The Health-Giving Cup Cyprian's Ep. 63 and the Medicinal Power of Eucharistic Wine

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Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 23, Number 2, Summer2015, pp. 189-211 (Article)

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Journal of Early Christian Studies 23:2, 189–211 © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

An earlier (and more eccentric) version of this essay was presented at the 2012 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. Thanks to Colleen Shantz and Angela Harkins, who chaired the section, for their encouragement to pursue the topic fur-ther. I am especially grateful to Andrew McGowan, Maureen Tilley, and Benjamin Dunning for their conversation, comments, and questions throughout various stages of research. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers at JECS.

1. George Ayliffe Poole, The Life and Times of St Cyprian (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1840), 286.

“The Health-Giving Cup”: Cyprian’s Ep. 63 and the Medicinal Power of Eucharistic Wine

JOHN DAVID PENNIMAN

Cyprian’s Epistle 63 represents the earliest extant account of the proper mean-ing and administration of the eucharistic cup. Against a group of Christians who were taking only water, Cyprian argues that wine is necessary for the ritual to be effective. While there has been much discussion surrounding the biblical references marshaled by Cyprian to prove his point, this article explores the extent to which those references are inflected through lexical and conceptual categories relating to the medical usage of wine. Wine figured prominently in literature on illness, health, and healing that proliferated during the Roman Empire. This article locates Cyprian within that broader dynamic, and argues that his emphasis on the health-giving effects of the eucharistic cup in Ep. 63 reflects similar descriptions of the medicinal power of wine found in manuals of Roman medicine and other folklore traditions.

“Let this be borne in mind, while we observe that the whole force of Cyprian’s reasoning, when he thus applies the Psalmist’s words to the matter in hand, is derived from the particular properties of wine, with its effects upon him who drinks it.”1

190 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

2. For a helpful overview of the different theories regarding these water-drinkers, see Gerard Rouwhorst, “L’usage et le non-usage du vin,” Rites de communion: Confé-rences Saint-Serge LVe Semaine d’études liturgiques, eds. Andre Lossky and Manlio Sodi (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010), 229–41. The definitive study of the “bread and water tradition” is Andrew McGowan’s Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

3. See, for instance, McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 204. For recent scholarship on Ep. 63, see Geoffrey G. Willis, “St. Cyprian and the Mixed Chalice,” Downside Review 339 (1982): 110–15; G. W. Clarke, The Letters of Cyprian of Carthage, vol. 3, Ancient Christian Writers 46 (New York: Newman Press, 1986), 288–89; Finbarr G. Clancy, S.J., “Imitating the Mysteries that You Celebrate: Martyrdom and Eucharist in the Early Patristic Period,” The Great Persecution: The Proceedings of the Fifth Patristic Conference, Maynooth, eds. Vincent Twomey and Mark Humphries (Port-land, OR: Four Courts Press, 2003), 121–27; McGowan, “Rethinking Agape and Eucharist in Early North African Christianity,” Studia Liturgica 34 (2004): 165–76; Allen Brent, St. Cyprian of Carthage: On the Church: Select Letters, Popular Patristics 33 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 171–87; Barry M. Craig, “Potency, Not Preciousness: Cyprian’s Cup and a Modern Controversy,” Worship 81.4 (2007): 290–313; Margaret M. Daly-Denton, “Water in the Eucharistic Cup: A Feature of the Eucharist in Johannine Trajectories through Early Christianity,” Irish Theological Quarterly 72.4 (2007): 356–70.

“JUST AS ORDINARY WINE . . .”: EUCHARISTIC RITUAL LOGIC IN THE THIRD CENTURY

In the middle of the third century c.e., Cyprian of Carthage penned a letter rebuking Christians who were using only water in the eucharistic cup. The identity of these water-drinkers, and the rationale behind their practice, has been the source of much scholarly speculation.2 And while Epistle 63 offers a unique vantage into the diversity of early Christian ritual, the letter also represents the earliest known attempt to establish the correct mean-ing and practice of the eucharistic drink.3 Cyprian’s argument hinges on a panoply of biblical typologies about wine—typologies that are drawn pri-marily from the Old Testament. This dynamic suggests that, for the water-only Christians, the passages from the Gospels and from the apostle Paul that came to form the basis of later eucharistic practice were not, in fact, normative. Cyprian was forced to make a persuasive case for the usage of a cup mixed with water and wine from disparate scriptural passages against an opponent who, it seems, understood the ritual quite differently.

In this respect, it is worth noting that the traditional words of institu-tion for the sacrament found in Matthew 26.26–28, Luke 22.19–20, and 1 Corinthians 11.23–26 nowhere mention the contents of the cup. The nearest we come is in Jesus’ proclamation that he “will not drink from the fruit of the vine” (οὐ μὴ πίω ἐκ τοῦ γενήματος τῆς ἀμπέλου) until the kingdom of God—a phrase that would seem to provide a definitive textual

PENNIMAN / MEDICINAL POWER OF EUCHARISTIC WINE 191

4. See Mark 14.25, Matthew 26.29, and Luke 22.18.5. Ep. 63.9.6. Paul Bradshaw has convincingly demonstrated how “the New Testament gener-

ally cannot provide the firm foundation from which to project later liturgical devel-opments.” See his The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 72.

7. McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 206. See also G. W. Clarke, Letters of St. Cyprian, 188–89.

8. Here, and throughout the essay, I emphasize the effects of the eucharistic cup as a crucial and under-analyzed dynamic in Cyprian’s ritual logic. I opened this essay with an epigram from George Ayliffe Poole, written nearly two centuries ago, about the importance of the “particular properties of wine, with its effects upon him who drinks it.” However, for Poole, this theme was only explored in order to bolster his polemical investment in an anti-Catholic rendering of Cyprian. More recently, Barry

anchor regarding the usage of wine.4 Yet while Cyprian appeals to this creatura vitis as a self-evident prescription from Jesus to drink wine, he mentions the passage only once in the letter.5 Thus, it seems clear from the wide array of other biblical references marshaled by Cyprian that there were groups of Christians who did not read the “fruit of the vine” in such terms—or perhaps just ignored these passages—and that proof-texting this reference alone would be insufficient to combat their error.6 Andrew McGowan has hypothesized that the water-drinkers were, perhaps, fol-lowing a “different tradition” altogether—one less invested in the cup as a symbol of Jesus’ blood and sacrifice.7

It is therefore worth reconsidering the challenge Cyprian faced in writing Ep. 63 and the discursive strategies he employed within its arguments. If there were precedents for a “mixed-cup” in post-biblical Christian mate-rial regarding “orthodox” eucharistic meaning and practice, he either did not know them—for he does not mention any—or he found them inad-equate. The only traditions found in the letter are the errant practices of his opponents and the catalog of disparate scriptural references to wine from which Cyprian constructs his own response. The “tradition” to which Cyprian appeals throughout Ep. 63 is, in fact, being built by him in media res. His task was to offer a definitive reading of scriptural references to wine in order to secure the proper meaning and practice of an inchoate ritual that was, at the time, understood to “do” different things from one Christian community to the next. In response to this diversity of mean-ing, Cyprian sought to establish the unique necessity of wine as a ritual element. This required him to align his citations of wine in scripture with his understanding of the effects that the eucharistic cup was supposed to have upon those who drink from it.8 That is to say, for Cyprian, the act of


Craig’s study has also helpfully emphasized the wine’s “potency” in light of modern liturgical practices (see, “Potency, not Preciousness,” 302).

