The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

It was a time at which the extremes of reckless cruelty, of profuse luxury, of shameless dissoluteness, met together; in which women were forbidden by an express law to expose themselves on the arena as gladiators; in which, when the emperor Severus would legislate against adultery, a memorial was handed to him with the names of three thousand persons whom his law would touch.207 Such was the character of the time which followed at once on the empire's golden age; the time in which the Church of God was lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes, and building up her divine polity amid the worthlessness of the world's greatest empire, and the instability of all earthly things.

II. In the last review which we took of her material progress we said that to the eye of Pius Antoninus she would not yet appear from her multitude as a power in the state. But before the end of the seventy-four years which we are here considering as one period, it was otherwise. Already in the reign of Commodus, Eusebius states that the word of salvation was bringing to the worship of the one God men out of every race, so that in Rome itself many distinguished for wealth and rank embraced it with their whole families.208 A few years later, when Tertullian writes his apology, he makes the heathen complain “that the state is overrun with us, that Christians are found in the country, in forts, in islands; that every sex and age and condition and rank come over to them.”209 And again; “we are of yesterday, and have already filled every place you have, your cities, islands, forts, boroughs, councils, your very camps, tribes, corporations, the palace, senate, and forum. Your temples only we leave you. For what war should we not be equal, we who are so ready to be slaughtered, if our religion did not command us rather to suffer death than to inflict it.” Elsewhere he speaks of Christians as “so great a multitude of men as to be almost the majority in every city.” Now make whatsoever allowance we will for Tertullian's vehemence, such statements, laid before adversaries, if they had not a great amount of truth in them, would bring ridicule on his cause rather than strengthen it. Tertullian besides wrote at the time of the general persecution set on foot by Septimius Severus against the Christian Faith, which itself was a proof of what importance it had assumed. We may perhaps put the first twenty years of the third century as the point at which, having passed through the period when it was embraced by individuals with a several choice, it was become the faith of families, and one step only remained, that it should become the faith of nations.210

Let us consider a moment the mode of its increase. It was twofold. The plant of which a root was fixed by the Apostles and their successors in each of the cities of the empire grew, gathering to itself in every place the better minds of heathenism, and exercising from the beginning a marked attraction upon the more religious sex and upon the most down-trodden portion of society; women were ever won to it by the purity which its doctrines inculcated, slaves by its tender charity: it gave a moral emancipation to both. If we possessed a continuous and detailed history of the Christian Faith in any one city, say Rome, or Alexandria, or Antioch, or Ephesus, or Carthage, or Corinth, for the first three centuries, what a wonderful exhibition of spiritual power and material weakness it would offer. By fixing the mind on Christianity as merely one object, as an abstraction, we lose in large part the sense of the moral force to which its propagation bears witness. It was in each city a community,211 which had its centre and representative in its Bishop, which had its worship, discipline, and rule of life presided over by him; its presbytery, diaconate, and deaconesses; its sisterhoods and works of charity, spiritual and temporal: a complete government and a complete society held together by purely spiritual bonds, which the state sometimes ignored, not unfrequently persecuted, but never favoured. Such was the grain of mustard-seed, from north to south, from east to west, in presence of the political Roman, the sensitive and lettered Greek, the sensuous African, the volatile and disputatious Alexandrian, the corrupt Antiochene. It had one sort of population to deal with at Rome, quite another in the capital of Egypt, a third at Ephesus, which belonged to the great goddess Diana, and the statue which had fallen down from heaven, a fourth at Carthage, where the hot Numidian blood came in contact with the civilisation of Rome, a fifth at Corinth, the mistress of all art and luxury. And so on. Now in each and all of these cities and a hundred others the divine plant met with various soils and temperatures; but in them all it grew. It had its distinct experiences, encountering many a withering heat and many a stormy blast, and watered full oft with blood, but in them all the seed, dropped so imperceptibly that the mightiest and most jealous of empires was unconscious of what was cast into its bosom, became a tree. It was an organic growth of vital power. Christianity, during the ten ages of persecution, is the upspringing of several hundred such communities, distinct as we see here, and as described above by S. Ignatius, but at the same time coinherent, as we saw in the beginning, and as we shall find presently. As, then, all the cities of the Roman empire had a secular political and social life, and a municipal government of their own, so had the Christian Faith in each of them a corresponding life of spiritual government and inward thought; and if we had the materials to construct the history of this Faith in any one, it would give us a wonderful insight into the course of that prodigious victory over the world which the whole result presents. We cannot do so. The data for it do not exist, and because they do not, we allude here to this first mode of growth made by the Christian Faith.

