For the Sake of a ‘Rational Worship’: The Issue of Prayer and Cult in Early Christian Apologetics

«Justin’s description of the main Christian rites can be explained under several points of view. In the context of this paper, we may emphasize the fact that it remains a unique piece, a kind of ‘meteorite’ within early Christian apologetics, inasmuch as it unveils the limits of the categories normally advanced to understand and justify worship by the most of its exponents. As such, cult proved not wholly subsumable into the ethos of an exemplary way of life or even into the idea of prayer as the true ‘sacrifice’. Also Tertullian shows his awareness of this, although he does not exceed the usual apologetic framework to the same extent as Justin does. Nevertheless he strongly elaborates on the moral conduct in the light of the worship practiced within Christian communities, so that the liturgy – through common prayer, reading of the Scriptures and spiritual exhortation – can be assumed to be a source and inspiration for the practical behaviour of the faithful. On the other hand it is precisely through the worship that both the institutional and the fraternal dimensions of the Christian communities find their appearance. It is not incidentally then if Tertullian’s picture of the ‘activities’ deployed by the Christians finds its seal in the description of the agape, the fraternal meal convened among the ‘brethren’ as the manifestation of their mutual love. Even if in the Apologeticum he remains silent about the celebration of the eucharist, by recalling the practice of such agapic meals he points altogether to a domain in which prayer and cultic actions could develop in their own right and did not more or less go lost in their refashioning within the particular approach of apologetic discourse»