Excerts from

Despite its extreme structural simplicity there was no ideal of squalor or poverty about the pre-Nicene celebration of the eucharist. The list of church plate at Cirta and many other such indications are a sufficient guarantee of that. The baptistery attached to the house-church at Dura-Europos (c. a.d. 230) was painted from floor to ceiling with pictures of scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and a similar decoration of the assembly-room of the church had just been begun when the building was destroyed. There could be a considerable degree of splendour about the setting of the ecclesia in a great Roman patrician house, and even where this was lacking attempts were evidently made to supply some dignity. There was no puritan cult of bareness for its own sake.

There was, too, an element of ceremony in the celebration and a good deal of moving about. The rite was viewed essentially as an action, and a number of people cannot combine to take different parts in a corporate action without some such element of ceremony, in the sense of organized and concerted movement. It was a large part of the deacon’s ‘liturgy’ by his ‘proclamations’ to direct and give the signal for these movements. There was, too, an element of solemnity; the bishop’s prayer was probably chanted as the Jewish prayers had been chanted. The use of the informal speaking voice for any part of the eucharist appears to be an innovation of the Latin churches in the early middle ages; for the eucharistic prayer itself it was not known before the Reformation. One cannot make much of the use by pre-Nicene writers of dicere (to say) in connection with the prayers. The ancients habitually used this word of a recitative, e.g. dicere carmen (lit. = ‘to say a song’). Probably the immemorial preface-chant of the West represents approximately the way in which the whole eucharistic prayer was originally recited there. Very similar intonations are traditional for the public prayers of the liturgy all over the East.

When all is said and done, the impression left by the early evidence about the celebration of the eucharist is one not so much of simplicity as of great directness, as became a deliberately ‘domestic’ act. There was no elaborate or choral music at the eucharist as at the synaxis; no special vestments or liturgical ornaments or symbolism, nothing whatever to arouse the emotions or stir the senses or impress the mind — just a complete and intense concentration upon the corporate performance of the eucharistic action in its naked self, without devotional elaborations of any kind whatever.

It is very easy for us to romanticize the life and worship of the primitive Christians. What was conventional in the social setting of their day has for us the picturesqueness of the strange and remote; what was straightforward directness in their worship has for us the majesty of antiquity. It is a useful thing occasionally to transpose it all into the conventions of our own day and look at the result.

Suppose you were a grocer in Brondesbury, a tradesman in a small way of business, as so many of the early Roman Christians were. Week by week at half-past four or five o’clock on Sunday morning (an ordinary working-day in pagan Rome) before most people were stirring, you would set out through the silent streets, with something in your pocket looking very like what we should call a bun or a scone. At the end of your walk you would slip in through the mews at the back of one of the big houses near Hyde Park, owned by a wealthy Christian woman. There in her big drawing-room, looking just as it did every day, you would find the ‘church’ assembling — socially a very mixed gathering indeed. A man would look at you keenly as you went in, the deacon ‘observing those who come in’ (Didascalidy ii. 57), but he knows you and smiles and says something. Inside you mostly know one another well, you exchange greetings and nod and smile; (people who are jointly risking at the least penal servitude for life by what they are doing generally make certain that they know their associates). At the other end of the drawing-room sitting in the best arm-chair is an elderly man, a gentleman by his clothes but nothing out of the ordinary — the bishop of London. On either side of him is standing another man, perhaps talking quietly to him. On chairs in a semicircle facing down the room, looking very obviously like what they are — a committee — sit the presbyters. In front of them is a small drawing-room table.

The eucharist is about to begin. The bishop stands and greets the church. At once there is silence and order, and the church replies. Then each man turns and grasps his neighbour strongly and warmly by both hands. (I am trying to represent the ancient by a modern convention. The kiss was anciently a much commoner salutation than it is with us in England, but it implied more affection than does merely ‘shaking hands’ with us.) The two men by the bishop spread a white table-cloth on the table, and then stand in front of it, one holding a silver salver and the other a two-handled silver loving-cup. One by one you all file up and put your little scones on the salver and pour a little wine into the loving-cup. Then some of the scones are piled together before the bishop on the cloth, and he adds another for himself, while water is poured into the wine in the cup and it is set before him. In silence he and the presbyters stand with their hands outstretched over the offerings, and then follow the dialogue and the chanted prayer lasting perhaps five minutes or rather less. You all answer ‘Amen’ and there follows a pause as the bishop breaks one of the scones and eats a piece. He stands a moment in prayer and then takes three sips from the cup, while the two men beside him break the other scones into pieces. To each of those around him he gives a small piece and three sips from the cup. Then with the broken bread piled on the salver he comes forward and stands before the table with one of the deacons in a lounge suit standing beside him with the cup. One by one you file up again to receive in your hands ‘The Bread of Heaven in Christ Jesus,’ and pass on to take three sips from the cup held by the deacon, ‘In God the Father Almighty and in the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit in the holy church,’ to which you answer ‘Amen’; then you all file back again to where you were standing before. There is a moment’s pause when all have finished, and then most of you go up to the bishop again with a little silver box like a snuff-box into which he places some fragments of the Bread. You stow it in an inside pocket, reflecting perhaps that Tarcisius was lynched six months ago for being caught with one of those little boxes upon him. There is another pause while the vessels are cleansed, and then someone says loudly ‘That’s all. Good morning, everybody.’ And in twos and threes you slip out again through the back door or the area door and go home — twenty minutes after you came in. That is all there is to it, externally. It would be absolutely meaningless to an outsider, and quite unimpressive.

But perhaps it did not all end quite so easily. You might very well never walk back up Maida Vale again. Perhaps the bishop stopped to speak to someone on the front-door steps as he went out, and was recognised by a casual passer-by who set up a great shout of ‘Christian! Christian!’ And before anyone quite realised what was happening a small jostling crowd had collected from nowhere and someone had thrown a brick through one of the windows; doors and windows were opening all down the street and there was a hubbub of jeers and yells, till a policeman arrived majestically, demanding ‘Wot’s all this ‘ere?’ ‘It’s those --- Christians again!’ shouts someone, and the policeman gets out his notebook and looks severely at the bishop standing with the two deacons just behind him at the foot of the steps. ‘Wot’s all this about?’ And then in response to the accusing shouts of the elbowing crowd there comes the deadly challenge from the policeman, ‘Is that right that you’re a Christian?’ And the bishop admits he is a Christian. ‘There’s another of them,’ says someone, pointing at one of the deacons. ‘There’s a whole gang of them in there.’ The deacons briefly admit their faith, and the policeman looks doubtfully at the house. It’s said that they always come quietly, but one never knows. He blows his whistle, more police arrive, the house is entered, and soon afterwards twenty-two people, including the bishop and his deacons and the little grocer from Brondesbury, are marched off to the station.

The proceedings are by summary jurisdiction, as in the case of a raid on a night-club with us. They are all charged together ‘with being Christians,’ i.e. members of an unlawful association. Each is asked in turn whether he pleads guilty or not guilty. If he answers ‘guilty,’ his case is virtually decided. The magistrate is perfectly well aware of the Christian rule of never denying their religion. Someone’s courage fails at the critical moment and he falters ‘Not guilty.’ Then there is a simple further test to be applied. At the side of the court-room is hung a picture of the king. Just go and kneel in front of that picture and say "Lord have mercy upon me," will you?’ says the magistrate. (The offering of the conventional pinch of incense or few drops of wine before the statue of the deified emperor, which was the routine test for Christianity, involved no more religious conviction than such a ceremony as I have invented here.) Some of the accused go through the prescribed test with white faces and faltering lips. One goes to the picture to do so and his conscience suddenly gets the better of his fear; he knocks the picture off the wall in a revulsion of nervous anger. He is hustled back to the dock and the picture is hung up again. The magistrate, a reasonable man, again asks each of those who have pleaded guilty whether they will even now go through the little ceremony. They all refuse. There is no more to be done, no possible doubt as to the law on the matter: non licet esse christianos; Christians may not exist.’ The legal penalty is death, and there is no ground of appeal. As a rule there is no delay. Unless they were reserved for the arena, sentences on Christians were usually carried out on the same day. So in our modern analogy fifteen Christians were hanged that afternoon at Wandsworth. On other occasions the policy of the administration might have caused private instructions to be issued to the magistrates that the law against Christianity is not to be too strictly enforced for the present; a sentence of the ‘cat’, penal servitude for life and transportation would have been substituted for the death-penalty. Whether this was really much more merciful may be doubted. The imperial lead-mines in Sardinia, for instance, which were the usual convict-station for Roman Christians in such a case, must have been even more like Devil’s Island than Botany Bay. Most of the prisoners died within two or three years.

We shall not begin to understand what the eucharist meant to Christians until we have estimated this background of real danger and intense hatred in a setting of absolutely normal daily life. It is true that organised and official persecution by the state was by no means continuous, that there were long periods when the central government was otherwise occupied, and wide regions where the local authorities were inclined to turn a blind eye to the existence of Christians, provided these did not thrust themselves upon their notice. But there were other periods and equally wide regions where official persecution raged with violence for years together. For two hundred years, from Nero to Valerian (roughly a.d. 65-260), Christian worship was in itself a capital crime. For another fifty after that, the law against Christian assembly relaxed; but to be a Christian was, by an illogicality, still brought under the capital charge of laesa maiestas. There is the opinion of Ulpian the jurist and the actual contemporary court-record of martyrdoms to prove that even in this period of peace in the latter half of the third century martyrdom was still only a matter of whether you happened to be accused. No one ever knew even in a period when the government was quiescent when persecution might not break out in the form of mob-violence, or what trivial cause might bring upon a man the inescapable official challenge ‘Art thou a Christian?’ Callistus trying to recover a commercial debt from Jewish debtors finds them making this charge against him in the prefect’s court to avoid payment; and within an hour or two he has been scourged and sentenced for life to the deadly Sardinian mines (Hippolytus, Philosophumendi ix. II). Marinus, the soldier accused of Christianity by a comrade envious of his promotion to centurion, is dead three hours after the accusation has been lodged (Eusebius, Eccl. Hist., VII. xv. 1). Both these typical stories are reported by contemporaries from periods which rank more or less as times of toleration. We can and should distinguish between the intermittent hostility of the government and the unorganized and unpredictable malignity of the mob or of private informers. But when all has been said that is true in mitigation of the severity of ancient persecutions, for two hundred and fifty years from Nero to Constantine to be a Christian was in itself a capital crime, always liable to the severest penalty, even when the law was not enforced. It remains a demonstrable historical fact from contemporary records that during this period thousands of men and women were killed, tens of thousands more suffered grievously in their fortunes and persons, and hundreds of thousands had to put up with the opposition of their families and the suspicion and ostracism of their neighbours for half-a-lifetime and more. And the storm center throughout the whole period was undoubtedly the eucharist.

When we regard what actually took place in the early eucharistic rite, the fear and hatred it inspired over so long a time seem ridiculous. Yet it is an uncanny fact that there is still scarcely any subject on which the imagination of those outside the faith is more apt to surrender to the unrestrained nonsense of panic than that of what happens at the catholic eucharist. As a trivial instance, I remember that my own grandmother, a devout Wesleyan, believed to her dying day that at the Roman Catholic mass the priest let a crab loose upon the altar, which it was his mysterious duty to prevent from crawling sideways into the view of the congregation. (Hence the gestures of the celebrant.) How she became possessed of this notion, or what she supposed eventually happened to the crustacean I never discovered. But she affirmed with the utmost sincerity that she had once with her own eyes actually watched this horrible rite in progress; and there could be no doubt of the deplorable effect that solitary visit to a Roman Catholic church had had on her estimate of Roman Catholics in general, though she was the soul of charity in all things else. To all suggestions that the mass might be intended as some sort of holy communion service she replied only with the wise and gentle pity of the fully-informed for the ignorant.

