The Principle of Analogy in Teaching the Incarnation and the Eucharist
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
As the Incarnation is the central doctrine
of Christianity, so the explanation of its meaning and the realization
of its importance in human life should be the focal point of Christian education.
If “the product of Christian education” is to be “illumined by the supernatural
light of the example and teaching of Christ,” [1]
Christ Himself must first be known as the God-man who enlightens every man
that comes into this world. By the same token, it is not only in the formal
religion or theology classes that the Incarnation may be treated but in every
discipline which deals with the subject of man and his relations with God.
Much has been written of late on the subject of integration in education;
how to make the truths of revelation permeate the whole curriculum of a Catholic
high school or college. No matter how complicated the process may be in practice,
in theory at least the person of Jesus Christ must somehow form the basic
integrating medium.
The present study does not intend to examine
how the various academic fields like history, modem literature and the classics
may incorporate the Incarnation as part of their subject matter. A previous
article on the classics suggested one method of approach, on the negative
side, in answering infidel critics who use the ancient writers as weapons
against the divinity of Christ. The purpose here is more theoretical, namely,
to review just two aspects of the Incarnation - the hypostatic union and the
Holy Eucharist - to see how this transcendent mystery can become more intelligible
to students, who need to know a great deal about the doctrine if they are
ever to become the supernatural men of character envisioned by Pius XI as
the fruit of Catholic education.
Principal of Analogy in Teaching the Mysteries of Faith
Before entering on the Incarnation itself,
it is well to recall that the Church has given us the pedagogical principles
by which the mysteries of faith can be understood, however dimly, by the aid
of divine grace. In treating of the relation of faith and reason, the Vatican
Council declared that although divine mysteries can never be comprehended
by reason alone, nevertheless, when enlightened by faith, “reason attains
some, and that a very fruitful understanding of mysteries…from the analogy
of those things which it naturally knows.” [2]
Consequently, although revealed truths like the Trinity, the Incarnation and
the supernatural life are beyond the capacity of the human mind directly to
understand until the beatific vision, still, by means of comparisons and similarities
with known things in nature, we can penetrate ever more deeply into the mysteries
of the Christian faith. The foundation for the comparison must accord with
Sacred Scripture and sound tradition, and the process should be guided by
the Church’s teaching, telling us how far the correlation may go. Within these
limits, however, the method of analogy is not only useful but indispensable
for teaching the truths of revelation. The parables of the Gospel are applications
of this principle: the kingdom of heaven is likened to a marriage feast; the
Church is compared to a grain of mustard seed; the mercy of God is similar
to the love of a father for his prodigal son; sanctifying grace is described
as a wedding garment; and the just man is like to a house that is built upon
the rock.
Basic Analogy of the Incarnation
The fundamental analogy which Christian tradition
uses for the Incarnation is the union of body and soul in man. Arguing against
the rationalists of his day, St. Augustine complained:
There are some who insist on an explanation
of how the Godhead was so commingled with man's nature as to constitute the
one person of Christ, since this had to be done once, as if they themselves
could explain how the soul is so united to the body as to constitute the one
person of a man, an event which occurs every day. For just as the soul is
united to the body in one person so as to constitute man, so God is united
to man in one person so as to constitute Christ. [3]
Augustine's point was that it is unreasonable
to refuse to believe that God and man are united in Jesus Christ, when we
do not fully understand how body and soul are united in ourselves. Obviously
we do know a great deal about the latter union, which is natural, and this
can help us to understand the former, which is supernatural. Also we read
in the Athanasian Creed which is part of the Divine Office, “As the rational
soul and the flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.” [4]
Given this similitude, therefore, the teacher is ready to use it as a key
to explain the various aspects of the Incarnation which form an essential
part of Christian education. Literally every phase of the hypostatic union
can be clarified by applying analogously to the union of the two natures in
Christ what we know from reason and philosophy about the union of body and
spirit in a human being.
- The first question which presents itself to the
student is how it was possible for God to have come down from heaven to become
man and yet not have left heaven. Applying the analogy of body and soul, St.
Augustine explains that our difficulty arises from a carnal conception of
Christ’s divinity. Once we realize that the divinity is something spiritual,
like man's soul, the mystery becomes more intelligible, seeing there is a
parallel situation which is taken for granted in the natural order. Augustine
wrote to his correspondent:
I wish you to understand that the Christian
teaching does not hold that the Godhead was so absorbed by the flesh in which
He was born of the Virgin, that He either relinquished or lost the governance
of the universe.... The nature of the soul is far different from that of the
body; how much more different must be the nature of God, who is the Creator
of both soul and body? [5]
Two operations of the soul help us to understand
how God could at the same time remain in heaven and become incarnate on earth.
