Trine immersion then, as to the origin of which Basil confesses his ignorance, must be older than either of the rival explanations. These are clearly aetiological, and invented to explain an existing custom, which the church had adopted from its pagan medium. For pagan lustrations were normally threefold; thus Virgil writes (Aen. vi. 229): Ter socios pura circumtulit unda. Ovid (Met. vii. 189 and Fasti, iv. 315), Persius (ii. 16) and Horace (Ep. i. 1. 37) similarly speak of trine lustrations; and on the last mentioned passage the scholiast Acro remarks: "He uses the words thrice purely, because people in expiating their sins, plunge themselves in thrice." Such examples of the ancient usage encounter us everywhere in Greek and Latin antiquity.
6. Age of Baptism.—In the oldest Greek, Armenian, Syrian and other rites of baptism, a service of giving a Christian (i.e. non-pagan) name, or of sealing a child on its eighth day, is found. According to it the priest, either at the door of the church or at the home, blessed the infant, sealed it (this not in Armenia) with the sign of the cross on its forehead, and prayed that in due season (ἐν καιρῷ εὐθέτῳ) or at the proper time (Armenian) it may enter the holy Catholic church. This rite announces itself as the analogue of Christ's circumcision.
On the fortieth day from birth another rite is prescribed, of churching the child, which is now taken into the church with its mother. Both are blessed by the clergy, whose petition now is that God "may preserve this child and cause him to grow up by the unseen grace of His power and made him worthy in due season of the washing of baptism." As the first rite corresponds to the circumcision and naming of Jesus, so does the second to His presentation in the temple. These two rites really begin the catechumenate or period of instruction in the faith and discipline of the church. It depended on the individual how long he would wait for initiation. Whenever he felt inclined, he gave in his name as a candidate. This was usually done at the beginning of Lent. The bishop and clergy next examined the candidates one by one, and ascertained from their neighbours whether they had led such exemplary lives as to be worthy of admission. In case of strangers from another church certificates of character had to be produced. If a man seemed unworthy, the bishop dismissed him until another occasion, when he might be worthier; but if all was satisfactory he was admitted, in the West as a competens or asker, in the East as a φωτιζόμενος, i.e. one in course of being illumined. Usually two sponsors made themselves responsible for the past life of the candidate and for the sincerity of his faith and repentance. The essential thing was that a man should come to baptism of his own free will and not under compulsion or from hope of gain. Macarius of Jerusalem (op. cit.) declares that the grace of the spirit is given in answer to our prayers and entreaties for it, and that even a font is not needful, but only the wish and desire for grace. Tertullian, however, in his work On Baptism, holds that even that is not always enough. Some girls and boys at Carthage had asked to be baptized, and there were some who urged the granting of their request on the score that Christ said: "Forbid them not to come unto Me" (Matt. xix. 14), and: "To each that asketh thee give" (Luke vi. 30). Tertullian replies that "We must beware of giving the holy thing to dogs and of casting pearls before swine." He cites 1 Tim. v. 22: "Lay not on thy hands hastily, lest thou share in another's sins." He denies that the precedents of the eunuch baptized by Philip or of Paul baptized without hesitation by Simon (to which the other party appealed) were relevant. He dwells on the risk run by the sponsors, in case the candidates for whose purity they went bail should fall into sin. It is more expedient, he concludes, to delay baptism. Why should persons still in the age of innocence be in a hurry to be baptized and win remission of sins? Let people first learn to feel their need of salvation, so that we may be sure of giving it only to those who really want it. Especially let the unmarried postpone it. The risks of the age of puberty are extreme. Let people have married or be anyhow steeled in continence before they are admitted to baptism. It would appear from the homilies of Aphraates (c. 340) that in the Syriac church also it was usual to renounce the married relation after baptism. