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Updated: May 11, 2025
This attempt to conciliate worldly converts, by adopting their ideas and practices, did not pass without remonstrance from those whose intelligence discerned the motive. "You have," says Faustus to Augustine, "substituted your agapae for the sacrifices of the pagans; for their idols your martyrs, whom you serve with the very same honors.
Superstition performed its maddest freak in the Stylites, men "who stood motionless on the tops of pillars;" the original maniac being one Simon, a Syrian, who actually spent thirty-seven years of his life on pillars, the last of which was forty cubits high. The Agapae were abolished, and auricular confession was established, during this century.
The great doctrine of transubstantiation directly points to the abominable practice of eating human flesh at the Agapae.... Upon the whole, it is impossible, from the mass of evidence already adduced, to avoid the conclusion that the early Christians, in their Agapae, were really guilty of the execrable vices with which they were so often charged, and for which they were sentenced to death.
These pious agapae, or love-feasts, often turned into disgusting orgies. When Augustin became Bishop of Hippo he had considerable trouble to get his people out of the habit of them. Notwithstanding his efforts, the tradition still lasts. Every Friday the Muslem women keep up the custom of visiting the cemeteries and the marabouts. Just as in the time of St.
He listens to the reading of the older Scriptures; he celebrates with the gathered company the eucharistic suppers and agapae; he keeps with them the Easter celebration, in memory of Him who shall give them eternal life. In emblem of their faith the sign of the fish is on their evening lamps. Theirs is a sterling citizenship.
Cor. xi., 17, 22, of disorder and drunkenness at these Agapae; the habit of speaking of the communion feast as "the Christian mysteries," a habit still kept up in the Anglican prayer-book; the fact that they took place at night, under cover of darkness, a custom for which there was not the smallest reason, unless the service were of a nature so objectionable as to bring it under the ban of the tolerant Roman law; and lastly, the use of the cross, and the sign of the cross, the central Christian emblem, and one that, especially in connection with the mysteries, is of no dubious signification.
Tertullian pleads earnestly that these accusations were false: "if you cannot do it, you ought not to believe it of others. Yet, when Tertullian became a Montanist, he declared that these very crimes were committed at the Agapae, so that he spoke falsely either in the one case or in the other.
"Let us now closely examine how far the Eleusinian and Bacchanalian feasts resembled the Christian Agapae whether the latter, modified and altered a little according to the change which would take place in the taste of the age, originated from the former, or were altogether from a different source.
In the churches women rose to give their opinions without being veiled, as if they were Greek courtesans; the Agapae, or love-feasts, had degenerated into luxurious banquets; and unchastity, the peculiar vice of the Corinthians, went unrebuked.
The word mass carries us back still further, and identifies the present mass with that of the Pagans.... Formerly the consecrated bread was called host, which word signifies a victim offered as sacrifice, anciently human very often.... Jerome and other Fathers called the communion bread little body, and the communion table mystical table; the latter, in allusion to the heathen and early Christian mysteries, and the former, in reference to the children sacrificed at the Agapae.
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