Saint Augustine on partaking of flesh and blood:Cognitive function without brain:
ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zerowww.zerohedge.com
Book 3 - Chapter 16 - Christian Doctrine:
Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man,” says Christ, “and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should have a share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us.
The same way, when our Lord says, “He who loveth his life shall lose it,” we are not to think that He forbids the prudence with which it is a man’s duty to care for his life, but that He says in a figurative sense, “Let him lose his life”—that is, let him destroy and lose that perverted and unnatural use which he now makes of his life, and through which his desires are fixed on temporal things so that he gives no heed to eternal.
Another book:
St Augustine - Exposition on Psalm 99:
It seemed unto them hard that He said, Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, you have no life in you: they received it foolishly, they thought of it carnally, and imagined that the Lord would cut off parts from His body, and give unto them; and they said, This is a hard saying. It was they who were hard, not the saying; for unless they had been hard, and not meek, they would have said to themselves, He says not this without reason, but there must be some latent mystery herein. They would have remained with Him, softened, not hard: and would have learned that from Him which they who remained, when the others departed, learned. For when twelve disciples had remained with Him, on their departure, these remaining followers suggested to Him, as if in grief for the death of the former, that they were offended by His words, and turned back. But He instructed them, and says unto them, It is the Spirit that quickens, but the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. John 6:63 Understand spiritually what I have said; you are not to eat this body which you see; nor to drink that blood which they who will crucify Me shall pour forth. I have commended unto you a certain mystery; spiritually understood, it will quicken. Although it is needful that this be visibly celebrated, yet it must be spiritually understood.
Today they teach that it should be carnally understood. Rebuking themselves the Master's own explanation in John 6:63. If a Catholic today says this is a figurative teaching - something spiritually to be understood (I AM the bread of life. The Word made flesh. Man shall not eat bread, but every Word from the mouth of God) - then the catholic church considers them to be an "Anathema."
St Augustine, therefore, would be an anathema in today's catholic church - not just for standing up for the truth of polygyny; but also his views on eating of flesh/drinking of blood. Btw - the doctrine of "Eucharist" wasn't even expressed until 1215 AD. The word Eucharist didn't exist in Augustine's time.
Please don’t judge me. I heard it from a poly husband and it cracked me up.