I mention this peculiar opinion of a good and sensible woman because it illustrates well enough a frame of mind among the ancient pagans which was at once a cause and a result of Christian secrecy about the eucharist. The gruesome stories of ritual murder and cannibal feasts which have been told since the stone age — when, no doubt, they had their justification — about all unpopular associations, received a fresh impulse from misunderstandings of indiscreet Christian talk of receiving ‘the Body and the Blood.’ The dark suspicions of orgies of promiscuous vice or even organised incest, which the nasty side of men’s imaginations is always willing to credit about mysterious private gatherings, were stimulated by talk of ‘the kiss’ and of ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters.’ The point is that these charges against the Christians were taken with the utmost seriousness by multitudes not only of the cruel and foolish and ignorant but of normally humane and sensible men. When the heathen slaves of a Christian master broke down under the torture always employed in the Roman courts to ensure the truthfulness of a slave’s evidence — such was the extraordinary reason seriously maintained for the practice — and proceeded to ‘confess’ their knowledge of such goings on among the Christians, it may have added to the disgust with which the decent pagan regarded all mention of the eucharist, but hardly at all to the strength of the general conviction that the holding of the ecclesia ought to be stopped by the authorities at all costs. One has only to read, for instance, the account by an eye-witness at Lyons in a.d. 177 of the pathetic occasion in the persecution there when after just such a ‘confession’ by heathen slaves the apostate Christians were mobbed by the crowd as self-confessed ‘polluted wretches’ (miarous), to realise just what associations the very word ‘eucharist’ would have in the mind of any decent Lyonnais for the next thirty years, or what sort of hysteria a rumour of the holding of Christian worship would be likely to work up in the city.

The imperial government was a great deal better informed than the populace. It regarded the church as a potential political danger for precisely the same reasons as any other totalitarian government is bound to do so. At times it took vigorous measures to protect itself against this danger, and it is an instance of Roman governmental capacity that whenever it did so it showed a clear understanding of the problem which confronted it. Active measures were always directed not so much against the holding of Christian beliefs as against the expression of that belief in the worship of the ecclesia. Those officials, for instance, who actually carried out the persecution under the emperor Decius (a.d. 250-251) must have been perfectly well aware from their behaviour that of the thousands of Christian apostates who offered sacrifice under threat of instant martyrdom, the vast majority remained sincerely convinced Christians in belief, even though by the failure of their courage at the moment of trial they now faced life-long exclusion from Christian communion. The persecutors were not concerned to produce sincere believers in the deity either of the emperor or of the Olympian gods, but to put an end to the illegal meetings of the Christian ecclesia. They could be content with the merest pretence of conformity because they could rely on the discipline of the church itself to exclude from the ecclesia all who had in any way compromised. The government’s attack was pressed all the time upon worship, by striking especially at the clergy with martyrdom or penal servitude, by the confiscation of all property upon which Christian worship was proved to have taken place, and by a variety of other measures, all designed to make impossible the holding of the ecclesia. But there was no parallel attempt by a counter-propaganda to discredit Christian beliefs or to defend pagan ones.

The church being what it was, the act of taking part in the common worship could be accepted by church and state alike as the effective test of Christianity. From the point of view of the state it was deliberate treason (laesa maiestas). From the point of view of the church the corporate action of the eucharist in the ecclesia was the supreme positive affirmation before God of the Christian life. There was no place on either view for that modern ‘Christianity’ which owns no allegiance to the church and her worship. To the state an academic belief which did not express itself in worship carried no danger of Christian allegiance. To the church belief which did not express itself in worship would have seemed both pointless and fruitless. Christian belief was the condition of admission to that worship, explicitly required before baptism and confirmation, which alone admitted a man to pray with the church, let alone communicate. On the other hand, for a confirmed Christian to allow himself to take any part whatever in non-christian worship was ‘apostasy,’ a public declaration that he renounced that faith in Christ as his redeemer which was his passport to worship. Down to a.d. 252 apostasy involved perpetual exclusion from the ecclesia in this world and damnation in the next, unless perhaps the lapsed Christian might hope to move the mercy of God after death by a life-long penance outside the corporate life of the church. The state was content to accept the logic of the Christian principle that religious belief can only be finally and adequately expressed by worship. When the well-organised Decian persecution encouraged apostasy by making compliance easy, and reaped an immense harvest of lapses, it must have seemed that the church was about to be strangled in her own inviolable discipline.

The church met the crisis by a revolutionary change in that discipline, which the government does not seem to have anticipated. In the teeth of bitter opposition from the zealots everywhere, the bishops restored to membership of the ecclesia all apostates who showed the sincerity of their repentance by undergoing a period of penance. The lapsed flocked back in thousands, and the correspondence of S. Cyprian contains abundant evidence with what eagerness they sought to resume their Christian life, not as believers — they had never ceased to be that — but as worshippers. For the Christian as for the persecutor the liturgy formed the very life not only of the church corporately but of the individual soul. It was a statesmanlike move, probably the only one which could have enabled the church to survive the second wave of persecution which the baffled government at once launched against the Christian revival under Valerian (a.d. 254-9). The state was eventually distracted by foreign war, and had to own itself unable to stamp out the ecclesia. An edict of Gallienus conceded permission to the Christians freely ‘to use their ecclesiai’ the property in which was restored to them (a.d. 260).

This was a virtual concession of freedom of worship, but it left the legal position ambiguous. Christian worship was no longer in itself a crime, and the church became a tolerated if not a legally recognised association. But Christianity was not a legal religion, and the individual Christian could still be charged with high treason.

For the next forty years the state simply turned its back upon the fact that the church existed, though everyone was aware that ‘the Christian question’ would have to be faced one day. But the forty years of uneasy toleration which ended the third century brought a considerable increase in Christian numbers, which together with the liberty of assembly now permitted, began to force upon the church a more regular organization of her worship. We find special church buildings for this purpose beginning to be erected in many towns and even in some quarters of Rome itself during this period. In Asia Minor especially the church came to number quite a large proportion of the population and could come more into the open. At Nicodmeia, the Eastern capital, where high officers of the court and even members of the royal family were attracted to the church, the Christian bishop’s cathedral is said to have been the most imposing public building in the city before the end of the third century.

Elsewhere, Christians were usually an unpopular minority, and worship had to be conducted with more discretion. But everywhere (as we have seen at Cirta) it was now an open secret where Christian worship was held and who the Christian clergy were. When the last tempest of persecution arose under Diocletian a.d. 303-13 — the longest as well as the fiercest the church ever had to face — it was again upon Christian worship that it pressed most fiercely. That worship was itself now much more open to attack by reason of its new semi-public organization. This time, too, there was a real attempt to refute Christian teaching by intellectual propaganda, and a systematic destruction of Christian literature. The virtual prevention of corporate worship except in the most furtive fashion for nearly ten years and the gradual extinction of the clergy by martyrdom or apostasy did on this occasion reduce the church to the direst extremities, in a way no previous persecution had ever done. The edicts of toleration put out in 313 by the emperors Maximin and Maximian, and comprehensively ratified and enforced by the new Christian emperor Constantine in the following year, came only just in time to save her from complete disorganization. The West was now finally free from organised persecution by the state, but the Eastern provinces still had to endure it intermittently for another five years

It will be seen that popular and official persecution of the church had very different motives. The state feared the church; the populace disliked the Christians. The state wished to make apostates; the mob as a rule preferred martyrs. It is a constant feature of the genuine Acta of the martyrs to find the magistrate arguing and pleading with the prisoner to deny his faith and fulfil the formal test of sacrifice, even delaying and straining the law sometimes to secure something which will pass for a denial, while the mob howl for the prisoner’s death.

The Roman judicial standard was on the whole a high one. There is evidence that many of the magistrates did not enjoy the duty of enforcing the law against Christians, and recognised its futility and injustice. But though the administration might often be disposed to avoid charging men with Christianity, the law placed a fatal weapon in the hands of both the hostility of the mob and private enmity. Once the accusation of Christianity had been brought to his notice the magistrate was bound to take cognizance of it. And once a man was put that fatal question ‘Art thou a Christian?’ there was no other way but apostasy or sentence. The magistrate and the martyr were alike helpless. It was always open to a magistrate more energetic or fanatical than his fellows to set the law in motion himself within his jurisdiction. But except when instructions were received from the central administration to ‘tighten things up,’ this appears to have been comparatively rare; and the general practice of changing the local magistrates annually usually ensured a brief duration to such local official action.

It is plain from second and third century Christian literature that the great permanent danger to the Christians came from the mob. As Tertullian puts it, ‘They think the Christians are at the bottom of every disaster to the state and every misfortune of the people. If the Tiber floods the city or the Nile fails to flood the fields, if there are portents in heaven or earthquakes on earth, if famine comes or plague, they clamour instantly "Throw the Christians to the lion." So many, to one lion?’ (Apologeticus, xi).

Thus the church could not meet the charges of cannibalism and incest, which the man in the street honestly believed about the eucharist, in the only way which might have been effective — though it did not convince my grandmother — by holding the rite with absolute publicity. This was partly at least because the state made the holding of Christian worship in itself a 1 Tertullian, capital crime. In any case she would probably have been reluctant to do this in a pagan worlds because the eucharist expressed in its very essence and idea the ‘separateness’ of the holy church from ‘the world that lieth in wickedness’ (John 5:19).

There was thus left only the alternative of denying the charges as often as possible in the course of propaganda, and enduring their consequences when this failed — as it invariably did — to convince the public. Justin in the famous ‘Open Letter to the Government’ which is known as his First Apology tried the expedient of describing just what was done at the eucharist with a disarming frankness, which to a modern reader must seem a convincing (and rather skilful) demonstration of its entire harmlessness. Yet it had no effect whatever on contemporary opinion. In his second manifesto of the same kind issued a year or two later, Justin himself obviously despairs of achieving much by this method of reasonableness, and adopts a much more indignant and defiant tone.

Tertullian used instead the method of a biting irony. But it is obvious throughout the book that though he addresses the administration he is really trying to counter the popular rumours about orgies at the eucharist, which are having a very serious effect. He twits the officials with the fact that they have never been able to discover the scantiest factual evidence for these charges — ‘how many babies any particular person has eaten, how many times he has committed incest, who the cooks were.... What a boast for any governor, if he had actually caught a man who had eaten a hundred babies!’ (Tertullian, Ap. ii). But his argument on these things is really addressed not to the officials, who did not take these charges seriously, but to the public which did. ‘Suppose these things are true for the moment. I only ask you who believe that such things are done to imagine yourself eager for the eternal life they are supposed to secure. Now! Plunge your knife into an innocent baby that never did anyone any harm, a foundling. Perhaps that is some other Christian’s office. Well, any way, stand looking down on this human being gasping in death almost before it has lived; wait while its new little soul escapes; catch its gurgling blood and soak your bread in that. Then gulp it down with pleasure! Then lie down and point out where your mother is to lie and where your sister. Take careful note, that when the dogs (chained to the lampstand) plunge all in darkness you may make no mistake. You will have done a sacrilege if you fail to commit incest. By these mysteries and this confirmation you shall live for all eternity. Tell me, now, is eternity worth that?.. Even if you thought so, I deny that you would want it on those terms. Even if you did want it, I deny that you could bring yourself to gain it thus. Why then can others, if you cannot? Why can you not, if others can? We are different from you in nature, I suppose — dog-headed men or sciapods? We have a different sort of teeth, or feel a different lust? You believe men can do these things? Then presumably you can do them. You are a man yourself, just like a Christian. If you know you could not bring yourself to do them, then do not believe that others can.... I suppose when someone wants to be initiated in this way he first goes to the high-priest of these mysteries, to find out what preparations he must make. And he tells him, "Oh, you will need a baby, a teeny baby, which does not understand death and will smile under your knife; and bread in which to catch its squirting blood ... and above all, you must bring your mother and your sister." What if they will not come, or the convert has none? What about Christians who have no near feminine relations? I presume he can be no rightful Christian unless he be a brother or a son?’ (Tertullian, Ap., viii).

Of course this sort of firework did no more good than Justin’s calculated naiveté. Indeed Tertullian’s whole Apology is so much in the nature of a devastating counter-attack on paganism all along the line that it seems more calculated to infuriate any conventionally-minded pagan who happened to read it than to soothe his alarm at the alleged revolutionary opinions and morals of the Christians. But the lurid background of suspicion and calumny about the eucharist and ill-will towards those who took part in it has to be borne in mind in considering the importance that Christians attached to its celebration and the reasons why they clung to this ill-famed rite.

