Almost Sacraments

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What do we make of the four “Almost Sacraments”? Among other things, we might note how they bear upon a common interest that is, sadly, more and more neglected in today’s Church: young men.

How many sacraments are there anyway? Seven? Two? Two-and-a-half? If you are Roman Catholic today, your Church has handed down this judgment at the Council of Trent at its seventh session on March 3rd, 1547:

If anyone should say that the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by Our Lord Jesus Christ, or that there are more or fewer than seven, that is, Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Order, and Matrimony, or even that any of these seven is not truly or properly a sacrament: let him be anathema.^[1]

As a medievalist, I find this answer (along with some other rulings of the Council of Trent) to be somewhat discouraging–particularly, the observation that there are no more than seven sacraments. Why not?

The history of the development, and ultimate acceptance, of a conventional heptad of sacraments in the Church is a fascinating story–and like so many other stories that we tell about the Church, it is a medieval story. To simplify irresponsibly, the Ancient Church imposed on its faithful one–or three–supreme sacrament(s) (without denying the possibility of other sacraments). The imparting of this Sacrament began with Baptism; Baptism was perfected by an anointing and laying on of hands (i.e., Chrismation/Confirmation); and once this was imparted, the Christian was enabled to receive the Holy Eucharist–the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ–and thereby complete his incorporation into the Mystical Body.

Virtually everyone accepted these sacraments–or mysteries–as the essence of the life of the Christian. Of course there were disagreements about the manner and minister of the sacrament–the Latin West reserved Confirmation to the Bishop, whereas in the Greek East it was delegated permanently to priests, a distinction that ultimately led to the lapse of infant communion in the West as the Christian population grew.^[2] Naturally, this originate triad of mysteries also implies and presupposes another: the laying on of hands through which men were initiated into the succession of the Apostles and received their Apostolic powers to bind and loose sins and to preside over the breaking of the Bread in remembrance of the Lord.

But what remained beyond these essential sacraments? Here is where things get interesting, and remain controversial to the present. During the “Dark Ages,” marriage in the Latin West, though blessed by priests (and increasingly policed by them), largely followed ancestral custom. The Germans had basically always practiced life-long monogamy (see Tacitus’ Germania), although the ruling Merovingian family of Francia (the line of “long-haired kings,” reges crinati, legendarily descended from the sea monster Merovech and, more reliably, from the warlord Clovis) was infamous for its polygamy–a practice that the church hierarchy had to accept for the time. By the time the Caroligians (the family of Charlemagne) had seized the throne, the Frankish royal family had advanced from polygamy to serial monogamy, though divorce and concubinage were still accepted as a natural part of the life of a great Christian king without blushing. (When I teach Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne and I am in a provocative mood, I challenge my students to tally up the number of the great king’s female companions indicated in the biography). The progress of the Roman Church in increasing its control over marriage in the generations that followed can be gauged by the controversy that dogged Lothar II (d. 855), Charlemagne’s great-grandson, in his attempt to divorce his wife Teutberga on outlandish, trumped up charges and his failure to have his bastard son, begotten of his erstwhile concubine, accepted as his legitimate heir.^[3] Despite these developments, theologians of the Carolingian era continued to dispute the sacramentality of marriage. Marriage was a natural institution and a family affair–priests could bless it, but the essence of the marital pact was accomplished through negotiations between families without requiring sacerdotal intervention. It was not until the later Middle Ages that church weddings preceding spousal cohabitation became de rigueur, and only then among the privileged classes.

