Andrew McGowan, Episcopal Divinity School.
The African Eucharist
The details of eucharistic meals in the Christian communities of Roman Africa prior to the time of Augustine can be reconstructed only with difficulty.(1)
In the past, the assumption of an "absolutely invariable" unity of structure (and other features) in "every eucharistic rite known to us throughout antiquity from the Euphrates to Gaul" tended to mean that liturgical historians harmonized by attributing customs from one place and time to another.(2)
While there is every reason to assume interaction between different centers or communities in terms of ritual as in theology, it now seems unwise to assume uniformity of practice.(3)
There are perhaps just three significant items or sets of literary evidence for the eucharist in Carthage up to and including the time of Cyprian: first, scattered references in the writings of Tertullian; second (and somewhat marginally), allusions to ritual meals in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas; and third, the writings of Cyprian, most notably Letter 63, which is the longest discussion of the conduct and significance of the eucharistic meal from any source known up to that time.(4)
It is therefore striking that each of these three seems to raise the question of the appropriate food and drink of the Christian ritual meal. Tertullian is at least squeamish about the use of wine; Perpetua's famous vision of a shepherd involves the eating of a curious sacramental cheese or curd; and Cyprian inveighs against theologically-orthodox colleagues who tolerate, or themselves practice, the use of water alone in the eucharistic cup. This evidence might encourage us to ask whether even such an apparently fundamental aspect of the eucharist as the meal-elements themselves might not have been entirely settled in Africa until Cyprian's time or afterwards.
In the first part of this paper I will present the evidence for avoidance
of wine in Carthage in the late second to mid-third centuries, and in the
second part attempt to interpret it, giving more detailed attention to
the different positions of Tertullian and Cyprian on this issue and their
respective thoughts about sacrifice. I will argue that this liturgical
detail and that theological issue are linked, rather more closely than
might otherwise be thought, not only to one another but to the construction
of power relations in these communities and in the wider society.(5)
Tertullian on the Eucharist
The eucharistic meal gathering in Tertullian's time had the semblance of a banquet; it was the cena domini (De Spect. 13) or convivium dei (Ad Uxor. 2.8). From the Apology (c.197) it is clear enough that in the communities with which he was then most familiar and wished to defend, wine was drunk, but in modest quantities (Apol. 39). Even at this stage, however, Tertullian seems to believe that abstinence is better. In the 'second' book of De Cultu Feminarum (probably not much later than the Apology),(6)
Tertullian presents avoidance of meat and wine as highly desirable if not universally acknowledged or practiced: "Are there not some who prohibit to themselves the very creature of God, abstaining from wine and animal food, the enjoyments of which border upon no peril or solicitude; but they sacrifice to God the humility of their soul even in the chastened use of food?" (De Cult. Fem. II.9.7)
There is, however, an apparent shift in Tertullian's thinking and practice as he came to be influenced by Montanism. In the Adversus Marcionem, written over a period of years but redacted in its known form in about 207/8,(7)
Tertullian seems quite uncomfortable or at least ambivalent about the use of wine. One apparent indication that this concern extends across the (anachronistic) distinction between ritual and other meals is the absence of any reference to use of wine in his attack on Marcionite eucharistic practice:
Indeed, up to the present time, [Marcion]
has not disdained the water which the creator made wherewith he washes
his people; nor the oil with which he anoints them; nor that union of honey
and milk wherewithal he gives them the nourishment of children; nor the
bread by which he represents his own proper body, thus requiring in his
very sacraments the "beggarly elements" of the Creator (Adv. Marc.
1.14.3).
If this is interesting as implicit evidence for Marcionite refusal of wine, eucharistic and otherwise (cf. Epiphanius, Pan. 42.3.3), it also seems surprising that Tertullian would not point the absence of wine out more clearly as a deviation. Looking ahead to the uncompromising position taken in De Ieiunio contra psychicos (c. 212) one can infer, I think, that Tertullian was already unwilling to engage in an argument for the drinking of wine, whether in ritual or otherwise.
