The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

“The enemy,” he says, “detected and down-fallen by the advent of Christ, now that light is come to the nations – seeing his idols left – has made heresies and schisms, wherewith to subvert faith, to corrupt truth, and to rend unity.” But this will all be in vain if men will look to the Head, and keep to the doctrine of the Master. For the truth may be quickly stated.282 “The Lord saith unto Peter: I say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. To him again, after His resurrection, He says: Feed my sheep. Upon him, being one, He builds His Church; and though He gives to all the Apostles an equal power, and says: As my Father sent Me, even so send I you; receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they shall be remitted to him, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they shall be retained; – yet in order to manifest unity, He has by His own authority so placed the source of the same unity as to begin from one. Certainly the other Apostles also were what Peter was, endued with an equal fellowship both of honour and power; but a commencement is made from unity, that the Church may be set before us as one: which one Church in the Canticle of Canticles doth the Holy Spirit design and name in the Person of our Lord: My dove, my spotless one is but one; she is the only one of her mother, elect of her that bare her.

“He who holds not this unity of the Church, does he think that he holds the faith? He who strives against and resists the Church, is he assured that he is in the Church? For the blessed Apostle Paul teaches this same thing, and manifests the sacrament of unity thus speaking: There is one Body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one Hope of your calling; one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God. This unity firmly should we hold and maintain, especially we bishops, presiding in the Church, in order that we may approve the Episcopate itself to be one and undivided. Let no one deceive the brotherhood by falsehood; no one corrupt the truth of our faith by a faithless treachery. The Episcopate is one, of which a part is held by each without division of the whole. The Church is likewise one, though she be spread abroad, and multiplies with the increase of her progeny: even as the sun has rays many, yet one light, and the tree boughs many, yet its strength is one, seated in the deep-lodged root; and as, when many streams flow down from one source, though a multiplicity of waters seems to be diffused from the bountifulness of the overflowing abundance, unity is preserved in the source itself. Part a ray of the sun from its orb, and its unity forbids this division of light; break a branch from the tree, once broken it can bud no more; cut the stream from its fountain, the remnant will be dried up. Thus the Church, flooded with the light of the Lord, puts forth her rays through the whole world, with yet one light, which is spread upon all places, while its unity of body is not infringed. She stretches forth her branches over the universal earth, in the riches of plenty, and pours abroad her bountiful and onward streams; yet is there one head, one source, one mother, abundant in the results of her fruitfulness.

“It is of her womb that we are born; our nourishing is from her milk, our quickening from her breath. The Spouse of Christ cannot become adulterate; she is undefiled and chaste; owning but one home, and guarding with virtuous modesty the sanctity of one chamber. She it is who keeps us for God, and appoints unto the kingdom the sons she has borne. Whosoever parts company with the Church and joins himself to an adulteress, is estranged from the promises of the Church. He who leaves the Church of Christ, attains not to Christ's rewards. He is an alien, an outcast, an enemy. He can no longer have God for a Father who has not the Church for a mother. If any man was able to escape who remained without the ark of Noah, then will that man escape who is out of doors beyond the Church. The Lord warns us and says: He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who gathereth not with Me, scattereth. He who breaks the peace and concord of Christ, sets himself against Christ. He who gathers elsewhere but in the Church, scatters the Church of Christ. The Lord says: I and the Father are one; and again of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost it is written: And these three are one. And does anyone think that oneness, thus proceeding from the divine immutability, and cohering in heavenly sacraments, admits of being sundered in the Church, and split by the divorce of antagonist wills? He who holds not this unity holds not the law of God, holds not the faith of Father and Son, holds not the truth unto salvation.

“This sacrament of unity, this bond of concord inseparably cohering, is signified in the place in the Gospel where the coat of our Lord Jesus Christ is in nowise parted or cut, but is received a whole garment, by them who cast lots who should rather wear it, and is possessed as an inviolate and individual robe. The divine scripture thus speaks: But for the coat, because it was not sewed, but woven from the top throughout, they said one to another, Let us not rend it, but cast lots whose it shall be. It has with it a unity descending from above, as coming, that is, from heaven and from the Father; which it was not for the receiver and owner in anywise to sunder, but which he received once for all and indivisibly as one unbroken whole. He cannot own Christ's garment who splits and divides Christ's Church. On the other hand, when on Solomon's death his kingdom and people were split in parts, Ahijah the prophet, meeting King Jeroboam in the field, rent his garment into twelve pieces, saying: Take thee ten pieces; for thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee; and two tribes shall be to him for my servant David's sake, and for Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen, to place my name there. When the twelve tribes of Israel were torn asunder, the prophet Ahijah rent his garment. But because Christ's people cannot be rent, His coat, woven and conjoined throughout, was not divided by those to whom it fell. Individual, conjoined, coentwined, it shows the coherent concord of our people who put on Christ. In the sacrament and sign of His garment, He has declared the unity of His Church.