First we examine the soul's activity in sensitive perception. Although it
is nowhere else except in its own body, yet the soul perceives many objects
that are outside the body:
For wherever the soul sees anything, there
it is exercising the faculty of perception…and wherever it hears anything,
there it is exercising the faculty of perception…. And are we to suppose
that something incredible is told us regarding the omnipotence of God, when
it is affirmed that the Word of God, by whom all things were created, did
so assume a body from the Virgin and manifest Himself with mortal senses,
as not to withdraw from the bosom of the Father, that is from the secret place
where He is with Him and in Him? [6]
On a higher plane, we examine the soul’s power of
intellection and communication of spiritual thought, clothed in bodily words,
and we gain a still deeper insight into the Word becoming flesh and yet remaining
with the Father:
I put some conception before my audience,
and I keep it with me. You find what you have heard, and I do not lose what
I have said…. When the conception is present in my heart, and I wish it
to be in yours, I make use of a sound as vehicle to have it pass to you. I
take up the sound and, as it were, put into it the conception, and I utter
it, bring it before you, and teach it without losing it. If my conception
could do this by my voice, could not the Word of God do it by His flesh? For
behold, the Word of God, God with God, the Wisdom of God abiding immutably
with the Father, that He might go forth to us, sought flesh to be as it were
the sound, and implanted Himself in it, and came forth to us, yet did not
withdraw from the Father. [7]
This comparison between human thought and the Word of God
also gives us the basic analogy for explaining, in human terms, how the Second
Person of the Holy Trinity proceeds from the Father by intellectual generation.
- The divine maternity of the Blessed Virgin is another
aspect of the Incarnation which gains in intelligibility by applying the analogy
of body and soul in man as humanity and divinity m the hypostatic union. According
to the teaching of the Church, Mary is not only the Mother of Christ but the
Mother of God? How is this possible and what does it mean?
We transfer the problem to the level of natural maternity
and ask ourselves: Is the mother of any child born into the world only the
mother of its body, or of the whole child, body and soul? Obviously she is
the mother of the whole person. Yet we know that the human soul is not generated
by the parents, father and mother. As a spiritual substance, it must be created
directly by God every time a child is conceived. If therefore we commonly
and logically attribute true motherhood to the mother of a human child, though
she is not the maker of its soul, we may with equal justice attribute true
maternity to Mary, as the mother of the Divine Child, although she is not,
in any sense, the cause of His divinity.
- One of the deepest reaches of the Incarnation is the
fact that in pointing to the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, we are describing
and denominating, in the truest sense of the word, God Himself. We speak of
God having been born in Bethlehem, living at Nazareth as a carpenter’s son,
preaching, teaching and healing the sick, suffering His passion, dying on
the cross and rising again from the dead. Fundamentally these predications
are correct because one and the same historical individual was at the same
time God and man.
This is rendered more clear in the light of the
Church's analogy. What do we see when we point to any person and call him
by name? We see only his body. Yet we attribute all his actions, whatever
he says and does everything down to the smallest detail of quality of voice
and gesture of hand, to the whole man, body and soul combined. In a similar
way, what men perceived by reason alone in Christ our Lord was only a human
being; and yet everything He did, from the resurrection of Lazarus to the
blessing of the children is attributed by faith not only to His divinity.
So that as truly as we say that every action of our body is animated by the
soul, we believe that everything which Christ did in His humanity, by reason
of its union with the Second Person of the Trinity, was also divinized by
God. [8]
- In order properly to appreciate the Incarnation,
it is necessary to recognize wherein lay the difference between God's presence
in the world prior to His becoming man, and His presence ever since. Evidently
the Word of God had been in the world since the world was made; nevertheless
we speak of His coming into the world at the time of the Annunciation.
The full meaning of this truth is shrouded in mystery.
But some clarity is afforded if we consider the different ways in which the
human soul may be present in various places. It can, for example, be present
in one place by reason of its influence, as the Holy Father is said to be
present among Catholics, where his authority is respected and obeyed; it can
also be present effectively, by reason of the works it produces, like the
presence of St. Thomas in the Summa or of Michelangelo in the Pieta.