Later in Adversus Marcionem (4.40) Tertullian does refer obliquely to the use of wine at Jesus' last supper---but not at the Christian eucharist. In this passage the issue is incarnation rather than 'real presence'; Jesus' eucharistic words concerning body and blood are taken to be guarantors of the literal truth of Jesus' corporeality, and wine itself is not actually mentioned in direct connection even with the meal of Jesus: "he likewise, when mentioning the cup and making the new testament to be sealed 'in his blood,' affirms the reality of his body. For no blood can belong to a body which is not of flesh" (4.40.4). Tertullian does here introduce imagery concerning grapes and wine (in the Hebrew Bible), but in order to reinforce this point about blood as guarantor of Jesus' corporeality, rather than as anything to do with the appropriate elements of a contemporary meal: wine, he says, is used as a figure for blood. A literary, rather than ritual, interpretation of biblical wine imagery is expanded upon:
Much more clearly still does the Book of
Genesis foretell this, when (in the blessing of Judah, out of whose tribe
Christ was to come according to the flesh) it even then delineated Christ
in the person of the patriarch, saying, "He washed his garments in wine,
and his clothes in the blood of grapes"---in his garments and clothes the
prophecy pointed out his flesh, and his blood in wine, who then (by the
patriarch) used the figure of wine to describe his blood (4.40.6).
In De Ieiunio Tertullian of course comes out more clearly against wine-drinking. The modest banquets he defended in the Apology are not hard to see behind his fulminations about the indulgence of the psychics (De Ieiun. 12). While he insists that Montanist fasts and xerophagies are temporary, contrary to psychic allegations (15.1), Tertullian is clearly more interested in defending the total abstinence of which the New Prophecy is accused (cf. 1.4), and attacking the profligate alternatives, than in refuting the factual basis of the charge.
This already leaves us with a fair amount of circumstantial evidence for two groups or tendencies in African Christianity who did not use wine in their eucharistic meals, i.e., Marcionites and Montanists. The latter are the more concretely attested in Tertullian's work and probably also the more likely to be influential among other Christians, given the likelihood that in this case clear divisions of orthodoxy and heresy might not have been as absolute as Tertullian's Montanist rhetoric sometimes implies.
These were far from alone. Christians elsewhere who used water in the eucharistic cup, or no cup at all, were rather more in number and variety than has generally been acknowledged. They also tended to abstain from all meat; this seems to be true of both the Marcionite and the Montanist tendencies (De Ieiun. 15; Hippolytus, Ref. 8.19) documented in African Christianity. Groups as theologically diverse as Ebionites, possibly some Valentinian Gnostics, and other more orthodox Christians (comparable to Cyprian's implicit addressees; see below) may have had similar practices. The various apocryphal Acts and the Pseudo-Clementine corpus also manifest versions of this type of asceticism.(8)
While capable of somewhat different use in different contexts, the pattern of abstinence from meat and wine was drawn from existing Jewish and pagan dietary regimens in which bread and water were, in effect, used as symbolic opposites of the pagan "cuisine of sacrifice".(9)
Clearer than any supposed links with kosher concerns as such, or with the dietary expression of sexual or other bodily "ascetic" self-preoccupation, are the social implications of such rejection: the creation of a separate social and cultural space free from the taint of pagan sacrifice, and hence potentially from the rule of sanctioned violence inherent in sacrificial symbolism.(10)
Avoidance of meat and wine arguably has,
in all these instances, primarily a negative meaning, but allows for the
creation of new forms of dietary and other ritual practice, as well as
of different forms of power. Roman Africa is one milieu where the specific
meaning of such rejection involves the self-understanding of the Christian
community vis-a-vis sacrifice and relations with the wider society. It
seems more than coincidental, in fact, that these issues of eucharistic
diet are so prominent in a setting where Christian identity was so clearly
marked by conflict with the wider society.