These men and women did not run continual risks to attend it merely because there they remembered with thankfulness in a specially moving way the death of Jesus which had redeemed them. They could do that anywhere and alone; some of them did it most of their waking hours. Nor was it simply that in the eucharist alone they could satisfy a personal longing for God by receiving holy communion. As a matter of fact if a devout third century Christian on his deathbed could have reckoned up all the communions he had ever made, he would probably have found that the large majority had been made from the reserved sacrament at home, quite apart from the liturgy. These desires of Christian personal devotion could be and were satisfied in private in comparative safety, without the dangers and scandal which centered round the eucharist. There was, indeed, a rather striking absence from the primitive eucharistic rite of any devotional practice which was calculated to arouse or feed a subjective piety — no confession of sins or devotions in preparation for communion, no corporate thanksgiving even, nothing but the bare requisites for the sacramental act. It was a burning faith in the vital importance of that eucharist action as such, its importance to God and to the church and to a man’s own soul, for this world and for the next, which made the Christians cling to the rite of the eucharist against all odds. Nothing else could have maintained the corporate celebration of the liturgy through the centuries when the ecclesia was outside the law.

For these Christian men and women were very normal. They were not impossibly heroic. Their answers in the dock often shew that they were very frightened. Even when they were most defiant their rudeness is often a mark of fear. Few men could look forward to the appalling tortures which the courts in the later second century sometimes took to applying — ‘to make them deny their crime’ as Tertullian bitterly remarked, ‘not like other criminals to confess it’ — without considerable perturbation. Many of them apostatised when it came to the final test, often most of them. The world, the flesh and the devil were as active and deadly with them as they are with Christians nowadays. And so was another enemy whose assaults on the church of the martyrs we often ignore though we know its deadening effects on ourselves — routine, the mere fact that one has been trying to be a Christian for quite a long time and little seems to come of it. The parable of the Sower was just as true then as now. But these normal men and women were prepared with open eyes to accept the risks and inconveniences they undoubtedly did encounter, just to be present at the eucharist together and regularly. I submit that it casts a flood of light on their beliefs about the eucharist and the nature of the church and Christian salvation generally, that they attributed this desperate importance not so much to ‘making their communion’ as to taking part in the corporate action of the eucharist.

It was to secure the fulness of this corporate action that a presbyter and a deacon had to be smuggled somehow into the imperial prisons, there to celebrate their last eucharist for the confessors awaiting execution; and S. Cyprian takes it as a matter of course that this must be arranged (Cyprian, Ep., v. 2). To secure this for his companions as best he could, the presbyter Lucian lying with his legs wrenched wide apart in the stocks of the prison at Antioch celebrated the mysteries for the last time with the elements resting on his own breast, and passed their last communion to the others lying equally helpless in the dark around him. To secure this a whole congregation of obscure provincials at Abilinitina in Africa took the risk of almost certain detection by assembling at the height of the Diocletian persecution in their own town, where the authorities were on the watch for them, because, as they said in court, the eucharist had been lacking a long while through the apostasy of their bishop Fundanus, and they could no longer bear the lack of it. And so they called on a presbyter to celebrate — and paid the penalty of their faith to a man. To secure this was always the first thought of Christians in time of threatened persecution. ‘But how shall we meet, you ask, how shall we celebrate the Lord’s solemnities? ... If you cannot meet by day, there is always the night,’ says Tertullian, bracing the fearful to stay and meet the coming storm. Even when a church had been scattered by long persecution, the duty was never forgotten. ‘At first they drove us out and ... we kept our festival even then, pursued and put to death by all, and every single spot where we were afflicted became to us a place of assembly for the feast — field, desert, ship, inn, prison,’ writes S. Denys, bishop of Alexandria, of one terrible Easter day c. a.d. 250, when a raging civil war, famine and pestilence were added to the woes of his persecuted church.

Literally scores of similar illustrations from contemporary documents of unimpeachable historical authority are available of the fact that it was not so much the personal reception of holy communion as the corporate eucharistic action as a whole (which included communion) which was then regarded as the very essence of the life of the church, and through that of the individual Christian soul. In this corporate action alone each Christian could fulfil for himself or herself the ‘appointed liturgy’ of his order, and so fulfil his redeemed being as a member of Christ. For my own part I have long found it difficult to understand exactly how the eucharist ever came to be supposed by serious scholars at all closely comparable with the rites of the pagan mysteries. The approach is so different. In the mysteries there is always the attempt to arouse and play upon religious emotion, by long preparation and fasts, and (often) by elaborate ceremonies, or by alternations of light and darkness, by mystical symbols and impressive surroundings, and pageantry; or sometimes by the weird and repulsive or horrible. But always there is the attempt to impress, to arouse emotion of some kind, and so to put the initiate into a receptive frame of mind. As Aristotle said, men came to these rites ‘not to learn something but to experience something.’ The Christian eucharist in practice was the reverse of all this. All was homely and unemotional to a degree. The Christian came to the eucharist, not indeed ‘to learn something,’ for faith was presupposed, but certainly not to seek a psychological thrill. He came simply to do something, which he conceived he had an overwhelming personal duty to do, come what might. What brought him to the eucharist week by week, despite all dangers and inconveniences, was no thrill provoked by the service itself, which was bare and unimpressive to the point of dullness, and would soon lose any attraction of novelty. Nor yet was it a longing for personal communion with God, which he could and did fulfil otherwise in his daily communion from the reserved sacrament at home. What brought him was an intense belief that in the eucharistic action of the Body of Christ, as in no other way, he himself took a part in that act of sacrificial obedience to the will of God which was consummated on Calvary and which had redeemed the world, including himself. What brought him was the conviction that there rested on each of the redeemed an absolute necessity so to take his own part in the self-offering of Christ, a necessity more binding even than the instinct of self-preservation. Simply as members of Christ’s Body, the church, all Christians must do this, and they can do it in no other way than that which was the last command of Jesus to His own. That rule of the absolute obligation upon each of the faithful of presence at Sunday mass under pain of mortal sin, which seems so mechanical and formalist to the protestant, is something which was burned into the corporate mind of historic Christendom in the centuries between Nero and Diocletian. But it rests upon something more evangelical and more profound than historical memories. It expresses as nothing else can the whole New Testament doctrine of redemption; of Jesus, God and Man, as the only Saviour of mankind, Who intends to draw all men unto Him by His sacrificial and atoning death; and of the church as the communion of redeemed sinners, the Body of Christ, corporately invested with His own mission of salvation to the world.

Despite all the formalism and carelessness and hypocrisy which a social tradition of the general attendance at the eucharist of all who have been baptised involves, and has always involved, in catholic countries, there is this to be said: that no personal subjective devotion on the part of select individual communicants can manifest Christ as the redeemer of all men and of all human life, either to themselves or to the world or before God. Nor can the corporate being of the church as His one Body with many members be fulfilled in an action from which the greater part of the baptized and confirmed members are regarded or regard themselves as tacitly excluded.

We do well to approach the mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood with the profoundest reverence and searching of heart. Yet a eucharist where the table is ‘fenced,’ even only by the consensus of Christian opinion, a eucharist at which frequency has come to be regarded as a special preserve of the clergy and ‘the devout,’ and at which the majority of practicing Christians are present only on comparatively rare occasions — this has just as much ceased to be the scriptural and primitive eucharist as has the most unprayerful and conventional non-communicating attendance at Sunday mass by the tradesmen of a Sicilian country town.

The unfamiliarity of a vast proportion of ‘C. of E.’ Christians with the eucharist may have begun with a false notion of reverence. It has ended by destroying the true understanding of the eucharist even among many of those who still frequent it. The clergy will all have encountered those choice souls who actually prefer to ‘make their communion’ only in the peace of a week-day celebration, where three or four leisured people can scatter themselves widely all over the church, and avoid disturbance by the larger congregation at ‘the 8 o’clock’ on Sunday. It would probably surprise the clergy to find how widespread this self-centred devotion is among the laity, and how many regular communicants would prefer to fulfil their personal religious needs in this way if their situation gave them the weekday leisure. This is not much better than a parody of devotion to the eucharist, which our practice and teaching have somehow succeeded in implanting as the ideal. Behind it lie centuries of the mediaeval distortion of the eucharist as the focus of a subjective individual piety. In reality it is the very action of Him who came ‘to die not for that nation only, but that also He should gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad (John 11:52).

Let us look back for a moment. We have seen that the eucharist is primarily an action, our obedience to our Lord’s command to ‘Do this’; and that this action is performed by the Shape of the Liturgy, the outline of the service viewed as a single continuous whole. We have also seen that the meaning of this action is stated chiefly in the great eucharistic prayer, which formed the second item of that Tour-action shape’ of the eucharist which has come down almost from apostolic times. Since this prayer was originally ‘the’ prayer, the only prayer in the whole rite, it was there that the whole meaning of the rite had to be stated, if it was to be put into words at all in the course of the service. We have also noted that, while the tradition as to the outline of the rite was always and everywhere the same, there was no such original fixity about the content and sequence of this prayer. Its text was subject to constant development and revision, so that it varied considerably from church to church and from period to period, and even (probably within narrower limits) from celebrant to celebrant.

In this chapter we shall set out the oldest specimens of ancient local traditions of this prayer which have come down to us, together with other material which throws light upon them.

The traditions we shall chiefly consider now are three — those of Rome, Egypt and Syria, for Rome, Alexandria and Antioch were the three most important churches in pre-Nicene times. But there were other traditions of the prayer elsewhere, some of them equally ancient, in North Africa, Spain and Gaul in the West, and in the apostolic churches of the Balkans and Asia Minor in the East. Unfortunately, by the accidents of history it happens that no texts of the eucharistic prayers of these churches have survived from pre-Nicene times, or indeed from any period at which their evidence can usefully serve for even a tentative comparison with the really ancient material. Our survey is thus bound to be very incompletely representative of the whole liturgical wealth of the pre-Nicene church as it actually existed, and the reader may reasonably wonder how it would be affected if these lost traditions could be included. I believe that the answer is ‘very little in principle and a great deal in detail,’ because of the form of the conclusions to which the extant material actually leads. The missing traditions of the prayer, if they could be recovered, would probably shew in its structure and phrasing a diversity equal to, or even greater than, those which survive. Such little evidence as we have about them suggests that they were verbally as independent of the prayers which we do know as these clearly are of one another. On the other hand this fragmentary evidence, and still more the incidental statements about the eucharist in the writers from these churches, suggest equally strongly that their fundamental understanding of the rite, that ‘meaning’ of it which their eucharistic prayers sought to state, was the same in all essentials as that found in the prayers which have survived. Diversity of form and a fundamental identity of meaning seem to have been the marks of the old local tradition everywhere.

We begin once more with the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, the most important source of information we possess on the liturgy of the pre-Nicene church. This invaluable document contains the only pre-Nicene text of a eucharistic prayer which has reached us without undergoing extensive later revision. We have to be on our guard, however, against interpreting all the other evidence exclusively in the light of this single document (which raises almost as many fresh problems as it solves, from one point of view), just because it is in this way of such unique interest and importance. In itself it represents only the local tradition of Rome, though at an early stage, before developments had become complicated.

After the opening dialogue, already sufficiently commented, Hippolytus’ prayer runs thus:

1. We render thanks unto Thee, O God, through Thy Beloved Servant Jesus Christ, Whom in the last times Thou didst send (to be) a Saviour and Redeemer and the Angel of Thy counsel; Who is Thy Word inseparable (front Thee);
2. through Whom Thou madest all things and in Whom Thou wast well-pleased;
3. Whom Thou didst send from heaven into the Virgin’s womb, and Who conceived within her was made flesh, and demonstrated to be Thy Son, being born of Holy Spirit and a Virgin;
4. Who fulfilling Thy will and procuring for Thee an holy people, stretched forth His hands for suffering (or for the passion) that He might release from sufferings them who have believed in Thee;
5. Who when He was betrayed to voluntary suffering (or the passion) in order that He might abolish death and rend the bonds of the devil and tread down hell and enlighten the righteous and establish the ordinance and demonstrate the resurrection,
6. taking bread (and) making eucharist to Thee, said: Take, eat; this is My Body, which is [or will be] broken for you.

