THE FAHERS OF THE DESERT

FEASTS AND FASTS.

 

THE ancient doctors of the Church, such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, look upon the Christian life as one continual festival, not indeed as one of those which are kept by feasting and worldly indulgence, but as a day of holy joy, because the night of sin has been overcome by redemption, because reconciliation with God has brought peace and true joy to the soul, and because from this joy no one is excluded who does not voluntarily separate himself from God. For this the angels sang on the holy night of Christmas their song of jubilee, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will."

The Prince of Peace, as Isaias had named Him, had come into the world, and brought down with Him from heaven peace and joy, which are enumerated by St. Paul among "the fruits of the Spirit." But in order that the Christian might the more surely be the figure of Christ, and the more perfectly bear the image of the heavenly man, as Christ had borne the image of the earthly, it was necessary that he should suffer himself to be continually penetrated and sanctified by the saving mysteries of Christianity, and that he should imitate the Saviour, contemplating His life step by step, and dwelling in this contemplation. For this reason particular times were set apart as festivals, which, like faithful messengers of religion, returned every year, unceasingly announcing the work of redemption, and by their attractive festivity enkindling and animating the sensual nature of man, and preparing his soul for the everlasting feast of heaven. The festival which returned the oftenest, because it could never be sufficiently celebrated, was Sunday, or, as it was more commonly called, the Lord's-day, (Dominica), which was dedicated even in apostolic times to the remembrance of the Resurrection of Christ.

On that day work was not permitted, and all the infirmities and miseries of this earthly life were banished from the mind, for it commemorated the triumph of the eternal life. The case was very different on Wednesday and Friday. The day on which Judas betrayed the Lord, and the day on which the Lord died on the Cross, were observed by fasting till three o'clock and fervent public prayer. They were called Days of the Stations, days on which the warriors of Christ kept watch at their posts. In Rome the remembrance of these days of the stations is still kept up. There is daily in Lent, and frequently during the rest of the year, a station, that is, a devout assembly of the faithful in certain churches, as arranged by Pope Gregory the Great. The prayers recited in each church on that day are enriched with an indulgence.

The most ancient festivals were those of Easter and Pentecost. The groundwork of Christianity was Christ crucified and Christ glorified. From that foundation arose the practice of the imitation of Him, which entered in a thousand ways into the life of the faithful. A period of penance, of long and uncertain duration, now restricted to the forty days' fast of Lent, (Quadragesima), preceded the celebration and contemplation of the sufferings and death of our Lord in the "great week", as it was called. The universal characteristics of the ecclesiastical fast were the late hour of the one meal, which was not taken till sunset, and the abstinence from meat and wine; and during its continuance neither marriage nor christening festivities were allowed. But the fervour of the faithful led them to practise still greater mortifications, especially in the East, where it was the custom to restrict themselves on all fast-days to bread and water, with at the utmost a few vegetables or dried fruits; while in the West this was only the case on Good Friday. They were anxious, on the other hand, to strengthen and fortify their souls, and for this purpose there were continual sermons all through Lent, as, for example, those preached daily by St. Chrysostom at Constantinople. A specimen of these is given us by Origen:—"Abstain from all sin, take to thyself no food of sin, enjoy not the indulgence of thy passions, drink not the wine of thy desires. Refrain from evil deeds and words, and from still more evil thoughts. Seek not the bread of false doctrine, and thirst not after a deceitful philosophy which is far from the truth." It was not sufficient that the body should be denied all sensual delights, the soul was also to be exercised in self-mastery; and the chief advantage of the mortification of the senses lay in this, that it facilitated the victory in spiritual things by keeping men constantly in the habit of fighting against the coarser passions.

Thursday in Holy Week was dedicated to the institution of the Eucharist, and was therefore in the morning a day of joy. After the fifth century the bishops took this day for the consecration of the Holy Oils for Baptism, Confirmation, and the Sick. In the evening began the anticipation of the solemnity of the day of the Holy Passion, the day of the Cross. All the people assembled in the church, and the history of the Passion was read. The day was passed in prayer, labour, mortification, and fasting, never in repose from work or in amusement. The prayers for infidels, Jews, heretics, and schismatics, on that day, together with the adoration of the Cross, which follows them, have been in use ever since the fifth century, and are in perfect accordance with the mind of Him who died upon the Cross for all men, and who prayed for His enemies and tormentors, saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." The great vigil of the festival of Easter began on Saturday evening, and lasted till daybreak on Sunday, so that the faithful remained in church uninterruptedly for ten or twelve hours.

