Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

“Therefore it is right for us to give heed to so great and so many examples, and to submit the neck, and, occupying the place of obedience, to take our side with them that are the leaders of our souls, that, ceasing from this foolish dissension, we may attain to the goal which lies before us in truthfulness, keeping aloof from every fault. For you will give us great joy and gladness if you render obedience to the things written by us through the Holy Spirit, and root out the unrighteous anger of your jealousy, according to the entreaty which we have made for peace and concord in this letter.”⁵¹

Let us sum up the force of the words just cited.

St. Clement, after invoking the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity as witnesses of the judgment he was about to promulgate, declares that “he who performs without regretfulness the ordinances and commandments that are given by God” shall “be enrolled and have a name among the number of them that are saved through Jesus Christ.” On the other hand, that those who are “disobedient unto the words spoken by Him through us” “will entangle themselves in no slight transgression and danger.” He adds, moreover, “You will give us great joy and gladness if you render obedience to the things written by us through the Holy Spirit.”[51]

From all which we learn that a decision of the Church of Rome, issued by its Bishop, as to whether the Bishop of Corinth was rightly or wrongly deposed, is declared, after attestation of the Three Divine Persons to be among the commandments and ordinances given by God; to be “words spoken by God through us,” that is, the Pope and the Church of Rome; to be “things written by us through the Holy Spirit,” to which absolute obedience was due, and which could not be neglected “without no slight transgression and danger.” The Pope, moreover, takes upon himself the power to deprive of the episcopate by issuing a judgment that an actual possessor of it is in his right, while he says at the same time that it would be “no light sin in us to deprive him of it unjustly.”

It is in every way remarkable that the first pastoral letter of a Pope which has been preserved to posterity should contain so undeniable an exercise of his supreme authority. Again, it is another noteworthy matter that this supreme authority should have been exercised in the lifetime of the last surviving Apostle, the Beloved Disciple. Further, would it be possible to apply in a stronger way than St. Clement, issuing an authoritative judgment, here applies them, those words of our Lord: “He that heareth you, heareth Me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth Me; and he that despiseth Me, despiseth Him that sent Me.”⁵² And again, “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.” Lastly, it is to be noted that the authority thus exercised concerns not a point of dogma, but the office of a Bishop; yet disobedience to it is considered as disobedience to “words spoken by God through us.”

The part of St. Clement’s letter, which contains the whole judgment thus commented on, has only been recovered within the last few years.

But that whole view of the constitution of the Church during the first century which is presented to us in the Epistle of St. Clement is remarkably corroborated by the letters of his contemporary, St. Ignatius of Antioch. That fervent confessor of God, passing in chains to martyrdom, pours forth, as is well known, the deepest fulness of his heart to the Churches which he visits in his long way of the cross from Antioch to Rome. The letters are short, the style abrupt, the expressions only incidental; he had no thought of writing a treatise on the constitution of the Church. Thus any short quotation is quite inadequate to render the full witness of the saint. It would be necessary to read through the whole series in order to feel how incessantly he dwells upon union with God wrought through obedience to the hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, which is the test in his mind of love to Christ. Thus, at the beginning of his letter to the Church of Smyrna, he speaks of the most blessed Passion of Christ, “a fruit of which are we that He might set up a token for all ages through His Resurrection to His holy and faithful ones, whether they be among Jews or Gentiles, in the one body of His Church.”