Meals of the Martyrs: Perpetua and Felicitas
The account of the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companions at Carthage in 202 contains only allusions to the eucharistic meal of her community, but invokes a world of culinary signification relevant also to understanding Tertullian's position on the use of wine. The central image for both purposes is the garden into which Perpetua ascends in her first dream or vision:
And I went up, and saw a vast expanse of
garden, and in the midst a man sitting with white hair, in the dress of
a shepherd, a tall man, milking sheep; and round about were many thousands
clad in white. And he raised his head and looked upon me, and said: 'You
have well come, my child.' And he called me, and gave me a morsel of the
cheese he was milking and I received it in my joined hands, and ate; and
all they that stood around said 'Amen.' And at the sound of the word I
woke, still eating something sweet (Pass. Perp. 4.9-10).(11)
The curious sacramental use of cheese and the obvious fact of Montanist influence in Carthage could together suggest a link with the later and supposedly Montanist Artotyritai or "bread-and-cheesers" who, according to Epiphanius of Salamis (Pan. 49.1.1), used these elements in their eucharistic meals. The connection is probably subtler than this; quite apart from doubts about the Montanist connections of the Artotyritai, neither the dream nor the divisions in Carthaginian Christian communities are clear enough to warrant a straightforward identification of this sort. It is unlikely that the community into which Perpetua had recently been baptized practiced a regular eucharistic meal involving cheese or curd, although from Tertullian's evidence the baptismal ritual in Carthage seems to have included reception of a mixture of milk and honey.
In any case, both the concrete and the visionary meals involve a sort of idyllic symbolism which contrasts strongly with the violence of the social order depicted in the narrative, and which appears even in Perpetua's dream as "swords, lances, hooks, daggers" obstructing the way to the realm of heavenly peace. The 'vegetarian' imagery of the dream (cf. the prized apples of Pass. Perp. 10) encourages the possibility of influence, broadly speaking, from the same 'bread-and-water tradition' of ritual resistance to sacrificial food.
While Perpetua is silent about wine, whether in dreamed paradise or dingy prison, it is tempting to suggest (though impossible to prove) that she and her companions would not have drunk it.(12)
In pagan antiquity wine seems to have been a sort of correlate to meat, as sacral drink to sacral food. Ascetic and philosophical pagans who refused meat also tended to avoid wine, not necessarily because of physiological concerns or belief in ensoulment of animals, but because of the strong symbolic association with the problematic practice of sacrifice (Philostratus, Vita Apoll. 2.35-7; cf. 2.6-7; Lucian, Fug. 14) While meat was often sacrificed and thus maintained a numinous quality even in later domestic use, wine could or even had to be sacralized on the spot. Libation was demanded at banquets, and offering wine was a simpler alternative to offering animals, not least for testing willingness to sacrifice (Pliny, Ep. 10.96).(13)
Wine is thus not necessarily beside the point for Perpetua, given the comparison between appropriate and inappropriate eating and drinking for the martyrs---themselves of course (all but) inappropriately eaten in the end. Perpetua does explicitly contrast the conduct of the traditional cena libera, a last banquet for the condemned, with the actual meal of the prisoners before their ordeal in the arena: "Moreover, on the day before the games when they celebrated that last supper, called the "free banquet," not as a "banquet" but, so far as they could make it so, an agape..." (17.1).
