THE CHRISTIAN ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE TEUTONIC KINGDOMS
CHAPTER VI
THE ORGANISATION OF THE CHURCH
CHRISTIAN organization was the means of expressing that which is behind and beneath all its details, namely the underlying and penetrating consciousness of the oneness of the Christian body and the Christian life. It was the process by which the separate charismata could be developed and differentiated, while at the same time the unity of the whole was safeguarded. Looked at in this light, the history of organization in the Christian Church is, in its main stream, the history of two processes, partly successive, partly simultaneous, but always closely related: the process by which the individual communities became complete in themselves, sufficient for their own needs, microcosms of the Church at large; and the process by which the communities thus organized as units proceeded to combine in an always more formal and more extensive federation.
But these two processes were not merely successive. Just
as there never had been a time when the separate communities, before they
became fully organized, were devoid of outside ministration or supervision, so
there never came a period when the fully organized communities lived only to
themselves: unity was preserved by informal means, till the growing size and
number of the communities, and the increasing complexity of circumstances, made
informal means inadequate and further formal organization imperative. And
again, though the formal self-expression of the individual community
necessarily preceded the formal self-expression of the federation of
communities, yet the history of organization within the single community does
not come to an abrupt end as soon as the community becomes complete in itself:
all functions essential for the Christian life are henceforth there, but as
numbers increase and needs and duties multiply, the superabundant vitality of
the organism shows itself in the differentiation of new, though always
subordinate, functions. And therefore, side by side with the well-known history
of the federation of the Christian churches, it will be our business to trace
also the obscurer and less recognized, but perhaps not less important,
processes which were going on, simultaneously with the larger processes of
federation, in the individual churches and especially in those of them which
were most influential as models to the rest.
The
Missionary Ministry
(A) In the early days of Christianity the first beginnings of a new
community were of a very simple kind: indeed the local organization had at
first no need to be anything but rudimentary, just because the community was
never thought of as complete in itself apart from its apostolic founder or
other representatives of the missionary ministry. ‘Presbyters’ and ‘deacons’ no
doubt existed in these communities from the first: ‘presbyters’ were ordained
for each church as it was founded on St Paul's first missionary journey; ‘bishops
and deacons’ constitute, together with the ‘holy people’, the church of
Philippi. These purely local officials were naturally chosen from among the
first converts in each district, and to them were naturally assigned the duties
of providing for the permanently recurring needs of Christian life, especially
the sacraments of Baptism—St Paul indicates that baptism was not normally the
work of an apostle—and the Eucharist. But the evidence of the earlier epistles
of St Paul is decisive as to the small relative importance which this local
ministry enjoyed: the true ministry of the first generation was the ordered
hierarchy, “first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers”, of which the
apostle speaks with such emphasis in his first epistle to the Corinthians. Next
in due order after the ranks of the primary ministry came the gifts of miracles—“then
powers, then gifts of healing”— and only after these, wrapped up in the obscure
designation of “helps and governments”, can we find room for the local service
of presbyters and deacons.
Even without the definite
evidence of the Acts and the Pastoral Epistles and St. Clement of Rome it would
be already clear enough that the powers of the local ministry were narrowly
limited, and that to the higher ministry, the exercise of whose gifts was not
confined to any one community but was independent of place altogether, belonged
not only the general right of supervision and ultimate authority over local churches,
but also in particular the imparting of the gift of the Spirit, whether in what
we call Confirmation or in what we call Ordination. In effect the Church of the
first age may almost be said to have consisted of a laity grouped in local
communities, and a ministry that moved about from place to place to do the work
of missionaries to the heathen and of preachers and teachers to the converts.
Most of St Paul's epistles to churches are addressed to the community, the holy
people, the brethren, without any hint in the title of the existence of a local
clergy: the apostle and the Christian congregation are the two factors of
primary account. The Didache shows us how right down to the end of the first century, in remoter districts,
the communities depended on the services of wandering apostles, or of prophets
and teachers, sometimes wandering sometimes settled, and how they held by
comparison in very light esteem their presbyters and deacons. Even a
well-established church, like that of Corinth, with half a century of history
behind it, was able, however unreasonably, to refuse to recognize in its local
ministry any right of tenure other than the will of the community: and when the
Roman church intervened to point out the gravity of the blow thus struck at the
principle of Christian order, it was still the community of Rome which
addressed the community of Corinth. And this custom of writing in the name, or
to the address, of the community continued, a relic of an earlier age, well
into the days of the strictest monarchical episcopacy: it was not so much the
bishop's headship of the community as the multiplication of the clergy which
(as we shall see) made the real gap between the bishop and his people.
The Local
Church
Most of our documents then of the first century show us the local
churches neither self-sufficient nor self-contained, but dependent for all
special ministries upon the visits of the superior officers of the Church. On
the other hand most of our documents of the second century—in its earlier years
the Ignatian letters, and an ever-increasing bulk of
evidence as the century goes on—show us the local churches complete in
themselves, with an officer at the head of each who concentrates in his hands
both the powers of the local ministers and those also which had at first been
reserved exclusively for the "general" ministry, but who is himself
as strictly limited in the extent of his jurisdiction to a single church as
were the humbler presbyter-bishops from whom he derived his name. When we have
explained how the supreme powers of the general ministry were made to devolve
on an individual who belonged to the local ministry, we have explained the
origin of episcopacy. With that problem of explanation we have not here to deal
in detail: we have only to recognize the result and its importance, when in and
with the bishop the local church sufficed in itself for the extraordinary as
well as for the ordinary functions of church government and Christian life.
In those early days of episcopacy, among the diminutive groups of
Christian “strangers and sojourners” which were dotted over the pagan world of
the second century, we must conceive of a quite special closeness of relation
between a bishop and his people. Regularly in all cities—and it was in the provinces
where city life was most developed that the Church made quickest progress—a
bishop is found at the head of the community of Christians: and his intimacy
with his people was in those primitive days unhindered by the interposition of
any hierarchy of functionaries or attendants his flock was small enough for him
to carry out to the letter the pastoral metaphor, and to “call his sheep by
name”. If the consent of the Christian people had always been, as Clement of
Rome tells us, a necessary preliminary to the ordination of Christian
ministers, in the case of the appointment of their bishop the people did not
consent merely, they elected: not till the fourth century did the clergy begin
to acquire first a separate and ultimately a predominant share in the process
of choice. Even though the “angel of the church” in the Apocalypse may not
have been, in the mind of the seer, at all intended to refer to the bishop, yet
this quasi-identification of the community with its representative exactly
expresses the ideal of second century writers. “The whole number of you I
welcome in God's Name in the person of Onesimus”, “in
Polybius I beheld the whole multitude of you”, writes Ignatius to the
Christians of Ephesus and Tralles: “be subject to the
bishop and to one another” is his injunction to the Magnesians:
the power of Christian worship is in “the prayer of the bishop and the whole
church”. So too to Justin Martyr, “the brethren as we are called” and “the
president” are the essential figures in the portraiture of the Christian
society.
If it is true that in the first century the apostle-founder and the
community as founded by him are the two outstanding elements of Christian
organization, it is no less true that in the second century the twin ideas of
bishop and people attain a prominence which throws all subordinate distinctions
into the background. Even as late as the middle of the third century we see
Cyprian—who is quite misunderstood if he is looked on only as an innovator in
the sphere of organization—maintaining and emphasizing at every turn the
intimate union, in normal church life, of bishop and laity, while he also
recognizes the duty of the laity, in abnormal circumstances, to separate from
the communion of the bishop who had proved himself unworthy of their choice: “it
is the people in the first place which has the power both of electing worthy
bishops and of spurning the unworthy”. Similar witness for the East is borne in
the same century by the Didascalia Apostolorum,
where bishop and laity are addressed in turn, and their mutual relations are
almost the main theme of the writer.
Episcopacy
and Unity
But this personal relation of the bishop to his flock, which was the
ideal of church administrators and thinkers from Ignatius to Cyprian, could
only find effective realization in a relatively small community: the very
success of the Christian propaganda, and the consequent increase everywhere of
the numbers of the Christian people, made some further development of
organization imperative. Especially during the long peace between Severus and
Decius (211-249) did recruits pour in. In the larger towns at least there could
be now no question of personal acquaintance between the president of the
community and all its members. No doubt it might have been possible to preserve
the old intimacy at the cost of unity, and to create a bishop for each
congregation. But the sense of civic unity was an asset of which Christians
instinctively availed themselves in the service of religion. If practical
convenience sometimes dictated the appointment of bishops in villages, these
were only common in districts where, as in Cappadocia, cities were few, and
where consequently the extent of the territory of each city was unduly large
for supervision by the single bishop of the city. Normally, even in days before
there was any idea of the formal demarcation of territorial jurisdiction, the
city or civitas with all its dependent lands was the
natural sphere of the individual bishop's authority. And within the walls of
the city it was never so much as conceivable that the ecclesia should be
divided. When the Council of Nicaea was making provision for the reinstatement
in clerical rank of Novatianist clergy willing to be
reconciled with the Church, the arrangement was subject always to the
maintenance of the principle that there should not be “two bishops in the city”.
The very rivalries between different claimants of one episcopal throne serve to bring out the same result—witness the earliest instances of
pope and anti-pope of which we have documentary knowledge, those of Cornelius
and Novatian in 251, and of Liberius and Felix about
357. In the latter case Constantius, with a politician's eye to compromise,
recommended the joint recognition of both claimants: but the Roman people—Theodoret, to whose History we owe the details, is careful
to note that he has recorded the very language used—saluted the reading of the rescript in the circus with the mocking cry that two
leaders would do very well for the factions at the games, but that there could
be only "one God, one Christ, one bishop." Exactly the same reason
had been given a century earlier in almost the same words, by the Roman
confessors when writing to Cyprian, for their abandonment of Novatian and adhesion to Cornelius: “we are not unaware
that there is one God, and one Christ the Lord whom we have confessed, one Holy
Spirit, and therefore only one true bishop in the communion of the Catholic
Church”. Both in East and West, in the largest cities as well as in the
smallest, the society of the faithful was conceived of as an indivisible unit;
and its oneness was expressed in the person of its one bishop. The parish of
Christians in any locality was not like a hive of bees, which, when numbers
multiplied inconveniently, could throw off a part of the whole, to be
henceforward a complete and independent organism under separate control. The
necessity for new organization had to be met in some way which would preserve
at all costs the oneness of the body and its head.
It followed that the work and duties which the individual bishop could
no longer perform in person must be shared with, or deputed to, subordinate
officials. New offices came into being in the course especially of the third
century, and the growth of this clerus or clergy, and
its gradual acquisition during the fourth and fifth centuries of the character
of a hierarchy nicely ordered in steps and degrees, is a feature of
ecclesiastical history of which the importance has not always been adequately
realized.
Of such a hierarchy the germs had no doubt existed from the beginning;
and indeed presbyters and deacons were, as we have seen, older component parts
of the local communities than were the bishops themselves. In the Ignatian theory bishop, presbyters, and deacons are the
three universal elements of organization, “without which nothing can be called
a church”. And the distinction between the two subordinate orders, in their
original scope and intention, was just the distinction between the two sides of
clerical office which in the bishop were in some sort combined, the spiritual
and the administrative: presbyters were the associates of the bishop in his
spiritual character, deacons in his administrative functions.
