Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

In the time of Irenæus, Clement, Tertullian, and Origen, the proof from the rapid growth of the Church in spite of the world’s opposition was by no means complete. Moreover, the greatest and most general persecutions, those of Decius, Gallus, Valerian, and Diocletian, came after this. Probably the struggle between the Church and the Empire was not understood in all its bearings before the time of Decius. But we possess two treatises of Athanasius, composed in his youth, about the year 320. They are extremely beautiful both in style and matter; and in parts of them Athanasius contemplates the whole preceding history of the Church and the effects of her preaching the cross of Christ. I take as a specimen what he says about certain miraculous effects worked by the name and the cross of Christ, for the truth of which he appeals to universal experience.²⁰²

“When did men begin to desert the worship of idols except from the time that the true God, the Word of God, appeared among men? When did the oracles which were everywhere among the Greeks cease and come to nought, save from the time that the Saviour manifested Himself upon earth? When did the gods and heroes of the poets begin to be condemned as mere mortal men, save from the time that the Lord set up His trophy against death, and preserved incorruptible the body which He had taken by raising it from the dead? And when was the deceit and madness of demons despised, save when the Word, the power of God, the Lord of all, and of these among all, in His condescension for the weakness of men, appeared upon the earth? When did the art and the schools of magic begin to be trodden underfoot, save upon the manifestation of the Word among men? In a word, when did the wisdom of the Greeks become foolish, save when the true Wisdom of God showed Himself on the earth? For of old the whole world and every spot in it was filled with the false worship of idols, and men held that there were no gods but idols. But now through all the world men desert the superstition of idols and fly to Christ, and worship Him as God, through whom they recognise the Father whom they knew not. And observe this wonder. The religions were different and numberless; each place had its own idol, and he that was invoked as god there could not pass to the next spot to persuade his neighbours to worship him, but could only just maintain his own worship; for no one worshipped his neighbour’s god, but kept to his own idol, thinking that he was the lord of all; whereas the one and same Christ is worshipped everywhere by all; and what the impotence of idols could not do to persuade its neighbours, this Christ has done, persuading not only those near, but simply the whole world to worship one and the same Lord, and through Him God His Father.

“Of old, also, everything was full of the deceit of oracles, and those in Delphi, and Dodona, and Bœotia, and Libya, and Egypt, and the Kabiri, and the Pythia, were admired in men’s imagination; but from the time that Christ is preached everywhere, this their madness also is stopped, and no one any longer acts the prophet. And of old the demons deceived men with spectres, taking possession of fountains and rivers, of wood and stones, and so astonishing the foolish with deceits. All these sights have vanished since the Divine Epiphany of the Word; for a man using only the sign of the cross scatters all their tricks. Of old men deemed those whom the poets called Zeus, and Kronos, and Apollo, and the heroes, to be gods, and were drawn into error by worshipping them; but now that the Saviour has appeared among men, these have been reduced to the nakedness of mortal men, while Christ has been recognised as alone true God, God the Word of God. What shall I say of the magic which had so much vogue among them? Before the Word was spread among us, it prevailed and worked among Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Indians, and astonished the beholders; but it was convicted and utterly brought to nought by the presence of the truth and the appearance of the Word. But as to the Grecian wisdom and the big words of the philosophers, I think it needs no word from us when the strange sight is before the eyes of all, that all the volumes written by the Greek wise men were not able to persuade even a few neighbours of immortality and virtuous life; while Christ, only by a few cheap words in the mouth of men who had no wisdom of the tongue, has persuaded numerous assemblies of men throughout the whole world to despise death and to have immortal longings, to pass by time and see eternity, earth’s glory to esteem as dust and ashes, and grasp instead of it a crown in heaven.

