Stupid question? Catholics take one portion and take it literally and then the next portion they claim isn’t and we ask a question, which by the way Catholics never answer, and it’s a stupid question? Catholics use what they want literelly and what doesn’t fit their meme they try to explain away allegorically. It’s disingenuous at best and a dishonest attempt at control.
Time after time scripture has been shown to Catholics that Christ was not talking about physical flesh during the last supper but Catholics deny it.
What Augustine is saying here is that those who merely understood Jesus in the temporal/carnal rather than understanding the spiritual are those who left Him after He said that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood.
It is the spirit that causes the bread to be the Body and the wine to be the Blood of Jesus.
That is what is meant by man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
The carnal is not of any avail, it is the Spirit enlivening the carnal that is of avail.
So, when one asks why if the Jesus said that those who ate the bread would never be hungry, that is a stupid question, because Jesus did not mean that the body would not feel hunger, rather that the soul would not.
He says after the feeding of the five thousand that those who follow Him are thinking of their bellies and not their souls, but that what He would give was food for their souls.
That is what Augustine was saying in this essay, that and about those who eat of the Body of Christ while not believing the Eucharist is indeed just that.