In ecclesiastical antiquity, along with abstinence from the usual daily meals, we find certain viands also forbidden—flesh and wine. To this period belong the xerophagiæ spoken of by Tertullian,[219] at which people abstained not only from flesh and wine but from liquid food and fruit as well. These, however, seem to have gone beyond the abstinence then usual throughout the Church. The Montanists held these xerophagiæ twice a year for fourteen days.[220]
Among Catholics also abstinence was pushed to great lengths. The canons of Hippolytus[221] prescribe for Holy Week only bread and salt. The Apostolic Constitutions will only permit bread, vegetables, salt and water, in Lent, flesh and wine being forbidden; and, on the last two days of Holy Week, nothing whatsoever is to be eaten.[222] The ascetics, whose acquaintance the Gallic pilgrim made in Jerusalem, never touched bread in Lent, but lived on flour and water.[223] Only a few could keep so strict a fast, and generally speaking people were satisfied with abstaining from flesh and wine. But this lasted throughout the entire Lent, and Chrysostom[224] tells us that in Antioch no flesh was eaten during the whole of Lent. Abstinence from milk and eggs (the so-called lacticinia) was also the general rule.
Thus abstinence from flesh meat (i.e. abstinence in the strict sense) was combined with the diminution of the quantity of food taken. It was also voluntarily practised by itself, without being accompanied by fasting (jejunium a carne et sanguine), by pious persons and ascetics, and was prescribed as a duty on certain days in monasteries and other religious communities, as, for instance, among the Canons of Chrodegang.
Throughout the early ages, abstinence was merely a pious custom. It was not until a later date that it was enjoined by law, as, for instance, by the fifty-sixth Trullan Canon, the Decree of Nicholas I. for the Bulgarians, the fourth and eighth councils of Toledo, the seventh canon of the council of Quedlinburg (1085), and the decretal of Gratian.[225] The custom of abstinence was then recognised and prescribed by ecclesiastical law for the whole of Lent, for all Fridays and Saturdays throughout the year, for the Ember Day, and a number of vigils.[226] No authentic document of antiquity is forthcoming to show that abstinence by itself, without an accompanying fast, had been prescribed by the Church.[227]
7. The Season of Preparation as an Integral Part of the Church’s Year
The division of this season of preparation into two parts, with special names for the Sundays, does not appear in the sermons of Augustine or Leo the Great. But in the ancient Gallic sacramentary—the missale Gothico-Gallicanum—five Masses, entitled simply missa jejunii or in quadragesima, are found assigned to the five Sundays before Palm Sunday. The names sexagesima and quinquagesima appear already in the canons of the fourth council of Orleans (541), but, as generally recognised titles for the Sundays before Easter, they begin to appear in service-books dating from the eighth century and onwards. The Gregorian Sacramentary is familiar with the names for the Sundays from Septuagesima to Quinquagesima, and then numbers five Sundays in Quadragesima until Palm Sunday.
In the ancient Spanish Mozarabic Sacramentary, the names Septuagesima, etc., do not yet appear, but the Sundays after Epiphany are numbered from one to eight, although the entire number was not always required, according as Easter fell early or late. After them follows the Dominica ante diem Cineris, then the five Sundays in Lent, and, finally, the Dominica in Ramis Palmarum.
The recently published Lectionary of Silos, belonging to the ancient rite of Toledo and compiled about 650, represents a much simpler form of the Church’s year. It enumerates neither the Sundays after Epiphany nor those after Pentecost, but merely those in Lent, and then is satisfied with twenty-four Masses for the remaining Sundays of the year.
A trace of the original length of Lent—six weeks, or forty-two days—exists still in the present missal, inasmuch as the secreta for the First Sunday in Lent runs: Sacrificium quadragesimalis initii solemniter immolamus.[228] Sundays, as we know, were never kept as fasts, and so the Western Church in reality kept only thirty-six fast days, a proof that the word quadragesima originally merely denoted the number of days over which the period of preparation extended. Since, however, our Lord had fasted forty days, the Church felt moved to keep to this number exactly, and so added the four missing days to the beginning of Lent. This alternation was first accomplished at the end of the seventh or beginning of the eighth century, and appears for the first time in the so-called Gelasian sacramentary,[229] while Gregory I.[230] himself still counted the days actually fasted as thirty-six. The three preceding Sundays were now included in the season of preparation and received the names of Quinquagesima, Sexagesima, and Septuagesima. The actual commencement of the fast fell on the Wednesday before Quadragesima, which appears in the Gregorian Sacramentary with a Mass of its own, but without its present name of Ash Wednesday (Feria IV. Cinerum).
This name comes from the sprinkling of ashes. Sprinkling ashes upon the heads of penitents, in token of sorrow, formed part of the ancient ceremonies connected with ecclesiastical penance. Since public penance usually began and ended with Lent, this custom was associated with this particular day. It soon became a general custom no longer restricted to penitents, although the Council of Benevento (1091) prescribes it principally for clerics. The ashes were prepared from the palms of the previous Palm Sunday. At the present time they are blessed in addition.