(f) Likewise also the cup, saying: This is My Blood which is shed for you.

7. When ye do this ye do [or make ye] My ‘anamnesis.’
8. Now, therefore, doing the ‘anamnesis’ of His death and resurrection
9. we offer to Thee the bread and cup
10. making eucharist to Thee because Thou hast made us worthy to stand before Thee and minister as priests to Thee.
11. And we pray Thee that [Thou wouldest send Thy Holy Spirit upon the oblation of Thy holy church]1 Thou wouldest grant to all who partake to be made one, that they may be fulfilled with (the) Holy Spirit for the confirmation of (their) faith in truth;
12. that we may praise and glorify Thee through Thy Servant Jesus Christ through Whom honour and glory (be) unto Thee with (the) Holy Spirit in Thy holy church, now and for ever and world without end.

R/ Amen.

We may analyze the structure of the prayer thus:

1. Address: Relation of the Father to the Eternal Word.
2. Thanksgiving for Creation through the Word.
3. Thanksgiving for the Incarnation of the Word.
4. Thanksgiving for Redemption through the Passion of the Word.
5. Statement of Christ’s purpose in instituting the eucharist.
6. Statement of His Institution of the eucharist.
7. Statement of His virtual command to repeat the action of (g) with a virtual promise of the result attaching to such repetition.
8. Claim to the fulfillment of the promise in (g).
9. Offering of the elements
10. constituting obedience to the command in (g), with an interpretation of the meaning understood by this obedience.
11. Prayer for the effects of communion.
12. Doxology.

This prayer was written down more or less verbally in this form at Rome c. a.d. 215, but the author emphatically claims that it represents traditional Roman practice in his own youth a generation before. It appears certainthat some of the phrasing in a-e is of his own composition, and represents his own peculiar theology of the Trinity; and it is at least possible that the wording of other parts of the prayer is from his own pen. But this does not make it improbable that the structure of the prayer as a whole (including a-e) and some of its actual wording were really traditional at Rome. The following parallels from the writings of Justin Martyr (Rome c. a.d. 155) all occur in professedly eucharistic passages, and some are even more remarkable in Greek than in English for the resemblance of then-phrasing to that of Hippolytus.

(a) The bishop ‘sends up praise and glory to the Father of all through the Name of the Son and the Holy Ghost’ (Ap. 1:65).

(Jesus is the ‘Beloved,’ the ‘Servant,’ the ‘Saviour,’ the ‘Redeemer’ and the ‘Angel of God’s counsel’ in a number of passages in Justin, though none of them are explicitly about the eucharistic prayer; the Word is ‘not separable’ from the Father (Dialogue, 128) but again this is not explicitly connected with the eucharistic prayer.)

(b-d) The eucharist was instituted ‘that we might at the same time give thanks to God for the creation of the world with all that is therein for man’s sake, and for that He has delivered us from the evil wherein we were born, and for that He loosed (the bonds) of powers and principalities with a complete loosing by becoming subject to suffering according to His own wil’ (Dialogue, 41).

(c, d, g) ‘As by the Word of God Jesus Christ our Saviour was made flesh and had flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have been taught that this food "eucharistised" by a formula of prayer which comes from Him ... is the flesh and blood of that Jesus Who was made flesh. For the apostles in the memoirs which are by them, which are called "gospels," have recorded that thus it was commanded them (to do): that Jesus took bread and gave thanks and said "Do this for the anamnesis of Me: This is My Body"; and likewise took the cup and gave thanks and said "This is My Blood"‘ (Ap. 1:66).

(h) ‘The offering of fine flour ordered (in the Old Testament) to be offered on behalf of those who were cleansed from leprosy was a type of the bread of the eucharist, which Jesus Christ our Lord ordered to be done [or ‘sacrificed’] for an anamnesis of His passion which He suffered on behalf of men, whose souls have (thereby) been cleansed from all iniquity’ (Dialogue, 41).

(i) ‘The sacrifices which are offered to God by us gentiles everywhere, that is the bread of the eucharist, and the cup likewise of the eucharist’ (Dialogue, 41).

(j) The bishop ‘sends up eucharists (thanksgivings) that we have been made worthy of these things by Him’ (Ap. I:65). ‘We (christians) are the true high-priestly race of God ... for God accepts sacrifices from no one but by the hands of His own priests’ (Dialogue, 116).

(k, l) These have no verbal parallels in Justin’s allusions to the eucharist like the above, though the same sentiments are to be found at large in his works.

We can thus at the least say that there is nothing whatever in the specifically eucharistic teaching of Hippolytus’ prayer which would have been repudiated by Justin sixty years earlier.

How far, then, does the tradition represented by Hippolytus’ prayer go back? I shall suggest later that at least the general structure of the first part of Hippolytus’ prayer was an inheritance from the days of the Jewish apostles at Rome, which the Roman church with its usual conservatism had maintained more rigidly in the second century than some other churches. We shall find that this prayer as a whole is more ‘tidy5 in arrangement and more logical in its connections, less confused by the later introduction of inessentials, and more theological and precise in its expression of what is involved in the eucharistic action, than the others we shall consider. Here it is necessary only to draw attention to the careful articulation of its central portion (e-j).

The only point of any difficulty which arises in interpreting this prayer is the question of the exact bearing of (e). Is it to be understood as stating that our Lord went to His ‘voluntary passion’ in order’that He ‘might abolish death’ etc.; or does Hippolytus mean that He instituted the eucharist in order that ‘He might abolish death,’ etc.? Grammatically the sentence could mean either; and though to our way of thinking the former meaning may seem much more obvious, it seems from other passages in Hippolytus’ works that he did think of holy communion precisely as the means whereby Christ intended to bestow on us these benefits of His passion. Thus he speaks of communion as ‘the food which leads thee back to heaven, and delivers from the evil powers and frees from hard toil and bestows on thee a happy and blessed return to God.’ Similarly, commenting on Luke xxii. 15 (‘With desire have I desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer’) Hippolytus remarks, ‘This was the passover which Jesus desired to suffer for us. By suffering He released from sufferings (cf. Prayer (d) above) and overcame death by death and by a visible food bestowed on us His eternal life.... Therefore He desired not so much to eat as He desired to suffer that He might deliver us from suffering by (our) eating’ In the face of these and certain other expressions which Hippolytus uses elsewhere, it seems unnecessary to argue further. Hippolytus regards holy communion as the means by which Christ ‘abolishes death’ and ‘rends the bonds of the devil’ in the faithful communicant. It is a means of ‘enlightenment’ and a ‘demonstration of the resurrection’ (cf. John vi:53-57). The institution at the last supper ‘establishes an ordinance’ — a phrase in itself difficult to interpret of the passion.

The institution narrative of (f) is in fact the pivot of the whole prayer as it stands. It is the climax or point of all that precedes, and the starting point of all that follows. The command and promise it contains (g) are the justification for all that is done and meant by the church at the eucharist. This is carefully defined in (h), (i), (j), as (1) the offering of the bread and cup (2) which is the ‘priestly’ action of the church, and therefore a sacrifice (3) because it is the anamnesis of His own death and resurrection commanded by our Lord to be ‘done’; or as Justin (sup.) calls it, ‘What Jesus Christ our Lord commanded to be done for an anamnesis of His passion, which He suffered on behalf of men whose souls have (thereby) been cleansed from all iniquity.’ In other words, the eucharist was regarded in the second century as the divinely ordered ‘anamnesis’ of the redeeming action of our Lord. A good deal therefore turns on the word anamnesis, which we have so far left untranslated.

This word, which the Authorised Version translates as ‘Do this in remembrance of Me’ in the New Testament accounts of the institution, is more common in Roman writers in connection with the eucharist than elsewhere in pre-Nicene times. As we shall see, it does not appear in the parallel sections of some traditions of the prayer. It is not quite easy to represent accurately in English, words like ‘remembrance’ or ‘memorial’ having for us a connotation of something itself absent, which is only mentally recollected. But in the scriptures both of the Old and New Testament, anamnesis and the cognate verb have the sense of ‘re-calling’ or ‘re-presenting’ before God an event in the past, so that it becomes here and now operative by its effects. Thus the sacrifice of a wife accused of adultery (Num. V:15) is ‘an offering "re-calling" her sin to (God’s) remembrance’ (anamimnes-kousa); i.e. if she has sinned in the past, it will now be revealed by the ordeal, because her sin has been actively ‘re-called’ or cre-presented’ before God by her sacrifice. So the widow of Sarepta (1 Kings xvii:18) complains that Elijah has come ‘to "re-call" to (God’s) remembrance (anamnesai) my iniquity,’ and therefore her son has now died. So in Heb. x:3-4, the writer says that because ‘it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins’ (in the sight of God), the sacrifices of the Old Testament were no better than a ‘re-calling’ (anamnesis) of the offerers’ sins before God. And though in this passage there is some indication that anamnesis has here partly at least a psychological reference to the Israelites’ own ‘conscience’ of sins, it is plain from the passage as a whole that it is primarily before God that the sins are ‘re-called’ and ‘not purged’ or ‘taken away.’ It is in this active sense, therefore, of ‘re-calling’ or ‘representing’ before God the sacrifice of Christ, and thus making it here and now operative by its effects in the communicants, that the eucharist is regarded both by the New Testament and by second century writers as the anamnesis of the passion, or of the passion and resurrection combined. It is for this reason that Justin and Hippolytus and later writers after them speak so directly and vividly of the eucharist in the present bestowing on the communicants those effects of redemption — immortality, eternal life, forgiveness of sins, deliverance from the power of the devil and so on — which we usually attribute more directly to the sacrifice of Christ viewed as a single historical event in the past. One has only to examine their unfamiliar language closely to recognise how completely they identify the offering of the eucharist by the church with the offering of Himself by our Lord, not by way of a repetition, but as a ‘re-presentation’ (anamnesis) of the same offering by the church ‘which is His Body.’ As S. Cyprian puts it tersely but decisively in the third century. ‘The passion is the Lord’s sacrifice, which we offer’ (Ep. 63:17).

These three points may be said to stand out from our cursory examination of the Roman eucharistic prayer: (i) The centrality in its construction of the narrative of the institution as the authority for what the church does in the eucharist. Its importance in this respect is greatly emphasised by being placed out of its historical order, after the thanksgiving for the passion. (2) What is understood to be ‘done’ in the eucharist is the church’s offering and reception of the bread and the cup, identified with the Lord’s Body and Blood by the institution. This ‘doing’ of the eucharist is our Lord’s command and a ‘priestly’ act of the church. (3) The whole rite ‘recalls’ or ‘re-presents’ before God not the last supper, but the sacrifice of Christ in His death and resurrection; and it makes this ‘present’ and operative by its effects in the communicants.

We have no pre-Nicene text of the eucharistic prayer from Egypt. The earliest document of this tradition which has come down to us is a prayer which is ascribed in the unique eleventh century MS. to S. Sarapion, bishop of Thmuis in the Nile delta from before a.d. 339 to some date between a.d. 353 and c. a.d. 360. Whether the ascription to Sarapion personally be correct or not (and it is quite possible, despite certain difficulties) the prayer is undoubtedly Egyptian, and in its present form of the fourth century, from before rather than after c, a.d. 350. But there are strong indications that this extant form is only a revision of an older Egyptian prayer, whose outline can be established in some points by comparison with eucharistic passages in third century Egyptian writers. We shall not go into this reconstruction in any detail here. Our business is only to establish summarily certain differences from the third century Roman prayer of Hippolytus, and also certain very important similarities of ideas, which seem to belong to the third century Egyptian basis underlying the present text, as well as to the present text itself.

