Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act or process of biting or chewing; mastication.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun rare The act of chewing.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act of eating.
  • noun Christianity The belief that eating the bread of Eucharist is eating the actual flesh of Jesus.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Father and the “word” was established; as also the proceeding of the “pneuma,” the divine organ of the divine Logos; as also the two natures and two wills resulting from the hypostasis; and lastly, the superior manducation — the soul nourished as well as the body, with the flesh and blood of the God-man, adored and eaten in the form of bread, present to the eyes, sensible to the taste, and yet annihilated.

    A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

  • Papists at this day, in behalf of their transubstantiation, that, if we reject their oral or carnal manducation of the flesh of Christ and drinking of his blood, there cannot be assigned a way of participation of Christ, in the receiving of him in this sacrament, distinct from that which is done in the preaching of the word.

    The Sermons of John Owen 1616-1683 1968

  • Christ; if it be pressed on us that these must be done by transubstantiation and oral manducation thereon, and can be no otherwise, nothing but an experience of the power and efficacy of the mystical communion with Christ in this ordinance, before described, will preserve us from being ensnared by their pretences.

    The Sermons of John Owen 1616-1683 1968

  • I cannot help reminding you of the characteristic passage: 'Consider a city-feast,' he exclaims, 'what manducation, what deglutition, and yet not one Alderman choked in a century!'

    Philosophy and Religion Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge Hastings Rashdall

  • Belief in the literal transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper was rigidly enforced and substituted for that spiritual presence and spiritual manducation which the earlier church had maintained.

    The Scottish Reformation Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics Alexander F. Mitchell

  • But spare us the repetition of those stale legends that man was made and unmade in the space of a few moments, and that ever since the manducation of the forbidden fruit his powers have withered, and that there is no remedy available for their recovery but incessant prayer and sacramental ordinances.

    Morality as a Religion An exposition of some first principles W. R. Washington Sullivan

  • Hence, a rigidly literal meaning was given to Christ's utterances about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and Christians were taught to believe that by the manducation of his bodily frame his holy spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael

    Morality as a Religion An exposition of some first principles W. R. Washington Sullivan

  • In 1577 a form of concord was produced in which the real manducation of Christ's body and blood in the eucharist was established and heresy and excommunication laid on all that refused this as an article of faith, with pains and penalties to be enforced by the secular arm.

    The Revelation Explained 1913

  • The remarkable passage on the spiritual manducation of the elements in Letter VIII. is commented on on p. 118.

    NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works 1895

  • It is not easy for Roman commentators to cite passages even apparently in support of the less spiritual view of the manducation, e.g. Fessler, Inst.Pat. i. 530, and the quotations under the word "Eucharistia," in the Index of Basil ed Migne.

    NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works 1895

Comments

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  • "As for the body, which our erudite voyeur pretends to ignore, it helps dig the ditch that will unearth the compromising roots of his clerical genealogy, the scholarly and social core of a family theology that realizes its golden age is now over, impervious to healthy criticism, manducation of the immutable precepts lying virtually undisturbed these past decades by those discreet stirrings that the surrounding vacuum causes to resonate until they finally swell into an event of sorts, a slender flame commensurate with our respectfully narrow national history."

    Talismano by Abdelwahab Meddeb, translated by Jane Kuntz, p 32 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback

    September 18, 2011