Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

We proceed to consider the dangers which beset that unity.

What during this period was the defence of the Church against errors of belief?

We may subdivide our answer into two heads: first, the question of the principle which actuated the Church in all her conduct of promulgating her faith; and, secondly, the question of fact, or a review of the errors themselves which she had to oppose.

The principle of the Church was, in one word, that which defines her own being – a divine authority establishing a kingdom, Jesus Christ, her Lord and Founder, living and acting in her. The consideration of the faith which she promulgated cannot be severed from that of her government and her worship. If we put together that which we have been observing, we find a hierarchy stretching over the whole earth, developing itself in councils, hearing and deciding causes both in an exterior and an interior forum, having a fourfold gradation, the Bishop in the diocese, the Metropolitan in the province, the Primate in the larger circle of several provinces, the Pope in the whole Church. But, further, the whole of this authoritative government rests upon an identical worship, in which dwells, in a wonderful manner, the very Person of Him who is the Founder and Maintainer of the kingdom, and which exhibits daily to the hearts and minds of His people the sublime truths upon which His presence rests. Again, this worship itself is a part of that daily discipline of life in which the people live, and by which they are subjects of their sovereign in the spiritual world of thought and action. The administration of sacraments, which belongs to practice, embraces a whole world of doctrine. It is also the carrying out and application to daily life of the Scriptures which the Church holds in her hands, and presents to her people under the guarantee of her authority.

Again, in all that we are enumerating, in the whole system of government, worship, and teaching, is comprised the Word of God committed to the Church, a word partly written and partly unwritten, but in both its parts equally the word of God, not human thought or inference; and the teaching office is exercised in the living administration of the one and the other part, which cannot in practice be divided.¹⁵⁵

Again, the knowledge of revealed truth as a whole, and of the system in which it should be enshrined and perpetuated on the earth among men, was a special gift communicated to the Apostolic Body. They could not propagate a religion without this special gift of understanding what they were to propagate. This was part of their endowment as Apostles, a point in which they were superior to all who should come after them, who would have to continue and hand on that which they had established.¹⁵⁶

Further, from this gift followed the consciousness from the beginning that the revelation made by Christ to His Apostles was complete as to its substance.¹⁵⁷ He was the Teacher whose word was final: they were those whom He sent to convey it to men. Their name expressed their office —the sent. They transmitted what they had received. Those who followed, even the greatest who sat in Peter’s seat, watched over the maintenance of what the Apostles had transmitted. They were overseers. The name of predilection which stands at the head of documents declaring the faith, re-establishing discipline, terminating disputes, is, as it may be, Gregory, Leo, Pius, but always Bishop; and the whole plenitude of spiritual power is conveyed in the word “Bishop of the Catholic Church.”

Since all that we have been so long saying is an illustration of this principle of the Church, – her own divine authority in promulgating her Lord’s message, – we need not dwell on it further, but turn at once to a review of those combats which she actually underwent, in order to see how her liberty and spiritual power are manifested during the period of persecution, by the issue of the conflict in which, from the beginning, she was engaged with various enemies.

The first of these conflicts is with unbelieving Judaism, and its period is chiefly from the Day of Pentecost to the destruction of the temple and city of Jerusalem by Roman arms.

When the Apostles went forth to their work, they first addressed themselves to their own brethren, the people of Israel; and for twelve years they addressed themselves to their brethren alone. The great point to which they had to win Jewish consent was that Jesus was the Christ. Those to whom they preached were well convinced that there would be a Christ, and many of them also that the time for His coming was at hand. The work of the Apostles was to show that the life and death of Jesus corresponded to the manifold prophecies concerning the Messiah contained in the books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and that He had done “the works of the Christ.” In this first period of their preaching a considerable number, even of the priests, listened to their call; but a much greater number rejected it. In Jerusalem itself the Sanhedrim began the long list of Christian persecutions, and those who had slain the Lord commanded His disciples not to preach in His name. We cannot doubt that the enmity of those Jews who rejected a suffering Christ was very bitter against their countrymen who proclaimed Him.

But as soon as the Apostles embraced the Gentiles in their teaching this bitterness would greatly increase; for then, besides proclaiming One who had suffered the death of the cross at the hands of His own people to be the appointed Head and Deliverer of that people, the Apostles opened all the benefits of His Headship to the very nations in the midst of which the Jews lived with the proudest sense of their own superior claim to the favour of God. We see, by the example of St. Paul and St. Barnabas, how the Apostles addressed themselves in each city to their brethren in the synagogue, and through them to the Gentile proselytes, male and female, who frequented it; how they received into the communion of the Church such as accepted their message, and these not only when they were Jews, but the Gentiles also; and how, by the decision of the Council at Jerusalem, the Gentiles so entering were not bound to accept the ceremonial law of Moses nor the rite of circumcision. If it was a grievous offence to Jewish pride that a crucified man should be propounded as the son of David and King of Israel, how intense was the anger excited by the fact that the children of the hated and despised nations were allowed to enter into possession of the divine inheritance of Israel’s race without receiving circumcision, the pledge of the Jewish covenant, the mark of the children of Abraham!

