Our esteemed pastor, Father Frederick Cain — a patristic scholar himself — has the holy habit of beginning Mass on the feasts of the apostles with a rousing round of “Faith of Our Fathers.” Today, the Feast of Saints Philip and James, was one of those days.

I love the hymn, and I was much pleased when my editors at Lay Witness magazine chose it as the title of my regular patristics column. When I was a kid (the late patristic era), the hymnals carried more verses than they do today. They’re still not the original verses by its hymnographer (Faber, that other Father Frederick, who was a contemporary of Newman). But they’re grand. I post them here as a kind of anthem for this blog.

Faith of our fathers! living still
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
Whene’er we hear that glorious word!

Refrain:
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.

Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free:
And truly blest would be our fate,
If we, like them, should die for thee. [Refrain.]

Faith of our fathers! we will strive
To win all nations unto thee;
And through the truth that comes from God
Mankind shall then be truly free. [Refrain.]

Faith of our fathers! we will love
Both friend and foe in all our strife;
And preach three, too, as love knows how
By kindly words and virtuous life. [Refrain.]

I was pleased to learn, after posting yesterday, that so many others were impressed by Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity. I got a gratifying bit of mail, and a respectable amount of traffic sent here from other blogs.

Stark’s statistical analysis of the early Church bowled me over, especially his contention that Christianity grew at a rate of 40% per decade through the first 300 years. Imagine if we could replicate that, or even get halfway there, today! There must be lessons there for evangelization and for family life.

That’s what David Mills thought, anyway. David is my long-suffering editor at Touchstone. He liked the Stark interview so much that he invited me to revisit the data and draw lessons for modern Christian family life. So I did that, and Touchstone kindly published the essay as Salt of the Empire: The Role of the Christian Family in Evangelization.

Thanks to Amy Welborn for putting us onto this:

ROME (CNS) — Archaeologists repairing a Roman catacomb have discovered an unusual network of underground burial chambers containing the elegantly dressed corpses of more than 1,000 people, a Rome official said.

The rooms appear to date back to the second century and are thought to be a place of early Christian burial. Because of the large number of bodies deposited over a relatively short period, experts believe a natural disaster or epidemic may have occurred at the time.

The corpses, dressed in fine clothes embroidered with gold thread, were carefully wrapped in sheets and covered in lime. Balsamic fragrances were also applied. . .

[Raffaella Giuliani, chief inspector of the Roman catacombs] said the experts believe they were Christian burial places, in part because Christians of that time dedicated great care to burial. Early Christians buried rich and poor with great dignity, in expectation of the resurrection of the dead — a fact that helps explain the presence in Rome of more than 50 miles of underground catacombs.

Read the rest at Catholic News Service.

Tracking the growth of Christianity 2,000 years ago is an ambitious undertaking for a sociologist. But Rodney Stark found it irresistible. Reading recent histories of early Christianity, he began to do some number-crunching. Soon, he says, it was a consuming “hobby.” And, before long, he had written a best-selling book, The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

What he found in his study of the first Christian centuries was an astonishing growth rate in the number of Christians of 40 percent per decade. From a small band of twelve, the Church had grown to 6 million people by 300 A.D. Stark maintains that the Emperor Constantine did not so much ensure Christianity’s success as acknowledge it. Constantine’s edict of toleration in 313 was overdue recognition that the Church had already won the empire.

But Stark is most interested in how the West was won. Contrary to pious histories, he holds that most growth came from individual conversions, and from the merchant and upper classes rather than the poor. Contrary to secular feminist pieties, he makes the case that most converts were women, that women benefited greatly from conversion, and that women were leaders in the early Church.

He also shows the remarkable effects of charity on Church growth. Christians, he demonstrates, were much more likely to survive epidemics because they cared for one another. And the pagans who received Christian care were much more likely to become Christians. In times of epidemic, Stark says, pagan priests and doctors were among the first to leave town.

Stark’s book vividly describes the misery of ordinary citizens of the pagan world. Most lived in cramped, smoky tenements with no ventilation or plumbing. Life expectancy was around 30 years for men and perhaps much lower for women. Hygiene was minimal. Medical care was more dangerous than disease, and disease often left its victims disfigured or dead. The human body was host to countless parasites, and tenements were infested by pests. For entertainment, people thronged to the circuses to see other people mutilated and killed.

