Spiritual Communion

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

"Wherefore with full assurance let us partake as of the Body and Blood of Christ: for in the figure of Bread is given to you His Body, and in the figure of Wine His Blood; that you by partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, may be made of the same body and the same blood with Him. For thus we come to bear Christ in us, because His Body and Blood are distributed through our members; thus it is that, according to the blessed Peter, we become partakers of the divine nature. (2 Peter 1:4) - St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 22 (Written in approximately 350AD)

Recently, it has become popular amongst Anglicans to insist that, in the absence of the Eucharistic gatherings of our local churches, we can substitute the sacraments with “Spiritual Communion” and online liturgical services. This theological turn, in many ways, goes back to the Medieval theory of receiving the grace of the Eucharist, not as a biblical meal, but as a visual process of adoration. This, in turn, is rooted in the Commentaries of the Liturgy by the Eastern theologians Nicholas Cabasilas and St. Germanus of Constantinople, who insisted that grace could be had within the Liturgy, even when one did not commune, due to the “panorama of grace” that was present within the visual components of the ritual itself and the “mystical contemplation of the Life of Christ” that was possible through analogies with the ritual actions of the priest. This justified the infrequent reception of Communion by the vast majority of laypeople, which was due to incredibly high standards of preparation and penance within a monastically controlled church in a very hardened, often immoral, political setting. And, it was also a justification for those who felt it was better to remain in a state of sin until one could retire from secular life completely and confess their sins all at once, do a period of penance, and die in the full communion of the Church as a retired lay monastic. This was the paradigm of late Byzantine practice, and informed the Medieval Roman practice extensively, because both Cabasilas and St. Germanus provided the most commonly read mysteriological commentaries on the Divine Liturgy in all of Christendom. They are quoted more by Western Scholastics than by the late Eastern Fathers.

This led to the Scholastic theory of receiving grace through contemplation and adoration, not in small part to the rediscovery of Aristotle in the West. Aristotle believed that sight was possible through a kind of physical connection with the thing being observed, a physical essence of an object that moved upon one’s eyes, was received, and could be stored by the memory. In this way, a small portion of the essence of a thing could be kept within us. Thus, to see the Eucharist was to “receive its essence”, which held a kind of saving grace in and of itself, since the essence of the Eucharist, hidden behind the material form of bread and wine, was Christ himself, and this essence could be stored in our minds through memory. These philosophical explanations were ensconced within St. Thomas Aquinas, and led to the standard practice of Eucharistic Adoration within the Roman Church, a practice that is not reflected in the praxis of the Early Church or in any of the Eastern Churches.

In the High Reformation, the Thomistically-inclined Protestant Fathers further developed these theories in order to try to understand what was happening physically and theologically in the consecration and reception of the Eucharist. Two predominant theories developed. One was a Lutheran theory of mysterious consubstantiation, which, in reality was highly influential within Anglicanism, and justified many of the Divines in their insistence that Bread and Wine remained, but that Christ was present, as well, in a mysterious capacity. This view allowed for the “redemptive sight of the sacraments,” and the Lutheran Church continued to reverence and elevate the Eucharist within its liturgies as a way to evidence this theology. Close to this was Calvin's understanding of the Eucharist, which was that Christ was “In, around and under,” the material bread and wine. Calvin's followers did not preserve this view, and the the theory that was most popular amongst the Radical Reformed, the Puritan and Presbyterian elements within 17th century Anglicanism, was that of “spiritual presence,” which was ultimately not in the bread and wine, but in the hearts of believers. To this view, there was no essential change in the elements of the Eucharist, and therefore no good to be had from the “elevation of the gifts” (to be seen by the faithful) and no good from adoration of the Eucharist. To them, this was idolatry. Thus, the 39 Articles explicitly dismisses and forbids these practices. “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them…” (Article 25 in the 39 Articles of Religion)

