Corona, iii.), were careful lest a crumb of the bread or a drop
of the wine should fall on the ground, and by such incidents the
body of Christ be harassed and attacked!
The Eucharist as a Sacrifice.—Before the 3rd century we cannot trace the view that in the Eucharistic rite the death of Christ, regarded from the Pauline standpoint as an atoning or redemptive sacrifice for the sins of mankind, is renewed and repeated, though the germ out of which it would surely grow is already present in the words “My blood ... which is shed for many” of Matt. and Mark; yet more surely in Paul’s “my body which is in your behoof” and “this do in commemoration of me,” where the Greek word for do, Gr. ποιεῖτε, Lat. facite, could to pagan ears mean “this do ye sacrifice.” In the first two centuries the rite is spoken of as an offering and as a bloodless sacrifice; but it is God’s own creations, the bread and wine, alms and first-fruits, which, offered with a pure conscience, he receives as from friends, and bestows in turn on the poor; it is the praise and prayers which are the sacrifice. In these centuries baptism was the rite for the remission of sin, not the Eucharist; it is the prophet in the Didache who presides at the Lord’s Supper, not the Levitically conceived priest; nor as yet has the Table become an Altar. Among Christians, prayers, supplications and thanksgivings have taken the place of the sacrifices of the old covenant.
In Cyprian of Carthage (c. 250) we first find the Eucharist regarded as a sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood offered by the priest for the sins of the living and dead. We cannot drink the blood of Christ unless Christ has been first trodden under foot and pressed.... As Jesus our high priest offered himself as a sacrifice to his Father, so the human priest takes Christ’s place, and imitates his action by offering in church a true and full sacrifice to God the Father (Ep. 63). He speaks of the dominical host (hostia), and takes the verb to do in Paul’s letter in the sense of to sacrifice. As early as Tertullian prayers for the dead, who were named, were offered in the rite; but there was as yet no idea of the sacrifice of Christ being reiterated in their behalf. After Cyprian’s day this view gains ground in the West, and almost obscures the older view that the rite is primarily an act of communion with Christ. In harmony with Cyprian’s new conception is another innovation of his age and place, that of children communicating; both were the natural accompaniment of infant baptism, of which we first hear in his letters. In the East we do not hear of the sacrifice of the body and blood before Eusebius, about the year 300. In the Armenian church of the 12th century the idea of a reiterated sacrificial death of Christ still seemed bizarre and barbarous.[1] But as early as 558 in Gaul the bread was arranged on the altar in the form of a man, so that one believer ate his eye, another his ear, a third his hand, and so on, according to their respective merits! This was forbidden by Pope Pelagius I.; but in the Greek church the custom survives, the priest even stabbing with “the holy spear” in its right side the human figure planned out of the bread, by way of rehearsing in pantomime the narrative of John xix. 34.
The change from a commemoration of the Passion to a re-enacting of it came slowly in the Greek church. Thus Chrysostom (Ham. 17, ad Heb.), after writing “We offer (ποιοῦρεν) not another sacrifice, but the same,” instantly corrects himself and adds: “or rather we perform a commemoration of the sacrifice.” This was exactly the position also of the Armenian church.
Wine or Water?—Justin Martyr perhaps contemplated the use of water instead of wine, and Tatian his pupil used it. The Marcionites, the Ebionites, or Judaeo-Christians of Palestine, the Montanists of Phrygia, Africa and Galatia, the confessor Alcibiades of Lyons, c. A.D. 177 (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. v. 3. 2), equally used it. Cyprian (Ep. 63) affirms (c. 250) that his predecessors on the throne of Carthage had used water, and that many African bishops continued to do so, “out of ignorance,” he says, “and simplemindedness, and God would forgive them.” Pionius, the Catholic martyr of Smyrna, c. 250, also used water. In the Acts of Thomas it is used. Such uniformity of language has led Prof. Harnack to suppose that in the earliest age water was used equally with wine, and Eusebius the historian, who had means of judging which we have not, saw no difficulty in identifying with the first converts of St Mark the Therapeutae of Philo who took only bread and water in their holy repast.
Abercius and Irenaeus are the first to speak of wine mixt with water, of a krāma (κρᾶμα) or temperamentum. In the East, then as now, no one took wine without so mixing it. Cyprian insists on the admixture of water, which he says represented the humanity of Jesus, as wine his godhood. The users of water were named Aquarii or hydroparastatae in the 4th century, and were liable to death under the code of Theodosius. Some of the Monophysite churches, e.g. the Armenian, eschewed water and used pure wine, so falling under the censure of the council in Trullo of A.D. 692. Milk and honey was added at first communions. Oil was sometimes offered, as well as wine, but it would seem for consecration only, and not for consumption along with the sacrament. With the bread, however, was sometimes consecrated cheese, e.g. by the African Montanists in the 2nd century. Bitter herbs also were often added, probably because they were eaten with the Paschal lamb. Many early canons forbid the one and the other. Hot water was mixt with the wine in the Greek churches for some centuries, and this custom is seen in catacomb paintings. It increased the resemblance to real blood.
Position of the Faithful at the Eucharist.—Tertullian, Eusebius, Chrysostom and others represent the faithful as standing at the Eucharist. In the art of the catacombs they sit or recline in the ordinary attitude of banqueters. In the age of Christ standing up at the Paschal meal had been given up, and it was become the rule to recline. Kneeling with a view to adoration of the elements was unheard of in the primitive church, and the Armenian Fathers of the 12th century insist that the sacrament was intended by Christ to be eaten and not gazed at (Nerses, op. cit. p. 167). Eucharistic or any other liturgical vestments were unknown until late in the 5th century, when certain bishops were honoured with the same pallium worn by civil officials (see Vestments).
In the Latin and in the Monophysite churches of Armenia and Egypt unleavened bread is used in the Eucharist on the somewhat uncertain ground that the Last Supper was the Paschal meal. The Greek church uses leavened.
Transubstantiation.—In the primitive age no one asked how Christ was present in the Eucharist, or how the elements became his body and blood. The Eucharist formed part of an agapé or love feast until the end of the 2nd century, and in parts of Christendom continued to be so much later. It was, save where animal sacrifices survived, the Christian sacrifice, par excellence, the counterpart for the converted of the sacrificial communions of paganism; and though charged with higher significance than these, it yet reposed on a like background of religious usage and beliefs. But when the Agapé on one side and paganism on the other receded into a dim past, owing to the enhanced sacrosanctity of the Eucharist and because of the severe edicts of the emperor Theodosius and his successors, the psychological background fell away, and the Eucharist was left isolated and hanging in the air. Then men began to ask themselves what it meant. Rival schools of thought sprang up, and controversy raged over it, as it had aforetime about the homoousion, or the two natures. Thus the sacrament which was intended to be a bond of peace, became a chief cause of dissension and bloodshed, and was often discussed as if it were a vulgar talisman.
Serapion of Thmuis in Egypt, a younger contemporary of Athanasius, in his Eucharistic prayers combines the language of the Didache with a high sacramentalism alien to that document which now only survived in the form of a grace used at table in the nunneries of Alexandria (see Agapé). He entreats “the Lord of Powers to fill this sacrifice with his Power and Participation,” and calls the elements a “living sacrifice, a bloodless offering.” The bread and wine before consecration are “likenesses of his body and blood,” this in virtue of the words pronounced over them by Jesus on the night of his betrayal. The
- ↑ See Nerses of Lambron, Opera Armenice (Venice, 1847), pp. 74, 75, 101, &c.