(a1) It is meet and right to praise, to hymn, to glorify Thee, O uncreated Father of the Only-begotten Jesus Christ. We praise Thee, O uncreated God, Who art unsearchable, ineffable, incomprehensible by any created substance. We praise Thee Who art known of Thy Son the Only-begotten, Who through Him art spoken and interpreted and made known to every created being. We praise Thee Who knowest the Son and revealest to the saints the doctrines concerning Him: Who art known of Thy begotten Word and art brought to the sight and understanding of the saints (through Him).

(a2) We praise Thee, O Father invisible, giver of immortality. Thou art the source of life, the source of light, the source of all grace and truth, O lover of men, O lover of the poor, Who art reconciled to all and drawest all things to Thyself by the advent (epidemia) of Thy beloved Son. We beseech Thee, make us living men; give us a spirit of light, that we may know Thee, the true (God) and Him Whom Thou hast sent, Jesus Christ; give us (the) Holy Spirit that we may be able to speak and tell forth Thine unspeakable mysteries. May the Lord Jesus speak in us and (the) Holy Spirit and hymn Thee through us.

(b1) [For Thou art far above all principality and power and rule and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this world but also in that which is to come. Beside Thee stand thousand thousands and ten thousand times ten thousands of angels, archangels, thrones, dominations, principalities, powers: by Thee stand the two most honourable .six-winged Seraphim, with two wings covering the Face and with two the Feet and with two flying, and crying ‘Holy’; with whom receive also our cry of ‘Holy’ as we say

(b2) Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth; full is the heaven and the earth of Thy glory.

(c) Full is the heaven, full also is the earth of Thine excellent glory. Lord of powers, fill also this sacrifice with Thy power and Thy partaking: For to Thee have we offered this living sacrifice, this unbloody oblation.]

(d1) To Thee have we offered this bread, the likeness of the Body of the Only-begotten. This bread is the likeness of the holy Body, because the Lord Jesus Christ in the night in which He was betrayed took bread and brake and gave to His disciples saying: Take ye and eat, this is My Body which is being broken for you for the remission of sins. Wherefore We also making the likeness of the death have offered the bread, and beseech Thee through this sacrifice to be reconciled to all of us and to be merciful, O God of truth;

(d2) [and as this bread had been scattered on the top of the mountains and gathered together came to be one, so also gather Thy holy church out of every nation and country and every city and village and house and make one living catholic church.]

(d3) We have offered also the cup, the likeness of the Blood, because the Lord Jesus Christ taking a cup after supper, said to His own disciples: Take ye, drink; this is the New Covenant, which is My Blood, which is being shed for you for remission of sins. Wherefore we have also offered the cup, offering a likeness of the Blood.

(e l) O God of truth, let Thy holy Word come upon (epidemesato) this bread that the bread may become Body of the Word, and upon this cup that the cup may become Blood of the Truth;

(e2) and make all who partake to receive a medicine (lit. drug) of life, for the healing of every sickness and for strengthening of all advancement and virtue, not for condemnation, O God of truth, and not for censure and reproach.

(f) For we have called upon Thy Name, O Uncreated, through the Only-begotten in (the) Holy Spirit.

(g) [Let this people receive mercy, let it be counted worthy of advancement, let angels be sent forth as companions to the people for bringing to naught of the evil one and for the establishment of the church.

(h) We entreat also on behalf of all who have fallen asleep, of whom also this is the ‘re-calling’ (anamnesis) — (There follows the recital of the names) — sanctify these souls, for Thou knowest them all; sanctify all who have fallen asleep in the Lord and number them with all Thy holy powers and give them a place and a mansion in Thy kingdom.

(i) And receive also the eucharist of the people and bless them that have offered the oblations (prosphora) and the eucharists, and grant health and soundness and cheerfulness and all advancement of soul and body to this whole people.]

(j) Through Thy Only-begotten Jesus Christ in <the> Holy Spirit: (R/ of the congregation) As it was and is and shall be unto generations of generations and world without end. Amen.

This is much longer than Hippolytus’ prayer, but from the point of view simply of eucharistic teaching it says no more than the terse and direct theological statements of the Roman prayer, and it says it less precisely and adequately. A variety of new themes have found their way into the contents, but they obscure the simple outline found in Hippolytus without adding anything essential to the scope. The structure may be analyzed thus:

(a) Address. This is much more elaborate than that of Hippolytus, but is concerned with the same subject, the relation of God the Father to God the Son (to the exclusion in each case of the Holy Ghost). The first paragraph directly repudiates the teaching of Arius that the Son does not know the essence of the Father and is a creature. This makes it clear that it has been re-written (or perhaps added bodily before the second paragraph) during the second quarter of the fourth century, when the Arian controversy was at its height. If the older formula contained anything equivalent to Hippolytus’ thanksgivings for creation, incarnation and passion, only the faintest traces remain, in the references to ‘every created being’ and ‘the advent’ of the Son, with no allusion to the passion at all.

(b) Preface. What seems to have altered the character of (a) is the introduction of the sanctus, and of the preface introducing it. The note of ‘thanksgiving’ and the word itself have disappeared from the address, which has become a sort of theological hymn leading up to the preface. Omitting certain very interesting theological changes in (b) which can be shown to have been made in the fourth century, we note only that the use of the sanctus at the Alexandrian eucharist, preceded by a preface closely resembling Sarapion (b), can be traced in the writings of Origen at Alexandria c. a.d. 230 (Ibid). This is the earliest certain evidence of the use of this hymn in the liturgy. Earlier citations of the words of the angelic hymn from the scriptures by Clement of Rome and Tertullian do not necessarily reflect a use of it at the eucharist, and it is absent from Hippolytus’ liturgy and from some other early documents. It is also noticeable that while the later Alexandrian Liturgy of S. Mark shews little trace in other parts of its eucharistic prayer of being descended from a prayer at all closely resembling that of Sarapion, in the one point of the wording of its preface S. Mark exhibits only small verbal variations from the text of Sarapion (b). The simplest explanation of these various facts is that the use of the preface and sanctus in the eucharistic prayer began in the Alexandrian church at some time before a.d. 230, and from there spread first to other Egyptian churches, and ultimately all over Christendom. If this be true, Sarapion’s (b), though an integral part of the text in its present (fourth century) form, is an interpolation into the original local tradition of the prayer at Thmuis, as is indicated by its having been borrowed almost verbally from the liturgy of Alexandria. We have no means of judging when this Alexandrian paragraph was first incorporated into the liturgy at Thmuis, whether as part of that revision which formed our present text of the prayer — which is certainly responsible for the present form of (a) and may quite well have included a recasting of the whole opening part of the prayer (Sarapion was a close friend and prominent supporter of S. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria from a.d. 328-373) — or by some earlier revision at Thmuis during the third century. But at Thmuis the preface has received no local development or variation worth mentioning from the Alexandrian text, which in the conditions of the period suggests that its incorporation was not of long standing when the present revision was made.

(c) Prayer for the acceptance of the ‘living sacrifice.’ This section is difficult to interpret. At first sight it marks an abrupt transition from the worship of the sanctus to the offering of the eucharistic oblation of the bread and the cup. The phrase ‘the unbloody sacrifice’ is used by fourth century writers (first by Cyril of Jerusalem a.d. 348) to mean the specifically eucharistic offering of the consecrated bread and cup; and a prayer having a definite reference to the consecration of the bread and cup, at this point before the recital of the institution, is a peculiar characteristic of some later Egyptian eucharistic prayers.

Nevertheless it is open to doubt whether this was the original application of (c), even if by Sarapion’s time it had already come to be interpreted in this sense. There is a certain difficulty in the prayer that God would ‘fill this sacrifice’ with His ‘partaking,’ which is awkward on any interpretation, but especially so if (c) be really a prayer about the bread and the cup. And there is an unexpectedness about the phrase ‘this living sacrifice’ applied to the elements on the altar at this stage of the prayer without any sort of warning, even allowing for the fact that the idea of a ‘moment of consecration’ had hardly developed in the fourth century (as the next section of the prayer sufficiently indicates). But it would be a good deal easier to understand if it has a connection with the previous petition, ‘we beseech Thee make us living men.’ In this case the ‘living sacrifice and unbloody oblation’ of (c) will have reference to the ‘sacrifice of praise’ offered in the hymn of the sanctus, and not to the eucharistic offering which follows. It is at least worthy of notice that in a pre-christian Jewish work (c. 100 B.C.) The Testament of the xii Patriarchs, the angels in heaven are said to offer ‘a rational and unbloody oblation’ to God, and it is in this angelic worship of heaven that the congregation has just been joining by the sanctus. Similarly a second century Christian writer, Athenagoras, speaks of’the lifting up of holy hands’ by Christians as ‘an unbloody sacrifice and rational liturgy,’ clearly with reference to prayer and praise rather than to the eucharist as such. In this case Sarapion (c) would represent originally a prayer for the acceptance of the sacrifice of praise offered in (b), much as (d1) contains a prayer for the acceptance of the eucharistic sacrifice of the bread and wine offered in the preceding sentence; and as (1) is a prayer for the acceptance of ‘the eucharist of the people’ offered in the whole preceding prayer.

Such an interpretation of (c) eases the abruptness of the main transition of thought, which comes not between (b) and (c), but between (c) and (d). The transitions are not very well managed anywhere in this prayer, but it seems easier at this point if there is a passage of ideas from the offering of the worship of the sanctus as a ‘living sacrifice’ of praise, to the offering of the eucharistic ‘sacrifice of the death.’ This carries with it the implication that (c) (which thus depends on the sanctus) is also an interpolation into the original form of the rite of Thmuis. A good deal has been built on the application of (c) in this prayer to the eucharist by some writers; but it does not really seem to make much difference to the specifically eucharistic theology of the prayer to exclude (c) from consideration in this respect.

(d) The Offering and Institution. As a preliminary to understanding this section it is best to dispose of (i2), which completely destroys the symmetry, otherwise obvious, between (d1) and (d3). The unsuitability of describing the corn from which the eucharistic bread has been made as having been originally ‘scattered on the tops of the mountains’ among the mud-flats of the Nile delta makes it plain that this is not an authentic product of the native tradition of the prayer at Thmuis, but a rather unimaginative literary quotation. It is in fact borrowed from the prayers for the agape found in Didache ix (Cf. p. 90). (In the Syrian or Transjordanian setting in which the Didache was probably composed, cornfields on the hill-tops occasion no surprise.) As an elaboration of (i1), (d2) is still a rather glaring ‘patch,’ which has not yet produced a similar elaboration of (j3). This suggests that it had not very long found a place in the prayer when the present recension was made. It may even have been introduced as a ‘happy thought’ by the last reviser, since it virtually duplicates matter found more in place in (g), which is itself an addition to the original outline of the prayer.

By contrast with Hippolytus, Sarapion in (d) fuses the formal statement of the offering of the elements with the narrative of the institution, which Hippolytus keeps distinct (cf. Hipp. (f) and (i)). Sarapion also states explicitly that the actual offering has already been made at the offertory, which Hippolytus leaves in the background. We have already seen the reason for this in the fact that ‘the’ prayer had originally to put into words the meaning of the whole rite, of what precedes as well as of what follows. Thus Sarapion can say ‘We have offered’ (before the prayer began) even though the whole prayer is itself headed in the MS. ‘Prayer of Offering’ or ‘Oblation.’ Finally, even more plainly than in Hippolytus, the narrative of the institution is here pivotal for the whole prayer, as the supreme authority or justification for what the church dees in the eucharist — ‘This bread is the likeness of the holy Body because the Lord Jesus took bread,’ etc.

(e) Prayer for Communion. This section forms a single whole, even though it falls into two distinct parts. It is a prayer for communion, the first part of which is concerned with the means and the other with the effects. In contrast with Hippolytus, where the institution narrative is taken as implicitly identifying the bread and wine with the Body and Blood of Christ by virtue of His own promise, Sarapion’s prayer shews a new desire for an explicit identification. This desire is found in other fourth century writers also, but hardly before that time. The way in which, e.g., (d3) goes out of its way to emphasise this identification of the bread and wine with the Body and Blood by the institution narrative itself, with the peculiar formula..’. drink, this is the New Covenant, which is My Blood’ (instead of ‘in My Blood,’ Luke 22:20), suggests that at one time the Hippolytan understanding of the force of the institution narrative had prevailed in Egypt also. It was only later that it was felt to need reinforcing by an explicit petition for the identification of the elements with the Body and Blood, such as we get here in (e).