In his letter to the Church of Ephesus there is a remarkable passage, in which he joins together the thought of the unity of a particular diocese with the unity of the bishops throughout the world. “It is fitting that you should by all means glorify Jesus Christ, who has glorified you, that by a uniform obedience you may be perfectly joined together and subject to the bishop, and the presbytery may be in all things sanctified. I do not command you, as if I were anybody; for though I am bound in the name of Christ, I am not yet perfected in Him. For now I begin to learn, and speak to you as my fellow-disciples. For I ought to be confirmed by you in faith, in admonition, in patience, in long-suffering. But since charity permits me not to be silent in regard to you, I have therefore taken upon me to exhort you that you may run together with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, as also the bishops, appointed throughout the earth, are in the mind of Christ. Whence, also, it becomes you to agree with the mind of the bishop, as indeed you do. For your illustrious presbytery, worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to a harp. Hence it is that, in your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung; and one and all you make up the chorus, that, being harmonious in concord, taking up the song of God in unity, you may sing with one voice to the Father through Jesus Christ, that He may both hear you and recognise by your good deeds that you are members of His Son. It is well for you, then, to be in blameless unity, that you may in all things partake of God.”

The vivid love and sense of the Church, as the great instrument of unity wrought by the Passion of Christ in the world, and compacted by the ministry which He has set up, distinguishes the letter of St. Ignatius as it does that of St. Paul to the same Ephesian Church, so specially beloved by the Apostle, and the scene of so many of his labours. But St. Irenæus⁵³ tells us that it was also from the bosom of this Church of Ephesus that the Apostle of love issued the Gospel in which he recorded for the world the great commission to feed the whole flock of Christ given to St. Peter on the shore of the lake of Galilee.

Let us add one more passage from the letter to the Trallians. “For when you are subject to your bishop as to Jesus Christ you seem to me to live not after the manner of men, but according to Jesus Christ, who died for us, in order that, believing in His death, you may escape death. It is therefore necessary that you do nothing without your bishop, but that you be subject to the presbytery also, as to the Apostles of Jesus Christ, our hope, in whom if we walk we shall be found. The deacons also, as being the ministers of the mysteries of Jesus Christ, must be acceptable to all. For they are not the ministers of meat and drink, but servants of the Church of God. Wherefore they must avoid all offences as they would fire. Let all in like manner reverence the deacons as Jesus Christ, and the bishop as the type of the Father, and the presbyters as God’s senate and the College of Apostles. Without these there is no Church.”

These words expressly state the organic unity of a local Church to be the bishop with his priests and deacons; but he had likewise noted that the bishops established throughout the earth were together “in the mind of Christ.”

The words of St. Clement the Pope, and St. Ignatius, the bishop of one of the three original patriarchal Sees, thus complete and corroborate each other. If we put the passages just cited from the latter with the statement of the former, that “the Apostles, preaching from country to country and from city to city, established their first-fruits, after proving them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of a people that were to believe,” we have a perfect chain let down from above, and binding the earth in its embrace: God, who sends forth Christ; Christ, who sends forth the Apostles; the Apostles, who appoint local bishops, who are the bond to their clergy and people. In the whole of this the expression of St. Ignatius is verified: “hence in your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung.” If the bishops throughout the world were not united with each other in as complete a harmony as the presbytery with the bishop in a particular diocese, these words would not be true. But, on the contrary, they are together “in the mind of Christ,” as He is “the mind of the Father,” and they feed not each a separate flock, but together “the flock of Christ.”

But who is the bond of their union? It pleased the Divine Providence that, even before St. Ignatius wrote, and even in the lifetime of the Apostle who recorded the commission to feed the whole flock of Christ, the harmony and obedience of which St. Ignatius spoke should be broken in a particular diocese, and that St. Peter’s third successor should execute his office and assert the Divine commission by fulfilling it. His conduct in this marks, by a solemn act, the line between the Apostolate and the Primacy. That he speaks in the name of the whole Roman Church, as the voice of a Body, illustrates further the words of St. Ignatius, “Your presbytery is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to a harp.”⁵⁴

In the testimony of these Apostolic Fathers, each completing the other, we have not only the local bishop planted as the unit of the Church’s organism in any particular city, but the bishop who sits in the See of Peter, the tie and bond of his brethren. The harp sounds its notes to Christ throughout the world.

