4. Early Designations of the Elements
It will not do, then, to impale the Fathers
upon
the horns of a modern dilemma,
BUt It
T1111$t
equally be admitted that the primitive Church
spoke of the eucharistic elements as
the body and blood of Christ. Of
course the teaching of the Church in
the
period about 150 did not bear the
aspect of the later formal conciliar utterances but Justin's word "we have
been taught" shows that then (as thirty years later
in Irenaeus, V., ii. 2, and in the Apostolic
Constitutions, viii. 12) the Church reiterated what the Gos-
pals gave it-" this is the body of Christ "-without troubling itself to reason at length on the
meaning of the words. This view appears so selfevident in the above-cited passage of Ignatius
(Smyrn.
vii. 1) that he says the heretics abstained
from the communion because they did not believe
"the eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior, Jesus
Christ." And even the Gnostic heretics, who (in
spite of what Ignatius says) had some sort of a
Eucharist of their own, apparently all retained the
designation of the elements as the body and blood
of Christ, in spite of their dooetism and spiritualism; Irenæus argues against them (IV., xviii. 4) as
if this designation were common ground. The
practise of the Church bears out the same contention. . Tertullian (De
corona, iii.)
and Origen (on
Eaod. aiii. 3) both speak, as of an old-established
tradition, of the great care taken that no crumb or
drop of the elements should fall to the ground.
The oldest formula of administration known, going back certainly to the third century, is simply
" the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, the cup
of life." The same conception is evidenced by the
reports of "Thyestean banquets" attributed by
the heathen to the Christians in the second decade
of
the second century, in Asia (Pliny's letter to
Trajan) and in Rome (Tacitus,
Annales,
xv. 44).
In a word, following the "this is" of the Gospels,
in the methods of speech used by the
Church, c
ateehetical as well as liturgical, in the popular belief,
and in the practise based on that belief, the Eucharist was the body and blood of Christ.
The very circumstance, however, that this same
fact is met alike among Gnostics and their opponents, in the writings of an Origen
and of a Tertullian, should warn against concluding from it the
prevalence of a realistic conception
a·
Oriental (whether of a Roman Catholic or a
zann"no" Lutheran kind) in the early Church.
Oon~oeDtion. The same thing may be inferred from
the fact that no early apologist thinks
it necessary to defend this designation of the elements se the body and blood of Christ against
pagan opponents as anything irrational. Justin
shows no
consciousness that this must seem a
stranger doctrine to the heathen than the inearnartion
or the resurrection; similar language is se
much a matter of course to Origen writing against
Celsus. But it would be equally unjustifiable to
conclude that
the language of the early Church
may be understood in a Zwinglian or Calvinistic
sense. The Fathers, whether Eastern or Western,
must be interpreted by the presuppositions of their
own times. Strauss draws a distinction
(Leben
Jean, ii. 437, let ed.) between the Oriental mind,
which thinks in images, and the more abstract
Western habit of thought. Yet it must be remembered that under the Empire the religious life of
the West was permeated by Oriental influences.
" Mysteries " were a natural concomitant of religion; and the idea that in a mystery earthly elements could " become " divine by the working of
some invisible power without any change of their
substance, was not unknown to the pagan philosophy of the West. It is now generally recognized
that the Gnosticism of the second and third oen-
turies understood or shaped Christian traditions
according to the idea of mysteries; and, while it is
not so universally admitted, it may safely be said
that the same influence of pagan religious
tradition
which led in Gnosticism to " an acute Hellenizing
of Christianity " (Harnack) began, about the same
time, though more slowly and gradually, to have
as effect on the Church which condemned Gnosticism. This is most clearly seen in the history of
baptism and the Lord's Supper. The very name
sacraments
is a token of this. Tertullian is the
first author who can be shown to have spoken of
eacramentum boptisntatia et euchariatia';
but the
idea is found in Clement of Alexandria, and is not
far off in Justin.
The
developed
Arcani Disciplina
(q.v.) of the fourth and following centuries must
have been a consequence of this tendency, and thus
later than the tendency itself. So, since the beginnings of the diaciptina are found in Tertullian,
the beginnings of the development which led to the
Hellenizing of Christian worship moat go back to
the first half of the second century. The atmosphere of mystery thus inherited from the ancient
world favored the leaving of the questions about
which after ages contended without a definite and
precise answer. A "symbolic" conception of the
sacramental gift by no means excluded one which
might be called "realistic." Harnack points out
that whereas by "symbol" now is understood a
thing which is not what it signifies, then it meant (for
many people, at least) a thing which was, in some
sense, what it signified. That the bread and wine
were, in some sense, the body and blood of
Christ
was accepted in the second century, as has been
seen. But this affirmation lay within the sphere
of mystery, meaning different things to different
persons according to the extent of their spiritual
attainment; it was in no sense a defined dogma.
