Augustine’s Conception of Sacrifice in City of God, Book X, and the Eucharistic Sacrifice

1. Introduction

In the tenth book of his monumental work on the City of God, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) develops a conception of sacrifice that has received considerable attention among theologians, not least in a number of recent scholarly contributions, including an essay by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.¹ This lively conversation centers on the question of how to interpret Augustine’s dense exposition, which, at first sight, would seem to propose an understanding of sacrifice that is entirely interiorized and detached from ritual expression. An initial reading of the text may well recall the third verse of the “Morning Hymn” (Morgenlied) by the Lutheran divine Paul Gerhard (1606–1676), written in 1666:

Come ye with singing,To God be bringingGoods and each blessing—All we’re possessing—All be to God as an offering brought.Hearts with love glowing,With praises o’erflowing,Thanksgiving voices,In these God rejoices,All other off’rings without them are nought.²

Lovely as it is, this hymn entails a firm rejection of the sacrificial character of the Mass, especially when Gerhard insists, in literal translation, that “songs of thanksgiving are incense and ram (Dankbare Lieder sind Weihrauch und Widder),” and hence the only offering that is holy and pleasing to God.

Gerhard’s poetical assertion stands for an interpretation of Augustine that had some currency in the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. For the Lutheran theologian Martin Chemnitz in his 1566 Examination of the Council of Trent, Augustine provided the justification for rejecting the Council’s teaching about the sacrificial character of the Mass and for setting against it “the true interior, invisible and spiritual sacrifices of the faithful.”³ Sacrifice is thus disconnected from ritual or symbolic expression and re-conceived as an interior attitude of religious devotion and moral conduct of life.⁴ On the Catholic side, we find among the propositions of the Louvain theologian Michael Baius that were condemned by Pope Pius V in 1567 the following statement: “The sacrifice of the Mass is a sacrifice for no other reason than for that general one by which ‘every work is performed that man may cling to God in holy fellowship’ [City of God, X, 5].”⁵

On the other hand, the vast corpus of Augustine’s works is full of sacrificial language with precise and specific references not only to the cross, but also to the Eucharist, both of which he calls “the most true sacrifice” (uerissimum sacrificium).⁶ How can these passages be squared with those sections in the City of God that would seem to advocate an entirely spiritual concept of sacrifice consisting in any work of mercy done to our fellow human beings for the sake of attaining God, our supreme good? In this article I argue that the hermeneutical key to reading the much-discussed exposition in the City of God is the apologetic context of the work. Augustine intends above all to contrast Christian sacrifice with pagan sacrifice and hence to reject the latter. In doing so, he presents a theology of sacrifice that has considerable spiritual depth; far from contradicting the by then traditional understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, Augustine enriches it by exploring it in its Christological and ecclesiological dimensions.

As so often in this prolific and supple thinker, we need to hold various strands in his writings together in order to avoid one-sided interpretations that can easily lead to a fractured vision of the Christian faith, as happened in history with the readings of Augustine on grace, free will and predestination.

2. The Apologetic Context of the City of God

Any analysis of the tenth book of the City of God needs to be clear about what Augustine wants to achieve with it. This book belongs to the first part of a large-scale apology against paganism. As the more recent study of late antiquity has shown, the Christianization of the Empire was a long process...