Presbyters
Our earliest documents define the work of presbyters by no language more
commonly than by that which expresses the "pastoral" relation of a
shepherd to his flock: “the flock in which the Holy Ghost hath set you as
overseers to shepherd the Church of God”, “the presbyters I exhort .. .
shepherd the flock of God among you ... not as lords of the ground but as
examples of the flock, until the Great Shepherd shall appear”. But in
proportion as the local organization became episcopal,
the pastoral idea concentrated itself upon the bishop. To Ignatius the
distinctive function of the presbyters is rather that of a council, gathered
round the bishop as the apostles were gathered round Christ—an idea not
unconnected perhaps with the position of the presbyters in the Christian
assembly; for there is no reason to doubt that primitive tradition underlies
the arrangement of the early Christian basilicas, where the bishop’s chair
stood in the centre of the apse behind the altar, and the consessus presbyterorum extended right and left in
a semicircle, as represented in the Apocalypse. So too in the Didascalia Apostolorum (Syriac and Latin) the one definite function allotted to
presbyters is that of “consilium et curia ecclesiae”.
Besides pastoral duties, however, the Pauline epistles bring presbyters into
definite relation also with the work of teaching. If ‘teachers’ were originally
one grade of the general ministry, they would naturally have settled down in
the communities earlier than the itinerant apostles or prophets: ‘pastors and
teachers’ are already closely connected in the epistle to the Ephesians: and
the first epistle to Timothy shows us that ‘speaking and teaching’ was a
function to which some at least of the presbyters might aspire. It is probable
enough that the second-century bishop shared this, as all other functions of
the presbyterate: St Polycarp is described by his
flock as an ‘apostolic and prophetic teacher’: but, as differentiation
progressed, teaching was one of the duties less easily retained in the bishop's
hands, and our third-century authorities are full of references to the class
known as presbyteri doctores.
Deacons
and readers
If presbyters were thus the bishop's counselors and advisers where
counsel was needed, his colleagues in the rites of Christian worship, his
assistants and representatives in pastoral and teaching duties, the prototypes
of the diaconate are to be found in the Seven of the Acts, who were appointed
to disburden the apostles of the work of poor relief and charity and to set
them free for their more spiritual duties of ‘prayer and ministering of the
Word’. Quite similarly in the ‘servants’ of the local church, the bishop found
ready to hand a personal staff of clerks and secretaries. The Christian Church
in one not unimportant aspect was a gigantic friendly society: and the deacons
were the relieving officers who, under the direction of the ‘overseer’, sought
out the local members of the society in their homes, and dispensed to those who
were in permanent or temporary need the contributions of their more fortunate
brethren. From their district-visiting the deacons would derive an intimate
knowledge of the circumstances and characters of individual Christians, and of
the way in which each was living up to his professio: by a very natural
development it became part of their recognized duties, as we learn from the Didascalia, to
report to the bishop cases calling for the exercise of the penitential
discipline of the Church. Throughout all the early centuries the closeness of
their personal relation with the bishop remains: but what had been spread over
the whole diaconate tends to be concentrated on an individual, when the office
of archdeacon—oculus episcopi,
according to a favorite metaphor—begins to emerge: the earliest instances of
the actual title are c. 370-380, in Optatus (of
Caecilian of Carthage) and in the Gesta inter Liberium et Felicem, (of
Felix of Rome).
Originally, as it would seem, deacons were not ministers of worship at
all: the earliest subordinate office in the liturgy was that of reader. We need
not suppose that deacon in the New Testament means a distinct official in the
Church any more than in the Synagogue: but the same phrase in Justin's Apology
has more of a formal sound, and by the end of the second century the first of
the minor orders had obviously an established place in church usage. While
Ignatius names only bishop, presbyters, and deacons, Tertullian, contrasting
the stable orders of Catholics with the unsettled arrangements of heretics,
speaks of bishop, presbyter, deacon, and reader. And in remote churches or
backwardly organized provinces the same four orders were the minimum recognized
long after Tertullian, as in the so-called Apostolic Church Order (third
century, perhaps for Egypt) and in the canons of the Council of Sardica (343,
for the Balkan peninsula: the canon is proposed by the Spaniard Hosius of
Cordova).
But the process of transformation by which the diaconate became more and
more a spiritual office began early, and one of its results was to degrade the
readership by ousting it from its proper functions. It was as attendants on the
bishop that the deacons, we may well suppose, were deputed from the first to
take the Eucharist, over which the bishop had offered the prayers and thanksgivings
of the Church, to the absent sick. In Rome, when Justin wrote, soon after 150,
they were already distributing the consecrated "bread and wine and
water" in the Christian assembly. Not very much later the reading of the
Gospel began to be assigned to them: Cyprian is the last writer to connect the
Gospel still with the reader; by the end of the third century it was a constant
function of the deacon, and the reader had sunk proportionately in rank and
dignity.
Minor
Orders
But this development of the diaconate is only part of a much larger
movement. In the greater churches at least an elaborate differentiation of
functions and functionaries was in course of process during the third century.
Under the pressure of circumstances, and the accumulation of new duties which
the increasing size and importance of the Christian communities thrust upon the
bishop, much which he had hitherto done for himself, and which long remained
his in theory, came in practice to be done for him by the higher clergy. As they
moved up to take his place, they in turn left duties to be provided for: as
they drew more and more to the spiritual side of their work, they left the more
secular duties to new officials in their place. Evidence for Carthage and Rome
in the middle of the third century shows us that, besides the principal orders
of bishop, presbyters, and deacons, a large community would now complete its clerus by two
additional pairs of officers, subdeacon and acolyte,
exorcist and reader, making seven altogether. The church of Carthage, we learn
from the Cyprianic correspondence, had exorcists and
readers, apparently at the bottom of the clergy; and it had also hypodiaconi and acoliti, who
served as the bearers of letters or gifts from the bishop to his
correspondents. Subdeacons and acolytes were now in
fact what deacons had earlier been, the personal and secretarial staff of the
bishop, while exorcists and readers were the subordinate members of the
liturgical ranks. The combination of all these various officers into a single
definitely graduated hierarchy was the work of the fourth century: but it is at
least adumbrated in the enumeration of the Roman clerus addressed by Pope
Cornelius, Cyprian's contemporary, to Fabius of
Antioch in 251. Besides the bishop, there were at Rome forty-six presbyters,
seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes;
of exorcists and readers, together with doorkeepers, there were fifty-two; of
widows and afflicted over fifteen hundred: and all this “great multitude” was “necessary
in the church”.
The Cursus Honorum
Promotion from one rank of the ministry to another was of course no new
thing. In particular the rise from the diaconate to the presbyterate,
from the more secular to the more spiritual office, was always recognized as a
legitimate reward for good service. “They that have served well as deacons”,
wrote St Paul, “purchase for themselves an honorable step”; though when the
Apostolic Church Order interprets place of a presbyter or that of a bishop is
meant. But it was a serious and far-reaching development when, in the fourth
century, the idea grew up that the Christian clergy consisted of a hierarchy of
grades, through each of which it was necessary to pass in order to reach the
higher offices. The Council of Nicaea had contented itself with the reasonable
prohibition (canon 2) of the ordination of neophytes as bishops or presbyters.
The Council of Sardica in 343 prescribes for the episcopate a “prolixum tempus” of promotions through the “munus” of reader, the officium of deacon, and the ministerium of
presbyter. But it was in the church of Rome that the conception of the cursus honorum—borrowed,
we may suppose, consciously or unconsciously from the civil magistracies of the
Roman State—took deepest root. Probably the oldest known case of particular
clerical offices held in succession by the same individual is the record, in an
inscription of Pope Damasus, of either his own or his father's career—there are
variant readings "pater" and "puer", but even the son's career must have begun early
in the fourth century—"exceptor, lector, levita, sacerdos". Ambrosiaster, a Roman and younger
contemporary of Damasus, expresses clearly the conception of grades of order in
which the greater includes the less, so that not only are presbyters ordained
out of deacons and not vice versa, but a presbyter has in himself all the
powers of the inferior ranks of the hierarchy. The earliest of the dated
disciplinary decretals that has come down to us, the
letter of Pope Siricius to Himerius of Tarragona in 385 (its prescriptions are repeated with less precision in that
of Zosimus to Hesychius of Salona in 418), emphasizes
the stages and intervals of a normal ecclesiastical career. A child devoted
early to the clerical life is made a reader at once, then acolyte and subdeacon up to thirty, deacon for five years, and
presbyter for ten, so that forty-five is the minimum age for a bishop: even
those who take orders in later life must spend two years among the readers or
exorcists, and five as acolyte and subdeacon. But the
requirements of Siricius and Zosimus are moderate
when brought into comparison with the pseudo-papal documents which came
crowding into being at the beginning of the sixth century: of the apocryphal
councils fathered on Pope Sylvester the one gives a cursus of 52 years, the other of 55, before the episcopate.
Two considerations indeed must be borne in mind which qualify the
apparent rigor of the fourth and fifth century cursus.
In the first place we have already traced the beginning of the depreciation of
the readership. In days when liturgical formulae were still unwritten, the
reader's office was the only one that was mechanical: what it had necessarily
implied was a modicum of education, and all who had passed through the office had
at least learned to read. Thus it came about, from the fourth century onwards,
that the readers were the boys who were receiving training and education in the
schools of the Church: according to the canons, for instance, of the Council of
Hippo in 393 readers on attaining the age of puberty made choice between
marriage and permanent readership on the one hand, celibacy and rise through
the various grades of clerical office on the other. And the second thing to be
remembered is that all these prescriptions of canons or decretals represented a theoretical standard rather than a practice regularly carried
out. Canon Law in the fourth century could still be put aside, by bishop or
people, when need arose, without scruple. Minor orders might be omitted. St
Hilary of Poitiers wanted to ordain Martin a deacon straight off, and only made
him an exorcist instead because he reckoned that Martin's humility would not
allow him to refuse so low an office. Augustine and Jerome were ordained
presbyters direct. Even the salutary Nicene rules about neophytes were on
emergency violated: Ambrose of Milan and Nectarius of
Constantinople were both elected as laymen (the former indeed as a catechumen),
and were rushed through the preliminary grades without appreciable delay; St Ambrose
passed from baptism to the episcopate in the course of a week.
But in spite of any occasional reassertions of the older freedom, it did
nevertheless remain true that the curses and all it stood for was gradually
establishing itself as a real influence: and it stood for a body continually
growing in size, in articulation, in strength, in dead weight, which drove in
like a wedge between bishop and people, and fortified itself by encroachments
on both sides. Doubtless it would have been natural in any case that bishop and
people, no longer enjoying the old affectionateness of personal intercourse,
should lose the sense of community and imperceptibly drift apart: but the
process was at least hastened and the gap widened by the interposition of the clerus. It was no longer the laity, but the clergy alone,
who were in direct touch with the bishop. Even the fundamental right of the
people to elect their bishop slipped gradually from their hands into the hands
of the clergy. Within the clerical class a continual and steady upward pressure
was at work. The minor orders take over the business of the diaconate: deacons
assert themselves against presbyters: presbyters in turn are no longer a body
of counselors to the bishop acting in common, but, having of necessity begun to
take over all pastoral relations with the laity, tend as parish priests to a
centrifugal independence. The process of entrenchment within the parochial
freehold was still only in its first beginnings: but already in the fourth
century—when theologians and exegetes were feeling after a formal and
scientific basis for what had been natural, instinctive, traditional—we find
presbyters asserting the claim of an ultimate identity of order with the
episcopate.
Such are the summary outlines of the picture, which must now be filled
in, here and there, with more detail. And the details will serve to reinforce
the conclusion that the principal features of the history of church
organization in the fourth and fifth centuries are not unconnected accidents,
but are to a large extent just different aspects of a single process, the
multiplication and development of the Christian clergy.
