Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/800

 EXTREME

720

EXTREME

to the belief that its administration was reserved to the priests.

St. Apliraates, "the Persian Sage", though he wrote (336-3-15) after Nicaea, may be counted as an Ante- Nicene witness, since he hved outside the limits of the empire and remained in ignorance of the Arian strife. Writing of the various uses of holy oil, this Father says that it contains the sign " of the sacrament of life by which Christians [in baptism], priests [in ordination], kings, and prophets are made perfect; [it] illuminates darkness [in confirmation], anoints the sick, and by its secret sacrament restores penitents" (Demonstratio xxiii, 3, in Graffin, "Patrol. Syriaca", vol. I, p. Iv). It is hardly possible to question the allusion here to the Jacobean rite, which was therefore in regular use in the remote Persian Church at the beginning of the fourth century. Its mention side by side with other unctions that are not sacramental in the strict sense is characteristic of the period, and merely shows that the strict definition of a sacrament had not been for- mulated. As being virtually Ante-Nicene we may give also the witness of the collection of liturgical prayers known as the " Sacramentary of Serapion". (Sera- pion was Bishop of Thmuis in the Nile Delta and the friend of St. Athanasius.) The seventeenth prayer is a lengthy form for consecrating the oil of the sick, in the course of which God is besought to bestow upon the oil a supernatural efficacy "for good grace and remis- sion of sins, for a medicine of life and salvation, for health and soundness of soul, body, spirit, for perfect strengthening". Here we have not only the recogni- tion in plain terms of spiritual effects from the unction but the special mention of grace and the remission of sins. Mr. Puller tries to explain away several of these expressions, but he has no refuge from the force of the words "for good grace and remission of sins" but to hold that they must be a later addition to the original text.

(b) The Great Patristic Age: Fourth to Seventh Century. — References to extreme unction in this period are much more abundant and prove beyond doubt the universal use of the Jacoljean unction in every part of the Church. Some testimonies, moreover, refer spe- cifically to one or more of the several ends and effects of the sacrament, as the cure or alleviation of bodily sickness and the remission of sins, while some may be said to anticipate pretty clearly the definition of ex- treme unction as a sacrament in the strict sense. As illustrating the universal use of the Jacobean unction, we may cite in the first place St. Ephraem Sjtus (d. 373), who in his forty-sLxth polemical sermon (Opera, Rome, 1740, vol. II, p. 541), addressing the sick person to whom the priests minister, says: " They pray over thee; one blows on thee; another seals thee." The "sealing" here undoubtedly means "anointing with the sign of the cross", and the ref- erence to St. James is clear [see Bickell, Carinina Nisibena, Leipzig, 1S66, pp. 223, 4, note, and the other passage (seventy-third carmen) there discussed]. Next we would call attention to the witness of an ancient Ordo compiled, it is believed, in Greek before the middle of the fourth century, but which is pre- served only in a fragmentary Latin version made be- fore the end of the fifth century and recently discov- ered at Verona (" Didascali^ Apostolorum " in " Frag- menta Veronensia", ed. Hauler, Leipzig, 1900), and in an Ethiopic version. This Ordo in both versions con- tains a form for consecrating the oil for the Jacobean rite, the Latin praying for "the strengthening and healing" of those who use it, and the Ethiopic for their " strengthening and sanctification ". Mr. Puller, who gives and discusses both versions (op. cit., p. 104 sq.), is once more obliged to postulate a corruption of the Ethiopic version because of the reference to sanc- tification. But may not the "strengthening" spoken of as distinct from " healing" be spiritual rather than corporal? Likewise the "Testamentum Domini",

compiled in Greek about the year 400 or earlier, and preserved in SjTiac (published by Rahmani), and in Ethiopic and Arabic versions (still in MSS.) contains a form for consecrating the oil of the sick, in which, besides bodily healing, the sanctifying power of the oil as applied to penitents is referred to (see "The Testa- ment of Our Lord ", tr. Cooper and Maclean, 1902, pp. 77, 78). From these instances it appears that Sera- pion's Sacramentary was not without parallels during this period.

In St. Augustine's "Speculum de Scriptura" (an. 427; in P. L.. XXXIV, 8S7-1040), which is made up almost entirely of Scriptural texts, without comment by the compiler, and is intended as a handy manual of Christian piety, doctrinal and practical, the injunction of St. James regarding the prayer-unction of the sick is quoted. This shows that the rite was a common- place in the Christian practice of that age; and we are told by Possidius, in his "Life of Augustine" (c. xxvii, in P. L., XXXII, 56), that the saint himself " followed the rule laid down by the Apostle that he should visit only orphans and widows in their tribulation (James, i, 27), and that if he happened to be asked by the sick to pray to the Lord for them and impose hands on them, he did so without delay ". We have seen Origen refer to the Jacobean rite as an "imposition of hands", and this title survived to a very late period in the Church of .St. Ambrose, who was himself an ardent student of Origen and from whom St. Augustine very likely borrowed it (see Magistretti, "Manuale Am- brosianum ex Codice SKC. XI ", etc., 1905, vol. I, p. 79 sq., 94 sq., 147 sq., where three different Ordines of the eleventh and thirteenth centuries have as title for the office of extreme unction, impositio 7nanuu)n super in- firmum). It is fair, then, to conclude from the biog- rapher's statement that, when called upon to do so, St. Augustine himself used to administer the Jacobean unction to the sick. This would be exactly on the lines laid down by Augustine's contemporary. Pope Innocent I (see below). St. Ambrose himself, writing against the Novatians (De Pcenit., VIII, in P. L., XVI, 477), asks: " Why therefore do you lay on hands and believe it to be an effect of the blessing [benedic- tionis opus] if any of the sick happen to recover? . . . Why do you baptize, if sins cannot be remitted by men? " 'The coupling of this lajdng-on of hands with baptism and the use of both as argxunents in favour of penance, shows that there is question not of mere charismatic healing by a simple blessing, but of a rite which, like baptism, was in regular use among the Novatians, and which can only have been the unction of St. James. St. Athanasius, in his encvclical letter of 341 (P. G., XXV, 234), complaining of the evils to religion caused by the intrusion of the Arian Bishop Gregory, mentions among other abuses that many catechumens were left to die without baptism and that many sick and dying Christians had to choose the hard alternative of being deprived of priestly ministrations — " which they considered a more terrible calamity than the disease itself" — rather than allow " the hands of the Arians to be laid on their heads". Here again we are justified in seeing a reference to extreme unc- tion as an ordinary Christian practice, and a proof of the value which the faithful attached to the rite. Cassiodorus (d. about 570) thus paraphrases the in- junction of St. James (Complexiones in Epp. Aposto- lorum, in P. L., LXX, 13S0): "a priest is to be called in, who by the prayer of faith [oratione fidei] and the unction of the holy oil which he imparts will save him who is afflicted [by a serious injury or by sickness]."

To these testimonies may be added many instances of the use of extreme unction recorded in the lives of the saints. See, e. g., the lives of St. Leobinus (d. about 550; Acta SS., 14 March, p. 348), St. Tresanus (ibid., 7 Feb., p. 55), St. Eugene (Eoghan), Bishop of Ardsrath (modern Ardstraw, in the Diocese of Derry; d. about 618; ibid., 23 Aug., p. 627). One instance