“Who, then, is the criminal and traitor, who so inflamed by the madness of discord, as to think aught can rend, or to venture on rending God's unity, the Lord's garment, Christ's Church? He Himself warns us in His Gospel and teaches, saying: And there shall be one Fold and one Shepherd… Think you that any can stand and live who withdraws from the Church, and forms for himself new homes and different domiciles?.. Believers have no house but the Church only. This house, this hostelry of unanimity, the Holy Spirit designs and betokens in the Psalms, thus speaking: God who makes men to dwell with one mind in a house. In the house of God, in the Church of Christ, men dwell with one mind, and persevere in concord and simplicity.” To this he adds: “There is one God, and one Christ, and His Church one, and the Faith one, and one the people joined into the solid unity of a body by the cement of concord. Unity cannot be sundered, nor can one body be divided by a dissolution of its structure, nor be severed into pieces with torn and lacerated vitals. Parted from the womb nothing can live and breathe in its separated state: it loses its principle of health;” for “charity will ever exist in the kingdom; she will abide evermore in the unity of a brotherhood which entwines itself around her.”

And he is more specific still; for this “one Church is founded by the Lord Christ upon Peter, having its source and its principle in unity,” “on whose person He built the Church, and in whom He began and exhibited the source of unity.”283

Certainly if any idea has ever been put forth clearly and definitely, it would seem to be the idea of organic unity here delineated by Cyprian, as necessary not merely to the well-being but to the essence of the Church. Nor does one see what words he could have found more expressly to reject the notion that the individual bishop in his diocese was the unit on the aggregation of which the Church was built, and to assert in contradiction that the Church was built on the Primacy of Peter as its generative, formative, controlling, and unifying power. According to him the whole order and government of the Church are bound up in the Lord's words to Peter: while as to the Church herself three ideas are in his mind so compacted together, so running into and pervading each other, that they cannot be severed; and these ideas are Unity, Grace, and Truth. The symbols of the Sun, the Tree, and the Fountain, the Lord's Coat, the one Flock tethered in one Fold under one Shepherd, the one House as opposed to sundry self-chosen domiciles, the Mother embracing her whole progeny in her womb, illustrate and enforce each other, and all contain the three ideas, of which Grace and Truth are as the warp and woof in which the substance of the one web consists. For Unity, Truth, and Grace, viewed as attributes of the Church, are blended together in the light and warmth of the sun, in the sap which vivifies every branch of the tree, and gives it fruitfulness from the root, in the fountain of water, under which image our Lord has so often summed up His whole gift to man, in the flock which the Shepherd has chosen, and for which He cares, in the house where the master dwells and collects his family, in the one robe which encompassed and contained the virtue of the Wearer, in the prolific womb which gives birth to the whole sacred race. The force of all these images lies in their unicity: plurality would not modify, but destroy them. Yet even these symbols are surpassed by that argument from the divine Unity which he sets forth as the type and cause of the Church's unity. From created likenesses – the fairest and choicest which the world presents – he passes to the uncreated nature, and from the divine immutability, wherewith these three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the divine Exemplar of Unity, Truth, and Grace, are one, deduces the Unity of the Church their dwelling-place.

Cyprian, then, cannot sever the Church of his heart, the Church for which he lived and died, from Unity, or from Truth, or from Grace: and this Church is to him founded on the Primacy of Peter, and developed from his person. The one Episcopate, whose golden chain he looks upon as surrounding the earth in its embrace, “of which a part is held by each without division of the whole,” wherein therefore joint possession is dependent on unity, would have no existence without the bond of the Primacy, from which it was developed and which keeps it one. Take away this, and the office of each bishop is crystallised into a separate mass, having no coherence or impact with its like: bishops so conceived would hold indeed a similar office, but being detached from each other would not hold joint possession of one Episcopate. Separate crystals do not make one body; nor a heap of pebbles a rock. But it was a Rock on which Christ built and builds His Church, that Rock being His own Person, from which He communicated this virtue, wherein the cohesion and impact of the whole Episcopate lies, to the See of him whom He constituted His Vicar. Finally, Cyprian contrasts pointedly the people of Christ which cannot be rent with the twelve tribes of Israel, which were torn asunder: as if he would beforehand repudiate that parallel between the Synagogue and the Church, in the question of unity, which has before now been resorted to as a refuge by minds in distress, who failed to see the tokens of the Bride of Christ in the community to which they belonged.

