Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

On the contrary, pure historical inquiry, going back in the dry light of science to the archaic society of nations as they first appear to us at the beginning of written records, shows this remarkable chain of facts. A condition of things is found existing, of which the only explanation is that family was the nidus out of which sprung forth the House, then the Tribe, then the Commonwealth with its patriarchal government. When property is traced to its origin it seems to be first found in the family as joint-ownership; and further, its succession is blended inexplicably with the existence and state of the family. Again, the close union of government with religion finds its root in the family. No testimony can be more unsuspicious than that of the learned author of “Ancient Law,” who observes (p. 4), that “the earliest notions connected with the conception of a law or rule of life are those contained in the Homeric words θεμις and Themistes.” “The divine agent, suggesting judicial awards to kings or to gods, the greatest of kings, was Themis.” She is the assessor of Zeus, the human king on earth, not a law-maker, but a judge. The Themistes are the judgments, in fact, of a patriarchal sovereign, “whose judgment, when he decided a dispute by a sentence, was assumed to be the result of direct inspiration.” And Themis and Themistes were (p. 6) “linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the human mind of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief met us on all sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep together all the cardinal institutions of those times, the State, the Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations which these institutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically common rites and to offer common sacrifices; and every now and then the same duty is even more significantly recognised in the purifications and expiations which they perform, and which appear intended to deprecate punishment for involuntary or neglectful disrespect. Everybody acquainted with ordinary classical literature will remember the Sacra Gentilicia which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in which some of the most curious features of primitive society are stereotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead man’s funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occurs in the continuity of the family.”

Thus every king, as history begins, appears in a position which recalls the memory of Adam or of Noah, as the divinely appointed judge, whose office springs out of his fathership. The original consecration, which rested on the government of the race when it begun, is seen not yet to have parted from its scattered members in their tribal or national insulation.13

It is observed of Homeric Greece that “the people in its orderly arrangement of family or clans, or tribal relationships coming down from the patriarchal form of life, derives its unity from its king, whose power as little springs from the people as that of the father from his children.” Thus he possesses this power not in virtue of compact or choice, but simply from Zeus.

Οὐ μέν πως πάντες βασιλεύσομεν ἐνθάδ’ Ἀχαιοί.οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίν· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω,εἷς βασιλεὺς, ᾧ δῶκε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλομήτεωσκῆπτροντ’ ἠδὲ θέμιστας, ἵνα σφίσιν ἐμβασιλέυῃ.

– Iliad, 2. 203.

This conception shows itself not merely on occasion in the poet, as perhaps in the well-known epithets, Jove-born, Jove-nurtured, friend of Jove, or in the genealogies which connect with the gods the princely races by ties of blood, but he has a distinct theory on the subject variously expressed.

ἐπεὶ οὔποθ’ ὁμοίης ἔμμορε πμῆς

σκηπτοῦχος βασιλὲυς, ᾧ τε Ζεὺς κῦδος ἔδωκε.

Agamemnon’s sceptre, the symbol of his rule over the Peloponnesus, is referred to the immediate gift of Jupiter.

The effect of this evidence, says the author just before cited, derived from comparative jurisprudence, is to establish that view of the primeval condition of the human race which is known as the “Patriarchal Theory.” This is, “that the eldest male parent – the eldest ascendant – is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed, the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood possesses of becoming one day the head of a family himself. The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father; and the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence.” “The sum of the hints given us by legal antiquities” is that “men are first seen distributed in perfectly insulated groups, held together by obedience to the parent. Law is the parent’s word. When we go forward to the state of society in which those early legal conceptions show themselves as formed, we find that they still partake of the mystery and spontaneity which must have seemed to characterise a despotic father’s commands, but that at the same time, as they proceed from a sovereign, they presuppose a union of family groups in some wider organisation. The next question is, what is the nature of this union and the degree of intimacy which it involves? It is just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its services, and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged by conjecture. It is full in all its provinces of the clearest indications that society, in primitive times, was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society, the Individual.”