Such was the double cause of indignation which led the Jews continually to plot against the life of St. Paul, to cut off St. James by the sword of Agrippa, to attempt at the same time the life of St. Peter, and during the whole period of apostolic preaching to set the Roman magistrates against the Christians.

We must add another cause of Jewish enmity, which, coming upon the two great causes already indicated, must have still more inflamed it.

For a considerable time, perhaps down to the persecution of Nero in the year 64,¹⁵⁸ the Christian faith appeared to the Romans to be what Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, and the brother, be it observed, of Seneca, called it, “a question of a word and names, and of your,” that is, the Jewish, “law;” so that practically, in this first time, to use the well-known expression of Tertullian, the apostolic preaching “was sheltered under the profession of a most famous, at least a licensed religion.”¹⁵⁹ This means that whereas by the laws existing at Rome before the coming of our Lord, the setting up of religions not authorised by the Senate was strictly forbidden; and whereas the profession of their own religion was everywhere allowed to the Jews as subjects of the empire, who were not called upon to renounce their ancestral belief, and whose synagogues were much frequented, as we know from Horace, even in his time; the first teachers of the Christian faith being Jews, and using the synagogue itself as a means of propagating their message, were covered by the protection extended to the Jewish religion. To the unbelieving Jews this protection, thus enjoyed by those whom they considered not only teachers of a false Messiah, but surrenderers of the special privileges and promises of the Jewish race, must have been very galling. Were apostates to be saved by their Jewish character from the very punishment which the Roman law itself imposed on religious innovators? Were they who overturned the very foundation of Jewish distinction to preach their sect under cover of the Jewish name? Accordingly they set themselves to kindle Roman enmity against the Christian faith by every means in their power. In the whole period between the conversion of Cornelius and the destruction of their own temple and city they were sleepless enemies, so that they fulfilled to the utmost the divine prediction, “Therefore, behold I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes: and some of them you will put to death and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city: that upon you may come all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the just even unto the blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen. I say unto you all these things shall come upon this generation.”¹⁶⁰

Poppæa is said by Josephus to have been a Jewish proselyte, and to have used her influence with Nero in favour of the Jews; and Tacitus¹⁶¹ records her to have been surrounded with fortune-tellers, which would include Jewish diviners of the future; and the combination of these statements has led to the conclusion by some that Nero was moved by her to those acts which resulted, not only in the sacrifice of that “vast multitude” recorded by Tacitus as suffering in the persecution raised against them for the burning of Rome imputed to them, but in removing for ever from the Christian religion the protection of being “licit,” as a part of an allowed religion. If this be so, all the subsequent persecutions were contained as in germ in the decision of Nero. The special cruelties of the punishments inflicted by Nero might cease upon his deposition, but the decision that the Christian faith was not a part of the Jewish, and therefore not “licit,” would remain as a principle of imperial legislation,¹⁶² as appears, in fact, in the conduct of Trajan when Pliny appealed to him for guidance. For it should not be forgotten that Pliny had already treated the profession of Christianity as in itself a capital crime, inasmuch as he ordered those who were guilty of it to be executed before he applied to Trajan for directions as to how he should treat them in future, on account of the difficulty which arose from their number. This evidence is complete so far as to show that it was not Trajan’s answer to Pliny which made the Christian religion illicit, but that it was already of itself a capital crime.

When St. Peter and St. Paul had crowned the Roman Church with their joint martyrdom under the authority of Nero, that Jewish revolt had already begun the issue of which was the accomplishment of the divine prediction that their “house should be left to them desolate.” But the stroke of Nero’s sword, wielded by his deputies,¹⁶³ was but the final act of Jewish enmity to St. Paul; what his life had been at their hands we have vividly described in his own words: “Of the Jews five times did I receive forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once I was stoned; thrice I suffered shipwreck; a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea.”¹⁶⁴ And as to St. Peter, they for whom Herod Agrippa, seeing that the slaughter of St. James pleased the Jews, proceeded to imprison Peter, intending after the Pasch to bring him forth to the people for public execution, would pursue him with their enmity all the rest of his life. And what happened to the chiefs, St. Peter and St. Paul, happened in their measure to the other first teachers of the new faith: they gained their crown of martyrdom through the perpetual enmity of the unbelieving Jews stirring up the Roman power against them.