Whether this means that use of wine was merely restrained or altogether absent among the Carthaginian confessors, three other prison accounts which do mention appropriate food and drink make for interesting comparison. In the slightly earlier story of the martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, "a certain Alcibiades, who was one of them, led a very austere life, partaking of nothing whatever but bread and water" (Eusebius, H.E. 5.3.1). Compare Tertullian's scathing condemnation of psychic martyr Pristinus, dying ignobly "stuffed as he had long been, thanks to the facilities afforded by the 'free custody'" and "premedicated with drugged wine as an antidote" (De Ieiun. 12). Perpetua and her companions seem more readily to be compared with the former. Third, and closer in time to Cyprian, is the case of the martyr Pionius of Smyrna, who is said to have partaken of "holy bread, and water" (Mart. Pion. 3.1) before his arrest.(14)
These examples all contribute to the sense that avoidance of wine might have been especially important in times of persecution, when sacrifice was the mark of the lapsed.
It is certain that others
regarded wine as part of the cuisine of sacrifice which the Christian,
and especially the martyr, should view with suspicion; and it is possible
or even likely that this concern extended to Perpetua and her companions.
Having rejected sacrificial eating and drinking in literal terms (Pass.
Perp. 5-6), Perpetua and her companions also clearly reject the order
of cosmos and polis implied therein. Perpetua's account and
the edited narrative in which it is placed present the martyr Church as
living in anticipation of a new order characterized by peace, in which
beasts would be benign rather than murderous, milk rather than meat their
contribution to diet, and bloodshed altogether absent.
Cyprian
Cyprian's sense of continuity with the earlier African martyrs, and also with Tertullian despite his Montanist leanings, are well-enough known. Given the material just discussed, it is now perhaps a little more surprising than otherwise to find the leader of the Church of the martyrs in Carthage fifty years later, no less subject to the institutional violence of imperial power, advocating a quite different ritual practice and articulating a very different sacrificial theory with it.
Cyprian attacks the use of water alone in the eucharistic cup in his letter to Caecilius (Ep. 63). Often quickly connected with heresiological references to Christians elsewhere known as Aquarii, this letter nevertheless suggests a concern rather closer to home and more serious than would be adequately covered in the dismissal of a "cranky sect".(15)
The targets of Cyprian's critique are numerous Catholic bishops, and the lengthy argument implies that it was necessary to do more than state the sacramentally-obvious to fix the problem. The issue seems to be real in areas near, but not within, those where he and Caecilius (bishop of Biltha, apparently a respected and senior figure) had direct authority, and the letter seems intended to have had a sort of encyclical use.(16)
Moving through a rather wild series of exegetically-based points,(17)
Cyprian may well be developing his own typological connections between Old Testament references to wine (Gen 9:20; 14:18; 49:11; Prov 9:1-5; Isa 63:2-6), but when dealing with water he seems likely also to be addressing interpretive contributions made by his opponents. He would hardly, for instance, have introduced the problematic prophetic references to saving water in the desert (Isa 43:20; 48:21) without some provocation. While the lack of explicit reference to others' arguments urges caution in exaggerating their sophistication, it does seem likely that Cyprian is attacking an alternative ritual tradition well-enough developed to have looked at its own practice through the lens of scripture.
There are also indications in Cyprian's argument that this practice of water-drinking is indeed traditional, i.e., that for its supporters it is not an innovation but the maintenance of an authorized practice. This is most evident in 63.14, where a series of statements reflects the apparent antiquity of the water-cup. First, Cyprian argues against the custom of those who "in the past" (in praeteritum) thought water alone should be offered (63.14.1). Then the unique filiation of Christ is presented as making his authority (which Cyprian of course claims for the mixed wine-cup) supersede that of any others, whoever they might be: "we ought not to follow what someone else before us (quid alius ante nos) thought was to be done, but what Christ, the one who is before all, did first" (63.14.2). When Cyprian muses on the necessity of asking about the identity of these others (quaerendum est enim ipsi quem sint secuti), one wonders whether this is a rhetorical question (63.14.1). Tertullian and his Montanist associates might have come readily to mind.