Episcopal
Elections
1. The people had originally chosen their bishop without serious
possibility of interference from the clergy. Voting by orders in the modern
sense was hardly known: in so far as any check existed on the unfettered choice
of the laity, it lay in the hands of the neighboring bishops from whom the
bishop-elect would naturally receive consecration. Cyprian, it is clear from
his whole correspondence, was made bishop of Carthage by the laity against the
decided wishes of his colleagues in the presbyterate.
After the death of Anteros of Rome in 236, we learn
from the story in Eusebius that “all the brethren were gathered together for
the appointment of a successor to the bishopric”. And this was still the
practice after the middle of the fourth century: the description of the
election of St Ambrose in 374 by his biographer mentions the people only.
Another biography, that of St Martin of Tours by Sulpicius Severus, depicts a
similar scene about the same date: Martin was elected, in the face of
opposition from some of the assembled bishops, by the persistent vote of the
people. The laity too, at least in some churches, still selected even the
candidates for the priesthood. Possidius, the
biographer of St Augustine, relates how Valerius of Hippo put before the
"plebs dei" the need for an additional
presbyter, and how the Catholic people, "knowing Saint Augustine's faith
and life," seized hold of him, and presented him to the bishop for
ordination. In Rome however the influence of the clergy was already
predominant. The episcopal elections, during the
troubled decade that followed the exile of Liberius in 355, are described in
the Gesta inter Liberium et Felicem: the clergy first pledge their loyalty to
Liberius and then accept Felix in his place: the opposition, who clung all
through to Liberius and after his death elected Ursinus as his successor, are represented as mainly a lay party—multitudo fidelium, sancta plebs, fidelis populus, dei populus— yet even in their electoral assembly the clergy
receive principal mention, “presbyteri et diacones ... cum plebe sancta”. And though there are some
indications that the party of Ursinus had strong
support in the local episcopate, it was Damasus, the candidate of the majority
of the clergy, who secured recognition by the civil power. At the end of the
fourth century a definite place is accorded to the clergy in the theory of episcopal appointments. The eighth book of the Apostolic
Constitutions distinguishes the three steps of election by the people, approval
by the clergy, consecration by the bishops. Siricius of Rome, in his decretal letter to Himerius, puts the clergy before the people, "si eum deri ac plebis edecumarit electio": the phrase "cleri plebisque" became normal in this connection, and
ultimately meant that it was for the clergy to elect and for the people to
approve.
Fundamental as these changes were, no doubt each stage of them seemed
natural enough at its time. Indirect election was an expedient unknown as yet:
real election by the laity, in view of the dimensions of the Christian
population, became more and more difficult, and the pretence of it tumultuous
and unsatisfactory. The members of the clergy on the other hand were now
considerable enough for a genuine electing body, yet not too unwieldy for
control: and the people were gradually ousted from any effective participation.
So far as the influence of the laity still continued to make itself felt, it
was through the interference of the State. Under either alternative Christian
feeling had to content itself with a grave deflection from primitive ideals.
2. The earlier paragraphs of this chapter have already given us reason
to anticipate the developments of the diaconate in the fourth century. We have
seen how the intimate relations of the deacons with the bishop as his personal
staff caused the business of the churches to pass more and more, as numbers
multiplied, through their hand; we have seen also how from their attendance on
the bishop, in church as well as outside of it, they gradually acquired what
they did not originally possess, a status in Christian worship. It is just on
these two lines that their aggrandizement still proceeded. In Rome and in some
of the Eastern churches (witness the last canon of the Council of Neocaesarea in Pontus, c. 315), the deacons were limited,
on the supposed model of the Acts, to seven, while the presbyterate admitted of indefinite increase, "and the mere disproportion in numbers
exalted the individual deacon" says Jerome bitterly. But if complaint and
criticism focused itself on the affairs of the church of Rome, where everything
was on a larger scale and on a more prominent stage than elsewhere, the
indications all suggest that the same thing was in lesser measure happening in
other churches.
The legislation of the earliest councils of the fourth century supplies
eloquent testimony to the ambition of deacons in general and Roman deacons in
particular. The Spanish canons of Elvira, c. 305, show that a deacon might be
in the position of "regens plebem",
in charge, no doubt, of a village congregation: he might (exceptionally)
baptize, but he might not do what in many places the bishops of the Council of
Arles, in 314, learnt that he did, namely "offer" the Eucharist. By a
special canon of the same Council of Arles, the deacons of the (Roman) City are
directed not to take so much upon themselves, but to defer to the presbyters
and to act only with their sanction. Both these canons of Arles are combined
and repeated in the 18th canon of Nicaea: but the reference to Rome is omitted,
and the presumptions of the diaconate —we must suppose that existing conditions
in the Eastern churches are now in view—take the form of administering the
Eucharist to presbyters, receiving the Eucharist before bishops, and sitting
down among the presbyters in church. Later on in the century we find the Roman
deacons wearing the vestment called "dalmatic", which elsewhere was
reserved to the bishop: and one of them—probably the Mercury who is mentioned
in one of Pope Damasus' epigrams — had asserted the absolute equality of
deacons and priests. Ambrosiaster, who may be confidently identified with the
Roman ex-Jew Isaac, the supporter of the Anti-pope Ursinus,
treats in the hundred and first of his Quaestiones "de iactantia Romanorum levitarum": Jerome, in his epistle ad Evangelum presbyterum, appropriates
the arguments of Ambrosiaster and clothes them with his own incomparable style.
The Roman deacons, they tell us, arrogate to themselves the functions of
priests in saying grace when asked out to dinner, and in getting responses made
to themselves in church instead of to the priests: and this arrogance is made
possible because of their influence with the laity and in the administration of
ecclesiastical affairs. But the mind of the Church is clear: even at Rome
presbyters sit, while deacons stand, and if at Rome deacons do not carry the
altar and its furniture or pour water over the hands of the priest — as they do
in every other church—that is only because at Rome there is a "multitude
of clerks" to undertake these offices in their place. We do not know that
these indignant remonstrances of Ambrosiaster and
Jerome had any practical results: we do know that in the second half of the
fourth and the beginning of the fifth century three deacons, Felix, Ursinus, and Eulalius, made vain
attempts upon the papal throne—the successful rivals of the two latter were priests,
Damasus and Boniface—while by the middle of the fifth century, as illustrated
in the persons of St Leo and his successor Hilarius,
the archdeacon almost naturally became pope.
3. As the deacon thus pressed hard on the heels of the presbyter, so the
presbyter in turn put himself into competition with the bishop. Ambrosiaster
and Jerome not only deny any parity of deacon and presbyter, but assert in
opposition a fundamental parity of order between presbyter and bishop. Both
were commentators on St Paul. Exegesis was one of the most fertile forms of
that astonishing intellectual efflorescence, which, bursting out at the
beginning of the fourth century in the schools of Origen and of Lucian, and in
the West fifty years later, produced during several generations a literary
harvest unequalled throughout the Christian centuries. And the two Latin
presbyters found in the Pastoral Epistles just the historical and scriptural
basis for the establishment of the claims of the presbyterate,
that the instinct of the times called for. The apostle had distinguished
clearly enough between deacons and presbyters or bishops: but he had used — so
they rightly saw —the terms presbyter and bishop for the same order of the
ministry, and it was an easy deduction that presbyter and bishop must be still
essentially one. So Ambrosiaster (on 1 Timothy) and so Jerome (on Titus)
explains that in the apostolic age presbyters and bishops were the same, until
as a safeguard against dissensions one was chosen out of the presbyters to be
set over the reste. The exegesis of Ambrosiaster and
Jerome was undeniably sound: their historical conclusions were, if the picture
given in the earlier pages of this chapter is correct, not so just to the facts
as those of another commentator of the time, perhaps the greatest of them all,
Theodore of Mopsuestia. No doubt the New Testament
bishop was a presbyter: but "those who had authority to ordain, the
officers we now call bishops, were not limited to a single church but presided
over a whole province and were known by the title of apostles. In this way
blessed Paul set Timothy over all Asia, and Titus over Crete, and doubtless
others separately over other provinces ... so that those who are now called
bishops but were then called apostles bore then the same relation to the
province that they do now to the city and villages for which they are
appointed": Timothy and Titus "visited cities, just as bishops today
visit country parishes."
"Uterque enim sacerdos est". In these words lies perhaps the
real inwardness of the movement for equating presbyters with bishops and of its
partial success: "Priesthood" was taking the place of
"Order". In the first centuries, to St Ignatius for instance and to
St Cyprian, the essential principle was that all things must be done within the
Unity of the Church, and of that unity the bishop was the local centre and the
guardian. That alone is a true Eucharist, in the language of Ignatius, which is
under the authority of the bishop or his representative. No rite or sacrament
administered outside this ordered unity had any reality. Baptism or Laying on
of hands schismatically conferred, whether without the Church among the sects
or without the bishop's sanction by any intruder in his sphere, were simply as
though they had not been. Under the dominance of this conception the position
of the bishop was unique and unassailable. But, as time went on, the single
conception of Order, intense and overmastering as to those early Christians it
had been, was found insufficient: other considerations must be taken into
account, "lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Breaches
were made in the theory first at one point, then at another. Christian charity
rebelled against the thought of wholly rejecting what was intended, however
imperfectly, to be Christian Baptism: iteration of such Baptism was felt, and
nowhere more clearly than at Rome, to be intolerable. As with Baptism, so,
though much more gradually and uncertainly, with Holy Orders. The distinction
between validity and regularity was hammered out: "quod fieri non debuit, factum
valet" was the expression of the newer point of view. Augustine, in his
writings against the Donatists, laid down the principles of the revised theology,
and later ages have done little more than develop and systematize his work.
It is obvious that in this conception less stress will be set on the
circumstances of the sacrament, more on the sacrament itself: less on the
jurisdiction of the minister to perform it, more on his inherent capacity:
less, in other words, on Order, more on Priesthood. We are not to suppose that
earlier thought necessarily differed from later on the question, for instance,
to what orders of the ministry was committed the conduct of the characteristic
action of Christian worship, or as to its sacrificial nature, or as to the
priestly function of the ministrants. But earlier language did certainly differ
from later as to the direction in which sacerdotal terminology was most freely
employed. In the general idea of primitive times the whole congregation took
part in the priestly office: when a particular usage of "sacerdos"
first came in, and for several generations afterwards, it meant the bishop and
the bishop only. The phraseology in this respect of St Cyprian is repeated by a
whole chain of writers down to St Ambrose. No doubt the hierarchical language
of the Old Testament was applied to the ministry of the Church long before the
fourth century: but it was either transferred in quite general terms from the
one hierarchy to the other as a whole, or it was concentrated upon the bishop.
Thus in the Didascalia Apostolorum it is the bishops who inherit the Levites' right to material support, the
bishops who are addressed as “priests to your people and levites who serve in the house of God, the holy catholic Church”, the bishop again who
is “the levite and the high priest” (contrast the
language of the Didache). But the detailed comparison
of the three orders of the Jewish ministry and the Christian was so obvious
that it can only have been the traditional use of sacerdos for the bishop that retarded the parallelism. We find levita for deacon
in the egiprams of Damasus and in the de Officiis of St Ambrose: but the complete triad of levita, sacerdos, summus sacerdos for deacon, presbyter, and
bishop meets us first in the pages of the ex-Jew Ambrosiaster. And while
Ambrose employs the Old Testament associations of the levite to exalt the dignity and calling of the Christian deacon, Ambrosiaster
contrasts the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” with the priests, and
paraphrases the titles sacerdos and summus sacerdos as presbyter and primus
presbyter. Summus sacerdos is freely used of bishops by
Jerome, though the title was forbidden even to metropolitans by an African
canon. But in any case the new extension of sacerdos to the Christian presbyter was too closely in harmony with existing
and not to take root at once. It is common in both St Jerome and St
Augustine: Pope Innocent speaks of presbyters as secundi sacerdotes: and from this time onward
bishop and priest tend more and more to be ranked together as joint possessors
of a common sacerdotium.