Pagan marriage was no respite. Greco-Roman women suffered in predatory relationships rife with abortion and unnatural acts. But Christian marriage was a different story. Christian husbands and wives tended to love one another, as their religion required. Their mutual affection, Stark says, and their openness to fertility led to more children, and thus to a still higher growth in converts for the early Church.

Stark demonstrates that Christian doctrine, hope and charity transformed the Roman Empire—one person at a time.

Of The Rise of Christianity, the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper said: “It is ironic yet satisfying to find sociology, so often used to attack dogmatic Christianity, now objectively confirming some of the claims that Christianity has made for itself.”

Read my Touchstone interview with Rodney Stark here.

I regularly write about the Fathers in Touchstone. You’ll find some of that work by searching Touchstone’s archive here. (Just plug in my last name: Aquilina.)

Subscribe to Touchstone here.

Happy St. Athanasius Day! Athanasius was the fourth-century Father who took on the world when, in the words of St. Jerome, “the world awoke to find itself Arian.” In his own lifetime, Athanasius was known as the Father of Orthodoxy. Get to know this guy, and you’ll always stay on the straight and narrow.

I’ll be on Spirit FM radio this morning to talk about St. Athanasius with Bruce and Kris McGregor. If you can listen online, tune in here. The McGregors are lovely people, and Spirit Morning Show is the cheeriest way to start your day. Eventually the Athanasius show will be archived here, with my other appearances on KVSS. No one is doing more to promote the Fathers via radio. You can help KVSS by donating here.

Read the works of St. Athanasius here and here.

Read his life in the old Catholic Encyclopedia here.

You’ll find a great selection of his icons here.

Philo of Alexandria (died around 50 A.D.) is one of those fascinating figures at the periphery of early Christian history — though there is no firm evidence that he was ever even dimly aware of the just-emerging Christian movement. A busy man, he served, in his long life, as a Jewish community official, a diplomat, a teacher, and a theologian. Profoundly influenced by the Greek philosopher Plato, Philo remained a devout Jew. Though he held fast to the literal meaning of the Scriptures, he believed that they also yielded an allegorical meaning — about God, about history, and about morals. Philo’s speculations took him far. He was daring in his contemplation of God. From Scripture, Philo discerned the existence of a divine Logos, or Word of God, whom he went so far as to call a “deuteros theos,” or “second God.” Christians have found his doctrine to be a breathtaking anticipation of the truth revealed in the Incarnation of the Son of God.

My friend Scott Hahn speaks often of Philo’s use of the Greek term eucharistia — which literally translates as “thanksgiving,” though for Christians, of course, it means so much more. The French patrologist Jean LaPorte believed that it meant more for Philo, too, and he wrote a book on the subject, Eucharistia in Philo. LaPorte points out that Philo and other Alexandrian Jews used “eucharistia” as an equivalent of the Hebrew “todah,” which is the term for the thanksgiving sacrifice of bread and wine. In later work, La Porte went on to connect Philo’s “eucharistic” writings with those of the later Alexandrian Christians.

The great Italian scholar Enrico Mazza sees, in Philo’s work “On the Contemplative Life,” the immediate precursor of the liturgy of Christian Alexandria. In that work, Philo describes a monastic community of Jews, called the Therapeutae, who met early in the morning for the hearing of the Scripture, the singing of antiphons, and a ritual meal that had a sacrificial character. Eusebius concluded, in his history, that this community eventually converted to Christianity and formed the foundational generation of the Alexandrian Church. Mazza finds Eusebius’s argument possible, at least, given the similarities between Philo’s description of the Therapeutae and what we know of later Egyptian liturgy and monasticism.

In any event, Philo had a profound influence on early Christian theology. Clement of Alexandria knew him well, and Philo’s allegorical method seems to provided the foundation for the distinctive biblical interpretation of Christian Alexandria. St. Jerome — who had little good to say about Christians like Ambrose, Augustine, and Chrysostom — praises Philo to high heaven. In his “Lives of Illustrious Men,” he can’t find a negative word to say about him. (If you’ve read this brilliant but prickly saint, you know that this is an extremely rare occasion.)

It is, however, Ambrose who, more than any other Father, puts Philo to work for the Gospel. I remember someone once telling me that Ambrose counted Philo among the prophets of Israel, but I could not locate that passage as I was preparing this blog entry. (If you know where it is, please let me know.)