All these and similar presences, however, are as shadows compared to the unique
presence of the human spirit in the body which it animates. Here we have no
mere influence, physical or moral, or mere effectiveness, but the soul itself,
from which all the activity of a man proceeds. Analogous to this unique presence
of the soul within the limits of its body, is the presence of the Word of
God within the confines of His humanity. God is present in Christ Jesus substantially,
in all the plenitude of His omnipotence and all the perfection of His divinity.
He is no more perfectly present anywhere in creation than He is in His humanity,
even as the soul is nowhere more completely present in the world than it is
in the body which it informs.
- Finally it is the teaching of our faith that
the humanity of Christ is the great sacrament of the New Law; through which
the grace of redemption flows from God to the human race. In the time of Christ,
it was through His human nature that He worked His miracles, preached the
truths of revelation and underwent His passion and death. Again we are confronted
with a mystery: why God should have so chosen to redeem mankind as to channel
His graces through the humanity He assumed of the Virgin Mary. But again some
help is found by reference to the basic analogy. The instrument which the
soul uses to perform its functions, even the highest, here on earth is the
body which it animates. The noblest operations of the soul are thought and
volition, yet how completely dependent for their exercise on the body. The
soul desires to understand the nature of things - it must use the body, through
the senses, to acquire the material whence ideas can be formed. The soul wishes
to share its thoughts and desires with other minds and hearts - it must resort
to bodily sound and sensible movement to communicate its spirit to others.
So intimate is the connection of body and soul in these functions that without
the senses operating there would be no thought received, or conceived, or
transmitted among men in the present order of providence, except by a miracle
of God.
In somewhat the same manner, God has chosen
to associate the humanity of Christ and His divinity in our regard. Grace
comes from the latter, but through the former. Being human, we receive, and
God transmits, the grace of salvation through the human nature of Christ,
assumed in Nazareth, sacrificed on Calvary, risen from the dead, and operating
in the Mass and sacraments as arteries of mercy from the divinity with which
the humanity is substantially conjoined.
The Eucharist—A Continued Incarnation
Since the Holy Eucharist contains the whole
Christ, true God and true man, the attributes predicable of the Incarnate
Word are also applicable to the Blessed Sacrament. As expressed by the present
Pontiff, when we look upon the Eucharistic Species, we should say: “Death
has not destroyed this body which was pierced by nails and scourged.... This
is that body which was once covered with blood pierced by a lance, from which
issued saving fountains upon the world, one of blood and the other of water.” [9]
This identity of Christ in the Eucharist and the Christ of history
was clearly stated by the same Pontiff when, as Cardinal Legate to the International
Eucharistic Congress in Budapest, he told the assembled faithful that the
Holy Eucharist is “that unsearchable mystery by which we believe that
the earthly life of Christ our Redeemer, though apparently closed at
His Ascension into heaven, still goes on and will go on until the end of time....
It is nothing less than the invisible continuation now of His visible presence
in times past.” [10]
Consequently, the fundamental analogy of body
and soul to humanity and divinity, which helps so much better to understand
the hypostatic union, is equally valid when applied to the Real Presence,
where “after the consecration of bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true
God and true man, is truly, really and substantially contained.” [11]
However, the Eucharist is not only the object of our worship and adoration;
it is also the instrument of our sanctification - as the Sacrament of the
Altar - to which another analogy is applied in Christian tradition.
Basic Analogy of the Blessed Sacrament
The Holy Eucharist as a sacrament of the New
Law was given its basic similitude by Christ Himself. He described the Blessed
Sacrament as food and drink for the soul, comparable to solid and liquid nourishment
for the body. “My flesh,” He said, “is food indeed, and my blood is drink
indeed.” [12]
And at the Last Supper, when instituting the sacrament of His love, He consecrated
what normally serves as bodily food into His sacred Body, and bodily drink
into His precious blood. The very manner of receiving the Blessed Sacrament,
orally as food and drink, signifies the function which the Eucharist is meant
to serve for the supernatural life of the soul.
When the Council of Trent defined the Catholic
doctrine on the Eucharist, it repeated the teaching of Christ, with an explicit
clarification which later events proved to be specially important. “Our Savior,”
the Council stated, “when about to depart from this world to the Father, instituted
this sacrament…(which)…He wished should be received as spiritual
food for souls, whereby they may be nourished and strengthened, living by
the life of Him who said: ‘He that eateth me, the same also shall live by
me,’ and as an antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and preserved
from mortal sins.” [13]
As with the Incarnation, the mystery of the Blessed
Sacrament becomes more clear and it’s teaching correspondingly easier as we
apply the similitude of food and drink to the function of the Eucharist in
our spiritual life.
