Simon Patrick published a work entitled Mensa Mystica or a Discourse concerning the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, in the year 1660, the year Charles II came to the throne, following the period of the Commonwealth.  In this work Patrick discusses the Eucharist as a commemorative sacrifice, saying:

“αναμνεσι  (anamnesis) doth not signify barely ‘recordatio’, recording or registering of his favours in our mind; but ‘commemoratio’, a solemn declaration that we do well bear them in our hearts, and will continue the memory, and spread the fame of him as far, and as long as ever we are able.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 94-95).

Patrick’s view here is that the Eucharist is not just a calling to mind of Christ’s sacrifice (recordatio) but rather commemoratio or solemn commemoration or declaration of sacrifice.  The commemoration is clearly more than the simple recording or marking in the mind, since he says:

“I would not be so mistaken, as if I though the Christian thanksgiving consisted only of inward thoughts and outward words.  For there are eucharistical actions also whereby we perform a most delightful sacrifice unto God. … The spiritual sacrifice of ourselves, and the corporal sacrifice of our goods to him, may teach the papists that we are sacrificers as well as they.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 114).

Here Patrick speaks of ‘a most delightful sacrifice unto God’ – the spiritual sacrifice of self, thereby speaking of those who make such spiritual sacrifices as ‘sacrificers’.  It would be a mistake however, to infer from this that Patrick only means spiritual self-sacrifice when he speaks of eucharistic sacrifice, since in outlining the nature of the commemoration in the Eucharist, Patrick goes on to argue that the nature of the Christian sacrifice is not restricted to ‘the spiritual sacrifice of ourselves’.  He says:

“As the bread and wine do commemorate the truth of his body; so do bread broken and wine poured out, commemorate the truth of his sufferings for us. … We do show it forth and declare it unto men, which is sufficiently clear by all that hath been said.  We do publish and annunciate unto all that he is Saviour of the world, and that he hath died for us and purchased blessings thereby beyond the estimate and account of human thought.  And further, the word κατταγγελλειν may import, that we do extol, predicate, magnify, and highly lift up in our praises this great benefit, so that all may come to the knowledge of it, as far as is in our powers to procure.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 99-100).

The Eucharist therefore shows forth Christ and his sufferings to all people, and it is through the Eucharist that the benefits of Christ are available in the present.  This is memorial remembrance or anamnesis, or as Patrick describes it commemoratio.  The eucharistic sacrifice is more than self-sacrifice – the Eucharist is also a showing forth and a declaring of Christ’s sacrifice in the present.  Further Patrick goes on to argue that in the Eucharist:

“We keep it (as it were) in his memory, and plead before him the sacrifice of his Son which we show unto him, humbly requiring that grace and pardon with all other benefits of it may be bestowed on us.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 100).

Sacrifice for Patrick is not re-iterated in an immoderate sense, but pleaded before God as the grace, pardon and benefit of the once only sacrifice is renewed in the present.  Patrick’s use of the word ‘plead’ here is important.  It has been argued that his is the earliest use of the word in relation to eucharistic sacrifice (McAdoo and Stevenson, 1997: 189).  The idea here presented by Patrick, and taken up by others, particularly in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is that Christ’s sacrifice is ‘pleaded’ or commemorated before God and that as this is done the benefits of that sacrifice are available in the present in the Eucharist.  This is the language of memorial remembrance or anamnesis before God as the grace, pardon and benefit of the once only sacrifice are renewed in the present.  This is also the language of moderate realism.  The effects of the once only sacrifice of Christ are available and pleaded in the present.

Cyril Dugmore argues that Patrick probably derived his theology of sacrifice in the Eucharist from Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist (Dugmore, 1942: 113).  This is especially so in relation to the using of the word ‘sacrifice’, not in its strict sense (fleshy, immoderate re-iteration), but in the sense of “a feast upon the one true sacrifice once offered by Christ for us” (Dugmore, 1942: 113).  Cudworth in his work A Discourse Concerning the True Nature of the Lord’s Supper, published in 1642, argues that

“ … the right notion of that Christian feast called the Lord’s Supper, in which we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ that was once offered up to God for us, is to be derived, if I mistake not, from analogy to that ancient rite among the Jews of feasting upon things sacrificed and eating of those things which they had offered to God.” (Cudworth, A Discourse Concerning the True Nature of the Lord’s Supper, cited in Stone, 1909: II, 316).

Patrick, following Cudworth, argues that:

“From all which discourse we may thus reason, that the Holy Sacrament is a feast upon the sacrifice which Christ offered, as the Jewish feasts were made with the flesh of those sacrifices which offered to God.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 126).

