THE influence of Christianity on the formation of the European unity
is a striking example of the way in which the course of
historical development is modified and determined by the intervention
of new spiritual influences. History is not to be explained
as a closed order in which each stage is the inevitable and logical
result of that which has gone before. There is in it always a
mysterious and inexplicable element, due not only to the influence
of chance or the initiative of the individual genius, but also to
the creative power of spiritual forces.
Thus in the case of the ancient world we can see that the artificial
material civilisation of the Roman Empire stood in need of
some religious inspiration of a more profound kind than was contained
in the official cults of the city state; and we might have
guessed that this spiritual deficiency would lead to an infiltration
of oriental religious influences, such as actually occurred during
the imperial age. But no one could have foretold the actual appearance
of Christianity and the way in which it would transform
the life and thought of ancient civilisation.
The religion which was destined to conquer the Roman Empire and to become
permanently identified with the life of the West
was indeed of purely oriental origin and had no roots in the European
past or in the traditions of classical civilisation. But its
orientalism was not that of the cosmopolitan world of religious syncretism
in which Greek philosophy mingled with the cults and
traditions of the ancient East, but that of a unique and highly individual
national tradition which held itself jealously aloof from the
religious influences of its oriental environment, no less than from
all contact with the dominant Western culture.
The Jews were the one people of the Empire who had remained obstinately
faithful to their national traditions in spite of the
attractions of the Hellenistic culture, which the other peoples of
the Levant accepted even more eagerly than their descendants
have received the civilisation of modern Europe. Although Christianity
by its very nature broke with the exclusive nationalism of
Judaism and assumed a universal mission, it also claimed the succession
of Israel and based its appeal not on the common
principles of Hellenistic thought, but on the purely Hebraic tradition
represented by the Law and the Prophets. The primitive
Church regarded itself as the second Israel, the heir of the Kingdom
which was promised to the People of God; and
consequently it preserved the ideal of spiritual segregation and the
spirit of irreconcilable opposition to the Gentile world that
had inspired the whole Jewish tradition.
It was this sense of historic continuity and social solidarity which
distinguished the Christian Church from the mystery religions
and the other oriental cults of the period, and made it from the first
the only real rival and alternative to the official religious unity
of the Empire. It is true that it did not attempt to combat or to replace
the Roman Empire as a political organism. It was a
supernatural society, the polity of the world to come, and it recognized
the rights and claims of the state in the present order.
But, on the other hand, it could not accept the ideals of the Hellenistic
culture or co-operate in the social life of the Empire. The
idea of citizenship, which was the fundamental idea of the classical
culture, was transferred by Christianity to the spiritual order.
In the existing social order Christians were peregrini - strangers
and foreigners - their true citizenship was in the Kingdom of
God, and even in the present world their most vital social relationship
was found in their membership of the Church, not in that
of the city or the Empire.
Thus the Church was, if not a state within the state, at least an ultimate
and autonomous society. It had its own organization and
hierarchy, its system of government and law, and its rules of membership
and initiation. It appealed to all those who failed to find
satisfaction in the existing order, the poor and the oppressed, the
unprivileged classes, above all those who revolted against the
spiritual emptiness and corruption of the dominant material culture,
and who felt the need of a new spiritual order and a religious
view of life. And so it became the focus of the forces of disaffection
and opposition to the dominant culture in a far more
fundamental sense than any movement of political or economic discontent.
It was a protest not against material injustice but
against the spiritual ideals of the ancient world and its whole social
ethos.
This opposition finds an inspired expression in the book of the Apocalypse,
which was composed in the province of Asia at a
time when the Church was threatened with persecution owing to the public
enforcement of the imperial cult of Rome and the
Emperor in the time of Domitian. The state priesthood that was organized
in the cities of the province is described as the False
Prophet that causes men to worship the Beast (the Roman Empire) and
its image, and to receive its seal, without which no man
might buy or sell. Rome herself, whom Virgil described as "like the
Phrygian Mother of the Gods, crowned with towers,
rejoicing in her divine offspring," [1] now appears as the Woman sitting
upon the Beast, the mother of harlots and abominations,
drunken with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of
Jesus. And all the heavenly hosts and the souls of the
martyrs are shown waiting for the coming of the day of vengeance when
the power of the Beast shall be destroyed and Rome
shall be cast down for ever, like a mill-stone into the sea.
This is an impressive witness to the gathering forces of spiritual hostility
and condemnation that were sapping the moral
foundations of the Roman power. The Empire had alienated the strongest
and most living forces in the life of the age, and it was
this internal contradiction, far more than war or external invasion,
that caused the downfall of ancient civilization. Before ever the
barbarians had broken into the Empire and before the economic breakdown
had taken place, the life had passed out of the
city-state and the spirit of classical civilization was dying. The
cities were still being built with their temples and statues and
theatres as in the Hellenistic age, but it was a sham façade
that hid the decay within. The future lay with the infant Church.