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catecheses, insists on "the longing for the heavenly polity, on the goodly resolution and attendant hope" of the catechumen (Pro. Cat. ch. 1.). If the resolution be not genuine, the bodily washing, he says, profits nothing. "God asks for nothing else except a goodly determination. Say not: How can my sins be wiped out? I tell thee, by willing, by believing" (ch. viii.). So again (Cat. 1. ch. iii.) "God gives not his holy treasures to the dogs; but where he sees the goodly determination, there he bestows the seed of salvation.... Those then who would receive the spiritual saving seal have need of a determination and will of their own.... Grace has need of faith on our part." In Jerusalem, therefore, whither believers flocked from all over Christendom to be buried, the official point of view as late as A.D. 350 was entirely that of Tertullian. Tertullian's scruples were not long respected in Carthage, for in Cyprian's works (c. 250.) we already hear of new-born infants being baptized. In the same region of Africa, however, Monica would not let her son Augustine be baptized in boyhood, though he clamoured to be. She was a conservative. In the Greek world thirty was a usual age in the 4th century for persons to be baptized, in imitation of Christ. It is still the age preferred by the Baptists of Armenia. But it was often delayed until the deathbed, for the primitive idea that mortal sins committed after baptism were sins against the Holy Spirit and unforgivable, still influenced men, and survived among the Cathars up to the 14th century. The fathers, however, of the 4th century emphasized already the danger of deferring the rite until men fall into mortal sickness, when they may be unconscious or paralysed or otherwise unable to profess their faith and repentance, or to swallow the viaticum. Gregory Theologus therefore (c. 340) suggests the age of three years as suitable for baptism, because by then a child is old enough, if not to understand the questions put to him, at any rate to speak and make the necessary responses. Gregory sanctions the baptism of infants only where there is imminent danger of death. "It is better that they should be sanctified without their own sense of it than that they pass away unsealed and uninitiated." And he justifies his view by this, that circumcision, which foreshadowed the Christian seal (σφραγίς), was imposed on the eighth day on those who as yet had no use of reason. He also urges the analogue of "the anointing of the doorposts, which preserved the first-born by things that have no sense." On such grounds was justified the transition of a baptism which began as a spontaneous act of
self-consecration into an opus operatum. How long after this it was before infant baptism became normal inside the Byzantine church, we do not exactly know, but it was natural that mothers should insist on their children being liberated from Satan and safeguarded from demons as soon as might be. The change came more quickly in Latin than in Greek Christendom, and very slowly indeed in the Armenian and Georgian churches. Augustine's insistence on original sin, a doctrine never quite accepted in his sense in the East, hurried on the change.
7. Confirmation.—In the West, however, the sacrament has been saved from becoming merely magical by the rite of confirmation or of reception of the Spirit being separated from the baptism of regeneration and reserved for an adult age. The English church confirms at fifteen or sixteen; the Roman rather earlier. The catechetic course, which formerly preceded the complete rite, now intervenes between its two halves; and the sponsors who formerly attested the worthiness of the candidate and received him up as anadochi out of the font, have become god-parents, who take the baptismal vows vicariously for infants who cannot answer for themselves. In the East, on the contrary, the complete rite is read over the child, who is thus confirmed from the first. The Roman church already foreshadowed the change and gave a peculiar salience to confirmation as early as the 3rd century, when it decreed that persons already baptized by heretics, but reverting to the church should not be baptized over again, but only have hands laid on them. It was otherwise in Africa and the East. Here they insisted in such cases on a repetition of the entire rite, baptism and confirmation together. The Cathars (q.v.) of the middle ages discarded water baptism altogether as being a Jewish rite, but retained the laying on of hands with the traditio precis as sufficient initiation. This they called the spiritual baptism, and interpreted Matt. xxviii. 19, as a command to practise it, and not water baptism.
