This beautiful institution, first mentioned by Jude as the “feasts of charity,”[911] was usually observed in connexion with the eucharist, though not necessarily a part of it. It dates from the earliest period of the church,[912] and its corruptions among the Corinthians called forth the sharp rebuke of the Apostle Paul.[913]
Tertullian thus describes its character in the second century: “Our supper, which you accuse of luxury, shows its reason by its very name; for it is called agape, which, among the Greeks, signifies love. It admits of nothing vile or immodest. We eat and drink only as much as hunger and thirst demand, mindful that the evening is to be spent in the worship of God. We so speak as knowing that God hears. After washing our hands and bringing lights, each is asked to sing to God according to his ability, either from Scripture or from his own mind. Prayer also concludes the feast.”[914] He calls it also a supper of philosophy and discipline, rather than a corporeal feast. At the close collections were made for widows and orphans and for the poor, many of whom would be thrown out of employment by their
renunciation of idolatrous trades; also for prisoners and for persons who had suffered shipwreck.[915] It is doubtless the agape which Pliny describes as “the common and harmless meal”[916] of the Christians, and at which, according to Lucian, their “sacred conversations”[917] were held. Clement of Alexandria calls the agape “the banquet of reason, a celestial food, and the supper of love; the pledge and proof of mutual affection.”[918]
The primitive church carefully guarded the celebration of the eucharist and agape from the pryings of idle curiosity or the perfidy of heathen malevolence, lest the name of God should be blasphemed, or the goodly pearls of salvation be trampled beneath swinish feet. But this very secresy and mystery became the occasion of the vilest slanders and aspersions. The Christians were accused of celebrating these rites with the most abominable orgies—feasting on human flesh and infants’ blood, and committing nameless crimes of still deeper dye. “They charge us,” say the martyrs of Lyons, “with feasts of Thyestes, and the crimes of Œdipus, and such abominations as are neither lawful for us to speak nor think.” The blameless believers were denounced as the very dregs of society, a skulking and darkness-loving race, meeting by night for profane conjuration and unhallowed banquets, as despisers of the gods, haters of mankind, and mockers at holy things,[919]
and were confounded with pestilent sorcerers who in midnight caves practiced their foul incantations against human life.[920] These accusations arose partly, it is probable, from distorted accounts of the holy communion of the body and the blood of Christ, interpreted as a literal partaking of the corporeal substance; partly from the vile practices of the Carpocratians and other heretics; but chiefly from the malice of the heathen themselves, judging the character of the Christian mysteries from the obscene orgies of Venus and Bacchus.
Tertullian indignantly resents the vile calumnies, and shows them to be monstrous and absurd. “We are daily beset by foes,” he exclaims, “we are daily betrayed, we are often surprised in our secret congregations; yet who ever came upon a half-consumed corpse among us, or any other corroborations of the accusations against us?”[921] He retorts upon the heathen the charge of infanticide, human sacrifice, and unnatural crimes, and contrasts therewith the purity of the Christian character. Minucius Felix also attests the modest and sober character of the Christian feasts, which they celebrated with chaste discourse and chaster bodies.[922]
In course of time the agapæ lost in great measure their religious character, and were employed for the anniversaries of the martyrs, and for marriage and
funeral occasions.[923] They were still further desecrated by their substitution for pagan festivals, in order, as St. Augustine remarks, “that the heathen might feast with their former luxury, though without their former sacrilege.”[924] These “pious hilarities” thus degenerated, in the fourth and fifth centuries, into convivial banquets and wanton revelry—a scandal and disgrace to Christendom, and provoked the indignant censure of the Fathers. “It is absurd,” says St. Jerome, “to honour with feasting the saints who pleased God with their fasts.” St. Augustine vehemently condemns those “who inebriate themselves in honour of the martyrs, and place even their gluttony and drunkenness to the account of religion.”[925] “These drunkards persecute the saints as much with their cups,” he says, “as the furious pagans did with stones.”[926] The good bishop of Nola, greatly scandalized at these semi-pagan revelries, painted with holy pictures the church of St. Felix, that as the ignorant peasants gazed more they might drink the less. It has been suggested that probably the pious figures in the gilt glasses of the Catacombs were designed for the same purpose; but many of their mottoes were of a highly convivial character, calculated rather to promote the revelry in which they were doubtlessly employed. Both the natalitia and the agapæ at length became so obnoxious in character as to excite the taunts of the
pagans and the condemnation of the more devout and thoughtful Christians. The abuse of the latter beautiful institution became so intolerable that it became the object of repressive decrees of successive councils till it was finally abolished. The council of Elvira (A. D. 305) prudently forbade the presence of females at these nocturnal meetings in the Catacombs.[927] That of Laodicea (A. D. 361) enacted that the agapæ should not be celebrated in churches. The council of Carthage (A. D. 397) forbade the clergy attending them, and the council of Trullo (A. D. 706) prohibited their celebration at all, under penalty of excommunication.
This beautiful symbol of Christian unity was revived in spirit by the founder of Methodism; but, to guard against the corruptions into which it had previously fallen, the elements of its celebration were restricted to bread and water. A similar custom is also observed among the Moravian brethren, from whom, probably, Wesley borrowed it. It has also been transmitted from primitive times by the Nestorian Christians of the Malabar coast.[928]