Verbum Caro, Panem Verum

There is a story among the nuns of an aspirant who was deeply troubled one morning when she noted the words ‘Sola Fides’ etched into the dark wood paneling above one of the nuns across choir. Knowing ‘Faith Alone’ to be one of Martin Luther’s defining ‘solas’ during the Protestant Reformation, she wondered what on earth that sort of thing was doing in a Catholic Monastery! With a wider view (and a little explanation from the Prioress), it became clear that these two words formed only a part of a glorious whole and that, far from being a very poorly-hidden Lutheran declaration, they are a beloved part of our Dominican heritage.

When read in full across the room, these words gradually emerge as the fourth stanza of the ‘Pange, Lingua, Gloriosi’, a hymn composed in the 13th century for the Feast of Corpus Christi and attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas:

“Verbum caro, panem verum
Verbo carnem éfficit:
Fitque sanguis Christi merum,
Et si sensus déficit,
Ad firmándum cor sincérum
Sola fides súfficit.”

This stanza is a little less famous than the one which follows (beginning with the incipit ‘Tantum ergo Sacramentum’ and sung at benediction of the Blessed Sacrament for centuries), but one would be hard-pressed to find another as densely packed with meaning. Alongside the third stanza, the fourth is arguably the core of the Pange, Lingua and most directly proclaims the mystery that St. Thomas was charged with celebrating. This is particularly true of the first two lines: ‘Verbum caro, panem verum/Verbo carnem éfficit’, which meet with the last line of the third stanza (‘Cibum turbæ duodénæ/Se dat suis mánibus.’) to form the actual center of the six-stanza hymn. This is no happy accident; in these lines we also find the center of our Eucharistic Theology.

Of course, it’s hard to know that if you don’t speak Latin!

So, let’s begin with a translation:

Verbum caro, panem verum
Verbo carnem éfficit

The Word-made-Flesh makes true bread
into flesh by a word

In these lines, we have the Word-made-Flesh (Verbum caro) actually making (éfficit) bread (panem) into flesh (carnem) by a word (Verbo). If we had time (and space!) to go into a reflection on the whole of the Pange, Lingua, we would see that St. Thomas is referring here to the Last Supper and Jesus’ Institution of the Eucharist. It is a simple but profound expression of the fact that Jesus, the ‘Word-made-Flesh’, turns the bread in his hands into flesh by a word, saying: ‘This is my body.’ (Matthew 26:26-29) Here, not only does St. Thomas poetically reveal the symmetry between God’s work of Creation (spoken through Jesus, His Word) and His work of Redemption (spoken through the Incarnation of the same Word), but he also states the fundamental reality of the Eucharistic Sacrifice: that Jesus ‘effects’ (éfficit), or makes a new reality of flesh actually present in what was previously bread.  

This is a vitally clear statement of what has become quite ambiguous since the Protestant Reformation, even in the minds of some Catholics; that is, that as the Church in the Mass enters into this mystery of the Eucharistic Sacrifice through Christ’s ministerial priesthood, the bread and wine offered are altered fundamentally, so that what we see as mere bread after the Consecration is actually the substance of Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. The Eucharist is not only a symbol, a mere representation, but a Sacrament – that which ‘effects’ what it symbolizes.

Something else is notable in these words, however. St. Thomas uses the phrase ‘panem verum’ in the original Latin, which is most robustly translated as ‘true bread’, not just ‘bread’ or even ‘real bread’ as it is given in some hymnals. For anyone who has heard John 6 (the ‘Bread of Life Discourse’) read during the Liturgy of the Word, the phrase ‘true bread’ might be setting off a few ready bells!

“Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven;
my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.” (John 6:32)

In the Latin Vulgate – the translation of Scripture most familiar to Aquinas – the Latin of this verse is ‘panem… verum’, exactly as St. Thomas renders it here.

So, why is this significant?

The ‘flesh’ into which Jesus turns the bread is not any mere flesh, but His flesh, the very body of the Word, which Jesus earlier tells the crowds in John 6 is the ‘true bread of Heaven’. It seems, then, that St. Thomas is not only referring to the miraculous change of the substance of bread into flesh, but also to the connection between that flesh and the imperatives of John 6:

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” (John 6:53)

The Eucharistic realities suggested here by St. Thomas’s use of the words ‘true bread’ seem far too intentional to be overlooked. It appears that St. Thomas included these particular phrases to evoke the full Truth of the Eucharistic Sacrifice that Christ’s Flesh, truly present, is our ‘true bread from Heaven’, consumable under the species of bread and wine that remain visible to us.      

We see a similar reality in the line which follows, where Jesus changes the wine into His Precious Blood:

Fitque sanguis Christi merum,

and the wine becomes the Blood of Christ.

The wine is changed, irrevocably altered, from what was wine into the Precious Blood of Our Lord under the species of wine and similarly serves as the ‘true drink’ referred to in John 6, so that we can participate in His Sacrifice as He intended and be fed by the Gift of this Sustaining Food.

The final three lines of the stanza confirm the amazingly complex reality of what was accomplished at Christ’s hands in the upper room and what is subsequently accomplished at each Mass offered by the ministerial priesthood of the Church. That simple bread and wine can become Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, consumable as the true bread and true drink of John 6, is a fact naturally alarming to reason and impossible for the senses, which can perceive only one reality at a time. St. Thomas, therefore, turns immediately to say:

Et si sensus déficit,
Ad firmándum cor sincérum
Sola fides súfficit.

And if sense is deficient
to strengthen a sincere heart
Faith alone suffices.

Our senses are a powerful and reliable means to know the truth of the world around us, but Aquinas notes that in the face of certain realities, they can only do so much. We are finite beings, so our ability to perceive what is infinite must necessarily be limited. That, St. Thomas suggests, is where Faith comes in – for what we cannot possibly know of our own abilities, must be revealed to us by the One who knows all Truth in its fullness. The Eucharist, St. Thomas infers, is one such mystery, and while he would never suggest that our senses are incompatible with Faith, he does clearly express the failure of those senses – their ‘deficiency’ – in grasping what is really present and the necessity that this Real Presence be revealed to us by God in Jesus through Faith. For this reason, the ‘sola fides’ of the last line refers not to Luther’s claim that Faith on its own can lead us to Salvation, but to the fact that only Faith can grasp what the senses cannot in the reality of our Eucharistic Lord, and only Faith, therefore, can provide the solid ground on which a heart sincerely seeking the Truth can rest.

It is clear, then, why this remarkable bit of poetry has served our sisters in their contemplation for over a hundred years! Rich in deep theology and ripe with both challenges for the intellect and consolations for an earnest heart, it is a treasure of St. Thomas’s profound mind and his own life of prayer, and we, as his sisters, are very much indebted to him and to the Lord for the gift of it.