I. In the Fathers.
The Greek term Eucharist, “thanksgiving,” for Christians came to designate the sacred meal (the Lord’s “Supper”), the consecratory blessing, the sacramental elements and finally the eucharistic action itself. The earliest Christian terms seem to have been fractio panis, a gesture which by metonymy designated the entire action (Lk 24:35; Acts 2:42, later taken up by Act. Pauli et Thec. 5; Serap., Eucol. 14,15), and “Lord’s supper” (1 Cor 11:19). Ignatius uses “Eucharist” as a technical term (Eph. 13,1; Phil. 4; Syrm. 8,1) to indicate both the celebration by which Christ is made really present and the mystery that reactualizes Christ’s redemptive incarnation and creates unity in the church. With this term Justin indicates both the eucharistic liturgy and the eucharistic food (1 Ap. 65-67); he also uses the term anamnēsis (Dial. 41,1; 70,4; 117,3), which sometimes recurs in John Chrysostom and in the liturgies (Der Balyzeh: Trad. Ap. 4,10; Lit. Johannis Chrys.). In the 4th c. Greeks often use the term mystērion, and esp. its plural, “mysteries, holy mysteries.” Also very frequent are the terms “to offer” and “offering”: in Greek prosphora (Latin oblatio), which for the Syrians became kurbons, gift. The term synaxis, which ordinarily indicates the holy assembly gathered to offer the Eucharist, can mean the celebration itself.
The Greek terms were transliterated into Latin: the common term eucharistia, a formal borrowing from the Greek; mystēria (Vita Ambr. 23; Ambrose, Comm. in Luc. 7,11; Innocent, Ep. 25 and the sacramentaries), a term also translated as sacramenta (Tertullian, De cor. 3; Cyprian, Ep. 74,4; also Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine). Cyprian also uses the term dominicum celebrare (Ep. 63,16; De opere 15; cf. Act. Saturn. 7). The expression sacrum or sacrum facere is general, analogous to actio/agere (see in Ambrose), which expresses the effectuation par excellence of sacred action. The term Missa, the dismissal at the end of a celebration, appears already in the 4th c. (Egeria, Itin. 25,10; Ambrose, Ep. 76 [20],4).
The fractio panis was the action that Jesus performed at the Last Supper and repeated after his resurrection. The first Eucharist was passed down as a complete Paschal event: Christ, the suffering servant, becomes the victorious Lord. This was part of the worship of the first Christians: it was dominated by the joy of remembering the resurrection and simultaneously a “proclamation of the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26).
The "Didache" links the Eucharist to the fraternal agapē, which explains the ambivalence of the expressions in the prayers, which were modeled on Jewish prayers but changed and reworked with a Christian spirit and terminology (chs. 9-10). Every Sunday the faithful gathered to break the bread and give thanks (ch. 14). Both the prayers and the celebration make clear the Eucharist’s ecclesial and eschatological character. The Eucharist occupies a central place in the letters of Ignatius (Eph. 5,2; 13,1; 20,2; Magn. 7,1-2; Phil. 4; Smyrn. 7,1; 8,1-2). Presided over by the bishop or his designee, in the Eucharist Christ is really present; in a privileged way, it realizes and concretely manifests unity with Christ and with the church; it plays an essential role in identifying the authentic Christian community.
The Eucharist demands charity and faith in the “one bread that is the medicine of immortality, the antidote for death, so as to live forever in Jesus Christ” (Eph. 20,2). Ignatius considers martyrdom to be closely correlated with the Eucharist: it is like a liturgical offering, the martyr enacting in himself the profound meaning of the Eucharist, as a total and lifegiving gift.
Justin offers the first description of the Eucharist after the NT (1 Apol. 65 and 67), in relation to baptism and Sunday. He clearly distinguishes two parts: the liturgy of the word and the properly eucharistic part (as well as the liturgy extended into one’s life through charity, the ethical-social reflection of a religious celebration). The remembrances of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read; the presider gives a homily of exhortation. All stand and lift up their prayers. Bread and wine are brought, with water. The presider recites the (consecratory) prayer of thanksgiving, to which all respond: “Amen.”
