Communion

← Encyclopedia

Communion has two old names and one gesture. The Greek-speaking churches called it eucharistia, thanksgiving, after the prayer of blessing said over the table; the apostolic letters speak of the Lord’s Supper; later Latin Christendom spoke simply of the Mass, after the words that dismissed the assembly. Behind the names stands a single act, repeated across nearly every branch of Christianity: bread is taken, blessed, broken, and shared, and a cup of wine is passed, and the community receives them as the body and blood of Christ. It is the rite that gathers the others around it — the center of the liturgy, the high point toward which the ministry of the word builds, the meal to which baptism admits. And it is the rite over which the churches have divided most bitterly, because the same gesture has been read in ways that cannot all be true at once.

The warrant: a meal on the last night

The rite rests on a meal. Three of the Gospels and the apostle Paul, writing to the church at Corinth around the middle of the first century, report that on the night before his death Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his followers with the words “this is my body,” then took a cup of wine and named it his blood, the blood of the covenant, poured out for many. In Paul’s account and in Luke’s the words carry a command: do this in remembrance of me. The other two Synoptic Gospels — Matthew and Mark — report the meal without that sentence.

The wording in the First Epistle to the Corinthians is the oldest layer the documentary record can reach. Paul wrote that letter in the mid-50s of the first century, a generation before the Gospels were set down, and he frames the words of institution as something he had already received and handed on — a formula in circulation before he quoted it. The same chapter shows the rite already going wrong: at Corinth the common meal had become a scene of division, the rich eating their fill while the poor went hungry, and Paul rebukes them for failing to discern the body. This is the earliest window onto the Supper as a living practice rather than a doctrine, and what it shows is a meal that was already weight-bearing, already disputed, already in need of correction, within two decades of the events it commemorates.

The narratives sit inside a Jewish frame. The Supper is set at Passover, the meal of unleavened bread and blessing cups that remembered the Exodus deliverance, and the language of covenant blood reaches back to Sinai. Whether the historical meal was the Passover seder itself (the Synoptic chronology) or a meal on its eve (John’s), the rite was born among Jews keeping the festivals of Israel, and the “breaking of bread” by which the first communities are described in the Acts of the Apostles carries that domestic, table- fellowship character before it acquired the architecture of an altar.

The doctrine of presence

What divides the churches is the question of what the bread and wine become. Communion is reckoned a sacrament — an outward sign of an inward grace, in the classic Western phrasing inherited from Augustine — and it stands beside baptism as one of the two rites that almost all Christians, however else they disagree, hold to have been instituted by Christ himself. The disagreement is not over whether the rite conveys grace but over the mode: in what sense Christ is present in the elements, and what the words of institution assert.

The medieval Western church gave the most exact answer. Over centuries of argument — sharpened by the eleventh-century controversy with Berengar of Tours, who was made to confess that the bread on the altar was the true body of Christ — the church came to hold that the bread and wine, while keeping every outward quality their senses present, are changed in their underlying reality into the body and blood of Christ. The technical name is transubstantiation: the substance is changed, the accidents — color, taste, weight, the look of bread — remain. The distinction is borrowed from Aristotle, whose analysis of substance and accident gave scholastic theology the conceptual machinery to say that a thing could become wholly other while appearing wholly unchanged. The Fourth Lateran Council, convened by Innocent III in 1215, used the word in its opening confession of faith, the first conciliar text to do so, and the Council of Trent later defined the doctrine in full against the Reformers. Thomas Aquinas gave it its enduring philosophical statement.

The doctrine carried consequences that reshaped the rite. If Christ is bodily present under the appearance of bread, the consecrated host is to be adored; the elevation of the host, the feast of Corpus Christi, the reservation of the sacrament in the tabernacle, processions of the blessed sacrament — all follow from the claim. The cup came in the later Middle Ages to be withheld from the laity, on the reasoning that the whole Christ is present under either kind. The rite that began as a shared supper had become, by the close of the medieval period, a sacrifice offered at an altar by a priest, witnessed by a congregation that communicated rarely.

The Reformation breaks here

The Reformation broke on this point as sharply as on any. The reformers agreed that the medieval Mass had gone wrong — they rejected the notion of the Mass as a sacrifice repeated by the priest, and most restored the cup to the laity and the vernacular to the prayers — but they could not agree among themselves about presence, and the disagreement fractured the movement from within.

Martin Luther held to a real, bodily presence. He read the words of institution as a plain statement that must be believed exactly as it stands, and he refused the philosophical apparatus of transubstantiation as an unnecessary scholastic addition: Christ’s body and blood are truly present in, with, and under the bread and wine, but how this is so is left to the words of Christ rather than explained by Aristotle. When he met Huldrych Zwingli of Zurich at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, the two could agree on fourteen articles and broke on the fifteenth — the presence — and the Protestant movement split into camps that have never fully closed. Zwingli taught the opposite extreme: the rite is a memorial, a sign and a remembrance, the word is read as signifying rather than identifying, the bread remaining bread and the believer recalling a death rather than receiving a body.

Between the two stands the Reformed tradition in the line of John Calvin, which taught a real but spiritual presence. For Calvin the bread and wine are not empty signs, as Zwingli’s harder followers held, nor is Christ dragged down into the elements, as he thought Luther’s position implied; rather the believer, eating in faith, is lifted by the Holy Spirit into communion with the body of Christ in heaven, so that the partaking is true and the gift is really given, though the manner is spiritual. Calvin set this out in the Institutes, conceding that the mystery was too high for him to grasp or to say, and refusing to choose between honoring the sign and honoring the thing signified.

