Religion: Primitive Mass

A slight Englishman with penetrating eyes and close-cropped, greying hair is hard at work this week lecturing and conducting a retreat at Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y. Few of Hobart’s students have ever before seen anything quite like Dom Gregory Dix. For one thing, he is a monk of the Benedictine order in the Church of England.* For another, he is a scholar who began specializing in military diplomacy and became one of the world’s leading experts on Christian liturgy.

Beautiful Fossil. At 23 Gregory Dix became a history don at Oxford, but after a couple of years the job began to bore him. When a friend told him that missionary teachers were needed to train African natives in the ministry, he volunteered. After three years, desperately ill of dysentery, he returned, “leaving a large part of my insides in Africa,” to face what seemed bound to be like a life of invalidism. He decided to devote his life to studying the origins of the Christian Church. In 1940 he became a monk, is now prior of Nashdom Abbey in Buckinghamshire. His 764-page Shape of the Liturgy won him an international reputation.

A persuasive, lucid speaker, Dom Gregory is lecturing on the primitive church at Hobart, as he will at numerous other U.S. universities and Episcopalian centers during the next six months. Wherever there is time for him to train assistants, he will also conduct a demonstration of the Mass as it was performed in approximately 200 A.D. Such Dix demonstrations aim to make Communion meaningful to Christians for whom it has been a beautiful but meaningless fossil of antique forms.

Ordinary People. At his demonstration Mass, Dom Gregory explains the primitive Communion as it was celebrated by a bishop, deacons, priests and congregation. Each member brought his own piece of bread and small portion of wine. The bishop and priests then consecrated all the bread and wine. At the end, the congregation filed by and took Communion under both forms, saving some of the bread to carry home so that they could take Communion by themselves during the week.

“At the Last Supper,” says Dom Gregory, “Jesus was performing the ordinary Jewish method of saying grace. He performed the usual four actions before supper and the usual three actions after. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it; He took the cup of wine, blessed it and passed it around. But at this last supper, He told those with Him to do this accustomed thing with a slightly new meaning—’This is My Body which is for you. Do this for the recalling of me.’

“This is the basic structure of the Eucharist . . . None of the devotional exercises which seem such an important part of our service were there. The congregation and priests of those days were perfectly ordinary people—they weren’t picturesque—who slipped in secret through the streets in the early morning. Each brought a piece of bread and some wine…

“Each individual offered himself—as Christ had offered Himself—and in Communion the individual got back his own life transformed into the life of God.”

* There are nine orders of men in the Church of England. Dom Gregory’s Benedictines, all bearing the Benedictine title of Dom, from Dominus (master), number 30-odd members in Britain, 10 in the U.S.