At one point Cyprian does seem to try and enter more sympathetically the viewpoint of those he criticizes:
It may be that some feel apprehensive at
our morning sacrifices that if they taste wine they may exhale the smell
of the blood of Christ. That is the sort of thinking which causes our brethren
to become reluctant to share even in Christ's sufferings in times of persecution,
by thus learning in making their oblations to be ashamed of the blood that
Christ has shed himself...How, I ask then, can we shed our blood for Christ's
sake, if we blush for shame to drink Christ's own blood? (63.15.2)
Cyprian may seem here to depict the water-drinkers as squeamish and socially accommodating.(18)
He does, however, use the same quip concerning Christ's blood and that of the potential martyr at Epp. 57.2 and 58.1, and there are similar statements elsewhere which reflect Cyprian's belief in the strengthening power of the sacred meal; that is to say, this statement need not imply observed reticence to martyrdom on the part of the water-drinkers, but merely predicts the outcome of such eucharistic abstinence.
In the following section Cyprian hypothesizes that propriety, rather than fear of discovery, may lead some who would have drunk it at banquets to refuse wine at a morning gathering of the Church, but would have done so happily enough in the evening (63.16). While it is theoretically possible that discretion is now the main factor behind such objections to eucharistic drinking, this does not quite seem to fit with the earlier African evidence, where wine is the mark of moderation or indeed of "psychic" decadence. Water-drinking, on the other hand, seems to have been characteristically rigorist; if indeed there was anxiety about the cup, the other cases of eucharistic water-drinking in Africa and elsewhere indicate there were probably better things to worry about than good social form.(19)
In fact, if Cyprian is not just guessing
at the reason for abstinence, then either he reflects a significant shift
in the community and its thinking since Tertullian and Perpetua, or else
his rhetoric seeks to achieve something of a turning of the tables on the
refusers of wine.
Cyprian, Tertullian and Sacrifice
We move then to the change that seems to have taken place between Tertullian's and Perpetua's time and that of Cyprian. The two male writers are more directly comparable, generically at least. Tertullian's position was of course personally as well as theologically somewhat different from Cyprian's, and some caution could be urged, for this and other reasons, before tracing a sort of evolutionary development between the two. Perpetua's journal provides, however, some confirmation that resistance to sacrificial food and drink was not likely to have been idiosyncratic on Tertullian's part at that earlier point.
Tertullian does seem to provide a link of sorts between earlier and later discussions of Christian ritual and ministry in relation to sacrifice. He is apparently the first Christian writer, for instance, to use vocabulary drawn from sacrificial cultus to describe ordained Church leaders in something approaching a descriptive or straightforward sense, rather than a clearly metaphorical one.(20)
His understanding of power within the Church emphasizes the charismatic without disposing of the institutional.(21)
A presbyter or bishop can be sacerdos or antistes (De Corona 3.2) for Tertullian; as in other writers of the period however, most positive uses of such words apply to the Levitical priesthood (De Ex. Cast. 7 etc.) and to that of Christ (Adv. Marc. 5.9.9), and believers as a group are just as much "priests" in this sense as are the elders (De Ieiun. 11.4). While Christ can safely be described as pontifex (Adv. Marc. 4.13.4, 5.35.7 etc.), Tertullian uses the term of Christian leaders only with scorn, presumably inferring excessive closeness to pagan mores as well as episcopal pretentiousness (De Pud. 1.6, Adv. Val. 37.1).(22)
While Tertullian uses sacrificial language in relation to the liturgy in a general sense, and even on occasion to the eucharistic assembly (De Orat. 19), it is just as readily applied to prayer in general (De Ex. Cast. 11). Crucially, no particular connection is made between eucharistic presidency and sacrificial action.(23)
Moreover, Tertullian has a marked anti-sacrificial side, more clearly manifested in polemical works but hardly to be minimized as merely rhetorical. Christians, he says, "do not offer sacrifice to the gods," emphasizing the action prohibited as much as its object (De Spect. 13) In the Adversus Judaeos (5) Tertullian draws radical contrasts between the material sacrifices of the old dispensation, including the offerings of flour as much as of animals, and the spiritual ones of the new. While he uses the language of "offering" in general terms, the concrete eucharistic elements are not themselves presented as analogues of Israelite sacrificial offerings, let alone of pagan ones.(24) Tertullian is certainly as concerned to demonstrate the difference between Christian practice on the one hand and sacrifice as generally understood on the other, as to link the two.
