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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: HIG-HOR |
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HOLY WATER , technically the water with which Christian believers sign the cross on their foreheads on entering or leaving church. The edict of Gratian lays down that it should be exorcized and blessed by the priest and sprinkled with exorcized salt. This rite is found in the Gelasian, Gregorian and other sacramentaries. In the East
East
wash
In the early church water was not expressly consecrated for baptisms and other lustrations. " Water," says Tertullian in his tract on baptism, " was the abode at the first of the divine Spirit, being more acceptable then (to God) than the other elements." He pictures the world in the beginning: " total darkness, formless as yet, without tending of stars, the melancholy abyss, the earth unprepared, the heaven undevelopt. The liquid alone an ever perfect material, smiling, simple, pure in its own right, as a worthy vehicle underlay the God." Water was similarly pure in itself in the old Persian religion. The Canons of Hippolytus, or Egyptian church order, of about A.D. 250, give no prayer for consecration of fonts, but enact that " at cock crow the baptismal party shall take their stand near waving water, pure, prepared, sacred, of the sea." The Teaching of the Apostles, c. loo, merely insists on " living," that is, clear and running water. The ancient feeling, especially Jewish, was that in lustrations the same water must not pass twice over the body
Either because running water was not always at hand, or as part of the growing tendency of the church to multiply ceremonies, rituals arose late
The first mention of a special
gift ) of the holy Spirit may be fully perfected through them." The youth then washes his hands, which on touching the sacrament had withered up, and is healed.The church shared the universal belief that holiness or the holySpirit is quasi-material and capable of being held in suspense in water, just as sin is a half material infection, absorbed and carried away by it. So Tertullian writes: " The water which carried the Spirit of God (probably regarded as a shadow or reflection-soul) borrowed holiness from that which was carried upon it; for every underlying matter must needs absorb and take up the quality of that matter which overhangs it; especially does a corporeal so absorb a spiritual, as this can easily penetrate and settle into it owing to the subtlety of its substance." " Water, " he continues, " was generically hallowed by the Spirit of God brooding over it at creation, and therefore all special
What is done in material semblance, he then argues, is repeated in the unseen medium of the Spirit. The stains of idolatry, vice and fraud are not visible on the flesh, yet they resemble real dirt. " 'The waters are medicated in a manner through the intervention of the angel
Tertullian believed that an angel
From all this we conclude that what is poetry to usakin to the folk- lore
worship in generalwas to Tertullian and to the generations of believers who fashioned the baptismal rites, ablutions and beliefs of the church, nothing less than grim reality and unquestionable fact.See John, marquess of Bute. and E. A. Wallis Budge, The Blessing of the Waters (London, 1901); E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1903). (F. C. C.) End of Article: HOLY WATER If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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