Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom Part 16

[117] S. Greg. I., 1. 6, Ep. 39; 8, Ep. 35.

[118] Bianchi, 3, 137.

[119] Bianchi, 3, 136.

[120] The Council of Antioch, in the year 341, almost repeats this canon, and lays it down as of universal application.

[121] Bianchi, 3, 132.

[122] The following paragraph is a translation from Cardinal Hergenrother's History, vol. i. pp. 196, 197, sec. 228.

[123] Bianchi, 3, 468; quoting the const.i.tution of Pope John XXII.

[124] Bianchi, 3, 440. The word _Sacerdos_ is here used as the proper appellation of the bishop in his diocese by Cyprian, Ep. 57, according to the usage in the third century, as the word _Ecclesia_ indicates the diocese; the argument being that if complete obedience were rendered to the bishop in the diocese, there would be complete peace in the whole Church ruled by the Collegium of Bishops.

[125] This paragraph translated from Bianchi, 3, 445.

[126] Bianchi, 3, 457, 458; St. Augustine in Ps. cxviii.

[127] Bianchi, 3, 474, 475.

[128] Bianchi, 3, 444; Apostol. Canon, 66 and 74.

[129] Bianchi, 3, 500, translated.

[130] Bianchi, 3, 485, translated.

[131] 1 Cor. ix. 14.

[132] Bianchi, 3, 526, 527.

[133] 1 Cor. xvi. 1.

[134] Bianchi, 3, 536, translated.

[135] 1 Cor. xi. 22.

[136] An incident mentioned of Alexander Severus.

[137] John xx. 30, xxi. 25, xvi. 12.

[138] Renaudot, Dissertatio de Liturgiarum Orientalium Origine et Auctoritate, p. li.

[139] St. Clestini, Ep. 21, Coustant, p. 493. The part quoted is supposed to have been added to St. Clestine's letter (which refers to the death of St. Augustine as having just happened) a little later, but was always joined with it afterwards from the beginning of the sixth century.

[140] Franzelin, De Traditione, Thesis vii. p. 49.

[141] Translated from Franzelin, Tractatus da Traditione Divina et Scriptura, pp. 50-53, down to "The Teaching Office."

[142] As, _e.g._, Rom. xvi. 17; 1 Cor. vii. 17, xi. 23, xiv. 33, xv. 12; 2 Cor. i. 18; Gal. i. 18; Phil. iv. 9; Colos. ii. 6, 7; 1 Thess. iv. 2; 2 Thess. ii. 14; 2 Tim. ii. 2; Heb. ii. 3, referred to by Franzelin, but especially Ephes. iv. 11-16, which is of itself sufficient to decide the whole question.

[143] St. Irenaeus, iii. 24.

[144] See Franzelin, De Traditione, p. 134.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.

_The Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her Mode of Positive Teaching and in her Mode of Resisting Error._

The Church is the Body of Christ as it moves through the centuries from His first to His second coming. We have been tracing the course through the first three of these centuries. Let us recur for a moment to the beginning, when we behold our Lord, at the head of His Apostles, pa.s.sing through the towns and villages of Galilee, preaching that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, imparting, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the principles of that divine kingdom, healing every infirmity and disease; then sending out His Apostles, and afterwards His disciples, by two and two, as His heralds and messengers. This was the prelude, the type and germ, of what was to come. Then, after His Pa.s.sion and Resurrection, we see the first stadium in the mission of the Apostles. They speak in His name; they manifest His power; His Person is in the midst of them; His Spirit upon them. The Apostle who once denied Him stands at their head, and speaks with authority, declaring the mission intrusted to him.

Forthwith three thousand, who speedily become five thousand, accede to the voice of his preaching. In twelve years Judaea and Palestine and Antioch have had the new doctrine planted among them, and then it is set up in Rome, the sceptred head of heathendom. The forty years of that first mission are crowned by the destruction of the deicide city, after that, by the hands of the Apostles and the fellow-labourers whom they have chosen, the suckers of the Vine have been laid in all the chief places of the Roman world. A kingdom had been preached and a kingdom had been founded; and its basis had been laid in authority-that of a crucified Head, transmitted to His Apostles.

The whole of this forty years' work is a Tradition or Delivery, to translate literally the Greek t.i.tle. Its bearers gave what they had received. It was intrusted to them, to their truthfulness and their accuracy; and those who received their message did not question it, but accepted it as they gave it. From first to last the Tradition rested on the one principle of authority, which had its fountain-head in the Person of our Lord. He spoke as one having authority in Himself, not as the Scribes and Pharisees, who interpreted an existing law; and they whom He had deputed to follow Him claimed a delegation from that authority, and spoke in virtue of it.