However this may be, Sarapion is not unique in the fourth century in feeling this, or in the way in which he expresses himself, by a prayer for the ‘advent’ (epidemesato) of the Word, parallel to His cadvent’ (epidemia) in the incarnation (cf. a2). S. Athanasius in the same period in Egypt writes: ‘When the great prayers and holy supplications have been sent up the Word comes upon the bread and the cup and they become His Body.’ The same idea is found in a number of Ethiopic rites which are of Egyptian connection, if not actual origin. Outside Egypt S. Jerome in Syria sixty years later speaks of bishops as those who ‘at the eucharist pray for the advent of the Lord,’ and similar language is used in Asia Minor in the fourth century, and later still in Italy, Gaul and Spain. This introduction of a prayer for ‘the coming of the Lord,’ the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, is a straightforward conception, which only makes explicit the ideas originally involved in the reference to the incarnation and in the institution narrative in earlier versions of the prayer. The implications of these references had already been made plain by writers like Justin in the second century. But the introduction of such a petition alters to some extent the balance of the prayer as a whole, by weakening the position of the institution narrative as the central pivot of the whole prayer.

Even in so early a specimen as that of Sarapion, the prayer of (e1) is definitely ‘consecratory’ in form, and thus prepares the way for the conception of a ‘moment of consecration’ within the eucharistic prayer as a whole. This conception was eventually accepted by East and West alike, though they chose different ‘moments’ to which to attach the idea. It was by a third development, a sort of theological refinement upon this secondary stage of any sort of explicit prayer to reinforce the old identification of the elements with the Body and Blood through the institution narrative, that the Greeks evolved during the fourth and fifth centuries the ‘tertiary’ stage of a prayer that specifically the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, would (in some sense) ‘make’ the elements into the Body and Blood of Christ. This became for them the ‘moment of consecration’; a ‘moment’ which the West, when it adopted the idea from the East, continued to place at the old pivot of the prayer, the institution narrative. Had the West wished to follow the East in divorcing the ‘moment’ from the institution, it could have found one at the prayer Quam oblationem of the Western canon before the institution narrative, which is just as much ‘consecratory’ as is (el) in Sarapion. Rome therefore reached this secondary stage of a petition for consecration apart from the institution; but remained there, without advancing to the ‘tertiary’ stage of the Eastern prayer for the sending of the Holy Spirit. Sarapion’s prayer in (e1) thus foreshadows the parting of the ways between later Eastern and Western liturgical ideas. (e2) Having prayed for the means of communion, Sarapion prays for its effects. Here it is noticeable that whereas Hippolytus’ prayer for the communicants confines itself to purely spiritual effects, that of Sarapion recognises that the sacrament is a ‘drug’ or ‘medicine’ of life, for the body as well as the soul. We need not suspect that this difference represents a ‘rapid decline of spirituality between the days of persecution and those of the established church of the fourth century,’ as one English writer has suggested. (Sarapion himself felt the full force of the Arian persecution of the catholics, and probably died in exile.) It is quite true that Hippolytus at this point says nothing of the eucharist as concerned with the human body; but in his section (e) he has quite clearly stated that one purpose of the institution of the eucharist is ‘to abolish death’ etc., which amounts to much the same thing, though put in a different way. In point of fact, Sarapion rests on old Egyptian tradition in what he calls the eucharist here. Clement of Alexandria, c. a.d. 190, had pictured our Lord as saying to the soul: ‘I am thy nourisher, giving Myself as bread, whereof he that tastes shall never more have experience of death, and daily giving Myself for the drink of immortality.’ We shall see in the next chapter that these ideas go back right through the second century into the New Testament itself. The Roman canon follows the tradition of Hippolytus in that it prays only for spiritual benefits for the communicants — that ‘they may be filled with all heavenly benediction and grace,’ a conservatism which is followed by our Prayer Book ‘Prayer of Oblation.’ But our words of administration — ‘preserve thy body and soul’ — have gone back to the wider view of the effects of communion, by contrast with the Roman words — ‘preserve thy soul unto everlasting life.’ In more discreet language our form contains Sarapion’s teaching that the eucharist is a ‘drug’ or ‘medicine of life’ for the body as well as the soul.

(f) The Invocation. We have already spoken of the great importance attached in the primitive Christian and the pre-christian Jewish tradition to the ‘glorifying of the Name’ of God at the close of the berakah or eucharistia, the ‘Thanksgiving’ at the end of supper. We have a further hint in this clause of the part played by this conception. The prayer in (el) and (e2) for the identification of the elements with the Body and Blood of Christ and for their eternal effects upon the bodies and souls of the communicants — the petition of the whole eucharistic prayer — is here understood as being efficacious chiefly ‘because they have called upon the Name of God.’ So again, Clement of Alexandria, citing an even earlier Egyptian writer c. a.d. 160, with whom Clement does not disagree on this point, says: The bread is hallowed by the power of the Name of God, remaining the same in appearance as it was (when it was) taken, but by (this) power it is transformed into spiritual power.’

Whatever the danger of approximating to mere magic in such ideas, we have to recognize that the special efficacy of prayer ‘in the Name of God’ or ‘of the Lord Jesus’ is clearly found in the New Testament, not only in the teaching of the apostles — and in their practice, e.g., in the matter of exorcisms — but also in the teaching of our Lord Himself. There is no clear dividing line to be drawn between the application of such ideas to the sacrament of the eucharist, and to that of baptism, whether this be given ‘in the Name of the Holy Trinity or, as primitively, ‘in the Name of the Lord Jesus.’ We accept it placidly in the case of baptism out of use and wont, because the church happens to have retained it in its full primitive significance in baptism. We are startled at it in the case of the eucharist, because there the church early overlaid it with other ideas. But in the time of Sarapion it had not yet entirely lost its primitive force in the eucharist, and it is likely that this clause was deliberately retained out of a lingering sense of the importance of the old conception, when the intercessions which follow in the present (fourth century) text were first interpolated at this point in the prayer.

(g), (h), (i) The Intercessions, for the Living, the Dead and the Offerers. These are an addition to the original outline of the prayer, of a kind which was made in most churches at some point within the prayer before the end of the fourth century. When the eucharist was celebrated apart from the synaxis in the pre-Nicene church there was a real loss in the absence of any intercessions whatever. There was a natural desire to replace them in some way; and it is quite possible that in some churches the custom arose during the third century of treating the intercessory ‘prayers of the faithful,’ which really formed the close of the synaxis, as a sort of invariable preliminary to the eucharist, even when this latter was celebrated without the rest of the synaxis. (But Sarapion’s own arrangement in his collection of prayers still puts the intercessions at the opposite end of the book to the prayers of the eucharist proper, in an altogether separate service.)

The alternative was to insert some intercessions at a fresh point within the eucharist itself. The rigidity of the primitive outline, which permitted of only one prayer at the eucharist, ‘the’ eucharistic prayer, necessitated their being included somehow within that, whatever confusion to its primitive shape and purpose this might cause. Even when the two services were celebrated together, there was a natural desire to associate a prayer for the ‘special intentions’ with which the eucharist was being offered as closely as possible with the act of offering, and this would lead to the same result. The existence of some prayer for the communicants towards the close of the prayer (in all the traditions with which we are acquainted) led in some churches to the development of this part of the prayer to cover other objects of intercession as well, as here at Thmuis, and also at Jerusalem, where it is probable that the practice started. In the fourth century such a position for intercessions acquired the further sanction of the idea of the special efficacy of prayer in the presence of the consecrated sacrament, which we shall find attested by S. Cyril of Jerusalem in a.d. 348 (Cf.p. 199). But Jerusalem in the fourth century, and especially S. Cyril, are in the forefront of ‘liturgical advance,’ and there is no sign of this further special development of ideas in Sarapion.

Alexandria and Egypt generally adopted another notion, that the special intentions of the sacrifice ought to be named before it was actually offered. We find accordingly that the Alexandrian intercessions were inserted into the opening of the prayer, before the sanctus. At Rome the intercessions for the living settled down at the beginning of the prayer (but after the sanctus), and those for the dead (originally only inserted at masses for the dead) at the end. Elsewhere other points were chosen; e.g., at Edessa they were interpolated after the sanctus and the first half of the eucharistic prayer, immediately before the consecration (Cf. p. 179 n). There was no uniformity about this, because each church began to copy others in ‘modernizing’ its liturgy at different moments and under different influences, inserting now the preface and sanctus, now intercessions for the living, now commemorations of martyrs and so on, at whatever point in its own local tradition of the prayer seemed most fitting; and in doing so it borrowed now verbally, now only in ideas, now from one source, now from another, or added native compositions and elaborations of its own as the liturgical gifts and knowledge of its successive bishops permitted.

The general result, when the synaxis and eucharist came to be fused into a single rite, celebrated as a normal rule without a break, was a duplication between the old intercessions, the ‘prayers of the faithfiiT, at the close of the synaxis, and the new intercessory developments within the eucharistic prayer. The old ‘prayers of the faithful’ tended after a while to atrophy in most rites, or even to disappear’altogether, as at Rome and in the Syriac S.James.

The chief points of interest in Sarapion’s intercessions are: (h) The description of the eucharist as the anamnesis of the dead — clearly in the same sense as at Rome of ‘re-calling’ something before God. But the word is not applied to the eucharist as the anamnesis of the passion in Sarapion, though it is found in this sense in Origen in third century Egypt. In (i) the prayers for the offerers are of interest as the earliest Egyptian evidence for the custom of each communicant bringing his or her own prosphora for themselves. To be one of ‘the people’ (laity), to offer the prosphora and to partake of communion, were still all virtually the same thing in Sarapion’s time in Egypt, to judge by the way the petitions in (e2), (g), and (i) repeat one another in their prayers for Advancement.’ In the later Alexandrian intercessions also, those for the dead immediately precede those for the ‘offerers.’

(j) The Doxology. In the present text this is reduced to meagre dimensions. Probably the interpolation of the intercessions has eliminated an older fully developed form at (f), which marked the conclusion of the prayer. That (j) does not preserve the original conclusion postponed to the end of the interpolated intercessions, seems clear from the fact that the traditional people’s response ‘As it was’ etc., does not attach itself to Sarapion’s conclusion either grammatically or in sense, though it is appended in the MS.

Comparing the whole prayer with that of Hippolytus one may say that though it is more than probable that Sarapion ultimately derives from a prayer on the berakah model, and though there are certain points of contact between Hippolytus and Sarapion in structure, it has in any case lost touch with its original type much more than has the older Roman prayer. Additional themes like the sanctus and the intercessions have complicated and obscured the outline so much that no clear verdict could be given on this question of derivation from the berakah from the study of Sarapion’s prayer taken alone. And certainly there has been no borrowing between the Roman and Egyptian prayers in the course of development. In the central part of the prayer [Sarapion (d)-(j) = Hippolytus (e)-(j)] the differences of phrasing and arrangement are very marked indeed, considering that both prayers are dealing with exactly the same subject.

But this obvious independence of the two traditions only brings into greater relief their agreement on the substance of those points which we noted as outstanding in Hippolytus’ statement of the meaning of the eucharistic action:

(i) The bread and the cup are explicitly stated to be ‘offered’ to God — though in Sarapion separately, in Hippolytus together. (2) Sarapion explicitly calls this a ‘sacrifice,’ as Hippolytus calls it a ‘priestly’ ministry; the meaning is the same though the statement is diverse. Though the eucharist is not called ‘the anamnesis of the passion,’ as in Justin and Hippolytus, it is called ‘making the likeness of the death.’ And (3) as in Hippolytus, the pivotal importance of the narrative of the institution in the prayer, as the ground of the eucharist’s effective ‘re-calling’ before God of tie sacrifice of Christ, does not in any way obscure the fact that it is Calvary and not the Upper Room which is thus ‘re-called.’