The eucharistic food is distributed, not forgetting those who are absent. At the end offerings are collected for the needy, realizing the fraternal charity the Eucharist requires. A pure oblation and a spiritual sacrifice (Dial. 41 and 117), the Eucharist is an anamnēsis of all of history, from the creation to the accomplishment of salvation; it must be expressed in “a life in conformity with the Lord’s precepts” (1 Ap. 66,1). Irenaeus (d. ca. 200) puts the Eucharist at the center of his vision of the world and of history: with all the dynamism of its mystery it opposes gnostic theses. The bread and wine are not only saved, but, becoming vehicles of grace—the body and blood of Christ—are saviors.
The Eucharist recapitulates and fulfills the long history of all earthly offerings and, in Christ in glory, anticipates the mystery of the whole harvest (Adv. Haer. IV,17-18). A particular assimilation to the Eucharist and its existential place recur in the Acts of the Martyrs, which celebrate the martyrs’ “thanksgiving” through the gift of their lives, dying to the world to rise again in God (Ignatius, Rom. 2,2; see also Polycarp, Martyrs of Lyons). Inscriptions and epitaphs (Abercius, Pektorios) express desire for the Eucharist, from which is drawn the hope of incorruptibility. Cyprian in Ep. 63 offers the first eucharistic treatise. He associates the Eucharist with Christ’s passion and resurrection, to which the faithful respond with their sacrifice. In addition to spiritual joy, he emphasizes, in the bond between Christ and the faithful, the unity symbolized by the grains combined in the one bread (already the Didache), a classical theme in the entire tradition up to the Middle Ages.
As for the organization of liturgies, while the structure of the assembly was fixed during the first centuries, the celebrant was free to improvise the prayers of thanksgiving and consecration based on a common tradition. The anaphora, to judge from later texts like the Apostolic Constitutions, followed the pattern of the baptismal creed, taking up its themes in the form of thanksgiving, in a trinitarian development.
Salvation history became thanksgiving and eschatological expectation. The Apostolic Tradition is presented less as a real liturgy of a specific church—not even Rome’s—than as a model on which others could also align themselves. The anaphora is a continuous text that develops without the interruption of the Sanctus. The structure is clearly christological and insists above all on the mystery of redemption. The theme of creation, so important in the Jewish liturgy and so clear in the Apos. Con., is almost avoided here. The prayer, which, like the Roman creed, centers on the work of Christ, introduces the account of institution, the thanksgiving in the form of anamnēsis, and finally the epiclesis to the Holy Spirit. This can be compared with the “Clementine liturgy” of the Apos. Con., whose Jewish inspiration and roots are evident, and which is an essential link between the archaic liturgies and the great liturgies of the 4th and 5th c. The attribution to Clement has a Jewish Christian feel.
The anaphora develops the history of salvation: praise of God, creation of the world, creation of humans, salvation history; all these prepare for the Sanctus. The account of institution is followed by an anamnesis, an epiclesis and intercession for the church. Hamman has demonstrated (in Kyriakon 835-843) the perfect symmetry between the anaphora and the baptismal catechesis (Apos. Con. VII,39,2-5). The prayer opens on the mystery of the Trinity, which is revealed in the economy, creation and history of salvation, up to its fulfillment. This solemn prayer begins with the Father, moves to the work of the Son, passes on to the ecclesial action of the Holy Spirit and closes with a doxology. Baptismal confession become consecratory thanksgiving, it is faith made into a sacramental mystery and a sacrament of the whole faith.
The golden age of patristics (4th-5th c.) was the era of the great liturgies, in both East and West. Different liturgical families arose during this period, developing autonomously at Antioch, Alexandria, in Cappadocia, and at Constantinople. The various churches gradually fixed their own liturgies: each had several formularies of anaphora. The East introduced the Sanctus in the 4th c. (Serapion, Eucol.; Apos. Con.). The Syriac liturgy (and the Byzantine, which derives from it) stressed the epiclesis to the Holy Spirit. The epiclesis and the prayers of intercession exchanged places according to liturgical families. The West tended to lose sight of the connection between the preface and the canon, which, as the word implies, was set once and for all.