9. See Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 80. She describes “ritual logic” in the following terms: “. . . one could not seek to construct a theory or model of ritual practice. Rather one could attempt to describe the strategies of the ritualized act by deconstructing some of the intrica-cies of its cultural logic.”

10. For more on her concept of “ritualization,” see Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 88–93. Bell elaborates: “The strategies of ritualization are particularly rooted in the body, specifically, the interaction of the social body within a symbolically constituted spatial and temporal environment. Essential to ritualization is the circular produc-tion of a ritualized body which in turn produces ritualized practices. Ritualization is embedded within the dynamics of the body defined within a symbolically structured environment” (93). It is from this framework that I understand Cyprian’s Ep. 63 as a kind of rear-guard form of ritual theory—an attempt to make intelligible and thus normative a local form of a particular ritual practice.

drinking from the eucharistic cup was supposed to produce a certain kind of pharmacological effect that water alone could not achieve.

Given the paucity of textual evidence related to the eucharistic cup prior to Ep. 63, the letter offers an important opportunity to explore the forma-tion of a ritual and the logic by which it was made intelligible. As Cath-erine Bell has noted, the logic underlying a ritual practice is not a static subject that can be objectively analyzed. Rather, it is something produced by the embodied activities, discursive strategies, and cultural assumptions that structure and govern its practice.9 Bell emphasizes what rituals do, the kinds of identities they produce, rather than an inherent meaning that can be excavated from within or beyond the practices employed. Thus she prefers the term “ritualization” as indicating the dynamic, kinetic, con-structive, and socially situated nature of ritual activities.10 We look in vain, then, for a conclusive, a priori meaning to eucharistic drinking. To be sure, the ritual logic governing Cyprian’s account of proper eucharistic drinking was articulated through a cobbling together of references to wine scattered throughout the biblical text. However, his expansive exegetical strategy did not occur in a hermeneutical vacuum. The alignment of biblical pas-sages about wine in Ep. 63 is pregnant with other cultural connotations and discursive strategies that have yet to receive adequate examination. This essay examines the extent to which the scriptural citations deployed by Cyprian in defense of wine are inflected through popular notions of illness, health, and especially the medicinal power of wine that permeated the early Roman Empire.

Within Ep. 63, Cyprian himself prompts us toward such an analysis by way of a provocative comparison offered at a crucial point in the argument:


11. Ep. 63.11.3 (G. F. Diercks, ed., Cyprianus: Epistulae 58–81, CCL 3C [Turnhout: Brepols, 1996], 404). This passage will be examined in detail below. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

12. Here I follow McGowan’s call for further exploration of Cyprian’s role as an innovator. See Ascetic Eucharists, 277.

13. Ascetic Eucharists, 216.

“And just as ordinary wine (vino communi) has the power to loosen the mind, relax the soul, and purge all sadness; likewise, by drinking the blood of the Lord and his health-giving cup, the memory of the old man is purged and we are made to forget our former lifestyle within this age.”11 When viewed through Bell’s notion of ritual logic as a byproduct of the practice rather than the engine that drives it, the positive connection between the effects of eucharistic wine and “ordinary wine” in Ep. 63 offers a unique opportunity to explore Cyprian’s innovation regarding proper eucharis-tic practice and meaning that only later became the presumed universal norm.12 If we take this comparison seriously, then Cyprian’s argument for wine cannot be understood only in terms of the biblical warrant for such a practice (though this no doubt remains crucial). Rather, the com-parison raises the question of what precisely wine was thought to do to one’s body and mind as medicine in the broader social and historical context of Ep. 63. Indeed, Cyprian’s reference to the effects of ordinary wine engages a discursive tradition stretching from the classical to the late ancient period—a tradition in which the pharmacological power of wine was widely understood as a potent, if at times unstable, curative drink.

In his assessment of the motivation behind those who drank only water during the Eucharist, McGowan offers the following observation: “While concerns for food as a basis of medicinal and (individual) moral integrity may perhaps have been implicit in the bread and water tradition . . . they were hardly prominent.”13 Although we lack evidence to construct a more complete picture of the identity and rationale of the water-drinkers, the direct appeal to the effects of ordinary wine demonstrates that medicinal concerns positively shaped Cyprian’s argument. He pairs the eucharistic wine with the ordinary precisely because the analogy allows him to con-sider both in a pharmacological register. As we will see below, the power of drinking the blood of Christ is, for Cyprian, grounded in traditions about the medical effects of wine as a treatment for illness.

In light of Cyprian’s appeal to the power of “ordinary wine,” I will argue that broad-ranging ancient concerns about wine as a mechanism for medicinal and moral integrity are inextricably bound up in the bibli-cal typologies that he offers throughout Ep. 63. To trace the contours of


14. Galen Thras. 19 (C. G. Kuhn, ed., Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia 5 [repr. Hilde-sheim: Georg Olms, 1964–65], 840).

15. Galen, Thras. 19 (Kuhn 5:840).16. Galen, Thras. 20 (Kuhn 5:840–41).

Cyprian’s medicinal concerns, I will first locate him within the Roman imperial social world in which sickness, health, and healing emerged as a normative mode of self-understanding. This also included a prominent body of literature that cataloged the potent medicinal effects of wine. Then, I will analyze the broader dynamic of sickness, health and healing within Cyprian’s pre- and post-Decian persecution writings. In these early writings, not only is sickness and health a recurring motif in Cyprian’s understanding of the Christian life, but he also describes the Decian sac-rificial offering as a “lethal cup”—indicating a provocative corollary to the effects of the eucharistic cup in Ep. 63. From this position, we will be better able to assess the force of his emphasis on the medicinal effects of wine within Ep. 63 and to evaluate the ways in which this dynamic is crucial to his overall argument.

“IMAGINE TWO WINE JUGS WHICH HAVE BEEN PIERCED IN MANY PLACES”: THE POWER OF WINE IN ROMAN MEDICINE

In Thrasyboulos 19–20, Galen describes the delicate constitution of the human body and the ease with which it falls out of balance. If the human body was not in need of a proper regimen of food and fluid, Galen observes, “it would not require continual calibration.”14 But because it is constantly falling into disrepair (φθείρεται), each person should have “an overseer who will attend to them” and replenish whatever has been depleted in their body.15 Galen then offers an analogy to further clarify his approach to human health and the importance of a medical regimen:

Imagine two wine jugs (δύο πίθω) which have been pierced in many places, both full at first and losing wine through the holes at an equal rate. One has an overseer (ἐπιστάτης) who always attends to it, replenishing the wine as it is lost. The other, with no one attending it until it is sufficiently empty, is replenished all at once only when it becomes obvious that the wine is depleted. . . . So it is in the case of healthy and sick bodies.16

The healthy body, for Galen, is like a leaky wine vessel and requires some-one to stand over it, to monitor its levels, and to keep it properly filled at all times. The sick body is a similar vessel left unattended and thus emp-


17. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 142.