But if this was so in the lifetime of the Apostles, who had seen and touched and handled the Word of Life, it was no less the case in the teachers who immediately followed them. We have seen a most striking instance in St. Clement, who claimed for the decision of the Roman Church in an important matter, and that during the lifetime of the Apostle John, that the words uttered by it were the words of the Holy Ghost, and a.s.serted that those who did not listen to them refused to listen to G.o.d Himself. But this language represents the language and the conduct of those who succeeded to the place of the Apostles in the whole three hundred years. There is no break and no change in this respect. The Nicene Council in its decisions has the same tone as the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem; it is no other than "it has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us."

For in truth, from first to last, all success in the divine kingdom is the work of the Spirit of Christ. Ho is the one power who gives life to the whole. In Him lies the secret of its unity, whereby the Body of Christians, or the Christian nation,[145] is one and the same at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and a thousand other places; for Jew and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, male and female, have all been made to drink into one Spirit.

Thus a living G.o.d will have a living Church; and in this first great period-instinct with a character of its own, as the conflict between the new Christian nation and the mightiest offspring of the old civilisation, that heir of Egypt, a.s.syria, Persia, and Greece, which transcended its ancestors-the great charter lies in the words, "As My Father sent Me, so also send I you." It is this ever-living mission which perpetuates "the Tradition or Delivery." Thus it is the accordant witness of all that we have hitherto said, from the testimony of the sacred writings to that of the first fathers and teachers, exhibited in all their conduct, that the living apostolic succession is the one thing inst.i.tuted by G.o.d to carry on His revelation and to maintain His kingdom. This succession it is which bears in its hands the various records forming the treasury of the kingdom, whether they be the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, or the sacraments which communicate a divine life, or the majestic liturgy which expresses the divine wors.h.i.+p, or the daily praxis of the Church, which is, in fact, the embodiment of its unwritten tradition: in all these, and through them in all ages, the apostolic succession works. And the mission through which it works is as living, real, and present, as immediate and efficacious now, as when the words first dropped from the lips of our Lord in the Body in which He rose again, "As My Father sent Me, so also send I you."

We may divide the consideration of the manner in which the Apostles proclaimed the divine kingdom into two heads, the first of which will be the whole work of positive promulgation, and the second the whole defence against error.

As to the first, I will touch on five points-the system of catechesis, the employment of a creed, the dispensing of sacraments, the system of penance, and the Scriptures carried in the Church's hand. And I am considering these especially in one point of view, as ill.u.s.trating the method of teaching pursued by a body which was intrusted with a divine message.

1. Converts were admitted into the Church after a process of oral instruction of more or less duration; for I am not here concerned with the extent of that duration, but with the fact that such instruction was invariably given by word of mouth, not by placing a book in the hands of those who came to be taught. What the Christian doctrine was it belonged to its teachers to say, and the system by which it was learnt was termed catechesis, _i.e._, instruction by word of mouth, by question and answer.

This is the word applied by St. Luke in the beginning of his Gospel to Theophilus, to whom he addressed it; and the opening verses of the Gospel describe the thing itself with an accuracy which leaves nothing to be desired; for the Evangelist speaks "of the things that have been accomplished among us, according as they have _delivered_[146] them unto us, who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word;"[147] and adds, "It seemed good to me also, having diligently attained to all things from the beginning, to write to thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mayest know the verity of those things in which thou hast been instructed by word of mouth." By which we see that it was not a book which had been put into the hands of Theophilus to teach him Christian truth, but a doctrine delivered by personal teachers, and derived from those who were eye-witnesses, and administered to others what they knew. But after Theophilus had become a full Christian, a Gospel might be addressed to him for confirmation of his faith.