These were not academic distinctions. The mode of presence decided whether a church kneeled before the host or sat at a table, whether the Supper was weekly or quarterly, who might receive and who was barred. The churches that came out of the sixteenth century carried their answers into their orders of worship and their disciplines of admission, and the question of presence remains a working fault line: communities that confess the same Christ still, in many cases, cannot share one another’s tables, the rite of unity standing as the most exact measure of their division.

The comparative puzzle

Beneath the doctrine lies an older question, and a stranger one. A sacred meal in which the worshipper takes a god into the body is not unique to Christianity. The mystery religions of the Greco-Roman world were built around ritual eating and drinking, initiation, and the promise of a blessed share in the divine. The initiates of Eleusis broke a long fast with the kykeon, a drink of barley and water and pennyroyal, at the climax of the rite. The worshippers of Dionysus drank the wine that was the god’s own gift and, in the myth, tore and ate the raw flesh of the sacrificial animal in which the god was thought present. The cult of Mithras held a communal banquet of bread and a cup as a central rite, reclining over the hide of the slain bull — a parallel noticed in antiquity itself, when Justin Martyr complained that the Mithraists set out bread and a cup of water in their initiations in imitation of the Christian table, reading the resemblance as a demonic counterfeit rather than a borrowing.

Since the nineteenth century the resemblance has been argued over hard. The history-of-religions scholars of the German school read early Christian practice against this surrounding world and asked whether the Supper had drawn its meaning from the cultic meals of the mysteries. Three positions have been held and are held still. The first derives the rite, in whole or in part, from the mystery-cult environment — a sacramental meal assimilated to the idiom of the Hellenistic cults as the faith moved out of Palestine into the Greek cities. The second derives it from within Judaism — from the Passover, the blessing cups of the Jewish table, the fellowship meals of the sects, and the eschatological banquet of the age to come. The third holds that the rite arose on its own ground, in the remembered meal of Jesus, and only afterward was described in vocabulary that the surrounding culture made available.

The chronology cuts against the simplest version of the borrowing thesis. The Roman cult of Mithras, on present evidence, is no older than the late first century — roughly contemporary with the writing of the New Testament, not prior to it — so the Christian table cannot have been copied from a Mithraic rite that did not yet exist when Paul quoted the words of institution. Where a resemblance is close, as with the Mithraic banquet, the historians who work most closely on the material tend to explain it not by derivation in either direction but by a shared ritual idiom: communal sacred meals were everywhere in the Greco-Roman world, and two cults reaching for the same ancient gesture need not have learned it from each other. The parallels are genuine and worth tracing; the leap to derivation is where the evidence thins.

A different reading runs the connection the other way. Esoteric and gnostic interpreters have treated the rite as a vessel for an inner knowledge — a survival of the ancient mysteries within the church, a sacrament whose outward form half conceals a teaching about the descent of spirit into matter and its return. On this view the Supper is not borrowed from the mysteries but is one, the last of the mystery cults still openly performed, its initiatory sense available to those with the gnosis to read it. The mainstream of historical scholarship does not follow the esoteric reading, but it shares with it one perception that the documentary record bears out: the meal was felt, from the beginning, to do something — to join the one who eats to the one who is eaten — and that conviction, older than any theory of how it works, is what every later account has had to reckon with.

Sources and scholarship {#research}

The critical reconstruction of how the rite developed in the Latin West is Josef A. Jungmann’s Missarum Sollemnia, translated as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (1951), the standard genetic history of the Mass from its earliest forms to the eve of the modern liturgical reforms. The comparative question — the relation of Christian and Greco-Roman sacred meals — is treated with authority in Walter Burkert’s Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard, 1987), the discipline’s standard short account, which reads mystery initiation as something undergone rather than taught and is markedly cautious about derivation claims.

The oldest external witness to the parallel is Justin Martyr, whose First Apology, written at Rome around the middle of the second century, describes the Christian thanksgiving over bread and a cup and then complains that the mysteries of Mithras set out bread and a cup of water “in imitation” of it; the text is available in the public-domain Ante-Nicene Fathers translation at New Advent (chapters 66–67). The medieval definition is fixed in the confession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, whose opening canon introduced the word transubstantiated into conciliar Latin; an English text of the decrees is hosted at Papal Encyclicals Online. The Reformed doctrine of spiritual presence received by faith is set out by Calvin in Book IV, chapter 17 of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, available in the Beveridge translation at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. For the comparative material the foundational nineteenth- and twentieth-century synthesis is Franz Cumont’s work on the oriental cults, with the Roman Mithraic record reassessed since the 1971 Manchester Congress; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter supplies the primary description of the Eleusinian kykeon.

The disputes the rite carries are not resolved by reciting them, and an even-handed account adjudicates none — neither the mode of presence nor the question of origin. What can be said is narrower and firmer: the gesture is older than every explanation of it. The bread is broken before any council has defined what the breaking means; the cup is shared before the schools have agreed on what is in it. A community sits down to a meal and, in eating, says that it is taking into itself the death it lives by — and the eating comes first, the arguments after, the table set before anyone has finished saying what is on it.

→ Related: Pentecost · Reformed Christianity · Acts Of The Apostles · Gnosis · Sacrament · Baptism · First Epistle To The Corinthians · Paul The Apostle · The Reformation · Martin Luther · John Calvin · Aristotle · Liturgy · Ritual · Christianity · Mystery Religions · Mithraic Mysteries · Eleusis · Dionysus · New Testament