18. Perkins, Suffering Self, 177.19. In Euripides’ Bacchae 280–84, wine is presented as the surest way to ease

pain, forget troubles, and treat misery. In the course of Plato’s Symposium, one of the recurring themes is Socrates’ seeming immunity to the pharmacological effects of wine (cf. 220a). The sympotic setting was, in many ways, dependent upon a shared intoxication: the erotic and intellectually stimulating effects of which helped to cre-ate a ritual space for self-expression, for “festive license.” On this point, see Richard Hunter, Plato’s Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8–15. In the Hippocratic treatise On the Use of Liquids 5 (ed. Paul Potter, Hippocrates, Volume 8, LCL 482 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995], 330–33), sweet wine (οἶνος δέ γλυκύς) is presented as an ointment for the treatment of chronic wounds (χρονία τρώματα) and equally effective as a potable remedy (φαρμακοποσία).

tied of its vital contents. The image of the human condition in this section of Thrasyboulos is one of precarious health, inevitable decay and disease, and thus a condition in need of constant remediation.

Galen’s depiction of human health as vulnerable and in need of care is indicative of a broader dynamic emphasizing illness and healing that emerged during the early Roman Empire—a dynamic in which Chris-tians like Cyprian readily participated. Judith Perkins has convincingly demonstrated how this was a period in which medical discourse took on increasing importance: “Medical narratives were offering inhabitants . . . a self-understanding similar to that of Christian texts. These medical narratives scripted a subject that was essentially a sick body located in a flawed world.”17 Specifically, Perkins has in mind narratives such as Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi in which the author “represented his ‘self’ as a body undergoing treatment. His relation with the divine was completely derived from this doctor/patient paradigm.”18 Whether through Aristides’ relationship with the healing god Asclepius or Galen’s recommendation for a personal physician who attends closely to his patients like a punctured πίθος, medical care provided a new conceptual space and a new discur-sive register for locating oneself in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries.

In addition, Galen’s image of the human body as a punctured wine jug in need of refilling is suggestive of Roman medical wisdom in a more direct sense. The properties of wine as a pharmacological substance were widely known throughout the ancient world, and its power is attested across social, ritual, and medical settings.19 Around the same time as Galen, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae connects the power of wine to medicine at the level of etiology in noting the widespread identification of the wine-god


20. Deip. 2.36 (S. Douglas Olson, ed., Athenaeus: The Learned Banqueters, Vol-ume 1: Books 1–3.106e, LCL 204 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007], 155–57).

21. Pliny, Natural History 7.37 (Harris Rackham, ed., Pliny: Natural History, Volume 2: Books 3–7, LCL 352 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942], 588). In this passage, Asclepiades is even said to have used such methods to revive a man who was near death.

22. Anonymous Londinensis 14.31 (W. H. S. Jones, ed., The Medical Writings of Anonymus Londinensis, Cambridge Classical Studies [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1947], 95).

23. Comp. proem.24. Comp. 12 (S. Sconocchia, ed., Scribonius Largus Compositiones, Bibliotheca

Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana [Leipzig: Teubner, 1983], 19).25. Med. 5.26.25 (W. G. Spencer, ed., Celsus: On Medicine, Volume 2: Books 5–6,

LCL 304 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938], 90).26. Med. 5.27.2 (LCL 304:112). Wine as a kind of antidote to poison will be cru-

cial in Cyprian’s interpretation.

Dionysos as “physician” (ἰατρόν).20 In fact, the effects of wine upon mind and body were among the first medical techniques brought from Greece to Rome in the first century b.c.e. by Asclepiades. In the early part of the following century, Pliny the Elder described Asclepiades as one who “dis-covered a method for healing the sick with wine.”21 Within the ancient sources, he was so widely known as an advocate for non-invasive rem-edies that he earned the epithet “The Wine Giver” (οἰνοδώτης).22 Indeed, following Asclepiades, the medical literature of the early Roman Empire was marked by a wide array of pharmacopoeia—a listing of drugs and their effects—in which wine figured prominently.

The Compositiones of Scribonius Largus written between 44 and 48 c.e. represents one prominent successor of Asclepiades’ method. Scribonius defends Asclepiades’ reluctance to administer harsh treatments unless absolutely necessary, noting that wine alone is a suitable first remedy for those who have a fever or are suffering acute pain.23 Later, he describes how wine can be used to dissipate (discutio) an epileptic seizure and revive (restituo) the mind.24 Celsus’s De Medicina (c. 45 c.e.) records that wine will help to resuscitate (reficio) those who are dying from loss of blood25 and can serve as a healing ointment for the skin or as an antidote to poi-sons of all kinds (quod omnibus venenis contrarium est).26

A contemporary of Celsus and Scribonius, Dioscorides produced perhaps the most influential volume of pharmacopoeia in his De Materia Medica. In a section devoted to wines, he describes the usefulness of a “wine diet” for detoxifying the body: “To be moderately drunk on wine for some days, most of all after drinking water, is helpful. For it alters the pores, flushes


27. Mat. Med. 5.6.13 (M. Wellmann, ed., Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei de mate-ria medica libri quinque, 3 vols. [Berlin: Weidmann, 1906–14], 3:10; trans. Robert T. Gunther, The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides [New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1959], 606). For the classic study on this, see John M. Riddle, Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 142–46.

28. For more on Asclepiades’ emphasis on the pores, see David Leith, “Pores and Void in Asclepiades’ Physical Theory,” Phronesis 57.2 (2012): 164–91.

29. Alph. Gal. 292 (Nicholas Everett, ed. and trans., The Alphabet of Galen: Pharmacy from Antiquity to the Middle Ages [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012], 370 and 372 [Latin]).

30. Meth. Med. 8.3.555–56 (Ian Johnston and G. H. R. Horsley, eds., Galen: Method of Medicine, Volume 2: Books 5–9, LCL 517 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011], 384).

out secretions (ἀνακαθαῖρον ἐκκρίσεις) blocking the senses and opens the body’s passages.”27 The medical method of Dioscorides (like that of Cel-sus and Scribonius) reflects Asclepiades’ emphasis on the opening and closing of the pores as the key to human health.28 The detoxifying and rejuvenating effects of wine were thus widely established within the basic techniques of Roman medicine. The Alphabetum Galieni—a later text of pharmacopoeia that represents an accretion of many previous drug-lore traditions—also describes wine’s power as a warming (calidus) agent, a supplier of strength and motion to the body (vires atque corpori praestat), a reparative (resumo) and restorative (reficio) substance.29 Across the medical literature of the early Imperial era, verbs such as resumo, reficio, and restituo appear regularly in descriptions of wine’s life-giving effect. Galen himself, writing in the mid/late second century, also advocated the power of wine to revivify: “To those who are sleepless, grieving or over-anxious . . . to those who are fatigued (κοπωθεῖσι) . . . to those who have been chilled . . . I give wine to drink to all such cases.”30 Thus, in the lexi-cal, medical, and symbolic worlds of Roman antiquity, wine was widely recognized as a reparative, enlivening, and cleansing drug.