And then there was the alternative lifestyle to consider: monasticism. Was this not a sacrament? Surely the transformation involved in taking on the life of the angels–entering here and now into the Kingdom of Heaven, where there is neither marrying nor being given in marriage, where there is neither buying or selling, “yours” or “mine”–must be a great mystery. After all, to become a monk or a nun was to do nothing else than to repent–the one and only necessary thing–to undergo μετανοία on a daily basis, the interior reorientation away from the world and toward God that was externalized by the reception of a haircut (the tonsure), the habit (or schema), and a new name which proclaimed a new creature set apart. Throughout all Christendom, in the East and in the West, and for a thousand years after the seminal life of Anthony the Great (251-356) was written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the monk/nun (rather than the priest or bishop) was seen as the paradigmatic Christian. In a world where infant baptism had become the norm, “conversion” generally referred not so much to the act of becoming a Christian for the first time as it did the act of becoming a monk.^[4]

Closely associated with this great mystery of conversion were the graced but discrete acts of repentance and healing in which even Christians of an ordinary stamp could participate: confession, ascetical penance, and anointings–those extraordinary instances where everyday Christians could partake in the life and death of Christ, the expressions and occasions of which varied tremendously East and West through the centuries and were closely influenced by contemporary monastic practice. (For instance, the introduction of private confession to a spiritual father in the seventh and eighth centuries offered the layman participation in what had been previously a monastic practice).^[5]

The twelfth century looms large in conventional accounts of the development of the fully-fledged sacramental teaching of the Church. In that century in the Latin West, the writings of theologians and canon lawyers–and above all, the work of the great theologian Hugh of St. Victor, the Parisian bishop Peter Lombard, and the canon lawyer Gratian–successfully promoted a sacramental heptad: baptism, confirmation, communion, confession, holy orders, holy matrimony, and “extreme unction.” This heptad was accepted and became entirely standard in the theological, canonical, and pastoral literature of the thirteenth century.^[6] During this same century this heptad, mutatis mutandis, also became standard in the Byzantine East through the insistence and imposition of Western churchmen, but without serious protest from the Greeks.^[7] The first conciliar statement that there are seven sacraments comes from November 22nd of 1439, at the eighth session of the Council of Florence, which saw the union of the Armenian and Roman Churches:

“There are seven sacraments of the New Law, that is baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penitence, extreme unction, order, and matrimony, which differ greatly from the sacraments of the Old Law. For whereas [the sacraments of the Old Law] were not causes of grace, but were only figures of the grace that would be given through the passion of Christ, these our [sacraments of the New Law] both contain grace and confer it upon those who worthily receive them. The first five of these [sacraments] are ordained to the spiritual perfection of each man in himself; the last two [sacraments] are ordained to the rule and multiplication of the entire Church.”^[8]

So there are seven sacraments. But the difference between this Florentine definition, and the later Tridentine definition given above, is that the former never says that there are only seven and no more than seven sacraments.

Of course, it would be irresponsible for me to suggest that the fathers of Florence actually had in mind that there were a few spare sacraments out there beyond the usual seven, which they just preferred not to name. That said, it is true that in the long, messy, and exciting history of Christ’s Church there have been other moments in the life of the Christian that were identified by theologians as especially permeated by saving grace, that were regulated by priests and liturgical scripts so as to convey visibly invisible realities, and that were thereby elevated–if not to the level of full-blown and universally-recognized sacrament–than at least to the very gray area where the lines between “sacrament” and “sacramental” are blurred. I want to mention a few of these “Almost Sacraments” in this essay, consider the common theme of virility and manhood that runs through them, and consider what we have lost by losing them.

I. The Sacrament of the First Shave

All traditional peoples have rites of passage for young men. In the Americas, in Africa, in Asia, and in old Europe, young men had to undergo some sort of ordeal–whether in fact perilous and existential or simply ritual and symbolic–that publicly enacted their transition from children abiding in their mother’s embrace and the nursery (i.e., the female space) into the society of men (the roll of citizenship, the comitatus, the Männerbund, warband, and so forth) with the privileges and obligations attendant therewith. The Germanic peoples encountered by Christian missionaries between the fourth and eighth centuries–at the heart of whose paradigm of manhood was the warrior bearing arms–were no different. According to the first-century Roman historian Tacitus, the Germans indicated the child’s achievement of manhood by presenting him with his weapons. This ceremonial arming persisted among Germanic groups in the Early Middle Ages, where it was accompanied by another rite. After the youngster had experienced his first growth of facial hair (or perhaps merely a notional first growth), his face was publicly shaved by an older man (usually his father) and in the presence of other men who then welcomed him into their fellowship. This rite of passage was accepted by Christian missionaries, sanctified with liturgical formulae and the intervention of a priest, and transformed into a graced rite known as the Barbatoria.^[9]