Nevertheless, Christianity won the victory only after a long and bitter
struggle. The Church grew under the shadow of the
executioner's rods and axes, and every Christian lived in peril of
physical torture and death. The thought of martyrdom coloured
the whole outlook of early Christianity. It was not only a fear, it
was also an ideal and a hope. For the martyr was the complete
Christian. He was the champion and hero of the new society in its conflict
with the old, and even the Christians who had failed in
the moment of trial - the lapsi - looked on the martyrs as their saviours
and protectors. We have only to read the epistles of St.
Cyprian or the Testimonia which he compiled as a manual for the "milites
Christi," or the treatise de Laude Martyrum which
goes under his name, to realize the passionate exaltation which the
ideal of martyrdom produced in the Christian mind. It attains
almost lyrical expression in the following passage of St. Cyprian's
epistle to Nemesianus, which is deservedly famous: "O feet
blessedly bound, which are loosed not by the smith but by the Lord!
O feet blessedly bound, which are guided to paradise in
the way of salvation! O feet bound for the present time in the world
that they may be always free with the Lord! O feet lingering
for a while among the fetters and crossbars but to run quickly to Christ
on a glorious road! Let cruelty, envious or malignant,
hold you here in its bonds and chains as long as it will, from this
earth and from these sufferings you shall speedily come to the
Kingdom of Heaven. The body is not cherished in the mines with couch
and cushions, but it is cherished with the refreshment
and solace of Christ. The frame wearied with labours lies prostrate
on the ground, but it is no penalty to lie down with Christ.
Your limbs unbathed are foul and disfigured with filth; but within
they are spiritually cleansed, though the flesh is defiled. There
the bread is scarce, but man liveth not by bread alone but by the Word
of God. Shivering, you want clothing; but he who puts
on Christ is abundantly clothed and adorned." [2] This is not the pious
rhetoric of a fashionable preacher; it is the message of a
confessor, who was himself soon to suffer death for the faith, to his
fellow bishops and clergy and "the rest of the brethren in the
mines, martyrs of God."
In an age when the individual was becoming the passive instrument of
an omnipotent and universal state it is difficult to
exaggerate the importance of such an ideal, which was the ultimate
stronghold of spiritual freedom. More than any other factor it
secured the ultimate triumph of the Church, for it rendered plain to
all the fact that Christianity was the one remaining power in
the world which could not be absorbed in the gigantic mechanism of
the new servile state.
And while the Church was involved in this life-and-death struggle with
the imperial state and its Hellenistic culture, it also had to
carry on a difficult and obscure warfare with the growing forces of
oriental religion. Under the veneer of cosmopolitan
Hellenistic civilisation, the religious traditions of the ancient East
were still alive and were gradually permeating the thought of the
age. The mystery religions of Asia Minor spread westwards in the same
way as Christianity itself, and the religion of Mithras
accompanied the Roman armies to the Danube and the Rhine and the British
frontier. The Egyptian worship of Isis and the
Syrian cults of Adonis and Atargatis, Hadad of Baalbek, and the Sun-God
of Emesa, followed the rising tide of Syrian trade
and migration to the West, while in the oriental underworld new religions,
like Manichaeanism, were coming into existence, and
the immemorial traditions of Babylonian astral theology were appearing
in new forms. [3]
But the most characteristic product of this movement of oriental syncretism
was the Gnostic theosophy, which was an
ever-present danger to the Christian Church during the second and third
centuries. It was based on the fundamental dualism of
spirit and matter and the association of the material world with the
evil principle, a dualism which derived more, perhaps, from
Greek and Anatolian influences than from Persia, since we find it already
fully developed in the Orphic mythology and in the
philosophy of Empedocles. But this central idea was enveloped in a
dense growth of magic and theosophical speculation which
was undoubtedly derived from Babylonian and oriental sources.
This strange oriental mysticism possessed an extraordinary attraction
for the mind of a society which, no less than that of India
six centuries before, was inspired with a profound sense of disillusionment
and the thirst for deliverance. Consequently, it was
not merely an exterior danger to Christianity; it threatened to absorb
it altogether, by transforming the historical figure of Jesus
into a member of the hierarchy of divine Aeons, and by substituting
the ideal of the deliverance of the soul from the
contamination of the material world for the Christian ideals of the
redemption of the body and the realisation of the Kingdom of
God as a social and historical reality. And its influence was felt
not only directly in the great Christian-Gnostic systems of
Valentinus and Basilides, but also indirectly through a multitude of
minor oriental heresies that form an unbroken series from
Simon Magus in the apostolic age down to the Paulicians of the Byzantine
period. In the second century this movement had
grown so strong that it captured three of the most distinguished representatives
of oriental Christianity, Marcion in Asia Minor,
and Tatian and Bardesanes, who were the founders of the new Aramaic
literature, in Syria.