“These are not mere words of ours, but appeal to the test of experience for their reality. Let any one who will go and see the proof of virtue in Christian virgins and the youths who cultivate purity, and the assurance of immortality in the vast multitude of martyrs. He that will try the truth of what we have said, let him upon the appearance of demons, the deceit of oracles, and magic wonders, use the sign of the cross which they mock at, with the mere name of Christ, and he will see how the demons fly, the oracles stop, the whole array of magic and trickery disappears. Who, then, and how great is this Christ who has by His mere name and presence cast His shade over and annihilated all these things everywhere, who prevails over all alone, and has filled the whole world with His teaching? Let the Greeks who mock and blush not say. Is He a man? how then has one man been too much for the power of all their gods, and convicted them by His own power of being nothing? Do they call Him a magician? but how can all magic be destroyed by a magician, and not rather be confirmed? For if He prevailed over some magicians, or was superior to one only, He might well be deemed by them to have surpassed the others by greater art; but if His cross carried off the victory over all magic absolutely, and the very name of the thing, it is plain that the Saviour is not a magician, since the demons invoked by other magicians fly from Him as their Lord. If He only drove away some demons, He might be thought to have power over the inferior by the chief of the demons, as the Jews mocking said of Him. But if all the fury of the demons is displaced and scattered by naming Him, it is plain they are wrong, and that our Lord and Saviour Christ is not, as they think, some demoniacal power. If, then, the Saviour is neither simple man, nor magician, nor a demon, but by His own Godhead has annulled and frustrated all the imagination of poets, the display of demons, and the wisdom of Greeks, it must be plain and confessed by all that He is truly the Son of God, the Word, and Wisdom, and Power of the Father. Hence His works are not human, but above man’s range, and are recognised to be the works of God in truth by their manifest effects, and by the comparison of them with the works of man.”

Athanasius speaks in these words for the whole period preceding him. The apologists of the early Church before him²⁰³ lay the most stress in proving her divine character upon five things – the predictions of the Old Testament, the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles, the miraculous power continuing on in Christians, the rapid propagation of the Church, and the steadfast endurance of confessors under persecution. Our Lord Himself laid the greatest weight upon the proof arising from prophecy, and from the works of power, themselves announced in prophecy, which He did, “the works of the Christ.” His answer to the disciples of John the Baptist included both. In fact, He came among a people possessing a divinely appointed priesthood and office of teaching, which He expressly acknowledged when He said, “The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in the chair of Moses; all things, therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do.” But He did not in any way attach Himself to this authority, much less submit to it in His office of teaching. If we reflect on the fact that He did not submit Himself to the authority which He acknowledged to be divine, yet claimed supreme authority, it is obvious that without miracles He could claim no authority as the Christ. And He said so most plainly Himself when He summed up, as it were, the whole bearing of His ministry towards the Jewish authorities in the words, “If I had not done among them such works as no man ever did, they should not have sin; but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father.”

Thus, as in His own life, so likewise in the life of His people, miracles and prophecy were of necessity the double external witness to His mission, as martyrdom, including under it every degree of confessorship, was the great internal witness.

And every ancient Christian writer alleges the existence and the exercise of miraculous power in the Church. But there is also another fact; not only all Christians, but Jews and heathens of every class, the bitterest opponents of the Christian faith, agreed in one point, namely, that superhuman²⁰⁴ power was at work in the world, and in the whole life of man, by which works exceeding man’s ability, and often transgressing the laws of nature, were wrought. They were eye-witnesses of these works. About a great number of them, so far at least as the fact was concerned, they could not be deceived, though they might be deceived as to the nature of the cause.

Without martyrdom and also without miracles the conversion which took place between the Day of Pentecost and the Edict of Toleration in 313 was not even conceivable. Let us consider the bond which connects the two together.