Another point in which their testimony exactly agrees is, that while St. Clement speaks of the government of the Church as enacted with even greater accuracy and enforced with even stronger penalties than the law of Moses, St. Ignatius takes the strict observance of unity and obedience to external authority as a perfect test of the inward disposition, a perfect assurance that those who exercised these virtues were members of Christ. The temper in which these Fathers write is as far as possible removed from the notion that Church government was either lax or uncertain. To them it comes from above, and requires inward obedience, as the appointment of Christ.

Eusebius, the first historian of the Church, compiling about the year 324 notices of the times before him, with, records at his command which are no longer extant, describes in the following terms the first period, that in which the Apostles themselves preached, which we may speak of as running from the Day of Pentecost to the destruction of Jerusalem: —

“Thus, under a celestial influence and co-operation, the doctrine of the Saviour, like the rays of the sun, quickly irradiated the whole world. Presently, in accordance with divine prophecy, the sound of his inspired Evangelists and Apostles had gone throughout all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Throughout every city and village, like a replenished barn-floor, numerous and populous churches were firmly established. Those who, in consequence of the delusions that had descended to them from their ancestors, had been fettered by the ancient disease of idolatrous superstition, were now liberated by the power of Christ, through the united force of the teaching and miracles of His messengers; and, as if delivered from dreadful masters, and emancipated from the most cruel bondage, they renounced the crowd of deities introduced by demons, while they confessed the one God, the Creator of all things. This same God they now also honoured with the rites of a true piety, under the influence of that inspired and reasonable worship which had been planted among men by our Saviour.”⁵⁵

The next period is distinctly marked by Eusebius as the first succession from the Apostles. St. Paul,⁵⁶ he says, preaching to the Gentiles, laid the foundations of Churches from Jerusalem in a circle round to Illyricum; and St. Peter preached to the circumcision in the five provinces recorded by him in his letter. He continues, “It is not easy to say how many imitators of these were by them judged worthy to exercise the pastoral office in the Churches founded by them, except so far as St. Paul’s own words record them. For he had numberless fellow-workers, fellow-soldiers, as he himself called them, most of whom he has delivered to immortal memory by mention of them in his letters.” Thus Timotheus was first Bishop of Ephesus; Titus was set over Crete, and expressly enjoined to appoint bishops in its several cities, for St. Paul draws out what sort of a character the bishop so appointed should be.⁵⁷ “Linus, whom he mentions being with him at Rome, has already,” says Eusebius, “been named by us as having been first Bishop of the Roman Church after Peter. But likewise Clement, who was the third appointed Bishop of the Romans, is recorded by St. Paul as his colleague and fellow-labourer.”

In a third passage Eusebius,⁵⁸ after speaking of Ignatius “as the second who received the episcopal succession of St. Peter at Antioch,” Evodius having been the first, and after quoting at length his letters, proceeds, “There were many others also noted in the times of these men who held the first rank of the apostolic succession. These, as the holy disciples of such men, built up further in every place the foundations of the Churches which had been laid by the Apostles. They spread the preaching further abroad and scattered the saving seeds of the kingdom of heaven far and wide through the breadth of the world. For the most of the disciples at that time, kindled by a more ardent love of the divine word, had first fulfilled the Saviour’s exhortation by distributing their substance to the needy. Afterwards, leaving their country, they performed the work of evangelists, filled with a noble ambition to proclaim Christ to such as had not yet heard the word of faith, and to deliver to them the writing of the sacred Gospels. Thus laying merely the foundations of the faith in new and strange places, and, appointing others to the pastoral office, they left them to cultivate the new plantation, and again went on to other places and nations by God’s grace and co-operation. For a great number of marvellous works of power were still done by them through the Holy Spirit; so that at the first hearing multitudes of men in a mass received into their souls readily the worship of the One Creator. As I cannot record by name all those who received the first succession of the Apostles as pastors and evangelists in the Churches throughout the world, I will mention those only where tradition of apostolical doctrine is carried down to us by actual memorials.”

