Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
sit in genere signe: sed intelligimus corpus Christi hic esse, sicut dictum est, secundum proprium modum huic sacramento” [In saying this we do not mean that Christ is only symbolically there, although it is true that every sacrament is a sign, but we understand that Christ’s body is there, as we have said, in a way that is proper to this sacrament]. And yet, Aquinas explains, the sacramental presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements relies on the operation of a figure, the bread and wine serving as a means by which Christ can be comprehended. Aquinas defines sacramental signs as serving a particular significative function, one that communicates a sacred term to human perception:
Signa dantur hominibus, quorum est per nota ad ignota pervenire. Et ideo proprie dicitur sacramentum quod est signum alicuius rei sacrae ad homines pertinentis, ut scilicet proprie dicatur sacramentum, secundum quod nunc de sacramentis loquimur, quod est signum rei sacrae inquantum est sanctificans homines.
[Signs are given to men. Now it is characteristic of men that they achieve an awareness of things which they do not known through things which they do know. Hence the term “sacrament” is properly applied to that which is a sign of some sacred reality pertaining to men; or—to define the special sense in which the term “sacrament” is being used in our present discussion of the sacraments—it is applied to that which is a sign of a sacred reality inasmuch as it has the property of sanctifying men.]
As Aquinas stipulates, the sacramental sign does not present its signified to the senses, but like any other sign, it requires interpretation: “Dicendum quod duplex est oculus scilicet corporalis, proprie dictus et intellectualis, qui per similitudinem dicitur. A nullo autem oculo corporali corpus Christi potest videri prout est in hoc sacramento … sed solo intellectu, qui dicitur oculus spiritualis” [There are two kinds of eyes, the eye of the body, properly so called, and the eye of the intelligence, called so by analogy. The body of Christ, as it is under this sacrament, cannot be seen by any bodily eye…. It is only open to the intellect, which may be called a spiritual eye]. For Aquinas, Christ’s body, which is substantially present albeit patently not perceptible by means of the senses, is apprehended by means of a “similitudinem” or figure. Aquinas locates the effective power of the sacrament in the virtue of christic presence even as he delineates the ways in which the communicant engages interpretively with the sacramental elements. This is to say that in the Thomist formulation, the sign is understood simultaneously as a figure or similitude and as an object whose value is inherent by virtue of its identity with the substance of Christ’s body. Even as this formulation invites an interpretive encounter with the eucharistic elements, which indicate figurally the principles of spiritual nourishment, charity, mercy, and sacrifice, as well as the abiding presence of Christ during what Aquinas calls the “peregrinatione,” or pilgrimage, of life,26 it also asserts that the sign has essential and efficacious meaning in and of itself because it has become sacramentally identical to the body of Christ.
Throughout the centuries of Christianity leading up to the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Altar is treated as an event in which corporeal experience is not extricable from hermeneutic activity, the perceptible sign not disseverable from its holy signified. Early exegetical writings on the Eucharist display a remarkable willingness to allow the materialist and figural valences of the ritual to maintain themselves in fruitful tension with one another. Indeed, the doctrine of transubstantiation is, as Thomas makes clear, entirely dependent upon a set of analogical associations: the body of Christ is unavailable to the bodily eye, but it is made present by means of a symbolic figure; likewise, the more figural perspective on the sacrament’s effects, described so influentially by Augustine, is secured by the good bishop’s insistence on the substantial reality of the divine body figured forth in bread and wine. And while it is plainly inaccurate to consider sixteenth-century Protestantism as a cohesive organization united in doctrine and creed, or to imagine, as Ross seems to do, that the sacramental program of the Reformation was to create irremediable lines of division between body and spirit, yet it is not too much to observe that as currents of receptionism and memorialism were introduced ever more fervently into the theological conversation over the course of the sixteenth century, it became increasingly possible to conceive of a sacramental system in which the referential meaning of signs may be divorced from the signs themselves. Where in the Lateran Council’s doctrinal canonization of transubstantiation the elements of the sacrament are transformed in essence into the body of Christ, sixteenth-century challenges to that formulation called into question the manner of association between corporeality and the spirit, and interrogated the material reality of Christ’s presence in the sacramental signs. In working through shifting conceptions of the significative status of the physical world, Reformation debates about the sacrament—the defining controversy of the Reformation itself—focus precisely on the relationship between signs and signifieds, presence and representation, materiality and tropology. To put it another way, the history of eucharistic theology in the sixteenth century is a history of theories about the operations of signification and figuration.
The shared investments of sacramental theology and language are confronted directly by Swiss reformer Huldreich Zwingli, whose paradigm-shifting assertions about the nature of the Eucharist are based explicitly in the figural qualities of linguistic representation. Zwingli and his followers contend that the sacrament functions as a trope, as “sacrae rei, hoc est factae gratuae signum. Credo esse invisibilis gratiae, quae scilicit dei munere facta & data est, visibilem figuram sive formam, hoc est visibile exemplum, quod tamen fere analogiam quandam rei per spiritum” [a sign of a sacred thing, i.e., of grace that has been given. I believe that it is a visible figure or form of the invisible grace, provided and bestowed by God’s bounty; i.e., a visible example which presents an analogy to something done by the Spirit].27 He elaborates:
Ex his enim fit manifestissimum quod veteres semper symbolice locuti cum corporis Christi in coena esui tantum tribuerunt, puta, non quod sacramentalis manducatio mundare animum posset, sed fides in deum per Iesum Christum, quae spiritualis est manducatio, cuius externa ista symbolum est & adumbratio. Et quemadmodum panis corpus sustinet, vinum vegetat, et exhilarat, sic animum firmat & certum facit de misericordia dei, quod filium suum nobis dedit.
[It becomes very evident that the ancients always spoke figuratively when they attributed so much to the eating of the body of Christ in the Supper meaning, not that sacramental eating could cleanse the soul but faith in God through Jesus Christ, which is spiritual eating, whereof this external eating is but symbol and show. And as bread sustains the body and wine enlivens and exhilarates, thus it strengthens the soul and assures it of God’s mercy that he has given us his son.]28
For Zwingli, the communicant, while considering the sacramental elements, is provoked to reflect on the divine principles of cleansing and sustenance to which the signs refer, an association that even in its evacuation of divine presence endows the signs of bread and wine with special value. As Zwingli explains elsewhere,
Res arduas significant. Ascendit autem euiusq; signi pretium cum aestimatione rei cuius est signum. Ut si res sit magna, pretiosa, et amplifica, iam signum eius rei eo maius reputetur…. Sic panis & vinum amicitiae illus quo deus humano generi per filium suum reconciliatus est, symbola sunt, quae non aestimamus pro materiae oretuim sed iuxta significatae rei magnitudinem.
[They signify sublime things. Now the value of every sign increases with the worth of the thing of which it is the sign, so that if the thing be great, precious, and sublime, its sign is, therefore, accounted the greater…. So the bread and wine are the symbols of that friendship by which God has been reconciled to the human race through his Son, and we value them not according to the price of the material but according to the greatness of the thing signified.]29
By amplifying the concept of referentiality in the Eucharist, Zwingli paradoxically foregrounds the sign qua sign—that is to say, in correlating the objective value of the sign to the thing it signifies, Zwingli also recognizes that a sign itself has an objective value. Indeed, the intrinsic value of the sign as a material object provides the means by which we comprehend the signified:
Visus cum panem videt ac calicem … Christum enim velut ante oculos conspicit, quem mens eius inflammata pulchritudine deperit. Tactus panem in manus sumit, qui iam nÕ panis sed Christus est significatione. Gustus Olfacts’q; & ipsi huc advocantur, ut