Ambrose cites a fragment of it (De sacr. III,1,5); Gregory the Great gave it its definitive form. It seems to have been gradually imposed on the whole West during the Carolingian Empire. Catechesis more than controversy (which was virtually non-existent) informs us of the sacramental teaching of the Fathers, who insist on Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, on the reality of his sacrifice, actualized in the church’s celebration, and on the unity of the faithful with Christ and among themselves in the Eucharist. They also recall the close connection between the word of God and the body of Christ: Caesarius of Arles, echoing St. Augustine, says that “the Word of Christ is not less than the Body of Christ” (Sermo 78,2); St. Ambrose had already proclaimed that one drinks of Christ from the chalice of the Scriptures as from the eucharistic chalice (En. Ps 1,33). We have exceptional evidence of the various Greek and Latin Fathers. The catechesis of the Mass was based on biblical figures and rites. The Hexateuch provided the principal types: Melchizedek (see Cyprian, Ambrose Augustine, Roman canon) and the manna, which St. John had already used. Methodius, like Ambrose, brings together three figures: Adam’s rib, the rock in the desert, Christ’s wound on the cross. To these is added the bread of the Presence (*Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. 24,6).
To this common background were added the blessing of Judah (Cyprian), which Justin and Irenaeus apply to Christ’s passion; Noah’s drunkenness, which prefigures sobria ebrietas (Cyprian); the Passover lamb, which represents the passion more than the Eucharist (exceptions: Cyprian, Commodian, Gregory of Elvira). We should also mention the psalms, esp. Ps 53. Ps 42 is presented as a eucharistic catechesis (Gregory of Nyssa). The nuptial image drawn by Ambrose from the Song of Songs allowed the development of a theology of teleiōsis and ecstasy.
Maximus the Confessor develops a theology of the spiritual life, from Christian initiation to perfection. Besides biblical figures, the Fathers also explain the various rites of the Mass, from preparation to communion and thanksgiving (Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. myst.). They emphasize the continuity between the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the bread. For them, the Eucharist is the sacramentum redemptionis, the sacrament that contains and dispenses all of Christ’s redemptive and saving action, from his death to his resurrection. The Antiochenes, like Theodore of Mopsuestia, less sensitive to biblical typology, see in it above all “the figures of heavenly goods and delights”: the eschatological aspect, traditional since the Didache and Serapion’s Euchologion.
John Chrysostom and Augustine love to develop the ecclesial aspect: “It is your mystery that is placed on the Lord’s altar. It is your mystery that you receive. To that which you are, you reply: Amen” (Aug., Serm. 272). St. Gregory the Great, who read and commented on Sacred Scripture with passion and enthusiasm, says of himself that often, reading and re-reading a text, he was unable to grasp its meaning, but “putting it before the brothers, I understood it” (In Ez. lib. II, hom. II,1).
The term “mystical body,” which originally meant the terminus a quo, ended by designating the terminus ad quem, i.e., the church, as H. de Lubac has shown. Hilary prefers to dwell on incorporation into Christ through the Eucharist, sacrament of the symbiosis between two living things, which makes the member identical with its head. The Eucharist is the sacrament of divinization (Hilary, ps.-Dionysius). To explain it the Fathers use the analogies of fire and the body, the body and the members, the bridegroom and the bride. Finally, faithful to the initiatives of the first centuries, the Fathers, Augustine and esp. John Chrysostom, bring out the concrete and social consequences and irradiations of the Eucharist. “The altar is composed of Christ’s own members, and for you the Lord’s body is the rock of sacrifice” (John Chrys., In 2 Cor hom. 20,3; other texts in Hamman, Vie liturgique, 282-284). Fundamental here is the thought hinted at in the Didache (4,8) and taken up with great frequency in patristic preaching: how is it possible to partake together of heavenly goods, without being able to then share earthly goods with the brothers?
