Mysterium Paschale: Ancient Origins and Present Use of the Phrase

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God. For in you we live and move and have our being, and while in this body we not only experience the daily effects of your care, but even now possess the pledge of life eternal. For, having received the first fruits of the Spirit, through whom you raised up Jesus from the dead, we hope for an everlasting share in the Paschal Mystery.

The Sixth Preface of the Sundays in Ordinary Time found in the Missal of Paul VI, modeled on diverse liturgical sources, and replete with Scriptural allusion, makes use of the term “Paschal Mystery,” a term which is not found in any of the liturgical antecedent texts from which those who crafted this Preface drew. The term, however, appears no fewer than eight times in Sacrosanctum Concilium and came to be one of the organizing principles of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, most evident in its Second Part. Perhaps it had entered the imagination of mid-twentieth century Catholics through the book which bears that title authored by the French Oratorian and convert, Louis Bouyer.

However, it was not the title Bouyer had himself envisioned; it was the title a Dominican editor of the Lex Orandi series (it was the fourth volume in the series) had chosen to give it, a fact that Bouyer notes with some chagrin in his Memoirs.[1] He mused that while sacramentum paschale had some precedent in medieval and early Christian Latin (this phrase, often in the plural, is witnessed in the liturgical texts of the Missal of Pius V, but limited in its appearances to the Easter season), mysterium paschale did not; nor was there, in his mind, any Greek witness to it either. And ironically, despite any number of recordings of medieval chant and renaissance polyphony that today may sport the title “mysterium paschale,” the actual phrase is found nowhere in the lyrics.

Even the title of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s somewhat controversial book in its English translation, Mysterium Paschale, is probably so titled in English because of the title of the earlier French translation, Mystère Pascal; the work in its original German is entitled simply Theologie der drei Tage.[2] Nonetheless, Bouyer does make use of the term no less than five times in his meditations, not merely in passing and, in at least one passage, in a key, summative judgment.[3] Following the lead of the Council, he was to use it more and more, with a desire, no doubt, to see it understood properly and fruitfully.[4] However, when employed as the title for his meditations on the Holy Week liturgies, it was hardly a common term.

Fr. Bouyer was to spend many years pondering, in numerous contexts, just what St Paul meant when—for example in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and Colossians—he spoke of “the mystery.” One of Bouyer’s later works, Mysterion (1986),[5] was the capstone of this extended research and reflection, a study of just what St Paul meant by μυστήριον. In particular, Bouyer was anxious to dispatch theories that associated Paul’s language with the so-called mystery religions which had proliferated in late antiquity. Bouyer demonstrates that Paul owes nothing to them and that Paul’s conception of what Bouyer will term “the Christian Mystery” is in fact very much in tune with biblical thought, in particular continuity with Jewish apocalyptic and wisdom literature being, as it were, its almost natural flowering.

It would be fruitful to spend some time reflecting both on the earliest extant use of the term “Paschal Mystery” in Christian discourse and also to engage Bouyer’s articulation of it as found in his book of 1945. And I would like to propose that the notion of “mystery” is important to both of them—quite probably because of its Pauline precedent—and that both determined to qualify or further specify this “mystery” precisely as “paschal.” τὸ μυστήριον, the Christian Mystery, then is, in its fullest expression, Paschal.

About a decade prior (1936) to the publication of Bouyer’s Mystère Pascal, the American papyrologist Campbell Bonner had identified in a Greek manuscript of the Chester Beatty collection a work which he recognized as an untitled Easter homily of 803 lines in one contemporary edition. Not long after a copy of the same work was discovered in the Bodmer collection of papyri as well, and had the title Peri Pascha. In 1940 Bonner published his edition of the work. It was determined to be a work of the bishop Melito of Sardis, known to us through Eusebius, who records an excerpt from Melito’s Apology to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the fourth book of his Ecclesiastical History. Thus, the homily can be dated with some confidence to the middle or second half of the second century. It has garnered over the past eighty years not insignificant attention.