In early medieval Gaul, Spain, and even the Roman East, the rite of the barbatoria was written down and codified in a text known as a sacramentary: books used by priests for performing the sacraments. Medievalist Yitzak Hen speculates that an entire Mass may have been developed specifically for the rite of the first shave and he provides the following translation of the prayer uttered by the priest on that occasion as contained in the Gelone Sacramentary (c. 790-800):

O God, through whose providence every adult creature rejoices in growth, be gracious to this servant of Yours, flourishing in the youthful blush of age and shaving his bloom for the first time. May he be strengthened in every respect through the support of your protection; may he live to old age and may he rejoice in your protection in this life and in eternity. Through [Christ] our Lord. Amen.^[10]

(That prayer probably reads better in Latin).

II. The Sacrament of Kingship

This is a good one and it caused no little trouble for western churchmen, particularly in the age of the Investiture Conflict (1073-1122). For many in the West today, the idea that politics is a “secular space” has become second nature. But there is nothing natural about this presupposition. As I have written in a previous essay in The Imaginative Conservative, this view–the idea of secularity upon which contemporary notions of the separation between Church and State are based–was a discourse and meme vigorously asserted by the reforming papacy and its agents in the age of Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) in the face of an older paradigm that imagined the king as a sacred person. The reformers were ultimately successful, but they had to fight an uphill battle against the deep archetype of the King-Priest. Ironically, in an earlier age the Church herself had contributed largely to this older paradigm by developing elaborate rites of coronation, set within the context of a Mass and before the altar, and involving unction–the anointing of the king-elect with sacred oils, a gesture first found in the First Book of Samuel (10:1). Through this anointing or chrismation, the man was transformed into a literal christus (“an anointed one”), holy in his person and set apart before the Lord: “Has not the Lord anointed you to be prince over his people Israel? And you shall reign over the people of the Lord and you will save them from the hand of their enemies roundabout. And this shall be the sign to you that the Lord has anointed you to be prince over his heritage.”

Among the various Masses for the coronation of a king that were composed in the Early Middle Ages, let us consider one special example. This comes from another sacramentary, the so-called Gelasian Sacramentary (which was composed roughly between 630 and 715, though our earliest extant manuscript of the sacramentary was written c. 750).^[11] (One reason why this sacramentary’s script for the coronation of a king deserves special consideration is because of the emphasis it places on the Roman Empire as a persisting reality–even nearly three-hundred years after its alleged “fall” in 476!)

At the beginning of the Mass of coronation, the priest prayed these words:

O God, Guardian of all Kingdoms and of the supreme Roman Empire, grant to Thy servants, our kings, to increase with understanding the triumph of Thy power, so that by His gift they might be ever powerful by Whose constitution they are princes. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ….

And then the priest prayed these words:

O God, in Whose hand are the hearts of kings, incline the ears of Thy mercy to the prayers of our humility, and apply the governance of Thy wisdom to our princes, Thy servants, so that, having drunk the counsels from Thy font, they might be pleasing to you and be glorious above all the kingdoms.

Then, after the priest placed the bread and wine on the altar, he offered these prayers to God in secret:

Receive, O Lord, the prayers and sacrifices of Thy Church for the salvation of Thy servant who makes supplication to Thee, and for the protection of Thy faithful people work the ancient miracles of Thy arm; so that once the enemies of peace have been overcome, the secure Roman liberty might serve Thee….

Then the priest initiates the great Eucharistic prayer and asks God to look with benevolence on the offerings with these words:

Therefore propitiously and benignly receive this sacrifice, O Lord, for Thy servant, which we offer to Thee by the ministry of the priestly office, since Thou hast deigned to confer upon him the power of empire. And, entreated by our supplication, grant that he, trusting in the protection of Thy majesty, might be increased in age and in kingdom.