Jerome and Ambrose were content to work with Philo as a Jew who anticipated Christian themes and interpretive methods. Other authors, however, claimed more. Eusebius reported that Philo had met St. Peter in Rome and was favorably impressed, ever afterward looking kindly on Alexandria’s Christians. Epiphanius goes further and tells us that the “papal audience” in Rome led to Philo’s conversion. By the early Middle Ages, we find references to Philo not only as a Christian, but as a bishop! The process is well documented in David Runia’s book Philo in Early Christian Literature. You’ll find Dr. Runia’s excellent summary of Philo’s influence on early Christian thought right here.

I had planned this to be just a short entry, occasioned by my dipping into Philo this week at work. But here I am, several paragraphs deep. I’ll hit the pause button.

Yes, absolutely. Go to Cleveland and experience the Lake Effect — from Gennesaret, that is. The Maltz Jewish Museum is hosting an exhibit titled “Cradle of Christianity: Treasures from the Holy Land.” Visit the museum’s website, and you’ll see samples of the artifacts on display. An online reviewer tells us that those artifacts include Caiaphas’s burial vault and an inscription of Pontius Pilate’s name. (Tip: In hushed museum galleries, hissing biblical villains is always in bad taste.) The exhibit originated at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum.

Cradle of Christianity . . . sheds light on Christianity’s earliest days: from its emergence against the background of Jewish society in the land of Israel during the 1st century CE, to its development alongside Jewish communities over the following six centuries. Ancient writings and archaeological finds from the Holy Land are woven together to recreate moving images of the past.

Moving indeed. I plan to go with my kids. Hope to see you there!

It’s too bad the Cleveland Museum of Art is closed for renovation. Its collection of Christian antiquities is exquisite. I don’t know when CMA plans to resume its normal business. But if it opens before the Maltz exhibit closes, you could plan a patristic-era festival for the eyes.

Today’s Wall Street Journal informs us of an exhibit of large-scale photos of Byzantium’s great churches and Cappadocia’s frescoed cave churches. Here’s info from the World Monuments Fund’s website:

Vaults of Heaven: Sanctuaries of Byzantium
April 26-July 28, 2006
Stunning large-scale photographs reinterpret the extraordinary achievements of Byzantium — and WMF’s efforts to conserve these fragile treasures. Hagia Sophia and other Turkish sites come alive in the work of photographer and architect Ahmet Ertuğ.

Jesus, A.D. 30
“This is My body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me. . . . This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.” (Lk 22;19-21).

St. Paul, A.D. 51
“As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:26-27).

The Didache, A.D. 48 (?)
“On the Lord’s own day, gather together and break bread and give thanks, first confessing your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure . . . for this is the sacrifice that was spoken of by the Lord.”

St. Ignatius of Antioch, A.D. 107
“Have but one faith, one preaching and one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ; and His blood which was shed for us is one; one loaf also is broken for all, and one cup is distributed among them all. There is but one altar for the whole Church, and one bishop, with the priests and deacons, my fellow-servants.”

Pliny the Younger (a pagan Roman governor), A.D. 111
[The Christians] “were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath [in Latin, sacramentum]. . . . When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food — but ordinary and innocent food.”

St. Justin Martyr, A.D. 150
“On the day we call the day of the sun, all . . . gather in the same place. The memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read, as much as time permits. When the reader has finished, he who presides over those gathered admonishes and challenges them to imitate these beautiful things. Then we all rise together and offer prayers for ourselves . . . and for all others, wherever they may be, so that we may be found righteous by our life and actions, and faithful to the commandments, so as to obtain eternal salvation. When the prayers are concluded we exchange the kiss. Then someone brings bread and a cup of water and wine mixed together to him who presides over the brethren. He takes them and offers praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and for a considerable time he gives thanks that we have been judged worthy of these gifts. When he has concluded the prayers and thanksgivings, all present give voice to an acclamation by saying: ‘Amen.’ When he who presides has given thanks and the people have responded, those whom we call deacons give to those present the ‘eucharisted’ bread, wine and water and take them to those who are absent.”

My last post draws, of course, from my book The Mass of the Early Christians. That book provides the paper trail for eucharistic doctrine from generation to generation in the first three centuries of Christianity.

For a more systematic treatment of the subject, with applications to daily life, I recommend my colleague Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper. For a deeper and more demanding study, try Hahn’s Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy and his Swear to God: The Promise and Power of the Sacraments. All of his books draw deeply from the Fathers.

Getting ready for Sunday Mass? Think about what you’re doing. Think for a moment: What did it mean to be a Christian in the time of the Fathers?

What set those first believers apart from their neighbors? What was the single act that best defined their life in Jesus Christ?

