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The single most important physical channeling of God's presence by this time occurred within the church, during the Eucharist, still the highlight of Lord's Day services. When the Eucharist shifted from a genuine evening meal to a morning meal of merely bread and wine, then that bread and wine took on even greater importance, as did the vessels used to hold them. More and more Christians believed that these earthly elements, once consecrated during the Eucharist, were transformed literally into Christ's flesh and blood. In addition, the old fellowship-meal table became an altar, and the vessels used for the Eucharist were no longer used for everyday meals.

The new setting of the Eucharist—the church building itself—became more visibly important than ever by the sixth century. Anyone visiting a Christian service on the Lord's Day then would have noticed the magnificent candelabra, censers, and colored marbles, all meant to increase the sense of holiness in the place. Perhaps most striking of all would have been the abundant images in mosaic, images once considered too earthbound or pagan for Christians. These portrayed not only recognizably Christian figures but also pagan deities and such elements of this world as birds, beasts, trees, baskets, fruits, vases, and even seasons. Summer might appear in a church mosaic as a bare-breasted woman wearing earrings and wielding a sickle the ocean as a half-nude man; the church building might take a blatantly Roman form, most notably a basilica. All this did not mean acceptance of paganism, but reflected Christianity's new confidence: fear of paganism's allure was past, because paganism had been subjected. Things of this world were now holy, creations of the Christian God.

Most telling here is that even the Sun, greatest symbol of Roman paganism, no longer had exclusively pagan meaning. Some early Christians had already used, with mixed results, the Sun's imagery to speak of Christ. But such imagery became more acceptable during the fourth century, when far more Christians began calling the first day "Sunday" rather than exclusively the Lord's Day—despite even the condemnations of an Augustine or a Chrysostom. Saint Jerome himself defended the practice, saying, why shouldn't we call it Sunday, since Christ is the Sun of justice and has filled the world with his light? Jerome even claimed that Sunday took its name from Christ the Sun rather than from the physical Sun. This was a classic example of reading present desires into the past, but Jerome demonstrated perfectly the ability to take something previously seen as Roman and make it Christian.

Indeed if the "Lord's Day" dominated Latin ecclesiastical usage by the fourth and fifth centuries, "Sunday" was at the same time more and more common in popular Christian usage. And when Christianity moved into northern Europe, "Sunday" was so common among Christians that the new northern converts simply used that name exclusively. Just as pagan forms had been conquered and appropriated, now the greatest pagan day was absorbed as well. Emerging vernacular languages around the Mediterranean, where the early church was born and raised, certainly retained "Lord's Day" in common usage, but a good Christian in either north or south could now find as much Christian imagery in "Sunday" as they pleased, and thus uttered the word without a second thought. Only the later vernacular languages of eastern Christianity, and Portuguese in the west, would reject all planetary names for the days of the week as offensively pagan.

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October (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51