Communion

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Communion is the central Christian rite in which bread and wine are blessed and shared as the body and blood of Christ. Known also as the Eucharist — from the Greek eucharistia, “thanksgiving” — and as the Lord’s Supper, it stands at the heart of Christian worship across nearly every branch of the faith, even as those branches disagree, sometimes bitterly, about what exactly the rite does.

Its warrant is a meal. The Synoptic Gospels and the apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians around the middle of the first century, report that on the night before his death Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and told his followers it was his body, then passed a cup of wine and called it his blood — adding, in Paul’s and Luke’s wording, “do this in remembrance of me.” That command is the oldest layer scholarship can reach, earlier than the Gospels themselves; what it meant in the first decades, before the rite acquired its later weight, is harder to recover than the later disputes suggest.

The disputes are theological, and they are old. The medieval Western church came to hold that the bread and wine, while keeping every outward quality, become in substance the body and blood of Christ — the doctrine of transubstantiation, defined as binding at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and given its philosophical frame from Aristotle. The Reformation broke on this point as much as any. Luther kept a real bodily presence while rejecting the scholastic explanation; Reformed theologians in the line of Calvin taught a spiritual presence received by faith; others, following Zwingli, held the rite to be a memorial, a sign and remembrance rather than a change in the elements. The churches that resulted still cannot share one another’s tables freely, and the question of presence remains a live fault line.

Beneath the doctrine lies an older comparative puzzle. A sacred meal in which the worshipper takes the god into the body has parallels in the mystery cults of the Greco-Roman world, and scholars since the nineteenth century have argued over whether early Christian practice borrowed from that environment, grew from Jewish ritual meals and Passover, or arose on its own and only later read in the surrounding vocabulary. The resemblances are real and worth tracing; they fall well short of derivation, and the evidence does not settle the matter. Esoteric readers have pressed the link the other way — treating the rite as a survival of the ancient mysteries within the church, a sacrament whose inner sense the outward form half conceals. Whichever way the history runs, the rite has held: a shared meal, repeated for two thousand years, in which a community enacts the death it claims to live by.

→ Related: Pentecost · Reformed Christianity · Acts Of The Apostles · Gnosis