Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

To apply this more particularly, it means that the State, in its administration of all temporal things, is bound incessantly to have regard to the free exercise by the Spiritual Power of its authority over spiritual things. It must allow that power to administer the whole work of the priesthood, and the whole work of the teaching, with that liberty of internal government which constitutes its jurisdiction, the seat of its royalty. It is not the place here to enumerate in detail how much that involves. It is enough to say that the ordinary action of the State and the ordinary action of the Church run daily into each other, as being concerned with the same man and the same society of men; and accordingly, that the allowing such a liberty to the Church by the State carries with it great consideration and regard for the Church by the State. But such a consideration and regard are quite incompatible with separate action of the two Powers in their respective spheres. An instance in point would be the State compelling a subject, who is a minister of the Church, to become a soldier. It is a purely natural right of the State to require the service of the subject for such a purpose. It is a purely spiritual right of the Church to have the use of her ministers for her own work. The use of the former right without consideration of the latter would constitute a separate action of the State in its sphere. But it would be at the same time an act of the utmost hostility on the part of the State to the Church. And other instances of the same kind present themselves through the whole domain of things which, in themselves, are purely temporal or purely spiritual. Besides these there is the class of mixed things, and, as one of them, let us take education.

Education, so far as it embraces instruction in the several arts and sciences which subserve man’s natural life, belongs to the domain of the State; so far as it embraces the formation of the spiritual character in man, which includes instruction in religion, and that not only as it concerns dogma, but also philosophy and science, belongs to the domain of the Church. If the State exercises its natural right over education with regard to the former, without allowing the supernatural right of the Church over the latter, which in itself would be no more than a separate action in its own sphere, it would constitute, at the same time, a complete infringement of the Church’s rights in her spiritual power of teaching and jurisdiction.

This is enough to show that the separate action of the two Powers in their respective spheres leads to the disjunction of man’s natural life from his supernatural end. This was not the intention of God in creating the two Powers, and placing man’s life under their joint government.

5. Another relation between the two Powers which may be conceived, is that of hostility upon the part of the State to the Church. This cannot be reciprocal. The Church can indeed and must resist, with her own weapons, unlawful aggression against the exercise of her rights in administering the “things of God,” but she cannot war against the State as such, because it is in her sight “the minister of God.” The hostility of the State which invades the Church’s exercise of her Priesthood, Teaching, and Jurisdiction constitutes persecution. There are many degrees of this. A heathen State may aim at the complete destruction of the Christian Church within its borders, as at times the Roman emperors did. A Christian State may also vex and hamper with every form of impediment the exercise of the Church’s powers. A State which has been Christian, becoming heretical or apostate, may assault the Church with a hatred, combined with deceit, which shall surpass the malignity of the Roman State of old or the heathen State at any time. In the course of centuries every degree of persecution has been exercised by the State, heathen, Christian, heretical, or apostate, against the Church, by the permission of the divine Providence; but no one will pretend to say that such a relation as hostility on the part of the State, and of suffering on the part of the Church, is the normal relation intended by God in the establishment of the two Powers. On the contrary, the States which persecute the Church, while they fulfil the divine purpose for its trial and purification, incur punishment in many ways for their crime against God in assaulting His kingdom, and, if they persevere, have been and are to be rooted up and destroyed.

6. In contrast to such relation between the two Powers, let us look for a moment at the divine Idea as it is thrown out in strong projection upon the background of ages. We have human government founded indeed by God at and with the commencement of the race, and continued by the strong sanction of His power ever since, through the dispersion, through the various races of men, one rising and another falling; human government possessed in common by a vast number of sovereignties, great and small, particular in place, with changing constitutions, everything about them, the people who bear them, the boundaries within which they flourish, the laws by which they are administered, shifting and transitory: no one of these sovereignties having a claim to say that it was founded by God, inasmuch as they all spring out of a long series of conquests and changes which succeed after the original patriarchal rule. These are distinctively the kingdoms of men, and in them is fulfilled, with a little longer range, what the poet says of each human generation —

“Like leaves on trees the race of man is found;”

the only thing about them which is not shifting and not transitory is the one thing which is of divine appointment, government itself. And in the midst of these nations, borne upon them, and shaken indeed, but imperturbable amid their fluctuations, behold the one government founded immediately by Christ in St. Peter, as no other sovereignty has been founded; in St. Peter, made by express language His Viceregent. Here is one sovereignty, universal in time and place, with no changing constitution, after the fashion of its human shadows, which are a royalty one day, a democracy another day, an empire a third, but one and the same for ever. Here is the kingdom of Christ.