In conclusion, we can summarize that the patristic age took the following lines on the Eucharist: (1) The Lord’s Last Supper is called “Eucharist.” (2) In the Eucharist, there is a salutaris presence of Jesus Christ in real terms of body and blood. This reality becomes an argument for defending the reality of the incarnation of the Word. The liturgical evidence has no exception The Eucharist is understood as oratio prex of the eucharistic species, on the lines of the community’s sacrificium offerre. It is the one valid sacrifice that may be offered to God (anti-Jewish and antipagan polemical context) and is not divisible, as though it could be offered by divided and opposed Christian groups, erecting one altar against another (antiheretical and antischismatic context, esp. in Cyprian’s time and in the subsequent period of the Donatist controversy in Africa). It was in the context of the Eucharist, “the one sacrifice,” that the Eucharist-church unity relationship was developed. (4) Regarding the historical nature of the sources (e.g., K. Gamber’s Codices Liturgici Latini), we must bear in mind that, given the distinct and not always verifiable stratification of these documents, we use the term “historical evidence” with a particular meaning. (5) In the West, the codification of the eucharistic prayers had a mainly christological tone, related in detail to the meeting of the moment; in the East it followed a biblical-historical direction based on creation and on God’s love revealed in history.
II. Iconography.
The Eucharist as a sacramental and liturgical event remained for a long time without a direct representation in early Christian art, on this point (Ambrose, De sacr. 4,14). (3) though this does not rule out the possibility of the eucharistic motif being included in other iconographical themes.
1. Banquet scenes.
We must consider carefully the first depictions of banquets in the 3rd-4th c., long held to be eucharistic solemnities because of the presence of the fractio panis. Thus Wilpert interpreted the banquet scene in the Greek chapel of the catacomb of S. Priscilla: the bishop, as president of the liturgical celebration, does not lie on the stibadium like the other six guests, but occupies the place of honor in cornu dextro. He breaks the bread with a certain solemnity, to distribute it to the others, as he will do with the wine in a two-handled cup near his hand. The woman participating in the banquet has her head veiled, which was rigorously prescribed for eucharistic celebrations, whereas for ordinary banquets it was pointless and unusual. Seven baskets of bread and a plate with two fishes and loaves recall the biblical account of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Wilpert, Fractio panis, 5ff.; 8/17).
Against this eucharistic interpretation, others see early Christian banquet scenes as depicting funeral banquets, in close parallel with scenes of similar structure in secular art. Bread and fish are the customary food of the dead; the baskets of bread, which recur frequently, allude to the large number of guests, who were often given loaves as gifts. Heavy consumption of wine is suggested by the lively gestures with which the servers are invited to mix new wine, as we see in several parts of the banquet scene in the area of the Agapai in SS. Pietro and Marcellino (WK 133, 2; 157, 1ff.). The survival of the pagan tradition of the funeral banquet in the early Christian period is amply demonstrated (Dölger, ICQUS 5, 503/27; A. Stuiber, Refrigerium interim = Theophaneia 11 [Bonn 1957] 124-136).
Interestingly, in the banquet scenes in SS. Pietro and Marcellino the servers are usually called Agape and Irene (a recent discovery has revealed the name of a Sabina, RivAC 35 [1970] fig. 22). If these are not simply two very common Christian names, we can obviously see in the funeral banquet the expression of the hope of participation in the celestial feast of the blessed, where Love and Peace will prepare the meal. In any case, the banquet depicted in the hypogeum of Vibia as a realistic funeral banquet is clearly characterized by the captions as a banquet of the blessed: Vibia, introduced into the Elysium by the angelus bonus, takes part in the banquet amidst the bonorum iudicio iudicati (WK 132, 1).
Nor is the opinion that the many baskets (or vases) allude to the high number of guests always on target. In cubicle A of SS. Pietro and Marcellino, Christ distributing the wine at Cana is set in the framework of a banquet scene (WK 57). The motif of the multiplication of the bread and wine is set even more integrally in a banquet scene, with the caption TAS EULOGIAS CU ESQIONTES, on the frieze of the apse of the underground basilica of Karmuz at Alexandria (DACL 1, 1127ff. and fig. 279; RBK 1 [1966] 106).
The varied interpretation of proto-Christian banquet scenes marked out the route later followed by research on early Christian iconography. In contrast with the first apodeictic judgments, it is advisable not to determine the spiritual content of the earliest banquet scenes by archaeological means alone. To what extent the memory of the biblical multiplication of the loaves, the hope of participation in the eschatological banquet, and perhaps also the representation of the Eucharist were present in the minds of authors and spectators, remains an open question.
