The Changing Meanings of sacramentum : Historical Sketches

Abstract

The Changing Meanings of sacramentum: Historical Sketches Daniel G. Van Slyke The current liturgical book containing the prayers of the Mass is the Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia, the third authoritative Latin version of the Roman Missal promulgated since the Second Vatican Council. Published in 2002, this Missal employs the word sacramentum on 252 occasions.1 By contrast, the word appeared only 131 times in the Roman Missal of 1962.2 The word's liturgical import, then, has practically doubled in the years following the Second Vatican Council. The need to plumb the depths of its meaning has grown accordingly. This essay sketches various meanings of sacramentum in a series of authors, mostly chosen for their influence, beginning with ancient pagans and ending with the Second Vatican Council. Key authors are considered from classical non-Christian Latin literature (Varro, Caesar, and Apuleius), the ante-Nicene period (especially Tertullian), the height of Latin patristic thought in the late fourth and early fifth century (Ambrose and Augustine), the transitional period of late antiquity (Isidore of Seville), the Middle Ages (Hugh of St Victor and Peter Lombard), the sixteenth century (the Council of Trent) and the twentieth century (the Second Vatican Council). This essay considers also the earliest use of sacramentum to designate a Christian phenomenon, and the term's appearances in early biblical translations . The result is a chronological survey that highlights the waxing , waning, introduction, re-introduction, and ongoing enrichment of the concepts that various Latin authors have conveyed with the word sacramentum. Antiphon 11.3 (2007): 245-279 1 Manlio Sodi and Alessandro Toniolo, eds, Concordantia et indices missalis Romani: Editio typica tertia (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002) 1474-78: 34 sacramenta; 61 sacramenti; 54 sacramentis; 37 sacramento; 15 sacramentorum; 51 sacramentum. 2 Such is my count of the list compiled by André Pflieger, Liturgicae orationis concordantia verbalia, prima pars, Missale Romanum (Rome: Herder, 1964) 589-94. 246 DANIEL G. VAN SLYKE I. ANCIENT NON-CHRISTIAN USES OF SACRAMENTUM What did sacramentum mean in the wider Latin-speaking world when it was first adapted by Christians? The extant uses of the word by classical pagan authors can be divided into three certain categories of meaning. The first and second categories are juridical and military. Various analogies with the word's military connotations comprise the third. Varro, writing a history of the Latin language between 127 and 116 B.C., defines sacramentum as the sum of money deposited with the pontiff by both the plaintiff and the defendant in a law suit: "he who won the decision got back his deposit from the temple, but the loser's deposit passed into the state treasury."3 In the mid-second century of the Christian era, Gaius, the renowned jurist, provides further details concerning a type of general legal action "by a sacrament ."4 Gaius specifies the formula with which the two parties in the lawsuit would pledge their sacraments in testimony to the justice of their respective claims: "The first claimant would then say: 'Inasmuch as you have claimed wrongfully, I challenge you with a sacrament of five hundred coins'; his adversary said likewise: 'And I you.'"5 Since the legal sacramentum had fallen into disuse by early Christian times, however, the term had only distant juridical overtones for the earliest Christians who used it.6 A turning point occurs in the first century B.C., when Julius Caesar becomes the first author to designate a military phenomenon with 3 M. Terentius Varro, De lingua latina V .180, in De lingua latina quae supersunt, ed. Georgius Goetz and Fridericus Schoell (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910) 54-55: "[si is] ea pecunia quae in iudicium venit in litibus, sacramentum a sacro; qui[s] petebat et qui infitiabatur, de aliis rebus uterque quingenos aeris ad pontem deponebant, de aliis rebus item certo alio legitimo numero assum; qui iudicio vicerat, suum sacramentum e sacro auferebat, victi ad aerarium redibat," trans. Roland G. Kent in Varro: On the Latin Language, vol. 1, Books V-VII, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1938) 169. 4 Gaius, Institutiones IV .12-14, in Iurisprudentiae anteiustinianae reliquias, vol. 1, ed. E. Seckel, B. Kuebler, and E. Huschke (Leipzig...