body, whereas in English it is the metaphorical sense of "member" that has become the ordinary
256 SAINT A UG USTINE - SERMONS
Let your faith be firm in God, let it be acceptable to God. Because what you don't see now, but believe, you are going to see there, where you will have joy without end.
NOTES
1. This date is my compromise between those proposed by two authorities who are usually in perfect accord: Fischer, who suggests 412-413, and Kunzelmann who favors 416-417. The sermon, though primarily on the eucharist, explains all three "sacraments of initiation": baptism, confirma¬ tion, and eucharist.
2. Evidently the sermon was preached just before communion, after the great eucharistic prayer, or canon of the Mass.
3. Presumably he means pagan myths; but possibly also various popular superstitions or naive misconceptions about the sacraments or the Holy Spirit.
4. When we read the scriptures aloud, the books of the illiterate? 5. He is going on to talk about the Mass, from the preface onward. So here by "sacraments" he seems to mean the successive stages of the eucharistic prayer, beginning with the exchange between celebrant and people which opens the preface; here each utterance appears to be a "sacrament."
6. What we now call the intercessions, or prayers of the faithful.
7. We have to remember that membrum in Latin still meant primarily a limb or organ of the body, whereas in English it is the metaphorical sense of "member" that has become the ordinary meaning: member of an organization, institute, or society.
8. The text is overloaded and corrupt here. As far as "because he wanted us to be ourselves his sacrifice all is plain. Then it continues—I leave out variously suggested punctuations—quod de¬ monstratum est ubi impositum est primum illud sacrificium Dei et nos id est signum rei quod sum us. I have simply omitted Dei et nos after the second sacrificium. I am guessing that "where the sacrifice was first put refers to the offertory, and that this somehow indicated that the offerings represented the people's offering of themselves.
For the same doctrine that we are also the sacrifice or victim being offered in the Mass, see The City of God, X,6.
9. Notice how his thought does not linger on the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements, but passes straight to the ultimate meaning of the eucharist, the ultimate grace signified by Christ's body and blood in the sacrament, namely the unity of the body of Christ which is the Church, and our living incorporation into it. He doesn't deny the real presence, as was later thought by, for example, some of the Protestant reformers. But he knows that it is only, so to say, the middle stage of the sacrament, what Saint Thomas Aquinas calls the res et sacramentum, the thing signified by the visible celebration, which is itself also the sacrament, that is the sign, of a further thing. It is this further thing, what Saint Thomas calls the res tantum, the ultimate thing or grace signified, that always interests Augustine. And the grace of the eucharist is the unity of the body of Christ and our participation in it. The real presence of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine has the same place in this sacrament as the baptismal character has in baptism: a kind of half-way stage, or middle level, in the sacramental mystery of grace.