Its second mode was thus. The Apostolical Churches, as they severally grew, scattered from their bosoms a seed as prolific as their own. They sent out those who founded communities such as their own. Thus the Christian plant was communicated from Rome to all the west. With every decade of years it crept silently over the vast regions of Gaul and Spain, advancing further west and north. This extension was not a chance springing up of Christians in different localities. It always took place by the founding212 of sees, with the apostolic authority, after the apostolic model. If the Roman colonia had its rites of inauguration, and was a transcript of the great city, its senate and its forum, so much more the Christian city had its prototype and derived its authority from the great citadel of the Faith, wherein Peter's prerogative was stored up,213 and whence it had a derivation wider in extent and more ample in character than that of Rome the natural city. But we will take from another quarter what is as perfect a specimen of this extension as any that can be found. In the great city of Alexandria, the centre of intellectual and commercial life to all the East and the whole Greek name, S. Peter set up the chair of his disciple Mark. There the evangelist taught and there in due time suffered. Dragged by an infuriated populace through the streets he thus gave up his soul. But the plant which he so watered with his blood was of extraordinary vigour. It not only grew amid the intensest intellectual rivalry of Greek and Jew in the capital, but likewise in course of time occupied the whole civil government which obeyed the præfect of Egypt. From Alexandria, Egypt and the Pentapolis of Cyrene derived their Christian faith and government; and so powerful was this bond that the bishop of the capital exercised control over all the bishops of the civil diocese, as it was then termed. He was in power a patriarch long before he had that name, or even the name of archbishop. How great and strict this rule was we may judge from an incident preserved by Photius,214 which occurred in the very last year of the period we are considering, in 235. Heraclas, bishop of Alexandria, a former pupil of Origen, had inflicted upon that great writer a second expulsion from the Church for his erroneous teaching. Origen on his way to Syria came to the city of Thmuis, where bishop Ammonius allowed him, in spite of the above-mentioned censure of Heraclas, to preach. When Heraclas heard this, he came to Thmuis and deposed Ammonius, and appointed in his stead Philippus as bishop. Afterwards, on the earnest request of the people of the city, he restored Ammonius to the office of bishop, and ordained that he and Philippus should be bishops together. The latter, however, voluntarily gave way to Ammonius, and succeeded him at his death. Such, ninety years before the Nicene Council, which recognised and approved these powers of the bishop of Alexandria, as being after the model of those exercised by the bishop of Rome,215 was his authority by the natural force of the hierarchic principle which built up the Church. And so little were these Christian communities, which we have seen so complete in their own organic growth, independent of the bond which held the whole Church together, and of which the authority of the Egyptian primate was itself a derivation.

These, then, were the two modes in which the Christian Faith pursued and attained its orderly increase; as a seed it grew to a plant in each city, and as a plant it ramified, or as Tertullian says, carried “the vine-layer of the faith”216 from city to city, from province to province. In the meantime the last disciples of the Apostles, those who from the especial veneration with which they were regarded as teachers of the Faith and “second links in the chain of tradition,” were termed Presbyters,217 had died out. S. Polycarp, at the time of his martyrdom in 167, was probably the sole remaining one, though his pupil S. Irenæus had known others. When the latter, upon the martyrdom of S. Pothinus in 177, is raised to the government of the See of Lyons, we may consider that no one survived in possession of that great personal authority which belonged to those who had themselves been taught by Apostles; and so at the third generation from the last of these the Church throughout the world stood without any such support, simply upon that basis of the tradition and teaching of the truth, and of the succession of rulers, on which the Apostles had placed it, to last for ever. Now in this position it had already, throughout the whole course of the second century, been violently assaulted by a family of heresies, which growing upon one root – a natural philosophy confusing the being of God with the world – burst forth into an astonishing variety of outward forms. Gnosticism completely altered and defaced Christian doctrine under each of the four great heads, the Being of God, the Person of Christ, the nature of man, the office and function of the Church. Into the Godhead it introduced a dualism, recognising with the absolute good an absolute evil represented by matter: it denied the reality of the Incarnation; it made the body a principle of evil in man's nature: but we will here limit ourselves to the characteristic and formal principle of the system from which it derived its name, to Gnosis as the means of acquiring divine truth. Now the Christian religion taught that revealed truth was to be attained by the individual through receiving, upon the ground of the divine veracity, those mysterious doctrines superior but not contrary to reason which it unfolded; and that the communication of such doctrines might continue unimpaired and unchanging, it taught that our Lord had established a never-failing authority charged with the execution of this office, and assisted by the perpetual presence of His Spirit with it to the end. But the Gnostics admitted only in the case of the imperfect or natural man that faith was the means for acquiring religious truth; to the spiritual, the proper gnostic, gnosis should take the place of faith: for to many a heathen, accustomed to unlimited philosophical speculation, the absolute subjection of the intellect to divine authority, required by the principle of faith, was repugnant. Now this Gnosis was in their mind not knowledge grounded upon faith, but either philosophic science, or a supposed intuition of truth, which was not only to replace faith, but the whole moral life, inasmuch as the completion and sanctification of man were to be wrought by it. And thus instead of an external authority the individual reason was set up as the highest standard of religious truth, the issue of which could only be rationalism in belief and sectarianism in practice.