Finally, after the reception of Holy Communion and the priest concluded the coronation Mass with these words:

O God, Who for the preaching of the Eternal Kingdom didst prepare the Roman Empire, present the celestial arms to Thy servants, our princes, so that the peace of the Churches be not troubled by the storm of wars, through Our Lord [Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God through all ages without end. Amen.]^[12]

Potent words that sat ill with the reformers of a later age, when, amidst the struggle for primacy in Christendom between the King and the Priest, the advocates of the priestly party now elaborated a discourse of anti-kingship that imaged crowned men as mere arch-thugs only saved–perhaps–by the sanction of the priest. This attempt to de-sacralize regal power did not go down without protests. Among the most strident exponents of sacral kingship in the twelfth century was the anonymous Norman ecclesiastic who conjured up the ancient King-Priest made by the sacrament of coronation in these words:

No one should take precedence by right over [the king], who is blessed
with so many and such great blessings, who is consecrated and made like
unto God with so many and such great sacraments, for no one is
consecrated and made like God with more or greater sacraments than
he is, nor indeed with equivalent ones, and so no one is co-equal with
him. Therefore he is not to be called a layman, for he is the anointed (christus) of
the Lord, a God through grace, the supreme ruler, supreme shepherd, master,
defender and instructor of holy Church, lord over his brothers, worthy to be
adored by all men, chief and highest prelate. It is not to be said that he is inferior
to the bishop because the bishop consecrates him, for it often happens that lesser
men consecrate a greater, inferiors their superior, as when the cardinals
consecrate a pope or suffragan bishops a metropolitan. This can be so because
they are not the authors of the consecration but ministers. God makes the
sacrament efficacious; they administer it. (Emphasis mine).^[13]

Nor were the eleventh and twelfth-century reformers entirely successful in their efforts at banishing the specter of the King-Priest. Intimations of the holiness of the king endured throughout the Middle Ages. Hence the need of the Council of Trent to state explicitly that there were only seven sacraments and, implicitly, that kingship was not among them.

III. The Sacrament of the Order of Chivalry

In the central Middle Ages the Church also struggled with men on the humbler scale of the aristocratic social ladder: the knights–armed servitors of greater lords–whose principal function in society was the exercise of violence, against one another, but often enough against the weak and the vulnerable: peasants, women, and the churchmen themselves. It has been rightly quipped that the average knight of the tenth and eleventh centuries had a lot more in common with Don Corleone than with Sir Lancelot. Particularly in these centuries, which witnessed the devolution of power and the usurpation of royal government by local lords and their armed bands, knightly violence ran rampant and ecclesiastics struggled to find some way to contain or channel it in more productive directions.

There were many false starts. Grassroots movements and peace rallies, eventuating in the “Truce of God” and the “Peace of God” attempted to limit the times within which knightly violence could be exercised as well as the persons liable to it. The saints themselves were enlisted as the enforcers of the oaths drawn out from the reluctant warriors to observe the peace. Meanwhile clerics and household chaplains attempted to introduce warriors to the customs of politesse through “courtesy books” and lessons on table manners and how to treat women with gentlemanly deference.

All in vain. The knight remained unreformed–despite all the warnings of the priests, the mask of female scorn which conceals female terror, the pathetic sight of trembling peasants kneeling in the mud, or even the fierce threats of the saints themselves. When the only alternative on offer to the warrior by his cultural and moral leaders is that he deny his fundamental nature, a man must nevertheless be himself.

If clerics hoped to acquire any hold over the aristocrat, they would have to make their peace with him as he was, in his essential identity and function as a fighter. Thus the high medieval Church embarked upon its most daring venture yet: to sanctify violence and reconcile the warrior to herself without requiring him to lay down his arms. The most extraordinary results of this endeavor were realized in the Crusades, the Military Monastic Orders, and the cult of chivalry.

