I've noticed this repeatedly. Protestants who insist they can go to the Bible and read it for themselves, without any bishop or pope telling them what it means, seem equally convinced that they cannot understand the Fathers except after they've been post-processed by a Protestant theologian or patristic exegete.
Augustine had a "symbolical" view of the Eucharist, hmmm? He says in one place that we sin if we don't adore the Host. You think he's teaching that we ought to adore a symbol? Hardly.
There isn’t one Catholic in a hundred - and probably a thousand - who has actually READ the Church Fathers deeply. It is the project of a lifetime...thousands and thousands of pages, involving controversies most of us have never thought about.
Mad Dawg made a point on another thread about devotional language vs logical language. That is another challenge in reading the Church Fathers. They were Fathers, not writers of Systematic Theology.
Please don’t tell me Catholics immerse themselves in the Church Fathers and read them in unbiased fashion. Neither do Protestants. No one who cares enough to spend years in research does it ‘just because’, or in a dispassionate curiosity.
Schaff gives lots of examples on both sides, and sometimes on 3 or 4 sides. That is about as good as it gets.
Augustine is the most-interpreted of all the Church fathers. Any genius (including Luther), precisely because of his nuanced mind, lends himself to varied interpretation.
The claim that Augustine had a “spiritualizing” view of Eucharistic presence goes back to Erasmus. It spawned the “sacramentarian” movement in the Low Countries which, many scholars believe, made its way down the Rhine and influence Zwingli to his extreme “merely symbolic” view (Calvin was not so extreme).
I think Augustine taught a genuine real presence, not a merely spiritual presence. Erasmus was wrong. But Dugmore and others popularized it and it’s now taken for granted by a lot of scholars.
You can interpret Augustine to support completely opposite viewpoints (e.g., on free will). I think it’s pretty clear that he had a full corporeal presence doctrine.
It all turns on what the meaning of spiritual is. Spiritual can mean “merely symbolic” or something between corporeal and merely symbolic (Calvin) or “sacramentally corporeal.”
The Catholic teaching is that the presence is corporeal but a unique kind of corporeality that is not sense perceptible, because obviously Christ’s presence is not visible or tangible in the Eucharist. “Sacramental” (special kind of corporeal) and “spiritual” are synonyms for those who believe in real but sacramental corporeal presence. But for those who believe in real absence (Zwingli) or spiritual but not corporeal (Calvin), “spiritual” is pitted against real and it means “sacramental” but sacramental understood as uncorporeal.
The history I just outline helps explained why Schaff and others claim that Augustine taught a spiritual presence. Isn’t that convenient, Augustine used the same word Calvin did. But did he mean the same thing as Calvin? I say no, Schaff says yes.
Alasdair Heron (mentioned in my preceding comment) also says no. He says Augustine did believe in real presence, not merely spiritual presence. Heron prefers to use “sacramental” to describe this real presence because “spiritual” can mean so many different things. We Catholics can also call the real corporal presence Sacramental presence because it’s not the same as everyday corporeal presence. We don’t mean quite the same thing as Heron means by “sacramental” but at least Heron doesn’t try to fit Augustine to a procrustean Calvinist bed. He remains a Reformed but he’s aware that Augustine didn’t exactly teach what Calvin taught and that Catholics are probably closer to Augustine’s real meaning. Heron does give more credence to Dugmore’s line of reasoning than I would, but still, he’s at least a Reformed thinker one can reason with.
Somebody needs to pick up a copy of the letters of St. Ignatius (95 AD). Not you, of course, but somebody who has written at length above.