, “Bread of Angels”) is a meditation on the Incarnation and the Eucharist.  It is also appropriate for the Feast of the Nativity, in which we celebrate the moment when the Word became Flesh, and for that reason we hear it most often during the Christmas Season. 

Please see also at Principium et Finis:

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the Angelic Doctor condones dissent - “St. Thomas Aquinas and Conscience: a Sin is Still a Sin” 

We Are Blind to Ourselves: Liturgical Prayer and the Body of Christ

(This Throwback was first published on 24 June 2015 on the blog Principium et Finis)  

  There is a Protestant radio station just two clicks away from the local Catholic station on my radio dial.  I was listening in the car on my way to work recently, and heard a brief snippet of the non-Catholic station.  I tuned in right in the middle of a sentence in which someone was saying: ". . . the importance of sin.  So, we'll be taking a walk through John's Gospel this morning . . ."  At which point, as I turned to the Catholic station, I thought to myself: "But what will he say about John chapter 6?", where we find "He who eats my body and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him" (John 6:53).  Interestingly, the first thing I heard when I continued to the Catholic station (The Presence, FM 106.7 here in the Portland area) was a priest discussing . . . John chapter 6.  

The Body of Christ

    Now, one might say this was just a coincidence, but if so, it certainly is a very suggestive coincidence.  As it happens, it reminded me of something I'd been mulling over since my recent post on Pascal's Wager.  I had quoted an atheist critic of the Wager, who said "most disbelievers disbelieve simply because they knows of no compelling evidence or reasons to believe."  In that particular post I dismissed this assertion as no more than unsupported opinion, and pointed out that, if true, it actually undermined the argument it was supposed to be supporting.  And I really don't know how one could prove such a thing anyway, or disprove it, given not only the impossibility of knowing what is in another person's heart, but our own inability, at times at least, to recognize our own true motivations.  I do know that a number of non-believers have told me explicitly that they turned away from God not because they were persuaded at first by rational arguments, but because His laws forbid doing things they wanted to do; in other words, they had an incentive to disbelieve.  I suspect that for all of us, whether or not we find something to be "compelling" depends, to some degree, on whether or not it is what we want (or expect) to hear.

    I think something like this may be at least part of the reason that our separated brethren in the Protestant communities similarly seem to miss the more "Catholic" passages in scripture (missing, for example, what seems to us to be the rather obvious import of Christ’s Eucharistic Discourse in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel).  Let me hasten to add that I'm not equating them to atheists; on the contrary, very many Protestants have a deep and sincere faith, and live exemplary Christian lives (case in point: the relatives of the nine people murdered last week at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, whose willingness to forgive the killer [here] is nothing if not Christ-like).  They have been formed in a tradition, however, that to varying degrees has rejected the incarnational aspects of Christianity as it was understood and practiced for the first millennium and a half after Christ said "You are Peter, and on this Rock I will build my Church." (Matthew 16:18) They simply can not maintain their understanding of what Christianity means and at the same time take at face value what Jesus says here:

I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. (John 6:51-55)

Pieter Breugel's "The Blind Leading The Blind"

 
  It is part of our nature, of course, to be blind to ourselves, and to interpret things from our personal perspective, which is as true for Catholics as it is for protestants and atheists.  I think that is a very large part of the reason why formal prayers, including private devotions (the rosary, novenas, etc.) and liturgical prayer such as the Liturgy of the Hours play so prominent a part in traditional Christianity. There is certainly a place for spontaneous and personal prayer; sometimes it’s appropriate and necessary to focus on ourselves and needs of which we are consciously aware. There is a danger, however, that we can start to see our spiritual lives as being primarily about us and what we perceive to be our "needs".  That is the reverse of what St. Paul is talking about when he says: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Liturgical prayer, on the other hand, is "inside out" prayer, which flows from us toward God. Instead of trying to draw God to us, it pulls us out of ourselves and unites us with Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church.  That is the beautiful and powerful symbolism of the traditional manner of saying Mass with the whole congregation, including the priest, facing the East together. Here we are not looking to ourselves or at each other, but as one body looking outward at the rising sun (literally ad orientem), representing the God who rises again and brings us life [incidentally, since I first published this post last year, ad orientem worship is showing signs of staging a comeback] .  

    Liturgical prayer is just one tangible way in which the Church reminds us that we are part of something bigger, that we are “members” of the Body of Christ (see 1 Corinthians chapter 12). We need to be reminded that, like Jesus’ Disciples, we sometimes need to be told how to pray (see Luke chapter 11 and Matthew chapter 6), and because we are both soul and body we need tangible reminders, and concrete means of praying to the God who is pure spirit.  Like St. Thomas, we need to touch Christ’s wounds (see John chapter 20).  And, of course, unless we eat his body and drink his blood we have no life in us.

Corpus Christi: William Byrd's "Ave Verum Corpus"

Today, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), we celebrate our Lord's unfathomable gift of Himself in the Holy Eucharist.  One of the most beautiful musical evocations of Christ's True Presence in the Eucharist is William Byrd's "Ave Verum Corpus" (Hail, True Body), performed in the clip below by The Tallis Scholars.