Eucharistic Realism in Justin

In First Apology 66 Justin states the Church’s faith about the eucharistic elements with a directness rarely matched in any age: the consecrated bread and cup are received “not as common bread and common drink,” but as the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus, made such by “the word of prayer” that comes from him. This file treats Justin’s eucharistic realism — what he says the food is, how he relates it to the incarnation, the role of the eucharistic word, and the place of his testimony in the early patristic doctrine of the Eucharist.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

“Not as Common Bread and Common Drink”

Justin’s central statement is worth quoting in full, for it is one of the load-bearing texts of early eucharistic theology: “For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh” (First Apology 66; ANF 1). Every clause carries weight. The food is not common — it has been changed in status from ordinary bread and wine. It is received as the flesh and blood of Jesus. And the analogy that governs the whole is the incarnation: as the Word took real flesh and blood for our salvation, so the eucharistic food is, really, the flesh and blood of that same incarnate Word. Justin is not speaking of a bare symbol or a memorial token; he speaks of the bread and cup as having become the body and blood of the Lord (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, I, pp. 168–170).

The Change of Status

Justin’s opening phrase — “not as common bread and common drink” (ou… koinon arton oude koinon poma) — is the hinge of his eucharistic realism, and its force should not be softened. The word “common” (koinos) marks a change of status: the bread and cup of the Eucharist are no longer ordinary, profane, everyday food; they have been set apart and made holy, and what is received is no longer mere bread and wine but the flesh and blood of Christ (First Apology 66; ANF 1). This is the same logic of consecration that runs through the Church’s whole sacramental life — the water of baptism is no longer common water, the oil of chrismation no longer common oil — and Justin applies it to the eucharistic gifts with full seriousness. The bread and wine are taken from the common stock of human food and, by the word of thanksgiving, removed from it into the holy; they become what they were not. Justin does not say the gifts merely represent or symbolize the body and blood while remaining common bread and wine; he says they are not common, precisely because they have become the body and blood of the Lord. The realism is in the denial: not common, but his flesh and blood.

The Incarnational Analogy

The structure of Justin’s sentence is the key to his eucharistic thought. He does not argue from a theory of substance or a philosophy of presence; he argues from the incarnation. The same Logos who, in becoming man, took to himself real flesh and blood “for our salvation” is the one whose word now makes the eucharistic food his flesh and blood. The Eucharist is, for Justin, an extension of the incarnation into the worship of the Church: the Word who once became flesh continues to give himself in fleshly food. This grounding in the incarnation is why eucharistic realism and the reality of Christ’s body are, in the early Fathers, a single front — to deny that the bread is truly his body is, in the same motion, to deny that he truly took a body. St. Ignatius of Antioch, a generation before Justin, makes exactly this connection when he says the Docetists “abstain from the Eucharist… because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 7; ANF 1; see St. Ignatius of Antioch). Justin stands squarely in that tradition, and the doctrine of the Word made flesh is the hinge of both his Christology and his Eucharist (see The Word Made Flesh).

The Word That Consecrates

Justin attributes the change in the elements to “the word of prayer that comes from Him” — variously rendered “the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word” or “the food eucharistized through the word of prayer that is from Him” (First Apology 66; ANF 1; the Greek phrase, di’ euchēs logou tou par’ autou, is grammatically dense and has been translated several ways). The precise mechanism Justin leaves undeveloped: he does not give us a theory of the moment or formula of consecration, and the later debates over the words of institution versus the epiclesis of the Spirit are centuries away. What is clear is that, for Justin, the bread and cup become the body and blood through a word — a thanksgiving and prayer that derives from Christ himself — and that this consecratory word stands at the heart of the rite he has just described, the President’s lengthy thanksgiving (eucharistia) of First Apology 65 and 67 (see The Earliest Liturgical Witness). Justin also notes that this word of consecration includes the recitation of the Lord’s own words at the Supper: the apostles in their “memoirs” recorded that Jesus took bread, gave thanks, and said, “This do ye in remembrance of Me, this is My body,” and likewise of the cup (First Apology 66; ANF 1) — the earliest external citation of the institution narrative in a eucharistic context.

The Eucharist as Sacrifice and Thanksgiving

Justin’s realism is matched by a developed sense of the Eucharist as the Church’s pure offering. In the Dialogue with Trypho he identifies the Christian Eucharist as the fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy of a pure sacrifice offered “in every place” among the nations (Malachi 1:11), and as the antitype of the thank-offering of fine flour that was prescribed for the cleansed leper: “the offering of fine flour… was a type of the bread of the Eucharist, which our Lord Jesus Christ commanded us to offer in remembrance of the suffering which He endured” (Dialogue with Trypho 41; ANF 1). He calls the bread and cup of the Eucharist the sacrifices that alone are acceptable to God, and insists that the Christians, not the Jews who reject Christ, are the ones who now offer the pure oblation foretold (Dialogue 41, 117; ANF 1). The two strands — the eucharistic food as the flesh and blood of Christ, and the Eucharist as the pure sacrifice of thanksgiving offered everywhere — are held together in Justin without strain, and both became permanent features of the Orthodox understanding of the Liturgy (see The Divine Liturgy).

Realism Without a Theory of How

It is important to be precise about what Justin does and does not say, lest he be made to answer questions he never asked. He affirms, plainly and twice, that the eucharistic food is the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus and is “not common bread and common drink” (First Apology 66; ANF 1). He does not offer any theory of how the bread and wine become the body and blood — no doctrine of transubstantiation, no philosophy of substance and accident, no account of the metaphysics of the change. Such theories belong to a much later age and a different set of questions. Justin stands at the level of confession, not of explanation: he reports, as the common faith of the Church, that the gifts are the body and blood, and he grounds this in the incarnation and the consecratory word, but he leaves the manner a mystery. This is in fact the characteristic stance of the Orthodox tradition itself, which has always preferred to confess the reality of the change while declining to define its mechanism — to say that the gifts are truly the body and blood of Christ, and to leave the how in the realm of mystery rather than scholastic explanation. Justin is an early and pure witness to that stance: full realism about the reality, full reticence about the mechanism.

Justin in the Patristic Eucharistic Tradition

Justin’s witness is decisive for the historian of doctrine because of its date and its plainness. Writing around 155, to an outside audience, without polemical pressure to exaggerate, he simply reports as the common faith of the Church that the eucharistic food is “not common bread and common drink” but the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus. This places a fully realist understanding of the Eucharist in the mainstream of the mid-second-century Church, in continuity with Ignatius before him and with Irenaeus, who a generation later argues from the reality of the eucharistic body and blood to the reality of the resurrection of our own flesh (Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.18, V.2; see St. Irenaeus of Lyons). The Orthodox Church reads Justin as an unbroken early witness to its own faith that the gifts are truly the body and blood of Christ — a faith stated, in his hands, not as a speculative theory but as the plain report of what the Church receives at the Lord’s table (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, I, pp. 168–170; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, pp. 196–199).

See Also

References

  • Justin, First Apology 65–66. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and Minns & Parvis, Apologies (OECT, 2009).
  • Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 41, 117. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; trans. Falls, rev. Halton, ed. Slusser.
  • Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 7. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Rev. ed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978.
  • Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.