- Since the Sacrament of the Altar is compared to
food and drink, we logically infer that just as nourishment is necessary for
sustaining the life of the body, so the Eucharist is needed to retain the
life of the soul. If we further analyze the two lives, we find that in both
cases they mean the union of the thing living with the vital principle which
gives it life. Thus the life of the body consists in its union with the soul,
and the soul's life consists in union with God through sanctifying grace.
To maintain this union sustenance is required, natural in one case and
supernatural in the other. And just as truly as without nourishment the
body will die by separation from the soul, so without its spiritual food in
the Eucharist the soul will die by separation from God by mortal sin. Hence
the warning of Christ, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink
His blood, you shall not have life in you.” [14]
In the early Church, Christians were so conscious
of this necessity that they gave Holy Communion to infants as soon as they
were baptized. They also distributed the Sacred Particles left over from Mass,
to the little children who were brought to the Holy Sacrifice. As late as
the Council of Trent, the necessity of Communion for children was a vexing
problem, which the Fathers of the Council finally solved by declaring that
“…there is no necessity which obliges children who lack the use of reason,
to receive the sacramental communion of the Eucharist, since, regenerated
by the water of baptism and incorporated into Christ; they cannot, at that
age, lose the grace of the sons of God which they possess.” [15]
Here it should be noted that the analogy has only a qualified application,
since infants need food as much as anyone; yet they do not need the spiritual
food of the Eucharist. The fact is the analogy holds in general, since Holy Communion is morally necessary once a person reaches the age of reason
and begins to exercise his spiritual powers with consequent danger to his
state of grace.
- Because it is food and drink, the Eucharist can
serve its purpose only where spiritual life is already, or still, present.
Hence arises the need for sanctifying grace in the soul antecedent to Holy
Communion, and the Church's condemnation of any practice, like the Protestant,
which allows the Sacrament to be received, although a person is conscious
of grievous sin. Against the Reformers, the Church has condemned the doctrine
that “the principal fruit of the most Holy Eucharist is the
remission of sins,” [16]
and the corresponding error that “faith alone is a sufficient preparation
for receiving the sacrament of the most Holy Eucharist.” [17]
- Furthermore as it is not enough to take food just
once or rarely to maintain life in the body, so, in order to remain alive
supernaturally the soul must communicate more or less frequently, otherwise
debility, disease and finally death will set in. It was this conviction, founded
on the analogy with bodily food that has prompted the custom of frequent Communion
since apostolic times. During the first centuries of the Church, the practice
was that everyone should communicate when he assisted at the Holy Sacrifice.
The various documents that bear on the subject: the first epistle of Pope
Anacletus, the tenth of the Apostolic Canons, and the writings of Gratian,
prove that worthy reception of the sacrament was obligatory on all the faithful
whenever they attended Mass.
As time went on, the practice of frequent and daily
Communion lapsed in the Church, until fifty years ago, in 1905, St. Pius X
restored the custom. It is instructive to read how he appeals to the analogy
of food as the doctrinal basis for renewing the daily frequentation of the
Eucharist:
Christ our Lord&3133;more than once, and
in no ambiguous terms, pointed out the necessity of eating His flesh and drinking
His blood, especially in these words: “This is the bread that came down from
heaven; not as your fathers did eat manna and are dead: he that eateth this
bread shall live forever.” From this comparison of the food of angels with
bread and with manna, it was easily to be understood by His disciples that,
as the body is daily nourished with bread, and as the Hebrews were daily nourished
with manna in the desert, so the Christian soul might daily partake of this
heavenly bread and be refreshed thereby. Moreover, whereas, in the Lord's
Prayer, we are bidden to ask for “our daily bread,” the holy Fathers of the
Church all but unanimously teach that by these words must be understood, not
so much that material bread which is the support of the body, as the Eucharistic
bread which ought to be our daily food. [18]
A further extension of this concept of the
Eucharist as food is the proportion which is commonly recognized between the
health and vigor of the body and the benefit which a person derives
from the food he eats. If the body is strong and vibrant with energy, the
food it takes will not only sustain life but profit the body immensely. On