New
Churches built
This new emphasis on the sacerdotium of Christian presbyters is perhaps to be
connected with the new position which in the fourth and following centuries
they were beginning to occupy as parish priests. It was the necessity of the
regular administration of the Eucharist which dictated the commencements of the
parochial system. While the custom of daily Eucharists was neither universal nor perhaps earlier than the third century—it arose
partly out of Christian devotion, partly out of the allegorical interpretation
of the "daily bread"—the weekly Eucharist was both primitive and
universal, and the needs in this respect of the Christian people could
ultimately be met only by a wide extension of the independent action of the presbyterate. Though in the larger cities it can never have
been possible, even at the first, for the Christian people to meet together at
a single Eucharist, the bishop, as Ignatius tells us, kept under his own
control all arrangements for separate services, and the presbyters, like the
head-quarters staff of a general, were sent hither and thither as occasion
demanded. It may have been as definite localities came to be permanently set
apart for Christian worship, that the custom grew up of attaching particular
presbyters to particular churches.
Probably it was during the long peace 211-249 that ground was first
acquired for churches within the walls at Rome: cemeteries were constructed by
the ecclesiastical authorities as soon as the beginning of the third century,
but the earliest mention of church property in the City is when the Emperor
Alexander Severus (222-235), as we learn from Lampridius,
decided a question of disputed ownership of land between the christiani and
the popinarii in favor of the former, because of the religious use which they were going to
make of it. Certainly by the time of Diocletian Christian churches throughout
the Empire were of sufficient number and prominence to become, with the sacred
vessels and the sacred books, a special mark for the edict of persecution in
303. And just as the restoration of peace produced an outburst of calligraphic
skill devoted to the Bible, of which the Vatican and Sinaitic codices are the enduring monuments, so, too, the ruined buildings were replaced
by others more numerous and more magnificent. Constantine erected churches over
the graves of the Apostles on the Vatican hill and the Ostian Way, while inside the walls the Lateran basilica of the Savior and the Sessorian basilica of the Holy Cross testified further to
the policy of the emperor and the piety of his mother. When Optatus wrote, fifty years later, there were over forty Roman basilicas, all of them
open to the African Catholics and closed to the Donatists. But this number
perhaps includes the cemetery churches, for the parish churches of the City
appear to have been exactly twenty-five under Pope Hilary (461-468), in its
life of whom the Liber Pontificalis enumerates a service of altar vessels for use within the City, one golden bowl
for the "station" and twenty-five silver bowls (with twenty-five amae or cruets,
and fifty chalices) for the parish churches, scyphus stationarius, scyphi per titulos. The station thus opposed to the
parishes is the reunion, on certain days of the year, of the whole body of the
Roman clergy and faithful under the pope at some particular church: it was a
corrective to the growth of parochial separatism, like the custom of sending
round every Sunday, from the pope's mass to the mass of every church within the
walls, the fermentum or portion of the consecrated bread.
It was part of the same careful guard against the over-development of
parochial independence, that, though there were parish clergy at Rome in the
fourth and fifth centuries, there was as yet no parish priest. When
Ambrosiaster wrote, it was the custom to allot two priests to each church. At a
council under Pope Symmachus in 499, sixty-seven priests of the City subscribe,
each with his title, “Gordianus presbyter tituli Pammachii” and so on: but
the tituli are not more than thirty, some of them having as many as four or five priests
attached to them. Indeed, thirty is perhaps too high a figure, for some tituli may appear
under more than one name—an original name from the donor or the reigning pope,
and a, supplementary name in honor of a saint. Of the fourth century popes
Damasus had named a church after St Lawrence, and Siricius after St Clement: the basilica built under Pope Liberius became St Mary Major
under Xystus III (432-440), and the two basilicas
founded under Pope Julius (337-352) became in time the Holy Apostles and St
Mary across Tiber.
But if the parochial system with its single rector was thus no part of
Roman organization as late as the end of the fifth century, it was in full vigor
at Alexandria two centuries earlier. Epiphanius tells us that, though all the
churches belonging to the catholic body in Alexandria (he gives the names of
eight) were under one archbishop, presbyters were appointed to each of them for
the ecclesiastical necessities of the inhabitants in the several districts. The
history of Arius takes the parochial system fifty or sixty years behind
Epiphanius: it was as parish priest of the church and quarter named Baucalis that he was enabled to organize his revolt against
the theology dominant at head-quarters under the bishop Alexander. The failure
of the presbyter and victory of the bishop may have reacted unfavorably upon
the position of the Alexandrine presbyters generally; the historian Socrates
expressly tells us that after the Arian trouble presbyters were not allowed to
preach there. At any rate it is just down to the time of Alexander and his
successor, Athanasius, that those writers who testify to peculiar privileges of
the Alexandrine presbyterate in the appointment of
the patriarch suppose them to have survived. The most precise evidence comes
from a tenth century writer, Eutychius, who relates that by ordinance of St
Mark twelve presbyters were to assist the patriarch, and at his death to elect
and lay hands upon one of themselves as his successor, Athanasius being the
first to be appointed by the bishops. Severus of Antioch, in the sixth century,
mentions that "in former days" the bishop was "appointed"
by presbyters at Alexandria. Jerome (in the same letter that was cited above,
but independent for the moment of Ambrosiaster) deduces the essential equality
of priest and bishop from the consideration that the Alexandrine bishop “down
to Heraclas and Dionysius” (232-265) was chosen by
the presbyters from among themselves without any special form of consecration.
Earlier than any of these is the story told in connection with the hermit Poemen in the Apophthegms of the
Egyptian monks. Poemen was visited one day by
heretics who began to criticize the archbishop of Alexandria as having only
presbyterian ordination. Unfortunately the hermit declined to argue 'with them,
gave them their dinner, and promptly dismissed them.
It is clear that an Alexandrine bishop of the fourth century slandered
by heretics can be no one but Athanasius; and therefore this, the earliest
evidence for presbyterian ordination at Alexandria, is just that which is most
demonstrably false. For Athanasius was neither elected nor consecrated by
presbyters: not more than ten or twelve years after the event, the bishops of
Egypt affirmed categorically that the electors were "the whole multitude
and the whole people" and that the consecrators were "the greater
number of ourselves." Yet this very emphasis on the part of the supporters
of Athanasius reveals one line of the Arian campaign against him; and the
conjecture may be therefore hazarded that it was by Arian controversialists
that the allegations of Alexandrine presbyterianism were first circulated, and that their real
origin lay in the desire to turn the edge of any argument that might be based
upon the solidarity of the episcopate. If the Catholics called upon the bishops
of the East not to champion a rebellious presbyter, their opponents would, on
this view, "go one better" in their enthusiasm for episcopacy, and
answer that Athanasius was no more than a presbyter himself. It is difficult
for us, who have to reconstruct the history of the fourth century out of
Catholic material, to form any just conception either of the mass of the lost
Arian literature—exegetical and historical, as well as doctrinal and polemical—or
of its almost exclusive vogue for the time being throughout the East, and of
the influence which, in a thousand indirect ways, it must have exerted upon
Catholic writers of the next generations. Jerome, writing amid Syrian
surroundings, would eagerly accept the there current
presentation of the Alexandrine tradition, though his knowledge of the later
facts caused him to throw back the dates from the known to the unknown, from
Athanasius and Alexander to Dionysius and Heraclas.
Of course there is no smoke without fire; and presumably the Alexandrine presbyterate, in the generations immediately preceding the
Council of Nicaea, must have possessed some unusual powers in the appointment
of their patriarch. But it seems as likely that these were the powers which
elsewhere belonged to the people as that they were the powers which elsewhere
belonged to the bishops.
The explanation here offered would no doubt have to be disallowed, if it
were true, as has sometimes been alleged, that Arianism all the world over
stood for the rights of presbyters, while the cause of Athanasius was bound up
with the aggrandizement of the episcopate. But the connection was purely
adventitious at Alexandria, or at any rate local, and the conditions did not
reproduce themselves elsewhere. There is no reason at all to suppose any
general alliance between presbyters and Arianism, or between the episcopate and
orthodox : on the contrary, all the evidence goes to show that in Syria and
Asia Minor, and perhaps elsewhere, the bishops were less Catholic than their
flocks. At Antioch, for instance, where Arian bishops were dominant during half
a century, orthodox zeal was kept alive by the exertions of Flavian and Diodorus, originally as laymen, afterwards as
priests. In so far as the doctrinal issue affected the development of
organization at all, it must on the whole, both because of the general
confusion of discipline and also because of the ill repute which the
tergiversations of so many bishops earned for their order, have enhanced the
tendency towards the emancipation of presbyters from episcopal control.
Whatever special conditions may have affected the course of development
at Rome or Alexandria, it may be taken as generally true that, by the end of
the fourth century the Christian presbyter's right to celebrate the Eucharist
was coming to be regarded as inherent in his sacerdotium rather than as
devolved upon him by the bishop. With this right went also the right to be
served by deacons as ministri,
and ultimately the right to preach. While the 18th canon of Nicaea still
regards the deacons as ministers of the bishop only, later in the fourth
century the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions speaks of “their service
to both bishops and priests”, and Ambrosiaster is aghast at the audacity of
trying to put presbyters and their servants on a par.
The right to preach had never been formally associated with any order of
the Christian ministry: Ambrosiaster was certainly interpreting the documents
on his own account. It is clear that in early times even a layman, like Origen,
might at the bishop's request expound Scripture to the congregation.
Nevertheless, though the right might be thus deputed, the sermon was part of
the Eucharistic service, and Justin Martyr no doubt describes the normal
practice when he makes the president of the assembly in person expound and
apply the lections just read from Prophets or Gospels. In the fourth century it
was treated as axiomatic that the right to preach, as part of the liturgy,
could not even be deputed save to those to whom could also be deputed the right
to offer the Eucharist itself. It is true that in many parts of the West the
archdeacon did compose and pronounce a solemn thanksgiving once a year, at the
lighting of the Paschal candle on Easter Even: but even this extraliturgical sermon de laudibus cerei was unknown at Rome, and Jerome,
or whoever was the author of the letter addressed in 384 to a deacon of
Piacenza (printed in the appendix to Vallarsi's edition), finds in it a gross violation of Church order. Even the rights of
presbyters in this respect were inchoate and still strictly circumscribed. In
the Eastern churches it was customary for some of them to preach in the
presence of the bishop and for the bishop to preach after them: and Valerius of
Hippo was consciously introducing an Eastern use into Africa—he was himself a
Greek, and therefore unable to speak fluently to his Latin flock—when he
commissioned his presbyter Augustine "against the custom of the African
churches" to expound the Gospel and preach frequently in his presence. To
Jerome, familiar with the Eastern custom, it was pessimae consuetudinis that in some (doubtless
Western) churches presbyters kept silence in the presence of their bishop:
their right to preach attached directly to the pastoral office which they held,
according to him, in common with the bishop.
But because presbyters might preach in the bishop's church, where he
could note and correct at once any defects in their teaching, it does not
necessarily follow that they might preach in the parish churches, and there
does not seem to be any clear indication in the fourth and fifth centuries that
they did in fact do so. For Rome indeed this is hardly surprising: we have seen
how jealously parochial independence was there limited, and even at the
bishop's mass, if we may believe the historian Sozomen,
there were no sermons either by priest or bishop. In fact St Leo's sermons—he
became pope just about the time that Sozomen published his Church History—are the first of which we hear after Justin's time
in Rome. But in Gaul too, and as late as the beginning of the sixth century,
only the city priests, the priests, that is, who served in the bishop's church,
had the right to preach: the second canon of the second Council of Vaison in 529 extends the right, apparently for the first
time, to country parishes; if the priest is at any time unable to preach
through illness, the deacon is to read to the people “homilies of the holy
fathers”.
