§ 95. THE SACEAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST. 491
aima, the weeks after Pentecost, after the fourteenth of September, and after the thirteenth of December), which were observed, after Gelasius or Leo the Great, as ordinary penitential seasons of the chirch. The candidates were obligee to prepare themelves for consecration by prayer and fasting.
§ 95. The Sacrament of the Eucharist.
Oomp. the Literature in vol. i. § 55 ; ii. § 69 ; the corresponding sections in the Doctrine Histories and Archaeologies, and the treatises of G. E. Steitz on the historical development of the doctrine of the Lord'a Supper in the Greek church, in Dorner\ "Jahrbiicher fiir Deutsche Theologie," for 1864 and 1865. In part also the liturgical works of Neale, Daniel, etc., cited below (§ 98), and Philip Fkeeman : The Principles of Divine Service. Lond. Part i. 1855, Part ii. 1862. (The author, in the introduction to the second part, states as his object: " To unravel, by means of an historical survey of the ancient belief concerning the Holy Eucharist, viewed as a mystery, and of the later departures from it, the manifold confusions which have grown up around tlie subject, more especially since the fatal epoch of the eleventh century." But the book treats not so much of the doctrine of the Eucharist, as of the ceremony of it, and the eucharistic sacrifice, with special reference to the Anglican church.)
The Eucharist is both a sacrament wherein God conveys to us a certain blessing, and a sacrifice which man of fers to God. As a sacrament, or the communion, it stands at the head of all sacred rites ; as a sacrifice it stands alone. The celebration of it under this twofold character fomis the holy of holies of the Christian cultus in the ancient church, and in the greater part of Christendom at this day.'
' Freeman, 1. c. Introduction to Part ii. (1857), p. 2, says of the Eucharist, not without justice, from a historical ai.d theological point of view: "It was confessedly through long ages of the church, aud is by the vast majority of the Christian world at this hour, conceived to be ... no less than the highest line of contact and region of commingling between heaven and earth known to us, or provided for us ; — a borderland of mystery, where, by gradations baffling sight and thought, the material truly blends with the spiritual, and tbe visible shades off into the unseen ; a thing, therefore, which of all events or gifts in this world most nearly answers to the highest sspirations and deepest yearnings of our wonderfully compotmded being ; while in some ages and climes of tae church it has been elevated into something yet mow awful and mvsterious."
492 THIKD TEEIOD. A.D. 311-590.
We consider first the doctrine of the Enchariit as a sao rainent, then the doctrine of the Eucliarist as a sacrifice, and finally the celebration of the eucharistic communion and eucharistic sacrifice.
The doctrine of the sacrament of the Eucharist was not a subject of theological controversy and ecclesiastical action till the time of Paschasius Kadbert, in the ninth century ; whereas since then this feast of the Saviour's dying love has been the innocent cause of the most bitter disputes, especially in the age of the Reformation, between Papists and Protestants, and among Lutherans, Zwiuglians, and Calvinists. Hence the doctrine of the ancient church on this point lacks the clearness and definiteness which the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, the Chalcedonian Christology, and the Augustinian anthropology and soteriology acquired from the controversies preceding them. In the doctrine of baptism also we have a much better righttosi^eak o£ a, consensus patri(m,th-a.n in the doctrine of the holy Su^^per.
In general, this period, following the representatives of the mystic theory in the previous one, was already very strongly inclined toward the doctrine of transubstantiation and toward the Greek and Roman sacrifice of the mass, which are inseparable in so far as a real sacrifice requires the real presence of the victim. T3ut the kind and mode of this presence are not yet particularly defined, and admit very difl'erent views : Christ may be conceived as really present either in and with tlie elements (consubstantiation, impanation), or under the illusive appearance of the changed elements (transubstantiation), or only dynamically and spiritually.
In the j)revious period we distinguish three views : the mystic view of Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus; the s^mibolical view of Tertullian and Cyprian ; and the allegorical or spiritualistic view of Clement of Alexandria and Origen. In the present the first view, which best answered the mystic and superstitious tendency of the time, pnjponderated, but tlie second also was represented by considerable authorities.'
Riickert divides the fathers into 2 classes : the Metabolical, and the Symbolical. Fhe symbolical view he assigns to Tertullian, Clement, Origen, Enseb., Athan., auj