“In most of the Greek states, and in Rome, there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups, out of which the State was at first constituted. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the type of them; and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is the family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow these indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by common descent from the progenitor of an original family? Of this we may at least be certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason except this for their holding together in political union. The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feelings, which we term emphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other principle – such as that, for instance, of local contiguity – establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action. It may be affirmed, then, of early commonwealths that their citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed membership to be founded on common lineage.”

“The conclusion, then, which is suggested by the evidence is, not that all early societies were formed by descent from the same ancestor, but that all of them, which had any permanence or solidity, either were so descended, or assumed that they were. An indefinite number of causes may have shattered the primitive groups; but wherever their ingredients recombined, it was on the model or principle of an association of kindred. Whatever was the fact, all thought, language, and law adjusted themselves to the assumption” (p. 131).

“On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society has left a plain and broad mark in the life-long authority of the Father, or other ancestor, over the person and property of his descendants, an authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of Patria Potestas. No feature of the rudimentary associations of mankind is deposed to by a greater amount of evidence than this, and yet none seems to have disappeared so generally and so rapidly from the usages of advancing communities” (p. 135).

“It may be shown, I think, that the Family, as held together by the Patria Potestas, is the nidus out of which the entire Law of Persons has germinated” (p. 152).

“When we speak of the slave as anciently included in the Family, we intend to assert nothing as to the motives of those who brought him into it or kept him there; we merely imply that the tie which bound him to his master was regarded as one of the same general character with that which united every other member of the group to its chieftain. This consequence is, in fact, carried in the general assertion already made, that the primitive ideas of mankind were unequal to comprehending any basis of the connection inter se of individuals apart from the relations of Family” (p. 164).

“The point which before all others has to be apprehended in the constitution of primitive societies, is that the individual creates for himself few or no rights and few or no duties. The rules which he obeys are derived first from the station into which he is born, and next from the imperative commands addressed to him by the chief of the household of which he forms part” (p. 311).

Then as to the union of government with religion: – “A stage occurs in the history of all the families of mankind, the stage at which a rule of law is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion. The members of such a society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty exposes the delinquent to divine correction” (p. 23). At the time of the Code of the Twelve Tables, “Roman society had barely emerged from that intellectual condition in which civil obligation and religious duty are inevitably confounded” (p. 18).

For, in fact, originally, “Law is the parent’s word” (p. 125), and “the civil Laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a patriarchal sovereign” (p. 166); that is, “as separate, isolated judgments, which, consistently with the belief in their emanation from above, cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle” (p. 5). Moreover, as to the origin of Property: – “It is more than likely that joint-ownership, and not separate ownership, is the really archaic institution, and that the forms of property which will afford us instruction will be those which are associated with the rights of families and the groups of kindred” (p. 259), as shown in the Indian village-community, the Russian and Slavonic village. And “we have the strongest reasons for thinking that property once belonged not to individuals, nor even to isolated families, but to larger societies composed on the patriarchal model” (p. 268). Thus the author conjectures “that private property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly formed by the gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of individuals from the blended rights of a community” (p. 269).

He remarks “a peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of society. Men are regarded and treated not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as a citizen, he is a member of his order – of an aristocracy or a democracy, of an order of patricians or plebeians; or in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste; next he is member of a gens, house, or clan; and lastly he is member of his family. This last was the narrowest and most personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was he ever regarded as himself, as a distinct individual. His individuality was swallowed up in his family. I repeat the definition of a primitive society given before. It has for its units not individuals, but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of blood-relationship” (p. 183). “The history of jurisprudence must be followed in its whole course, if we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved itself into the component atoms of which it is now constituted; by what insensible gradations the relation of man to man substituted itself for the relation of the individual to his family, and of families to each other” (p. 185).