This dynamic of a sick body in need of care was therefore not unique to early Christian self-definition. It represents the context for the prolif-eration of medical manuals and pharmacopoeia throughout the Roman Empire—and the pharmacological power of wine occupied a significant space within that growing body of literature. Thus, even in the New Tes-tament wine is presented as a handy first-aid salve for roadside wounds (as mentioned in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.43) and as a soothing tonic for stomach pains or other chronic internal illnesses (as prescribed in 1 Timothy 5.23). Such references suggest that knowledge about the pharmacological effects of wine was widespread in the early


31. Jared Secord, “Medicine and Sophistry in Hippolytus’ Refutatio,” SP 65 (2013): 217–24.

32. Paed. 2.2.19 (M. Marcovich, ed., Clementis Alexandrini Paedagogus, Supple-ments to VC 61 [Leiden: Brill, 2002], 79).

33. Paed. 2.2.22 (Marcovich, 61:81).34. Paed. 2.2.23 (Marccovich, 61:81).35. Quis div. salv. 29 (G. W. Butterworth, ed., Clement of Alexandria, LCL 92 [Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919], 330). Clement’s reference to “David’s vine” (ἄμπελος Δαυὶδ) in this highly symbolic rendering of the parable evokes Didache 9, in which the prayer of thanksgiving for the Eucharist begins: “We give thanks to you, our father, for the holy vine of David . . .” (Bart D. Ehrman, ed., The Apostolic Fathers, Volume 1, LCL 24 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004], 431).

Roman Empire, even among those who would have been less familiar with technical medical literature. At the same time, Jared Secord has recently outlined the ways in which Christians of the second and third centuries, such as Hippolytus, were not only aware of this technical literature but were also familiar with the public demonstrations of physicians such as Galen in major cities around the empire.31 The prominence of these pub-lic medical demonstrations suggests that the discourse of medicine was a cultural phenomenon to which early Christians from a variety of educa-tional levels were exposed.

With this proliferation of medical traditions throughout the early Roman Empire, reference to wine’s medicinal uses in scripture raises questions about the reception of these passages in later interpretation. Biblical exe-gesis and moral exhortation were frequently mingled with observations, both literal and figurative, about the health-giving aspects of wine. For example, Clement of Alexandria opens a lengthy discussion on drunk-enness in Book 2 of the Paedagogus with an appeal to 1 Timothy and a rather straightforward discussion of wine’s medicinal power. Although he is chiefly concerned with the danger of drinking too much wine, Clement also recognizes its usefulness as a “remedy” (βοήθημα).32 He permits that the “drug of the vine safely rekindles” the vital heat of the elderly33 and that “it is fitting to employ wine as a curative for the betterment of one’s health, since it has the power to relax and bring balance.”34 Yet, in Quis dives salvetur, Clement reads the administering of wine as an ointment in the parable of the Good Samaritan as a symbol of Christ’s healing power. Placing his audience in the role of the man who fell among robbers, Clem-ent concludes that all people have been “dealt many deadly wounds” for which “Jesus is the only doctor . . . who pours wine, the blood of David’s vine, upon our injured souls.”35 In this way, Clement demonstrates how


36. See also Origen, Contra Celsum 3.61.37. Andrew Crislip, Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Early Christianity

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 169. In these later centuries, Christian engagement with sickness and medicine also takes concrete expression within the literature of the Church Orders. See also Ric Barrett-Lennard, “The Can-ons of Hippolytus and Christian Concern with Illness, Health, and Healing,” JECS 13 (2005): 137–64.

38. On locating Cyprian within the broader values and worldviews of his time, see especially Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 26.

exegesis that drew upon scriptural references to the medical power of wine could slide easily between typology, allegory, and literal commentary.36

The pervasiveness of medical narratives of sickness, healing, and medi-cation throughout the first few centuries of the Common Era opened a powerful imaginative space for Christians who, like many of their contem-poraries, sought to understand their place in a world marked by disease and death. Andrew Crislip has persuasively demonstrated the legacy of this phenomenon within the literature of late ancient Christian asceticism: “Illness has the potential to destroy and to transform the self: to lead pain-fully and inconsolably to the unmaking of the self, yet also to open up new realms of experience and to create a new self, or at least to create the space for the sufferer to do so.”37 Cyprian’s account of the world’s sickness and the frailty of the human condition engages this burgeoning medical discourse. In order to see the precise ways in which Cyprian “scripted a subject” in much the same way as Galen’s wine jug and its overseer, it is important to foreground his emphasis on illness and medication in ear-lier writings.38

“DEATH DELIVERED BY A LETHAL CUP”: CONTEXTUALIZING SICKNESS AND HEALING IN CYPRIAN’S EARLY WORK

Cyprian’s understanding of the sacraments—and of the pharmacological power of the eucharistic cup in particular—was rooted in his view that humanity was, at its core, sick, frail, and lacking the remedies with which to heal itself. This bleak diagnosis is offered throughout the writings that precede Ep. 63 and must be understood in the context of the crises that Cyprian faced prior to that letter on the eucharistic cup. In Ad Donatum (246), one of Cyprian’s earliest writings, there is a suggestive antithesis to the eucharistic cup. The world is, for Cyprian, a poisoned drink in which


39. Don. 11.227–32 (M. Simonetti and C. Moreschini, eds., Cyprianus: Opera II, CCL 3A [Turnhout: Brepols, 1976], 10).

40. Don. 4.60–62 (CCL 3A:5).41. Don. 5.92–99 (CCL 3A:6).42. See Allen Brent, A Political History of Early Christianity (New York: T&T

Clark, 2009), 257. See also Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, 204–13.43. On the sacrifice in this sense, see Clifford Ando’s description of the sacrifice in

Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Classics and Con-temporary Thought 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 208–9.

the lethal juices have been cunningly mixed with sweetness to hide the toxin. This drink “appears to be a healing cup” (medicato poculo videtur esse), and those who drink from it unwittingly ingest their own death.39 Even at this early juncture, Cyprian formulates the Christian life as a move-ment from poison-induced sickness toward restored health by means of sacramental medicine. In Ad Donatum, conversion (and baptism in par-ticular) is described as the cure. Thus, Cyprian refers to his “second birth” as an “antidote” (auxilium), a “drinking in of the Spirit” that “revived” (reparavit) him to a “new humanity.”40 The sacraments of the Christian community serve as a “curing remedy for the sick” (in medellam dolen-tium) that can “destroy the deadly poison” (venenorum virus extinguere) implanted by the evil of the world.41 While still inchoate, Ad Donatum demonstrates the extent to which Cyprian’s understanding of the human condition and the sacraments was informed by the medical narrative of sick bodies in need of proper treatment.