Historians of the liturgy and of the Church have mined it for its data on Quartodeciman liturgical practice; its strong anti-Jewish passages have been studied by social and cultural historians; classicists have examined it as a witness to the cultural and literary movement called the second sophistic; those interested in the history of scriptural interpretation have turned to it for its developed typologies. In recent decades Stuart Hall and Alistair Stewart have published a number of works—including translations—of Melito.[6] To my knowledge, Melito is not mentioned by Bouyer in any of his works, and the proximity in time between the discovery of the text and Bouyer’s meditation on the Triduum make it most unlikely that he had read or studied Melito’s paschal homily. Nonetheless, both clerics in fact use the term, and the second-century bishop and twentieth-century Oratorian function for my purposes as a kind of inclusio: its first appearance in the Christian lexicon and a work which at the very least contributed to the term’s later re-emergence. And that term is now, as I have already noted, part of the parlance of contemporary Catholic faith and practice.

It is immediately evident that Melito reads and preaches the Old Testament typologically—seeing the saving events of Israel’s history—particularly its Pascha, the Passover and liberation from Egypt—as prefiguring the saving work of Christ. Preaching on the text of Exodus 12 (which he indicates had just been read liturgically), Melito works to make manifest to his hearers the relationship, real and profound, between the events just proclaimed from Exodus and the saving work of another Lamb, whom Melito, with rich typological associations and rhetorical flourish, building to a doxological crescendo, identifies for his hearers: “This is Jesus, the Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever” (lines 63-64).[7] As he begins his exposition, Melito notes that the Paschal account of Exodus is tripartite: comprised of the sacrifice of the sheep, salvation of the people, and the punishment of Pharaoh. This mystery, he then tells his hearers, is “new and old, eternal and temporary, perishable and imperishable, mortal and immortal” (7-10). This is, in the opening lines of his exposition, he says, “the Paschal Mystery” (τὸ τοῦ πάσχα μυστήριον). It is the manifestation and revelation of the full meaning of Israel’s Pasch of old. His text is then devoted to teasing out all the connections between the old and new, the Pasch of Israel and the salvific action of Christ, whose saving work is prefigured in it. Melito sees in numerous figures of the Old Testament anticipations of (and proleptic sharers in) the work of Christ.

The term μυστήριον occurs 20 times in the 803 lines of text (in Hall’s edition), and is clearly the central theme around which the homily is organized. It appears alone and unqualified eight times (2; 5; 9; 94; 98; 199; 213; 216; 301). It is qualified five times as “the Lord’s Mystery” or “the Mystery of the Lord” (208; 405; 410; 415; 425); and in four instances he speaks of it as the “Paschal Mystery” (10; 65; 396; 448); four times he explicitly identifies this mystery with the person of Christ: boldly asserting in one line “the Paschal Mystery, which is Christ” (448-449), and in another (having Christ speak) “I am the Pascha of Salvation” (770). And while it is likely that Melito knew at least some of the Pauline texts (there are several allusions noted by Hall), somewhat surprisingly he does not allude to or quote directly 1 Corinthians 5.7: “Christ, our Pasch, has been sacrificed” [καὶ γὰρ τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν ἐτύθη Χριστός], though that is, of course, the tenor of his entire homily.

Melito qualifies the mystery as Paschal by the rhetorical contraposition of the Egyptians with the children of Israel; and at times also contraposing Pharaoh and Moses: “As the sheep is being slain, and the Pasch is being eaten, and the mystery is being brought to completion, and the people are celebrating, and Israel is being sealed or marked / that is the moment when the angel came to strike Egypt, uninitiated in the mystery, lacking a share in the Pascha, unmarked by the blood, lacking the protection of the Spirit, hostile and faithless” (92-103). He later explains that what was disaster for the Egyptians was liberation for the Israelites: the blood of a slain lamb liberates. It is a mystery both beyond words [ἀνεκδιήγητον, 199] and utterly unexpected or stunning [καινόν 199 and 213]. Melito proclaims that at the same time the angel made Egypt childless, he refrained from striking Israel, awed by the blood in which the angel “beheld the mystery of the Lord present in the sheep,” the “Lord’s life in the sacrifice of the Lamb,” and a “prefigurement of the Lord in the death of the sheep” (208-210).