This formal principle of Gnosticism when duly carried out would deny the idea of the Church, its divine institution, its properties and prerogatives. For the gnostic mode of attaining divine truth, as above stated, contains in it such a denial. Besides this, the gnostic doctrine that matter was the seat of evil, destroyed the belief that Christ had assumed a body: the gnostic doctrine that the supreme God could enter into no communion with man made their Æon Christ no member of human society, but a phantom which had enlightened the man Jesus, and then returned back to the “Light-realm.” Not being really the Son of God, he could have no Church which was his body: not really redeeming, for sin to the gnostic had only a physical, not a moral cause, he was but a teacher, and therefore had created no institution to convey grace; which, moreover, was superfluous, for whatever elements of good human nature had were derived from creation and not from redemption. Nor was such an universal institution wanted, since not all men but only the spiritual were capable of being drawn up to the Light-realm. The Gnostic therefore required neither hierarchy nor priesthood, since the soul of this system was the gnosis of the individual. For this a body enjoying infallibility through the assistance of the Holy Ghost was not needed. It was enough for enthusiasts and dreamers to pursue their speculations without any limit to free inquiry, save what themselves chose to impose as the interpretation of such scriptures as they acknowledged, or as the exhibition of a private tradition with which they held themselves to be favoured.

Lastly, the idea of Sacraments, as conveying grace under a covering of sense, would be superfluous to the gnostic, inasmuch as the spiritual elements in man belong to him by nature, and are not communicated by a Redeemer, and would be repulsive to him because matter is a product of the evil principle, and cannot be the channel of grace from out the Light-realm.218

My purpose here has only been to say just so much of Gnosticism as may show how the whole Christian truth was attacked by it, and especially the existence and functions of the Church.

And this may indeed be termed the first heresy in that it struck its roots right up into Apostolic times. Irenæus, Eusebius, and Epiphanius account Simon Magus to be its father, and the father of all heresy. As such it is not without significance that he encountered the first of the Apostles in Samaria, endeavouring to purchase from him the gifts of grace and miraculous power, and that he likewise afterwards encountered him at Rome. To this the first manifestation of Gnosticism succeed heretical doctrines concerning the Person of our Lord, which sprung out of Judaism; but no sooner are these overcome than Gnosticism in its later forms spreads from Syria and Alexandria over the whole empire, everywhere confronting the Church, seducing her members, and tempting especially speculative minds within her. A mixture itself of Platonic, Philonic, Pythagorean, and Parsic philosophy, affecting to gather the best out of all philosophies and religions, in which it exactly represented the eclectic spirit of its age, arraying itself in the most fantastic garb of imagination, but at the bottom no dubious product of the old heathen pantheism, it set itself to the work, while it assumed Christian names, of confusing and distracting Christian truth. From the beginning of the second century it was the great enemy which beset the Church. It may, then, well represent to us the principle of heresy itself, and as such let us consider on what principles it was met by the Church's teachers.

Now to form a correct notion of the danger to which the Christian people at this time was exposed, we must have before us that it was contained in several hundred communities, each of them forming a complete spiritual society and government. These had arisen under the pressure of such hostility on the part of the empire that it is only in the time of the last emperor during this period, Alexander Severus, that churches are known to have publicly existed at Rome.219 For a very long time all meetings of Christians and all celebration of their worship was secret. It is obvious what an absolute freedom of choice on the part of all those who became Christians this fact involved. Nor did that freedom cease when they had been initiated into the new religion. Their fidelity to the Christian faith was all through their subsequent life solicited by the danger in which as Christians they stood. Only a continuous freedom of choice on their part could maintain it. And not only did every temporal interest turn against it, but in the case at least of the more intellectual converts the activity of thought implied in their voluntary acceptance of a new belief served as a material on which the seductions of false teachers might afterwards act, unless it was controlled by an everliving faith, and penetrated by an active charity. The more these Christian communities multiplied, the more it was to be expected that some of them would yield to the assaults of false teachers. It is in just such a state of things that a great dogmatic treatise was written against Gnosticism by one who stood at only a single remove from the Apostle John, being the disciple of his disciple Polycarp. Irenæus, by birth a native of lesser Asia, enjoyed when young the instructions and intimate friendship of the bishop of Smyrna. In his old age he delighted to remember how Polycarp had described his intercourse with John, and with those who had seen the Lord: how he repeated their discourse, and what he had heard from them respecting the teaching and the miracles of that Word of life whom they had seen with their own eyes. “These things,” says Irenæus, “through the mercy of God I then diligently listened to, writing them down not on paper, but on my heart, and by His grace I ruminate upon them perpetually.”220 Later in life he left Smyrna, and settled in Lyons, of which Church he was a presbyter when the terrible persecution of 177 broke out there. Elected thereupon to succeed a martyr as bishop, he crowned an episcopate of twenty-five years with a similar martyrdom. He wrote, as he says, during the episcopate of Eleutherius, who was the twelfth bishop of Rome from Peter, and sat from 177 to 192. After describing at length the Gnostic errors concerning the divine nature, he sets forth in contrast the unity of the truth as declared by the Church in the following words:

