Eucharistic Theology

For St. Cyril of Alexandria the Eucharist is no peripheral devotion but the very test and seal of his Christology. The flesh of Christ received in communion is “life-giving flesh” (zoopoios sarx) — vivifying not because it is human flesh but because it has become the own flesh of the Word, who is Life by nature. This file traces that doctrine: its grounding in the Incarnation, its locus classicus in Book 4 of the Commentary on John on John 6:53–57, its sharp anti-Nestorian deployment in the Third Letter and the Eleventh Anathema, the polemical “cannibalism” charge that must be read as Cyril’s construal rather than a fair report of Nestorius, Henry Chadwick’s thesis that the Eucharist is the “nerve-centre” of Cyril’s Christology, and Cyril’s place in the Orthodox tradition of the real presence and the union effected in communion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Life-Giving Flesh

The hinge of Cyril’s eucharistic theology is a single Greek phrase: the “life-giving flesh” of Christ — zoopoios sarx (ζωοποιὸς σάρξ). The adjective is load-bearing. Flesh as such does not give life; a corpse is flesh, and the flesh of any man, however holy, can no more vivify another than it can raise itself. If the flesh received in the Eucharist is life-giving, this can only be because something has happened to that flesh which lies altogether beyond the order of created humanity. For Cyril that “something” is the Incarnation itself: the flesh of Christ has been made the own flesh of God the Word, who is Life by nature (zoe kata physin), the source from which all that lives derives its living.

The logic is exact and it is the same logic that governs the rest of Cyril’s theology. The Word is not life by participation, as creatures are, but life in his own essence — “in him was life” (John 1:4), and “as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). When this Word made a complete humanity his own in the hypostatic union, he did not leave that humanity inert. As iron plunged into fire takes on the energy of fire while remaining iron, so the flesh united to the Word — without ceasing to be true human flesh — became the bearer of the Word’s own vivifying power. The Eucharist therefore does not communicate “common flesh” but flesh that has been made the very flesh of him who is Life; and to receive it is to receive Life itself under the form of the body.

This is why, for Cyril, eucharistic realism is not an isolated doctrine to be defended on its own but a direct corollary of the Incarnation. The same union that makes Mary Theotokos — God-bearer, because the one she bore is God the Word made human — is the union that makes the eucharistic flesh life-giving. To deny the one is, in Cyril’s eyes, to be on the way to denying the other. The whole weight of his Marian and Christological polemic and the whole weight of his eucharistic doctrine rest on a single conviction about who is present in the flesh of Christ.

The Locus Classicus: Commentary on John, Book 4

The doctrine receives its fullest and most beautiful exposition in Book 4 of the Commentary on the Gospel of John, in Cyril’s treatment of the Bread of Life discourse, John 6:53–57 (In Joannem, PG 73:9–1056; CPG 5208; trans. P. E. Pusey, Library of Fathers 43). Here, expounding “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” Cyril sets out the structure of eucharistic participation.

Christ’s holy body, he argues, is life-giving “since it is ineffably united with the Word who gives life to all.” The flesh is not vivifying of itself; it is vivifying because of the One whose flesh it is. The union of communicant with Christ is then modelled on the union of the flesh with the Word: in receiving the Eucharist “we too are united to that flesh just as it is united to the Word.” The body of Christ is thus the instrument through which the life-giving power of the Word reaches the believer — and reaches him not only in soul but in body. The communicant takes the deifying, incorruptible flesh into his own perishable flesh, and that flesh becomes in him a seed of incorruption, the pledge and principle of the resurrection of the body. “I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:54) is, for Cyril, no detached promise but the natural consequence of having received into one’s mortal members the flesh that has conquered death.

Two features of this exposition deserve emphasis. First, the realism is physical in the precise sense that it concerns the body’s destiny: Cyril is not content to say that the soul is nourished by faith, for the resurrection he is defending is the resurrection of the flesh, and only a real reception of the life-giving flesh secures it. Second, the union is mutual and ascending: as the flesh is united to the Word, so we are united to the flesh, and through the flesh to the Word — a chain of communion that draws the believer up into the very life of God. The Eucharist is, in this sense, the engine of Cyril’s whole soteriology of participation.

The Anti-Nestorian Argument

What makes the eucharistic doctrine combustible is the use to which Cyril put it against Nestorius. If — as Cyril read the Antiochene Christology — the Word and the man Jesus are only conjoined, joined “by unity of dignity” or by indwelling rather than made genuinely one, then the flesh of Christ is, at the end of the day, a man’s flesh: the flesh of one whom the Word honours and inhabits, but not the Word’s own flesh. And a man’s flesh, however sanctified, cannot give life. On Nestorian premises, Cyril argued, the Eucharist collapses: there is nothing in the chalice but the flesh of a creature, and the central act of Christian worship is voided of its power.

