The Eucharist and the Fathers of the Church

Perhaps the earliest description of the celebration of the Eucharist outside the New Testament is from the Didache, which is dated either to the second half of the first century or to the first half of the second century.

The Eucharistic faith of the age of the Apostolic Fathers is given in an extraordinarily clear way by St. Ignatius of Antioch in his seven letters written on his way to be fed to the wild beasts in the Coliseum around the year AD 107.

A brief account of the liturgy of the Eucharist is offered by St. Justin in his work, First Apology, written about AD 150.

St. Irenaeus, writing some seventy years after St. Ignatius and thirty years after St. Justin, develops the same themes with regard to the Eucharist.

One of the earliest complete Eucharistic Prayers that has come down to us is in the work often attributed to St. Hippolytus called the Apostolic Tradition, which is commonly dated to the first part of the third century.

St. Cyprian of Carthage treats the Eucharist in a letter written around AD 253 to a fellow bishop named Cecil.

One of our primary sources of knowledge about the faith of the early Church in the Eucharist can be found in homilies given to the newly baptized to catechize them on the Church’s faith regarding the sacraments of Christian initiation. A fragment of a homily of St. Athanasius to the neophytes has been preserved in which St. Athanasius emphasizes the realism of the Eucharistic conversion:

St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogic Catecheses, which are the sermons he gave in the Basilica of the Resurrection in Jerusalem to the newly baptized sometime before his death in AD 387, conclude with a robust affirmation of faith in the mystery of the real presence.

St. Hilary, great fourth-century bishop of Poitiers, France, affirms the real presence, explaining that the Eucharist has the power to sanctify or divinize us because the true Body of Christ, present in the Eucharist, is united to His soul and the divine nature of the Son.

In his De Sacramentis, which is a collection of homilies given to the neophytes in Easter week, St. Ambrose speaks very clearly about the conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ through the power of the words of institution said at the consecration.