It is perhaps surprising at first sight to find that in the fourth and
fifth centuries presbyters are establishing a new independence in face of the
bishop, rather than bishops exerting a new and stricter authority over
presbyters. The conclusion has been reached by direct evidence; but it is also
the conclusion clearly indicated by the analogy of the whole upward movement
which we have seen at work in respect both to the minor orders and to the
diaconate.
But if this movement exerted so powerful an influence on the one hand
upon minor orders and diaconate, and on the other hand upon the priesthood, we
could not expect that bishops should be exempt from it. How and where it led in
their case it will be part of our business, in the second half of this chapter,
to trace. It was outside their own borders that the bishops of the great
churches were tempted to look for a wider field of activity and a more
commanding position. From the very first the bishop of each community had
represented it in its relation to other Christian communities, had been, so to
say, its minister for foreign affairs. The Visions of Hermas were to be
communicated to “the cities outside” by Clement, for that function belongs to
him. The complex developments of this function, from the second century to the
fifth, must now engage our attention.
(B)
So far we have been dealing only with the internal development of the
individual Christian community. But there is an external as well as an internal
development to trace; the separate communities were always in intimate touch
with one another, and the common feeling of the mass of them formed an
authority which, from the beginning, the law of Christian brotherhood made
supreme. “If one member suffer, all the members suffer”, “we have no such
custom, neither the churches of God”: the principles are laid down in our
earliest Christian documents, and the organization of the Catholic Church was
an attempt to work them out in practice. No doubt the result only imperfectly
embodied the idea, and in the process of translation into concrete form the
means came sometimes to appear of more value than the end.
The history of the second century shows how naturally the formal
processes of federation grew out of what was at first the spontaneous response
to the calls of membership of the great Society, the natural effort to express
the reality of Christian union and fellowship. The Roman community, under the
leadership of St Clement, writes a letter of expostulation when the traditions
of stability and order are threatened by the dissensions between the Corinthian
community and its presbyters.
St Ignatius addresses separate epistles to the churches of several
cities in Asia Minor, on or near his road to Rome, exhorting them to hold fast to
the traditional teaching and world-wide organization of the Christian Society.
The church of Smyrna announces to the church of Philomelium the martyrdom of
its bishop Polycarp: the churches of Lyons and Vienne send to their brethren in
Asia and Phrygia an account of the great persecution of 177, and the confessors
from the same cities intervene with Pope Eleutherus in favor of a sympathetic treatment of the Montanist movement. Correspondence
was reinforced by personal intercourse: Polycarp journeyed to Rome to discuss
the Easter difficulty with Pope Anicetus; Hegesippus, Melito and Abercius travelled widely among different churches; Clement
of Alexandria had sat at the feet of half-a-dozen teachers. Never was the
impulse to unity, the desire to test the doctrine of one church or of one
teacher by its agreement with the doctrine of the rest, stronger than in the
days when formal methods of arriving at the general sense of the scattered
communities had not as yet been hammered out. The Christian statesmen of the
age of the councils were only attempting to provide a more scientific means of
attaining an end which was vividly before the minds of their predecessors in
the sub-apostolic generations.
The crucial step in the direction of organized action was taken when the
bishops of neighboring communities began to meet together for mutual counsel.
Such concilia were no doubt, in the first instance, called for specific purposes and at
irregular times. Tertullian alludes to decisions of church councils unfavorable
to the canonicity of the Shepherd of Hermas, and makes special mention on
another occasion of councils in Greece. The earliest notice of separate
councils held simultaneously to discuss a pressing problem of the day is also
the earliest indication of the sort of area from which any one of such councils
would naturally be drawn; for when, about 196, tension became acute in regard
to the attitude of the bishops of proconsular Asia,
who refused to come into line with the Paschal observances of other churches,
councils were held, as we learn from Eusebius, of the bishops in Palestine and
in Pontus and in Gaul and in Osrhoene. During the
course of the third century these local or provincial councils became more and
more a regular and essential feature of church life and government. But there
was as yet very little that was stereotyped about the system. It was Cyprian
beyond all others who succeeded, during his brief ten years of episcopate,
248258, in forging a very practical weapon for the needs of the time out of
the conciliar movement: and of Cyprian's councils
some represented (proconsular) Africa alone, some
Africa and Numidia, some Africa, Numidia, and Mauretania combined; the meetings
were more or less annual, but the extent of the area from which the bishops
were summoned depended apparently upon the gravity of the business to be dealt
with. Again, if the civil province was in ordinary cases the natural model to
follow, there was no necessary dependence upon its boundary lines, where these
were artificial or arbitrary. For reasons of State the senatorial province of proconsular Africa and the imperial province of Numidia
were so arranged that the more civilized districts and the seaboard belonged to
the one, the more backward interior to the other: but the Numidia of
ecclesiastical organization was the ethnic Numidia, the country of the
Numidians, not the Numidia of political geography. Perhaps it was just for this
reason, because ethnic and ecclesiastical Numidia was shared between two civil
provinces, that in assemblies of the Numidian bishops the president was not, as
elsewhere, the bishop of the capital of the province, but the bishop senior by
consecration.
Not the least important result of the new direction given by Constantine
to the relations of Church and State was the authorization and encouragement of episcopal assemblies on a larger scale than had in
earlier days been possible. Where difficulties, disciplinary or doctrinal,
proved beyond the power of local effort to resolve, councils were planned of a
more than provincial type. The Council of Arles in 314 was a general council, concilium plenarium, of
the Western Church, summoned by Constantine as lord of the Western Empire, to
terminate the quarrel in Africa between the partisans of Caecilian and the
partisans of Donatus. Judgment went in favor of Caecilian, whose party, because
they alone now remained in communion with the churches outside Africa, were
henceforward the Catholics, while the others became a sect known after the name
of their leader as the Donatists. The dispute between Alexander and Arius at
Alexandria was in its beginning as purely local as that between Caecilian and
Donatus, but the issue soon came to involve the comparison of the fundamental
theologies of the two great rival schools of Alexandria and Antioch. From a
council such as Arles it was but a step to the conception of a general council
of the whole Church, where bishops from all over the world should meet for
comparison of the forms which the Christian tradition had taken in their
respective communities, for open ventilation of points of controversy, and for
the removal of misunderstanding by personal intercourse. Constantine, now
master of an undivided empire, organized the first ecumenical council at Nicaea
in 325. The great experiment was not an immediate success: the Nicene council
rather opened than closed the history of Arianism on the larger stage, and it
was not till after the lapse of half a century that wisdom was seen to be
justified of its works, though the very keenness of the struggle made the long
delayed and hardly won triumph more complete in the end. No council ever
fastened its hold on Christian imagination in quite the same way as the Council
of Nicaea.
Surfeit
of Councils
Not that there was ever any quarrel between the supporters and the
opponents of the Homousion as to the
rightness of the procedure which had been called into being. The weapons with
which the council and the creed were fought were rival councils and rival
creeds: the verdict of the court was to be set aside by renewed trials and
multiplied appeals in the hope of modifying somehow the original judgment. Of
all these supplementary councils none was strictly general, though on three
occasions—at Sardica and Philippopolis in 343, at Ariminum and Seleucia in 359, at Aquileia and
Constantinople in 381—councils representing separately the Greek and the Latin
episcopate were held more or less at the same time in East and West. Others,
like that of Sirmium in 351, were held, wherever the emperor happened to be in
residence, by the bishops attached at the moment to the court: others again
were local and provincial. The atmosphere of Rome was never perhaps quite
congenial to councils: yet even the Roman Church was swept into the movement,
and the pronouncements of Pope Damasus (366-384) came before the world under
the guise of conciliar decisions.
The experience of the fifty years that followed the Council of Tyre in
335 taught the lesson that it was possible to have too much even of a good thing.
Pagan historian and Christian saint from different starting-points arrived at
the same conclusion. Ammianus Marcellinus,
criticizing the character and career of the Emperor Constantius, noted
caustically that he threw the coaching system quite out of gear because so many
of the relays were employed in conveying bishops to and from their councils at
the expense of the State. And Gregory of Nazianzus,
in the year 382, refused to obey the summons to a new council, because, he
says, he never saw “any good end to a council nor any remedy of evils, but
rather an addition of more evil as its result. There are always contentions and
strivings for dominion beyond what words can describe”.
Perhaps it was partly by a natural reaction against councils, in those districts
especially where they had followed most quickly upon one another, that the
tendency to aggrandize the important sees at the expense of other bishops—and
at the expense therefore of the conciliar movement,
since in a council all bishops had an equal vote—seems about this time to take
a sudden leap forward. Valens the Arian and Theodosius the Catholic alike made
communion with some leading bishop the test of orthodoxy for other bishops. A
first edict of Theodosius on his way from the West to take up the Eastern
Empire in 380 expresses Western conceptions by naming in this connection only
Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alexandria: a later edict from Constantinople in
381 places Nectarius of Constantinople before Timothy
of Alexandria, and adds halfa-dozen bishops in Asia
Minor and a couple in the Danube lands as centres of
communion for their respective districts.
Equality
of Bishops
Here then we must pause for a moment to take into account the second
main element in the history of the federation of the Christian churches. Every
federation has to face this primary problem—the reconciliation of the equal
rights of all participating bodies with the proportional rights of each
according to their greater or less importance. The difficulty which modern
constitutions have tried to solve by the expedient of a dual organization, the
one part of it giving to all constituent units an equal representation, the
other part of it a proportionate representation according to population (or
whatever other criterion of value may be selected), was a difficulty which lay
also before the early Church. The unit of the Christian federation was the
community, whose growth and development is described in the first half of this
chapter; and that description has shown us that the necessary and only
conceivable representative of the individual community was its bishop. But some
communities were small and insignificant and unknown in history, others were
larger in numbers, or more potent in influence, or more venerable in
traditions: were the bishops of these diverse communities all to enjoy equal
weight?
Such a question was no doubt not consciously put until the scientific
and reflective period of Christian thought began, nor before the complex
process of federation was approaching completeness: that is to say, not before
the end of the fourth century. But in so far as it was put, it could receive
but one answer. In the theory of Christian writers from St Irenaeus and St Cyprian onwards, all bishops were equal, for they were all appointed, to
the same order and invested with the same powers, whether the sphere in which
they exercised them were great or small; and this theory was given its sharpest
expression in Jerome's assertion (in the same 146th letter) that the bishop of Gubbio had the same dignity as the bishop of Rome, seeing
that both were equally successors of the Apostles. But in fact, and side by
side with the fullest recognition of this theoretical equality, the bishops of
the greater or more important churches were recognized, as the rules of the
federation were gradually crystallized, to hold positions of privilege, so that
the ministry of the Church came to consist not only of a hierarchy within each
local community, at the head of which stood the bishop, but of a further
hierarchy among the bishops themselves, at the head of which, in some sense,
stood the bishop of Rome. The first steps towards such a hierarchy were on the
one hand the traditional influence and privileges which had grown up unnoticed
round the greater sees, and on the other hand the position acquired by
metropolitans in the working out of the provincial system.
The canons of the same councils which first provide for regular meetings
of the bishops of each province, reveal also the rapid aggrandizement of the
bishop of the metropolis, who presided over them. If at Nicaea the ‘commonwealth
of bishops’ is the authority according to one canon, by another the ‘ratification
of the proceedings’ belongs to the metropolitan. The canons of Antioch, sixteen
years later, lay it down that the completeness of a synod consists in the
presence of the metropolitan, and, while he is not to act without the rest,
they in turn must recognize that the care of the province is committed to him
and must be content to take no step of any sort outside their own diocese apart
from him. Traditional sanction is already claimed for these prerogatives of the
metropolitan: they are “according to the ancient and still governing canon of
the fathers”.
