Annotation CXII

”Take, and eat: this is my body,” etc. — Matthew 26:26

On the Eucharist.

Christian Druthmar is reckoned by the Sacramentarian heretics into the number of the ancient fathers, whom they falsely and impudently boast to be defenders of their impiety — because, in the commentary on Matthew, he so declares this sentence that he seems to assert that the Body of Christ is present in the sacrament of the altar no otherwise than in figure. For he writes in this manner: “He gave his disciples the sacrament of his body, unto the remission of sins, and unto the preservation of charity, that, mindful of that deed, they might always do this in figure [as a memorial] of what he was about to do for them; and, that they might not forget this charity, [he said,] ‘This is my body’ — that is, in the sacrament.” And a little after: “As if someone, departing on a journey, leaves to those who love him a certain bond of love, to this end, that they do these [things] every day, that they may not forget him:

so the Lord commanded us to do — spiritually transferring [his] body into the bread, [and] into the wine [his] blood — that by these two [things] we might commemorate what he did with his body and blood, and might not be ungrateful for so most-loving a charity.” Know, Christian reader, that this passage has been shamefully and dangerously mutilated and corrupted — whether by the ignorance of copyists, or by the negligence of printers, or by the fraud of heretics; which I detected not by empty conjecture, but from the genuine and entire reading of a most ancient codex, which I inspected at Lyon, [in] manuscript, in the Library of the Franciscans. For in place of what the codices printed in Germany have — “This is my body, that is, in the sacrament” — the Lyon exemplar has more: “This is my body, that is, truly subsisting in the sacrament.” Again, where in the printed volumes we read, “spiritually transferring [his] body into the bread, [and his] blood into the wine,” in the Lyon [manuscript] it reads: “transferring the bread into [his] body, and the wine into [his] blood.” I am not unaware that the words of this author, even as they have been published by the printers, can most easily be vindicated from the usurpation of the heretics. But since they themselves, restored to their integrity, most clearly show that the pious mind of the author abhors the madness of these [heretics], I have judged [it] superfluous to bring forward here any other interpretation.