Only a few years later, Cyprian’s image of a lethal cup cloaked by sweet-ness would prove prescient. After seizing command of the empire in 249, the emperor Decius put forth his edict calling for a universal sacrifice in 250. Allen Brent has described this sacrifice as a kind of “apotropaic” medicine, a social salve that was meant to bind the wounds of the past and enact a new era of wellbeing throughout the empire.42 Those who offered incense, meat, and a cup of wine on an altar dedicated to the emperor recalled a golden age of Rome’s strength, embodied its unity, and anticipated its future vitality.43 As someone whose career as a bishop was defined by the deleterious effects of this sacrifice on the Christian commu-nity, Cyprian saw something toxic at work in the Decian cup. Is it possible that what he saw was, in fact, a direct parallel between the poisoned drink that “appears to be a healing cup” (mentioned earlier in Ad Donatum 11) and the calamity caused by the imperial sacrifice? This connection, while not provable, seems at least plausible given the intensification of Cyprian’s medical terminology throughout his post-persecution writings, wherein


44. This is the terminology J. Patout Burns uses throughout Cyprian the Bishop (New York: Routledge, 2002).

45. It is outside the scope of this essay to offer a substantive commentary on the internal social dynamics of the North African Christian community. However, it is important to note here that Cyprian’s own position was not fixed but rather shifted over time away from the rigorists. It is notable, then, that as his position toward the lapsed softened, his increasing investment in the categories of illness, health, and heal-ing served to articulate a program of rehabilitation. For more on Cyprian’s shifting position, see especially Patout Burns, Cyprian the Bishop as well as Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, and Maureen A. Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).

46. Tilley, Bible in North Africa, 37.47. For Cyprian’s relation to Levitical purity codes, see especially Tilley, Bible in

North Africa, 35–40 and Patout Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, 132–50. The concep-tual division of ritual purity and medical health is a modern construct foreign to the thought-world of antiquity in which Cyprian was embedded. Dale Martin has helpfully shown how, in ancient ideology, notions of ritual purity/contamination were not sepa-rable from those pertaining to medical illness. See Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. 139–97. For further discussion of this connection in antiquity (Christian or otherwise), see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1985), 80 and Crislip, Thorns in the Flesh, 15–35.

he increasingly adopts the tone of a diagnostician seeking to identify the causes and effects of illness and offers suitable remedies.

In the aftermath of Decius’s requirement to sacrifice, Cyprian’s Christian community was fractured in three: at one extreme were those “ rigorists” who shunned any former member that performed the offerings at the impe-rial altar. At the other extreme were the “laxists” who sought to assimi-late these “lapsed” members back into the Christian body as quickly as possible.44 As J. Patout Burns has convincingly narrated, Cyprian’s legacy was to forge a middle way between these positions.45 One hallmark of Cyprian’s middle way was his heightened emphasis on the efficacy of Chris-tian sacraments in providing the purification and medication needed to heal the frail and diseased Christian body. The sin of the lapsed, as a kind of infectious disease contracted from the Decian cup, required an equally potent regimen of treatment. Maureen Tilley has observed that Cyprian’s “fascination with purity extended to a consideration of sin as contagion. It was communicable by both touch and proximity.”46 This fascination can be found in the dynamic relationship between ritual purity and medi-cal health that sits at the core of Cyprian’s post-persecution writings on the effects of the sacraments: to the extent that the rituals were performed properly, the ritualized subject that emerged would be one of health and wholeness.47

Cyprian’s preoccupation with purity, the risk of contagion, and the need


48. Laps. 7.120–26 (R. Weber and M. Bévenot, eds., Cyprianus: Opera I, CCL 3 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1972], 224). See also Allen Brent’s rendering in St. Cyprian of Carthage: On the Church: Select Treatises, Popular Patristics Series 32 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 108–9.

49. Laps. 9.170–72 (CCL 3:225).50. For the use of propino as a “toast” or as the drinking of a common cup to

the health of someone, see Plautus, Curculio 2.3 (Wolfgang de Melo, ed., Plautus: Casina, The Casket Comedy, Curculio, Epidicus, The Two Menaechmuse, LCL 61 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011], 270): “I offered a toast with a great cup: he drank it, put down his head and slept” (propino magnum poclum: ille ebibit, caput deponit, condormiscit). Even here, however, the soporific power of wine follows close behind its usage in salutation.

51. For explicitly medical usage of propino, see Pliny, Natural History 20.42 (W. H. S. Jones, ed., Pliny: Natural History, Volume 6, LCL 392 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951], 64) and 28.2 (W. H. S. Jones, ed., Pliny: Natural History, Volume 8, LCL 418 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963], 6).

52. Tusc. Disp. 1.40.96 (J. E. King, ed., Cicero: Tusculan Disputations, LCL 141 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927], 114).

53. Laps. 14.280 (CCL 3:228). Brent nicely emphasizes the medical force of this passage in his translation: “So ought the priest of the Lord provide healing medi-cines of salvation instead of leading astray by compliance with their deceitful desires.

for treatment is evident in his response to the post-persecution crisis. This is especially the case in De Lapsis, where the entire Decian persecution is framed in medical terms. Cyprian refers to it as a medical examination (probatio) that evaluates the onset of disease (correptio) and the severity of the remedies (remediis severioribus) required for treatment.48 Expanding upon his previous account of a poisoned cup in Ad Donatum 11, Cyprian explicitly depicts the sacrifice of Decius as a kind of anti-eucharistic drink in which “death is delivered by a lethal cup” (mors invicem letali poculo propinata est).49 Here, the verb propino conveys a deeper pharmacologi-cal connotation that will reappear in Cyprian’s description of the eucha-ristic wine in Ep. 63. While propino generally indicates a drink offered or taken to the health of another (as in a toast),50 it can also describe a drug ingested as poison or medicine.51 The two senses are often conflated, as in the Tusculan Dispuations where Cicero recounts the fate of Theramenes (d. 404 b.c.e.) who drank a poisoned cup of hemlock for his execution under the Thirty Tyrants. In a last act of defiance, he mocked his killer by proclaiming, “I take this [poison] to the health of noble Critias!” (propino hoc pulcro Critiae).52

Later in De Lapsis, Cyprian describes an antidote for the “poisoned” cup of the Decian sacrifice. Only the rite of penance is able “to provide a health-giving medicine” (remediis salutaribus providere) to the wounds of lapsed Christians.53 Cyprian imagines the priest of the church as a


It is an unskilled doctor (inperitus medicus) who examines the swelling hollows of wounds (tumentes vulnerum sinus) with a hand that acts sparingly. He only increases the infection shut up within in the deep recesses of the organs (in altis recessibus vis-cerum virus inclusum dum servat exaggerat) while he is trying to preserve them. The wound requires opening up, and being operated on, and receiving treatment with a far stronger remedy that involves the excision of putrefactions (putraminibus ampu-tates). Although his sick patient, lacking endurance in his pain, initially screams and cries out and complains, he afterwards gives thanks when he will experience his health restored (senserit sanitatem)” (Select Treatises, 118). Maurice Bévenot has argued that Cyprian’s shifting position toward the lapsed can be seen most clearly in his approach to penance. See Maurice Bévenot, “The Sacrament of Penance and St. Cyprian’s De Lapsis,” Theological Studies 16 (1955): 175–213.