The gradations thus marked in the propagation of the gospel are three: first, that of the Apostles in Judea before their dispersion; secondly, that of the Apostles with their personal fellow-workers throughout the world; thirdly, that of the men called Apostolic, because they had lived in the time of the Apostles without having been their first co-operators, or, to use the Pauline expression, fellow-soldiers. This carries us over the ninety years from the Day of Pentecost to the end of Trajan’s reign, during which reign, the time, as Eusebius calls it, of St. Clement of Rome and of St. Ignatius of Antioch, he notes that there was a specially abundant outburst of such teachers.

Eusebius bears witness through the whole of his History to the universality of the episcopal regimen. Likewise he carefully gives the descent of the three great Sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. He notes how they took their rise from the person of Peter, who sat at Antioch himself, who sent his son Mark to Alexandria, and whose coming to Rome the historian describes in the words following: —

“Immediately in the reign of the Emperor Claudius, the most benign and man-loving providence of God conducted to Rome Peter, the great and powerful among the Apostles, who for his virtue was chosen to lead them all against Simon, the plague of mankind.⁵⁹ Peter, like a valiant commander of God’s army, clothed in heavenly panoply, carried from the East to the West the precious freight of intellectual light, bearing the proclamation of the heavenly kingdom, to be the sure and saving word of souls.” He records the martyrdom of the two Apostles, Peter and Paul, together at Rome under Nero, giving for this fact a fourfold testimony; of historians generally; of their tombs, which were still to be seen at Rome; of the presbyter Cains, who, at the beginning of the third century, appealed to the existence of these tombs, the one at the Vatican, the other on the Ostian Road, as a proof where “the sacred tabernacles of these Apostles had been deposited;” and lastly, to the letter of Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth in the middle of the second century, who spoke of their having both taught the Church of Corinth as well as that of Rome, and of both having suffered martyrdom together. “These particulars I have given,” says Eusebius, “that the memory of the fact may be the more confirmed.”⁶⁰ He gives carefully during two hundred years the descent of the bishops in these three Sees, and the number of years they sat – a tacit witness to the eminent rank of the three great Mother Sees established by Peter in the three chief cities of the Roman Empire; and an honour which he gives besides only to the Church of Jerusalem, since all, he says, have ever borne reverence “to the throne of the Apostle James, the first who received the episcopate of the city of Jerusalem from the Saviour Himself and the Apostles!”

In another place he writes: “Again, when I consider the power of the Word, how the most populous churches were constructed by the rudest and most ignoble disciples of Jesus, not in obscure and unknown places, but founded in the most conspicuous cities, in very imperial Rome itself, in Alexandria and Antioch, for all Egypt and Libya, for Europe, and for Asia, – again I am compelled to search out the reason of this, and to confess that they could not have succeeded in so audacious an attempt except by some divine and superhuman power, and the working together with them of Him who said ‘Make disciples all nations in My name.’”⁶¹