John Chrysostom was to make this same connection a couple centuries later: it was precisely and only in its capacity as a sign or type [τύπος] of Christ’s blood that the blood smeared on the lintels of the homes of the Israelites was salvific.[8] Melito then describes for his hearers the power [δύναμις] of the mystery (216) with a lengthy digression on the relationship between type and antitype, prefigurement [προτύπωσις, 220-221] and fulfillment, model and reality [ἀλήθεια] (215-300). The type, prefigurement, and model all have their power precisely in their capacity as sign of the antitype, fulfillment, and reality. In short, Melito concludes, now that the type of the slain lamb has been fulfilled in the death of Christ, the sacrifice of sheep no longer has any power to save (280ff). Further, to Melito’s mind, any power it ever had to save derives from its status as the type—the divinely ordained and privileged type—of the death of the Lord. The sacrifices of old have now lost any efficacy, as has worship in any one particular place, such as Jerusalem, since through the outpouring of grace the glory of the Lord has filled the earth (295) and Almighty God has made his dwelling among men in Christ Jesus (300). Having expatiated on the type and its corresponding fulfillment, Melito pivots, and turns to the “content” or, perhaps better, “inner structure” [κατασκευή] of the Mystery.

Employing a rhetorical question which Hall suggests is intended to echo the Passover Haggadah, “What is Pascha?” (303), Melito then seeks to inform the mystery which he has been proclaiming with its specifically paschal character. He offers the (erroneous) etymological explanation that it derives from the verb πάσχειν, “to suffer” (304). In a beautiful trope that Melito employs repeatedly, the advent of Christ is described as a mission of mercy, as a coming to the aid of “the suffering one” [ὁ πάσχων]; Christ does this both by clothing himself [ἀμφιασάμενος] with the one who suffers and by sharing in his sufferings [συμπαθῶν] (305-310), in order to lift him on high to heaven.

In another passage Melito repeats this theme: it is on account of [διά] the suffering one that Christ had come from heaven, and further, he clothed himself in him [ἐνδυσάμενος]; playing on the multiple connotations of τὰ πάθη, Melito says, he “accepted the sufferings of the suffering one through a real body, capable of experiencing suffering” (454-455) and in so doing “put an end to the passions of the flesh” (456); there is no docetic Christology here. In fact, Melito rhetorically invites his hearers to discover Christ identifying and associating himself with them: ὁ πάσχων, “the suffering one,” refers, depending upon one’s perspective, equally to fallen humanity and to Christ. And by the power of the Spirit, Christ thus puts death to death; in Hall’s rendering “he killed death, the killer of men” (458).

In four different places within the homily Melito explicitly links the Paschal Mystery of which he is speaking explicitly to the person of Christ (63-65; 448-449; 479; 770). “He is the Pascha of our salvation” (479), and, employing the first person for greater rhetorical intensity, Christ himself—not Melito the homilist—speaks: “I am the Pascha of salvation” (770). Christ, in his saving work, instantiates or embodies this Mystery. Far from being a secret gnosis or hermetic logion, the Christian Mystery is Paschal, that is, it is not an idea, a teaching, or a concept, but a Person, in fact, a Person-in-act, it is Christ, offering himself with a love that is willing to suffer, to suffer on behalf of humanity itself suffering the effects of sin and death.

This reprise of a relatively obscure work by Melito may seem like an odd digression, but I have come to think that Fr. Bouyer was nonetheless seeking to do in the mid-twentieth century something of what Melito was doing at the end of the second—that is, to understand and communicate the Christian Mystery precisely as Paschal. As already mentioned, Bouyer makes clear that the Pauline notion of “the mystery” (τὸ μυστήριον) owed nothing to the pagan mystery religions prevalent in late antiquity (a common assumption in the nineteenth century) and rather that Paul sought to convey that in Christ, the entire saving plan of God had been revealed, allowing a deeper understanding both of Israel’s entire history—enabling Christians to see in this history the profound dignity of the Jewishness, so to speak, of the Christian faith itself—and also that of the entire cosmos.