2. Biblical scenes and typological prefigurations of the Eucharist.
Whether the OT scenes of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (WK 41; 78), the gathering of the manna (catacombs of Cyriaca [WK 242, 2]), the return of the spies with the cluster of grapes (DACL 8, 1161 and fig. 1157ff. 11ff.), Habakkuk bringing bread to Daniel in the lions’ den (Rep. 43-5), and finally the depiction of Abel and Melchizedek contain eucharistic symbolism is something that cannot as a rule be established with certainty, and is deduced more from patristic interpretations than from the depictions themselves.
For the sacrifice of Isaac, e.g., it seems that its interpretation as a type of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and model of Abraham’s obedience in faith precedes the eucharistic interpretation, such that eucharistic content can be ruled out of the earliest iconographical repesentations. But the 6th-c. mosaics of the presbytery of S. Vitale in Ravenna, showing Abel and Melchizedek beside an altar, do express an undeniable eucharistic allegory, given that they are in the apse of the church (Timmers 689, fig. 1); this also goes for the adjacent scenes of Abraham offering hospitality to the three men at Mamre and hastening to sacrifice his son.
The two mosaics, with the scenes of Abel, Abraham and Melchizedek, recur in S. Apollinare in Classe as an illustration of the prayer Supra quae of the Roman canon. NT motifs should be considered in the same way. Representations of the multiplication of bread and wine on the oldest sarcophagus friezes are not necessarily derived from the salvific sepulchral symbolism of Jesus’ miracles; but they were later linked with the representation of the Last Supper, so that we can no longer rule out a eucharistic meaning (Salerno ivory relief, 11th c., Schiller, fig. 70). The oldest representation of the Last Supper is on the mosaics of the portico of S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (520–6) (Schiller fig. 67). Here, as in the codex Rossanensis (third quarter of 6th c.), Christ sits at table, in the place of honor in cornu dextro, surrounded by the apostles. In the codex Augustinus (ca. 600), he sits at the center of the table (Schiller fig. 73). In Byzantine art, the so-called communion of the apostles is a representation of the Last Supper transferred to the liturgical plane. From the 6th c. on, a number of representations have come down to us, variously structured, on the silver patenae of Riha (Dumbarton Oaks Collection) and Stuma near Antioch (Schiller fig. 56), in the Rossano codex, and in the codex of Rabbula at Florence (Schiller fig. 57ff.; 61).
3. Characterizing symbols and elements.
In many medieval Christian symbols a eucharistic meaning must be acknowledged, esp. in depictions of bread, fish, vines, grape clusters and wine. The eucharistic symbolism of the fish is attested as early as the 2nd-3rd c. by the inscriptions of Abercius and Pektorios (Dölger 2, 486-515). Many see a symbolic representation of the Eucharist in the two figures of fish in the crypt of Lucina in S. Callisto and in the baskets of loaves next to what may be a chalice full of red wine (WK 28, 1ff.), but this remains undemonstrable (Dölger 5, 527-533). The same reservations apply to the lamb multiplying loaves in the new area of the catacomb of Commodilla (RivAC 34 [1958] 35) and on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, whose side panels also show gleaning and grape-harvest scenes (Rep. 680, 1-3). Grape clusters and vines, which lend themselves to a vast range of symbolic representations, can refer with certainty to the Eucharist only when the context unequivocally suggests it, as, e.g., on the silver cup of Antioch (5th c.) (Age of Spirituality, 605-608).
By E. Dassmann in "Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity", produced by the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, general editor Angelo Di Berardino, Translated from the Italian "Nuovo Dizionario Patristico e di Antichità Cristiane, 3 volumes, 2006–2008 Casa Editrice Marietti, S.p.A., Genova-Milano. Published in the United States of America by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, with permission from Casa Editrice Marietti.Principal translators: Joseph T. Papa, Erik A. Koenke and Eric E. Hewett, excerpts vol. 1 pp. 854-859. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.