The concept of change in the liturgy has never been an easy one for Christians to deal with. Normally peace-loving Christians can turn violent when faced with a change in their Sunday Eucharist. One only has to think of the recent “liturgy wars” within Roman Catholicism and the rejection of the missal of Paul VI by some groups of Catholics and the similar difficulties with the translation of its third typical edition by others. But today the more serious question facing the Catholic liturgical scholar does not deal with mere translation matters or even with the relatively minor differences between the missals of Pius V and Paul VI,Footnote 1 this challenge does not belong to the modern period, but it is found in the earliest stratum of eucharistic tradition.
The Catholic Church teaches that her Eucharist was established by Jesus Christ on Holy Thursday, during the Last Supper that he celebrated with his disciples “on the night before he was betrayed” (1 Cor 11:23) in anticipation of the Cross and Resurrection.Footnote 2 But it is hard to find any modern book on the history of liturgy and published by an established academic publishing house in the English-speaking world that would agree with this. Indeed most scholars today take an overly cautious view of liturgical history and adopt the view of “we just cannot say” regarding the most basic details of the pre-Nicene Eucharist. Indeed some seem to delight in “proving” that we can say little or nothing about early liturgy. Paul Bradshaw, one of the main proponents of this school of thought, can even claim that:
As a result of the great advances that have been made in liturgical scholarship in the last few decades, we now know much less about early eucharistic worship than we once thought that we did. Indeed, it sometimes appears that if things keep on their present rate, it is possible that we shall soon find that we know absolutely nothing at all: for a large part of what current research has achieved has been to demolish theories that had been built on unreliable foundations.Footnote 3
The purpose of this article is to suggest, pace Bradshaw, that the current theories are not built on unreliable foundations and that, indeed, from a Catholic point of view these theories are quite acceptable.
The first modern students of liturgy in the eighteenth century tried to get back to the ritual of that night of the Last Supper. When faced with the variety of traditional eucharistic prayers in the Western and Eastern Churches, the presumption was made that these had developed from a single common eucharistic liturgy of apostolic times. The main difficulty with this understanding was that most of the proposed reconstructions of the text of the apostolic liturgy were based on De Traditione Divinae Missae, a spurious document purporting to be by Proclus, a mid fifth-century bishop of Constantinople.Footnote 4 Basing their theories on pseudo-Proclus these theories thought that “the earliest apostolic liturgies had been very long but were deliberately abridged in later centuries in order to retain the participation of less fervent generations of Christians.”Footnote 5 But by the beginning of the twentieth century scholars realized that De Traditione Divinae Missae was, in fact, a forgery and further study seemed to indicate that the various texts of the traditional eucharistic prayers did not seem to have a common textual origin making it nigh impossible to reach a common apostolic text of the eucharistic liturgy. Not surprisingly, this caused some consternation, as it seemed to call the very validity of the sacraments into doubt.
Dom Gregory Dix, an Anglican Benedictine, stepped in to fill this gap with his very influential book, The Shape of the Liturgy. While Dix did not support the idea of a common apostolic text, he replaced this with a proposed common “shape” of the eucharistic liturgy that would have been typical for all of the earliest Christians. There is, he said, “even good reason to think that this outline – the Shape – of the Liturgy is of genuinely apostolic tradition.” He assumed that the first part of the eucharistic liturgy, which centred on scripture readings, was imported into early Christian liturgy from the Jewish synagogue service which the apostles would have been familiar with. In Dix's understanding this liturgy of the Word was followed by a eucharistic celebration. He analysed the actions of Jesus in the Last Supper and saw that he carried out seven actions and that these soon became a universal fourfold eucharistic rite that was common to all Christians: “(1) the offertory; bread and wine are ‘taken’ and placed on the table together. (2) The prayer; the president gives thanks to God over the bread and wine together. (3) The fraction; the bread is broken. (4) The communion; the bread and wine are distributed together.”Footnote 6
As it succeeded in explaining the origins of the eucharistic celebration and maintained the vital connection with the person of Christ, Dix's theory became enormously popular and was incorporated into most studies from the mid-twentieth century until the 1990's. In addition most scholars understood that the development of the eucharistic rite followed a linear modelFootnote 7 which shows how various elements were gradually added to the primitive “shape,” so that the liturgical families and rites grew gradually and organically from the original apostolic “shape” of the Eucharist.Footnote 8 While not all the evidence fits neatly into the linear model, nonetheless, I propose that today this is still the best model for the Catholic liturgical scholar to follow.