Things were not so far advanced in this direction, it is true, in the
West. At any point in the first five centuries the Latin Church lagged far
behind the pitch of development attained by its Greek contemporaries.
Christianity had had a century's start in the East, and at the conversion of
Constantine it is probable that if the proportion of Christians in the whole
population was a half, or nearly a half, among Greek-speaking peoples, it was
not more than a fifth, in many parts not more than a tenth, in the West. The
Latin canons of Sardica in 343 show how little was as yet known of
metropolitans. Although many of the enactments deal with questions of
jurisdiction and judicature, the bishop of the metropolis is mentioned only
once, and then in general terms. The name metropolitan is as foreign to these canons as to the earliest versions of the Nicene canons.
East and
West
With this backwardness of development among the Latins went also a much
smaller degree of subservience to the State: and it resulted from these two
causes combined that their church organization in the fourth and fifth
centuries reflected the civil polity much less closely than was the case in the
East. The "province" of the Nicene or Antiochene canons is the civil province, its metropolitan is the bishop of the civil
metropolis, and it is assumed that every civil province formed also a separate
ecclesiastical unit. It followed logically that the division of a civil
province involved division of the ecclesiastical province as well. When the
Arian emperor Valens, about 372, divided Cappadocia into Prima and Secunda, it was with the particular object of annoying the
metropolitan of Caesarea, St Basil, and of diminishing the extent of his
jurisdiction by raising Anthimus of Tyana to metropolitan rank; and though Basil resisted, Anthimus succeeded in the end in establishing his claim.
Before the end of the fourth century not only every province but every group of
provinces formed an ecclesiastical as well as a civil unit: the provinces of
the Roman Empire had by subdivision become so numerous that Diocletian had
grouped them into some dozen dioeceses with an exarch at the head of each, and the Council of Constantinople
in 381 forbids the bishops of one dioecese or
exarchate to interfere with the affairs of "the churches beyond their
borders." So wholly modeled upon civil lines was the ecclesiastical
organization throughout the East, that in the middle of the fifth century the
canons of Chalcedon assume an absolute correspondence of the one with the
other. Every place which by imperial edict might be raised to the rank of a
city, gained ipso facto the right to a bishop (canon 17). Every division for
ecclesiastical purposes of a province which remained for civil purposes
undivided was null and void—even if backed up by an imperial edict—the real metropolis being alone entitled to
a metropolitan (canon 12). Civil and public lines must be followed in the
arrangement of ecclesiastical boundaries.
This conception summed itself up in the claim put forward on behalf of
the see of Constantinople at the councils of 381 and
451. The bishops of these councils, deferring, perhaps not unwillingly, to the
pressure of the local authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, gave to the bishop
of Constantinople the next place after the bishop of Rome, on the ground that
Constantinople was New Rome, and that “the fathers had assigned precedence to
the throne of Old Rome because it was the Imperial City”.
Nothing was better calculated than such a claim to bring out the latent
divergences of East and West. Both in Church and State the rift between the
Latin and the Hellenic element had begun to widen perceptibly during the course
of the fourth century. Diocletian's drastic reorganization of the Imperial
government gave the first official recognition to the bipartite nature of the
Roman realm, and after the death of Julian in 363 the two halves of the Empire,
though they lived under the same laws, obeyed with rare and brief exceptions
separate masters. Parallel tendencies in the ecclesiastical world were working
to the surface about the same time. The Latinization of the Western Churches was complete before Constantine: no longer clothed in
the medium of a common language, the ideas and interests of Latin-speaking and
Greek-speaking communities grew unconsciously apart. The rival ambitions of
Rome and Constantinople expressed this antinomy in its acutest form.
Church
and State
The right of the civil government to be in its own sphere the accredited
representative of Divine power on earth, the duty of the Christian Society to
preserve at all costs its separateness and independence as the salt of mankind,
the city set upon a hill—these were fundamental principles which could both
appeal to the sanction of the Christian Scriptures. To hold the balance evenly
between them has been, through the long centuries since Christianity began to
play a leading part upon the political stage, the worthy task of philosophers
and statesmen. That one scale should outweigh the other was perhaps inevitable
in the first attempts, and it was at least instructive for future generations
that the experiment of an over-strained allegiance to each of the two theories
should have been given full trial in one part or another of Christendom.
To Byzantine churchmen the vision of the Christian State and the
Christian Emperor proved so dazzling that they transferred to them something of
the religious awe with which their ancestors had venerated the genius of Rome
and Augustus. The memory of Constantine was honored as of a ‘thirteenth apostle’.
The resentment of the native Monophysite churches of Syria and Egypt against
such of their fellow-countrymen as remained in communion with Constantinople
concentrated itself in the scornful epithet of Melkite or King's man.
The Latins were more moved by the sentiment of the Roman name, and less
by its incarnation in the Emperor. As Romans and Roman citizens, they felt the
majesty of the Roman Respublica to attach to place
even more than to person. If Rome was no longer the abode of emperors, it was
in their eyes not Rome but emperors who lost thereby. The event which stirred
men in the West to the depths of their being was not the conversion of
Constantine but the fall of Rome. When Alaric led his Goths to the storm of the
City in 410, there seemed to be need for a new theory of life and for revision
of first principles. The great occasion was greatly met. St Augustine wrote his
twenty-two books de Civitate Dei to answer the obvious objection
that Rome, inviolate under her ancestral gods, perished only when she turned to
Christ. True it was that the City of the World had fallen: but it had fallen in
the Divine providence, when the times were ripe for a new and higher order of
things to take its place. The reign of the City of God had been ushered in.
It was a natural corollary of the principles of Western churchmen that
the Divine Society could not possibly be bound to imitate the organization of
the earthly society which it was to supplant. Pope Innocent, in direct
opposition to the practice of the East, wrote to Alexander of Antioch in 415
that the civil division of a province ought not to carry ecclesiastical
division with it; the world might change, not so the Church. Pope Leo refused
his assent to the so-called 28th "canon" of Chalcedon, not merely as
an innovation, but because its deduction of the ecclesiastical primacy of Rome
from her civil position was quite inconsistent with the doctrine cherished by
the popes upon the subject since at least the days of Damasus .
Here then we have a bifurcation of Eastern and Western ideas, leading to
a clear-cut issue, in which both sides appealed to the truth of facts. Which of
them represented the genuine Christian tradition? Certainly the case of
provincial organization favored the Eastern view, for it was taken over bodily
from the State. But then it was relatively modern; a far higher antiquity
attached to the privileged position of the greater sees, and it was upon the
origin and history of their privileges that the answer really turned.
The Three
Great Sees
Of course there never had been a time when some churches had not stood
out above the rest, and the bishops of those churches above other bishops. The
Council of Nicaea, side by side with the canons that prescribed the normal
organization by provinces and metropolitans, recognized at the same time
certain exceptional prerogatives as guaranteed by "ancient custom. In
Egypt especially, Alexandria eclipsed its neighbor cities to a degree
unparalleled elsewhere in the East; and while it might not have been easy to
sanction the authority of the Alexandrine bishop over the whole of "Egypt
Libya and Pentapolis," if it had been quite
unique in its extent, the Nicene fathers could shelter themselves under the
plea that "the same thing is customary at Rome." A gloss in an early
Latin version of the canons interprets the Roman parallel to consist in the
"care of the suburbicarian churches," that is to say, the churches of
the ten provinces of the Vicariate of Rome—central and southern Italy with the
islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Over these wider districts the Roman and
Alexandrine popes respectively exercised direct jurisdiction, to the exclusion
in either case of the ordinary powers of metropolitans. The further
prescription of the Nicene canon that "in the case of Antioch and in the
other provinces" the churches were to keep their privileges, was
understood by Pope Innocent to cover similar direct jurisdiction of Alexander
of Antioch over Cyprus; and a version of the canons "transcribed at Rome
from the copies" of the same pope defines the sphere of Antioch as
"the whole of Coele-Syria."
What was it then that had given these three churches of Rome,
Alexandria, and Antioch the special position to the antiquity of which the
Nicene council witnesses? Roman theologians from Damasus onwards would have
answered unhesitatingly that the motive was deference to the Prince of the
Apostles, who had founded the churches of Rome and Antioch himself, and the
church of Alexandria through his disciple Mark. But this answer is open to two
fatal retorts: it does not explain why Alexandria, the see of the disciple, should rank above Antioch, a see of
the master, and it does not explain why our earliest authorities, both Roman
and non-Roman, so persistently couple the name of St Paul with the name of St
Peter as joint patron of the Roman Church. Cyprian is the first writer to talk
of the "chair of Peter" only.
Therefore we are driven back upon the secular prominence of the three
cities as the obvious explanation of their ecclesiastical dignity. Yet if the
appeal to history of the two councils which elevated Constantinople to the
second place was thus not without a large measure of justification, their bald
expression of Byzantine theory does not really, any better than the
contemporary Roman view, cover the whole of the facts. If rank and influence in
the ecclesiastical sphere depended, more than on anything else, on rank and
influence in the civil sphere, it did not depend on it entirely. The
personality and memory of great churchmen went for something. Carthage was no
doubt the civil capital of the diocese of Africa, and Milan of the diocese of
Italy: but it would be rash to assert that the inheritance which St Cyprian
left to Carthage and St Ambrose to Milan was quite worthless or ephemeral. And
if this was true of the great bishops of the third and fourth centuries, it was
still more true of the apostles whom the whole Church united in venerating.
Legends of apostolic foundation were often baseless enough, but their very
frequency testified to the value set upon the thing claimed. Throughout the
course of the long struggle with Gnosticism, the teaching of the apostles was
the unvarying standard of Christian appeal: and evidence of that teaching was
found not only in the written Creed and Scriptures but in the unwritten
tradition of the churches and episcopal successions
founded by apostles.
From the second century onwards a catena of testimony makes and
acknowledges the claim of the Roman Church to be, through its connection with
St Peter and St Paul, in a special sense the depository and guardian of an
apostolic tradition, a type and model for other churches.
Roman
Theory under Damasus
The pontificate of Damasus (366-384) has been more than once mentioned
in the preceding pages as the period of the first definite self-expression of
the papacy. The continuous history of Latin Christian literature does not
commence till after the middle of the fourth century; the dogmatic and
exegetical writings of Hilary in Gaul (c. 355) and Marius Victorinus in Rome (c. 360) are the first factors in a henceforward unbroken series. On
the beginnings of this new literary development followed quickly the movement,
of which we have already noticed symptoms in other directions, for interpreting
existing conditions and constructing out of them a coherent and scientific
scheme. These conditions had grown up gradually, naturally, and almost at
haphazard: it now seemed time to try to put them on to a firm theological
basis, and in the process much that had been fluid, immature, tentative, was
crystallized into a hard and fast system. It fell to the able and masterful Damasus, in the last years of a long life and a troubled
pontificate, to attempt what his predecessors had not yet attempted, and to
formulate in brief and incisive terms the doctrine of Rome upon Creed and Bible
and Pope. A council of 378 or 379, after reciting the Nicene symbol, laid down
the sober lines of Catholic theology as against the various forms of one-sided
speculation, Eunomian and Macedonian, Photinian and Apollinarian, to
which the confusions of the half-century since Nicaea had given birth; and the
East could do no better than accept the Tome of Damasus, as seventy years later
it accepted the Tome of Leo. Another council in 382 published the first
official Canon of Scripture in the West—the influence of Jerome, at that time
papal secretary, is traceable in it—and the first official definition of papal
claims. Roman primacy is grounded, with obvious reference to the vote of the
council of 381 in favor of Constantinople, on "no synodal decisions" but directly on the promise of Christ to Peter recorded in the
Gospel. Respect for Roman tradition imposes next a mention of "the
fellowship of the most blessed Paul"; but the dominant motif reappears in
the concluding paragraph, and the three sees whose prerogative was recognized
at Nicaea are transformed into a Petrine hierarchy
with its prima sedes at Rome, its secunda sedes at Alexandria, and its tertia sedes at Antioch.
