Though the trend was to see the communion elements as the actual body and blood of Christ, there is another strain as well that used symbolic vocabulary to refer to the elements of the Lord's Supper. Serapion (died 211 AD) refers to the elements as "a likeness."7 Eusebius of Caesarea (died c. 339 AD) on the one hand declares, "We are continually fed with the Savior's body, we continually participate in the lamb's blood," but on the other states that Christians daily commemorate Jesus' sacrifice "with the symbols of his body and saving blood," and that he instructed his disciples to make "the image of his own body," and to employ bread as its symbol.8 The Apostolical Constitutions (compiled c. 380 AD) use words such as "antitypes" and "symbols" to describe the elements, though they speak of communion as the body of Christ and the blood of Christ.
Other Fathers who mix Real Presence vocabulary with symbolic terms include Cyril of Jerusalem (died 444),10 Gregory of Nazianzus (died 389),11 and Macarius of Egypt (died c. 390 AD).12 Athanasius clearly distinguishes the visible bread and wine from the spiritual nourishment they convey.13 The symbolic language did not point to absent realities, but were accepted as signs of realities which were present but apprehended by faith.
While St. Augustine (died 430) can be quoted to support various views of the Lord's Supper, he apparently accepted the widespread realism theory of his time,15 though in some passages he clearly describes the Lord's Supper as a spiritual eating and drinking.
An Open Controversy
However, the uses of symbolic language cited above are exceptions. More and more the more popular, vividly materialistic theory was adopted that regarded the elements as being converted into the Lord's body and blood. Though the Latin church had been moving toward the view of the Real Presence for some time, the first person who clearly taught the doctrine of transubstantiation (though not using that term) was Paschasius Radbertus (785-865), abbot of the monastery at Corbey, France, in a book On the Body and Blood of the Lord (831). His chief opponent among several was Ratramnus, another monk at Corbey, who wrote a tract asserting a sacramental rather than literal sense in which the elements were the body and blood of Christ.17 Radbertus was later canonized as a saint and Ratramnus' book banned by the Roman Church.
In reaction to Radbertus' assertion of the corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Berengar (d. 1088) defended Ratramnus openly, but when threatened with trial and excommunication recanted. By the mid-eleventh century, transubstantiation was a dogma of the Latin church and was officially accepted in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).
http://www.jesuswalk.com/lords-supper/history-real-presence.htm
Clearly transubstantiation was not an early church doctrine. Several views existed! Quoting ECF's who mention the REAL Presence, does not prove transubstantiation at ALL. Protestants readily see a real presence (spiritual).
You wrote:
“Quoting ECF’s who mention the REAL Presence, does not prove transubstantiation at ALL. Protestants readily see a real presence (spiritual).”
Sorry, but you posted nothing of value. All Protestants do not see a spiritual presence in their mock re-enactments of the Lord’s Supper. I have had them tell me so. I have no reason to believe they are lying on that score.
And yes, “Quoting ECF’s who mention the REAL Presence” does in fact prove there was a general belief in Transubstantiation in the early Church even if that term itself was not used.
"Christ was carried in his own hands when, referring to his own body, he said, ‘This is my body’ [Matt. 26:26]. For he carried that body in his hands" (Explanations of the Psalms 33:1:10 [A.D. 405]).Tertullian on Communion:
"I promised you [new Christians], who have now been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the sacrament of the Lord’s table. . . . That bread that you see on the altar, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ. That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ" (Sermons 227 [A.D. 411]).
"What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. This has been said very briefly, which may perhaps be sufficient for faith; yet faith does not desire instruction" (ibid., 272).
"Nobody eats this flesh without previously adoring it" (Explanation of the Psalms 99).
"He took flesh from the flesh of Mary . . . and gave us the same flesh to be eaten unto salvation. . . . We do sin by not adoring" (ibid).
Tertullian regularly describes the bread as ‘the Lord’s body.’ The converted pagan, he remarks, ‘feeds on the richness of the Lord’s body, that is, on the Eucharist.’ The realism of his theology comes to light in the argument, based on the intimate relation of body and soul, that just as in baptism the body is washed with water so that the soul may be cleansed, so in the Eucharist ‘the flesh feeds upon Christ’s body and blood so that the soul may be filled with God.’ Clearly his assumption is that the Savior’s body and blood are as real as the baptismal water.Macarius (Patriarch of Antioch 681) on Communion:
"[T]here is not a soul that can at all procure salvation, except it believe whilst it is in the flesh, so true is it that the flesh is the very condition on which salvation hinges. And since the soul is, in consequence of its salvation, chosen to the service of God, it is the flesh which actually renders it capable of such service. The flesh, indeed, is washed [in baptism], in order that the soul may be cleansed . . . the flesh is shadowed with the imposition of hands [in confirmation], that the soul also may be illuminated by the Spirit; the flesh feeds [in the Eucharist] on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul likewise may be filled with God" (The Resurrection of the Dead 8 [A.D. 210]).
To Macarius the Eucharist was a palmary argument against Nestorianism.Theodoret on the Eucharist
The flesh and blood of which we partake in the Eucharist is not mere flesh and blood, else how would it be life-giving?
It is life-giving because it is the own flesh and blood of the Word, which being God is by nature Life. Macarius develops this argument in a manner which shows how shadowy was the line which separated the Monothelite from the Monophysite
Theodoret of Cyrus (from his Eranistes). It is a Greek style dialogue such as those found in Socrates between a student (Eran) and a teacher (Ortho):
Eran.--And after the consecration how do you name these?
Orth.--Christ's body and Christ's blood.
Eran.--And do yon believe that you partake of Christ's body and blood?
Orth.--I do.
Eran: "Therefore, just as the symbols of the Lord's body and of his blood are one thing before the priest's invocation, but after the invocation are changed, and become something else, so to was the Lord's body changed, after the ascension, into the divine essence."
Ortho: "You have been caught in the nets which you have woven, for not even after the consecration do the mystical symbols depart from their own nature! They continue in their former essence, both in shape and appearance, and are visible, and palpable, as they were beforehand
But they are regarded as what they have become, and believed so to be, and are worshipped as being what they are believed to be. Compare then the image with the archetype, and you will see the likeness, for the type must be like the reality. For that body preserves its former form, figure, and limitation and in a word the substance of the body; but after the resurrection it has become immortal and superior to corruption; it has become worthy of a seat on the right hand; it is adored by every creature as being called the natural body of the Lord.
Eran.— Yes; and the mystic symbol changes its former appellation; it is no longer called by the name it went by before, but is styled body. So must the reality be called God, and not body.
Orth.— You seem to me to be ignorant— for He is called not only body but even bread of life. So the Lord Himself used this name and that very body we call divine body, and giver of life, and of the Master and of the Lord, teaching that it is not common to every man but belongs to our Lord Jesus Christ Who is God and Man. For Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
"For we offer to Him His own, announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the Flesh and Spirit. For as bread which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of resurrection to eternity (...) Even as the blessed Paul declares in his epistle to the Ephesians that ‘We are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones’: he does not speak these words of some spiritual and invisible man, for a spirit has not bones nor flesh; but he (Paul) refers to that dispensation by which the Lord became an actual man, consisting of flesh, and nerves, and bones, - that flesh which is nourished by the cup which is His blood, and receives increase from bread which is his body. And just as a cutting from the vine planted in the ground fructifies in its season, or as a corn of wheat falling on the earth and becoming decomposed, rises with manifold increase by the Spirit of God, who contains all things, and then, through the wisdom of God, serves for the use of men, and having received the Word of God, becomes the Eucharist, which is the Body and Blood of the Christ (...)”.