Between St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch at the end of the first century, and Eusebius at the beginning of the fourth, stands at the end of the second century the witness of Tertullian. In setting forth the legal ground of prescription against the heretics of his day, he gives an account of the original propagation of the divine kingdom, which exactly tallies with all that precedes. “Christ Jesus our Lord … had chosen twelve disciples to be attached to His side, whom He destined to be the teachers of the nations. Accordingly, after one of these had been struck off, He commanded the eleven others, on His departure to the Father, to go and teach all nations, who were to be baptized into the Father, and into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost. Immediately, therefore, the Apostles, whom this designation indicates as the Sent, having on the authority of a prophecy, which occurs in a psalm of David, chosen Matthias by lot as the twelfth into the place of Judas, obtained the promised power of the Holy Ghost for the gift of miracles and of utterance. And after first bearing witness to the faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judea, and founding Churches, they next went forth into the world, and preached the same doctrine of the same faith to the nations. They then, in like manner, founded Churches in every city” (that is, an episcopal See in each city, without which, as St. Ignatius told us, there is no Church) “from which all the other Churches, one after another, derived the tradition of the faith and the seeds of doctrine, and are every day deriving them that they may become Churches. Indeed it is on this account only that they are able to deem themselves apostolic, as being the offspring of Apostolic Churches. Every sort of thing must necessarily revert to its original for its classification. Therefore the Churches, though they are so many and so great, comprise but the one Primitive Church founded by the Apostles, from which they all spring. In this way all are primitive and all are apostolic, while all together make up a unity; while they have peaceful communion, and title of brotherhood, and bond of hospitality, privileges which no other rule directs than the one tradition of the self-same mystery. From this, then, do we prescribe the rule that, since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the Apostles to preach, no other ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed; for ‘no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.’ Nor does the Son seem to have revealed Him to any other than the Apostles, whom He sent forth to preach that, of course, which He revealed to them. Now what this was which they preached – in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them – can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very Churches which the Apostles founded in person, by declaring the gospel to them directly themselves, both by word of mouth, as the phrase is, and subsequently by their Epistles. If, then, these things are so, it is in the same decree manifest that all doctrine which agrees with the Apostolic Churches – those wombs and original sources of the faith – must be reckoned for truth, as undoubtedly containing that which the said Churches received from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and Christ from God; whereas all doctrine must be prejudged as false which savours of contrariety to the truth of the Churches and Apostles of Christ and God.”⁶²

But the whole work of St. Irenæus against heresies is based exactly upon the fact which we are here setting forth. His object was to show that the true faith was preserved intact in all the Churches of the world by means of the bishops appointed by the Apostles. Thus he commences his third book: “For the Lord of all gave to His Apostles the power of the gospel, through whom we have learnt the truth, that is, the doctrine of the Son of God; to whom the Lord said, ‘He who heareth you, heareth Me, and who despiseth you, despiseth Me, and Him who sent Me.’” … “For after our Lord arose from the dead, and they had been clothed with the power of the Holy Spirit coming down upon them from on high, they were completely filled and had perfect knowledge: they went forth into the ends of the world, proclaiming the gospel of good things from God, and announcing peace from heaven to men, all of them and every one of them possessing equally the gospel of God.” … “All, therefore, who wish to see the truth may behold in every Church the tradition of the Apostles, which was made known through the whole world; and we can number up those who were appointed by the Apostles bishops in the Churches, and their successors down to our own times, who have neither taught nor known any such delirious imagination as theirs.” He is speaking of the heresy of Valentinus. “For had the Apostles known recondite mysteries, which they were in the habit of teaching separately and secretly from the rest to the perfect, they would deliver such especially to those to whom they were intrusting the Churches themselves. For they desired those to be very perfect and blameless in all things whom they were leaving as their successors, handing over to them their own place of teaching. For if these acted faultlessly, the good would be great; whereas if they failed, the calamity would be complete.”

Irenæus sums up all this view in another place, where he says: “True knowledge is the doctrine of the Apostles, and the ancient compacted fabric of the Church through the whole world, and the character of the Body of Christ, according to the succession of bishops, to whom they delivered that Church which is everywhere.”⁶³

In what has preceded we have traced carefully the transmission of spiritual authority, putting together the various intimations respecting it which are given in the four Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles of St. Paul, and the Apocalypse. From these intimations a most clear and unambiguous result has been deduced. Then proceeding to historical proofs, we find the third Pope from St. Peter, at the end of the first century, in an official document, summing up in words of great precision what had been the actual course of things in the two generations which lay between the Day of Pentecost and the time at which he was writing. If we compare the Gospels which record the institution of the power, and the history which records its actual beginning and exercise, as thus given by St. Clement, we find the most exact agreement. Another saint and martyr, contemporary with St. Clement, and holding by second succession from St. Peter what became the great patriarchal See of the East, affords the strongest corroboration to him in the doctrinal statements which are found interwoven in the letters addressed by him to various churches as he is carried a prisoner on his way to martyrdom. The first extant historian, writing in 324, on the eve of the assembling of the first General Council, testifies throughout the ten books of his work the universality of the episcopal regimen, and intimates its organic structure by giving each link in the spiritual descent of the three great Sees of Peter and of the Church of Jerusalem. Intermediate between these three authorities, Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, writing seventy years after St. Clement, and Tertullian, writing thirty years after Irenæus, give very graphic accounts of the Church in their day, which exactly accord both with the Pope and Martyr-bishop preceding and the historian following them. Instead of calling in other witnesses, let us attempt to give a general view of the Episcopate as it is found when emerging from the last great persecution, which terminated the first stadium of its course, and was followed by the peace of the Church, proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine 283 years after the Day of Pentecost. The whole of this period marks a time in which the growth of the Church and the form of her constitution were the result of a power proceeding solely from within, never favoured by the civil power, often actively persecuted, and daily in a thousand ways discouraged.