Thus while Tertullian accepts the possibility of using
sacrificial language to refer to the Church and its worship in a general
sense, he makes little or nothing of analogues between specific persons
or rituals in the Church and those in some more obviously sacrificial context,
Jewish or pagan. This development is left to Cyprian, and it is the issue
of using wine which gives rise to his most lengthy and specific arguments
on this matter.
Cyprian and Sacrifice
The importance of sacrifice in Cyprian's thought and especially in his understanding of the eucharist is well-enough recognized; but the degree of innovation involved in his formulations has arguably been somewhat underestimated. If we accept the indications of Tertullian's influence on Cyprian and his theology, what we have briefly seen of the earlier writer's sacrificial terminology indicates that Cyprian does not begin in a vacuum; but Cyprian's appropriation of numerous specific sacrificial features and their direct correlation with aspects of Christian ritual and other forms of practice seems quite unique up to this point.
The thickness of sacrificial language in Letter 63 is very marked and well-recognized. Missing from many discussions of the letter however, is recognition of the symbolic centrality of wine, not only in the orthodox practice of the eucharist, but in Greco-Roman sacrifice generally. The connection between Cyprian's theology of eucharist and Church and the water/wine issue is in fact often treated as fairly meaningless, and the supposedly marginal or bizarre issue of eucharistic water-drinking has been thought merely to provide Cyprian with the quirky occasion for a doctrinal treatise.(25)
In fact Cyprian's insistence on the use of wine in the eucharist has, I suggest, this association between wine and sacrifice as a fundamental assumption, and hence the 'Aquarian' context is more than a disposable detail in his exposition.(26)
The precise problem of the offering of water instead of wine is thus the very apt occasion for this exposition of a thoroughly sacrificial understanding not only of Christian prayer or worship, or even of the eucharist itself in particular, but specifically of the theological basis for ritual action and of the role of the bishop.
In Letter 63, Cyprian's insistence on wine leads him to emphasize two points in addition to the exegetical typologies mentioned earlier, namely the symbolic connection between eucharistic wine and the blood of Christ, and the fact that wine was part of the substance of the rite as founded. Both of these issues have clear links with sacrificial practice.
In the first case, the visual connection between wine and blood reinforces the presentation of Jesus as sacrificial victim, whose blood as well as flesh was significant (63.2, 9, 13). While this seems to stem from the Gospel and Pauline accounts of the 'words of institution' themselves, the contents of the cup are not actually referred to there. Cyprian emphasizes the contents in such a way as to imply the necessity of wine for a sacrificial meal.
