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Five: Monster Ingratitude
- Baylor University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
99 five Monster Ingratitude From its earliest emergence and throughout the Middle Ages, the Christian church’s central religious rite was the Eucharist, a thanksgiving offering and meal, which became known as the Mass (from the dismissal at the end of the Latin mass, ite missa est). Medieval Christians viewed it as a gift exchange. In the early medieval period, it was an oblatio offered by the entire community of the faithful.1 Laymen participated in the great eucharistic offering through the offertory, often enacted as a procession of gifts, including bread and wine, toward the eucharistic altar. When the Council of Macon (585) learned that some churches had deviated from the divine mandatum that required them to offer the “host” (hostiam) at the altar, it decreed that all men and women bring an offering of bread and wine each Sunday (oblatio ab omnibus viris el mulieribus offeratur tam panis quam vini).2 It was not a free linear gift. So long as the faithful offered the gifts in the spirit of Abel, offering their heart with bread and wine, they could be confident that through these offerings (immolations) they were obtaining remission of sins.3 In the Missale Gothicum of the eighth century the gifts are offered with the prayer that God would sanctify and receive the gifts, and also to absolve sins (per ea placates peccata nostra).4 Behind the practice of the Offertory was the Augustinian idea that the “whole redeemed community , that is to say the congregation and fellowship of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice through the great Priest who offered himself in his suffering for us.” Through the gift, the church not only was cleansed of sin but also became the one body of the head, Jesus.5 Christians may not have looked for a material countergift, but they expected spiritual benefit when they offered the sacrifice of the Mass.6 100 ⌣ gratitude Two key changes took place over the course of the Middle Ages. On the one hand, the participation of the laity in the eucharistic rite declined to the vanishing point. The Offertory was slowly eliminated, and with the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century a fissure opened up between the roles of laity and priest in the great Christian ritual of gratitude. Clergy alone began to eat the bread and drink the wine, and architectural and other liturgical changes reinforced clerical sacredness. Cloisters and choirs were marked off from clergy, the priest celebrated the Eucharist silently with his back to the congregation and often with no congregation present, the people no longer brought forward the bread and wine, and the host was changed from the bread of the “lay” table to specially prepared wafers. Communal offering per sacerdotes became a sacerdotal sacrifice pro populo.7 Priests became quasibrokers in a patronage system; they offered the sacrifice for the people, were able to win the favor of God, and were the conduits for the distribution of gifts to the entire people. The people no longer enjoyed a direct gift-andgratitude relationship with God. The other development was the commercialization of the Mass.8 The Mass had long been conceived as a gift that evoked a countergift of forgiveness from God. Yet over the course of the Middle Ages, the rise of votive and private masses, as well as mass stipends, turned the gift exchange into something closer to a sale. Most masses of the Middle Ages did not take place in the gathered congregation, but in private, in monastic cells where monks chanted Mass after Mass on behalf of a paying patron. By their stipend, Christians could purchase a cleric’s time to say Mass on their behalf. Masses were paid for to expiate particular sins, and penitential manuals specified how many penances could be removed by the performance of a mass. One mass could replace seven or twelve days of penitential fast, and the purchase of twenty masses could take the place of fasts over seven or nine months. Eventually, “precisely calculated price lists emerged.”9 The thanksgiving rite of the church was partially taken from the realm of the gift and placed in the realm of commercial exchange. The transformation of the Mass was a result, a signal, and a cause of a revolution in Western religion. It centered on gifts and gratitude, in theory and in practice.10 Grace and Gift Jesus was an ingrate. So were the Reformers. They rejected the church’s settled...