If Christianity had been merely one among the oriental sects and mystery
religions of the Roman Empire it must inevitably have
been drawn into this oriental syncretism. It survived because it possessed
a system of ecclesiastical organization and a principle
of social authority that distinguished it from all the other religious
bodies of the age. From the first, as we have seen, the Church
regarded itself as the New Israel, "an elect race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, a people set apart." [4] This holy society was
a theocracy inspired and governed by the Holy Spirit, and its rulers,
the apostles, were the representatives not of the community
but of the Christ, who had chosen them and transmitted to them His
divine authority. This conception of a divine apostolic
authority remained as the foundation of ecclesiastical order in the
post-apostolic period. The "overseers" and elders, who were
the rulers of the local churches, were regarded as the successors of
the apostles, and the churches that were of direct apostolic
origin enjoyed a peculiar prestige and authority among the rest.
This was the case above all with the Roman Church, for, as Peter had
possessed a unique position among the Twelve, so the
Roman Church, which traced its origins to St. Peter, possessed an exceptional
position among the churches. Even in the first
century, almost before the close of the apostolic age, we see an instance
of this in the authoritative intervention of Rome in the
affairs of the Church of Corinth. The First Epistle of Clement to the
Corinthians (c. A.D. 96) gives the clearest possible
expression to the ideal of hierarchic order which was the principle
of the new society. [5] The author argues that order is the law
of the universe. And as it is the principle of external nature so,
too, is it the principle of the Christian society. The faithful must
preserve the same discipline and subordination of rank that marked
the Roman army. As Christ is from God, so the apostles are
from Christ, and the apostles, in turn, "appointed their first converts,
testing them by the spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of
the future believers. And, knowing there would be strife for the title
of bishop, they afterwards added the codicil that if they
should fall asleep other approved men should succeed to their ministry."
Therefore it is essential that the Church of Corinth
should put aside strife and envy and submit to the lawfully appointed
presbyters, who represent the apostolic principle of divine
authority. [6]
The doctrine of St. Clement is characteristically Roman in its insistence
on social order and moral discipline, but it has much in
common with the teaching of the Pastoral Epistles, and there can be
no doubt that it represents the traditional spirit of the
primitive Church. It was this spirit that saved Christianity from sinking
in the morass of oriental syncretism.
In his polemic against the Gnostics in the following century St. Irenaeus
appeals again and again to the social authority of the
apostolic tradition against the wild speculations of Eastern theosophy.
"The true Gnosis is the teaching of the apostles and the
primitive constitution of the Church throughout the world." And with
him also it is the Roman Church that is the centre of unity
and the guarantee of orthodox belief. [7]
In this way the primitive Church survived both the perils of heresy
and schism and the persecution of the imperial power and
organised itself as a universal hierarchical society over against the
pagan world-state. Thence it was but a step to the conquest
of the Empire itself, and to its establishment as the official religion
of the reorganised Constantinian state. Whether Constantine
himself was moved by considerations of policy in his attitude to Christianity
is a debatable question. [8] No doubt he was
sincere in the conviction he expresses in his letter to the provincials:
that he had been raised up by the Divinity from the far west
of Britain to destroy the enemies of Christianity, who would otherwise
have ruined the Republic; and this belief may well have
been reinforced by a conviction that the order and universality of
the Christian Church predestined it to be the spiritual ally and
complement of the universal Empire. In any case, this was the light
in which the official Christian panegyrist of Constantine,
Eusebius of Caesarea, interpreted the course of events. "One God,"
he writes, "was proclaimed to all mankind; and at the same
time one universal power, the Roman Empire, arose and flourished. The
enduring and implacable hatred of nation for nation was
now removed; and as the knowledge of one God and one way of religion
and salvation, even the doctrine of Christ, was made
known to all mankind; so at the selfsame period, the entire dominion
of the Roman Empire being vested in a single sovereign,
profound peace reigned throughout the world. And thus, by the express
appointment of the same God, two roots of blessing,
the Roman Empire and the doctrine of Christian piety, sprang up together
for the benefit of mankind." [9]
In fact the official recognition of the Church and its association with
the Roman state became the determining factor in the
development of a new social order. The Church received its liberty
and in return it brought to the Empire its resources of
spiritual and social vitality. Under the later Empire the Church came
more and more to take the place of the old civic
organisation as the organ of popular consciousness. It was not itself
the cause of the downfall of the city state, which was
perishing from its own weakness, but it provided a substitute through
which the life of the people could find new modes of
expression. The civic institutions which had been the basis of ancient
society had become empty forms; in fact, political rights
had become transformed into fiscal obligations. The citizenship of
the future lay in the membership of the Church. In the Church
the ordinary man found material and economic assistance and spiritual
liberty. The opportunities for spontaneous social activity
and free co-operation which were denied by the bureaucratic despotism
of the state continued to exist in the spiritual society of
the Church, and consequently the best of the thought and practical
ability of the age was devoted to its service.