The Christian faith itself rests upon two miracles. The first is the assumption of human nature by the Divine Word, the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity, in the womb of the Virgin Mary. This act of the divine condescension is so transcendent in all its bearings as not merely to surpass the order of nature, but to be, as it were, the parent of miraculous power in all that supernatural order which it creates and maintains. It is the fontal source of grace to man, of his first creation in grace, the first Adam himself being the image of the Second who was to be, and for whose sake the whole creation was made. Take away from the Christian faith that “Gospel of Mary” which St. Luke has recorded in the mission of the Angel Gabriel to her, and that faith is not only altered, but it ceases to be. Everything which the Christian believes and hopes depends, in fact, upon that miracle of miracles, the union of the divine nature with the human in the Person of Jesus Christ. Therefore all His children are born of a miracle, nurtured upon a miracle, live and hope and suffer and die in faith of a miracle, so great, so peculiar, so inconceivable beforehand, that all other miracles are but its progeny.

But, secondly, the very existence of this first miracle was guaranteed and made known by another – the resurrection of Jesus Christ in that very Body bearing the marks of the nails and the wound of the spear in which He was crucified. It was faith in this resurrection which sent forth a College of twelve unlettered men to convert the world, and by that faith they converted it, so far at least that the diadem of its emperors was surmounted by the cross of Christ. They and their successors who went forth in the same faith were misused, calumniated, persecuted, tormented to death in every shape and fashion, until Constantine saw the token in the sky and placed it on his banner.

What, then, we have said as to the Incarnation we may also say as to the Resurrection of Christ; take it away, and the Christian people have no longer a foundation on which to rest. They would simply cease to be.

They are, therefore, doubly the children of miracle.

They were thus from the beginning – and they could not but be – instinct with the sense of miracle.

But these two miracles were no less the ground of martyrdom and of all that life, consisting in the endurance and even choice of suffering, hardship, privation of every kind, of which martyrdom is the seal and crown. The connection between miracle and martyrdom seems to be this: The Incarnation of our Lord is the very reason of miraculous power being exhibited in the world, just as His assumption of human nature is itself the miracle of miracles. The purpose of all miracle is to bring home to the creature a special action of the Creator as Governor of the world, but the head and crown as well as the starting-point of such special action is, in our actual world, the miracle of the Incarnation.

Again, the original need of miraculous action springs from the moral darkness superinduced by the Fall, which the Incarnation repairs. The angelic world, while under probation, or any world of rational creatures unfallen, needs no miracles. And all miracles anterior to Christ are part of a chain of events leading on to Him, just as all martyrs before Christ have their reason of existence in Him alone. The occasion of martyrdom is the enmity between the seed of the serpent and the Seed of the Woman, and miracle is from beginning to end the hand of God showing itself in the contest. “All the just,” says St. Augustine,²⁰⁵ “who have been from the beginning of the world have Christ for their Head. For they believed in the future coming of that One whom we believe to have come, and they were healed by faith in the same One by faith in whom we are healed, that He might be head of the whole city Jerusalem.” And the most inspired of Christian poets, when he beheld the great rose of Paradise flowering with the saints of all times, divided them by their preceding or following the coming of Christ:

 
“Da questa parte, onde ’l fiore è maturo
Di tutte le sue foglie, sono assisi
Quei che credettero in Cristo venturo
Dall’ altra parte, onde sono intercisi
Di vôto i semicircoli, si stanno
Quei ch’ a Cristo venuto ebber li visi.”
 

– Paradiso, c. 32, 22.

In like manner the Apostle commences his illustration of the life of faith by the martyrdom of Abel, “who being dead yet speaketh.” Thus the one life pleasing to God from the beginning to the end is identical in its substance, and shows the oneness of the divine plan, commencing its execution in the very family of the first man. There the just loses his life for his justice’ sake, and Abel becomes the type of Christ and of all who follow the Divine Master. So St. John the Baptist, marking the transition from the old covenant to the new, the precursor of our Lord, with the triple aureole of virginity, doctorship, and martyrdom, gives up his life to maintain the sanctity of marriage.