In Syria the church of Antioch claimed and was accorded a primacy from, at the latest, some while before the end of the second century. But for a variety of reasons this was never so effectively exercised as was that of Alexandria over Egypt. Despite a cleavage of race and language between the native Copts and the large population of immigrant Greeks, Egypt had been a self-conscious unity under the leadership of Alexandria for centuries before the coming of Christianity. The unchallenged supremacy of the Alexandrian bishop over all the churches of Egypt only gave Christian expression to an enduring political and geographical factor in past Egyptian history. But from pre-historic times Syria has always been a mosaic of different races, cultures, religions and languages, which no political framework has ever held together for long. The welter of Canaanite tribes of very diverse racial origin which the Hebrews under Joshua succeeded in overcoming in the hills of Southern Syria is typical of the pre-historic background of the whole country. It is equally typical of its history that the invading Israelite confederacy should promptly have disintegrated into its original tribal units under the Judges; and even after it had been welded into a single state under Saul and the House of David, should have split again after less than a century into the rival states of Israel and Judah. The North and East of Syria were no less prone to division than the South throughout their history — until only yesterday, when the four separate republics of French Syria and the two states of Palestine and Transjordan under British mandate still divided a country which seems geographically destined to be a unity, but which is racially and culturally one of the least united in the world.

During the century c. 250-150 B.C., the Seleucid kings of Antioch made the most promising of all the many attempts to unify Syria, on the basis of the introduction everywhere of Greek language and culture. They hoped this would be a general solvent of all the diverse local traditions, and act as a cement for the motley elements over which they ruled. They were thwarted by the stubborn adherence of large parts of the population to their ancient cultures, of which the resistance of the jews of the South under the Maccabees is only the most obvious and violent example.

The Seleucids failed in their main object, but they had a good deal of incidental success with their chosen means, the introduction of that form of later Greek civilization which we call ‘Hellenism.’ Henceforward Syria was riven by a new division, running right across all its old fractions, that between hellenism and the old native cultures, which diverse though they were, may be classed together as predominantly Semitic. This new cleavage does not run along racial lines, for the vast majority of the hellenists were not immigrants but hellenised Syrians. Nor was it primarily geographical, though naturally Antioch and the great coast towns were strongholds of hellenism, as the hinterland was of the native tradition. But there were large purely oriental quarters in Antioch itself and whole Aramaic-speaking districts in its neighbourhood; on the other hand there were at times strong Greek influences at work in Edessa and Damascus, inland cities which were normally centres of Semitic culture; while some of the smaller cities on the Eastern frontier were completely hellenised. The backbone of the Semitic tradition was the peasantry of the countrysides, as the peak of hellenism was found in the towns. But there were Greek-speaking country districts, while some towns, especially in the East — Edessa, Palmyra, Damascus — were strongly Semitic by tradition, and others like Aleppo and Emesa (Horns) formed a sort of debatable land between the two cultures. In short, Syria was an older underlying patchwork of races, languages, traditions and religions, with a recent and different patchwork of hellenism and the surviving native cultures superimposed upon it. The underlying patchwork is local, but the only line of division one can draw between hellenism and the oriental traditions is purely cultural By a.d. 300 a man might be a Syrian (which could mean racially a mongrel of half-a-dozen different strains) and yet as hellenised and westernized in speech and mind and habit of life as an inhabitant of Athens or Alexandria or even Rome. And his next-door neighbour might be equally Syrian by blood and remain as completely oriental in culture and language and thought as his forefathers a thousand years before. Or he might be bilingual, with some sort of footing in both worlds. First Rome and then Byzantium inherited the hellenising policy of the Seleucids; and while these European powers ruled the land, Antioch, which had been founded as the capital of hellenism in Syria, remained the administrative and ecclesiastical capital. With the return of Semitic ascendancy after the Arab conquest in the seventh century, dominance returned to the old Semitic centre of Damascus, to which both the Arab rulers and the Christian patriarchs transferred their courts. Henceforward Antioch slowly declined into insignificance.

The patriarchate of Antioch saw itself as the Christian heir to the Seleucid tradition of the leadership of all Syria in the path of hellenism; and with only two brief exceptions (under the heretical patriarchs Paul of Samosata in the third century and Severus in the sixth), it identified itself with the ‘royalist’ hellenising movement throughout its history. But in adhering to this policy the patriarchs had to face in the ecclesiastical field just those same centrifugal tendencies and obstinate local traditions which faced every attempt at political centralization. When Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem in a.d. 451 succeeded after twenty-five years of manoeuvring in extracting from the general council of Chalcedon formal recognition of his see as an independent patriarchate over Palestine, he only added a Christian chapter to the long story of the wars of Israel with Syria which punctuate the Books of the Kings, and are continued by the revolt of the Maccabees against the Seleucids. And besides this inveterate separatism of the South there were other pockets of local resistance to all Antiochene or hellenistic domination, less strongly marked but in the end equally tenacious. Against the overwhelming political power of Rome or Byzantium these local patriotisms could only express themselves in terms of ecclesiastical resistance, under the pretext of doctrinal heresy culminating in schism. But these dissident churches drew their strength from racial and cultural forces far more than from theological nicety. Apart from a whole succession of obscure and fantastic popular movements like that of the Messalians in the fourth century (most of which were hardly sufficiently Christian to be classed as heresies) we have to reckon, first, with the great East Syrian revolt against Antioch in the fifth century, which adopted the banner of the Nestorian heresy; and secondly, with its doctrinal opposite, the West Syrian revolt of the sixth century which called itself Monophysite; and thirdly, with the Maronite schism in the Lebanon of the eighth century, which took the excuse of Monothelitism. We need not here concern ourselves with the doctrinal pretexts. The real dogma of all the rebels was ‘anti-Byzantinism’ or ‘anti-hellenism’ as the ‘orthodoxy’ of Antioch was always in practice ‘Caesaro-papism.’ Between them the royalist patriarchate and the nationalist schisms shattered Syrian Christianity as a living force, and left it permanently weakened to face the pressure of moham-medan political conquest. To-day more than three quarters of the descendants of the old Christian inhabitants of Syria are mohammedans, and the Christian remainder is so riven into fragments as to be a negligible missionary power. The islamic populations of Syria and Egypt no less than their schismatic churches are permanent monuments of the long attempts of the church of Constantinople to dominate the Christian world in the interest of the Byzantine emperors.

It is not surprising that this background of abiding cultural division and local separatism should have left its mark on the liturgy. But the liturgical divisions of Syria, by a series of historical accidents, do not entirely coincide with those of ancient ecclesiastical politics or present doctrinal allegiance. In the field of liturgy we can distinguish four main influences which cross the present sectarian divisions in a most confusing way:

(1) The old rite of the church of Antioch itself, which is very imperfectly known;

(2) The other early West Syrian liturgical traditions, which we shall ignore;

(3) The East Syrian tradition, centered in Edessa;

(4) The South Syrian tradition of Jerusalem.

(1) What may be called the ‘patriarchal’ rite of Syria was the so-called Liturgy of S. James. It is generally taken that, as it stands, this is not the old local rite of Antioch, which is known to us only obscurely from a number of sources, of which the most reliable are hints to be found in the Antiochene writings of S. John Chrysostom (c. A.D. 360-397). S. James as it stands is closely connected with the fourth century rite of Jerusalem, which was adopted by the Antiochene church at some point in the fifth century — when is uncertain. It had not yet happened when S. John Chrysostom left Antioch in A.D. 397, and it is reasonable to suppose that it did not happen after a.d. 431, when Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem greatly embittered relations between Jerusalem and Antioch by claiming not merely independence (which he successfully asserted twenty years later) but jurisdiction over Antioch itself for his own see. The unique position of Jerusalem as the ‘holy city’ and above all its prestige as a model of liturgical observance were such during the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries as to cause the adoption of Jerusalem customs to a greater or lesser extent by other churches all over Christendom. It is not surprising that it should have influenced its own patriarchal see in these respects with especial force at this time. At all events, Antioch to some extent adopted and adapted the Jerusalem Liturgy of S. James, probably between A.D. 400 and 430, and made it the patriarchal rite so far as Antiochene influence extended.

Strangely enough, though the patriarchs of Antioch thus introduced the Jerusalem rite into North Syria, they did not themselves remain faithful to it, and ultimately abandoned its use altogether. In pursuit of their usual hellenising policy they had begun (? in the seventh century) to use a version of the Greek Liturgy of S. Basil, as at least an occasional alternative to their own rite of S. James. After some centuries of increasing ‘Byzantinising,’ they ended in the thirteenth-fourteenth century by dropping all trace of their own Syrian rite in favour of the full rite of Byzantium, upon which power the Antiochene orthodox patriarchate had by then become helplessly dependent. Thus S. James, though the patriarchal rite of Antioch, is neither a ‘pure’ descendant of the original rite of the Antiochene church, nor the rite which has been used by its patriarchs for the greater part of their history.

(2) North-West Syria followed its patriarchs in adopting S. James, but with one important reservation. While the structure and framework of S. James everywhere came into use, the text of its eucharistic prayer never achieved the same prescriptive authority in N.W. Syria as the rest of the rite. Some seventy alternative eucharistic prayers are known from this region, composed at all periods from the fourth-fifth centuries down to the fifteenth. In other words, the working authority of the Antiochene patriarchate was never sufficiently strong in the nearest parts of its own territory, even before the great revolts of the sixth century, to break down the old tradition that every church could follow its own usage in the phrasing of its eucharistic prayer, and that celebrants could remodel this within certain limits at their own discretion. The general outline of these prayers follows that of S. James fairly closely as a rule. But some of them exhibit very interesting and probably ancient variations, and have been only roughly adapted to fit the S. James type; while even those prayers which follow it more closely are verbally independent compositions on the same theme rather than mere imitations.

But by the time of the Monophysite schism (sixth century) S. James had obviously become the standard West Syrian tradition. For a while after that royalists and schismatics used the same rite, until the royalists came to think of it as a badge of local particularism and abandoned it for the rite of Constantinople. This left it to the exclusive use of the Mono-physites, among whom it now survives in an Arabic translation, though before the seventeenth century it was generally used in an ancient Syriac version (which is still in use in a few Christian villages round Damascus). The Syriac appears to have undergone more than one revision since the sixth century, sometimes to bring it into greater conformity with Byzantine innovations, sometimes in complete independence of these. Even in their hostility to Byzantium the provincials could not help being more than a little impressed by the Byzantines’ own valuation of themselves as the source of all that was ‘correct’ in matters ecclesiastical. They were consequently always apt to adopt the latest Byzantine customs after more or less delay, and so gradually to Byzantinise their own rites. Modern and mediaeval Monophysite MSS. of S. James differ textually from one another more considerably than those of any other rite — another symptom of the permanent lack of central authority in matters liturgical in Syria.

(3) North-East Syria seems never to have adopted S. James having gone off into Nestorianism and independence too early to have been much influenced by its adoption by the patriarchs of Antioch. Instead, this part of the country adopted as its standard liturgy the ancient rite of the church of Edessa, the Liturgy of SS. Addai and Mari (the traditional ‘apostles’ of Edessa). This may well be connected originally with the second century rite of Antioch, whence Edessa had received the faith; though this is no more than a very reasonable conjecture. Edessa was a semi-independent state on the Eastern Roman frontier, a strong centre of Semitic culture and tradition, though theologically it also acted as a channel for the diffusion of Greek ideas to the purely unhellenic regions around and east of itself. Even Nestorius, whose teachings the later school of Edessa professed to follow, was an ecclesiastic of Antioch who became patriarch of Constantinople; and his teachers Theodore and Diodore, who were venerated as Nestorian ‘doctors,’ were likewise thoroughly hellenised, even though all three were from inner Syria and probably racially non-hellenic. The Edessan liturgy has therefore undergone some infiltration of hellenic ideas even in the earliest texts now available.