54. Laps. 15.295–97 (CCL 3:229).55. See especially Ep. 65.3 and Laps. 25. In Ep. 65, Cyprian warns that those who

have participated in the Decian sacrifice will, if left untreated, defile the eucharistic altar and spread their sickness to others. In the memorable passage from De Lapsis 25, he recounts the story of a young girl whose nurse gave her idol food—bread moistened with wine, in fact—from an imperial altar during the persecution. This child had ingested the wine of the “lethal cup.” After the persecution, her parents retrieved her and took her to celebrate the Eucharist. Cyprian narrates how the girl vigorously refused to drink from the cup, to the extent that the deacon force-fed her the elements by pressing the cup to her lips and pouring the wine into her mouth. This unworthy drinking had severe physical effects on the girl, including convulsive sobbing and vomiting. Her contaminated body and mouth could not contain the sacred drink. The eucharistic wine was expelled by the pollution infecting her insides.

56. See, e.g., Ep. 30.3.3, 31.6.4–7.2, 55.16.3.

medicus—a doctor trained in the identification of illness and the proper application of treatments. Without such remedies, the deadly poison of the “lethal cup” remains “deeply and profoundly entombed within the inner organs” (altis et profundis visceribus infixa) of those who failed the medi-cal examination of the persecution.54 In several places, Cyprian describes how those who carry the hidden sickness contracted at the Decian sacri-fice represent a contagious threat to the rest of the Christian community and face bodily harm should they ingest the Eucharist in their “unwor-thy” state.55 In response to such concerns of purity and illness, the depic-tion of the priestly office as that of a medicus (or an overseer of medical health) emerges as a prominent theme in Cyprian’s writing following the Decian crisis.56 The lapsed were essentially a sick group in need of healing and, as Allen Brent has observed, “Christ had granted to the church the power of binding and loosing sins. And now, remarkably, it had occurred to Cyprian that in order to make a second confession in atonement for a failed first one, human frailty required strengthening with the very sac-raments that both he and the [rigorist] Novatians had been denying the


57. Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, 13 (emphasis added).58. Pontius, Vit. Cyp. 9.1–2.59. See especially Mort. 14 (CCL 3A:24) in which Cyprian offers—in rather unset-

tling and visceral detail—an account of the grotesque symptoms of suffering (dolor) caused by the plague. The faithful, for Cyprian, are not immune to this suffering. Rather, they must endure it with hope and virtue. It represents a test of faith in the same way that the persecution did. For a thorough study of Mort. that explores its consolatory character, see J. H. D. Scourfield, “The De Mortalitate of Cyprian: Con-solation and Context,” VC 50.1 (1996): 12–41.

60. In Dem., Cyprian’s approach is that of an apologist. He defends the Chris-tian community against the accusation that it is responsible for the pestilence that has destabilized the peace of the empire (cf. Dem. 2.24–30, 10.194–202). There is little literary evidence for the so-called “Plague of Cyprian” outside the writings of Cyprian and his successors. Fifty years later, Arnobius of Sicca will adopt Cyprian’s defense that Christians are not to blame for plague (Adversus Gentes 1.3). Despite the recent pestilentiae, Arnobius observes that humanity has, throughout history, been subjected to devastating sicknesses and thus Christians cannot be to blame for this particular epidemic. In De Caesaribus 30, Aurelius Victor recounts how the son of Decius, Hostilianus, died during an outbreak. For a brief discussion on Cyprian and his plague, see Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14 and 106.

61. Dem. 5.81–87 (CCL 3A:37).

lapsed.”57 The binding and loosing of sins was, for the later Cyprian, an act of therapeutic care.

In addition to the persecution, the sick body/flawed world paradigm acquired an even deeper and more acute meaning for those in North Africa during the early 250s. Concerns for medical health and healing would have intensified during the outbreak of a horrific plague that spread quickly throughout the region on the heels of the Decian crisis.58 Cyprian’s most explicit descriptions of this outbreak are found in De Mortalitate59 and Ad Demetrianum,60 both of which were written during the ravages of the plague. In addition, he evinces a deep sensitivity to the “anxiety” (sollicitudo)61 among those under his care—an anxiety instigated by the rapid spread of the disease and the terrible suffering it caused. The har-rowing spectacle of human sickness and the medical or folkloric methods employed to stanch its spread perhaps provide further texture to Cyprian’s understanding of the fundamental frailty of the human condition and the necessity of a proper medical regimen.

Between the Decian crisis and the virulent plague, Cyprian had cause for a growing concern about illness, purity, and healing treatments. The church—as comprised of bodies susceptible to disease, contamination, and death—was itself a body ever under the threat of sickness and rupture. Cyprian’s legacy as one who sought to establish the proper administra-


62. See Clarke, Letters, 288 and McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 205. 63. Clarke helpfully illuminates the crucial distinction between traditio and con-

suetudo made throughout Ep. 63. Cyprian deploys the former in order to establish the God-ordained usage and efficacy of wine in the eucharistic cup, while the latter becomes an epithet for newfangled customs and aberrant practices. Although Cyprian readily rejects consuetudo at many points in the letter, he is surprisingly opaque in describing the customs in any detail. While it may make sense that some Christians saw too close an affinity between the offering at Decius’ altar and that of the Eucha-rist, we have no clear evidence that this was the primary point of contention with Cyprian’s opponents. It seems possible that he was merely aware of the practice of water-drinking and not actually familiar with the groups in question. On this point, see Willis’ description of Cyprian’s opponents as “some mysterious cranky sect” (“Mixed Chalice,” 110) as well as McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 208–9.

64. See Clarke, Letters, 287–88.

tion of the sacraments is, in this way, deeply invested in the discourse of health and healing that so characterized his age. And while the immediate context of Ep. 63 was neither the Decian crisis nor the plague, the power of wine that it evokes reveals no less of a preoccupation with medical care—and with the treatment of sick bodies—than the rest of Cyprian’s writings from the early and mid-250s.

“OFFERED AS A MEDICINAL DRAFT TO THOSE WHO BELIEVE”: A PHARMACOLOGY OF THE LORD’S CUP

It has been noted that Ep. 63, which was addressed to a fellow-bishop named Caecilius, has the character of an encyclical meant to instruct church leaders on the proper meaning and administration of the “cup of the Lord.”62 There is little indication of the identity and motive of Cyprian’s opponents. At one point, Cyprian speculates that in the past some have been afraid of having wine on their breath early in the day (63.15)—but this is far from an unequivocal description of the water-drinkers’ ratio-nale.63 The letter is difficult to date with any precision. Graeme Clarke’s argument for a later dating (c. 255) is compelling on several points—most especially, the confidence with which Cyprian wields his episcopal author-ity (63.1), the fact that the Eucharist is presented as steeling the nerves of Christians to face future persecutions (63.15), and the general escha-tological anticipation that frames its outlook (63.18).64 A later date also allows for a provocative connection between the healing power of the eucharistic cup and the lethal cups mentioned earlier in Ad Donatum 11 and, especially, De Lapsis 9. With these references in the background, the pharmacological aspects of the eucharistic wine found throughout Ep. 63


65. Ep 63.1.1 (CCL 3C:389–90). See also Brent, Select Letters, 173.66. Ep. 63.1.1 (CCL 3C:390).67. Ep. 63.2.1 (CCL 3C:391).68. Ep. 63.2.1 (CCL 3C:391).69. Ep. 63.2.2 (CCL 3C:391). This is consistent with the overarching approach to

wine lore described above. The lexicon of wine’s power in medical literature focused primarily on its life giving capacity.

