Eucharist: believing in order to understand

Living during the period immediately preceding the great scholastic works of Aquinas, Bonaventure and others, St Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033-1109), helped defend and deepen the Church's understanding of the Eucharist at a crucial moment in history. Yet, he lived after the controversy surrounding a certain Berengar of Tours (c. 999-1088) whose teachings raised serious questions about how Christ is present in the Eucharist and prompted the Church to articulate its doctrine with greater precision. 

For Anselm, faith receives what reason can never fully understand.  His distinctive contribution was not a detailed Eucharistic treatise but the theological method encapsulated in his famous phrase fides quaerens intellectum ‘faith seeking understanding’.  Though he did not in a specific reference to the Eucharist, his famous phrase from the Proslogium is worth repeating:

I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, --that unless I believed, I should not understand.

Applying Anselm's principle of faith seeking understanding to the Eucharist, we may say that this mystery is first received in faith before its depths are explored by theology.  In the same work, St Anselm explains that only the one who is both truly God and truly man can reconcile us to the Father.  The Christ who is present in the Eucharist is the same incarnate one born of Mary; the same who died on Calvary; and the same risen Lord who now reigns in glory. 

Canterbury cathedral where St Anselm exercised his ministry 

Through the sacrament the same Christ becomes truly and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine, and through Holy Communion draws believers into deeper union with himself. The sacrament of the Eucharist is no less than the presence of the incarnate and risen Lord sacramentally offered by the Church as the memorial of his saving sacrifice.  His theology is well summarised in the following:

Teach me to seek you, and reveal yourself to me, when I seek you, for I cannot seek you, except you teach me, nor find you, except you reveal yourself. Let me seek you in longing, let me long for you in seeking; let me find you in love, and love you in finding. Lord, I acknowledge and I thank you that you have created me in this your image, in order that I may be mindful of you, may conceive of you, and love you; but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices, and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing, that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except you renew it, and create it anew.  Proslogium