Jean Khoury

Summary: This article explores one of the most daring affirmations of Catholic sacramental theology: that in Holy Communion we receive not only the Body and Blood of Christ, but His Soul and Divinity. Following the Council of Trent, the New Testament, and the mystical tradition, it argues that this reception is not merely a pious sentiment but an objective ontological reality with profound consequences for the spiritual life. Drawing on Saint Paul, Elizabeth of the Trinity, the early martyrs, and the patristic reading of the Gospel of Saint John, the article unfolds the meaning of Christ living, thinking, willing, and suffering in the baptised soul. It examines the theological precision required — Christ is not a viator but a comprehensor, and our union with Him is one of grace, not nature — while insisting that this precision never diminishes the audacity of the mystery. It concludes with practical implications: the Christian life consists in allowing Christ’s interior dispositions gradually to penetrate and transform one’s own, making each baptised person an extension of His humanity in the world until the end of time.

Introduction

There is a sentence in the Catechism of the Council of Trent that few Catholics pause over long enough to feel its full weight. The Eucharist, it declares, contains the whole Christ: Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. We tend to move past the word soul rather quickly, as though it were an afterthought tucked between the more familiar affirmations. It is not. That word opens onto one of the most vertiginous depths of Christian faith.

When we receive Holy Communion, we receive Jesus’ Soul. His Soul, united to ours. Not as a figure of speech. Not as a devotional exaggeration. As a fact of faith.

Saint Paul had already intuited where this must lead when he wrote: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). That sentence is either true — radically, literally, ontologically true — or it is a dangerous delusion. The mystical tradition, the early martyrs, and the Fathers of the Church were convinced it is true. This article proposes to take it seriously, to follow its logic, and to reflect on what it means for those who receive the Lord in the Eucharist.

I. What We Receive: The Teaching of the Church

The Council of Trent defined with precision what occurs in the Eucharist. In the consecrated species, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained. The adverb whole is not decorative. It means Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity — the complete Person of the Incarnate Son of God, undivided.

This teaching rests upon the logic of the hypostatic union. Because the Second Person of the Trinity took to Himself a human nature — body and soul — He is never present in a dismembered fashion. Where His Body is, His Soul is. Where His Soul is, His Divinity is. The Eucharist does not offer us a fragment of Christ. It offers us Christ.

Saint John Eudes drew out the consequences with characteristic boldness:

“I beg you to consider that Jesus Christ is your true Head and that you are one of His members. He is to you what the head is to its members; all that is His is yours, His spirit, His heart, His body, His soul, and all His faculties.”  (Saint John Eudes)

This is not spiritual hyperbole. It is the ecclesiological doctrine of the Mystical Body stated in its personal form: what belongs to the Head belongs to the members. What belongs to Christ belongs, by grace and union, to those incorporated into Him.

II. A Necessary Precision: Christ Is Not a Wayfarer

To speak of receiving Christ’s soul, and of His interior life becoming ours, requires one theological precision that cannot be omitted without falling into error.

One might be tempted to speak, loosely, of Christ’s faith becoming our faith, or of His hope being communicated to us. This is imprecise. Classical Catholic theology teaches that Christ, during His earthly life, did not possess faith and hope in the sense proper to us. Faith is, in the words of the Letter to the Hebrews, “the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). But Christ’s human soul enjoyed an immediate and unfailing knowledge of the Father — what theology calls the beatific vision.

Saint Thomas Aquinas is unambiguous:

“Faith has to do with things that are not seen. But Christ saw God fully and therefore could not have faith.”  (Summa Theologiae, III, q. 7, a. 3)

This distinction is important because it defines the nature of our union with Him. We do not receive from Christ something He Himself possessed as a fellow wayfarer. We receive the overflow of His fullness. He is simultaneously viator et comprehensor — present among us as a pilgrim and yet already in possession of the Father’s glory. What He communicates to us by grace exceeds anything we could acquire by natural effort, because it flows from a knowledge and love of the Father that are already total and unmediated.

More accurately, then, we should say: our faith is progressively conformed to Christ’s vision and knowledge of the Father. The dispositions of His soul — His filial trust, His obedience, His compassion, His desire for the Father’s glory — gradually become our dispositions as we open ourselves to His indwelling.