Thus in every city of the later Empire, side by side with the old citizen
body, we find the new people of the Christian Church, the
"plebs Christi," and as the former lost its social privileges and its
political rights, the latter gradually came to take its place. In the
same way the power and prestige of the clergy - the Christian ordo
- increased as those of the civil ordo - thhe municipal
magistracy - declined, until the bishop became the most important figure
in the life of the city and the representative of the whole
community. The office of the bishop was indeed the vital institution
of the new epoch. He wielded almost unlimited power in his
diocese, he was surrounded by an aura of supernatural prestige, and
yet, at the same time, his was an essentially popular
authority, since it sprang from the free choice of the people. Moreover,
in addition to his religious authority and his prestige as a
representative of the people, he possessed recognized powers of jurisdiction
not only over his clergy and the property of the
Church, but as a judge and arbitrator in all cases in which his decision
was invoked, even though the case had already been
brought before a secular court. Consequently, the episcopate was the
one power in the later Empire capable of
counter-balancing and resisting the all-pervading tyranny of the imperial
bureaucracy. Even the most arrogant official feared to
touch a bishop, and there are numerous instances of episcopal intervention
not only on behalf of the rights of individuals, but also
of those of cities and provinces.
So, too, the Church came to the economic help of the people in the growing
material distress and impoverishment of the later
Empire. Its vast endowments were at that time literally "the patrimony
of the poor," and in great cities like Rome and Alexandria
the Church by degrees made itself responsible for the feeding of the
poor as well as for the maintenance of hospitals and
orphanages.
St. Ambrose declared that it was a shameful thing to have gold vessels
on the altar when there were captives to be ransomed,
and at a later period when Italy was devastated by famine and barbarian
invasion St. Gregory is said to have taken his
responsibilities so seriously that when a single poor man was found
dead of hunger in Rome, he abstained from saying Mass as
though he were guilty of his death.
This social activity explains the popularity of the Church among the
masses of the people and the personal influence of the
bishops, but it also involved new problems in the relation of the Church
to secular society. The Church had become so
indispensable to the welfare of society, and so closely united with
the existing social order, that there was a danger that it would
become an integral part of the imperial state. The germs of this development
are already to be seen in Origen's theory of the
Church. [10] He draws an elaborate parallel between the Christian society
and that of the Empire. He compares the local
church to the body of citizens in each city - the Ecclesia - and as
the latter had its Boulé or Curia and its magistrates or
archons, so, too, the Christian Church has its ordo or clergy, and
its ruler, the bishop. The whole assembly of churches, "the
whole body of the synagogues of the Church," corresponds to the unity
of the cities in the Empire. Thus the Church is, as it
were, "the cosmos of the cosmos," and he even goes so far as to envisage
the conversion of the Empire to Christianity and the
unification of the two societies in one universal "city of God."
In the fourth century the ecclesiastical organization had become closely
modeled on that of the Empire. Not only did each city
have its bishop, the limits of whose see corresponded with those of
the city territory, but the civil province was also an
ecclesiastical province under a metropolitan who resided in the provincial
capital. By the end of the fourth century an effort was
even being made to create an ecclesiastical unity or "exarchate" corresponding
to the civil diocese or group of provinces that
was governed by an imperial vicar.
The logical culmination of this development was to make the capital
of the Empire also the center of the Church. The solution
indeed might seem to have been already provided by the traditional
primacy of the Church of Rome, the imperial city. But in the
fourth century Rome no longer occupied the same unique position that
it had held in the previous centuries. The center of the
Mediterranean world had shifted back once more to the Hellenistic east.
Since the reorganization of the Empire by Diocletian,
the emperors no longer resided at Rome, and the importance of the old
capital rapidly declined, especially after the foundation
of the new capital at Constantinople in 330.
These changes also affected the position of the Roman Church. Under
the early Empire Rome had been an international city and
Greek was the language of the Roman Church. But from the third century
A.D., Rome and the Roman Church gradually
became Latinised, [11] and East and West tended to drift apart. The
ecclesiastical aspect of this centrifugal tendency is already
visible in the middle of the third century, in the opposition of the
Eastern bishops, under St. Firmilian, to Pope Stephen on the
question of the re-baptism of heretics, and the tendency became still
more marked in the following century. From the time of
Constantine onwards the Eastern churches began to look to Constantinople
rather than to Rome for guidance, and it was the
imperial court rather than the Apostolic See that was the center of
unity. This was already evident in the later years of
Constantine himself, and his successor, Constantius II, went so far
as to anticipate the Caesaropapism of later Byzantine history
and to transform the Church of the Eastern provinces into a State Church
closely dependent on the imperial government.
The essential organ of the ecclesiastical policy of Constantine and
his successors was the General Council, an institution which
was not, like the earlier provincial councils, of purely ecclesiastical
origin, but owed its existence to the imperial power. [12] The
right of convocation was vested in the emperor, and it was he who decided
what was to be discussed and ratified the decisions
by his imperial sanction. But, though in the hands of a crowned theologian
like Constantius or Justinian, the General Council was
an instrument of the imperial control of the Church rather than an
organ of ecclesiastical self-government, it was also a
representative institution, and the great ecumenical councils were
the first representative deliberative assemblies that had ever
existed. [13] Moreover, the Eastern churches in the fourth century
were far from being the passive servants of an Erastian
government. They were full of independent spiritual and intellectual
life. If the Western Church takes a second place in the
ecclesiastical history of the time, it is largely because the great
religious forces of the age had their center in the East.
