But this effect of participation in the bread and cup was not in Paul’s opinion automatic, was no mere opus operatum; it depended on the ethical co-operation of the believer, who must not eat and drink unworthily, that is, after refusing to share his meats with the poorer brethren, or with any other guilt in his soul. The phrases “discern the body” and “discern ourselves” in 1 Cor. xi. 29, 31 are obscure. Paul evidently plays on the verb, krinô, diakrinô, katakrinô (κρίνω, διακρίνω, κατακρίνω). The general sense is clear, that those who consume the holy food without a clear conscience, like those who handle sacred objects with impure hands, will suffer physical harm from its contact, as if they were undergoing the ordeal of touching a holy thing. The idea, therefore, seems to be that as we must distinguish the holy food over which the words “This is my body” have been uttered from common food, so we must separate ourselves before eating it from all that is guilty and impure. The food that is taboo must only be consumed by persons who are equally taboo or pure. If they are not pure, it condemns them.
The “one” loaf has many parallels in ancient sacrifices, e.g. the Latin tribes when they met annually at their common temple partook of a “single” bull. And in Greek Panegureis or festivals the sacrificial wine had to be dispensed from one common bowl: “Unto a common cup they come together, and from it pour libations as well as sacrifice,” says Aristides Rhetor in his Isthmica in Neptunum, p. 45. To ensure the continued unity of the bread, the Roman church ever leaves over from a preceding consecration half a holy wafer, called fermentum, which is added in the next celebration.
With what awe Paul regarded the elements mystically identified with Christ’s body and life is clear from his declaration in 1 Cor. xi. 27, that he who consumes them unworthily is guilty or holden of the Lord’s body and blood. This is the language of the ancient ordeal which as a test of innocence required the accused to touch or still better to eat a holy element. A wife who drank the holy water in which the dust of the Sanctuary was mingled (Num. v. 17 foll.) offended so deeply against it, if unfaithful, that she was punished with dropsy and wasting. The very point is paralleled in the Acts of Thomas, ch. xlviii. A youth who has murdered his mistress takes the bread of the Eucharist in his mouth, and his two hands are at once withered up. The apostle immediately invites him to confess the crime he must have committed, “for, he says, the Eucharist of the Lord hath convicted thee.”
It has been necessary to consider at such length St Paul’s account of the Eucharist, both because it antedates nearly by half a century that of the gospels, and because it explains the significance which the rite had no less for the Gnostics than for the great church. The synoptists’ account is to be understood thus: Jesus, conscious that he now for the last time lies down to eat with his disciples a meal which, if not the Paschal, was anyhow anticipatory of the Millennial Regeneration (Matt. xix. 28), institutes, as it were, a blood-brotherhood between himself and them. It is a covenant similar to that of Exodus xxiv., when after the peace-offering of oxen, Moses took the blood in basins and sprinkled half of it on the altar and on twelve pillars erected after the twelve tribes, and the other half on the people, to whom he had first read out the writing of the covenant and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.”
But the covenant instituted by Jesus on the eve of his death was hardly intended as a new covenant with God, superseding the old. This reconstruction of its meaning seems to have been the peculiar revelation of the Lord to Paul, who viewed Christ’s crucifixion and death as an atoning sacrifice, liberating by its grace mankind from bonds of sin which the law, far from snapping, only made more sensible and grievous. This must have been the gist of the special revelation which he had received from Christ as to the inner character of a supper which he already found a ritual observance among believers. The Eucharist of the synoptists is rather a covenant or tie of communion between Jesus and the twelve, such as will cause his life to survive in them after he has been parted from them in the flesh. An older prophet would have slain an animal and drunk its blood in common with his followers, or they would all alike have smeared themselves with it. In the East, even now, one who wishes to create a blood tie between himself and his followers and cement them to himself, makes under his left breast an incision from which they each in turn suck his blood. Such barbarisms was alien to the spirit of the Founder, who substitutes bread and wine for his own flesh and blood, only imparting to these his own quality by the declaration that they are himself. He broke the bread not in token of his approaching death, but in order to its equal distribution. Wine he rather chose than water as a surrogate for his actual blood, because it already in Hebrew sacrifices passed as such. “The Hebrews,” says Robertson Smith (op. cit. p. 230), “treated it like the blood, pouring it out at the base of the altar.” As a red liquid it was a ready symbol of the blood which is the life. It was itself the covenant, for the genitive τῆς διαθήκης in Mark xiv. 24 is epexegetic, and Luke and Paul rightly substitute the nominative. It was, as J. Wellhausen remarks,[11] a better cement than the bread, because through the drinking of it the very blood of Jesus coursed through the veins of the disciples, and that is why more stress is laid on it than on the bread. To the apostles, as Jews bred and born, the action and words of their master formed a solemn and intelligible appeal. It belongs to the same order of ideas that the headship of the Messianic ecclesia in Judea was assigned after the death of Jesus to his eldest brother James, and after him for several generations to the eldest living representative of his family.