III. The Scandal of It

Christianity has always provoked scandal. In the second century, Christians were accused of cannibalism on account of the Eucharist. Justin Martyr had to explain to pagan readers that what takes place at the Christian table is not consumption of a corpse but reception of the living Lord. The charge was grotesque, but it arose from a genuine perception that something radical was being claimed.

Today the charge would be different. The psychological language of our age offers a different set of suspicions: dissociation, delusion, the dissolution of personal identity. If someone were to say in a clinical consultation, “Another person lives in me, thinks in me, acts in me, and I seek to allow His desires to replace my own”, the diagnostician would reach for a classification.

And yet this is exactly what the New Testament says. Not approximately. Not metaphorically.

“For me to live is Christ.”  (Philippians 1:21)

“We have the mind of Christ.”  (1 Corinthians 2:16)

“He who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.”  (1 Corinthians 6:17)

The Christian does not become a passive receptacle in which Christ replaces the individual. Grace does not destroy nature; it perfects it. This is the perennial principle of Saint Thomas: gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. The person remains fully themselves. The soul retains its faculties. The will retains its freedom. But all of this is now elevated, purified, and, in the deepest sense, fulfilled, because it is inhabited by Another.

One striking sign that this is not a pathological fusion of personalities is the extraordinary diversity of the saints. Francis of Assisi and Thérèse of Lisieux, Catherine of Siena and John of the Cross, Padre Pio and Elizabeth of the Trinity — Christ lived in all of them, and yet each one is unmistakably themselves. Not identical copies of a single template, but wholly individual human beings in whom a common life shines forth differently. The more they were conformed to Christ, the more fully they became who they were created to be.

IV. An Extension of His Humanity

Elizabeth of the Trinity captured the mystical vocation with unusual precision in a phrase that resists easy translation: “Je voudrais être pour Lui une humanité de surcroît.” The expression de surcroît means something added, supplementary, extended — an extra humanity offered to Christ.

Her thought is this: Christ’s visible earthly humanity is no longer present among us in the manner it was before the Ascension. But He desires to continue manifesting His life, His prayer, His obedience, His compassion, and even in a certain sense His suffering, through the members of His Mystical Body. Our humanity becomes an extension of His presence and action in the world.

This is not an extension of the hypostatic union, nor an identification with His divine Sonship by nature. The distinction between Creator and creature is never dissolved. But in the order of grace and mission, our human nature becomes — as Saint Paul expresses it — the place where Christ continues to live:

“You are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”  (1 Corinthians 12:27)

Saint Augustine dared to say, in a homily on the Eucharist:

“Let us rejoice and give thanks: we have become not only Christians, but Christ.”  (Saint Augustine)

He immediately clarifies that this is because Head and members form one Mystical Christ — Christus totus — not because the distinction between Christ and the believer disappears. But the audacity of the affirmation stands: by grace, through Baptism and the Eucharist, we participate so genuinely in Christ’s life that Augustine can speak in this way without contradiction.

The Church, then, is not merely the community that remembers Christ. She is the place where He continues to live and act in history, through human beings who have become, by grace, extensions of His humanity.

V. Christ in the Martyr

The earliest witnesses to this mystery are the martyrs. Reading the accounts from the second and third centuries, one is struck by a consistent pattern: the writer does not merely see a brave believer imitating Christ under pressure. He sees Christ Himself continuing His Passion in the body of the martyr.

This is not hagiographical exaggeration. It is the direct application of a truth Christ had already stated: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). Not: “Why do you persecute my followers?” Not: “Why do you harm those dear to me?” But: “Why do you persecute me?” The identification between Christ and His members is so complete that what is done to them is done to Him.

The martyr’s serenity before the tribunal, his silence before his accusers, his forgiveness of his executioners, his radical confidence in the Father — these do not arise from heroic natural courage. They arise because another life is manifesting itself through his. Christ is not merely accompanying the martyr as an external support. He is living His own Passion again, in a member of His Body.

This is why the Pauline formula is not merely theological: it is pastoral, existential, and verifiable in the lives of those who have taken it literally.