It was in the East that there arose the monastic movement which created
the dominant religious ideals of the new age, and
though it spread rapidly from one end of the Empire to the other, it
continued to derive its inspiration from the hermits and
ascetics of the Egyptian desert.
It was the East also that created the new liturgical poetry and the
cycle of the liturgical year which was to become the common
possession of the Christian Church. [14]
Above all, it was the East that united the Christian tradition with
that of Greek philosophical culture and embodied Christian
doctrine in a scientific theological system. The foundations of this
development had already been laid in the third century, above
all by Origen and the catechetical school of Alexandria, and the work
was carried on in the following century by Eusebius in
Palestine, by Athanasius at Alexandria, and finally, by the three great
Cappadocian Greeks, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nazianzus,
and St. Gregory of Nyssa. Thanks to their work the Church was able
to formulate a profound and exact intellectual statement of
Christian doctrine and to avoid the danger of an unintelligent traditionalism
on the one hand, and on the other, that of a
superficial rationalisation of Christianity, such as we find in Arianism.
No doubt this process of theological development was accompanied by
violent controversies and the intellectualism of Greek
theology often degenerated into metaphysical hair-splitting. There
is some justification for Duchesne's remark that the Eastern
Church would have done well to think less of speculative questions
about the Divine Nature and more about the duty of unity;
[15] but the development of scientific theology was not the only or
even the principal cause of heresy and schism, and without
that development the whole intellectual life of Christendom would have
been immeasurably poorer.
In order to realise what the West owed to the East, we have only to
measure the gap that divides St. Augustine from St.
Cyprian. Both of them were Westerners, and Africans, both of them owed
much to the older Latin tradition of Tertullian. But,
while Cyprian never indulges in philosophical speculations and is not
even a theologian in the scientific sense of the word,
Augustine yields nothing to the greatest of the Greek Fathers in philosophical
profundity. He is, as Harnack puts it, an Origen
and an Athanasius in one, and something more as well.
This vast progress is not to be explained as a spontaneous development
of Western Christianity, even though we admit the
supreme personal genius of Augustine himself. The theological development
of the West in the century that followed Tertullian
was in fact a retrograde one, and writers such as Arnobius and Commodian
possess no theology, but only a millennarist
traditionalism. [16]
The change came with the introduction into the West of Greek theological
science during the second half of the fourth century.
The agents of this transformation were the Latin Fathers, Hilary of
Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, Rufinus of Aquileia, and
the converted rhetorician, Victorinus; while at the same time St. Martin
of Tours and Cassian of Marseilles, both of them natives
of the Danube provinces, brought to the West the new ideals of oriental
asceticism and monasticism. [17]
The Latin Fathers, apart from St. Augustine, were not profound metaphysicians
nor even original thinkers. In theological matters
they were the pupils of the Greeks, and their literary activity was
mainly devoted to making the intellectual riches that had been
accumulated by the Christian East available in the Latin world. Yet
at the same time they were the heirs of the Western tradition,
and they combined with their newly acquired knowledge the moral strength
and the sense of discipline that had always
characterised the Latin Church. Their interest in theological problems
was always subordinated to their loyalty to tradition and to
the cause of Catholic unity. In the Western provinces the Christians
were still but a small minority of the population, and
consequently the Church was less exposed to internal dissensions and
still preserved the spiritual independence that it had
possessed in pre-Constantinian times.
This is very evident in the case of the Arian controversy, for Arianism
appeared in the West as not so much an internal danger to
Christian orthodoxy as an attack from without on the spiritual liberty
of the Church. The Western attitude is admirably
expressed in the remonstrance which Hosius, the great bishop of Cordova,
addressed to the Emperor Constantius II: "I have
been a confessor," he wrote, "in the persecution that your grandfather
Maximian raised against the Church. If you wish to renew
it you will find me ready to suffer all rather than to betray the truth
and to shed innocent blood. . . . Remember that you are a
mortal man. Fear the day of judgment. . . . Do not interfere in ecclesiastical
affairs, or dictate anything about them to us, but
rather learn from us what you ought to believe concerning them. God
has given to you the government of the Empire and to us
that of the Church. Whosoever dares to impugn your authority, sets
himself against the order of God. Take care lest you
likewise render yourself guilty of a great crime by usurping the authority
of the Church. We are commanded to give unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.
It is not lawful for us to arrogate to ourselves the imperial
authority. You also have no power in the ministry of holy things."