For the first Christians, to be a believer meant to go to Mass. The Eucharist was then, as it is now, the source and summit of Christian life.

We see this clearly in the Church’s earliest history, the Acts of the Apostles. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” “Day by day,” the author goes on, the Jerusalem Christians shared a common life of worship, “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes” (Acts 2:42,46).

In Troas with Paul, Luke recounts, “On the first day of the week . . . we were gathered together to break bread” (Acts 20:7).

Wherever the first Christians assembled, they “broke bread.”

This was no ordinary meal. It was, rather, the fulfillment of the command of Jesus Christ at His Last Supper. “He took bread, and when He had given thanks He broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ ”

Jesus himself performed the first “remembrance” on the day of His resurrection. After His famous walk to Emmaus with two incredulous disciples, “When He was at table with them, He took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished out of their sight. . . . He was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 24:30-31,35).

To be faithful to Jesus, then, was to follow His command and His example. To keep faith was to give thanks and break bread in His memory. These actions, collectively, took their name from Jesus’ own words, “giving thanks,” in Greek, eucharistia — Eucharist.

More than a memorial

What did this thanksgiving mean to those founders of the Christian Church? It was a memorial, but it was more than that. The passage from Acts uses the Greek word “koinonia,” which can be translated “fellowship,” “sharing,” or “participation,” but “communion” is the preferred English term. The “thanksgiving” of the early Christians was a communion of persons — a communion of the believers with Christ and with one another.

St. Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth, around A.D. 51: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17).

The first Christians knew holy Communion as something more than symbolic. It was a mingling of bodies and souls. The closest analogy they could find was in the union of a married couple. Thus, the Book of Revelation refers to the Mass, mystically, as “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rv 19:9).

Jesus himself had foretold His Eucharist in the most graphic, physical terms. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is My flesh” (Jn 6:51).

The early Church took Jesus at His word and always spoke of the Eucharist with the same flesh-and-blood realism. Belief in Jesus’ Real Presence was essential to a Christian’s profession of faith. To hold a different doctrine was an act of infidelity. “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body,” wrote St. Paul, “eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (1 Cor 11:29).

That judgment held in the subsequent generations. St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, wrote around A.D. 107 that a distinguishing mark of a heretic was the denial of the Real Presence. “From the Eucharist and prayer they hold aloof, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.”

Eucharist fed the faith

All of this was the faith of the Church, before there were New Testament Scriptures, long before there were church buildings. The books of the New Testament were likely not completed until A.D. 90-100. The official list of the books of the Bible was not approved for the universal Church until 419. But the earliest liturgical manual we have, The Didache, was probably set to parchment around 48 A.D. (I follow Enrico Mazza in the dating of The Didache. His arguments are very persuasive.)

Moreover, Christianity arose long before the printing press. Few people had access to books of the various Gospels and letters that were in circulation.

Few people could read them anyway, as literacy was rare in many parts of the world.

Yet the faith endured because Christians received the Word and the sacrament within their eucharistic assemblies. Indeed, Word and sacrament were inseparable realities. As the early Christians read the books of the New Testament, they found not just isolated references to the Eucharist, but a sacramental motif pervasive from the very beginning of Jesus’ life. He was born, after all, in Bethlehem, which in Hebrew means “House of Bread.”

When Jesus multiplied the loaves, believers saw a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. When Jesus changed water into wine, He prefigured the transformation of wine into His blood. It is the overwhelming judgment of the Fathers of the Church that when Jesus instructed us to pray for “our daily bread,” He taught us to pray for the Eucharist. In third-century Africa, St. Cyprian wrote: “We ask that this bread should be given to us daily, that we who are in Christ and daily receive the Eucharist for the food of salvation, may not, by the obstacle of some heinous sin, be kept back from receiving Communion, from partaking of the heavenly bread, that we may not be separated from Christ’s body.”

St. Cyprian, like his scriptural forebears, spoke with precision here. For to be “excommunicated” meant literally to be excluded from Communion, which for believers is a sentence of death (see 1 Cor 11:30).

Indeed, the Eucharist was life itself for the Church, and believers preferred death to missing Mass. The martyrs of Abitina, in third-century Africa, told their accusers, “Without fear of any kind we have celebrated the Lord’s Supper, because it cannot be missed. . . . We cannot live without the Lord’s Supper.”

