haps the exorcisms, but also their always being sent out of church before the Mass of the faithful
268 SAINT AUGUSTINE - SERMONS
4. See 1 Cor 9:9. Com was threshed by oxen dragging a heavy sledge, with iron teeth in it, a tribulum, round and round over the sheaves on the threshing-floor; it still is in communities where combine harvesters are not available, or feasible. See Sermon 111, note 17.
5. His brief explanation of the sacraments of initiation in these terms, like that of all the Fathers, both Latin and Greek, presupposes the order baptism, confirmation, first communion. This is indeed the theologically correct sacramental order. Is it not time that the Latin Churches started taking it more seriously, and putting confirmation back in its proper place before first communion, as the most suitable preparation for first communion?
6. Was there just one loaf of bread on the altar, even at this stage of the Church's history? Or was unity signified by all the small loaves the faithful had brought being piled in one heap on one dish? This seems more likely. The Latin Churches were not yet using unleavened bread for the eucharist.
7. He means primarily the Donatists.
8. The exercises through which the catechumens and the competentes were put, especially per¬ haps the exorcisms, but also their always being sent out of church before the Mass of the faithful began, and finally, no doubt, their having to strip naked in order to be baptized, must have been very humbling, if not exactly humiliating in the harsh sense of that word. Augustine records somewhere in the Confessions his astonished admiration of what he considered the humility of the distinguished rhetorician Victorinus Afer publicly confessing his faith, in the "giving back" of the symbol by the competentes, when he became a Christian in Rome (Confessions VIII, 2, 5).
9. "We" being, presumably, both clergy and older faithful.
10. Augustine's liturgy has it in the singular, Sursum cor, instead of the plural of the Roman formula, Sursum corda.
11 • A sacerdote. In Patristic times the word sacerdos, priest, was almost invariably applied only to bishops, never—or hardly ever—to the presbyters whom we now call priests (the English word "priest" deriving from "presbyter"). So to avoid the reader thinking that it refers to priests in the sense in which we now use the word, it has to be translated "high priest."
This usage, to the best of my knowledge, is so untypical of Saint Augustine that it does provide a ground for questioning the authenticity of this sermon.
12. Apud acta Dei—a very strong way of describing the eucharist; it refers above all, one as¬ sumes, to the divine act of changing the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
13. See 1 Cor 11:29.