VI. The Second Reading of Saint John

The Gospel of Saint John yields itself on two levels of reading, and it is the second that becomes accessible only when one has already been incorporated into Christ.

At the first level, John is writing history. He is reporting what Jesus did and said: the call of the disciples, the wedding at Cana, the encounter with the Samaritan woman, the healing of the man born blind, the raising of Lazarus, the washing of the feet, the Passion, the Resurrection, the appearance in the garden.

But once one has received Christ in Communion, once His Soul has been united to ours and He has begun to live in us, the Gospel opens onto a second dimension. What Christ accomplished in His earthly humanity is not sealed off in the past. It is communicated to the members of His Body. The blind man who receives sight is also the soul that emerges from ignorance and spiritual darkness. Lazarus coming forth from the tomb is the soul raised from the death of sin. The woman at the well who receives living water is the soul thirsting for God and finding Him. The disciple resting upon the Lord’s breast is the contemplative soul resting in His love.

All that Jesus’ humanity lived and did becomes ours. Not by imagination. Not by pious sentiment. By the mystical reality of incorporation: because we are in Him, and He is in us, His mysteries are operative in us.

The Fathers read Scripture in exactly this way. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine — all of them interpret the events of the Gospel as realities unfolding not only in history but in the soul. Saint Leo the Great expressed the principle with perfect concision:

“What was visible in our Saviour has passed over into His mysteries.”  (Saint Leo the Great)

The visible acts of Christ in history have become sacramental and mystical realities through which He continues to act in the Church and in the souls of His members. The Gospel is not only the record of what Christ accomplished once. It is the account of what He continues to accomplish — in us, through us, as us.

VII. Entrusted to Human Freedom

There is one further dimension of this mystery that must not be softened: Christ entrusts the continuation of His life in the world to genuinely free human beings, which means He accepts the real possibility of refusal.

He chose not to remain visibly present after the Ascension and to do everything Himself. Instead, He willed that His work should continue through His members. This is the incarnational logic extended into history: God does not save by bypassing human freedom, but by entering into it.

The Gospel itself gives us the clearest evidence of this. The disciples who will eventually give their lives for the Gospel are, in the Synoptics, men who misunderstand, argue about precedence, fall asleep in Gethsemane, and flee. Peter confesses Christ and then denies Him. Judas is chosen, formed, and sent — and betrays Him. The Acts of the Apostles does not show us a flawless Church but one that argues, hesitates, and yet is carried forward by grace.

Christ’s own words refuse any complacency here:

“Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”  (Luke 18:8)

“Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.”  (Luke 13:24)

The verb strive (ἀγωνίζεσθε) is the language of struggle and contest. The Kingdom is not entered by inertia. Faith is not a passive inheritance. It is something that must be received, preserved, and fought for within real human freedom.

At the level of created freedom, therefore, there is a genuine contingency in salvation history. Grace is always prior and always sufficient, but it is not imposed in such a way that removes the possibility of refusal. What we call a “risk”, in the concrete Gospel sense, is simply this: Christ chooses to work through real human freedom as it actually is, not through a guaranteed mechanism. He places His Gospel, His sacraments, and His mission into hands that can truly fail.

Saint Paul names this without embarrassment: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Corinthians 4:7). The treasure is real and imperishable. The vessel remains fragile clay.

Practical Conclusions

1. Receive Communion as a Real Event

Holy Communion is not a rite to be performed or a spiritual moment to be appreciated. It is the most objective event in the Christian life: the reception of Christ — Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity — into one’s own person. To receive worthily is to open oneself to a real union of souls. To remain in that union throughout the day is the basic act of the spiritual life.

2. Allow His Dispositions to Become Yours

The entire spiritual life can be described, from one angle, as the progressive penetration of Christ’s interior dispositions into one’s own soul. His filial trust in the Father, His obedience, His compassion for the weak, His patience under contradiction, His desire for God’s glory above His own comfort — these are not virtues to be acquired by human effort alone. They are realities to be received, because the One who possesses them fully is living within you.

The daily word received in prayer, the fidelity to grace in ordinary circumstances, the acceptance of suffering — all of these are means by which Christ communicates something of His own interior life and reproduces in the soul some aspect of His mystery.