Further, the Passion of our Lord is the source of martyrdom; and union with Him, especially in the act of His Passion, is the cause of all the effects which martyrdom produces. As He said, in reference to His coming Passion, of Himself, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remaineth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit;” so Tertullian said of His people, “The blood of Christians is seed.” In martyrdom lies the perpetuation of faith in Christ. He stands in the midst of the ages, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, working backwards and forwards. The shedding of Abel’s blood, the first blood shed, and the blood of the brother shed by the brother, points to the shedding of Christ’s blood; and so in the interval between Abel and Christ the blood of all the just ones is shed for the hope of Christ. As all martyrdom preceding Him was for the hope of Him, so all following is in remembrance and participation of Him.

There is a strong parallel between miracle and martyrdom as to their principle, their witness, their power, and their perpetuity.

1. First, as to principle. The conception of miracle springs at once from the doctrine of God the Creator, Orderer, and Maintainer of the universe, united with the doctrine of the Fall of man and the ignorance thence superinduced, and requiring to be dissipated by an objective confirmation of the truth. This confirmation is produced when He suspends that order of nature which He has impressed on things. “The divine power can at any time, without prejudice to His providence, do something beyond the order impressed on natural things by God. This is the very thing which He sometimes does to manifest His power. For in no manner can it be better shown that all nature is subject to the divine will than by this, that sometimes He does something beyond the order of nature; for by this it is made to appear that the order of things proceeded from God, not by a necessity of His nature, but by His free-will.”²⁰⁶

On the other hand, the conception of miracles is incompatible with the notion of a power evolving itself by a strict necessity in the universe. This involves at the same time the rejection of the notion of sin as a violation of the eternal law. For the evolution itself is the only law admitted, and is incapable of sin, which arises from the misuse of the liberty of the will. A world evolved by eternal necessity denies any liberty to the will. In this the Positivist and Materialist of the present day only take the position which the Stoic took of old. All the three deny miracle, because they deny creation.

And the principle of martyrdom is the intimate union between Christ and Christians, whereby the Head and His members form one Body. The community in suffering rests on this. At the head of persecution is the statement of our Lord Himself (the narrative of which, it may be remarked, is given three times in the Acts), “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” Thus a martyr said to martyrs, “He who once conquered death for us is ever conquering death in us. You know that you are contending under the eyes of your present Lord; that by the confession of His name you reach His own glory. For He is not as if He was only looking at His servants, but He wrestles Himself, He combats Himself in them; in the contest of our struggle, Himself both crowns and is crowned.”²⁰⁷

The martyr Felicitas underwent in prison the sufferings of premature childbirth. One of the attendants remarked to her, “You who so much show your suffering now, what will you do when you are thrown before the wild beasts, which you despised when you refused to sacrifice?” And she answered, “It is I who suffer now that which I suffer; but then there will be another in me who will suffer for me, because I also shall be suffering for Him.” On which St. Augustine comments: “It was He who caused women to suffer with faith and the courage of men who deigned in His mercy for their sake to be born of a woman… Eve’s penalty was not absent, but Mary’s grace was present. What she owed as a woman was exacted; what she needed in help was given by the Virgin’s Son.”²⁰⁸

2. As to the witness of miracles, in matter of fact the objective proof of our Lord’s mission as Messias and Son of God was based, both in His own life and in the propagation of His faith, upon miracles viewed in a double light – first, as they are in themselves, and secondly, as the fulfilment of prophecy. “To confirm doctrines which surpass natural knowledge He showed visibly works which surpass natural power, by the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, and, what is more wonderful, the inspiration of human minds, so that untaught and simple men, filled with the gift of the Holy Spirit, obtained in an instant the utmost wisdom and readiness of speech; so that not by the violence of arms, not by the promise of pleasures, but amid the tyranny of persecutors, an innumerable multitude, not merely of simple, but of the wisest men was drawn into the Christian faith. They preached doctrines surpassing man’s understanding; they set a restraint on carnal pleasures; they taught contempt for everything that is in the world. It would be the most marvellous of all marvels if the world without miracles had been led to the belief of doctrines so difficult, the working of deeds so arduous, the hoping of rewards so exalted, by simple and ignoble men.”²⁰⁹