Then came the Benediction of the Paschal Candle, and the Blessing of the Font, with most beautiful prayers and lessons out of the Old Testament. This was also the time for the Baptism of the Catechumens, and last of all, on Easter Day itself, came the Mass of the Resurrection. This was truly a day of rejoicing. The faithful embraced each other with the greeting, "The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed." The neophytes celebrated their own resurrection from the death of sin, their being born again "of water and the Holy Ghost," simultaneously with the Resurrection of their Redeemer. This rejoicing lasted not only during Easter week, but the whole time till Pentecost, so that Tertullian undertook to show that the Christians had even more feasts than the pagans.

The jubilee of the Alleluias rises up afresh on the day of the Ascension of our Blessed Lord. He had spent the forty mysterious and gracious days since His Resurrection with His disciples, and promised to send them the Holy Ghost from on high, who was to comfort them when they no longer saw His form or heard His voice amongst them. He had then so spiritualised them that they did not look upon the separation from Him with feelings of earthly sorrow, but in holier dispositions received it as an additional grace. There lies a veil over the forty days in the desert which preceded His appearance in the world as the Messias, and on the forty days which precede His departure from the world there rests a veil also. The two mysteries of the combat in which He overcame the world, and of His supernatural glory, must alike be contemplated and adored in silence and in faith.

After the fifth century, three days of prayer before the Ascension were likewise occupied in calling down the blessing of God on the germinating fields and meadows. The whole of nature was involved in the consequences of sin by the fall of the first man, so that she could not bring forth her blossoms and her fruits without the sunshine and the dew of grace. As man had dragged her down with him in his fall, he must seek to free her from the curse by prayer. Mamertus, Bishop of Vienne in France, was the first who ordained these days of prayer to be observed with processions through the fields, in the year 469, after his city had suffered severely from earthquakes and scarcity. From thence they spread over the whole of Catholic Christendom.

Ten days after the Ascension there came the sweet feast of Whitsuntide, which brings the fulness of the grace of the Redeemer, the Holy Ghost, the Fruit of His love. Without the Holy Ghost there would be no Church, for He is her soul and quickens her, He is her heart and gives her the pulse of unity. His coming is the birth of the Church in the world.

It is peculiar that the Nativity of Christ, the festival of the sanctification of human nature, the "Mother of all other feasts", as St. Chrysostom calls it, should be less ancient than the festivals of Easter, the Ascension and Pentecost The uncer­tainty of the day of our Lord's Nativity is said to have been the cause of this. It is supposed that it was first established in Rome on the 25th of December, in order to give a Christian meaning to the heathen festival in honour of the returning sun, by fixing on that day the rising of the sun of Christianity. But before the middle of the fifth century the feast of Christmas had passed from the West over the whole of the East. The fast of the four weeks of Advent, to prepare the sinful world for the merciful coming of the Lord, shows in what high honour it was held.

New feasts were added in the course of later centuries, when the Church was able without restraint to develope her own proper life, thus completing more and more the circle of holy recollections. But the feast of the Epiphany is exceedingly ancient, the feast of the appearance or manifestation of the Lord, which is kept on the 6th of January, and is dedicated to the joint commemoration of the three events by which He made Himself known to the world: the Adoration of the Magi, who were led to His crib by a star; the Baptism in the Jordan, when the heavens opened above Him; and the marriage at Cana, when He worked His first miracle. The love and piety of the faithful also by degrees assigned their proper places to the feasts of our Blessed Lady. The Emperor Justinian, as early as the year 542, commanded that the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin should be kept on no other day than the 2d of February. A few hundred years later we find on the 25th of March the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, or more pro­perly the Annunciation of our Blessed Lord. To these were joined other solemnities on days commemorating events of importance to Christianity: such as the remembrance of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome, which is kept on the 18th of January under the name of St. Peter's Chair; the day of the death of the Apostles Peter and Paul on the 29th of June; the nativity of St. John the Baptist, who shares with our Blessed Lord and His most Holy Mother, the distinction of His birth into the world being honoured; whilst fir other saints and martyrs it is the day of their entrance into heaven, namely, the day of their death, that is kept. In short, our calendar, which we carelessly glance at merely for the sake of the dates, or because we have something to do on this or that day, consists in reality of nothing but memorials of the supernatural life upon which our daily life should be moulded and arranged.

