Talk:Viaticum

Messy edits

This article deserves to be developed, but somebody's adding info that is poorly sourced and not very well explained. Also, my sources (I provided the long note on Charon's obol as pre-Christian viaticum) say that the Church condemned the practice of placing the wafer in the mouth of those already dead; the viaticum was only supposed to be administered to those still living. It nourishes the soul for the journey. Cynwolfe (talk) 22:11, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Coins for Charon

This is akin to the ancient pagan practice of placing coins on the eyes of the dead person so that he or she had money to pay the passage for Charon to ferry the person across the River Styx to Hades.

is removed by me because this is not a true statement.

Paying the coin to cross the river Styx was obligatory, while administering the Viaticum was not. It was only meant to strengthen the dying person emotionally / psychologically. Not having the Viaticum administered did not mean one could not go to heaven. |A significant difference thus. If we insist to compare, we should then also refer not only to Charon, but also to Egyptian mummies, Nordic myths and so on.

If anything, the Viaticum is (perhaps!) based on the old Greek principle of giving those who were to embark on a long journey, a farewell meal called hodoiporion.

Josh

Well regardless, that statement would have probably been original research. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 06:40, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Several points of dispute:

• Coins were NOT placed on the eyes of the dead in classical antiquity; if anything (and this is highly debatable), it was a Jewish custom; see discussion in the article on Charon's obol. Charon's obol is always said by literary sources to have been placed in the mouth.
• Paying the coin was NOT "obligatory", if you mean required for burial and passage to the afterlife; again see article Charon's obol. Coins are found only in some burials, and not all of these are instances of Charon's obol (strictly defined as the coin in the mouth). It is a literary trope, however, that without a coin the dead couldn't cross.
• The Eucharist for the dying may have some connection to the farewell meal (I don't know the scholarship on this question), but that is unrelated to the influence of Charon's obol on the use of the viaticum. The point is NOT that the Christian rite was "borrowed" from the traditional religions of Greece and Rome; the point is that in its administering, the use of the communion wafer itself appears to have been influenced by Charon's obol, in that the wafer was sometimes placed in the mouth of a person already dead, contrary to Church doctrine. Again, this is discussed at length in the article on Charon's obol. The point is precisely that from the 2nd to the 4th centuries the Church worked to distinguish Christian practices from those of the traditional religions.

I might also point out that the Latin word "viaticum" was used to mean Charon's obol (again, documented in the article) for centuries before the Church fathers borrowed the word for the Eucharist for the dying (in the 4th century). This borrowing suggests that they were aware that their viaticum served a similar function and could offer new Christian converts a sacramentally acceptable alternative to a ritual they had found comforting. Again, Charon's obol was placed in the mouth; placement of two coins on the eyes is a wildly popular misconception that is supported by neither the literary sources of antiquity nor archaeology. (I assume it is documented for a later period.) The placement in the mouth and the use of the term "viaticum" are evidently two influences on the (mis)use of the communion wafer in a manner consistent with Charon's obol.

As for this constituting original research: hardly. Several references are now provided in a footnote to this article; again, further discussion at "Charon's obol"; but the relevant passages in most of these books can be accessed online through Google Books. These are works by scholars whose primary interest is the history of Christianity (that is, these are not books with a polemical purpose, nor on Neopagan spirituality). Obviously, this is only one small point worth a sentence in an article on the Viaticum; when this article is fully developed, the reference to Charon's obol won't stand out with the undue importance it has now. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:24, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

haplology?

How is "viaticum" a haplology for via tecum? Same number of syllables. Some other figure of speech, perhaps, but not haplology. --Richardson mcphillips (talk) 21:07, 23 May 2017 (UTC)