Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 9.djvu/345

 LITURGY

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LITUBQY

is certainly one. St. Paul's insistence on the form " For ever and ever, Amen" (c/i rods alQvas tQp al'Jbvtov ifi^p. — Rom., xvi, 27; Gal., i, 5; I Tim., i, 17; cf. Heb., xiii, 21; I Pet., i, 11; v, 11; Apoc., i, 6, etc.) seems to argue that it is a liturgical form well known to the Christians whom he addresses, as it was to the Jews. There are other short hymns (Rom., xiii, 1 1-2; Eph., V, 14; I Tim., iii, 16; II Tim., ii, 11-3), which may well be hturgical formulae.

In the Apostolic Fathers the picture of the early Christian Liturgy becomes clearer; we have in them a definite and to some extent homogeneous ritual. But this must be understood. There was certainly no set form of prayers and ceremonies such as we see in our present Missals and Euchologia; still less was anything written down and read from a book. The celebrating bishop spoke freely, liis prayers being to some extent improvised. And yet this improvising was bound by certain rules. In the first place, no one who speaks continually on the same subjects says new things each time. Mo<lem sermons and modern extempore

Erayers show how easily a speaker falls into set forms, ow constantly he repeats what come to be, at least for him, fixed formulaj. Moreover, the dialogue form of prayer that we find in use in the earliest monuments necessarily supposes some consta,nt arrangement. The people answer and echo what the celebrant and the deacons say with suitable exclamations. They could not do so unless they heard more or less the same prayers each time. They heard from the altar such phrases as: "The Lord be with you", or "Lift up your hearts", and it was because they recognized these forms, had heard them often before, that they could answer at once in the way expected.

We find too very early that certain general themes are constant. For insta nee our Lord had given thanks just before Ho spoke the words of institution. So it was understood that every celebrant began the prayer of consecration — the Eucharistic prayer — by thanking God for His various mercies. So we find always what we still have in our modern prefaces — a prayer thanking God for certain favours and graces, that are named, just where that preface comes, shortly before the consecration (Justin, " Apol.," I, xiii, Ixv). An intercession for all kinds of j>eople also occurs very early, as we see from references to it (e. g., Justin, "Apol.," I, xiv, Ixv). In this prayer the various classes of people would naturally be named in more or less the same order. A profession of faith would almost inevitably open that part of the ser\'ice in which only the faithful were allowed to take part (Justin, ''Apol.", I, xiii, Ixi). It could not have been long before the archtype of all Christian prayer — the Our Father — was said publicly in the Liturgy. The moments at which these various prayers were said would very soon become fixed. The people expected them at certain points, there was no reason for chang- ing their order, on the contrary to do so would dis- turb the faithful. One knows too how strong con- servative instinct is in any religion, especially in one that, like Christianity, has always looked back with unliounded reverence to the golden age of the first Fathers. So we must conceive the Liturgy of the first two centuries as made up of somewhat free improvisations on fixed themes in a definite order; and we realize too how naturally under these cir- cumstances the very words used would be repeated — at first no doubt only the salient clauses — till they became fixed forms. The ritual, certainly of the sim- plest kind, would become stereotyped even more easily. The things that had to Ix? done, the bringing up of the bread and wine, the collection of alms and 80 on, even more than the prayers, would l^e done al- ways at the same point. A change here would be even more disturbing than a change in the onier of the prayers. A last consideration to be noted is the tendency

of new Churches to imitate the customs of the oldet" ones. Each new Christian community was formed by joining itself to the bond already formed. The new converts received their first missionaries, their faith and ideas from a mother Church. These mis- sionaries would naturally celebrate the rites as they had seen them done, or as they had done them them- selves in the mother Church. And their converts would imitate them, carry on the same tradition. In- tercourse between the local Churches would furthei accentuate this uniformity among people who were very keenly conscious of forming one body with one Faith, one Baptism, and one Eucharist. It is not then surprising that the allusions to the Liturgy in the first Fathers of various countries, when compared show us a homogeneous rite at any rate in its main outlines, a constant type of ser\'ice, though it was subject to certain local modifications. It would not be surprising if from this common early Liturgy one uniform type had evolved for the wnole Catholic world. We know that that is not the case. The more or less fluid ritual of the first two centuries crys- tallized into different liturgies in East and West; difference of language, the insistence on one point in one place, the greater importance given to another feature elsewhere, brought about our various rites. But there is an obvious unity underlying all the old rites that goes back to the earliest age. The medieval idea that all are derived from one parent rite is not so absunl, if we remember that the parent was not a written or stereot3T>ed Liturgy, but rather a gencsrai type of service.

III. The Liturgy in the First Three Centu- ries. — For the first period we have of course no com- plete description. We must reconstruct whiit we can from the allusions to the Holy Eucharist in the Apostolic Fathers and apologists. Justin Mart3T alone gives us a fairly complete outline of the rite that he knew. The Eucharist described in the "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles'* (most authorities now put the date of this work at the end of the first century) in some ways lies apart from the general development. We have here still the free "prophesying" (x, 7), the Eucharist is still joined to the Agape (x, 1), the refer- ence to the actual consecration is vague. The like- ness between the prayers of thanksgiving (ix-x) and the Jewish forms for blessing bread and wine on the Sabbath (given in the "Berakoth" treatise of the Tahnud; cf. Sabatier, "La Didache", Paris, 1885. p. 99) points obviously to derivation from them. It has been suggested that the rite here described is not our Eucharist at all; others (Paul Drews) think that it is a private Eucharist distinct from the official public rite. On the other hand, it seems clear from the whole account in chapters ix and x that we have here a real Eucharist, and the existence of private cele- brations remains to be proved. The most natural explanation is certainlv tnat of a Eucharist of a very archaic nature, not fully described. At any' rate we have these liturgical points from the book. The " Our Father" is a recognized formula: it is to be said three times every day (viii. 2-3). The Liturgy is a eucharist and a sacrifice to be celebrated by breaking bread and giving thanks on the "Lord's Day" by people who have confessed their sins (xiv, 1). Only the oaptized are admitted to it (ix, 5). The wine is mentioned first, then the broken bread; each has a formula of giving thanks to God for His revelation in Christ with the conclusion: "To thee be glory for ever" (ix, 1, 4). There follows a thanksgiving for various benefits; the creation and our sanctification by Christ are named (x, 1-4); then comes a prayer for tfie Church ending with the form: "Maranatha. Amen"; in it occurs the form: " Hosanna to the God of David" (x, 5-6).

The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (written probably between 90 and lOOj contains an