Chivalry–the way of the armed horseman–was a cultural movement and a complex of memes. Often enough these memes were devised by clerics. The discourse of chivalry presented a set of ethical standards and ideals encoded within adventurous literature about “proper” knights and “noble” warriors whose deeds evoked admiration in their listeners. Chivalrous tales showed how good knights served their lords, fought and destroyed their enemies, respected priests and had recourse to the sacraments, and, within the adjacent cult of heterosexual eroticism called “Courtly Love,” how they related to women. Through exquisite and artful verse, chaplains and noble ladies discretely disseminated lofty ideals and aspirations into the minds of the men who raptly consumed these lyrics and remodeled their own ethical compasses according to the pole-star of knighthood as humble service. Whereas the Peace and Truce and yesterday’s clerical harangues against armed men had offered the warrior nothing, chivalry offered to him the vision of an armed man rising up and taking heaven by violence.^[14]

A man became a knight through a set of rituals that became more elaborate and liturgical as the discourse of chivalry developed over time. In the eleventh century, the ritual was rather rudimentary: the aspiring knight (“squire”) was initiated into Christian soldiery by an older knight who gave him his weapons and then struck him violently in the face so that he would not easily forget this moment.^[15] (Incidentally, the vestiges of that blow are retained to this day in the Roman Catholic sacrament of Confirmation, where the bishop lightly taps the cheek of the confirmandus with his hand). In the centuries that followed, as the discourse of chivalry intensified until Knighthood had been re-imagined as a sort of secular equivalent of Holy Orders and the Knight as a sort of lay priest, the ritual of dubbing a knight became more covered with liturgy and priestcraft so as to better convey the sacrality of the knight’s calling and its fundamental alliance with priesthood.

According to Ramon Llull, a Catalonian courtier-turned-mystic in the thirteenth century, in his Book of the Order of Chivalry, knighthood was a divine institution. God had created the order of knights in a world torn, after the fall, by injustice and oppression:

In the beginning, when contempt for justice had come into the world because of the diminution of charity, justice sought to recover its honour by means of fear. And thus the entire populace was divided into groups of a thousand, and one man–more kind, wise, loyal and strong, and with nobler courage, a better education and better manners than all the rest–was picked and chosen from every thousand.

Among all the beasts, the finest, swiftest and most capable of enduring the most amount of work, and the most suitable for serving man was sought out; and since the horse [cavall] is the noblest beast and the most suitable for serving man, thus of all beasts the horse was chosen, and it was given to the man who was chosen from one thousand men, and thus is that man called a knight [cavaller].^[16]

Just as a bishop must make careful inquiry into the life and mind of the man he is about to ordain a priest, so the senior knight–Ramon tells us–must carefully examine the squire who wishes to join the Order of Knighthood. He must ascertain that his motives are pure and selfless. Only after the senior knight is satisfied on this point can the liturgy of knight-making commence.^[17] This is how Ramon Llull describes it.

First, the squire should confess his sins to the priest so as to be prepared to receive the Body of Christ in communion and the Order of Knighthood worthily. Then, the elder knight initiating the squire should select a great feast day for the ceremony of knighting. This will guarantee that “many men…gather that day in that place in which the squire shall be made a knight, and they will all pray to God for the squire that He may give him grace and benediction through which he will be loyal to the Order of Chivalry.”

The squire must fast and keep vigil in church on the eve of his knighting. He should not listen to the lascivious songs of the jongleurs about “whoring and sin,” lest he embark upon his vocation in disgrace. The following day, the squire hears solemn Mass sung by the priest. During the Mass the squire “shall come before the altar and present himself to the priest who is in the place of God, and to the Order of Chivalry, so that he may be a servant of God, and he must bind himself to the Order of Chivalry and submit to honouring and upholding it with all his might.” Then the priest should preach a sermon to him in which he explains the “fourteen articles” of faith, the ten commandments, and the seven sacraments of the Church. “And the squire shall remember well all these things so that he knows how to reconcile the office of knighthood with the things that pertain to the Holy Catholic Faith.”

