Augustine in His Own Words
The Preacher 153
We work our hands when we do this: "Deal your bread to the hungry, and bring the needy into your house" (Is 58:7); "Enclose alms in the heart of the poor, and it shall intercede for you before the Lord" (Sir 29:12).58
Eucharist and Mystagogy
The Liturgy of the Word, that is, the first half of the Sunday service, was open to all: to baptized, to catechumens, even to pagans. But the second half, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, was secret. Only baptized were permitted to attend. Catechumens were dismissed after the sermon, and the church doors were closed and locked. At the Easter Vigil, the competentes were baptized and chrismated (or, as we say today in the Western Church, "confirmed"). They then joined the assembled faithful behind closed doors and witnessed and received the Eucharist for the first time. Fourth-century bishops took this opportunity, beginning on Easter morning and continuing through Easter Week, to instruct the newly baptized on the secret ceremonies of baptism, chrismation, and eucharist, a form of preaching known as "mystagogy" ("teaching of the mysteries"). Mystagogical sermons survive from Augustine's contemporaries, such as Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Ambrose. Here is an example of Augustine's mystagogy, delivered to the newly baptized (he calls them infantes, "newborns"). It touches on Augustine's influential (and sometimes misunderstood) theology of sacrament. This is Sermon 227, given in its entirety:
I remember my promise. I promised you who have just been baptized a sermon to explain the sacrament of the Lord's table, something which you now see and which you were made participants in last night. You need to know what you have received, what you are going to receive, and what you ought to receive daily. That bread, which you see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God, is the Body of Christ. That cup (or rather what the cup holds), sanctified by the word of God, is the Blood of Christ. Through these the Lord wished to commemorate for us His Body and Blood, which He poured out for the remission of sins. If you receive them properly, you are what you have received,59 for the Apostle says: "We the many are one bread, one body" you." He thus insisted that a twofold action of forgiveness and almsgiving was to accompany the prayer. Thus he spoke of these as the Prayer's "two wings," enabling it to fly to God (s. 58.10). See Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 286–93; also Louis Swift, "Giving and Forgiving: Augustine on Eleemosyna and Misericordia," Augustinian Studies 32 (2001): 25–36.
58. S. 56.4–11 (PL 38:387–82); my trans. This is one of several surviving sermons on the Lord's Prayer delivered at the traditio orationis; see also s. 57, 58, 59. Augustine's exegesis of the Lord's Prayer owes much to his North African predecessor, Cyprian of Carthage. See Alistair Stewart-Sykes, ed., Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen: On the Lord's Prayer, Popular Patristic Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2004).
59. "You are what you have received": This echoes Augustine's famous one-liner from s. 272: "Be what you see, receive what you are" (Estote quod uidetis, accipite quod estis).