The work wrought by the Eternal Son made man reveals the inner logic of God’s work in history and also reveals the vocation of all creation as doxological: all creation is ordered to praise and glorify God. With the angelic fall and that of man in Adam, this original vocation had been both impeded and distorted.[9] The eternal Word, by his full embrace of human nature, enables and capacitates humanity once again to fulfill this vocation, because he himself does so first—accomplishing what Adam had failed to do—and thus humanity does and can do the same, but only and precisely “in Christ,” in an expression prized by St Paul.

My contention is that, as Melito had before him, Bouyer desired to reveal the profound relationship between the saving Pasch of Israel and the new and eternal Pasch initiated by the saving work of Christ, an act that continues in and through the Church and which is made present in the Church’s sacred liturgy, in every Eucharistic celebration, and par excellence in the great three days which comprise the one celebration of the Triduum. That Pasch, in fact, formats not only the life of the individual Christian as well as that of the entire Body of the Church, but even the Church’s year: its entire temporal cycle takes its origin from, is structured around, and is oriented toward Pascha, Easter. More precisely, and like the bishop Melito long before him, Fr. Bouyer is seeking to express that the content of the Christian Mystery is best understood when seen as the fulfillment of what is prefigured in the Pasch recorded in Exodus. The genius of this is found in the fact that this connection, while made explicit by Fr. Bouyer, is already implicit in the liturgy itself.

Deeply aware of this, Bouyer saw his task as merely making explicit all that is bound up in the great three days, scripturally, ritually, and euchologically. Bouyer is occupied with unpacking the full implications of the Church’s liturgical practice, implications which were—at least to some of his contemporaries and indeed to many of the faithful of the time—not necessarily evident or obvious. In fact, in a later work, reflecting on the conciliar reform of the liturgy—and in reference specifically to the Easter Vigil—Bouyer was to lament the failure of pastors to make clear for the faithful the many implications of the renewed rites of Holy Week:

How many priests even now complain that the reform of Holy Week, especially the restoration of the Easter Vigil, has had little or no practical effect? How could it have been otherwise if the Christian people have not been made aware of the true significance of those most sacred celebrations of the Church? And how could they be made aware so long as their clergy are so insensitive, and therefore so little influenced, either in their spiritual practice or in their teaching by the spirit of the liturgy itself?[10]

It is clear for Bouyer—and he repeated this often especially in the wake of poor or ill-conceived implementation of such reform—that the principal aim of the liturgical movement, and the reform of the liturgy more specifically, was not primarily structural or linguistic, but at its heart directed to foster a deeper understanding on the part of all—clergy and laity—of the profound significance of the liturgy as an action first of Christ and then of the baptized in union with him.

In his Mystère Pascal, Bouyer leads with the Pauline Mystery, which embodies not an idea but, as he says, “a fact,” or perhaps even better, as we have found in Melito, a Person, and a Person-in-act,[11] Christ offering himself to the Father and in so doing drawing all things to himself. The rich nuances of the Pauline ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι of Ephesians 1:10, which de Lubac had suggested moves in at least four, complementary ways,[12] capture the truly remarkable and absolutely comprehensive nature of God’s work in Christ. In Christ and under his headship, all of human (and cosmic) history is “summed up,” and the logos or meaning of God’s creative and redemptive plan is made manifest in the earthly life, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus Christ; this is the Pauline Mystery. As revealed in the Apocalypse of John, it is the Lamb who had been slain who is worthy to break open the scroll and read its contents: that is, it is Christ, dead and risen, who alone can make sense of the entire narrative of history. He is indeed its Logos.