Initially we ought to understand a very simple structure to the liturgy. Basically the primitive shape would be a prayer said over bread and wine (probably mixed with waterFootnote 9), this prayer would take place in a Christian assembly, presided over by an Apostle or one of their successors. Naturally the prayer would be influenced by the memories of the practice of Jesus, Jewish meal prayers, and early Christian prayer patterns in general. Then the assembly would receive the eucharistic elements. While it took time to develop a more formal theology, the early Christians did share a core of belief regarding the eucharistic mystery.Footnote 10 It was this common faith combined with a common practice, both of which found their origin in Christ, that constituted the beginning of Christian liturgy.
The best example of the “shape” in the pre-Nicene Church is provided by St Justin in his Apologia, written around the year 155. Here St Justin is attempting to explain general Christian practice to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius in the context of various misunderstandings and persecutions of the early Christian. As many of these persecutions centred on the Christians meetings, Justin provides an outline of the Christian celebration of the Eucharist. This outline can be seen in every orthodox celebration of the Eucharist from Justin's day to our own.Footnote 11 And even Bradshaw will allow that this general shape was widespread, albeit in very general terms, “long before” the fourth century.Footnote 12 Here is Justin's description:
On the day called Sunday an assembly is held in one place of all who live in town or country, and records of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as time allows.
Then, when the reader has finished, the president in a discourse admonishes and exhorts (us) to imitate these good things.
Then we all stand up together and send up prayers; and as we said before, when we have finished praying bread and wine and water are brought up, and the president likewise sends up prayers and thanksgivings to the best of his ability, and the people assent, saying the Amen; and the (elements over which) thanks have been given are distributed, and everyone partakes; and they are sent through the deacons to those who are not present.
And the wealthy who so desire give what they wish, as each chooses; and what is collected is deposited with the president.Footnote 13
While there are not many other descriptions of the eucharistic celebration from the pre-Nicene era, there are a lot of hints that there was a canonical way of celebrating the Eucharist. In the First Letter of Clement, written at the end of the first century, Pope Clement states that there is a prescribed order of celebration (unfortunately without telling us exactly what that order is). Here we also find that already a sacrificial hermeneutic has entered into the interpretation of the celebration.Footnote 14 This sacrificial hermeneutic, while by no means being the only valid interpretation, has remained as a constitutive element of the understanding of the Eucharist.Footnote 15
In the late second century St Irenaeus informs us that the Eucharist “is the offering which the church received from the apostles and which it offers throughout the whole world, to God who provides us with nourishment, the first-fruits of divine gifts in this new covenant.”Footnote 16 This way of celebrating is contrasted to that of the Gnostics who have a different way of celebrating which does not come from the Lord.Footnote 17 In another fragment of St Irenaeus, preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History (written about 320 ad), he recounts that when St Polycarp visited Rome during the reign of Pope Anicetus (c.157–c.168), the pope invited Polycarp to preside the Eucharist and this in spite of their unresolved disagreement on the calculation of the date of Easter. Given that Polycarp was able to preside the Eucharist in the Church of Rome, it is obvious that both Polycarp at Smyrna and Anicetus at Rome had a common understanding of how the Eucharist should be celebrated.Footnote 18 While these historical testimonies may not be enough evidence for the modern critic, we have to realize that for this time period it actually constitutes quite a lot of evidence. A modern author claims that even two or three documents from the pre-Nicene period in fact constitute “a tsunami of information.”Footnote 19
Gradually the classical eucharistic prayers evolved from this simple beginning. But it is crucial to understand that here there is more than a casual evolution and that the Holy Spirit aided the Church in her canonization of the eucharistic prayer.Footnote 20 While the earliest forms of this prayer may have been very simple or even lacked elements that would later become constitutive, such as the Sanctus Footnote 21 and maybe even at a very early stage the Words of Institution themselves,Footnote 22 the form of the prayer gradually evolved. The very earliest celebrations of the Eucharist did not rely on written texts; there was a certain oral commonality to these celebrations. The bishop or priest who presided the celebration prayed using familiar structures, vocabulary and word patterns. The ritual grew from “habit and custom”Footnote 23 where the early Church, aided by the Holy Spirit, developed a more complete common shape of the eucharistic liturgy starting from and respecting the great gift of the Eucharist which Christ entrusted to his bride the Church. At this stage there was a “uniformity of type rather than detail.”Footnote 24
But this is not to say that there were no exceptions to this “shape.” The issue is how do we treat these exceptions? Do we see them as aberrations or accept them as equally valid alternative practices? Andrew McGowan catalogues many of these departures from the “shape” in his work Ascetic Eucharists. The work starts with a helpful analysis of meals and food and drink in the ancient context. But then he continues to examine all the evidence remotely connected with Christianity, giving as much weight to “Radical Pseudepigrapha” as to orthodox Christianity.Footnote 25
Of the mainstream texts McGowan examines the most famous of these is St Cyprian's Letter 63 to Caecilius. Here St Cyprian is addressing the problem of some confessors who were reported to celebrate the Eucharist using a chalice filled with water and not wine. When faced with the fact that apparently some priests in third century North Africa celebrated a Eucharist with water and not wine, the modern student has two options. One can either believe that both wine and water were equally viable options in the early Church and it is by a simple quirk of fate that wine won out in the bigger historical picture.Footnote 26 Alternatively, if one believes that the eucharistic liturgy is something divine and that the Holy Spirit has protected it in the history of the Church, then one has to hold that these celebrants in third century North African were simply wrong, thus agreeing with St Cyprian that it “is against evangelical and apostolic practice that in certain places water is being offered in the chalice of the Lord that by itself cannot form an image of Christ's blood.”Footnote 27 We should not be surprised that some early Christians simply got things wrong: even today it is not unknown for priests who acting in good (albeit badly formed) conscience to celebrate invalid sacraments.Footnote 28 Furthermore, what is of note in this North African example is not that we have an early exception to the “shape” of the Eucharist but the fact that the Church condemned heterodox liturgical practices, both those of heretics and those committed by those who were blameless in other respects.