70. Ep. 63.3–4.3 (CCL 3C:391–94).71. Ep. 63.3.1 (CCL 3C:391).

can be understood as an additional element in Cyprian’s broader scripting of Christians as frail subjects in need of medical treatment. The logic that undergirds Cyprian’s rejection of a water-only Eucharist depends upon the effects of the cup’s contents—effects that he describes, I contend, by way of an innovative reading strategy in which biblical passages discussing wine and its properties are inflected through pharmacological reasoning.

This dynamic is evident from the letter’s opening. Cyprian asserts at the outset that the Eucharist must follow in strict accordance with “what the Lord Jesus Christ did and taught, who is the founder of this sacrifice and its teacher.”65 By situating his argument as following the authoritative teaching of Jesus, Cyprian establishes a direct link between the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and the “sacrifice” of the eucharistic cup. The blood of the for-mer requires the wine of the latter—though Cyprian immediately turns to passages outside the words of institution to demonstrate this requirement. His first reference to the “Lord’s tradition” (traditionis dominicae)66 is, in fact, the identification of Jesus as the “true vine” in John 15.1.67 But his point here is not simply that, lacking wine, the cup lacks a symbolic con-nection to Jesus as “true vine.” Even more, Cyprian asserts that a wineless cup fails to induce the proper anamnetic effect called for in the accounts of Luke 22.19 and 1 Corinthians11.24.68 Without wine, the cup loses its power to rescue (redempti) and vivify (vivificati) those who drink it.69 In order to bring people to life, the eucharistic cup must contain a substance that has the power to do so.

Having defined the basic parameters of the “Lord’s tradition,” Cyprian pivots toward typologies of wine drawn from the Old Testament to bol-ster this tradition. The first two references are drawn from the account of Noah’s drunkenness (Gen 9.20) and then from Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine (Gen 14.18–19).70 The reference to Noah is almost perfunctory—Cyprian merely observes that Noah’s inebriation due to wine is “both an anticipation and a form of the passion of the Lord.”71 Next, Cyprian explains in detail how the elements of Melchizedek’s offering signify the precedent of a sacred celebration (rite celebrari)—one that is


72. Ep. 63.4.1 (CCL 3C:393).73. Ep. 63.5.1–2 (CCL 3C:395).74. Ep. 63.7.2 (CCL 3C:397). Cyprian is prompted here by Isaiah 63.2 (“Why are

your robes red, and your garments like those who tread the winepress?”). Tertullian also utilized the wine-press metaphor for the Crucifixion (see Adv. Marc. 4.40). Later, Augustine employs the winepress image to describe those who imitate Christ through martyrdom; such Christians are trampled under the foot of persecution. As a result they shuffle off their mortal coil like a grape skin, allowing their souls to flow like wine toward heaven (En. Ps. 8.3 [CSEL 93.1A:169]).

75. Ep. 63.8 (CCL 3C:397–400).

established (constituta) through the use of bread and wine. The elements mentioned in Melchizedek’s rite establish, for Cyprian, the necessary con-nection between bread/wine and body/blood in the Eucharist. Bread and wine are offered (optulerat) by Melchizedek, while Christ offered (optulit) his body and blood to God the Father.72

Drawing upon Proverbs 9.1–5—wherein Wisdom proclaims: “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed”73—Cyprian discerns another foreshadowing of Christ’s passion: the flowing together of wine and water in the mixing bowl of Wisdom’s banquet prefigures the wound in Christ’s side in John 19.34 and thus necessitates a similarly mixed cup in the Eucharist. But Cyprian inflects his typological reading here with the lexical and conceptual categories of medicine. Thus, in the following sec-tion, Cyprian abandons the image of the crucifixion as a wine bowl and draws upon the image of the crucifix as a winepress (torcular) in which Christ is trampled and crushed (Christus calcatus . . . et pressus) to produce a powerful vintage.74 He goes on to explain that, like the blood pressed out of Christ at the cross, the wine that flows from the wine press into the Eucharistic cup “is offered as a medicinal draft to those who believe” (quo credentibus propinaret). Here, as in De Lapsis 9 discussed above, Cyprian’s use of the verb propino carries with it a pharmacological con-notation, suggesting the administration of a medicine or drug. The deadly effects caused by the cup offered to Decius are reversed in the administra-tion of the Lord’s cup.

From the gruesome violence of the winepress, an elixir of life gushes forth. On its own, water fails to provide the vivifying and healing power of Christ’s blood. Cyprian bolsters his argument against the water- drinkers by placing water within its own typological system: when scripture appeals to water alone, he notes, it does so in order to symbolize the rite of baptism.75 The “drinking” of water at baptism produces satiety (hence John 4:13 and the water which permanently removes thirst). The wine of the eucharistic cup, by contrast, results in a continual thirst. This lack of


76. Ep. 63.8.4 (CCL 3C:400).77. Ep. 63.11.2 (CCL 3C:403).78. Ep. 63.11.2 (CCL 3C:403).79. Ep. 63.11.3 (CCL 3C:404): ebrietas dominici calicis . . . ebrietas vini saecularis.80. Ep. 63. 15.2 (CCL 3C:412).81. Cyprian’s logic is difficult to parse here. Does the vinum saecularis refer to

actual wine? Or is it a metonym for the deadly customs of the present age? That Cyprian contrasts the inebriation of the present age from that of the Lord’s cup by way of the effects that the latter shares with “common” wine suggests that this pas-sage is a crucial, if slippery, moment in his argument.

satiety, for Cyprian, is a constitutive element and necessary effect of the ritual.76 The Christian community must administer the wine regularly, as a kind of medical regimen, while the waters of baptism are needed only once to be efficacious.

The pharmacological inflection of Cyprian’s exegesis reaches its climac-tic expression in his consideration of Psalm 22.5 (“Your cup is the best, and extremely intoxicating”).77 The psalmist’s emphasis on intoxication prompts Cyprian to reflect explicitly upon the powerful effects of the eucha-ristic wine as an identifying characteristic of the ritual (he incredulously exclaims: “Water cannot produce drunkenness!”78). To that end, Cyprian contrasts the drunkenness of the Lord’s cup with that drunkenness that comes from the wine of the present age.79 The mention of vinum saecularis once again brings to mind the poisonous and lethal cups (described in Ad Donatum 11 and De Lapsis 9) that slowly degrade a person’s health. In contrasting the calix domini to the sacrificial cup of the Decian persecu-tion, we may better understand Cyprian’s meaning when he asks “how can we pour out our blood for Christ if we are ashamed to drink Christ’s blood?”80 Only a eucharistic cup filled with wine can produce the kinds of Christians prepared to refuse the cups of the world and its rulers in future persecutions.