In Bouyer’s masterfully crafted Introduction to Mystère Pascal, he links three temporally distinct realities: the Pasch of Israel, the Pasch of Christ, and the Church’s Pasch. The Church’s liturgy is, he asserts, “an action, not of the past, but of the present, where the past is recovered and the future draws near. . . . Each day makes our own the action of Another accomplished long ago, the fruits of which we shall see only later in ourselves.” Past, present, and future are simultaneously present in the sacrifice of the altar, and the Christian lives and participates proleptically—actually but incompletely in this age—in the Kingdom, a Kingdom which is no mere place or state, but is Christ himself, the αὐτοβασιλεία in the language of Origen.[13] The Church’s Pasch has no “content” other than Jesus Christ, dead and risen;[14] it is, Bouyer avers, “not a mere commemoration,” but “the cross and empty tomb rendered actual.” Predicated upon the Pauline—and later Augustinian—notion of the Church as the Body of the divine Head, the capital grace proper to Christ flows mystically into the members of his Body.[15] The trans-historical dimension (past-present-future) of Christ’s saving work is underlined beautifully in St Thomas’s O Sacrum Convivium and elaborated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church §1085, which itself emphasizes the deeply Johannine theme of abiding or remaining (μένειν):

In the liturgy of the Church, it is principally his own Paschal mystery that Christ signifies and makes present. During his earthly life, Jesus announced his Paschal mystery by his teaching and anticipated it by his actions. When his Hour comes, he lives out the unique event of history which does not pass away. Jesus dies, is buried, rises from the dead, and is seated at the right hand of the Father “once for all.” His Paschal mystery is a real event that occurred in our history, but it is unique: all other events happen once, and then they pass away, swallowed up in the past. The Paschal mystery of Christ, by contrast, cannot remain only in the past, because by his death he destroyed death, and all that Christ is—all that he did and suffered for all men participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being made present in them all. The event of the Cross and Resurrection abides and draws everything toward life.

Against the Marcionite desire to dissociate the work of Christ from the history of Israel, Bouyer emphasizes that the Pasch of Christ cannot be understood apart from the Pasch of Israel, which anticipates and foreshadows Christ’s own. And at the same time the Pasch of Israel, itself an act of divine redemption, is given even fuller significance only and especially in light of the One who has come in the flesh to liberate and to associate with himself all those who share, through the sacraments, in his unique Pascha.[16] This association with him in his saving act means that for the Christian, the “imitation of Christ” is not simply or even primarily the fulfillment on the part of the believer of a moral template left by Christ, but rather, as Bouyer claims, it is “the life of Jesus Christ propagated,” in each, “reproducing itself in men of all the ages, watered by that living water that flows forever over this earth, from the throne where the immolated Lamb is seated in the glory of his immolation.”[17]

Thus, the Christian’s moral life is capacitated by the divine life of Christ himself, who communicates himself in the sacraments. It is—to use one of Bouyer’s favorite and oft-cited lines of St Paul—“Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1.27) who is at work, formatting, we might say, the life of the baptized, accomplishing his life in the life of the believer. All of the sacraments are arranged as spokes, so to speak, around the hub of the paschal sacrament, the Eucharist: either ordering believers to it (in Baptism and Confirmation), sharing effects flowing from it (in Penance and Anointing), or serving the communio it establishes in the Body (in Matrimony and Orders). This pattern is clearly discernible in the presentation of the sacramental economy in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In the wake of the Church’s ongoing exercise in “Eucharistic Revival,” this little foray into Melito’s Easter homily and Bouyer’s lectio on the Sacred Triduum might provide some takeaways from these two authors relative to a more profound understanding and celebration of the central mystery and act of the Christian faith.

1. True to the esprit of the early liturgical movement, any genuine and fruitful “revival” or deepening of Eucharistic faith, piety, and practice must be found in a deeper awareness and understanding of just what the Church’s liturgy is and what it accomplishes. As both Melito and Bouyer emphasize, the liturgy is principally the action of Christ; we are privileged stewards and, by grace, participants in the saving acts which are properly his. Pius XII’s definition of the liturgy is a compact tour de force that does the work for us:

The public worship which our Redeemer as Head of the Church renders to the Father, as well as the worship which the community of the faithful renders to its Founder and through him to the heavenly Father. It is, in short, the integral worship rendered by the Mystical Body, Head and Members.