But as the vocation of a Christian is not to be fulfilled by a trifling and superficial joy, but by the supernatural rejoicing of a heart entirely resting in God, and a life wholly consecrated to Him, it was necessary that zeal for this sanctification should extend over all the aims and objects of life. Earnest prayer, devout attendance at the public worship of God, careful fulfilment of the precepts of the Church as to fasting, almsgiving, and various mortifications, were only fruits of the fervour which was an essential element of striving after perfection. An ardent spirit of penance laid the foundations of perfection in the minds of Christians, for it led through the compunction of repentance to humility; and humility is the soil, dark, trodden under foot and apparently insignificant, out of which springs the richest harvest. To become a Christian does not mean to become on a sudden inaccessible to sin. No! certainly not. The tempter entered into the desert with the Divine Saviour to endeavour to arouse sensuality, pride, and ambition even in Him. To become a Christian means to receive through the Sacraments, and first of all through Baptism, grace to fight with sin and power to overcome it. A Christian is still a man ; and poor, weak human nature is not always willing to conduct this battle with that vigour and constancy without which victory is unattainable. Thus he falls—falls through his own fault, through his rejection of grace, which is always ready to come to his succour with divine assistance ; and he falls out of the realm of salvation into that of evil. The more horror of sin there is in a soul, the more susceptible is it of the stings of con­science, and the more clearly will it perceive after its fall the loss of its happiness, and cry out for salvation from the abyss. Then God hears its cry of distress, and stretches forth His fatherly Hand and leads it to the sacrament of penance, the sacrament of mercy as it should properly be called ; which is likened by the Fathers of the Church to the plank which saves from shipwreck.

The necessity of confessing one by one to the priest all grave sins without exception, secret or public, was universally maintained, and looked upon as the groundwork of salvation. This necessity rested upon the Christian faith in the priest's power of binding and loosing, which has its inmovable foundation in the Holy Scriptures. "Peace be to you; as the Father hath sent me. I also send you." When Christ had said this, He breathed on them, (the Apostles,) and said to them, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained". He chose for this action the time after His Resurrection, when He had ordained His Apostles and disclosed to them the deeper signification of His mission and of their succession to it. The power which the Father had given to the Son, of the remission of the sins of men and their sanctification, the Son gave to His Apostles, and in His Apostles to their successors also, because the need of remission of sins and of sanctification never ceases upon the earth. This power is one of the graces of the priesthood, and ceases with it as a flame expires when the wax is consumed. The Catholic priest alone can with the power of God remit sins.

The earliest teachers of the Church affirm this necessity of the confession of sins. Tertullian compares those who are unwilling to submit to this duty with the sick who die miserably, because out of false shame they will not show the hidden wounds of their body to the physician. The great St. Cyprian, Archbishop of Carthage, (A.D. 258,) says, that the mere thought of saving one's life by sacrificing to idols is sinful, and therefore to be confessed to the priest. St. Pacian, Bishop of Barcelona in 370, warns all against the attempt to deceive the priest, or to confess imperfectly, and blames those who have indeed fully confessed their sins, but who will not submit to the penance imposed upon them. St. Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople, (A.D. 407,) holds it up as an especial dignity of the priest that he possesses power not over bodies as the princes of the world, but one which extends even to heaven, for what he does on earth by means of the power of absolving and retaining is valid in heaven. St. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, (A.D. 397,) defends the exercise of this power against the heretics, as an office committed to priests. St. Basil the Great, Archbishop of Cesarea in Cappadocia, (A. D. 379,) writes: "It is with the confession of sins as with bodily infirmities; we show the latter only to the skilful physician, and confess the former to those alone who can heal them." And St. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, (A.D. 300,) speaks thus: "Show boldly to the priest what is hidden, and discover to him the secrets of thy soul. He will have care alike for thy healing and thy reputation."