The Church of which we know most as to its method of converting Gentiles is the Alexandrine Church, in which, from very early time, there was a famous catechetical school, founded, it is said, by St. Mark himself, the names of whose after teachers, Athenagoras, Pantaenus, and still more Clement and Origen, have distinguished it.[148] Its method has been thus described:-

"In the system of the early catechetical schools the _perfect_, or men in Christ, were such as had deliberately taken on them the profession of believers, had made the vows and received the grace of baptism, and were admitted to all the privileges and the revelations of which the Church had been const.i.tuted the dispenser. But before reception into this full disciples.h.i.+p, a previous season of preparation, from two to three years, was enjoined, in order to try their obedience and instruct them in the principles of revealed truth. During this introductory discipline they were called _catechumens_, and the teaching itself _catechetical_, from the careful and systematic examination by which their grounding in the faith was effected. The matter of the instruction thus communicated to them varied with the time of their disciples.h.i.+p, advancing from the most simple principles of natural religion to the peculiar doctrines of the gospel, from moral truths to the Christian mysteries. On their first admission they were denominated _hearers_, from the leave granted them to attend the reading of the Scriptures and sermons in the church.

Afterwards, being allowed to stay during the prayers, and receiving the imposition of hands as the sign of their progress in spiritual knowledge, they were called _wors.h.i.+ppers_. Lastly, some short time before their baptism, they were taught the Lord's Prayer (the peculiar privilege of the regenerate), were intrusted with the knowledge of the Creed, and, as destined for incorporation into the body of believers, received the t.i.tles of _competent_ or _elect_.[149] Even to the last they were granted nothing beyond a formal and general account of the articles of the Christian faith, the exact and fully developed doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and, still more, the doctrine of the Atonement, as once made upon the cross, and commemorated and appropriated in the Eucharist, being the exclusive possession of the serious and practical Christian. On the other hand, the chief subjects of catechisings, as we learn from Cyril, were the doctrines of repentance and pardon, of the necessity of good works, of the nature and use of baptism, and the immortality of the soul, as the Apostle had determined them."[150]

It is not needful for our present purpose to go further into the "Discipline of the Secret." It is enough to point out how this whole method, which belonged to the Church everywhere, though carried out no doubt in various degrees of perfectness according to the endowments and zeal of individuals and the energy of pastoral care, testified throughout the magistral character of the Church, and that those who came into her fold must come in the spirit of little children, according to our Lord's saying. Those certainly who so came could not question the doctrines which they received, nor the authority of which they were not judges, but disciples.

2. But the use of a Creed,[151] communicated at a certain advanced period of the instruction given, and as a prelude to the rite which admitted into the Body, was a further token of authority. Nor indeed can any greater act of authority be well imagined than the summing up what is to be believed as the doctrine of salvation in a few sentences. This is not done in the Scriptures themselves, whether of the Old or New Testament, or both together. And how great an act of authority it was in the mind of the Christian people is well expressed in the tradition which not only called the first creed the Creed of the Apostles, but represented them before their separation not again to be reunited, as contributing each one to the twelve propositions forming it. Such a tradition, even if it be not true, is not only a picturesque but a most powerful and emphatic exhibition of the feeling which Christians entertained as to the act of authority implied in creating the instrument which conveyed the Christian faith. For if each separate article of the Creed may be attested by the Christian Scriptures, yet the selection of such and such doctrines, their arrangement and force when put together, indicate something quite other than the existence or expression of such doctrines scattered about Scripture, just as the f.a.ggot is something much more than the sticks which compose it. And in accordance with this judgment upon the authority of a creed as such, we find that enlargements or explanations of the first Creed have only been made by the highest authority in the Church, and on rare occasions, as a defence against heresies which threatened the very being of the Church, or as the more complete expression of doctrines in which the Church felt her life to be enshrined. But it was a Creed which from the beginning bore the t.i.tle of the Rule of Faith. The Creed was recited by the baptized, as a token of their acceptance and incorporation into the Church; repeated as a daily prayer of singular power and efficacy; renewed by the dying as a confession of faith and pa.s.sport to the tribunal of the great Judge. St. Augustine,[152] in a sermon to catechumens, said, even in his time, "You must by no means write down the words of the Creed in order to remember them, but you must learn them by hearing them; nor when you have learnt them must you write them, but hold them ever in your memory and ruminate on them."

Nor, though the doctrines contained in the original Creed may be attested by the Scriptures, was the authority of the Creed and of the power which imposed it derived from the testimony of the Scriptures. It was antecedent in time to such testimony, and it was derived from those who were authors of the Scriptures, and who were at least as infallible in such an act as in the account which they might communicate to the churches of what they had seen and heard.[153]

To the method of catechesis, therefore, as the means of instruction, we add the employment of the Creed, which is the Church's oriflamme, round which her host gathers, and to which it looks in the ever-during struggle of the faith.

3. Next consider the daily life into which the convert was introduced when his course of catechetical instruction was concluded and he was put in possession of the Creed.