In the Fathers of the first three or four centuries can be traced the same tendency to spiritualize the Eucharist as we encountered in the fourth gospel, and in the _Didache_. Ignatius, though in _Smyrn_. 7 he asserts the Eucharist to be Christ's "flesh which suffered for our sins," elsewhere speaks of the blood as being "joy eternal and lasting," as "hope," as "love incorruptible," and of the flesh as "faith" or as "the gospel." Clement of Alexandria (c. 180) regards the rite as an initiation in divine knowledge and immortality. The only food he recognizes is spiritual; e.g. knowledge of the divine Essence is "eating and drinking of the divine Word." So Origen declares the bread which God the Word asserted was his body to be that which nourishes souls, the word from God the Word proceeding, the Bread from the heavenly Bread. Not the visible bread held in his hand, nor the visible cup, were Christ's body and blood, but the word in the mystery of which the bread was to be broken and the wine to be poured out. "We drink Christ's blood," he says elsewhere, "when we receive His words in which standeth Life." So the author of the _Contra Marcellum_ writes in view of John vi. 63 as follows (_De eccl. Theol_. p. 180):
"In these words he instructed them to interpret in a spiritual sense his utterances about his flesh and blood. Do not, he said, think that I mean the flesh which invests and covers me, and bid you eat that; nor suppose either that I command you to drink my sensible and somatic blood. Nay, you know well that my words which I have spoken unto you are spirit and life. It follows that the very words and discourses are his flesh and blood, of which he that constantly partakes, nourished as it were upon heavenly bread, will partake of the heavenly life. Let not then, he says, this scandalize you which I have said about eating of my flesh and about drinking of my blood. Nor let the obvious and first hand meaning of what I said about my flesh and blood disturb you when you hear it. For these words avail nothing if heard and understood literally (_or_ sensibly). But it is the spirit which quickens them that can understand spiritually what they hear."
But these views were not those of the uninstructed pagans who filled the churches and needed a rite which brought them, as their old sacrifices had done, into physical contact and union with their god. Their point of view was better expressed in the scruples of priests, who, as Tertullian (c. 200) records (_De Corona_, iii.), were careful lest a crumb of the bread or a drop of the wine should fall on the ground, and by such incidents the body of Christ be harassed and attacked!