Such is the strong – may we not say irrefragable? – testimony which the condition of human society, as it emerges into the light of history, bears to the family as the cradle of man’s life. It is in the original soil of the family that the four goods we have noted, marriage, religion, government, and the alliance between religion and government, spring up together. Further, also, they are seen to be not separate, one here and another there, but bound together in the strictest coherence. For if this human race be thrown up and down throughout the world, divided and insulated in its several parts by vast distances and by thousands of years, even the scattered limbs are shaped in the mould stamped upon it at its birth, and in them government, law, property in its origin and its succession, and religion bear witness to the family character. This archaic society, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, from Scythia in the north to India in the south, is never a crowd of individuals but an organic structure: Adam and Eve prolonged and living in their race. We see that in the beginning the fathership of God created a human plant which should reveal Himself in its development, bearing in its structure and fruit an undying witness to His nature; and serving, in spite of corruption and decline, for the future exhibition of His fathership in a yet higher degree, even to the communication of the divine nature.

Whatever may be the interval of time which runs out between the dispersion of the family at Babel, and the appearance of each separate member on the platform of history – and the longer this time, the greater the marvel we note – the family remains in each as a sort of universal θεσμός upon which the commonwealth, the government, property viewed in itself and in its descent, law, and religion itself rest. The “natural state” and the “social compact” when inquired into become unsubstantial fictions; “theories plausible and comprehensive,” as the author of ancient law observes, “but absolutely unverified” (p. 3). Man is seen to be the child of Adam; and all the relations of men to each other to have been originally determined by that origin, and persistently maintained in its mould.

Now let us return to the relation between the Spiritual and the Civil Power, which forms part of this original constitution of the race.

At the head of the human race we have seen, first in Adam and then in Noah, the junction of the two orders, sovereignty and priesthood. There never was a time when the race was without government; there never was a time when the race was without sacrifice. The delegated authority of God rested ever upon the former for the prosperity of man’s life upon earth; the worship of the one God, man’s Creator and End, was summed up in the latter. All human life consists of the tissue formed by the two; and as in his first abode man’s condition was subject to his obedience to the divine command, so throughout his course his worship of God ruled his temporal condition. The lot of the antediluvian world bore witness to that truth. With Noah the experience began afresh. Then once again the covenant with Noah and his seed after him was made in sacrifice, in which the unity of God and the religion of man stand recorded, and man’s earthly lot is made dependent on the purity of his worship. Thus the two orders are seen in their origin to be both of divine institution; just as the life of man upon earth was from the beginning subordinate to his ultimate end, so government, which was created for the former, was subordinate to worship, which was created for the latter.

Let us follow rapidly the relation between man’s social state and his religion, arising out of such origin, that we may note how the degradation of worship entailed the degradation of society.

In Noah and his sons, so long as the earth continued of one tongue and speech, the priesthood belonged to the head of the family. That was its natural descent. We may suppose that the dispersion began with the same rule, but we are not able to say how long that rule continued in force. There was intended to be one priesthood offering one sacrifice over all the earth to the one God. How prodigious became the degradation when the divine unity was lost! A variety of gods was introduced; a similar variety of priesthoods followed: and the sacrifice, which was the rendering of supreme homage to the one Creator and Lord of life, in which was contained the everliving prophecy of man’s future restoration, was prostituted to a number of deities, the offspring of man’s sensual imagination, or of perverted tradition, or of worship of natural powers, or of demoniacal trickery.

As soon as the patriarchal State was changed by war into the State founded by conquest, the natural appurtenance of the priesthood to the head of the family must at least have been modified. It was probably often attached to the actual head of the State. But it does not need to trace step by step the debasement of worship and the multiplication of deities which took place in the Gentile world. It is enough to see how the whole mass of nations had by the time of Christ become divided from each other in their civil societies and their religious belief. But we may note that as with the loss of belief in one God the nations originally lost the belief in their own brotherhood, so their national gods became the stronghold of national prejudices and hatreds. Thus a debased religion was turned into a source of cruelty to man, who had no bitterer enemy to his life and welfare than a foreign god; and instead of human life being sacred to man, it was sometimes even an act of worship to immolate him to an idol.

It is not too much to say that the profound enmity of the Gentile nations to each other was grounded in the variety of their gods; and in this instance religion, which in its purity is the bond of human society, had become a main cause of alienation between the members of the race.