With the unfortunate "Black Rubric" of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, Anglicanism fell into a Protestant trap by trying to explain the mystery, which can be seen in the infamous footnote in the 1662 edition, slightly changed from the 1552 edition, meant to assuage the violent jihad of Puritan extremists. “…That thereby no adoration is intended, or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental Bread or Wine there bodily received, or unto any Corporal Presence of Christ's natural Flesh and Blood. For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored; (for that were Idolatry, to be abhorred of all faithful Christians;) and the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ's natural Body to be at one time in more places than one.” The statement “in more places than one” shows the depth of the childish and reductionist thinking of the Reformation. In this statement we can see that “spiritual reception” also means that there is no incarnated, objective sense of Christ’s “Real Presence” in the Eucharist, because Christ “is not there.” The Eucharist could be interpreted as a “means of grace” and not the reception of Christ Himself.

This Reformed understanding of what is happening is a very different way of seeing the Eucharist from the rest of Christian history, and flies in the face of Patristic belief, which saw the mysterious transformation of the Eucharist as a continuation of the profound mystery of the Incarnation. As St. Cyril of Jerusalem, again, in the introduction of his "Mystagogy," says, “God, who by the power of the Holy Spirit, joined the material of a virgin’s womb to His own essence, and it became God and Man without change, confusion, or alteration, does the same with this bread and wine, which are united to Christ by His word and the power of the Holy Spirit.” What the Ancient view teaches us is that we cannot define the transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ in “scientific” terms, because Christ’s Incarnation itself is the most profound and confounding of cosmological mysteries. How the God who created everything could be contained, joined and fully present in material form is the most ridiculous of theological propositions, and yet the entire Christian Gospel hangs upon this truth. Considering this, understanding how the Eucharist in its physical elements are incorporated by the work of the Holy Spirit into the glorified Body of Christ in Heaven, sitting at the right hand of God the Father, is easy. God has no difficulty in incorporating bread and wine into His being, just as we have no problem incorporating it into ours. It is a continued act of Incarnation, and is fully manifest in the corporate body of the Church, which IS the Body of Christ based upon our Communion in Christ through His Body.

In the Ancient Church of the West, as an Orthodox Church in the Anglican Patrimony, with restored orders and full doctrinal submission to the Seven Ecumenical Councils and the Apostolic Canons, we must affirm Christ's objective presence in the Eucharist, and must maintain that “Spiritual Communion” is not the same as the Eucharist. We can understand liturgical contemplation and “Spiritual Communion” as receiving the grace of the Holy Spirit by recalling the Sacraments we have already received, recalling our baptism, which is praised by the Early Fathers as a fountain of repentance and reconciliation with God. St. Isaac the Syrian says that tears of repentance over sin is a “renewal of baptism” or a “return to baptismal waters,” and praises those who contemplate the mysteries in a spirit of reverence and prayer. Spiritual Communion can be remembering our Communion with Christ and asking God for the outpouring of His grace through that physical, temporal and actual connection with Him. It is a return to the objective realities of Christ’s presence in the Sacraments and a meditation upon that truth. “Our insistence on the reality of the Eucharist has to be stressed, and as such, spiritual communion has to be understood as a pastoral devotion in times of plague or persecution when the faithful cannot access a priest or parish to receive the Eucharist. We have to be on guard against is the idea that Spiritual Communion is normative or even gives the exact same grace as receiving the Eucharist.” (Quote from Christopher Barber)

Properly understood, Spiritual Communion is a devotion that looks backward and forward, like many of the Sacraments themselves, connecting us with that which has been received and what will be manifest of God's grace, according to His Will. It is not the same act, or "essentially the same", as the act of Communion. it is a meditation on Communion, a prayer for God’s Grace, and an anticipation of the time when we can be united once again with our Brothers and Sisters in the Eucharistic Reality of our Local Church the the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood. It is, as Cabasilas and St. Germanus insisted, a mystical contemplation on the meaning of Communion, and a prayer that may, by God’s mercy, avail us to sustaining grace for the difficult days ahead by the Mercy of Christ and the Power of the Holy Spirit.