St Augustine's theory of the Civitas Dei was,
in germ, that of the medieval papacy, without the name of Rome. In Rome itself
it was easy to supply the insertion, and to conceive of a dominion still
wielded from the ancient seat of government, as world-wide and almost as
authoritative as that of the Empire. The inheritance of the imperial traditions
of Rome, left begging by the withdrawal of the secular monarch, fell as it were
into the lap of the Christian bishop. In this connection it is a significant
coincidence that the first description which history has preserved to us of the
outward habit of life of a Roman pontiff belongs to the same period, probably
to the same pope, as the formulation of the claim to spiritual lordship. Ammianus was a pagan, but not a bigoted one. He professes,
and we need not doubt that he felt, a genuine respect for simple provincial
bishops, whose plain living and modest exterior "commended them to the
Deity and His true worshippers." But the atmosphere of the capital, the ostentatio rerum Urbanarum, was fatal to unworldliness in religion. After relating that in the year 366 one hundred and thirty-seven
corpses were counted at the end of the day in the Liberian basilica, on the
occasion of the fight between the opposing factions of Damasus and Ursinus, the historian grimly adds that the prize was one
which candidates might naturally count it worth any effort to obtain, seeing
that an ample revenue, showered on the Roman bishop by the piety of Roman
ladies, enabled him to dress like a gentleman, to ride in his own carriage, and
to give dinner-parties not less well appointed than the Caesar's.
Some forty or fifty years after Damasus the Roman author of the original
form of the so-called Isidorian collection of canons,
incorporating in his preface the substance of the Damasine definition on the subject of the three Petrine sees,
adds to Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch mention also of the honor paid, for the
sake of James the brother of the Lord and of John the apostle and evangelist,
to the bishops of Jerusalem and Ephesus. Mere veneration of the pillars of the
apostolic Church is not enough to account for this modification of the original
triad; the reasons must be sought in the circumstances of the day. If Ephesus
is said to “have a more honorable place in synod than other metropolitans”, it
may be merely that Ephesus, the most distinguished church of those over which
Constantinople, from the time of St John Chrysostom, asserted jurisdiction, was
a convenient stalking-horse for the movement of resistance to
Constantinopolitan claims; but it is also possible that the phrase was penned
after the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431, where Memnon of Ephesus was seated next after the bishops of Alexandria and Jerusalem. If
the bishop of Jerusalem is “accounted honorable by all for the reverence due to
so hallowed a spot”, and nevertheless “the first throne”, sedes prima, “was never by the ancient definition of the fathers reckoned to
Jerusalem, lest it should be thought that the throne of our Lord Jesus Christ
was on earth and not in heaven”, we cannot help suspecting that at the back of
the writer's mind hovers an uneasy consciousness that the apostolic traditions
of Rome, which were so readily brought into play against Constantinople, might
find an inconvenient rival in Jerusalem. Not that at Jerusalem, apart from a
certain emphasis on the position of James the Lord's brother, there was ever
any conscious competition with Rome: but it was true that, about the time that
this canonical collection was published, the see of
Jerusalem was just pushing a campaign of aggrandizement, carried on for over a
century, to a triumphant conclusion.
Contentions
for higher place
The claims of Jerusalem were comparatively modest at the start, and it
did not occur to Damasus for instance that they need be taken into serious
consideration. Two initial difficulties hampered their early course. Although
Jerusalem was the mother church of Christendom, and the home and centre of the
first apostolic preaching, Aelia Capitolina,
the Gentile city founded by Hadrian, had no real continuity with the Jewish
city on the ruins of which it rose. The church of Jerusalem had been a church
of Jewish Christians, the church of Aelia was a
church of Gentile Christians, and for a couple of generations too obscure to
have any history. A probably spurious list of bishops is all the record that
survives of it before the third century. Then came the taste for pilgrimages—in AD 333 a pilgrim made the journey all
the way from Bordeaux—and the growing cult of the Holy Places: Jerusalem was
the scene of the most sacred of Christian memories, and locally at any rate Aelia was Jerusalem. From the time of Constantine onwards
the identification was complete. The second difficulty was of a less archaic
kind, and took longer to circumvent. Aelia-Jerusalem
did not even dominate its own district, but was quite outshone by its near
neighbor at Caesarea. Politically Caesarea was capital of the province:
ecclesiastically it was the home of the teaching and the library of Origen, and
the Origenian tradition was kept alive by Pamphilus the confessor and by Eusebius, bishop of the
church at the time of the Nicene council. It was hardly likely that the council
would do anything derogatory to the friend of Constantine, the most learned
ecclesiastic of the age: and in fact all the satisfaction that the bishop of
Jerusalem obtained at Nicaea was the apparent right to rank as the first of the suffragans of the province—like Autun in the province of Lyons, or London in the province of Canterbury. Local
patriotism felt the sop thus thrown to it to be quite unsatisfying, and for a
hundred years the sordid strife "for the first place" went on between
the bishop of Jerusalem and the bishop of Caesarea. In the confusion of the
doctrinal struggle it was easy enough for an orthodox bishop to refuse
allegiance to an Arianising metropolitan: and
Caesarea being in close relations with Antioch, it was natural for the bishops
of Jerusalem to turn to their neighbors at Alexandria, nor, we may suppose, was
Alexandria disinclined to favor encroachment upon the territory of its Antiochene rival. Western churchmen, with their profound
belief in the finality of every decision of Nicaea, looked coldly on the
movement, and it is one of the counts in Jerome's catalogue of grievances
against John of Jerusalem. But at the first Council of Ephesus, with Cyril of
Alexandria in the chair and John of Antioch absent, Juvenal of Jerusalem
secured the second place, though he still failed to abrogate the metropolitical rights of Caesarea. At the Latrocinium of Ephesus in 449, again under Alexandrine
presidency, he managed to sit even above Domnus of
Antioch. The business of the Council of Chalcedon was to reverse the
proceedings of the Latrocinium, and it might have
been anticipated that with the eclipse of Alexandrine influence the fortunes of
Jerusalem would also suffer. But a timely tergiversation on the doctrinal issue
saved something for Juvenal and his see: the council decreed a partition of
patriarchal rights over the "East" between the churches of Antioch
and Jerusalem.
Very similar were the proceedings which established the
"autocephalous" character of the island church of Cyprus. The
Cypriots too began by renouncing the communion of the Arian bishops of Antioch:
they too espoused the cause of Cyril against John at the Council of Ephesus,
and were rewarded accordingly: and just as the Empress Helena's discovery of
the Cross served the claims of the church of Jerusalem, so the discovery of the
coffin containing the body of Barnabas the Cypriot, with the autograph of St
Matthew's Gospel, was held to demonstrate finally the right of the Cypriots to
ecclesiastical isolation.
With this evidence before us, it is hard to deny that the history of the
generations which first experienced the "fatal gift" of Constantine
supplied only too good ground for St Gregory's complaint of contentions and
strivings for dominion among Christian bishops. But though these contentions disturbed
the work of councils, councils did not create them and Gregory was hardly fair
if he laid on councils the responsibility for them: rather, in this direction
lay the remedy and counterpoise, seeing that councils represented the
parliamentary and democratic side of church government — stood, that is to say,
in idea at least, for free and open discussion as against the untrammeled
decrees of authority, and for the equality of churches as against the
preponderance of metropolitan or patriarch or pope. No more grandiloquent
utterance of these principles could indeed possibly be found than the words
with which the Council of Ephesus concludes its examination of the Cypriot
claim. "Let none of the most reverend bishops annex a province which has
not been from the first under the jurisdiction of himself and his predecessors;
and so the canons of the fathers shall not be overstepped, nor pride of worldly
power creep in under the guise of priesthood, nor we lose little by little,
without knowing it, that freedom which our Lord Jesus Christ, the Liberator of
all men, purchased for us with his blood."
And councils really were, at any rate in two main departments of their
activity, the organ through which the mind of the federated Christian
communities did arrive at some definite and lasting self-expression, namely in
the Creed and in the Canon Law. In both directions, it is true, East and West
moved only a certain part of the way together : in both too, while the impulse
was given by councils, the influence of the great churches added something to
the completeness of the work: in the case of the Creed, what became a universal
usage in the liturgy was at first only a usage of Antioch and Constantinople;
in the case of the Canon Law the collective decisions of councils were supplemented
by the individual judgments of popes or doctors before the corpus of either
Western or Eastern Law was complete. Nevertheless it remains the fact that it
was from and out of the conciliar movement that
Church Law, as such, came into being at all ; that the canons of certain fourth
and fifth century councils are the only part of this Law common to both East
and West; and that again the only common formulation of Christian doctrine was
also the joint work of councils, which for that very reason enjoy the name of
ecumenical, Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon.
Councils
and the Creed
1. The origins of the Christian Creed or Symbolum are lost in the obscurity which hangs over the sub-apostolic age. We know it
first in a completed form as used in the Roman church about the middle of the
second century. From Rome it spread through the West, taking the shape
ultimately of our Apostles' Creed; and one view of its history would make this
Roman Creed the source of all Eastern Creeds as well.
But a summary statement of Christian belief for the use of catechumens
must have been wanted from very early times, and it is possible that what St
Paul "handed over at the first" to his Corinthian converts (1 Cor.
xv. 3) was nothing else than a primitive form of the Creed. Anyhow, from
whatever source it was derived, a common nucleus was expanded or modified to
meet the needs of different churches and different generations, so that a
family likeness existed between all early Creeds, but identity between none of
them.
At the Council of Nicaea the Creed was for the first time given an
official and authoritative form, and was at the same time put to a novel use.
The baptismal Creed of the church of Palestinian Caesarea, itself a much more
technically theological document than any corresponding Creed in the West, was
propounded by Eusebius: out of this Creed the Council constructed its own
confession of faith, no longer for baptismal and general use, but as the
"form of sound words" by acceptance of which the bishops of the
churches throughout the world were to exclude the Arian conception of Christianity.
The example of the Creed of Nicaea on the orthodox side was followed in the
next generation by numerous conciliar formularies
expressing one shade or another of opposing belief. When the Nicene cause
finally triumphed, the Nicene Creed was received all the world over as the
expression of the Catholic Faith; and the Council of Ephesus condemned as
derogatory to it the composition of any new formula, however orthodox.
The Council of Ephesus represented the Alexandrine position: at
Constantinople, however, a new Creed was already in use, which was like enough
to the Nicene Creed to pass as an expanded form of it, and was destined in the
end to annex both its name and fame. This Creed of Constantinople had been
developed out of some older Creed, probably that of Jerusalem, by the help of
the test phrases of the Nicaenum and of further
phrases aimed at the opposite heresies of the semi-Sabellian Marcellus and the semi-Arian Macedonius. It may be
supposed that this Creed had been laid before the fathers of the council of
381: for at the Council of Chalcedon, where of course Constantinopolitan
influences were dominant, it was recited as the Creed of the 150 fathers of
Constantinople, on practically equal terms with the Creed of the 318 fathers of
Nicaea. In another fifty years the two Creeds were beginning to be hopelessly
confused, at least in the sphere of Constantinople, and the Constantinopolitanum was introduced into the liturgy as the actual Creed of Nicaea. In the course of
the sixth century it became not only the liturgical but also the baptismal
Creed throughout the East. In the West it never superseded the older baptismal
Creeds—except apparently for a time under Byzantine influence in Rome—but as a
liturgical Creed it was adopted in Spain on the occasion of the conversion of
King Reccared and his Arian Visigoths in 589, and
spread thence in the course of time through Gaul and Germany to Rome.