It is precisely in this distinction between the calix domini and the vinum saecularis that Cyprian makes his most explicit comparison between the effects of “ordinary” wine and eucharistic wine.81 In order to demonstrate the unique potency of the Lord’s cup and the “inebriation” it causes as spe-cifically different from the inebriation of the present age, Cyprian unfurls an elaborate account of the salutary power of wine that resonates with the descriptions found throughout Roman era pharmacopoeia:

Those who drink of the Lord’s cup are intoxicated in order to become sober, in order that spiritual wisdom may be restored (redigat) to their minds and that they may recover (resipiscat) their understanding of God from the sense of the present age. And just as ordinary wine has the


82. Ep. 63.11.3 (CCL 3C:404).83. The dual properties of the eucharistic drink function both as a symbol of and

a mechanism for ecclesial unity. The water (figured as humanity), when mixed with wine (figured as the divinity of Christ), connects all believers to one another and joins them to Christ as one whole, healthy body. Cyprian will draw upon biological lan-guage in order to emphasize this unifying power of mixed wine. Throughout 63.13, he refers to the power of wine as producing a “physical joining” (copulo) on three

power to loosen (solvitur) the mind, relax (relaxatur) the soul, and purge (exponitur) all sadness, likewise by drinking the blood of the Lord and his health-giving cup (poculo salutari) the memory of the old self is purged (exponatur) and we are made to forget (fiat oblivio) our former lifestyle within this age. And our grief-stricken heart, which was previously choked (premebatur) by suffocating sins, is remedied (resolvatur) and turned to joy through God’s care. Therefore, drinking this wine in the church of the Lord brings delight (laetificare), but only if it is drunk in accordance with the true prescriptions of the Lord.82

The terminology Cyprian employs throughout his comparison of the “blood of the Lord” to ordinary wine resonates with the reparative, enliv-ening, and cleansing effects described in the medical texts of Scribonius, Celsus, Dioscorides, and Galen. Indeed, Cyprian’s argument against the water-drinkers hinges on the expectation—made explicit in this passage—that the contents of the eucharistic cup must “do” something to those who drink it. If the eucharistic rite is to produce the kind of effects Cyprian thinks that it should, water becomes ineffectual and insufficient from a pharmacological standpoint. The “extreme intoxication” mentioned in Psalm 22 is thus both a typological justification for wine and an occasion to draw out of that typology a deeper understanding of its specifically medicinal potency within the Eucharist.

The poculum salutaris of Ep. 63 offers a stark contrast to the pocu-lum letalis of De Lapsis 9 and the poisoned poculum of Ad Donatum 11. Like Celsus’s description of wine as cure-all for poisons, Cyprian depicts the eucharistic cup as an antidote to the death and sickness caused by the cups of the world. By it, the afflictions of illness, sorrow, and death are soothed and cured. Indeed, for Cyprian, the afflictions of persecution and of plague offered Christians an opportunity to create new spaces of self-understanding. Likewise, the health-giving wine of the Eucharist offered an occasion for the regular restoration and ongoing maintenance of health among those in the Christian community who had already received the more intensive healing treatments of baptism and penance. The psychic weight of the “old self” (veteris hominis) marked by illness and death is purged, opening the space for a new self that is marked by healing care.83


separate occasions. Twice he describes it as a “yoking together” (coniugo)—a word suggestive of sexual union. And crucially, he imagines the effect of the mixed cup as a blending of natures into an “organic whole” (conpage soliditum). For Cyprian, the healing effect of the mixed cup upon the individual represents a microcosm of its effect on the Christian community. For more on this, see also Brent, Select Letters, 182 n.8.

84. Mary Douglas, “A distinctive anthropological perspective,” in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, ed. Mary Douglas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 11.

85. McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 208.

CONCLUSION

“[Drinks] make an intelligible, bearable world which is much more how an ideal world should be than the painful chaos threatening all the time.”84

Cyprian’s worldview was sensitive to the frailty of the human condition and its susceptibility to disease, pollution, and death. This sensitivity was not only born out of his leadership of a Christian community that faced the twin afflictions of persecution and plague, but was also a product of the diffusion of medical teachings throughout the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries. Wine, we have seen, figured prominently in these teachings and its effects were widely recognized. As far back as George Ayliffe Poole’s assessment in 1840, the “particular properties of wine” and “its effects” have been identified as crucial components of Cypri-an’s argument in Ep. 63. More recently, Andrew McGowan has observed that “Cyprian promulgates a teaching on the Eucharist with implications that have as much to do with real power as with real presence.”85 The goal of this essay has been to take these observations seriously and to explore more fully the ways in which Cyprian’s attempt to establish a scriptural basis for the necessity of wine in the Eucharist is inflected in terms of its medical potency.

When contrasted with the poisonous effects of the vinum saecularis—and especially when viewed in contrast to the cups mentioned in Ad Donatum 11 and De Lapsis 9—the “real power” of the calix domini is found not only in the anamnesis of Christ’s sacrifice that it induces but also in the pharmacological effects it produces in the body and mind of those who partake of it. Thus in light of Cyprian’s earlier discussions of the healing aspects of baptism and especially penance, the function of the priest or bishop as a kind of medicus takes on greater medical specific-ity within Ep. 63. For priests, like the famous physician Asclepiades, are wine-givers. Or, like Galen’s “overseer” in the metaphor of the punctured


86. There is more work to be done on the extent to which concerns for illness, health, and healing contributed to early Christian ritual logic in the manner suggested above. In Ignatius of Antioch’s letter to the Ephesians, the breaking of bread is referred to as “a medicine that brings immortality (φάρμακον ἀθανασίας); an antidote (ἀντίδοτος) that allows us not to die but to live at all times in Jesus Christ” (LCL 24:241). But it is Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechical Oration 37 that makes the connection between the bread and wine of the Eucharist and healthy human physiology most explicit. In that passage, the ritual act of eating and drinking is framed as an antidote to the body’s poisoned state. Drawing directly upon the medical lexicon, Gregory empha-sizes how the divine nourishment contained in the material elements is metabolized deep within the body, transforming its nature (see Raymond Winling, ed., Grégoire de Nysse: Discours Catéchétique, SC 453 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2000], 314–24.) The present essay is a first step toward a project that seeks to analyze the broader significance of this dynamic in early Christianity.

wine jugs, they are vigilant caregivers to the Christian community, regu-larly administering the cup so as to prevent illness and maintain vitality.

As our earliest extant writing that attempts to establish the proper meaning and practice of the eucharistic cup, Ep. 63 presents the ritual as a regimen aimed at purging, relaxing, healing, and enlivening. The ritual-ized subject of Ep. 63 is not dissimilar to the subjects found in the medi-cal traditions and pharmacopoeia that proliferated in Cyprian’s time.86 Within the broader narrative of sick bodies that populate a flawed world, Cyprian’s insistence on wine in the Eucharist was predicated on the notion that only this drink had the power to create a restored world, a healed self, out of the diseased and dying wreckage of the old.

John David Penniman is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Bucknell University

Documents

The Health-Giving Cup Cyprian's Ep. 63 and the Medicinal Power of Eucharistic Wine