The position of bitter enmity to the Christian religion taken up by the unbelieving Jews was far from terminating with the destruction of Jerusalem. As the nation, with its imperishable vitality, survived that blow, and the further severe punishment dealt upon it after the insurrection headed, in the reign of Hadrian, by the false Messiah Barcochba, who inflicted upon the Christians in Judæa fearful torments, so through the whole period of persecution which the Church suffered from the Roman empire, the Jews fanned by every means in their power the heathen hatred of the Christian people. Tertullian, at the end of the second century, represents them as not possessing an inch of land which they could call their own, yet at the same time as propagating every vile report against Christians. He gives this specimen: “Report has introduced a new calumny respecting our God. Not so long ago a most abandoned wretch in that city of yours (Rome), a man who had deserted indeed his own religion – a Jew, in fact, who had only lost his skin, flayed of course by wild beasts, against which he enters the lists for hire day after day with a sound body, and so in a condition to lose his skin – carried about in public a caricature of us with this label, An ass of a priest. This had ass’s ears, and was dressed in a toga, with a book, having a hoof on one of his feet. And the crowd believed this infamous Jew. For what other set of men is the seed-plot of all the calumny against us?”¹⁶⁵

Jewish hatred of the Christian faith stopped as little with Constantine’s edict of toleration as it had with the destruction of the temple by Titus or the banishment of the people by Hadrian; but here we have only to consider it in the first period of the forty years.

This is one aspect of that first conflict with Judaism, but there is likewise another, of which the issue was the gradual severance of the Christian Church from the synagogue. As the first struggle came from the enmity of those who rejected Jesus as the Christ, so the second came from those who received Him, but at the same time clung to the Jewish law and its observances.

The problem of the first twelve years’ teaching was, whether the Jewish nation would, as a nation, receive the faith of Him whom its rulers had crucified. An ardent longing for the salvation of their people as a whole must have lain deep in the heart of those first Jewish converts. But even after it became plain that only a remnant would accept the faith, and after a great number of Gentile converts had been received throughout the empire, on conditions which exempted them from the practice of the law of Moses, when St. Paul, at a late period of his ministry, went up to Jerusalem, he was entreated, because there were many thousands among the Jews that had believed who were all zealots for the law,¹⁶⁶ to perform in his own person publicly in the temple a vow according to the law, with which he complied.

No doubt one of the greatest difficulties experienced in these first forty years was the amalgamation of Jewish and Gentile converts in the one Christian Church; but I would draw attention only to the completeness of the result. Among the questions then settled¹⁶⁷ were the meaning of the Old Testament law in regard to the faith in Christ, the relation of our Lord to the Jewish prophets, His superiority to them, His divine nature, and thus His relation to God the Father. I pass over the consideration of all these to make one remark. The ultimate result is the proof of power, and by the time the Jewish temple and the public worship carried on in it were destroyed by the Roman avenger of the God he did not know, the Christian Church was seen to emerge in its character of a religion for all mankind. The association of St. Paul with St. Peter in the patronage of the Roman Church is the most conclusive refutation of theories as to their enmity and rivalry. The one Christian community, ruled by one Episcopate, derived from the Person of Christ, and containing Jews and Gentiles in the one Body of Christ, is the best proof that the force of that divine unity prevailed over zeal for the law and national privileges on the one hand, as over all the errors and confusions of heathen life on the other. Jewish persecution had its completion in the ruin of the deicide city. Those thousands of believers, zealots for the law, were in a few short years merged in the ever-increasing number of the Gentile converts. That great mother Church of Jerusalem, mindful of her Lord’s prophecy dwelling in her thoughts, was warned by the Roman standards encompassing the city to migrate to Pella, beyond the Jordan, and thus the centre of Jewish influence in the Church was dissipated beyond recall. The Christian Church took over the inheritance of the synagogue, displaced and destroyed, without being confined to its rites and ceremonies. The high priest, the priest, and the levite of the old covenant, touched with the life-giving flesh of Christ, passed into the ministry of the new; and while the lamb ceased to be offered for the daily sacrifice in the temple, the Lamb of God on every Christian altar became the Sacrifice and the Food of the one Christian people.

Thus the providence of God, offering to His chosen people their Saviour, had, when they rejected Him, worked a double result of their unbelief: one, the destruction of their city and polity; the other, the coming forth in unity and independence of the true Israel, “the nation of Christ.”