[18]
St. Hilary of Poitiers goes still further and attacks the emperor with
all the resources of his classical style. "We are fighting
today," he writes, "against a wily persecutor, an insinuating enemy,
against Constantius the antichrist, who does not scourge the
back, but tickles the belly, who does not condemn to life but enriches
to death, who instead of thrusting men into the liberty of
prison, honours them in the slavery of the palace . . . who does not
cut off the head with the sword, but slays the soul with gold .
. ." [19]
The language of Lucifer of Cagliari is still more uncompromising, and
the very titles of his pamphlets, "On royal apostates," "On
not sparing the persons of those who offend against God," or "On the
duty of martyrdom," breathe a spirit of hostility and
defiance against the secular powers that recalls that of Tertullian.
Thus the Western Church was far from being dependent upon the state;
the danger was rather that it might have become
permanently alienated from the Empire and from the traditions of ancient
civilisation, like the Donatist Church in Africa, or the
Church in Egypt after the fifth century.
This danger was averted, on the one hand, by the return of the Western
Empire to orthodoxy under the house of Valentinian,
and on the other, by the influence of St. Ambrose and the new development
of Christian culture. In St. Ambrose, above all, the
Western Church found a leader who could maintain the rights of the
Church no less vigorously than St. Hilary, but who was at
the same time a loyal friend of the emperors and a devoted servant
of the Empire.
Ambrose was indeed a Roman of the Romans, born and trained in the traditions
of the imperial civil service, and he brought to
the service of the Church the public spirit and the devotion to duty
of a Roman magistrate. His devotion to Christianity did
nothing to weaken his loyalty to Rome, for he believed that the true
faith would be a source of new strength to the Empire and
that as the Church triumphed over paganism so the Christian Empire
would triumph over the barbarians.
"Go forth," he wrote to Gratian, on the eve of his expedition against
the Goths, "go forth under the shield of faith and girt with
the sword of the Spirit; go forth to the victory promised of old time
and foretold in the oracles of God." . . . "No military eagles,
no flight of birds here lead the van of our army, but Thy Name, Lord
Jesus, and Thy worship. This is no land of unbelievers, but
the land whose custom it is to send forth confessors - Italy; Italy
oft times tempted but never drawn away; Italy whom your
Majesty has long defended and now again rescued from the barbarian."
[20]
Thus Ambrose is the first exponent in the West of the ideal of a Christian
state, as was Eusebius of Caesarea in the East. But he
differs utterly from Eusebius in his conception of the duties of the
Christian prince and the relations between the Church and the
state. Eusebius' attitude to Constantine is already that of a Byzantine
court bishop, and he surrounds the figure of the emperor
with a nimbus of supernatural authority such as had always characterized
the theocratic monarchies of the ancient East. But
Ambrose belongs to a different tradition. He stands midway between
the old classical ideal of civic responsibility and the
mediaeval ideal of the supremacy of the spiritual power. He has something
of the Roman magistrate and something of the
mediaeval pontiff. In his eyes the law of the Church - the jus sacerdotale
- could only be administered by the magistrrates of the
Church - the bishops, and even the emperor himself was subject to their
authority. "The Emperor," he wrote, "is within the
Church, not over it"; and "in matters of faith bishops are wont to
be the judges of Christian emperors, not emperors of bishops."
[21] And accordingly, while Eusebius addresses Constantine as a sacred
being exalted above human judgment, [22] Ambrose
did not hesitate to rebuke the great Theodosius and to call him to
account for his acts of injustice. "Thou art a man, temptation
has come upon thee. Conquer it. For sin is not removed save by tears
and repentance." [23]
The authority of St. Ambrose had a far-reaching influence on the ideals
of the Western Church, for it helped to strengthen the
alliance between the Church and the Empire, while at the same time
it preserved the traditional Western conception of authority
in the Church. In the East the Church was continually forced to turn
to the Emperor and to the councils which he convoked in
order to preserve its unity; in the West the conciliar system never
attained such importance, and it was to the Roman See that
the Church looked as the center of unity and ecclesiastical order.
The attempts to define the jurisdiction of the Papacy by the
Council of Sardica in 343, and by the Emperor Gratian in 378, are of
minor importance in comparison with the traditional belief
in the apostolic prerogative of the Roman See and in the "Romana fides"
as the norm of Catholic orthodoxy. In the fifth century
this development was completed by St. Leo, who united the conviction
of St. Ambrose in the providential mission of the Roman
Empire with the traditional doctrine of the primacy of the Apostolic
See; while, earlier in the same century, St. Augustine had
completed the Western theological development and endowed the Church
with a system of thought which was to form the
intellectual capital of Western Christendom for more than a thousand
years.
And thus, when the Western Empire fell before the barbarians, the Church
was not involved in its disaster. It was an
autonomous order which possessed its own principle of unity and its
own organs of social authority. It was able at once to
become the heir and representative of the old Roman culture and the
teacher and guide of the new barbarian peoples. In the
East it was not so. The Byzantine Church became so closely bound up
with the Byzantine Empire that it formed a single social
organism which could not be divided without being destroyed. Anything
that threatened the unity of the Empire also endangered
the unity of the Church. And so it was that while the Eastern Empire
resisted the attacks of the barbarians, the Eastern Church
lost its unity owing to the reaction of the oriental nationalities
to the ecclesiastical centralization of the Byzantine state. Among the
oriental peoples, nationality took on a purely religious form and the
state was ultimately swallowed up by the Church.
