Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/662

 PYX

588

PYX

Pj^hagoreans were carried on by the enthusiasm characteristic of discoverers to maintain that num- bers are not only the symbols of reality, but the very substance of real things. They held, for example, that one is the point, two the line, three the surface, and four the soliil. Seven they considered to be the fate that dominates human life, because infancy ceases at seven, maturity begins at fourteen, marriage takes place in the twenty-first year, and seventy years is the span of life usually allotted to man. Ten is the perfect number, because it is the sum of one, two, three, and four — the point, the line, the surface, and the solid. Having, naturally, observed that all num- bers may be ranged in parallel columns under "odd" and "even", they were led to attempt a similar ar- rangement of the qualities of things. Under odd they placed light, straight, good, right, masculine; under even, dark, crooked, evil, left, feminine. These opposites, they contended, are found everywhere in nature, and the union of them constitutes the harmony of the real world.

The account given by the Pythagoreans of the "harmony of the spheres" is the best illustration of their method. There are, they said, ten heavenly bodies, namely, the heaven of the fixed stars, the five planets, the sun, the moon, the earth, and the counter- earth. The counter-earth is added because it is necessary to make up the number ten, the perfect number. It is a body under the earth, moving parallel with it, and, since it moves at the same rate of speed, it is invisible to us. The five planets, the sun, the moon, and the earth with its counter-earth, moving from west to east at rates of speed propor- tionate to the distance of each from the central fire, produce eight tones which give an octave, and, there- fore, a harmony. We are not conscious of the harmony, either because it is too great to be per- ceptible Ijy human ears, or because, like the black- smith who has grown accustomed to the noise of his hammer on the anvil, we have lived since our first conscious moments in the sound of the heavenly music and can no longer perceive it. In their psy- chology and their ethics the Pythagoreans used the idea of harmony and the notion of number as the ex- planation of the mind and its states, and also of virtue and its various kinds. It was not these par- ticular doctrines of the school so much as the general notion which prevailed among the Pythagoreans of the scope and aim of philosophy, that influenced the subsequent cour.se of speculation among the Greeks. Unlike the lonians, who were scientists and related philosophy to knowledge merely, the Pythagoreans were religiously and ethically inclined, and strove to bring philosophy into relation with life as well as with knowledge. Aristotelianism, which reduced philos- ophy to knowledge, never could compete, in the estimation of its advocates, with Christianity, as neo-Pythagoreanism did, by setting up the claim that in the teachings of its founder it had a "way of life" preferable to that taught by the Founder of Chris- tianity.

Iamblichus, LeytndaTy Life of Pythagorax, in Latin (Leipzig, 1815). tr. Taylor (London, 1818); Ghote, Hist, of Greece, IV (London, 1885), 525 aqq.; Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philos., tr. Alleyne, I (London, 1881), 306 sqq.; Ueberweq. His/, of Philos., tr. Morris. I (New York, 1892), 42 sqq.; Tannery, Pout rkisl. de la science helUne (Paris, 1887), 201 sqq.; Turner, Hist, of PMl. (Boston, 1903), 38 sqq.

William Turntir.

Pyx. — The word pjTt (Lat., pyxis, which translit- erates the Greek, iru?/», a box-wood receptacle, from iri/foj, box-tree) was formerly applied in a wide and general sense to all vessels used to contain the Bles.se<l Eucharist. In particular it was perhaps the commonest term applied to the cup in which the Blessed Sacrament actually restpd when in the Middle Ages it was suspended above the altar. Thus the Custumal of Cluny in the eleventh century speaka

of the "deacon taking the golden pyx {auream pyxidem) out of the dove (columba) which hangs permanently above the altar". In later times however it has come about that the term pyx is limited in ordinary usage to that smaller vessel of gold, or silver- gilt, in which the Eucharist is com- monly carried to the sick. Such vessels are some- times made flat like a watch, some- times mounted upon a little stand like a miniature ciborium. From the resemblance in size and shape the word pyx is

PlX

Copper with Enamel, French, XIII Centurj

also used to denote the small silver vessel or custode in which the Sacred Host is commonly kept in the Tabernacle, that it may be transferred thence to the monstrance when the Blessed Sacra- ment is exposed for the service of Benediction. In the Middle Ages pyxes for carrj-ing the Eucharist to the sick were not unfrequently made of ivory. In spite of synodal decrees it is to be feared that there were Pvx many churches

V Century both in medieval

and later times which preserved no proper pyx for taking Viaticum to the sick. In these cases the custom seems to have prevailed, even if it was not officially tolerated, of carrying the Host wrapped in a corporal in a burse which was sus- pended round the priest's neck or even of placing it between the leaves of a breviary.

The ' ' pyx-cover ", or " pyx- cloth", of which we some- times read in medieval in- ventories, was a veil which hung over the pyx as it was suspended above the altar, and it was consequent l.v a cloth of considerable size. At the present day the pyx when carried secretly to the sick, as is the case in most Protest- ant and many Catholic coun- tries, is generally carried in a burse or pyx-bag, i. e. a silken bag suspended round the priest's neck within which the pyx is wrapped in a di- minutive corporal used for ^^^ cloth that purpose.

CoRBLET, Hisloire du Sacrement de VEucharistie (Paris. 1885), L 379-90; Otte, Handbuch der kirchlichen Kunst-Archdolofne (I^ipzig, 1883). L 236-40; Rohault de fleury. La Messe, V (Paris, 1887), 57-94. with plates; Bumpus. Dictionary of Ec- clesiastical Terms (London, 1910), pp. 251-252.

Herbert Thurston.