In all this the Divine Kingdom accomplished its first stage, being founded by Jewish teachers in spite of the enmity of unbelieving Judaism without, and blending the Jew and the Gentile convert within by the force of its potent unity.

The contest with Judaism in both its phases had but a restricted scope, if we compare it with that manifold contest with error which filled the whole history of the Church from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council. It is not easy to realise the circumstances under which that contest was waged. First, from the persecution begun under Nero in the year 64, to the edicts of Constantine in 311-313, the Christian Church lay under the ban of the Empire as an illicit religion. It is indeed true that the whole of this long period of two hundred and fifty years is not a time of active persecution. There are intervals throughout, of considerable length, in which the Church carried on her silent course of conversion, without the law being executed against her, with at least anything like a general intention to destroy her. Still, even in these intervals, she was in the condition of a society in opposition at all points to the powers of the world, and, to say the least, discouraged by the spirit of the time. She could not unfold and publish her constitution. The thing of all others which she could least venture to disclose was her polity, that episcopate with its centre in Rome which was the bond of her strength as a regimen. In spite of herself, Roman law forced her into the position, in many respects at least, of a secret society; secret, not because her doctrines in themselves required concealment; secret, not because her polity was in itself an infringement of the Empire’s civil rights, but because both doctrine and polity involved a change in the religious, social, and civil relations of the world which the Roman Empire was not prepared to concede, and which, had it divined, not Nero alone, or Domitian, “a portion of Nero in his cruelty,”¹⁶⁸ but every Roman emperor, with Trajan at their head, would have stamped out. Again, it is difficult to realise the condition of a religious society which could not carry out its worship under the protection which publicity confers. Yet as to this we have no authority to show that there were public Christian churches before the reign of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after the Church began. Her eucharistic liturgy was a secret; her sacred books were kept out of the sight of the heathen; but even so the language and the treatment of subjects in these books, not to speak of the choice of those subjects, betoken that they belonged to a society which needed not only the harmlessness of the dove but the wisdom of the serpent. It had need to keep its head under cover. To take one instance out of many. I do not know a more remarkable example of reticence than that passage in the Acts of the Apostles wherein it is said of Peter, that when delivered by the angel from prison, he sent a message to James and the brethren, and then “went out and departed into another place.” Here St. Luke, writing in a time of active persecution, rather more than twenty years after the event which he was recording, and when Nero had broken out against the Church, carefully abstains from saying that the place to which St. Peter went was Rome, and that he went to found the Church there, for such foundation was the thing above all others which Roman law looked upon with most suspicion, in its confusion of temporal with spiritual rule. Now we have to bear in mind, in order to realise the condition of the Church in this whole period, that all her work of promulgation, her daily administration of sacraments, her worship, her defence of the truth which she had received and which she was to guard, were carried on under this state of compression, a perpetual outlawry in the letter of the law, which might be put into exercise at the will of a local magistrate or the rising of a discontented populace, and which on many occasions was actually enforced by the supreme authority of the emperor. And it is not a little to be borne in mind what the political condition of the empire then was. The rights of the citizen, as opposed to the government, were overborne by a tremendous despotism, which only allowed light and air to its subjects so far as the science of government had not reached the complete development of modern times. The Roman emperors were not enabled to wield a secret police, because such an instrument of servitude had not yet been invented, nor had they reached an universal military conscription, because the Roman peace rendered such a sacrifice unnecessary; they had only the supreme power of life and death in their hands without restriction. Into the midst of such a despotism the Christian religion was cast. The seed silently deposited in each city in the episcopal germ grew with its individual life, which was yet the life of one tree; but how little was that secret unity of root apparent to the world, at least in the first half of this time! How truly, indeed, was the prophecy of the Lord fulfilled: “Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves;”¹⁶⁹ and how apposite the warning, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves!”

But as the Episcopate was a tree growing upon one root, so the faith on which it lived was one sap. Yet to what danger of isolation, especially in those first times, were small communities of Christians in so many several cities exposed. The Sees, it is true, were not crystallised units, but associated in provinces under Metropolitans. Yet their bishops did not possess the civil liberty of meeting when they chose. Upon the whole action of the Church there was a perpetual constraint from without. The two forces which held the Church together were the Episcopate viewed as one body, and the directing, controlling, regulating authority of St. Peter’s See at its centre. Yet not once in the well-nigh three hundred years could the Episcopate meet in universal councils, and the action of the Roman Church, an action which of all others within the bosom of the Christian society the Roman State would regard with the most jealousy, could only be exercised with a due respect to that jealousy, and in conjunction with that large measure of autonomy which the condition of a compressed and often-persecuted society, sprinkled over a vast number of provinces, imposed.

