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death that he directs the sick person after receiving it
to commend his soul into the hands of God and bid
farewell to the living. He enjoins the unction of sick
children also on the ground that it sometimes cures
them, and that penance is (often) necessary for them.
Theodulf's teaching is so clear and definite that some
Protestant controversialists recognize him as the
originator in the West of the teaching which, as they
claim, transformed the Jacobean rite into a sacrament.
But from all that precedes it is abundantly clear that
no such transformation occurred. Some previous
writers, as we have seen, had explicitly taught and
many had implied the substance of Theodulf's doc-
trine, to which a still more definite expression was
later to be given. The Scholastic and Tridentine doc-
trine is the only goal to which patristic and medieval
teaching could logically have led.
IV. Matter .\nd Form. — (For the technical mean- ing of these terms in sacramental theology see S.\cra- MENTS.) — (1) The remote matter of extreme unction is consecrated oil. No one has ever doubted that the oil meant by St. James is the oil of olives, and in the Western Church pure olive oil without mixture of any other substance seems to have been almost always used. But in the Eastern Church the custom was in- troduced pretty early of adding in some places a little water, as a symbol of baptism, in others a little wine, in memory of the good Samaritan, and, among the Xes- torians, a little ashes or dust from the sepulchre of some saint. But that the oil must be blessed or con- secrated before use is the unanimous testimony of all the ages. Some theologians, however, have held con- secration to be necessary merely as a matter of pre- cept, not essential for the validity of the sacrament, e. g. "\'ictoria (Summ. Sacramentorum, no. 219), Juenin (Comm. hist, et dogm. de Sacram., D. vii, q. iii, c. i), de Sainte-Beuve (De Extr. L^nct., D. iii, a. 1), Drouven (De Re Sacramentaria, Lib. VII, q. ii, c. i, 2) ; indeed Berti, while holding the opposite himself, ad- mitted the wide prevalence of this view among the recent theologians of his day. But considering the unanimity of tradition in insisting on the oil being blessed, and the teaching of the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV) that "the Church has understood the matter [of this sacrament] to be oil blessed by the bishop", it is not surprising that by a decree of the Holy Office, issued 13 Jan., 1611, the proposition as- serting the vaUdity of extreme unction with the use of oil not consecrated by the bishop should have been proscribed as "rash and near to error" (Denzinger, no. 1628 — old no. 1494), and that, to the question whether a parish priest could in case of necessity val- idly use for this sacrament oil blessed by himself, the same Holy Office, reaffirming the previous decree, should have replied in the negative (14 Sept., 1842; ibid., no. 1629 — old no. 1495). These decisions only settle the dogmatic question provisionally and, so far as they affirm the necessity of episcopal consecration of the oil, are applicable only to the Western Church. .A.S is well known, it is the officiating priest or priests who ortlinarily bless the oil in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and there is no lack of evidence to prove the antiquity of this practice (.see Benedict XIV, De Synod. Dioec, VIII, i, 4). For Italo-Greeks in communion with the Holy See the practice was sanctioned by Clement VIII in 1595 and by Benedict XIV (see ibid.) in 1742; and it has likewise been sanctioned for vari- ous bodies of Eastern Uniats down to our own day (see "Collect. Lacensis", II, pp. 35, 150, 582, 479 sq.; cf. Letter of Leo XIII, "De Discipl. Orient, conser- vanda" in "Acta S. Sedis", XXVII, pp. 257 sq.). There is no doubt, therefore, that priests can be dele- gated to bless the oil validly, though there is no in- stance on record of such delegation being given to Western priests. But it is only the supreme authority in the Church that can grant delegation, or at least it may reserve to itself the power of granting it (in case
one should wish to maintain that in the absence of
reservation the ordinary bishop would have this
power). The Eastern Uniats have the express appro-
bation of the Holy See for their discipline, and, as re-
gards the schismatical Orthodox, one may say either
that they have the tacit approbation of the pope or
that the reservation of episcopal power does not ex-
tend to them. In spite of the schism the pope has
never wished or intended to abrogate the ancient
privileges of the Orthodox in matters of this kind.
The prayers for blessing the oil that have come down to us differ very widely, but all of them contain some reference to the purpose of anointing the sick. Hence, at least in the case of a bishop, whose power is ordinary and not delegated, no special form would seem to be necessary for validity, provided this purpose is ex- pressed. But where it is not at all expressed or in- tended, as in the forms at present used for blessing the chrism and the oil of catechumens, it appears doubtful whether either of these oils would be valid matter for extreme unction (cf. Kern, op. cit., p. 131). But in the nature of things there does not seem to be any reason W'hy a composite form of blessing might not suffice to make the same oil valid matter for more than one sacrament.
(2) The proximate matter of extreme unction is the unction with consecrated oil. The parts anointed according to present usage in the Western and Eastern Chui-ches have been mentioned above (I), but it is to be observed that even to-day there are differences of practice in various branches of the Orthotlox Church (see Echos d'Orient, 1899, p. 194). The question is whether several unctions are necessary for a valid sacrament, and if so, which are the essential ones. Arguing from the practice with which they were ac- quainted and which they assumed to have existed always, the Scholastics not unnaturally concluded that the unctions of the five organs of sense were es- sential. This was the teaching of St. Thomas (Suppl., Q. xxxii, a. 6), who has been followed pretty unani- mously by the School and by many later theologians down to our own day (e. g. Billot, De Sacramentis, II, p. 231) who set the method and tradition of the School above positive and historical theology. But a wider knowledge of past and present facts has made it in- creasingly difficult to defend this view, and the best theologians of recent times have denied that the unc- tion of the five senses, any more than that of the feet or loins, is essential for the validity of the sacrament. The facts, broadly speaking, are these: that no ancient testimony mentions the five unctions at all, much less prescribes them as necessary, but most of them speak simply of unction in a way that suggests the sufficiency of a single unction; that the unction of the five senses has never been extensively practised in the East, and is not practised at the present time in the Orthodox Church, while those Uniats who practise it have sim- ply borrowed it in modern times from Rome; and that even in the Western Church down to the eleventh centurj' the practice was not very widespread, and did not become universal till the seventeenth century, as is proved by a number of sixteenth-century Rituals that have been preserved (for details and sources see Kern, op. cit., p. 133 sq.). In face of these facts it is impossible any longer to defend the Scholastic view except by maintaining that the Church has frequently changed the essential matter of the sacrament, or that she has allowed it to be invalidly administered during the greater part of her history, as she still allows with- out protest in the East. The only conclusion, there- fore, is that as far as the matter is concerned nothing more is required for a valid sacrament than a true unc- tion with duly consecrated oil, and this conclusion may henceforth he regarded as certain by reason of the recent decree of the Holy Office already referred to (I), which, though it speaks only of the form, evi- dently supposes that form to be used with a single
