laudable Practice

Section XII  of Taylor's The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654) abounds with quotations from the Greek Fathers. Taylor demonstrates how the teaching of the Greek Fathers regarding the change effected in the bread and wine in the Holy Mysteries does not support transubstantiation; that is, "the passage and conversion of the whole substance, into the whole substance". He points to the terms used by "the Greek Church" to describe the change occurring in the Eucharist: When the Fathers in this question speak of the change of the symbols in the holy Sacrament, they sometimes use the words of μεταβολὴ, μεταρρύθμισις, μετασκεύασμος, μεταστοιχείωσις, μεταποίησις in the Greek Church: conversion, mutation, transition, migration, transfiguration, and the like in the Latin; but they by these doe understand accidental and Sacramental conversions, not proper, natural and substantial. Such change is also affirmed by the Greek Fathers - and ...

In Section XI of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), Taylor's use of Fathers of the Eastern Churches continues. He invokes them in the context of affirming that - in the words of the so-called Black Rubric - "the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here" (emphasis added). The first Eastern father to whom Taylor turns in this section is Theodoret of Cyrus: Christ as man according to the body is in a place and goes from a place, and when he comes to another place is not in the place from whence he came ... So Theodoret, Domini corpus incorruptibile resurrexit & impatibile & immortale, & divinâ gloriâ glorificatum est, & à coelestibus adoratur potestatibus; corpus tamen est, priorem habens circumscriptionem. Christs body even after the resurrection is circumscribed as it was before. And therefore as it is impious to deny God to be invisible: so it is profane, not to believe and professe...

In Section IX of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), we see further evidence of Taylor's commitment to 'breathing with both lungs' by again turning to Origen.  The key part of this Section is a commentary on Origen's eucharistic theology: we might regard it as part of Taylor's contribution to the ' Origenist moment in English theology '. He sees in Origen an understanding of the Eucharist which coheres with that of the English Church - "say we too" - in which heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material realities are affirmed, with the Lord's body "eaten in a spiritual sense", for "this is the plain and natural sense of the words of Origen": he plainly distinguishes the material part from the spiritual in the sacrament, and affirms, that "according to the material part, that meat that is sanctified by the word of God and prayer, enters into the mouths, descends into the belly, an...

In Section V of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), we continue to see Taylor quote extensively from theologians of the Christian East and point to the liturgies of the Eastern Churches. The opening paragraph of this Section quotes from Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret, to demonstrate the reality of the bread and wine in the Eucharist: St. Cyril of Alexandria; "called bread his flesh." Theodoret saith that "to the body he gave the name of the symbol, and to the symbol the name of his body. The pairing is, of course, interesting, as Theodoret challenged Cyril's Christology. This in itself is suggestive of how Taylor generously viewed the Christian East as embracing both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian theologians and churches. Another extract from Theodoret - "In the exhibition of the mysteries he called bread his body, and the mixture in the chalice he called blood" - appears, as do words from the Byzantine John M...

In a previous post , I highlighted how in The Worthy Communicant (1660), Jeremy Taylor evoked Eastern liturgy and piety, in the form of the Liturgy of Saint James, to illustrate the mystery of the Eucharist. This highlights a possible theme in Taylor's writings on the Sacrament: a turn to the East, seeing there a richer Eucharistic theology which, he believed, had more in common with an Augustinian understanding of the Lord's presence in the Eucharist - retrieved in the Latin West by the Reformation - than with Tridentine accounts of transubstantiation. Something of this is seen in the Section I of his The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654). Here Taylor turns to another Eastern liturgy, that - I assume - of Saint Cyril (used by the Copts), to demonstrate how, as he states, "the spiritual sense [of the Lord's sacramental presence] is the most real": For every degree of excellency is a degree of being, of reality, and truth: and ...