The witness of martyrdom is expressed in its very name, that they who suffered death for the sake of Christ were simply called witnesses. The analogy with miracles is very strong indeed, the one being the witness of God attesting the truth of His messengers by visible signs, which suspend or reverse the order which He has Himself established as a general rule; the other being the witness of men who suffer all those things from which the nature of man recoils in order to attest the truth of God.

3. As to the power exercised by miracles over the minds of men, the victory over idolatry and the whole heathen life, which was the reflection of that idolatry, could not have been accomplished – all other powers remaining in the Church – without this one. In fact, a diabolic spiritual power, termed by our Lord “the strong man armed,” being, as the result of the Fall, in possession of his captive, could only be cast out by One stronger than he, the Son of God Incarnate. The series of miracles wrought by His disciples were the arms which He used. His name alone when invoked by them is attested in numberless instances to have had a supernatural effect.

As to the power exercised by martyrdom, the whole history is full of that victory over idolatry and the heathen life which was accomplished by the suffering of our Lord’s disciples in His name and in community with Him. Over and above the effect which the voluntary endurance of suffering for conscience’ sake has upon the minds of men, martyrdom merited the propagation of the faith as if our Lord’s Passion required to be repeated in His members for the growth of His Body. Such is the fact expressed by St. Paul in the words, “I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ in my flesh for His Body, which is the Church.” And, again, “As the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so also by Christ doth our comfort abound.” In this martyrdom threw a light upon the divine government of the world; and as the reversibility of guilt had formed the history of fallen man, so the reversibility of merit formed the history of man redeemed. Thus over against the abyss of judgment lies the abyss of grace, the treasure-house of the Church, of which the King of martyrs holds the key. That treasure-house is the communion of saints. The power of martyrdom is one of its great exhibitions. Its source is the Incarnation of the Son. Taking the mass of sufferings undergone by the mystical Body of Christ in the process of its growth, there is nothing in the web of human guilt, how intricate soever it may be, from the beginning to the end of the world, which has not its counterpart in the reversibility of merit, all derived from the Passion of the Incarnate Son.

4. As to the perpetuity of the miraculous power, the same reason exists through the whole course of the Church’s preaching for the signs in her following them that believe. The promise is most clearly recorded at the conclusion of St. Mark’s Gospel, without limit of time or place. The performance in this first age, when she had to meet all the tyranny of rulers and all the rage of unbelievers, is recorded also. The promise clearly extends to the whole time over which the command relating to it extends: “Go ye unto the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

As to the perpetuity of martyrdom, it is clear, to use St. Paul’s expression, that what is wanting of the sufferings of Christ will not be made up until His Body is completed “in the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

In all these respects the two great powers of miracle and martyrdom, united in their origin, seem to run into and complete each other. The witness of God and the witness of man concur in the formation of the kingdom of His Son.

It may also be noted that all those who reject God as Creator, Judge, and Remunerator proclaim as a first principle that a miracle is impossible, while they have the same dislike to martyrdom as the great adversary is said to have for holy water.