But it is of unique interest and importance none the less, because it is basically still a Semitic liturgy, the only remaining specimen of its kind. It is cast in a different idiom of thought from that of the eucharistic prayers of the hellenistic Christianity which had developed out of S. Paul’s missions to the hellenistic world north and west of Syria. Its special importance lies in this — that any agreement of ideas with these hellenistic prayers which may be found to underlie the marked peculiarities of SS. Addai and Mari helps to carry back the eucharistic tradition of the church as a whole behind the divergence of Greek and Western Christianity generally from that oriental world to which the original Galilaean apostles had belonged. The obscure history of the Syrian liturgies has a special interest just because it illustrates that contrast between the whole mind and thought of the hellenic and Semitic worlds which rarely meets us with any definiteness in Christian history outside the pages of the New Testament. We shall therefore conclude this chapter by examining two Syrian eucharistic prayers which are expressions of the two aspects of Syrian tradition, those of the more Semitic Liturgy of SS. Addai and Mari and of the more hellenistic Liturgy of S. James. There is much to be learnt from their different ways of expressing what is fundamentally the same liturgical tradition.

(a) Worthy of praise from every mouth and of confession from every tongue and of worship and exaltation from every creature is the adorable and glorious Name [of Thy glorious Trinity, O Father and Son and Holy Ghost,]

(b) Who didst create the world by Thy grace and its inhabitants by Thy mercy and didst save mankind by Thy compassion and give great grace unto mortals.

(c1) [Thy majesty, O my Lord, thousand thousands of those on high bow down and worship, and ten thousand times ten thousand holy angels and hosts of spiritual beings, ministers of fire and spirit, praise Thy Name with holy Cherubim and spiritual Seraphim offering worship to Thy sovereignty, shouting and praising without ceasing and crying one to another and saying:

(c2) Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Hosts; heaven and earth arc full of His praises and of the nature of His being and of the excellency of His glorious splendour. Hosanna in the highest, and Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He that came and cometh in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! And with these heavenly hosts]

(d) We give thanks to Thee, O my Lord, even we Thy servants weak and frail and miserable, for that Thou hast given us great grace past recompense in that Thou didst put on our manhood that Thou mightest quicken it by Thy Godhead,

(e) and hast exalted our low estate and restored our fall and raised our mortality and forgiven our trespasses and justified our sinfulness and enlightened our knowledge, and, O our Lord and our God, hast condemned our enemies and granted victory to the weakness of our frail nature in the overflowing mercies of Thy grace.

(/) And we also, O my Lord, Thy weak and frail and miserable servants who are gathered together in Thy Name, both stand before Thee at this time

(g) and have received by tradition the example which is from Thee,

(h) [rejoicing and glorifying and exalting and commemorating and performing this (great and fearful and holy and life-giving and divine) likeness of the passion and death and burial and resurrection of our Lord and our Saviour Jesus Christ.]

(i) And may there come, O my Lord, Thy Holy Spirit and rest upon this oblation of Thy servants, and bless and hallow it that it be to us, O my Lord, for the pardon of offences and the remission of sins and for the great hope of resurrection from the dead and for new life in the kingdom of heaven with all those who have been well-pleasing in Thy sight.

(j) And for all this great and marvelous dispensation towards us we will give Thee thanks and praise Thee without ceasing in Thy church redeemed by the precious Blood [of Thy Christ], with unclosed mouths and open faces lifting up praise and honour and confession and worship to Thy living and life-giving Name now and ever and world without end.

R/ Amen.

Before commenting in detail on this prayer there are two general observations of some importance to be made, (i) So far as can be ascertained the biblical text which underlies the scriptural citations in this prayer is not a Greek text, but one of the Syriac versions — which, it is not possible to distinguish. It would appear certain, therefore, that unlike most other Eastern vernacular rites, Addai and Mari was not originally a translation from the Greek, but was composed in Syriac.

(2) Whatever may be the case in the opening address of the prayer and certain phrases elsewhere, the body of this eucharistic prayer is undoubtedly addressed not to the Father but to the Son. Phrases such as ‘Thou didst put on our manhood’ (d), and ‘the example which is from Thee’ (f), are quite inapplicable to the First Person of the Trinity; and ‘Thy ... servants who are gathered together in Thy Name’ is a reference to Matt. 28:20 — ‘Where two or three are gathered together in My (our Lord’s) Name, there am I in the midst of them.’ However surprising the idea of a eucharistic prayer to the Son may seem to us, it was not very unusual in antiquity. Besides the Egyptian Liturgy of S. Gregory and another Egyptian eucharistic prayer published by Hyvernat, there are three Ethiopic liturgies all addressed to the Son. In Syria itself the Monophysite Second Liturgy of S. Peter and two lesser Maronite liturgies are directed to the Son, as is part of the eucharistic prayer of the Syriac S. James itself (Cf.p. 190 n.), which is followed in this by nearly all the sixty or seventy lesser Syriac liturgies. Evidently there was a strong tradition on this point in Syria generally. In the West there are distinct traces of such a custom having once been common in Mozarabic and Gallican eucharistic prayers; and the repeated condemnation of the practice by two North African councils at the end of the fourth century proves that it was not unknown there either. The fact that SS. Addai and Mari is addressed to the Son is thus only a proof of antiquity, and not an exceptional peculiarity.

(a-c) Address, Memorial of Creation, Preface and Sanctus. It seems fairly clear that the preface and sanctus, which have no connection with what precedes and follows, are an interpolation, and that Addai and Mari (like Hippolytus) originally did not contain any such feature. ‘Came and cometh’ in the Benedictus is found also in the Syriac S. James, which may give us a clue as to whence the whole passage was borrowed (cf. p. 188). What is more difficult to decide is the authenticity of (a) and (b). The address to the Trinity has obviously been rewritten, but Mr. Ratcliff has pointed out that (a) ‘Worthy ... of confession from every tongue ... is the Name .. . of Thy ... Trinity’ is reminiscent of Philippians ii. 9-11, where, however, ‘the Name’ is the Name of Christ. It seems, therefore, probable that the interpolation of the sanctus has led to the re-writing of (a) in Addai and Mari (much as we saw that it has done in Sarapion); but in Addai and Mari this has been effected by the substitution of an address to the Trinity for an older address to the Son. In this case the phrase Thou didst save mankind by Thy compassion’ finds a natural explanation.

(d-e) Thanksgivings for Incarnation and Redemption. There is nothing of much importance to be said about these clauses, except to draw attention to the parallel with Hippolytus (c) and (d) of the memorials of the incarnation and redemption in Addai and Mari (d) and (e). There is also some similarity of language between Addai and Mari (e) and Hippolytus (e) but the real parallel with Hippolytus (e) in thought is in Addai and Mari (i).

(f) The Presence. This is the first important structural difference of Addai and Mari from Hippolytus. Part of what is put after the institution narrative in Hippolytus (7) (‘because Thou hast made us worthy to stand before Thee’) Addai and Mari places before its own equivalent to an institution narrative. We have already noted the implication of the allusion to Matt, xviii:20, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.’ In the reference to ‘standing before Thee’ in Addai and Mari there is probably an allusion to Luke xxi:36 — ‘pray ... that ye may be worthy ... to stand before the Son of Man.’ Behind all this section (f) of Addai and Mari lies the New Testament idea of the eucharist as an anticipation of the second coming and last judgement. (In scriptural language to ‘stand before’ God has often the sense of ‘to appear for judgement.’) But it is all put by way of allusions which are unfamiliar to us, though doubtless conveying their meaning with sufficient clearness to those who used and framed the prayer.

(g) The Institution. Addai and Mari has no explicit institution narrative, but it has an equivalent to it in this brief allusion to what happened at the last supper. The important point to notice is that structurally it plays precisely that pivotal part in the whole prayer which the extended narrative plays in other prayers. It states the authority for performing the eucharist and justifies the petition for communion which is about to follow. The difference of treatment from Hippolytus and Sarapion should not be allowed to obscure this fundamental similarity between the two types of prayer.

(h) Statement of the Purpose of the Eucharist (= Hippolytus (h)). This section of Addai and Mari in its present form has in any case been rewritten, since it suddenly refers to our Lord in the third person, instead of addressing Him directly like the rest of the prayer. The whole connection of thought between (g), (h) and (i) is very confused and difficult to follow. Mr. Ratcliff, emphasizing the parallel between ‘example’ in (g) and ‘likeness’ in (h) is disposed to omit the words ‘great and fearful and holy and life-giving and divine’ in (h) as a later expansion, but to retain the rest of (h) as an original part of the prayer. Interpreting ‘the great and marvellous dispensation’ of (j) as ‘the passion and death and burial and resurrection’ mentioned in (h), he would exclude (i) altogether from the original form of the prayer. He regards its interpolation — at all events in this position — as a later insertion made to bring Addai and Mari more into line with Greek Syrian liturgies (cf. S. James, j1, j2, p. 191).

I confess that I cannot, as at present advised, quite accept this reconstruction, for a variety of reasons. First, this does not help us as regards the sudden ‘switch’ in the address of the prayer from the Son to the Father, about which Mr. Ratcliff offers no suggestion; nor does it mend the halting construction of the whole sentence. It is impossible to be dogmatic in such a case, but it seems to me that the real interruption to the sequence of thought in the prayer lies precisely in this clause (h), with its sudden wordiness and change of address, and its equally abrupt mention of the specific events of ‘the passion, death, burial and resurrection’ which the prayer has carefully avoided mentioning everywhere else. (Cf. e.) The prayer as a whole is concerned with the eternal effects of redemption mediated by the eucharist, not with the historical process of the achievement of redemption in time. If (h) be omitted, the grammar, sequence and intention of the prayer become clearer. The ‘example which is from Thee’ (g) then justifies the petition for communion in (1); the allusion to the last supper (g) explains ‘the oblation’ of the church in (1). As we shall see, there is a close connection of thought between (g) and (i) which would make them complementary in any form of the prayer. I conclude, therefore, despite the acknowledged authority of Mr. Ratcliff on the history of the Syrian liturgy, that it is (h) which is an interpolation inserted to bring Addai and Mari more closely into line with Greek Syrian liturgies; and that (1) is an integral part of the prayer in anything like its present form. Some indication of the importance of the point is that with the elimination of (h) there disappears the only direct reference in the whole prayer to the passion and resurrection of our Lord.

(i) Prayer for Communion. The interpretation of this section is technically a somewhat delicate matter. It is natural that those scholars who accept the theory that some petition that God would ‘send’ the Third Person of the Holy Trinity to ‘make’ the elements the Body and Blood of Christ was an essential part of every primitive eucharistic prayer, should be disposed to see here only one more example of what they conceive to have been the universal primitive practice. It is equally natural that those scholars who believe such an epiklesis-petixion to have been a Greek invention of the fourth century should be inclined to treat the whole section as a later interpolation intended to bring Addai and Mari into line with Greek fourth century developments.

Both ways of regarding it seem rather too simple to fit all the facts of the case. On the one hand, (1) is hardly an epiklesis at all, in that it does not actually pray for any sort of conversion of the elements, but for something quite different, namely for the benefits of communion. It is in fact a petition for those benefits exactly parallel to the clauses we have already found forming the essential petition of the eucharistic prayer before the doxology in Hippolytus (k) and in Sarapion (e2). On the other hand, the terms in which Addai and Mari frames this petition are so obviously primitive (and, I would add, so obviously un-Greek), resting as they do upon that Jewish eschatological doctrine which tended to be lost to sight in gentile Christianity after the second century, that one must hesitate a good deal to regard (i) as any sort of late invention. As regards its later transference from somewhere else in the rite to this point, this is a possibility. But we cannot eliminate this section without cutting out of the prayer as a whole every element of petition whatsoever, which is in itself an improbable form for such a prayer to take after the second-third century.

Finally, while I agree that there is no vestige of evidence in any Greek or Latin author outside Syria during the first three centuries that the Holy Ghost was recognised as playing any part whatever in the consecrating of the eucharist (which in that period is invariably ascribed to the Son), there is one Syrian piece of evidence (cf. p. 278) that ‘Holy Spirit,’ in some sense, was recognised as playing some part in the consecration by Syrian churchmen during the third century, if not earlier. Addai and Mari is not a Greek or Latin document but a Syriac one, and it is best considered in relation to its own special background of Semitic Syrian thought and altogether apart from the ideas of the Greek and Latin churches. We can therefore leave the whole controversy about the Greek epiklesis on one side for the moment, and consider this clause of Addai and Mari simply in what i