But although from the fifth century the two halves of the Empire drifted
apart in religion as well as in politics, the division was not
complete. The Papacy still preserved a certain primacy in the East,
for as Harnack says, "even in the eyes of the Orientals there
attached to the Roman Bishop a special something, which was wanting
to all the rest, a nimbus which conferred upon him a
special authority." [24] And similarly, the Western Church still regarded
itself as in a sense the Church of the Empire, and
continued to recognise the ecumenical character of the General Councils
which were convoked by the Byzantine Emperor.
These conditions characterised the whole period with which we are about
to deal. It was not until the eleventh century that the
religious bond which united East and West was finally destroyed and
Western Christendom emerged as an independent unity,
separated alike in culture and religion from the rest of the old Roman
world.
ENDNOTES
1.Qualis Berecyntia mater Invehitur curru Phrygias turrita
per urbes Laeta deum partu, centum complexa nepotes Omnis
caelicolas, omnis supera alta tenentis.
Aen., VI, 785. Back to text.
2.St. Cyprian, Ep. LXXVI, trans. R. E. Wallis. Back to
text.
3.In recent years particular attention has been devoted
to the Mandaeans or "Christians of St. John," of Southern
Babylonia, the only one of these sects that
has survived to modern times. Lidzbarski and Reitzenstein have attempted
to
prove that this sect was originally connected
with the Essenes and with the disciples of John the Baptist, and consequently
that the Mandaean writings have an important
bearing on the question of Christian origins. S. A. Pallis, however, has
shown (in his Mandaean Studies, 1919) that
the parallels with Judaism are superficial and of relatively recent origin
and
that Mandaeanism is essentially a Gnostic
sect which subsequently, in Sassanian times, came under the influence of
Zoroastrian ideas. He also rejects the earlier
theory of Brandt that the fundamental stratum in Mandaean beliefs is based
on ancient Babylonian religion. Back to text.
4.I Peter ii. 9. Back to text.
5.So clear is this, that Sohm went so far as to regard
this epistle as the starting-point of the juridical conception of the
Church, which in his view abruptly replaced
the earlier "charismatic" view. But, as Harnack points out, the conception
of
a divine apostolic authority is as old as
the Church itself and appears clearly enough in the decree of the Council
of
Jerusalem. Acts xv, 23-27. Back to text.
6.I Clement, XX, XXXVII, XL-XLIV, etc. Back to text.
7."By its (the Roman Church's) tradition and by its faith
announced to men, which has been transmitted to us by the
succession of bishops, we confound all those
who in any way by caprice or vainglory or by blindness and perversity of
will gather where they ought not. For to this
Church, on account of its higher origin, it is necessary that every Church,
that
is, the faithful from all sides, should resort,
in which the tradition from the Apostles has always been preserved by those
that are from all parts" (Irenaeus, Against
Heresies, III, iii).
The expression "propter potentiorem principalitatem"
which I have translated as "higher origin" is somewhat disputed. It
has often been translated as "more powerful
headship" or as "pre-eminent authority" (e.g., in the Ante-Nicene Library
translation, Vol. I, p. 261). I think there
can be little doubt that principalitas = archaiotes and refers to the origins
of the
see, as in the passage of Cyprian, Ep. LIX,
13 - "navigare audent ad Petri cathedram et Ecclesiam principalem unde
unitas sacerdotalis exorta est," where "principalem"
means the original or earliest church.
It is the same argument that Optatus and St.
Augustine were to use against the Donatists, as in the lines:
Numerate sacerdotes vel ab ipsa Petri sede,
et in ordine illo patrum quis cui successit
videte:
ipsa est petra quam non vincunt superbae infernorum
portae.
Psalmus c. partem Donat. 18. Back to text.
8.The question has recently been discussed by Mr. Norman
Baynes in the Raleigh Lecture for 1929. He maintains that the
dominant motive in Constantine's career was
his "conviction of a personal mission entrusted to him by the Christian
God,"
that he "definitely identified himself with
Christianity, with the Christian Church and the Christian creed"; and that
he
believed the prosperity of the Empire to be
bound up with the unity of the Catholic Church. Thus the Byzantine ideal
of a
Roman Empire founded on the orthodox faith
and united with the orthodox Church has its source in the vision of
Constantine. Constantine the Great and the
Christian Church by N. H. Baynes; Proceedings of the British
Academy, Vol. XV. (with very full bibliographical
notes on the subject). Back to text.
9.Oration in Praise of Constantine, XVI. Back to text.
10.Contra Celsum, III, 29, 30. Cf. Battifol, l'Eglise Naissante,
ch. vii. Back to text.
