Anicetus believed he was partaking in the body and blood of Christ. If Polycarp believed this was profane, how could he possibly remain in communion with Anicetus.
The Bible tells us that the life is in the blood, hence the law against drinking the blood of the creature.
Now understand this: The life is in the blood; the blood is not life, it carries the life in it. The creature draws the life from the blood to every living cell in the body of the creature. The life is, and in this portion of our being that life is IN, carried by, delivered throughout the body, by the blood. But we humans are more than just animal creatures. we have a spirit which can deliver LIFE to our souls. Our soul is not our physical, creature body; we are souls who inhabit a body.
Spiritual life is not drawn from the circulating blood. The spirit of man is dead in trespasses and sin, unless GOD places LIFE in the human spirit. As Jesus illustrated (let the dead go bury their dead), the soul can exist in a state of deadness; where the spirit in the soul has no life in it (it was taken out when Adam sinned), the soul can be carried around connected to the living body, but that soul is in a state of 'deadness'. Jesus came to bring LIFE to the dead spirit of men. He doesn't place that LIFE in the human spirit via the same system whereby the life of the creature is in the blood. The Blood Jesus offers is not creature blood.
When I was a little boy there was an Army colonel who washed his big car in the parking lot of Fairlington apartments, on Utah Street, and he used Army buckets made of canvas which had a metal ring sewn into the canvas at the bottom and a larger canvas ring sewn into the rim of the opening at the top of the bucket. I was captured by the way the water gave shape to the bucket, and how a full bucket would 'spill' water over the top if you pushed your finger into the side of the bucket. Think of the human spirit like the canvas bucket. without the water in it was flat, not even a bucket. But when full of water it had a full shape of 'bucket' and if jostled would allow water to pour out of the bucket to the surroundings.
Life of the creature is in the blood. The blood is not the life, the life is carried, is in the blood and gets distributed to all living parts of the body.
When John O'Brien, in The Faith of Millions, says that the Catholic Priest brings Jesus from the Heavenly throne, this Jesus would not be drawing LIFE from blood, so this myth of ingesting the body, blood, soul, and Divinity of Jesus The Christ is just that, a myth, a great error. The Jesus in Heaven is not drawing His Life from blood but from the Spirit of God.
When anyone takes the bread and wine at the Passover Remembrance of Jesus Sacrifice for us as the Lamb of God, there is no life transferred by the tokens, but there is spiritual life for the believers in Him. This Life doesn't get into us via the gastronomic system, it comes by way of believing in Him as The source of Life.
When the ones who come out of the Tribulation arrive in Heaven, they will have washed their garments in the blood of the Lamb of God.
The parable Jesus told of the man who showed up at the wedding without the proper wedding garment gives us a clue via metaphor for the thing washed in the blood of the Lamb of God, for the blood must be seen on 'the doorposts and lentils' so angel would pass over and not take the life of the first born.
The LIFE is in the blood, the blood is not the life. How does Jesus say He has life as He speaks to the twisters and chasers after signs and wonders, in John 6.