3. Read the Gospel as a Living Document

Once one has received Christ and allows Him to live more consciously within oneself, the Gospel ceases to be merely a historical record and becomes a living description of what Christ is accomplishing in the soul right now. To read the healing of the blind man is to open oneself to one’s own blindness being healed. To read the washing of the feet is to receive the Lord’s own humility as a gift. To read the Passion is to find Christ entering and transfiguring one’s own suffering.

This is not an allegorical game. It is the second reading — the participatory reading — which the Fathers practised and which only becomes available to those who are genuinely united to Him.

4. Be a Real Extension of His Humanity

Elizabeth of the Trinity’s phrase is a vocation, not a description. We are called to offer Christ a living, active human existence through which He can continue to pray, to love, to forgive, to serve, and to reveal the Father. This is a concrete task: to become progressively transparent to Christ so that what people encounter in us is, as much as grace allows, an encounter with Him.

This does not mean suppressing personality or becoming passive. It means allowing the soul to be so formed by His interior life that its natural gifts and particular character become instruments of His presence.

5. Take Human Freedom Seriously

The mystery of Christ living in us does not suppress the drama of freedom. On the contrary, it intensifies it. We are genuinely capable of welcoming or resisting grace. The history of the Church, the life of every Christian, and our own daily experience confirm this. To hold together the reality of Christ’s indwelling and the reality of our freedom — capable of fidelity and capable of failure — is to stand in the truth of the Christian life without illusion.

The appropriate response is vigilance, prayer, and perseverance — not anxiety, but clarity.

General Conclusion

No philosopher, left to natural reason alone, would have invented the Christian doctrine of the Eucharist. The idea that a human person could receive into themselves the Soul of the Son of God, that this Soul could dwell within them, think and will and love in them, and gradually transform their interior life from within — this exceeds every category that unaided reason could have elaborated.

And yet this is what the New Testament teaches, what the Council of Trent defines, and what the saints discovered in lived experience. The early martyrs did not merely die bravely for a memory. They suffered and forgave and held firm because Christ was living His own Passion in them. The great mystics did not merely admire Christ from a distance. They allowed Him, over years and decades of prayer and fidelity, to reproduce His own interior dispositions within them.

Elizabeth of the Trinity saw clearly that this is the vocation of every baptised person, not only of mystics and martyrs. Each Christian is called to be, for Christ, une humanité de surcroît — a supplementary humanity through which He continues to live, pray, love, and act in the world until His Body is fully formed and His prayer is answered: “I in them” (John 17:23).

The mystery may well leave one dizzy. It is supposed to. The appropriate response is not to reduce it to something more comfortable, but to stand before it, receive it, and spend a lifetime discovering what it means.

Bibliography

Scripture

The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994.

Magisterial Documents

Council of Trent. Decree on the Most Holy Eucharist (Session XIII, 1551). In Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner SJ. London: Sheed & Ward, 1990.

Pius XII. Mystici Corporis Christi (1943). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Patristic Sources

Augustine of Hippo. In Evangelium Johannis Tractatus. Trans. John Gibb. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1888.

Augustine of Hippo. Sermo 272. Trans. Edmund Hill OP. In The Works of Saint Augustine: Sermons, vol. 7. Hyde Park: New City Press, 1993.

Justin Martyr. First Apology. Trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1885.

Leo the Great. Sermons. Trans. Charles Lett Feltoe. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 12. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1895.

Scholastic and Systematic Theology

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920–1942. Particularly: III, q. 7, aa. 3–4 (on Christ’s knowledge and faith); III, qq. 73–83 (on the Eucharist).

Garrigou-Lagrange OP, Réginald. The Three Ages of the Interior Life. Trans. Sr Timothea Doyle OP. St Louis: B. Herder, 1947.

Mystical and Spiritual Theology

Élisabeth de la Trinité. J’ai trouvé Dieu: Œuvres complètes. Paris: Cerf, 1991. (Writings including letters and retreats.)

Éudes, Jean. The Life and Kingdom of Jesus in Christian Souls. Trans. Sisters of the Good Shepherd. New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1946.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.

Thérèse of Lisieux. Story of a Soul. Trans. John Clarke OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996.