He pressed the point to its rhetorical extreme. If the flesh is merely a man’s, then to eat it is to engage in anthropophagy — to eat the flesh of a mere man, a “cannibalism” that no Christian could intend. The whole intelligibility of John 6 thus becomes, for Cyril, an argument for the hypostatic union and against the conjunction-Christology: only if the flesh is the own flesh of the Word is the Bread of Life discourse anything but a scandal.

The positive doctrine is stated with great precision in the Third Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 17; PG 77:105–121). In the Eucharist, Cyril writes, we receive “not common flesh — God forbid — nor yet the flesh of a man sanctified and conjoined to the Word by unity of dignity, or merely possessing a divine indwelling, but the truly life-giving and very own flesh of the Word himself.” Every clause is aimed: “not common flesh” denies a bare physicalism; “nor the flesh of a man sanctified and conjoined by dignity” names and rejects what Cyril took to be Nestorius’s position; “the very own flesh of the Word himself” states the hypostatic union as the only ground on which the flesh can be what the Church confesses it to be. This is then codified in the Eleventh of the Twelve Anathemas appended to the letter, which anathematizes anyone who does not confess that the Lord’s flesh is life-giving and is the very own flesh of the Word — making the eucharistic doctrine a formal test of orthodoxy.

[Disputed: Cyril’s “cannibalism”/anthropophagy charge should be presented as his polemical construal of where Nestorian premises lead, not as a fair summary of Nestorius’s own eucharistic teaching. Modern scholarship cautions that Nestorius did not in fact deny the real presence or teach that the Eucharist is the flesh of a “mere man,” and that Cyril’s argument caricatures the Antiochene position in order to expose what he saw as its hidden logic; cf. Chadwick, “Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy,” 145–164.]

Chadwick’s “Nerve-Centre” Thesis

The classic modern study of this nexus is Henry Chadwick’s “Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy” (Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 2 [1951]: 145–164). Chadwick’s thesis is that the Eucharist is the “nerve-centre” of Cyril’s Christology — that the conviction that the Church receives in communion the life-giving flesh of the Word is not a consequence drawn after the fact but the very motive that drives the urgency of the entire anti-Nestorian polemic. Cyril fights for the hypostatic union, on this reading, because he is fighting for the Eucharist: if the union fails, the chalice is emptied of its life, and the salvation that the liturgy daily mediates is exposed as an illusion. The eucharistic stake explains the otherwise startling vehemence of his attack — for what is at issue, in his own mind, is whether the faithful are fed with God or with a man.

Chadwick’s reading has been broadly confirmed and deepened by later scholarship. Lawrence J. Welch, Christology and Eucharist in the Early Thought of Cyril of Alexandria (San Francisco: International Scholars, 1994), shows that the eucharistic realism is present in Cyril’s early, pre-controversial works, so that he did not invent it as a polemical weapon but brought a settled eucharistic conviction to the controversy. Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: OUP, 2004), sets the eucharistic flesh within the wider economy of participation in the divine life. John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004), and Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000), situate the doctrine within the unfolding of the dispute.

Cyril and the Orthodox Eucharistic Tradition

Cyril stands in the Orthodox tradition as one of the great patristic witnesses to the real presence and to the union effected in communion. His insistence that the Eucharist is the very own flesh of the Word, and that to receive it is to be made one body and one blood with Christ, anticipates the realism of the Byzantine liturgical tradition and of the later Fathers who systematized it — pre-eminently St. John of Damascus, whose treatment of the Mysteries draws the Cyrilline doctrine into a fuller account of the change of the gifts. The accent on communion as union — the believer drawn into the flesh of Christ and through it into the life of the Word — is taken up and developed by St. Maximus the Confessor in his mystagogy of the Liturgy and stands behind the Orthodox understanding of the Divine Liturgy as the sacrament of incorporation into the deified humanity of Christ.

What is distinctive in Cyril, and what the tradition received from him, is the Christological grounding of the whole. He does not argue from the words of institution alone, nor from a theory of sacramental causality, but from the identity of the One whose flesh is given: because the flesh is the Word’s own, it is life-giving; because it is life-giving, communion is deification; because communion is deification, the Eucharist is the daily medicine of immortality and the seed of the resurrection. In this Cyril joins the line that runs from St. Ignatius of Antioch — “the medicine of immortality” — to the mature Orthodox synthesis, and his particular contribution is to have welded eucharistic realism and Incarnational Christology into a single, indissoluble argument.

See Also

References

  • Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John (In Joannem), Book 4 (on John 6:53–57), PG 73:9–1056; PG 74:9–756; CPG 5208; trans. P. E. Pusey, Library of Fathers 43, and T. Randell, Library of Fathers 48.
  • Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 17), with the Twelve Anathemas (esp. the Eleventh), PG 77:105–121.
  • Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ (Quod unus sit Christus), PG 75:1253–1361; trans. John A. McGuckin, On the Unity of Christ, Popular Patristics 13 (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995).
  • Henry Chadwick, “Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 2 (1951): 145–164.
  • Lawrence J. Welch, Christology and Eucharist in the Early Thought of Cyril of Alexandria (San Francisco: International Scholars, 1994).
  • Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004).
  • Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000).