The nature of the sacrifice spoken of by both Cudworth and Patrick, in their ‘feast upon a sacrifice’, is that of commemorative sacrifice.  It is a sacrifice expressed in terms of moderate realism.  He affirms moderate realism by saying that in relation to the institution of the Eucharist “we do nothing but what Christ did, and therefore if he offered no sacrifice, neither do we, but only commemorate that sacrifice which he was then about to offer” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 103).  He does say however, that the Eucharist “may be called a sacrifice, because with the Action we do offer to God all good things” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 102-103).  For Patrick the idea of eucharistic sacrifice includes more than mere remembrance or bringing to mind – it includes also the notion of self-sacrifice and the concept of memorial remembrance or anamnesis.  Patrick’s theology of eucharistic sacrifice is based on moderate realism.

In regard to the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Patrick was clear in his rejection of transubstantiation, as he understood it.  He says:

“Christ does not descend locally unto us that we may feed on him, but as the Sun toucheth us by his beams without removing out of his sphere, so Christ comes down upon us by the power of the Holy Ghost, moving by its heavenly virtue into our hearts, though he remain above.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 109).

For Patrick there was no sense of a local or physical presence possible in the bread and wine of the Eucharist (immoderate realism), but he did not at the same time subscribe to a view which said that there was no presence of Christ at all in the Eucharist.  In a work written in 1690, entitled An Answer to a Book spread abroad by the Romish Priests, entitled, The Touchstone of the Gospel, Patrick denied that:

“ … the bread of the Supper of our Lord was but a figure or remembrance of the body of Christ received by faith, and not his true and very body.” (Patrick, An Answer to a Book spread about by the Romish Priests, entitled, The Touchstone of the Gospel, edn. Taylor, 1858: VII, 299).

For Patrick, anyone who argues that he did not see a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was spreading a “fiction and false representation” which could be disproved by reference to Article XXVII of The Thirty-Nine Articles (Patrick, An Answer to a Book spread about by the Romish Priests, entitled, The Touchstone of the Gospel, edn. Taylor, 1858: VII, 299).  Clearly Patrick saw Article XXVII as teaching a notion of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Patrick’s view of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was that “Christ is really present in the Eucharist, though not substantially, and that there is real participation of Christ by the faithful receiver” (Dugmore, 1942: 115).  Immoderate realism is denied and moderate realism is affirmed.  In Mensa Mystica Patrick speaks also of how Christ is present in the Eucharist.  He says:

“The change is our souls and not in the Sacrament; … his presence is with the bread, though not in it.  Though it be only in us, yet it comes with it unto us if we receive him.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 151).

Patrick is here affirming that the bread remains bread and that there is no change in it.  Christ is not ‘in’ the bread through some change occurring; rather Christ is present ‘with’ the bread.  Clearly this presence ‘with’ is not the physical presence of Christ, since Patrick has already denied any form of immoderate realism, but it is nonetheless a ‘real’ presence.  Any notion of change can only apply to those who receive the sacrament and not to the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  As McAdoo and Stevenson point out, Patrick’s words here suggest that his notion of presence is ‘relational’ (McAdoo and Stevenson, 1997: 91).  The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is therefore ‘with’ the bread and wine and at the same time Christ is present ‘with people’ in a sense other than by physical change and immoderate realism.  This sense is that of relation. 

Earlier Patrick has spoken of a ‘heavenly virtue’ present by the work of the Holy Spirit.  For Patrick the role of the Holy Spirit is very important, even crucial, in the way in which Christ is present ‘with’ the bread and wine and ‘with’ people.  Indeed in speaking of the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Patrick says:

“And this is all that is meant by the real presence of Christ in this Sacrament, which the Church speaks of and believes; as it is one reason likewise of the change which is so much noised, because by his power these things become effectual to so great purposes, when they are holily received.  Our Lord doth call these signs by the things they signify, because in a spiritual manner his body and blood are present in us, viz. by the communication of that to us which did purchase for us.” (Patrick, Mensa Mystica, edn. Taylor, 1858: I, 150).

It is this notion of a heavenly virtue and the spiritual real presence that seems comparable to the idea of instantiation of Christ’s nature as word or logos.  It is by the power of the Holy Spirit that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, with the elements and with the people, becomes effectual.  It is therefore legitimate to call the bread and wine of the Eucharist the body and blood of Christ, since this is following the Lord’s example.  It is by the reception of the bread and wine that Christ communicates to those who receive his body and blood and the benefits of his passion.  Patrick’s idea of the real presence and sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist is based on the assumptions of moderate realism.