By the way, although Ramon Llull indicates that there are seven sacraments of the Church—the “usual seven” —he goes on to say this in his treatise: “By means of these seven sacraments shall we be saved. And the sacrament of Chivalry is obliged to honour and comply with these seven sacraments, and it therefore pertains to every knight to know his office in such matters as he is obliged to.” (Emphasis mine).

After the priest has finished his sermon, and the knight-aspirant has confirmed his wish to be a knight and begged God’s blessing “so that he can be His servant for his entire life,” the priest yields the floor to the “prince or high baron,” the elder knight, who will enroll the squire in the Order of Chivalry. Just as only true bishops can validly impart holy orders, only a true knight can impart the sacrament of Chivalry. This is how it is done:

The squire shall kneel before the altar, and let him lift his bodily and spiritual eyes and his hands unto God. And the knight shall gird the sword upon him to signify chastity and justice; and to signify charity he must kiss the squire and give him a hard slap so that he will remember what he is promising and the great burden he must carry and the great honour he is taking through the Order of Chivalry.

After these rites have been performed, the new knight must present himself on horseback before “the people” so that they may become witnesses to his transformation and the great charge he has undertaken, and so that they can hold him to his promises. At work here is a logic similar to the Church’s insistence that marriages be publicly celebrated in the presence of witnesses. The rest of that day is given over to festivity, song, banqueting, and gift-giving: not only does the “ordaining” knight bestow gifts upon the “newly-ordained,” but the new knight must reciprocate, “for he who receives a gift as noble as the Order of Chivalry is unworthy of his Order if he does not bestow gifts as he must bestow gifts.”^[18]

IV. The Sacrament of Brotherhood (ἀδελφοποιία)

Finally we consider a sacramental rite of the Christian East: “brother-making” (or “sister-making”), adelphopiia, a rite that has attracted some controversy among scholars. The controversy arose from the attempt of the late medievalist John Boswell to argue, in his Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1994), that this was a rite of erotic union between persons of the same sex celebrated in Christian antiquity prior to the Church’s turn against homosexuality in the High Middle Ages. To put it bluntly, this was an absurd claim and was shredded to pieces by Catholic University of America patrologist Robin Darling Young in her scathing review of Boswell’s book as an attempt to “re-image Church history.”^[19] In truth, “brother-making” was a rite intended to sanctify the friendship between two persons of the same sex and to elevate it to the level of spiritual brotherhood. The relationship was henceforth sacred, but had no sexual or erotic implications. Young was equipped to see through Boswell’s claims not only because of her erudition and vast knowledge of the ancient Christian East, but because of her personal experience. That is because this rite is still practiced today among Syrian Christians, and Young herself was joined in spiritual sisterhood to her fellow scholar, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, by a Syrian Orthodox archbishop residing in Jerusalem. This is how the ceremony went down, according to Young:

After the liturgy, the bishop had us join our right hands together and he wrapped them in a portion of his garment. He pronounced a series of prayers over us, told us that we were united as sisters, and admonished us not to quarrel. Ours was a sisterhood stronger than blood, confirmed in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, he said, and since it was a spiritual union, it would last beyond the grave.^[20]

The witness of Byzantine history to the practice of “brother-making” is admittedly somewhat ambivalent. This rite was never “main-streamed” in the way that marriage or the monastic tonsure was. Ecclesiastical authorities, not quite knowing how it should be classified among other more canonical relationships, repeatedly tried to prohibit it. Nevertheless evidence shows (not least of which, the repeated prohibitions themselves) that this rite continued to be practiced, even at the highest levels of Byzantine society, into the eleventh century.^[21]

Young does not detail the prayers pronounced by the presiding bishop at her own “sister-making.” However, the Byzantine Euchologion (essentially the Greek equivalent of the Latin sacramentary) that was first printed in Venice in 1730 preserves ancient prayers for this rite.^[22]

According to the Euchologion, the priest meets the friends at the holy altar, upon which is placed the Holy Gospels. The friends place one of their hands on the Gospels and in the other they hold lit candles. The priest begins the service with the customary prayers of the Byzantine Church (the Trisagion; O Most Holy Trinity; the Our Father) and then prays, “Save, O Lord, Thy servants and bless Thine inheritance.” After which follow invocations of the Holy Apostles, Christ, and the Theotokos. Then the priest begins a litany, within which we find these supplications:

For the servants of God coming to receive this blessing, for their love in Christ, let us pray to the Lord! 

