The Meaning of Symbols and the Eucharist

Just about all Protestants believe that the Eucharist is just a symbol, meaning, it has no real or literal significance. A flag may symbolize a country, but it is not the country itself. In the same way, Protestants believe that the Eucharist is a symbol of Christ's body, but is not Christ's body itself. It is not the real body of Christ, or it is not the literal body of Christ. If this is what Protestants want to claim, then they can have absolutely no support from the Church Fathers, nor could they in principle. The reason is because this view of the Eucharist is anachronistic, that is to say, it assumes a metaphysical view of symbols, namely nominalism, that didn't exist at the time and wasn't commonplace until the 16th and 17th century. 

The Church Fathers tended to be Platonists, which is a kind of realism. Nominalism is an anti-realism. Platonism is not only a kind of realism, but on the more extreme part of the realism spectrum, which is why Platonism is sometimes called "Heavyweight realism" as opposed to something like Aristotleanism, which is sometimes called "Moderate Realism." So whatever their views of symbols were, they took these symbols to very real, to have a real relationship or real participation of the thing. 

For example, the Medieval textbook on the Sacraments, Book IV of the Lombard's Sentences, is titled "On the Doctrine of Signs". Sacramentum literally translates to "Sacred Signs". The common definition of Sacraments in Catholic Theology is "visible signs of an invisible grace". The notion that the Sacraments are signs, or symbols, plays an enormous part in traditional Catholic Theology. So while the Church Fathers may have called the Eucharist a symbol or sign, this is what they meant, a real relationship or a real participation in the Body and Blood of Christ, and they didn't have the non-existent definition of denying some reality of the symbol in mind, which is necessary for the Protestant understanding of the Eucharist. So no Church Fathers can support the Protestant understanding of the Eucharist. So Protestantism is probably false. 

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