This opinion is elaborately discussed by the
Benedictine editor, Touttée, Dissertatio iii. c. 7, who
argues that the Unction described by Cyril is a Sacrament distinct from
Baptism, that it has for its proper grace the gift of the Holy Spirit,
and further that this gift is not conferred in Baptism. Of these
assertions the first and second appear to represent Cyril’s view
correctly: the last is an exaggeration and a mistake, the
tendency of which is to identify the Chrism of the Eastern Church with
that which is used in Confirmation by the Roman Church, and to exalt
the rite of Confirmation as a proper Sacrament distinct from Baptism,
and even superior to it. A view differing in some respects from
both of these has been recently put forward by a learned and devout
writer of our own Church, who has fully discussed the teaching of Cyril
and other Eastern Fathers, and gives the result of his investigation in
the following “Summary A. J. Mason, D.D.,
The Relation of Confirmation to Baptism, p. 389. Though I
find myself compelled to differ widely from my friend Canon Mason in
the interpretation of Cyril’s teaching on this subject, I cannot
refrain from expressing my sincere admiration of the tone and purpose
of his treatise, and of the learning and research which it
exhibits.:”
“For very many centuries the Christians of the East have never
been forced to define to themselves at all clearly the position of a
person baptized but unconfirmed. Their mode of administering
Confirmation (Chrism?) by the hands of the baptizing
Presbyter—though among the Greeks and some others with chrism
prepared by the Bishop—relieves them from the necessity which
weighs upon us Westerns, of teaching Christian children what their
status is between the two rites. Confirmation (Chrism?) is
for them, far more than it has been for a long while in the West, a
factor in Baptism. Only a more or less conscious desire not to fall
behind Western teachers in honouring the perfecting Unction can have
led their later authorities to treat that Unction as a sacrament
numerically distinct from Baptism. To all the early doctors of
the East the two things are one, and Baptism culminates in the
Unction. The tendency among Oriental Christians was, not to
attribute to Baptism in our modern sense the gift of the Holy Ghost,
but rather to consider Baptism by itself as a bare rite, benefiting the
body alone, and dependent for its spiritual efficacy upon other
actions, after and before. Not that this tendency has its full
way. The Greek Fathers may be said certainly on the whole to
trace the forgiveness of sins, the preparatory cleansing, to the
baptismal Laver; the gift of the Holy Ghost, for the ordinary purposes
of Christian living, they trace, like S. Chrysostom, to that act which
comes “ immediately after Baptism, and before the
Mysteries.”