Second, Cyprian strongly emphasizes the necessity of following the exact prescription given by Jesus as "founder and teacher of this sacrifice" (63.1). The notion of dominical institution is perhaps so well-known that it threatens to overshadow the similarities with other cases of sacrificial institution and the importance of the role of auctor. Temples and shrines were often understood to manifest the continuation of a founder's will for sacrifice to be offered. Cyprian presents the story of the Last Supper as a 'cult legend' which undergirds the precise terms of the memorial banquet, a Greco-Roman commonplace.(27)
Fidelity to the tradition is not only a matter of moral obedience to Jesus, but of ritual propriety and adherence to the founder's will; on this the validity of a sacrifice depended.(28)
Cyprian's willingness to seek closer connections between the eucharist and specific features expected of a sacrifice extend to, and indeed focus on, the role of the sacrificing priest. It has been noted often that his emphasis on the bishop as sacerdos is very strong, and once again unique up to this point.(29)
This has less to do with the link between eucharistic presidency and ordination that might be assumed; this, after all, was not the controversy at hand. Cyprian is not interested in presenting presbyters as priests, but in constructing the role of bishop in terms, once again, of the generalized understanding of sacrifice and the role of priest in society. As sacerdos of the Christian community, Cyprian's bishop occupies a place analogous to that of the various priests of Roman religion; not religious specialists as such, but civic leaders enacting the ritual aspect of life together. Thus Cyprian can elsewhere speak of the Christian community in Carthage as plebs or populus, and their election of the bishop as suffragium.(30)
Cyprian's conversion could therefore almost be seen as leading him into
a parallel universe, whose structure was fundamentally similar to that
of the pagan world. He carried with him the expectations of an honestior,
and had not so much rejected as transmuted ambitio saeculi. These
baptized values were now contending with the traditional Romano-African
religious world-view in claiming to be the real form of the social and
cosmic order. In background he may not have been so unlike Tertullian or
Perpetua; each of these, however, seems to reflect something of the specific
interaction of Church and society in their own time.
Conclusions
Liturgies offer more for the understanding of ancient Christianity than merely the explicit theology of liturgical texts. The examination of a range of issues, from times and places of ritual acts through to the presence and ordering of persons and objects, may contribute to a greater sense of the meanings and relationships created and conveyed in communities which formed or adopted the practices.(31)
There is still perhaps a tendency to consider ritual action as "metaphorical" with regard to belief, or in terms of a dichotomy between thought and action, but ritual arguably defies or denies such ready resolution.(32)
In particular, as Catherine Bell has put it, ritualization may need to be understood as a strategy for the construction of power relationships, rather than as a mere symbolic key to unlocking what is "real".(33)
These liturgical issues of appropriate food and drink certainly seem linked with power beyond symbolic expression. Tertullian, Perpetua and Cyprian all give voice to concern that participation in ritual meals would enact power, for good or ill. They do so, however, from markedly different starting points, despite their affinities. Tertullian's and Perpetua's places as lay persons and Cyprian's as a bishop arguably point in different directions as far as sacrifice and power are concerned, but there have also been changes in the time between. The emphatic exposition of episcopal authority for which Cyprian is famous reflects not (just) timeless episcopal self-interest, but the growth of the Carthaginian Christian Church and the emergence of structures of authority within it which were possibly unique, as it was recently put, in the Roman world at the same time as increasingly reflecting very Roman notions of power.(34)
Cyprian's sacrificial Christianity begins to look like an official religion-in-waiting.
While Cyprian and Tertullian both experienced conflict with pagan Roman
authority, and the Carthaginian Church may have identified itself in terms
of persecution right throughout this period, the specific ways in which
the African Christians related these experiences to the practice and theory
of sacrifice seem to have changed markedly. For Tertullian (and perhaps
even more for Perpetua) the 'otherness' of Christianity was about structure
as well as specifics; sacrifice was at best an ambivalent notion to apply
to Christian life and ritual, and at worst something entirely to be rejected.
Cyprian, however, was a sacrificial enthusiast, who could engage with heretics
and pagans alike on their terms; the issue was no longer the propriety
of sacrifice as such, but rather which was the right sacrifice to offer,
and which the right priest to do so.(35)
1 On that more readily-accessible period, see W. C. Bishop, "The African Rite," Journal of Theological Studies 13 (1912) 250-77; K. Gamber, "Ordo Missae Africanae: Der nordafricanische Messritus zur Zeit des hl. Augustinus," Römische Quartalschrift 64 (1969) 139-53; E. J. Kilmartin, "Early African Legislation concerning Liturgical Prayer," Ephemerides Liturgicae 99 (1985) 105-27.
2 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy 48.
3. 3 See Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
4 See the discussion of date by Graham Clarke, The Letters of St Cyprian of Carthage (ACW 46; New York: Newman, 1986) 3.287-8. I have made free but not exclusive use of Clarke's translation of Letter 63.