11.St. Hippolytus is the last Roman Christian to write in Greek.
Novatian in the middle of the third century already writes
Latin, although Greek probably remained the
liturgical language until the following century. Back to text.
12.Harnack writes: "In all cases it was a political institution,
invented by the greatest of politicians, a two-edged sword which
protected the endangered unity of the Church
at the price of its independence." (History of Dogma, Eng. trans., III,
127.) Back to text.
13.Cf. H. Gelzer, Die Konzilien als Reichsparlamente in Ausgewahlte
Kleine Schriften (1907). He argues that the
Councils followed the precedent of the ancient
Senate in their arrangement and forms of procedure. Back to text.
14.Dom Cabrol has shown how the liturgical cycle was evolved
from the local ceremonies connected with the Holy places at
Jerusalem in the fourth century. The ceremonies
of Holy Week at Rome were in origin an imitation of this local cycle, and
the group of churches round the Lateran at
Rome, St. Maria Maggiore, Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme, St. Anastasia, etc.,
in which these ceremonies were performed,
reproduced the sanctuaries of the holy places at Jerusalem. Cabrol, Les
Origines Liturgiques, Conf. VIII. Back to
text.
15.Que l'on eût été bien inspiré,
si au lieu de tant philosopher sur la terminologie, d'opposer l'union physique
a l'union
hypostatique, les deux natures qui n'en font
qu'une à l'unique hypostase qui régit les deux natures, on
se fût un peu plus
préoccupé de choses moins sublimes
et bien autrement vitales. On alambiquait l'unité du Christ, un
mystère; on sacrifiait
l'unité de l'Eglise, un devoir." Duchesne,
Eglises Séparées, p. 57. Back to text.
16.The backwardness and isolation of the West in theological
matters is shown by the fact that St. Hilary himself admits that
he had never heard of the Nicene faith until
the time of his exile in A.D. 356. (De Synodis, 91.) Back to text.
17.We may also note the introduction of liturgical poetry into
the West by Hilary and Ambrose. Back to text.
18.The letter is given in Greek by Athanasius, History of the
Arians, 44. I follow Tillemont's French version in Memoires,
Tom. VII, 313. Back to text.
19.Contra Constantium imperatorem, 5. Back to text.
20.De Fide, II, xvi. 136, 142 (trans. H. de Romestin). Back
to text.
21.Ambrose, Ep. XXIV, 4, 5. Back to text.
22.Cf. the whole of his Oration in Praise of Constantine. E.g.,
he writes, "Let me lay before thee, victorious and mighty
Constantine, some of the mysteries of His
sacred truth: not as presuming to instruct thee who art thyself taught
of God;
nor to disclose to thee those secret wonders
which He Himself not through the agency or work of man, but through our
common Saviour and the frequent light of His
Divine presence has long since revealed and unfolded to thy view; but in
the hope of leading the unlearned to the light
of truth and displaying before those who know them not, the causes and
motives of thy pious deeds." Cap. XI. Back
to text.
23.Ambrose, Ep. LI, 11. Back to text.
24.History of Dogma (Eng. trans.), III, 226. He goes on to say,
"Yet this nimbus was not sufficiently bright to bestow upon
its possessor an unimpeachable authority;
it was rather so nebulous that it was possible to disregard it without
running
counter to the spirit of the universal Church."
The Greek ecclesiastical historians, Socrates and Sozomen, both of them
laymen and lawyers, are impartial witnesses
to the position accorded to the Roman see at Constantinople in the fifth
century, as Harnack notes (ibid., note 2).
Cf. Batiffol, Le Siège Apostolique, 411-416. Back to text.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Dawson, Christopher. "The Catholic Church." Chapter II of The Making
of Europe (New York The Catholic University of
America Press, 2002).
Reprinted by permission provided courtesy of The Catholic University
of America Press, which will republish The Making of
Europe in its entirety in the Fall of 2002.
AUTHOR
Catholic historian Christopher Dawson was most likely the most penetrating
student of the relationship of religion and culture
who has ever written. In contrast to a nation centered view of European
history, which he saw as destructive, Dawson
advocated the study of Europe as a cultural whole, united by a common
Christian faith and Christian moral standards. His
careful documentation and explanations of how no aspect of European
life has not been profoundly affected by Christian faith
won him many admirers, including T. S. Eliot and Arnold Toynbee. Committed
to recovering the moral basis for Western
Civilization, Dawson held that it was the gap between Christian principles
and their realization that provides the real drama of
history in the West and that this view is the basis not only of a Catholic
view of history, but of a proper view of history. The
extensive treatment of other cultures and their relationship with Christianity
provided by Dawson is, in addition, the very model
of a proper multicultural approach. Dawson wrote twenty-two books,
all of which have been out of print since the early 60s.
Progress and Religion (Spring, 2001) Making of Europe (Fall, 2002)
and Medieval Essays (Spring, 2002) will be
republished by Catholic University of America Press.
Copyright © 2002 The Catholic University of America Press