Salute one another with an holy kiss.
CHAPTER IV
THE KISS OF PEACE
The kiss, as expressive of deep, spiritual love, also came to figure in the primitive Christian Church.
Christ has said: “Peace be with you, my peace I give you,” and the members of Christ’s Church gave each other peace symbolically through a kiss. St Paul repeatedly speaks of the “holy kiss” (ϕίλημα ἄγιον), and, in his Epistle to the Romans, writes: “Salute one another with an holy kiss”; and he reiterates this exhortation in both his Epistles to the Corinthians (1, xvi. 20, and 2, xiii. 12), and his first Epistle to the Thessalonians (v. 26), wherein he says: “Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss.”
The holy kiss has gradually found admission into the ritual of the Church, and was imparted on occasions of particular solemnity, such as baptism, marriage, confession, ordination, obsequies, etc., etc. At a wedding the ceremony was as follows: On the conclusion of High Mass and after the Agnus Dei had been chanted, the bridegroom went up to the altar and received the kiss of peace from the priest. After this he returned to his wife, and gave her the priest’s kiss of peace at the foot of the crucifix. Reminiscences of this rite still survive in several churches in England.
The holy kiss played an important part even at the Mass; in the Greek Church it was imparted before, in the Roman Catholic Church after, the consecration of the elements. The priest kissed the penitent, and through this kiss gave him peace; this was the true kiss of peace (osculum pacis). We have a peculiar memorial of this in Old Irish, where the word pōc, which is derived from the Latin pax, means “kiss,”—not “peace.” This change of meaning must, I suppose, be attributed partly to a misunderstanding of the priest’s words when he kissed the penitent: Pacem do tibi (Peace I give unto thee), i.e., people understood the kiss as the chief thing, and thought pacem referred to that. The same peculiarity is again to be met with in mediæval Spanish, where paz has also the meaning of “kiss.” In an ancient romance which relates how Fernando dubbed the Cid a knight, it says at the end, “He buckled a sword on his waist, and gave him ‘peace’ (i.e., a kiss) on the mouth”:
El rey le ciñó la espada
Paz en la boca le ha dado.
The holy kiss occurs even in the early Christian love-feasts, the so-called ἀγαπαί, and indeed was often exchanged in the church itself by all the faithful without regard to sex, which gave the heathen cause for scandal, and its use was restricted so that only men kissed men, and women, women.