5 The earlier portions of this paper develop material in the process of publication, in Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Clarendon, forthcoming). The 'bread-and-water' eucharistic tradition is discussed there at length. This book is based on "To Gather the Fragments: The Social Significance of Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals," Ph.D diss., University of Notre Dame, 1996.
6. 6 See T. D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Rev. ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) 51, 53.
7 Barnes, Tertullian 326-8.
8 See Ascetic Eucharists, especially chapters 4-6.
9 See especially Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
10. 10 See Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
11 Adapted from Herbert Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) 111-13.
12 Here as elsewhere (cf. 'Apostolic Tradition' 6), the curd or cheese might better be understood as a sort of transmuted (milk) drink, rather than as an additional food. See further Ascetic Eucharists Ch.3.
13 See further Ascetic Eucharists Ch. 2.
14. 14 On the date, see T. D. Barnes, 'Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum', JTS n.s. 19 (1968) 509-31, especially 529-31.
15 G. G. Willis, "St Cyprian and the Mixed Chalice," Downside Review 100 (1982) 110.
16 Clarke, Letters of St Cyprian 291.
17 E. C. Benson comments that the letter is characterized by a "wildness of Biblical interpretations and...looseness of logic.."; Cyprian: His Life; His Times; His Work (London: Macmillan, 1897) 291.
18 That position is more explicit (if not exactly clearer!) in a awkwardly-glossed version of the text, where the words "that if they taste wine they may exhale the smell of the blood of Christ" have become "to offer wine, in case during the morning through the taste of wine its smell be recognized by its fragrant odor, and they are known to be Christians, since we commemorate the blood of Christ in an offering of wine." Compared with this version, the "squeamishness" interpretation of shorter text seems less clear.
19 Note in particular the case of the thoroughly-orthodox Pionius, on which see Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) 460-90.
20 David Rankin, Tertullian and the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 163.
21 Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 279; J. E. Merdinger, Rome and the African Church in the Time of Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 28-35.
22 Rankin, Tertullian and the Church 164-5.
23 John D. Laurance, 'Priest' as Type of Christ: The Leader of the Eucharist in Salvation History According to Cyprian of Carthage (New York: Peter Lang, 1984) 195.
24 See V. Saxer, "Tertullian," The Eucharist of the Early Christians (R. Johanny ed.; New York: Pueblo, 1978) 132-55. I believe Saxer goes (much) too far in saying that, for Tertullian, Christians "offer God the Christ who is present in the bread" (149) and similarly. The language of offering or oblation is common enough in Tertullian but generalized, not applied to the bread as such (let alone to Christ in the bread).
25 Raymond Johanny, "Cyprian," The Eucharist of the Early Christians 160-4.
26 Thus while Nancy Jay comments (Throughout Your Generations Forever 166 n.10) that in the context of a dispute about wine Cyprian's argument seems "less radical", recognition of the place of wine in sacrifice shows how (very) radical it was.
27 See Charles A. Kennedy, "The Cult of the Dead in Corinth," Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Marvin H. Pope (Guilford, Conn.; Four Quarters, 1987) 227-36.
28 A similar point seems to apply to the controversy with Stephen, where Christ is emphasized as origo of baptism; see Merdinger, Rome and the African Church 36-49.
29 See Laurance, 'Priest' as Type of Christ 195-8.
30 Rives, Religion and Authority 288-91.
31 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford, 1992) 3.
32 See Jack Goody in Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 29-33, commenting on the work of Mary Douglas. Douglas has contributed significantly to the analysis of meals, among other areas; see especially
33 Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice 197.
34 Rives, Religion and Authority 307-9; see also 251-61.
35 The story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram seems to have been a favorite of Cyprian's for addressing the question of authority; their crime was to have offered unauthorized sacrifice (Epp. 64, 67, 72 etc.).