To the modern mind it is absurd that an image or symbol should be taken for that which is imaged or symbolized, and that is why the early history of the Eucharist has been so little understood by ecclesiastical writers. And yet other religions, ancient and modern, supply many parallels, which are considered in the article [Sacrament].
Authorities.—Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites; Goetz, Die Abendmahlsfrage; G. Anrich, Das antike Mysterienwesen (Göttingen, 1894); Sylloge confessionum (Oxford, 1804); Duchesne, Origins of Christian Culture; Funk’s edition of Constitutiones Apostolicae; Hagenbach, History of Doctrines, vol. ii.; Geo. Bickell, Messe und Pascha; idem. “Die Entstehung der Liturgie,” Ztsch. f. Kath. Theol. iv. Jahrg. 94 (1880), p. 90 (shows how the prayers of the Christian sacramentaries derive from the Jewish Synagogue); Goar, Rituale Graecorum; F.E. Brightman, Eastern Liturgies; Cabrol and Leclercq, Monumenta liturgica, reliquiae liturgicae vetustissimae (Paris, 1900); Harnack, History of Dogma; Jas. Martineau, Seat of Authority in Religion, bk. iv. (London, 1890); Loofs, art. “Abendmahlsfeier” in Herzog’s Realencyklopädie (1896.) Spitta, Urchristentum (Göttingen, 1893); Schultzen, Das Abendmahl im N.T. (Göttingen, 1895); Kraus, Real-Encykl. d. christl. Altert. (for the Archaeology); art. “Eucharistic”; Ch. Gore, Dissertations (1895); Hoffmann, Die Abendmahlsgedanken Jesu Christi (Königsberg, 1896); Sanday, art. “Lord’s Supper” in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible; Th. Harnack, Der christl. Gemeindegottesdienst.
(F. C. C.)
Reservation of the Eucharist
The practice of reserving the sacred elements for the purpose of subsequent reception prevailed in the church from very early times. The Eucharist being the seal of Christian fellowship, it was a natural custom to send portions of the consecrated elements by the hands of the deacons to those who were not present (Justin Martyr, Apol. i. 65). From this it was an easy development, which prevailed before the end of the 2nd century, for churches to send the consecrated Bread to one another as a sign of communion (the εὐχαριστία mentioned by Irenaeus, ap. Eus. H.E. v. 24), and for the faithful to take it to their own homes and reserve it in arcae or caskets for the purpose of communicating themselves (Tert. ad Uxor. ii. 5, De orat. 19; St Cypr. De lapsis, 132). Being open to objection on grounds both of superstition and of irreverence, these customs were gradually put down by the council of Laodicea in A.D. 360. But some irregular forms of reservation still continued; the prohibition as regards the lay people was not extended, at any rate with any strictness, to the clergy and monks; the Eucharist was still carried on journeys; occasionally it was buried with the dead; and in a few cases the pen was even dipped in the chalice in subscribing important writings. Meanwhile, both in East and West, the general practice has continued unbroken of reserving the Eucharist, in order that the “mass of the presanctified” might take place on certain “aliturgic” days, that the faithful might be able to communicate when there was no celebration, and above all that it might be at hand to meet the needs of the sick and dying. It was reserved in a closed vessel, which took various forms from time to time, known in the East as the ἀρτοφόριον, and in the West as the turris, the capsa, and later on as the pyx. In the East it was kept against the wall behind the altar; in the West, in a locked aumbry in some part of the church, or (as in England and France) in a pyx made in the form of a dove and suspended over the altar.