The alliance of the State in each nation with its religion was, as we have seen, an original good of the race; and it continued through all the debasement of worship. Had that worship maintained its original purity, the alliance would have been an unmixed good. But as the belief became corrupt, it ended in the public force being ever at the command of error. The final issue of this alliance seems to have been when the State had laid hold of religion to deify, as it were, itself. The Roman emperors were the most complete, but by no means the sole, bearers of this corruption. They were considered to embody in their single persons the united majesty of the gods. Whoever refused obedience to their worship was guilty of the double crime of sacrilege and treason.

If this be a correct summary of the relation between the Two Powers as it issued in the final condition of Gentilism, it is clear that the State had far less declined from the high purpose for which it was instituted, that is, the preservation of human society, than the priesthood from the corresponding purpose which belonged to it, that is, the worship of God and the sanctification of human life. The civil power was still in every respect a lawful power. And obedience was due to it for conscience’ sake, as expressly declared by our Lord and His Apostles. But the priesthood had been so utterly debased by its worship of false gods, which tore from it the crown of unity, and by the abominations which its rites in too many instances carried with them, that it had ceased to be a lawful power. It had moreover fallen, at least in the Roman empire, and from the time of the Cæsars, under the dominion of the State.

Yet down to the very coming of our Lord the veneration which had belonged to the original character and institution of the priesthood is made manifest by the clear acknowledgment that the authority of the priest was not derived from the king. The Gentiles in the lowest depths of their moral degradation referred the excellency of the priesthood to its divine origin. The honour due to God, and the thought of the future world, were so imbedded in the original constitution of human society everywhere, that even in a pantheon of false gods, and in a service paid to numberless male and female deities, the priest’s office itself was held to be divine.14

In the case of the Romans, it is true that when the free state was suppressed by the empire, the priesthood and the imperial power were improperly conjoined in the same person. But this conjunction was at once a novelty and an usurpation. Thus the office of Pontifex Maximus, first seized by Lepidus after the death of Julius Cæsar, and after Lepidus assumed by Augustus, and then kept in succession by the following Cæsars, whether through the adulation of the people or their own pride, seemed to pass as a proper title of their principate, and was numbered among the honours, even of the Christian emperors, down to Gratian, who refused and prohibited it. Nevertheless the functions of these two powers were reckoned as distinct; but in the time of the Kings and the free Commonwealth this distinction was much more marked.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus describes the Roman Pontifical College: – “They have authority over the most weighty affairs; they are judges of all sacred causes, whether among private persons, or magistrates, or ministers of the gods; they legislate for all sacred things which are not written or prescribed by custom, enacting laws and customs as seems to them good; they examine into all magistracies to which sacrifice and worship of the gods belong, and scrutinise all priests; they keep watch over the ministers which these use in their sacred office, so that the sacred laws be not transgressed; they instruct and interpret for lay persons who do not understand what concerns the worship of gods or genii. If they observe any disobedient to their commands, they punish them according to the due of each. They are themselves exempt from all trial and punishment. They render account neither to senate nor to people. It would be no error to call them priests, or sacred legislators, or custodians, or, as we should prefer, rulers of sacred things. On the death of any one another is elected to his place, not by the people, but by themselves, whoever of the citizens they judge the most meet.”15 From this account of the historian, says Bianchi, we may deduce the following conclusions: – Firstly, how great was the power of the Roman Sacerdotes in judging matters of religion, in which the magistrates were subject to them. Secondly, their authority to punish those who transgressed their laws, independently of kings and magistrates. Thirdly, their immunity from the civil power, even of the Commonwealth itself, to which they were not bound to render an account of what they did. Fourthly, the distinction which existed between the power of the priests and that of the civil magistrates, which results not merely from the points recited, but also from the reflection that the Pontiffs were perpetual, while the magistrates under the free Commonwealth were temporary. The latter were created by the suffrages of the people; in the former vacancies were filled by the College of Pontiffs itself. This custom lasted from Numa’s time to the year of Rome 601, when Cneius Domitius, tribune of the people, transferred the right of filling vacancies from the College to the people; this was abolished by Sylla in his dictatorship; but again restored by the Tribune Titus Labienus during Cicero’s consulship. But finally the right of electing its members was given back to the College of Pontiffs by Augustus.