That the knowledge of Apostolic harmony might be granted to them, let us pray to the Lord!

That their faith might be unshaken and that love without fiction might be given them, let us pray to the Lord!

That they might be held worthy to glory in the precious cross, let us pray to the Lord!

That they, and we, might be liberated from every affliction, disturbance, and tribulation….

Then after saluting the Theotokos, the priest makes the following prayer:

O Lord our God, Who has granted everything to us that is for our salvation, and Who has also commanded us to love one another and to pardon each other’s offenses; and now, O Lord and Lover of Mankind, to Thy servants, joined to one another in spiritual love, who come to Thy holy temple to receive the blessing, grant unshaken faith and sincere love; and just as Thou gavest peace to Thy holy disciples, give even to them all things that they ask for which are unto salvation, and grant them eternal life. Because Thou art merciful and benevolent God, and to Thee we refer glory: to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

Another prayer follows, and here is a variant of that prayer as found in a manuscript in the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata in Italy:

Almighty Lord, Who from the beginning endowed man, made according to Thy image and likeness, with immortal life; Who desired Thy most glorious Apostles–Peter, the highest of all, and Andrew; James and John the sons of Zebedee; Philip and Bartholomew–to be made brothers bound not by the mode of nature, but by the bond of the Spirit; Who even made Thy holy martyrs Sergius and Bacchus, Cosmas and Damian, and Cyrus and John to be brothers–do Thou bless also these thy servants, bound together not in the mode of nature, but by the bond of love: grant them to love each other, and that neither offense nor hatred disturb their fraternity through all the days of their lives. By the power of the Thy All-Holy Spirit and by the intercessions of the All-Holy Theotokos….^[23]

What do we make of these “Almost Sacraments”? Among other things, we might note how they bear upon a common interest that is, sadly, more and more neglected in today’s Church: young men. With the exception of the last sacrament of “brother-making,” which can also be “sister-making,” these quasi-sacraments commemorated and infused with grace specific points of transformation and becoming in the life of a young male: his first beard; his first reception of weapons; and, at least in the case of some men, his anointing as king.

Even if a woman can be crowned, it is clear that the King, along with the Priest and the Warrior are masculine archetypes abiding in the human imagination (if not in Heaven). This is a deep truth rooted in nature, regenerate or not. Historical circumstances may change, but the needs arising from nature are not nearly so fungible and men remain what they are. If sacraments are disclosures of grace, and if grace is supposed to build on nature–rather than destroy it–we are left wondering at a philosophy of pastoral care that would shut the doors of the sacred precincts to the tokens and aspirations of masculinity and allow them to abide among the damned–along with, I suspect, many young men who have made up their minds that the Church is a female space.

And then, in the sacrament of brother-making, there is friendship: the forgotten treasure of the Western Tradition and the final refuge for young men today. But male friendship today is a beleaguered citadel–though conservative pundits don’t seem much alarmed. For all of conservatives’ talk of marriage, of men needing to “man up” and “marry that girl,” when was the last time you heard a sermon on friendship? I bet it’s been a while. And this is strange. The heathen poets and philosophers all extolled friendship as the most sublime and virtuous relationship to which man can aspire. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero remind us of friendship again and again. Friendship–not marriage (necessary as that is)–is the fabric of the warband, the polis, and the virtuous state. Nor did Christian revelation change this consensus. Indeed, friendship received its greatest commendation from God Himself. The New Testament does not make for encouraging reading when it comes to marriage, sex, and procreation. But when Christ reclined at His last meal, surrounded by His own warband, He told them this:

Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do the things that I command you. I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends: because all things whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you. (Jo. 15:13-15).