Another area where contemporary liturgical scholarship has challenged the accepted historical narrative is the case of the early church order commonly called the Apostolic Tradition. Most of the classical twentieth-century histories of the liturgy give pride of place to this document.Footnote 29 While this document has been known for a long time, it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that it came to be attributed to St Hippolytus who was active in Rome in the third century.Footnote 30 In turn this identification gave it an important place in the renewal of the books of the Roman rite in the wake of Vatican II.
However the textual history of the Apostolic Tradition is complicated and while it was originally written in Greek only small fragments of the original survive. This has meant that every modern editor of the work has had to make some subjective interpretations in their reconstruction of the original document from an assortment of fragments of the Apostolic Tradition in various ancient languages.Footnote 31 In the early 1990's Marcel Metzger argued that it is unwise to treat the Apostolic Tradition as being authored by Hippolytus and that rather than seeing it as a single coherent document, it might be better to see it as a collection of disparate canons.Footnote 32 Bradshaw took this up in his influential textbook on the early liturgy,Footnote 33 and in 2002, together with two colleagues, Bradshaw published a new edition of the Apostolic Tradition.Footnote 34 Here they make no attempt to reconstruct an original text of the document but merely to provide English translations of the various sources. While this edition is undoubtedly useful to scholars, it must be argued that it suffers from a fatal flaw: it is not really an edition of the Apostolic Tradition, but rather a sourcebook. Whatever the case for Hippolytan authorship or its original provenance and date, there must have existed some early Christian document, a document that enjoyed some popularity in the early Church, which formed the basis of the later adaptations.Footnote 35 One would also have hoped that the team of editors of the 2002 edition would have felt themselves more capable of producing a proposed reconstruction than the man on the street, who, if all he has to work with is the 2002 edition, is obliged to reconstruct some form of the Apostolic Tradition by himself.Footnote 36
This recent work has left scholars perplexed as to how to use the Apostolic Tradition in their historical work. It has also led some to omit treatment of it altogether in their work on early Christian liturgy. This in turn has added to the general confusion regarding historical development of the Eucharist in the pre-Nicene period and it would seem that some scholars even enjoy this fact. Fortunately, some of the most recent scholarship has once again started to use this source.Footnote 37
But the basic theological issue is not about the historical authenticity of one document or another, but whether today we understand the early Church as a varied confederation of divergent tendencies and groups or admit that the first Christians “had one heart and soul” (Acts 4:32). In the first centuries was there a basic unanimity of practice and belief despite variant liturgical practices or was everyone free to believe what he liked and whatever put him best in touch with his inner self? When in the late first century St Ignatius of Antioch speaks of “one Eucharist”Footnote 38 are we simply to dismiss him off hand as being one of those “proto-Orthodox” whom fate allowed to win the early Christian power struggles and later to rewrite Christian history from their own biased and intolerant point of view? Or is a practicing Catholic allowed to believe that Ignatius was, in fact, correct and that the Church was founded by Christ with a vital sacramental basis and that perhaps the most important part of this is the Eucharist instituted by Christ himself? Otherwise we have to side with some modern scholars who would propose a multitude of contradictory practices in the early Church.Footnote 39
At its heart, the problem of the history of the Eucharist is not so much an analysis of the evidence. This is especially true for the early period where there are so many lacunae in our knowledge and the discovery of even a single new manuscript could revolutionize our understanding. The Faith of the Church cannot be enslaved to the vagaries of archaeology and the survivals of pre-Nicene liturgical manuscripts. The problem is, rather, one of a hermeneutic of history. How is the Catholic scholar to approach the study of the Eucharist?
