Agape feast
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The Agape feast, or love-feast, was an early Christian banquet or common meal featuring a Eucharistic ritual. It centered on the bread and wine of nearly universal Christian practice, and included ritual elements of the Jewish Passover Seder and of Mediterranean funerary banquets. These Hellenic funeral banquets were also called agape feasts, agape referring especially to selfless love or God's love for humanity.
Agape feasts included plenty of food and drink. Christian writers from Paul to Augustine lamented the abuse of these meals by those who over-indulged. By the Middle Ages, agape feasts were replaced by Eucharist liturgies with symbolic amounts of bread and wine.
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[edit] Early Christianity
Such meals were widespread, though not universal, in the early Christian world. The earliest account of what can be seen as one of them is that in 1 Corinthians 11:20-22, where it appears associated with, and given the name of, the celebration of the Lord's Supper. The service apparently involved a full meal, with the participants bringing their own food but eating in a common room. Perhaps predictably enough, it could at times deteriorate into merely an occasion for eating and drinking, or for ostentatious displays by the wealthier members of the community, as happened in Corinth, drawing the criticisms of Saint Paul in the passage mentioned.
Soon after the year 100, Ignatius of Antioch refers to the agape or love-feast.[2] Letter 96 from Pliny the Younger to Trajan in about 112 suggests that the meal was taken after at least that part of the Eucharistic rite that is now called the Mass of the Catechumens or Liturgy of the Word. Tertullian too writes of these meals.[3] Clement of Alexandria (c.150-211/216) distinguished so-called "Agape" meals of luxurious character from the agape (love) "which the food that comes from Christ shows that we ought to partake of".[4] Accusations of gross indecency were sometimes made against the form that these meals sometimes took.[5] Referring to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata III,2, Philip Schaff commented: "The early disappearance of the Christian agapæ may probably be attributed to the terrible abuse of the word here referred to, by the licentious Carpocratians. The genuine agapæ were of apostolic origin (2 Pet. ii. 13; Jude 12), but were often abused by hypocrites, even under the apostolic eye (1 Corinthians 11:21). In the Gallican Church, a survival or relic of these feasts of charity is seen in the pain béni; and, in the Greek churches. in the ἀντίδωρον or eulogiæ distributed to non-communicants at the close of the Eucharist, from the loaf out of which the bread of oblation is supposed to have been cut."[6]
Augustine of Hippo also objected to the continuance in his native North Africa of the custom of such meals, in which some indulged to the point of drunkenness, and he distinguished them from proper celebration of the Eucharist: "Let us take the body of Christ in communion with those with whom we are forbidden to eat even the bread which sustains our bodies."[7] He reports that even before the time of his stay in Milan, the custom had already been forbidden there.[8]
Canons 27 and 28 of the Council of Laodicea (364) restricted the abuses.[9] The Third Council of Carthage (393) and the Second Council of Orleans (541) reiterated this legislation, which prohibited feasting in churches, and the Trullan Council of 692 decreed that honey and milk were not to be offered on the altar (Canon 57), and that those who held love feasts in churches should be excommunicated (Canon 74).
[edit] Protestant revivals of the practice
After the Protestant Reformation there was a move amongst some groups of Christians to try to return to the practices of the New Testament Church. One such group were the Moravians led by Count Zinzendorf and they reinstituted the Love Feast. This was a simple sharing of Love Feast Buns and tea or punch, and then testimonies were given.
John Wesley the founder of Methodism travelled to America in the company of the Moravians and greatly admired their faith and practice. After his conversion in 1738 he introduced the Love Feast to the Methodist Church. Due to the lack of ordained ministers within Methodism, the Love Feast took on a life of its own, as there were few opportunities to take Communion.
The Primitive Methodists also celebrated the Love Feast, before it gradually died out again in the Nineteenth Century as the revival cooled.
[edit] Contemporary
Some contemporary Christians participate in Agape meals on rare occasions, to experience this historical form of the Eucharist. Many Christians, however, after celebrating the Eucharist, now routinely participate in a sharing of light refreshments and conversation in an informal gathering that is functionally an Agape. This post-Eucharistic gathering is often called "fellowship hour" or "coffee hour" and is regarded by many clergy as a particularly opportune time for engaging adults in Christian education. The Church of the Brethren is one which regularly practices Agape feasts (called "Love Feast"), generally including anywhere from a light to full meal eaten together, foot washing, and a short message.
[edit] Agape in Freemasonry
Agape is also the name given by some masonic traditions to the formal meals held after meetings. [10] The meal always includes a joint of meat (normally beef) to be cut ceremonially by the master of the lodge. The meal is often accompanied with wine, normally supplied by senior members of the lodge. It has been a tradition in freemasonry since the late eighteenth century, though may have taken place previous to the Grand Lodge being formed in London in 1717.
[edit] References
- ^ The word "Agape" in the inscription has led some to interpret the scene as that of an Agape feast. However, the phrase within which the word appears is "Agape misce nobis" (Agape, mix for us, i.e. prepare the wine for us), making it more likely that Agape is the name of the woman holding the cup. A very similar fresco and inscription elsewhere in the same catacomb has, in exactly the same position within the fresco, the words "Misce mi Irene" (Mix for me, Irene). A reproduction of this other fresco can be seen at Catacombe dei Ss. Marcellino e Pietro, where it is accompanied by the explanation (in Italian) "One of the most frequently recurring scenes in the paintings is that of the banquet, generally interpreted as a symbolic representation of the joys of the afterlife, but in which it may be possible to discern a realistic presentation of the agapae, the funeral banquets held to commemorate the dead person." Agape, like Irene, may thus be the name of the person buried where the fresco was painted.
- ^ Smyrnaeans, 8:2
- ^ Apology, 39; De Corona Militis, 3
- ^ Paedagogus II, 1
- ^ "Sed majoris est Agape, quia per hanc adolescentes tui cum sororibus dormiunt, appendices scilicet gulae lascivia et luxuria" (Tertullian, De Jejuniis, 17, quoted in Gibbons: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).
- ^ Elucidations
- ^ Letter 22, 1:3
- ^ Confessions, 6.2.2
- ^ The Council of Laodicea in Phrygia Pacatiana
- ^ http://www.freemason.org/documents/CFMSummer2004.pdf