So here’s to the Almost Sacraments of the virile Christianity of yesterday. Rest in peace. We’ll see you again.

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Notes:

^[1] Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. Joseph Alberigo et al., 3rd ed. (Bologna: Instituto per le scienze religiose, 1973), 684.

^[2] On infant communion in the West, see Robert F. Taft, SJ, “The Liturgy in the Life of the Church,” Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 40.1-4 (1999): 187-229.

^[3] On Lothar II’s attempted divorce, see Pierre Riché, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, trans. Michael Idomir Allen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 177f.

^[4] For a good overview of medieval monasticism, see C.H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Harlow/London/New York: Longman, 2001).

^[5] Grover A. Zinn, “Sacraments,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Robert E. Bjork, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; reprinted 2012), 1446.

^[6]  Zinn, “Sacraments,” 1446-1447.

^[7] On the Greek reception of the seven sacraments, see Christiaan Kappes, “A New Narrative for the Reception of Seven Sacraments into Orthodoxy: Peter Lombard’s Sentences in Nicholas Cabasilas and Symeon of Thessalonica and the Utilization of John Duns Scotus by the Holy Synaxis,” Nova et Vetera 15.2 (2017): 465-501.

^[8] Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, 540-541: “Nove legis septem sunt sacramenta, videlicet baptismus, confirmatio, eucaristia, penitentia, extrema unctio, ordo et matrimonium, que multum a sacramentis differunt antique legis. Illa enim non causabant gratiam, sed eam solum per passionem Christi dandam esse figurabant. Hec vero nostra et continent gratiam et ipsam digne suscipientibus conferunt. Horum quinque prima ad spiritualem uniuscuiusque hominis in se ipso perfectionem, duo ultima ad totius ecclesie regimen multiplicationemque ordinata sunt.”

^[9] See Yitzak Hen, “Converting the Barbarian West,” in Medieval Christianity, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, A People’s History of Christianity 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 44-47.

^[10] This is Yitzak Hen’s translation, see pp. 46-47.

^[11] See Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to Sources, trans. William Storey and Niels Rasmussen (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1986), 61-78.

^[12] Liber sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae ordinis anni circuli (Sacramentarium Gelasianum), ed. Leo Cunibert Mohlberg et al. (Rome: Herder, 1960), 217-218. My translations. Cf. Yitzak Hen’s problematic translation in “Converting the Barbarian West,” 43. My thanks to Mattias Gassman, of the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, for pointing out the problems with Hen’s translation and helping me revise my own translations.

^[13] Translated by Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300 (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1988; reprinted 2004), 78. For context on the Norman Anonymous, see pp. 74ff.

^[14] On these issues in general, see: Sidney Painter, “Western Europe on the Eve of the Crusades,” in A History of the Crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton, vol. 1, The First Hundred Years (Madison/Milwaukee/London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 10-17. Also, Philip Daileader provides a very thorough overview in lectures three and four of his course on The High Middle Ages with the Teaching Company. Joachim Bumke, The Concept of Knighthood in the Middle Ages (New York: AMS Press, 1982); Constance Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

^[15] See Painter, “Western Europe on the Eve,” 15.

^[16] Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry, trans. Noel Fallows (Rochester: Boydell Press), 40.

^[17] Ramon Llull, 59-61.

^[18] Ramon Llull, 62-65.

^[19] Robin Darling Young, “Gay Marriage: Reimaging Church History,” First Things (Nov. 1994),https://www.firstthings.com/article/1994/11/gay-marriage-reimagining-church-history

^[20] See Young, cited above. https://www.firstthings.com/article/1994/11/gay-marriage-reimagining-church-history

^[21] R. J. Macrides, “Adelphopoiia,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan, 3 vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), I:19-20.

^[22] Εuchologion sive Rituale Graecorum, ed. James Goar (reprinted, Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1960), 898-901.

^[23] Euchologion, 898-901.

The featured image is “A Scottish Sacrament” (between 1858 and 1893) by Henry John Dobson, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.