Confession of sins was made in various ways; sometimes publicly either before the assembled clergy and people, or before the clergy alone, and sometimes privately to the bishop or to a priest. Crimes which were known either by their nature or through chance, and had given public scandal, generally required public disclosure. Hidden sins were also frequently made manifest, sometimes spontaneously, but generally by the advice of the priest to whom they were first privately confessed, when he judged such humiliation to be desirable. This publicity, however, was urged upon none to whose interests as a citizen it would be prejudicial. The public declaration of the gravest sins, such as apostasy, idolatry, murder, or impurity, was invariably followed by public penance, as was also secret confession at times, according to the advice of the priest.

The practice of penance was not the same at all times and in all places; it was most severe in the second century and at the beginning of the third. It was then thought a favour for a great sinner even to be allowed to begin his penance. It was looked upon as a slow and painful process of healing, which was to work a serious and lasting conversion, and to give the sinner the opportunity even in this life of making the most complete satisfaction possible, and of purifying his soul from the smallest stains of sin. It was not only to work upon the sinner himself, but others alsowere to be deterred from sin, and filled with the deepest dread of it, by the example of such heavy penances. Therefore permission to do penance and thereby to reconcile themselves with the Church and to receive her Sacraments was only given to those who demanded it humbly, urgently, and perseveringly. Until they had obtained it, their names, if they had committed any great sin, were struck out of the rank of the faithful, and they could never take part in the public offices of the Church.

The penance began generally on the first Wednesday in Lent, with prayer and the imposition of hands by the bishop and the whole of the clergy. The penitent appeared in poor apparel, with his hair shorn, and ashes strewn upon his head, and with bare feet. If he were married, his wife must give her consent to his undertaking to do public penance, for as long as it lasted he must not only abstain from all pleasures, but live as a stranger in his own house. Prostrate on his face on the ground he received the sentence pronounced upon him by the laws of the Church, which was to try and purify him, often during a course of years, with practices of penance, mortification, and humiliation. If he had to go through all the four states of penance, he began by placing himself outside the church in the courtyard, and imploring the faithful who entered, to plead for him with God and the bishop. In the second degree he was allowed to stand at the doors of the church in the portico and there to be present at the prayers, but not at the Mass of the Catechumens. The third degree was called the beginning of penance, the two former being only preparations for it. The penitent was allowed to enter the nave of the basilica as far as the ambo of the lector, to be present at the Mass of the Catechumens, and to leave the church with them as soon as the Mass of the Faithful commenced. Immediately before his release from the third class he received anew the imposition of hands from the bishop, and listened on his knees to the prayers which were offered specially for him. As a penitent of the fourth class he was allowed to take part in all the prayers and celebrations of the Church, as well as to be present at the entire sacrifice of the Mass, but not to bring any offering or to receive communion. These were permitted only after the complete performance of his penance, with the solemn approbation of the bishop.

No ordinary dispositions would have sufficed to lead men to such repentance and humble resignation, and induce them to tread so heroically under foot all pride and self-love. But this holy spirit of penance diminished very much in the fourth century, and the inclination to submit to these severe punishments gradually decreased. Therefore the public accusations and penances ceased, and like­wise the special office of penitentiary priests, who used to hear the confessions of the penitents, prescribe to them the degree and manner of their penance, watch over their conduct, and determine the time of their transition from one class to another and finally of their being admitted to holy communion. From that time penitents were allowed to confess to a priest of their own choice, and it rested with their own consciences to acquit themselves more or less faithfully of the penances which he imposed. Pope Leo the Great (A.D. 461) propagated this custom, and by means of established rules and laws prevented its exercise being left to the arbitrary discretion of each priest; and from that time secret judicial confession, which enables the priest to decide upon the remission or the retaining of sins, has remained in full use in the Church. The hearing of confessions was in the first instance the right of the bishops; but as they themselves were not sufficiently numerous to supply the demand for confessors, they bestowed the necessary jurisdiction upon the priests of their diocese, and in later times upon the monks also. For this reason priests can now hear confessions only in the diocese to which they belong, and in no other without the permission of the bishop of that diocese.