“The Church, though she be spread abroad through the whole world unto the ends of the earth, has received from the Apostles and their disciples faith in one God;” and he proceeds to recite her creed, in substance the same as that now held: then he adds, dwelling with emphasis on the very point which I have been noting, the sprinkling about, that is, of distinct communities so widely dispersed, which yet are one in their belief.

“This proclamation and this faith the Church having received, though she be disseminated through the whole world, carefully guards, as the inhabitant of one house, and equally believes these things as having one soul and the same heart, and in exact agreement these things she proclaims and teaches and hands down, as having one mouth. For, though the languages through the world be dissimilar, the power of the tradition is one and the same. Nor have the churches founded in Germany otherwise believed or otherwise handed down, nor those in Spain, nor in Gaul, nor in the East, nor in Egypt, nor those in the middle of the world. But as the sun, God's creature, in all the world is one and the same, so too the proclamation of the truth shines everywhere, and lights all men that are willing to come to the knowledge of the truth. Nor will he among the Church's rulers who is most powerful in word say other than this, for no one is above his teacher;221 nor will he that is weak in word diminish the tradition, for the Faith being one and the same, neither he that can say much on it has gathered too much, nor he that can say little is deficient.”

Against the gnostic claim to possess a private tradition, in virtue of which each of them “depraving the rule of the truth was not ashamed to preach himself,” he sets forth the one original tradition which the Apostles,222 only “when they had first been invested with the power of the Holy Ghost coming down on them, and endued with perfect knowledge,” delivered to the churches founded by them. “And this tradition of the Apostles, manifested in the whole world, may be seen in every church by all who have the will to see what is true, and we can give the chain of those who by the Apostles were appointed bishops in the churches, and their successors down to our time, who have neither taught nor known any such delirious dream as these imagine. For, had the Apostles known any reserved mysteries, which they taught to the perfect separately and secretly from the rest, assuredly they would have delivered them to those especially to whom they intrusted the churches themselves. For very perfect and irreprehensible in all respects did they wish those to be whom they left for their own successors,223 delivering over to them their own office of teaching, by correct conduct on whose part great advantage would accrue, as from their fall the utmost calamity. But since it were very long, in a volume like this, to enumerate the succession of all the churches, we take the church the greatest, the most ancient, and known to all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles Peter and Paul, and pointing out the tradition which it has received from the Apostles, and the faith which it has announced to men, reaching down to us by the succession of its bishops, we confound all those who form societies other than they ought, in any way, whether for the sake of self-fancied doctrines, or through blindness and an evil mind. For, with this church, on account of its superior principate, it is necessary that every church agree, that is, the faithful everywhere (every church) in which by the (faithful) everywhere, the apostolic tradition is preserved.

“The blessed Apostles, then, having founded and built up the church, committed to Linus the administration of its episcopate… Anencletus succeeds him, from whom in the third place from the Apostles Clemens inherits the episcopate… He is succeeded by Evaristus; Evaristus by Alexander, who is followed by Xystus sixth from the Apostles. Then Telesphorus, who was gloriously martyred; next Hyginus; then Pius; after whom Anicetus. Soter followed Anicetus; and now in the twelfth degree from the Apostles Eleutherius holds the place of bishop. By this order and succession the tradition from the Apostles in the Church and the teaching of the truth have come down to us. And this proof is most complete that it is one and the same life-giving Faith which has been preserved in the Church from the Apostles up to this time, and handed down in truth… With such proofs, then, before us, we ought not still to search among others for the truth, which it is easy to take from the Church, since the Apostles most fully committed unto this, as unto a rich storehouse, all which is of the truth, so that everyone, whoever will, may draw from it the draught of life. For this is the gate of life: all the rest are thieves and robbers. They must therefore be avoided; but whatever is of the Church we must love with the utmost diligence, and lay hold of the tradition of the truth. For how? if on any small matter question arose, ought we not to recur to the most ancient churches in which the Apostles lived, and take from them on the matter in hand what is certain and plain. And suppose the Apostles had not even left us writings, ought we not to follow that order of tradition which they delivered to those to whom they intrusted the churches? To this order many barbarous nations of believers in Christ assent, having salvation written upon their hearts by the Holy Spirit without paper and ink, and diligently guarding the old tradition.”224