One of the most effective means for maintaining unity and overcoming error was the regular meeting of Councils. In ante-Nicene times these took place in various provinces of the Church, but did not extend to the whole Church. The first Western General Council was held at Arles in 314, and it needed the permission of the Emperor Constantine to take place. Before the peace of the Church its various provinces stand out in groups, under the presiding influence of the greater Sees. Thus, Alexandria unites all the Churches of Egypt and Libya, and the great See of Antioch serves as a centre for the numerous Sees of the East. Ephesus collects the churches of Asia Minor, and Carthage those of Africa. A certain local spirit and certain tendencies of thought would grow up. Perhaps a certain school of teaching may be said to characterise each of these groups. Even the natural temperament¹⁷⁰ of the African, the Egyptian, the Asiatic, and the Oriental character, receiving the one seed of Christian doctrine, would show itself in their several developments. The correction of such local tendencies lay in the free and unfettered intercourse and relation with St. Peter’s See; but it was this precisely which the above-noted circumstances of the times rendered difficult.

For all these reasons we may look upon the period stretching from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene Council as one whole, in which the contest between the faith of the Church and the various forms of emergent or antagonistic error was carried on under trials which tested to the utmost her inherent vigour.

We may approach the subject by reflecting that the first condition of Christians was one of simple faith. The Son of God had come upon earth, and being found in fashion as a man, had taught, worked miracles, suffered, died, and risen again. He had thus delivered a divine truth to His Apostles for communication to the world. It was not the result of human inquiry, but the working of a new life derived from the Person of the Incarnate God. A new knowledge formed part of this life, and a new speculation was thus begun. But the complete thing was the life, that is, the Church as an institution, with her sacrifice, her sacraments, her daily discipline, her hierarchy; Jesus Christ dwelling in His people, perpetuating in that people the life which He had begun on earth.

This life was received by an act of faith. It was based upon authority, continued by a tradition which carried in its bosom all the things just enumerated. Such a state is borne witness to in the letters of St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John, and again in the letters of St. Ignatius and in the Epistle to Diognetus. Its force lay in the strength, simplicity, and earnestness of the faith received as a divine revelation. It is vividly expressed by St. John in his opening words: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life; for the life was manifested; and we have seen and do bear witness, and declare unto you the life eternal which was with the Father, and hath appeared to us: that which we have seen and have heard we declare unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship may be with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.”

The fulness of truth had thus appeared corporally in the Word become flesh, and by this appearance a new epoch had begun to man,¹⁷¹ and henceforth there were only two attitudes of the human spirit possible towards the truth thus revealed. On the one hand, it might recognise the revelation as truth given by God, and make it the standard and guiding principle of speculation. On the other hand, it might use its freedom to assume an independent standing-point over against this revelation, which it might subject to its private reason. In the former case revelation would be primary and reason secondary; in the latter case the position would be reversed. Reason would take what it liked and reject what it disliked in revelation. In the former, reason, using the natural powers of the human mind in subordination to revealed truth, and accepting the Christian mysteries as data, would proceed by profound meditation upon them, would connect doctrine with doctrine, and come to the perception of the harmony contained in the structure of the revelation made in Christ; to a system, in fine, of speculative theology. In the latter, following its particular bias, according to the spirit of the time in each period, it would attempt to subject revelation to itself, to alter some parts, to discard others, to improve or reject according to its own inward attraction.

The one is the principle of orthodoxy, the other that of heresy.

As a matter of fact, we find from the institution of the Christian Church – that is, the entrance of Christ’s Person into the world – a spiritual war commence, which runs through all the ages, and of which the time from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council is only the first period. But in that period the combatants are already well defined, the two standing-points definitely taken up, and the battle waged even upon the most important of all truth, the existence and the character of God Himself. The Christian God is carried through three centuries, and impressed upon the belief of men by the Christian Church; the philosophic god is set up against Him by those who subjected faith to reason; and in the collision between the two the pantheon of false gods is dispersed and shattered, and dissolved in the pure light of the Christian heaven.

That first condition of the Christian Church, during which it lived on pure faith – I mean the simple historical transmission of its worship, its sacraments, its discipline, and its government, as they were instituted – lasted for several generations; it may be said quite to the end of the second century. During this whole time the attacks of human reason acting upon the principle of heresy were incessant, and it was to defend themselves against these attacks that those who stood entirely upon the ground of faith and tradition in the first instance gradually betook themselves to the arms of reason, reflection, and learning superadded to the faith.