Origins
of Church Law
2. Canon Law, even more clearly than the Creed, Sowed its development to
the work of councils.
The conception of a Church Law, ius ecclesiasticum, ius canonicum, was not matured till the fourth century, and
then largely as a result of the new position of the Church in relation to the
State, and in conscious or unconscious imitation of the Civil Law. Down to the
close of the era of persecutions the discipline of the Church was administered
under consensual jurisdiction without any written code other than the
Scriptures, in general subordination to the unwritten or regula, the “rule of truth”, “the
ecclesiastical tradition”. Primitive books like the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apostolic Church
Order give us a naive picture of the unfettered action of the bishop as judge
with his presbyters as assessors. But as time went on the questions to be dealt
with grew more and more complex; it became no longer possible to keep the world
at arm's length, and the relations of Christians with the heathen society round
them required an increasingly delicate adjustment; the simplicity of the
rigorist discipline, by which in the second century all sins of idolatry,
murder, fraud, and unchastity were visited with
lifelong exclusion from communion, yielded at one point after another to the
demands of Christian charity and to the need of distinctions between case and
case. The problem became pressing when the persecution of Decius suddenly broke
up the long peace, and multitudes of professing Christians were tempted or
driven to a momentary apostasy. The Novatianist minority seceded rather than hold out to these unwilling idolaters the hope of
any readmission to the sacraments: the Church was forced to face the situation,
and it was obviously undesirable that individual bishops should adjudicate upon
similar circumstances in wholly different ways. It was here that St Cyprian
struck out his successful line: his first councils were called to deal with the
disorganization which the persecution left behind it, and the bishops at least
of Africa were induced to agree upon a common policy worked out on a uniform
scale of treatment.
There is, however, nothing to show that at Cyprian's councils any canons
were committed to writing, to serve as a permanent standard of church
discipline. That crucial step was only taken fifty years later, as the
persecution initiated by Diocletian relaxed and the bishops of various
localities could meet to take common counsel for the repair of moral and
material damage. During the decade 305-315 the bishops of Spain met at Elvira,
the bishops of Asia Minor at Ancyra and at Neocaesarea,
the Western bishops generally at Arles; and the codes of these four councils
are the earliest material preserved in later Canon Law.
The decisions of such councils had however no currency, in the first
instance, outside their own localities, and even the Council of Arles was a concilium plenarium only of the West; but the feeling was already gaining strength, and it was
quite in accordance with the ecclesiastical policy of Constantine, that
uniformity was desirable even in many matters where it was not essential, and
an ecumenical council offered unique opportunities of arriving at a common
understanding. So we find the Council of Nicaea issuing, side by side with its
doctrinal definition, a series of disciplinary regulations, among which are
incorporated, often in a greatly modified form, some canons of the Eastern
Council of Ancyra and some canons of the Western Council of Arles.
These Nicene canons are the earliest code that can be called Canon Law
of the whole Church, and at least in the West they enjoyed something like the
same finality in the realm of discipline that the Nicene Creed enjoyed in the
realm of doctrine. “Other canon than the Nicene canons the Roman church
receives not, the Nicene canons alone is the Catholic Church bound to recognize
and to follow,” writes Innocent of Rome in the cause of St Chrysostom. Leo does
not exclude quite so rigorously the possibility of additions to the Church's
code: but the Nicene fathers still exercise an authority unhampered by time or
place.
The principle was simplicity itself, but it came to be worked out with a
naive disregard of facts. On the one hand the genuine Nicene code was not
accepted quite entire, and where Western tradition and Nicene rules were
inconsistent, it was not always the tradition that went under: the canon
against kneeling at Eastertide is, in all early versions that we can connect
with Rome, entirely absent; the canon against the validity of Paulianist baptism was misinterpreted to mean that the Paulianists did not employ the baptismal formula. On the
other hand many early codes that had no sort of real connection with the Nicene
councils sheltered themselves under its name and shared its authority. The
canons of Ancyra, Neocaesarea and Gangra,
possibly also those of Antioch, were all included as Nicene in the early Gallican collection. The canons of Sardica, probably
because of the occurrence in them of the name of Hosius of Cordova, are in most
of the oldest collections joined without break to the canons of Nicaea: and a
rather acrimonious controversy was carried on between Rome and Carthage in the
years 418 and 419, because Pope Zosimus cited the Sardican canons as Nicene, and the Africans neither found these canons in their own
copies nor could learn anything about them in the East. The original form of
the collection known as Isidore's was apparently
translated from the Greek under Roman auspices at about this time: the canons
of Nicaea are those quas sancta Romana recipit ecclesia, the codes of the six Greek councils
Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra,
Antioch, Laodicea, and Constantinople follow, and then the Sardican canons. A Gallican editor of this version, later in
the fifth century, combines the newer material with the older tradition in the
shape of a canon proposed by Hosius, giving the sanction of the Nicene or Sardican council to the three codes of Ancyra, Neocaesarea, and Gangra.
Codification
of Church Law
We must not suppose that all this juggling with the name Nicene was in
the strict sense fraudulent: we need not doubt the good faith of St Ambrose
when he quoted a canon against digamous clergy as Nicene, though it is really Neocaesarean, or of St Augustine when he concludes that the
followers of Paul of Samosata did not observe the ‘rule of baptism’, because
the Nicene canons ordered them to be baptized, or for that matter of popes
Zosimus and Boniface because they made the most of the Sardican prescriptions about appeals to Rome, which their manuscripts treated as Nicene.
The fact was that the twenty canons of Nicaea were not sufficient to form a
system of law: the new wine must burst the old bottles, and by hook or by crook
the code of authoritative rules must be enlarged, if it was to be a serviceable
guide for the uniform exercise of church discipline. In the fourth century the
councils had committed their canons to writing. In the fifth century came the
impulse to collect and codify the extant material into a corpus of Canon Law.
The first steps were taken, as might be expected, in the East. Somewhere
about the year 400, and in the sphere of Constantinople-Antioch, the canons of
half-a-dozen councils, held in that part of the world during the preceding
century, were brought together into a single collection and numbered
continuously throughout. The editio princeps, so to say, of this Greek code contained the
canons of Nicaea (20), Ancyra (25), Neocaesarea (14), Gangra (20), Antioch (25), and Laodicea (59): it was
rendered into Latin by the Isidorian collector, and
it was used by the officials of the church of Constantinople at the Council of
Chalcedon, for in the fourth session canons 4 and 5 of Antioch were read as
canon 83 and canon 84, and in the eleventh session canons 16 and 17 of Antioch
as canon 95 and canon 96. The canons of Constantinople were the first appendix
to the code: they are translated in the Isidorian collection, and they are cited in the acts of Chalcedon, but in neither case
under the continuous numeration. When Dionysius Exiguus,
early in the sixth century, made a quasi-official book of Canon Law for the
Roman church, he found the canons of Constantinople numbered with the rest,
bringing up the total to 165 chapters: his two other Greek authorities, the
canons of the Apostles and the canons of Chalcedon, were numbered
independently. The earliest Syriac version adds to
the original nucleus only those of Constantinople and Chalcedon, with a double
system of numeration, the one separate for each council, the other continuous
throughout the whole series. And in the digest of Canon Law, published about the
middle of the sixth century by John Scholasticus of
Antioch (afterwards intruded as patriarch of Constantinople), the “great synods
of the fathers after the apostles” are ten in number--i.e. not counting the
Apostolic Canons the councils proper are brought up to ten by the inclusion of
Sardica, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon—and "besides these, many
canonical rules were laid down by Basil the Great."
Greek Canon Law
Two features in the work of John the Lawyer illustrate the transition
from earlier to later Canon Law. In the first place the list of authorities is
no longer confined strictly to councils, to whose decrees alone canonical
validity as yet attached in the fourth and fifth centuries: a new element is
introduced with the Canons of St Basil, and by the time we arrive at the end of
the seventh century, when the constituent parts of Eastern Canon Law were
finally settled at the Quinisextine council in Trullo, the enumeration of Greek councils is followed by
the enumeration of individual doctors of the Greek Church, and an equal
authority is attributed to the rules or canons of both. In the second place
John represents a new movement for the arrangement of the material of Church
Law, not on the older historical and chronological method, by which all the
canons of each council were kept together, but on a system of subject-matter
headings, so that in every chapter all the appropriate rules, however different
in date or inconsistent in character, would be set down in juxtaposition. Three
of John's contemporaries were doing the same sort of thing for Latin Church Law
that he had done for Greek—the deacon Ferrandus of
Carthage in his Breviatio Canonum, Cresconius, also an African, in his Concordia Canonum, and Martin, bishop of
Braga in north-western Spain, in his Capitula. But the day of the great medieval systematisers was not yet: these tentative efforts after an
orderly system seem to have met at most with local success, and the business of
canonists was still directed in the main to the enlargement of their codes,
rather than to the co-ordination of the diverse elements existing side by side
in them.
Early Greek Church Law was simple and homogeneous enough, for it
consisted of nothing but Greek councils: even the first beginnings of the
corpus of Latin Church Law were more complex, because not one element but three
went to its composition. We have seen that its nucleus consisted in the
universal acceptance of the canons of Nicaea, and in the grafting of the canons
of other early councils on to the Nicene stock. Thus, whereas Greek canon law
admitted no purely Latin element (and in that way had no sort of claim to
universality), Latin canon law not only admitted but centred round Greek material. Of course, as soon as the idea of a corpus of
ecclesiastical law took shape in the West, a Latin element was bound to add
itself to the Greek; and this Latin element took two forms. The natural
supplement to Greek councils were Latin councils: and every local collector
would add to his Greek code the councils of his own part of the world, Gallic,
Spanish, African, as the case might be. But just about the same time with the
commencement of the continuous series of councils whose canons were taken up
into our extant Latin codes, commences a parallel series of papal decretals: the African councils begin with the Council of
Carthage in 390 and the Council of Hippo in 393, the decretals with the letter of Pope Siricius to Himerius of Tarragona in 385. Such decretal letters were issued to churches in most parts of the European West, Illyria
included, but not to north Italy, which looked to Milan, and not to Africa,
which depended on Carthage. As their immediate destination was local, not one
of them is found in the early Western codes so universally as the Greek
councils; on the other hand their circulation was larger than that of any local
Western council, and some or others of them are found in almost every
collection. It would even appear that a group of some eight decretals of Siricius and Innocent, Zosimus and Celestine, had
been put together and published as a sort of authoritative handbook before the
papacy of Leo (441-461). Outside Rome, there were thus three elements normally
present in a Western code, the Greek, the local, and the papal. In a Roman
collection, the decretals were themselves the local
element: thus Dionysius Exiguus' edition consists of
two parts, the first containing the Greek councils (and by exception the Carthaginian
council of 419), the second containing papal letters from Siricius down to Gelasius and Anastasius II. But even the code of Dionysius, though superior to all others in accuracy
and convenience, was made only for Roman use, and for more than two centuries
had only a limited vogue elsewhere. Each district in the West had its separate
Church Law as much as its separate liturgy or its separate political
organization; and it was not till the union of Gaul and Italy under one head in
the person of Charles the Great, that the collection of Dionysius, as sent to
Charles by Pope Hadrian in 774, was given official position throughout the
Franklin dominions.