8. Disciplina arcani.—The communication to the candidates of the Creed and Lord's Prayer was a solemn rite. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his instruction of the catechumens, urges them to learn the Creed by heart, but not write it down. On no account must they divulge it to unbaptized persons. The same rule already meets us in Clement of Alexandria before the year 200. In time this rule gave rise to what is called the Disciplina arcani. Following the fashion of the pagan mysteries in which men were only permitted to gaze upon the sacred objects after minute lustrations and scrupulous purifications, Christian teachers came to represent the Creed, Lord's Prayer and Lord's Supper as mysteries to be guarded in silence and never divulged either to the unbaptized or to the pagans. And yet Justin Martyr, Tertullian and other apologists of the 2nd century had found nothing to conceal from the eye and ear of pagan emperors and their ministers. In the 3rd century this love of mystification reached the pitch of hiding even the gospels from the unclean eyes of pagans. Probably Mgr. Pierre Battifol is correct in supposing that the Disciplina arcani was more or less of a make-believe, a bit of belletristic trifling on the part of the over-rhetorical Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries.[[3]] It is in them that the atmosphere of mystery attains a maximum of intensity. They clearly felt themselves called upon to out-trump the pagan Mystae. Yet it is inconceivable that men and women should spend years, even whole lives, as catechumens within the pale of the church, and really remain ignorant all the time of the Trinitarian Epiclesis used in baptism, of the Creed, and above all of the Lord's Prayer. Wherever the Disciplina arcani, i.e. the obligation to keep secret the formula of the threefold name, the creed based on it and the Lord's Prayer, was taken seriously, it was akin to the scruple which exists everywhere among primitive religionists against revealing to the profane the knowledge of a powerful name or magic formula. The name of a deity was often kept secret and not allowed to be written down, as among the Jews.
9. Regeneration.—The idea of regeneration seldom occurs in the New Testament, and perhaps not at all in connexion with baptism; for in the conversation with Nicodemus, John iii. 3-8, the words "of water and" in v. 5 offend the context, spiritual re-birth alone being insisted upon in vv. 3, 6, 7 and 8; moreover, Justin Martyr, who cites v. 5, seems to omit them. Nor is there any mention of water in ch. i. 13, where, according to the oldest text, Christ is represented as having been born or begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
In 1 Pet. i. 3, it is said of the saints that God the Father begat them anew unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus, and in v. 23 that they have been begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible through the word of God. But here again it is not clear that the writer has in view water baptism or any rite at all as the means and occasion of regeneration. In the conversation with Nicodemus we seem to overhear a protest against the growing tendency of the last years of the 1st century to substitute formal sacraments for the free afflatus of the spirit, and to "crib, cabin and confine" the gift of prophecy.
The passage where re-birth is best put forward in connexion with baptism is Luke iii. 22, where ancient texts, including the Gospel of the Hebrews, read, "Thou art my beloved Son, this day have I begotten Thee." These words were taken in the sense that Jesus was then re-born of the Spirit an adoptive Son of God and Messiah; and with this reading is bound up the entire adoptionist school of Christology. It apparently underlies the symbolizing of Christ as a fish in the art of the catacombs, and in the literature of the 2nd century. Tertullian prefaces with this idea his work on baptism. Nos pisciculi secundum ΙΧΘΥΝ nostrum Jesum Christum in aqua nascimur. "We little fishes, after the example of our Fish Jesus Christ, are born in the water." So about the year 440 the Gaulish poet Orientius wrote of Christ; Piscis natus aquis, auctor baptismatis ipse est. "A fish born of the waters is himself originator of baptism."
But before his time and within a hundred years of Tertullian this symbolism in its original significance had become heretical, and the orthodox were thrown back on another explanation of it. This was that the word ΙΧΘΥΣ is made up of the letters which begin the Greek words meaning "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour." An entire mythology soon grew up around the idea of re-birth. The font was viewed as the womb of the virgin mother church, who was in some congregations, for example, in the early churches of Gaul, no abstraction, but a divine aeon watching over and sympathizing with the children of her womb, the recipient even of hymns of praise and humble supplications. Other mythoplastic growths succeeded, one of which must be noticed. The sponsors or anadochi, who, after the introduction of infant baptism came to be called god-fathers and god-mothers, were really in a spiritual relation to the children they took up out of the font. This relation was soon by the canonists identified with the blood-tie which connects real parents with their offspring, and the corollary drawn that children, who in baptism had the same god-parent, were real brothers and sisters, who might not marry either each the other or real children of the said god-parent. The reformed churches have set aside this fiction, but in the Latin and Eastern churches it has created a distinct and very powerful marriage taboo.