Unfortunately, even among Catholic historians many avoid attributing historical developments to the action of God and interpret the facts of history in a completely secular manner.Footnote 40 While the historian must take all of the evidence into account, ultimately what takes precedence must be the unity of the divine deposit of faith and not any single element in a historical reconstruction. As a result of this, there will probably be times when a Catholic historian will be rejected by his non-Catholic confrères:
It is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to explain the Christian view of history to a non-Christian, since it is necessary to accept the Christian faith in order to understand the Christian view of history, and those who reject the idea of a divine revelation are necessarily obliged to reject the Christian view of history as well.Footnote 41
How then are we to interpret the history of the Eucharist? There are manifest differences in the way the Eucharist has been celebrated in different ages.Footnote 42 There has clearly been development in the shape of the Eucharist. Perhaps the best way to understand this development is to apply the category of the development of Doctrine as championed by Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman. Newman understood the development of Doctrine as being something natural: as in physiology the fully-grown being is the same as the child, so the fully-grown doctrine is the same as that of the primitive Church. In this development change is good and necessary, as he famously quipped, “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”Footnote 43 If we apply this to the Eucharist as celebrated today in the majority of Catholic parishes using the Paul VI Missal, then we are left with only one question:
The only question that can be raised is whether the said Catholic faith, as now held, is logically, as well as historically, the representative of the ancient faith. This then is the subject, to which I have as yet addressed myself, and I have maintained that modern Catholicism is nothing else but simply the legitimate growth and complement, that is, the natural and necessary development, of the doctrine of the early church, and that its divine authority is included in the divinity of Christianity.Footnote 44
Today's Eucharist, in its different forms but with a common shape, is the result of a “legitimate growth.” In this growth we must maintain that we are dealing with a single organism and not evolution, as for Newman development can never be confused with Darwinian evolution. Development takes place within the life span of a single living organism, but, according to Darwin's understanding of evolution, two distinct species could evolve from a common ancestor.Footnote 45 This is not the case with the Christian Sacraments. Christ did not bequeath us some liturgical raw material from which various Sacraments could evolve, in such a way that certain bodies of Christians have the Eucharist and others have some other sort of a liturgical service that, while not eucharistic in the Catholic sense, is equally valid and in accordance with the mind of Christ. No, the Eucharist is an eternal reality and is constitutive of the Christian Church, to the degree that if a body of Christians no longer validly celebrates this Sacrament that body cannot be considered to be a Church. This means that the Eucharist celebrated today in a Catholic parish in New Jersey, is the same Eucharist as was celebrated by the Fathers of the Council of Trent, is the same as was celebrated by Gregory the Great and is the same as was established by Jesus Christ in the “days of his flesh.”Footnote 46
This idea of development is taken up by the Second Vatican Council in Dei Verbum 8 which states that the Church's worship has been handed on from the Apostles and is a constitutive element of the Church, but that throughout the centuries there is a “growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down.”Footnote 47
In proposing a different hermeneutic in the study of liturgical history, I am not attempting to discredit the work of other scholars, personally I spend most of my leisure time reading their latest work. Indeed, it is their duty to present the historical evidence of early Christian liturgy to the best of their abilities. It is not merely a matter of there being an objectively right and wrong way to interpret historical evidence that every scholar of every view can agree on. The reality is, however, that there is a specifically Catholic way to interpret the history of the Church and her liturgy and that this truth has too often been forgotten. The Catholic historian of liturgy can and must use all the historical research available, even if he is working within a different worldview to his non-Catholic confreres. Therefore the history of liturgy is a discipline of Catholic theology that has the important task of helping people understand the truths of the Catholic Faith and the practitioner of this discipline, as a Catholic theologian, must approach his task with a critical attitude whose gaze has been purified by faith.Footnote 48 This explanation can change with the passage of time and the developments of historical scholarship at large, but the Faith itself cannot be swayed by various theories and brought into doubt by the chance survivals of early texts. The fact that Christ established the Eucharist at the Last Supper, and that this is the same Eucharist that is still celebrated by the Catholic Church must be definitely held. I, for one, want no part in any fellowship which believes that the Eucharist of the Catholic Church is simply a chance survival of one eucharist among many, and that the Church conceivably could be better off using some other model. No!; the great joy of Catholicism is that we have access to the unique Eucharist that our Lord instituted “in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the Cross throughout the centuries until He should come again, and so to entrust to His beloved spouse, the Church, a memorial of His death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a paschal banquet ‘in which Christ is eaten, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.’”Footnote 49
