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ATouchable God 41 Corpus Christi An eminently tangible source of supernatural power in the MiddleAges was the Eucharist,which was understood to be,in some mysterious way that theologians struggled to elucidate,the actual body of Christ.For those who doubted the real presence, accounts of eucharistic miracles told of hosts that bled or transformed into flesh or a living body. One tale told of a Jew who caused a consecrated host to bleed by stabbing it with a knife.When he threw it into a cauldron of boiling water it reportedly changed into a beautiful child.Another story told of a woman who laughed when Gregory the Great administered the host to her“because you called this bread,which I made with my own hands,the‘Body of the Lord’”(Lansing 1998: 103).After Gregory prostrated himself in prayer the bread changed into a (perhaps accusatory) finger-shaped piece of flesh.He prayed again,the flesh changed back into bread, and the scoffer devoutly swallowed the wafer and her words.These miracle stories warned Christians not to take the Eucharist lightly or be deceived by its mundane appearance. While ordinary folk might bake the bread that became the body of Christ with their own hands, only priests were allowed to handle the consecrated host. This gave the clergy a tactile and spiritual advantage over the rest of humanity. A special healing power was sometimes attributed to priestly fingers, sanctified as they were by touching the consecrated host.“As true as I today have touched the body of Christ with these fingers,so say I to you,recover from this affliction,” a medieval abbot is recorded saying as he touched the neck of a woman with a throat infection (Snoek 1995: 350).This touch of holiness was deemed to make the fingers of a saintly priest particularly potent relics. If the nonordained could not handle the Eucharist,however,they could swallow it. Swallowing, indeed, was the most efficacious act one could perform with the Eucharist, as it was believed to only begin its work of grace when it reached the warm, welcoming cavity of the stomach and was digested.This most intimate of tactile acts gave great comfort and delight to many, who could thus feel that they were both physically and spiritually united to Christ.The mystic Angela of Foligno, for one, had a strong experience of this interior sensuous and spiritual delight,saying that swallowing the host gave her“an extremely pleasurable sensation ” that caused her to “tremble violently” (Angela of Foligno 1999: 61). However, consuming the Eucharist also caused many considerable anxiety. If the host was truly the body of Christ,was it not irreverent to be crushing it with one’s teeth?What if a crumb of the host fell down and was lost?Was Christ’s body to lie among the dust and be eaten by mice?These and related issues were given lengthy consideration by medieval theologians.A cloth could be held under the chins of communicants to prevent the loss of sacred fragments.The consumption Classen_Text.indd 41 3/15/12 2:48 PM 42 chapter two of the holy blood of Christ might be limited to priests so as to minimize spillage. Communion could henceforth be denied to infants to avoid any spitting up of the sacrament. Even so, troubling questions remained concerning the fate of the Eucharist once inside the body. Jesus himself had stated that “everything that enters into the mouth goes into the belly and is passed out in stool” (Matt. 15: 17). Did this occur as well with the Eucharist?To refute this impious line of thought medieval theologians worked hard to develop complex theories concerning the assimilation of food, and especially of the Eucharist, into the body (P. Reynolds 1999: 5).This process was part of the scholastic drive to apply reason and logic to symbols and mysteries. From a modern (and perhaps classical) perspective the simplest solution to many of these trying difficulties would seem to be to interpret the Eucharist as representing,rather than containing,Christ’s body.This did not suit the medieval mentality, however, which craved real contact, not encounters with “empty” symbols. Indeed, an oath was devised in the eleventh century for theologians who were inclined to be less than literal in their understanding of the nature of the Eucharist: “I believe that the bread and wine which are laid on the altar are after the consecration not only a sacrament but...

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