I have now, then, answered the question which I put above – How came the Roman Emperor to allow to Christians the liberty to render to God the things of God, that is, to believe, to worship, and to be governed according to the law of Christ? It was done by an internal action of the Holy Spirit, forming by a process of individual conversion in the minds of an innumerable multitude a certain type of Christian character, an image in each one of the Founder of the line; and at the same time by an external action of the same Holy Spirit co-operating in this conversion “with signs following.” Never before were the divine and the human societies pitted against each other in so absolute a conflict. Perhaps it is even the only period as yet in the 1850 years of Christian life in which the Battle of the Standards, of poverty, affliction, and contempt on the one side, of the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life on the other, has been completely carried out – completely in that the representation on each side embraced the whole society. For if any would not be poor, afflicted, and despised in those times, either they could not become Christians, or becoming so in times of comparative peace, they were speedily scattered by the winnowing flail of persecution. But on the other side, the combative heathenism from Tiberius to Maxentius was pre-eminently corrupt. It should be added, that in the 1850 years, never has there been so astonishing a result as the advance of the Christian Church, from those who met in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost to those who received from Constantine perfect civil freedom to believe that doctrine, to exercise that worship, to be governed by that Episcopate, which formed together the greatest conceivable contradiction to the heathen world of Augustus. It was the result of ten generations, sanctified by suffering and multiplied by martyrdom.

There is another point of view also in which this period should be regarded. What did these champions of conscience do for that very civil order of things to which in their character of Christians they had so often to refuse obedience, and to say simply, in the words of their first leader, “We ought to obey God rather than men”?

They conferred upon all future generations of men an inestimable benefit, for they established the doctrine that the individual man has rights which the collective society of men may not violate. They overthrew the autocracy of the State, which had crushed out the heart of humanity.

During those ages, after the conversion of the original Roman commonwealth into the Cæsarean empire, there was no guarantee of civil liberty. From the city which only refused fire and water to its guiltiest citizens, the Empire had grown into a power wherein a charge of majestas justified the application of every torment to the accused; and the charge of majestas was ever at hand in the case of a Christian. If Augustus, though he slaughtered without mercy when his interests were concerned, studied to give his rule the aspect of moderation, the emperors his successors became more and more uncontrolled. Not only had they legislative power, but the imprisonment and the execution of any obnoxious person was entirely in their hands. In this long period of 284 years, Christians without number suffered loss of goods, confinement in loathsome dungeons, separation from their families, and finally death itself under torment and insult, because they would worship Christ as God, because they would not swear by the genius of the Emperor, because they would not burn a few grains of incense on the altar of an idol, because one who had dedicated herself to God would not marry, because a soldier would not carry out an impious command, for any of the innumerable reasons for which they were offensive to the world, which the world called “their hatred of the human race,” that being the phrase of the day for the Kulturkampf.

Thus they suffered and they died, and in so suffering and dying they constructed a new basis of civil liberty. For this it was which the Church’s creation of the Spiritual Power betokened. It meant the establishment of the Christian conscience not merely in the individual, but in the great world-wide corporation of the Church, which thus formed an impregnable citadel of defence against civil absolution, by cutting off from it the triple domain of the Church’s priesthood, teaching, and jurisdiction. What heathenism had destroyed by corrupting the worship of the one true God into a multitude of false gods, the Church restored by setting up the worship of the Blessed Trinity; and the priesthood, which unutterable degradations had humbled in the dust of human passions and vices, the Church took from the Body of her Lord, dyed red in blood, and invested with the imperishable sanctity of the Priest after the order of Melchisedek; and that kingship which Nero and Domitian, Elagabalus and Galerius, had stained with unspeakable crimes, it renewed in the example of those princes over all the earth who ruled not as the kings of the Gentiles, but as Fathers in God. Christian monarchy is the Church’s work, and the Christian State became possible because the Christian people in times of authority which was cruel, and of majesty which was selfish, had shown the example of rulers who governed for their people’s sake, governed by the authority of One who created the government of His people when He said by the Lake of Galilee to the disciple who should be the type and mould and origin of the episcopate for ever, “If thou lovest Me, feed My sheep.”

This was a purifying and ennobling of civil society wrought by the Church over and above its spiritual end. The kingdom of heaven, whilst it limited, also invigorated the earthly kingdom, showing that Christians alone are freemen, by exercising the highest of all freedoms in belief, in worship, and in obedience to spiritual government, and in the conduct which is their united result.