In Origen and in Cyprian we put ourselves back into the middle of the third century. In the words of the latter we see portrayed to the life that idea which had filled the hearts of Christians through seven generations of labours and sorrows from the day of Pentecost down to his time. But whence arose this perfect union of all hearts and minds in the early Christians, who were penetrated with the conviction that the Church was the home of truth and grace? We may answer this question thus: No catechumen was received into the fold without a clear and distinct belief in that article of the earliest creed, and part of the baptismal profession, “the Holy Catholic Church.” A new word was made to express a new idea, the glorious and unique work of that ever-blessed Trinity whom the creed recited: the Home and House in which the Triune God, whom the Christian glorified, by indwelling made the fountain of that grace and that truth which God had become Man in order to communicate. The catechumen's baptism into the one Body was the foundation of all the hope in which his life consisted;284 the integrity, duration, sanctity of that Body being component parts of the hope. And with regard at least to all gentile converts this precise and definite catechetical instruction was reinforced by the new sense which at their conversion was impressed on them of the heathenism out of which they were then taken. In how many of them was the remembrance of their past life connected with the guilt of deeds and habits which their new Christian conscience taught them to regard as fearful sins. Nay, the notion of sin itself – as a transgression of the eternal law and an offence against the personal Majesty of God – was a Christian acquisition to the corrupted heathen. Thus the passage into the one Body and the divine Kingdom was contemporaneous in their case with a total change of the moral life. It is Cyprian, again, who has given us a vivid account of this change, which took place at a time of mature manhood in his own life, and which will serve as a graphic sketch of what had happened to the great mass of adult converts besides himself.

Let us suppose a man forty-five years of age speaking: “For me, while I yet lay in darkness and bewildering night, and was tossed to and fro on the billows of this troublesome world, ignorant of my true life, an outcast from light and truth, I used to think that second birth, which divine mercy promised for my salvation, a hard saying according to the life I then led: as if a man could be so quickened to a new life in the laver of healing water as to put off his natural self, and keep his former tabernacle, yet be changed in heart and soul. How is it possible, said I, for so great a conversion to be accomplished, so that both the obstinate defilement of our natural substance, and old and ingrained habits, should suddenly and rapidly be put off; evils whose roots are deeply seated within? When does he learn frugality, to whom fine feasts and rich banquets have become a habit? Or he who in gay sumptuous robes glisters with gold and purple, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple raiment? Another whose bent is to public distinctions and honours cannot bear to become a private and unnoticed man; while one who is thronged by a phalanx of dependents, and retinued by the overflowing attendance of an obsequious host, thinks it punishment to be alone. The temptation still unrelaxed, need is it that, as before, wine should entice, pride inflate, anger inflame, covetousness disquiet, cruelty stimulate, ambition delight, and lust lead headlong.

“Such were my frequent musings; for whereas I was encumbered with the many sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to be rid of, so I had used myself to give way to my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of better things, to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving water succoured me, washing away the stain of former years, and pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast the light which comes from heaven, after that I drank in the heavenly Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth, then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to me, what was hidden was revealed, what was dark began to shine, what was difficult now had a way and means, what had seemed impossible now could be achieved, what was in me of the guilty flesh now confessed that it was earthy, what was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost now had a growth according to God. Thou knowest well, thou canst recollect as well as I, what was then taken from me, and what was given by that death of sin, that quickening power of holiness. Thou knowest, I name it not; over my own praises it were unwelcome to boast, though that is ground never for boasting but for gratitude, which is not ascribed to man's virtue but is confessed to be God's bounty; so that to sin no more has come of faith, as heretofore to sin had come of human error. From God, I say, from God is all we can be; from Him we live, from Him we grow, and by that strength which is from Him accepted and ingathered we learn beforehand, even in this present state, the foretokens of what is yet to be. Let only fear be a guard upon innocency, that that Lord who by the influence of His heavenly mercy has graciously shone into our hearts, may be detained by righteous obedience in the hostelry of a mind that pleases Him; that the security imparted to us may not beget slothfulness, nor the former enemy steal upon us anew.”285

Add to this that Christians were marked out as one Body by the Jewish and heathen persecution which tracked them everywhere. But the sects were not persecuted. The various schools of the Gnostics all agreed in this, that it was not necessary or desirable to suffer martyrdom for the faith. Their view was, that they could believe with their minds whatever they pleased, though an enemy might force them by threats of suffering to utter with the mouth what they abhorred; and with this convenient distinction they escaped imprisonment, poverty, bereavement, and death. But the Christian was bound – when the fitting circumstances came – to repeat the confession of his Lord before Pilate. Joined therefore to his baptismal belief, and to the utter change of life involved in his conversion, was the bond of common suffering which held together Christians as one Body throughout the world: whence an old martyr bishop said: “The Church, for that love which she bears to God, in every place and at every time sends forward a multitude of martyrs to the Father, whereas all the rest not only have no such thing among themselves to show, but deem not even such a witness necessary.”286