St. Augustine, writing in the year 398, observes precisely of this time, that is, the year 314, that if the Donatists suspected the judgment of their African colleagues, there were thousands of bishops beyond the sea to whom they might have recourse.⁶⁴ In his own time he counted 476 Catholic bishoprics in the African provinces. Throughout the Roman Empire it would seem that, before the peace of the Church, not only every considerable city, but even small towns, possessed their bishop. St. Hilary says: “Though there be only one Church in the world, yet every city has its own Church;” and St. Cyprian and St. Dionysius of Alexandria assert this of their own time.⁶⁵

The conduct, then, of St. Peter, of St. Paul, and of all the Apostles in the propagation of the Church, was from the beginning one and uniform, and impressed itself on the succeeding generations.⁶⁶ They founded a Christian colony on the solid basis of a complete administration, and establishing their most fervent disciples as the chiefs of that hierarchic organisation, they left to them the charge of forming new centres of spiritual life in the cities dependent on those first chosen. Thus St. Peter chose first Antioch, Queen of the East, the head afterwards of fifteen ecclesiastical provinces; then Rome, the head of the whole Empire, of which Pope St. Innocent said, writing in the year 416 to the Bishop of Eugubium, that “it was an acknowledged fact that no one had established Churches” (by which he means a Bishop’s See) “in all Italy, the Gauls, the Spains, in Africa, in Sicily, and the intervening islands, except those whom the venerable Apostle Peter or his successors had appointed bishops.”⁶⁷

Thirdly, he chose Alexandria, whose bishops became the head of the three provinces, Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis. But no less St. Paul planted in Ephesus the Mother Church of the province of Asia (one-twentieth only of the great country called Asia Minor); in Thessalonica, the metropolis of Thrace; in Corinth, that of Achaia; he and Barnabas, in Salamis, that of Cyprus; while he set a disciple to appoint bishops over the whole island of Crete. These are specimens of the power which was thus established in every city over the whole world traversed by the Apostles and their descendants, a power fixed, not transitory; local, not roving. It was an occupation of each city by the spiritual authority exactly similar in divine things to the military colonies which Rome planted in its provinces for the propagation of its temporal sway. It was a corporate body with a most compact unity, at the head of which, informing and directing every act, stood the bishop, a name of power and jurisdiction. Of them St. Paul said, “Obey your prelates, and be subject to them.” From such words the power of government is a clear inference. If the faithful are obliged to obey the prelates of the Church, these must have authority to command. Thus St. Gregory of Nazianzum, addressing in the year 373 the governor of his province, used these words: “The law of Christ subjects you to my authority and to my tribunal. For we also have a government, nay, I will add a greater and more perfect government, unless spirit must yield to flesh, and heavenly things to earthly. I know that you will accept my freedom of speech, because you are a sheep of my flock, a sacred sheep of a sacred flock, nurtured by the Great Shepherd.”⁶⁸ Elsewhere he calls it “the government which is innocent of blood,” contrasting it with “the government of the sword and the lash.” The Greek Fathers universally, in explaining the dignity of the episcopate, use this word government.⁶⁹