the other hand, if the body is weak and sickly, the appetite fails, food and
drink become unpleasant to take, and the value derived is at a minimum. Comparably,
in the supernatural order, the more virile the life of the soul and the better
prepared ascetically for Holy Communion, the more benefit it receives from
this spiritual food. In the words of the Decree on Frequent Communion:
Although the sacraments of the New Law take
effect ex opere operato [by the very fact of reception], nevertheless they
produce a greater effect in proportion as the dispositions of the recipient
are better. Therefore care is to be taken that Holy Communion be preceded
by serious preparation and followed by a suitable thanksgiving according to
each one's strength, circumstances and duties. [19]
- However, the Church compares the Eucharist not only
to food and drink, but also to medicine, calling it “the antidote whereby
we are delivered from daily faults and preserved from deadly sins.” Pursuing
this analogy we find the reason for the Church's opposition to the Jansenist
heresy which conceived the Blessed Sacrament exclusively as a reward for virtue
and the privilege of high sanctity. The Jansenist Arnauld excluded from the
Holy Table, “all those…who are not yet perfectly united to God alone
…who are not entirely perfect and perfectly irreproachable.” [20]
Contrary to this error, the Church teaches that
as Holy Communion is spiritual food to nourish and sustain the soul, it is
also medicine, like bodily medication in the natural order. St. Pius X
used this medicinal function as the main argument for daily reception of the
Blessed Sacrament:
The desire of Jesus Christ and the Church
that all the faithful should daily approach the sacred banquet is directed
chiefly to this end, that the faithful, being united to God by means of the
Sacrament, may thence derive strength to resist their sensual passions, to
cleanse themselves from the stains of daily faults, and to avoid those graver
sins to which human frailty is liable. So that it’s primary purpose is not
that the honor and reverence due to our Lord may be safeguarded, or that the
Sacrament may serve as a reward of virtue bestowed on the
recipients. [21]
Theologians commonly distinguished three ways
in which the Eucharist may be considered medicinal: it restores to the soul
spiritual strength, which had been diminished through previous sins; it remits
both penalty and temporal punishment due to our daily venial faults; and it
moderates the force of concupiscence, notably the risings of lust. All these
effects are analogous to the natural effect of bodily remedies which may serve
as a tonic to retrieve the energy lost through sickness or physical exhaustion;
as an antidote to counteract the result of a poison that has entered the body;
or as an antibiotic, to combat the spread of infection and assist the forces
of nature in their resistance to bodily disease.
Conclusion
The foregoing analysis was only illustrative of the
general principle stated at the beginning that as a teacher uses the method
of analogy in explaining the mysteries of faith, to that extent will they
become more intelligible, more distinctive one from another, and more vital
in the spiritual life of the student. When we reflect that even in the natural
order, the things of God must be explained by analogous concepts drawn from
created things, it is only to be expected that divine mysteries need to be
described by comparison with the world of nature.
References:
[1] Pope Pius XI, Christian Education of Youth (New York: The Paulist Press, 1939), p.36
[2] Enchiridion Symbolorum (Denziger-Bannwart) 1796, (Hereinafter, this work is cited as DB.)
[3] St Augustine, “Epistula 137,” translated in Augustine Synthesis, ed. Eric Przywara, S.J. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1945), p.51
[4] DB 40.
[5] St. Augustine, op. cit., pp. 48-49
[6] Ibid., pp. 49-50
[7] Ibid., “Sermo 28,” p.209
[8] The analogy here in question is of the body in man to the humanity (body and soul) in
Christ, and of the soul in man to the divinity in Jesus Christ. In the form of a proportion, this would read:
Body and Soul in Christ Body in man
---------------------------- = ---------------
Divinity in Christ Soul in man
[9] Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Letter on the Sacred Liturgy (Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1948), p. 48.
[10] La DocumentationCatholique, XXXIX (June 20, 1938), coll. 710-714.
[11] DB 874. Decree of the Council of Trent, Session XIII.
[12] John 6:56
[13] DB 875.
[14] John, 6:54
[15] DB 933.
[16] DB 887.
[17] DB 893.
[18] The Decree on Daily Communion [Issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Council, it was approved by St. Pius X on December 20, 1905.] (London: Sands and Co., 1909), p. 25.
[19] Ibid., p. 31.
[20] Arnauld, Antoine, De La Frequente Communion (Lyon, 1683), p. 186.
[21] [ed. - No Reference Cited]
Catholic Educational Review
Vol. 53 - #5, May 1955, pp. 217-229
Copyright © 1998 Inter Mirifica
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