During the third century, in Africa at least, as we learn from Tertullian and St. Cyprian, the practice on the part of the faithful of bringing to their homes and reserving for private Communion a portion of the Eucharistic bread, would appear to have been universal. Tertullian refers to this private domestic Communion as a commonplace in Christian life, and makes it the basis of an argument, addressed to his wife against second marriage with an infidel in case of his own death: “Non sciet maritus quid secreto ante omnem cibum gustes et si sciverit esse panem, non illum credet esse qui dicitur?” (Ad Uxor. c. v, P.L. I, 1296). There can be question here only of the species of bread, and the same is true of the two stories told by St. Cyprian: the one of a man who before Communion, had attended an idolatrous function, and on retiring from the altar and opening his hand in which he had taken and carried the Sacred Species, found nothing in it but ashes; the other of a woman who “cum arcam suam, in qua Domini sanctum fuit, manibus indignis tentasset aperire igne inde surgente deterrita est” (De Lapsis 26). This custom owed its origin most probably to the dangers and uncertainties to which Christians were subject in times of persecution, but we have it on the authority of St. Basil (Ep. xciii, P.G., XXXII, 485) that in the fourth century, when the persecutions had ceased, it continued to be a general practice in Alexandria and Egypt; and on the authority of St. Jerome (Ep. xlviii, 15, P.L. XXII, 506) that it still existed at Rome towards the end of same century. It is impossible to say at what precise period the practice disappeared. The many obvious objections against it would seem to have led to its abolition in the West without the need of formal legislation. The third canon attributed to the Council of Saragossa (380) and the fourteenth canon of the Council of Toledo (400), excommunicating those who do not consume in the church the Eucharist received from the priest (Hefele, Conciliengesch., I, 744; II, 79), were directed against the Priscillianists (who refused to consume any portion of the Eucharistic bread in the church), and do not seem to have been intended to prohibit the practice of reserving a portion for private Communion at home. In the East the practice continued long after its disappearance in the West, and in the eighth century the faithful were able to avail themselves of it as a means of avoiding association with the Iconoclastic heretics (Pargoire, L’Église byzantine, Paris, 1905, p. 339 sq.). It had already been adopted by the anchorites, as St. Basil (loc. cit.) tells us, and continued to be a feature of anchoretic life as late as the ninth century (see Theodore Studita (d. 826), Ep. i, 57, ii, 209, in P.G. XCIX, 1115, 1661).