Moreover, as a fourth cause, the historic origin of their name and belief led them up to that day of Pentecost when the descent of the Spirit of God constituted the formation of that body in belonging to which was all their hope and trust; with the existence of which their faith was identified; in the communion of which their charity was engendered. As the birth and the life and the passion of Christ were that subject-matter on which their whole faith grew, so the creation of their existence as a people was a definite act in which the Redeemer showed Himself the Father of His Race, creating them as His children and generating them by His Spirit. The loving thought of Christians in every age ran along this line to its source. Nature herself presents us with an image of what this idea of the Church was to them. As the great river whose water is the symbol of blessing and the bearer of fertility leaps down a giant birth from its parent lake, ever blazing under the splendour of a tropical sun, yet ever fed by sources springing from snow-crowned mountains, and changes in its course the desert into earth's fruitfulest region, so the river of God, welling forth on the day of Pentecost from the central abyss of the divine love, bore down to all the nations the one water of salvation, and wheresoever it spread, the desert retreated, and the earth brought forth corn and wine in abundance. And the idea of this divine stream was from the beginning as deep as it was clear in every Christian heart. It is one of a very few doctrines, such as the unity of the Godhead, whereof indeed it is the image and the result, of which there is not only an implicit belief but a definite consciousness from the first. For the thought of the kingdom is inseparable from that of the king: and he could be no divine Sovereign whose realm was not one and indivisible: and that this realm should break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms,287 but itself stand for ever, was the trust on which the whole Christian life of endurance and hope was built.

The Christian society through its whole structure was marked with the seal of that great act on which it grew, the assumption of human nature by a divine Person. Its whole government, its whole worship, and the whole moral and spiritual being of its people radiate from that Person as King, as Priest, and as Prophet. Take first the character of the individual Christian. It is in all its gradations, in that marvellous range of the same being which stretches from the highest saint matured in acting and suffering to the most imperfect penitent received into the bosom of the one mother, a copy, more or less resembling, of our Lord Himself. He, the divine Image, is the original from which every Christian lineament is traced, and every one of His race repeats Him in some degree. Every virtue is such as a transcript of some portion of His character; and the whole life of the individual resolves itself into an imitation of Him. Thus He is the Prophet not only declaring the whole divine will to men, but leading them in it by His own example. The divine Painter is but representing in every one of His children a copy in some sort of that life, which He set forth in full in the thirty-three years: a thought which we have seen Origen expressing in the chrism which descended from the head of Aaron to the utmost skirt of his raiment.

But likewise in His Priesthood a parallel derivation ensues. First He multiplies Himself in His Apostles: they again in the Bishops whom they create; while each of these communicates himself in his priests. A triple transfusion suffices to form the whole hierarchical order. Nothing can be conceived more simple, yet nothing more efficient supposing that He is what He proclaimed Himself to be. The victim which He appoints to be offered by this priesthood is Himself, and His Body so offered is the food, the life, and the bond of the whole spiritual Body thus created. That Person with which He took the manhood is the centre of all this worship, of which the manhood so taken is the instrument. Thus it is that His second office of Priest, bound up so entirely with Himself, is yet communicated through His divine manhood to the whole Body which He forms. And this order remains through all ages, as intimately connected with his Person now, as eighteen centuries ago, and as it will be when all the centuries to come are evolved.

One office remains; His office of King. And here, again, the jurisdiction which He created for His kingdom springs from His Person, and that not only in its origin but in its perpetual derivation. He was Himself288 the Apostle: as such He first multiplied Himself in the Twelve, whom from Himself He named Apostles. His public life on earth is an image of the whole mission or government which He would set up after His ascension. He lives with the Twelve: He teaches them: He is their Instructor, Father, and Friend. When His Apostles afterwards created Bishops, this form of our Lord's life on earth was exactly reproduced in the earliest dioceses. Thus S. Mark went forth from the side of Peter, and the mode of his living, and the family which he drew around him at Alexandria was after this pattern. He, the Bishop, is the image of Christ, and his twelve presbyters of the Apostles. This model is continually set forth by S. Ignatius as a divine command and institution, he being himself the occupant of the great Mother See of the East, the third See of Peter, and that wherein he first sat.289 Thus the canonical life was formed by the exactest imitation of our Lord's public life, and its reproduction throughout the various dioceses formed the Church. Such was the life which S. Augustine afterwards practised and reduced to rule; and those who planted the Christian Faith throughout the north, Apostles to new and barbarous races, had this model before them. The diocese was first a family, in which the Bishop as a father presided over his priests, and sent them forth to their work. The Eucharist which he consecrated was from the beginning dispensed from his church to all his flock. The diocese, then, in its earliest form was an image of our Lord's intercourse with the Twelve, wherein the Bishop represents Him, and the priesthood His Apostles.