"A kind of transubstantiation": Hooker and the fruit of the Eucharist

How should we to interpret Hooker's famous dictum on the Eucharist, "The real presence of Christ’s most blessed body and blood is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament" (LEP V.67.6)?

It is not a denial that the consecrated Elements are changed:

Christ assisting this heavenly banquet with his personal and true presence doth by his own power add to the natural substance thereof supernatural efficacy, which addition to the nature of the consecrated elements changeth them and maketh them that unto us which otherwise they could not be (V.67.11).

It is not to say that the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist are mere figures:

the Eucharist is not a bare sign or figure only ... the efficacy of his body and blood is not all we receive in this sacrament (V.67.8).

It is not to deny that there is a "conjunction of his body and blood with those elements" (V.67.10).

The Bread and Cup "are his body and blood for that they are so to us who receiving them receive that by them which they are termed" (V.67.5).

In other words, Hooker's famous dictum does not mean that the consecrated Bread and Cup are separated and divided (the echoes of Chalcedon are, of course, deliberate) from the Lord's Body and Blood. Hooker is quite explicit that this is not so:

The bread and cup are his body and blood because they are causes instrumental upon the receipt whereof the participation of his body and blood ensueth (V.67.5).

What, then, is the meaning of Hooker's dictum? Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, it is to Thomas Aquinas we might turn to grasp the meaning and significance of Hooker's statement. In Summa Theologiae, Thomas reviews the various names given to the Sacrament:

In Greek, moreover, it is called Metalepsis, i.e. "Assumption," because, as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iv), "we thereby assume the Godhead of the Son" (ST III.73.4).

In his commentary on John 6:55, he declares of the Eucharist:

And so this is a food capable of making man divine and inebriating him with divinity.

It is this theme of divinization in the Eucharistic understanding of Thomas which draws us to understand the meaning of Hooker's famous dictum.

Hooker begins his discussion of the holy Eucharist with reference to John 6, declaring of the Lord's words, "Such as will live the life of God must eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man". He continues "in the Eucharist, so we receive the gift of God" (V.67.1). It is in the midst of this chapter which opens with John 6 that he states his famous dictum: it flows from his reading of John 6 as Eucharistic teaching. He then draws the chapter to a close with a startling image that brings us to see the significance of the dictum:

they [i.e. the consecrated Elements] are thereby made such instruments as mystically yet truly, invisibly yet really work our communion or fellowship with the person of Jesus Christ as well in that he is man as God, our participation also in the fruit, grace and efficacy of his body and blood, whereupon there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change of both body and soul, an alteration from death to life (V.67.11).

"The real presence of Christ’s most blessed body and blood is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament" because the purpose and end of the gift of the Lord's Body and Blood in the holy Eucharist - "true and real though mystical" (V.67.8) - is our participation in the life of God, our transubstantiation, our divinization. Here is the Eucharistic miracle, what Hooker beautifully and profoundly describes in words immediately prior to his famous dictum:

a far more divine and mystical kind of union which maketh us one with Him even as He and the Father are one (V.67.5).

To describe Hooker's dictum as evidence of 'Receptionism' is to entirely miss the point. To claim the dictum as evidence of Hooker holding a 'low' view of the Eucharist is nonsense on stilts. The dictum actually points to just how 'high' is his claim for the gift of the Lord's Body and Blood in the holy Eucharist. The dictum echoes the teaching of St. Thomas as to the fruit of the holy Eucharist. This is what the Eucharist does. It effects in us "a kind of transubstantiation". It makes us bearers of the real presence of Christ, He who is One with the Eternal Father. It makes us partakers of the divine nature.

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