2. Melito and Bouyer both contend that the Christian Mystery is essentially Paschal in its character and inner logic: the content of the Christian Mystery is Christ in his saving acts foreshadowed in the life of Israel, Christ dead and risen, living in the Church and communicating himself through the sacraments, most especially the Eucharist, which makes that saving act, that Paschal Mystery, present and available, drawing believers to participate in it.

3. As both Melito and Bouyer are at pains to emphasize, the Paschal Mystery is not simply a concept, an intellectual category, or a reified abstraction, it is a Person or, more precisely, a Person-in-act. This notion of Christ in his redeeming act is also central in the thought of the Alsatian Redemptorist and biblical theologian F.X. Durrwell.[18] Thus, the central or defining feature of the Christian faith is not a doctrine, but an action.

4. It follows that the kerygmatic act of the Church par excellence is the faithful and devout celebration of the Mass. Paul himself, who in his extant letters seems to find little interest in quoting or citing the teaching of Jesus, associates the kerygma with the celebration of Christ’s sacrifice (in the singular passage in which he quotes the ipsissima verba of the Lord): “for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim [καταγγέλλετε] the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11.26). For Paul, Christ did not come principally to proffer advice or tell us something (the prophets did that, to limited effect); no, Christ came principally to do something.

By no means am I trying to minimize evangelization, catechesis, and teaching, much less the teaching of the Lord recorded in the Gospel, but rather am contending that these must be contextualized within the Mystery which is made manifest and efficacious in the supreme act of the Church’s worship. This is why Sacrosanctum Concilium §7 could assert that, among its many important apostolates, its teaching and catechesis, its love for the poor and its outreach to the peripheries, there is nothing that the Church does which is more efficacious than the faithful celebration of the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal Sacrifice is both an anticipation of and participation in our final end, the praise and worship of God, the proleptic fulfillment of humanity’s doxological vocation, and the engine of charity in the life of the Church.

5. Both Bishop Melito and Fr. Bouyer teach us that the Paschal Mystery is comprehensible in its full richness only in the context of the Pascha of Israel which prefigures it. Further, the very liturgical life of the Church—its lectionary, its rites, its euchological tradition—are all predicated upon typological relationships, revealing discernible and recurring patterns of divine action in history. Typological readings of Scripture are thus an integral feature of the Church’s life and its imagination. It is certainly not the only hermeneutic for reading Scripture, but it is an essential mode of reading that cannot be abandoned as passé, unsophisticated, or “pre-critical.” [Aside: The language of “pre-critical” exegesis is at best problematic, and to be avoided: earlier (whether ancient or medieval) modes of reading scripture were themselves highly nuanced, critical, and capable of shrewd observation and deep insight, not to mention patent of linguistic, lexical, and syntactical sophistication, all without the benefit of, for example, digital databases. To term such approaches “pre-critical” is in fact quite misleading and betrays a value judgment as to the superiority of contemporary methodologies].

6. Finally, the saving work of Jesus Christ—made present and available in the sacrifice of the altar—is the center point of human, indeed cosmic, history. The paschal homily of Melito and the meditations of Fr. Bouyer reflect this fact. Everything that preceded it—most especially the history of Israel—was ordered to it, and pointed directly or obliquely toward it, and everything subsequent to the Paschal Mystery of Christ is affected by it: there is no saving grace that does not somehow derive from it. In this regard, I will leave the last word to Fr. Bouyer’s contemporary and one-time colleague at the Institut Catholique, Jean Daniélou. He reminds us, in his little meditation on history, that:

The Christian answer to the contemporary challenge is a confession of faith: there is no superseding Christ, he is the fulfillment all things, he is the fulfillment of all things, he is the Alpha and the Omega, the last end of the world as he is the spring of its eternal youth. In him all things are made new, and the word “beyond” has no meaning in relation to him who is the consummation of all. His coming is the completion of human history. Therefore, we look for no progress, no development comparable in importance to that which we already possess in Jesus Christ. He has given us infinitely more than any technological advance or social revolution could offer. . . . For Christians, the structure of history is complete, and its decisive event, instead of coming last, occupies the central position.[19]

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