Those martyrs had drawn deeply from three centuries of devotion — and more. For Christ did not invent the Eucharist whole cloth, but rather presented it as a fulfillment of the Old Covenant sacrifices. His Last Supper took place, after all, at a sacrificial meal, the Passover. Over time, many of the prayers of ancient Israel would be taken up into the Mass. Hear, for example, the cup blessing of the Passover liturgy: “Blessed are you, Lord God, creator of the fruit of the vine.”

The service of the synagogue repeats the words from Ezekiel (which appear again in Revelation): “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” The Dead Sea Scrolls hint at other Jewish sources of Christian ritual: “When the table has been prepared for eating, and the new wine for drinking, the priest shall be the first to stretch out his hand to bless the first-fruits of the bread and new wine.”

Household churches

The early Christians must have had a vivid experience of the close communion of the Church. For, until the legalization of Christianity in 313, the Church owned no buildings. As we saw in the Acts of the Apostles, the faithful assembled for the Eucharist in family homes. Sometimes, when wealthy families converted, they turned over substantial estates for liturgical use. The Basilica of San Clemente in Rome may have been built upon just such a household. Another “house-church” was excavated, somewhat intact, in Syria. Late last year, a construction crew dug up yet another in Megiddo, near Jerusalem.

Still, though the first Christians were “at home” with the Eucharist, they were never casual in their practice. Their reverence was profound. In the third century, the Scripture scholar Origen of Alexandria wrote: “You who are accustomed to take part in the divine mysteries know, when you receive the body of the Lord, how you protect it with all caution and veneration lest any small part fall from it, lest anything of the consecrated gift be lost.”

In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem exhorts his people to take the same care: “Tell me, if anyone gave you grains of gold wouldn’t you hold them with all care, on your guard against losing any? Won’t you keep watch more carefully, then, that not a crumb fall from you of what is more precious than gold and jewels?”

Just a few years later, St. Jerome — the greatest biblical scholar of the ancient Church — would write of the need “to instruct by the authority of Scripture ignorant people in all the churches concerning the reverence with which they must handle holy things and minister at Christ’s altar; and to impress upon them that the sacred chalices, veils and other accessories used in the celebration of the Lord’s passion are not mere lifeless and senseless objects devoid of holiness, but that rather, from their association with the body and blood of the Lord, they are to be venerated with the same awe as the body and the blood themselves.”

This is the reverence the early Christians gave to the sacrament they received. It was not reverence for the sake of ceremony. It arose naturally because they knew that here, under the appearance of bread and wine, was Emmanuel, God-with-us. It welled up within them because the Lord’s Supper was a meal they could not live without. They loved the sacrament as true lovers — because they were at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

And this reverence was more than a sometime thrill, the emotional response to beautiful liturgy. Reverence for the Eucharist was the foundation of a culture — a kingdom — that was thoroughly Christian.

According to one of the most ancient liturgical texts, our reverence for the Eucharist must be extended to the poorest of the poor: “Let widows and orphans be revered like the altar.”

The Elaine Pagels critique, launched by Father Paul Mankowski, S.J., is heating up. See the developments at Pontifications and Biblicalia.

I promised you some thoughts on the patristic roots of the Holy Grail legends. As I said before, if Arthur existed, he was a contemporary of the Fathers. And if vestiges of his history survive in the legends, they are likely preserved among relics of the piety of his times.

Chalice piety was widespread and profound during this period. Several generations before Arthur’s Battle of Mount Badon, St. Jerome urged Pope Damasus to promote not only reverence for the Eucharist, but reverence for the Eucharistic vessels as well. In the pre-Constantinian Acts of the Martyrs, we find catalogs of chalices confiscated by the pagan authorities — chalices made of precious metals. In the late second century, Tertullian reports the use of richly decorated chalices. And ritual abuses of the eucharistic chalice brought down the wrath of Fathers as early (and as far-flung) as Irenaeus (second-century Gaul) and Cyprian (third-century Africa).

The ancients revered the chalice and worshipped its Contents. From earliest times the chalice was emblematic of the mystery it held — the mystery of Christ and of salvation by His blood (see Lk 22:20). The chalice came to stand also for the true doctrine of the mystery.

In my new book, The Grail Code, my co-author and I examine the patristic material in some detail, and we trace its trajectory in literature well into the Middle Ages.

Ancient chalice piety isn’t the only source of the Grail legends. There’s much more. In fact, it involves a conSpiracy wilder and vaster than Dan Brown ever imagined.

My co-author Chris Bailey is hosting an ongoing Grail discussion in the room next to his Grail library at our website, GrailCode.com.