This explains the fact that the doctrine of the Eucharist shows a much less regular development
than the dogmas of the early Church, such as that
of the Trinity or of the person of Christ.
The first important step in such development as
there was is connected with the application of the
idea of sacrifice to the Lord's Supper. The fact
has often been overlooked that this
application is
unscriptural. It made its first appearance, to be
sure, under the aspect of New-Testa
e.
Entraaos went thoughts. Prayer was spoken
°_o"rl' of as th0 sfterifiN ef the
lips (HA.
xui.
°ial 1& of.
Rev. v. 8
conception. ~ , viii. 3; Hos. aiv. 2);
to do good and to communicate was
to offer a sacrifice with which God was well pleased
(Heb. xiii. 1(1).
$o it was not far to considering
in the same light the offerings of love which served
for the Eucharist, and, so far as they were not
needed for that for. the necessities of the poor
(Polycarp,
Ad
Phil.
iv. 2). But the thing soon
went further than this; even the Didache (xiv. 3)
regards the Lord's Supper, in the words of the
famous prophecy of Malachi (i. 11), as the "pure
offering" of the new covenant. This might have
been of little consequence if the Eucharist had remained, as it appears in Ignatius and in the Didache, a real meal, or connected with one, and if the
" giving thanks 11 had remained an act of the com.
munity, or of members specially adapted to it or
visiting prophets (Didache, a. 7). To realise the
significance of the change from this to the speaking of the eucharistic words as a specialised
funotion of the officials, it is
necessary only to remember how utterly distinct from what was
called worship in heathen tradition, from all sacerdotal and
theurgic action, were the earliest Christian assemblies--the gatherings "to edifying" of I Cor. siv.
23, 26 and the agape' of I Cor. xi Z(). The distinction, then, grew less when the administration of the
Eucharist became the function of appointed officials (of. Ignat.,
Ad Smyrn. viii.
2;
ANF, i. 89,
" Let that be deemed a proper euchariat which is
[administered] either by the bishop, or by one to
whom he has entrusted it"). It grew still less
when the
Agape (q.v.) was gradually separated
from the Lord's Supper. Alms and
oblations, at
first connected closely, began to be separated, the
latter term designating the eucharistic elements,
which alone received the mystical blessing of the
bishop (Justin's "chief," Gk.
proeatae);
and it was
an easy step to finding the sacrificial act in this
blessing, instead of in the free-will offering by the
members. But, however this development is
traced, the terms used by Justin are certainly noteworthy. If it was the
Proeataa
who "made the
bread of the Eucharist a memorial of the suffering
of Christ," it can hardly be denied that the distance is but short from this to the words of Cyprian
: "the priest imitates that which Christ did
and offers a true and complete sacrifice in the
Church to God the Father" (Epist, btiii.). Remembering that many of the ancient mysteries had
their
dramatic representations of sacred cultlegends, that the conception of the unbloody renewal of the sacrifice of Christ continued to shade
off from a symbolic-imitative commemoration feast
until after the time of Gregory the Great, and that
the Greek Church in the final development of its
mass approaches closely to a dramatic representation of the Passion, it will seem not too much to
say that the above-quoted formula of Justin is is
the direct line of development that leads to the
Roman mass. The really important thing is that
in the interval between Justin and Cyprian, the
"sacrifice of praise" had become a priestly "sacrifice of propitiation." Immense as the change seems
when judged by the New-Testament standard, it
will not surprise any one acquainted with the
GrecoRoman world of that period; the conception of
sacrifice, once admitted, brought with it all its
natural concomitants. Nor were connecting links
wanting. Prayer was made for those who brought
the oblations; to emphasise the communion with
the departed, oblations were made foe them too;
and the "offerings for the dead" which Tertullian
knows as a custom already ancient (De omona, iii.)
show a more propitiatory character than those for
the living. Tertullian still considered the giver of
the oblations as the one who offered the sacrifice;
commending his dead to God "through the priest"
(De ezhortatione caatilalia,
ai.). But even here s
priestly mediation is assumed, and it is but a short
step to the priestly sacrifice
as the Church of the
latter half of the third century knew it.