But that which rules the relation of the one kingdom and the many kingdoms to each other, is the end for which they are constructed: human government, the one abiding because divine element in the many kingdoms, exists for the peace, the order, and the prosperity of man’s life on earth. But this, its highest end, is subject, like all the natural goods of man, to a higher end, the eternal beatitude of man. In the last resort temporal government itself was originally founded and actually exists only for this purpose. But the one kingdom of Christ is directed immediately to this very purpose. Because there is an inseparable relation of all earthly things to that highest end, therefore each of these temporal kingdoms and the one spiritual kingdom have a bond between them which cannot be broken. If it were not for this, their range is so apart from each other, their powers so independent of each other, that they would speedily part company. The strong hand of God has joined them to draw together the chariot of human government by the yoke of the last end.

How entirely independent in themselves are their constituent parts! On the one hand, earthly might, grounded indeed in right but ruling by force, cemented by riches, carrying the sword of life and death in its hands, exulting in all the vast accumulation of human arts and sciences, the work of civilised man through long ages; on the other hand, a royal priesthood, with a divine truth, carried through the ages by an order of men generated spiritually in virtue of the consecration once given by the hands of Christ to Peter and his brethren. The temporal government marked by wealth and force; the spiritual by poverty and weakness. Yet both reign over the soul and body of man individual and collective. These powers are both ordained by God; can they be also ordained with co-ordination?

The following passage of St. Thomas²⁷ leads, I think, to a full answer to this question: —

“As the life by which men live well here on earth is as means to the end of that blessed life which we hope for in heaven, so whatever particular goods are obtained by man’s agency, as, for instance, riches, profits of trade, health, eloquence, or learning, have for their end the good of the mass. If then, as we have before shown, the person charged with the care of the last end ought to be the superior of those who are charged with means to an end, and to direct them by his authority, it is evident from what we have said that, just as the king ought to be subject to that domain and regimen which is administered by the office of the priesthood, so he ought to preside over all human offices and regulate them by his supreme authority. Now whoever has the duty of doing anything which stands to another thing as means to an end, is bound to see that his work is suitable to that end; so the armourer furbishes his sword for fighting, and the builder arranges his house to be lived in. Since, then, the beatitude of heaven is the end of that life by which we live at present virtuously, the king’s office requires him to promote such a life in his people as is suitable for the attainment of blessedness in heaven, by ordaining what tends thither, and by forbidding, so far as is possible, the contrary.”

The king will here stand for whoever has sovereign authority. That sovereign authority therefore is itself subject to the law of God through all its exercise. The bearer of that law of God is the Spiritual Power which stands over against all sovereigns, in all countries, with the commission placed expressly in its hands by Christ. So far, therefore, as the law of God is concerned, which is precisely the same for the individual and the multitude, the sovereign is in every country subject to it, and the more stringently because, in the words of St. Thomas, he presides over all human offices. These by their nature are subject to the superhuman office.

This is the indirect Power over temporal things possessed by the Royal Priesthood which has been instituted by Christ. The indirect Power rests simply on the supernatural end of man, and cannot be denied without the denial of that supernatural end. And on account of this end the relation between the two Powers cannot be one of co-ordination, and must be one of subordination.

Nothing can be further removed from the confusion of the two Powers, or from the absorption of the one by the other, than this Idea of their relation. For it is a purely spiritual power which belongs to the priesthood: any power which it exerts over temporal things is indirect, based simply upon the subjection of those temporal things to the bearer of the divine law; and therefore this indirect Power extends over all temporal things without exception, but over all only so far as they concern the last end of human life.

The sum is this. God is the one Creator, Designer, and Ruler of the order of Nature and the order of Grace, and in both has one end in view, the glorification of Himself by His creatures; which glorification in beings possessed of reason can only consist in the knowledge and love of His infinite perfections.

There is no power on earth of man over man but that which is derived from God, either mediately or immediately; and therefore every power is, strictly speaking, vicarious, a portion of His lordship over the human race, committed to man, and subject to the end of His glorification by His creature: in which is comprehended the ultimate happiness of that creature; since that happiness is itself the exercise of his mind and his will in knowing and loving his Creator, so that God’s honour is the creature’s bliss.

But, further, the order of nature was in its origin united with the order of grace, and subordinated to it. The intervention of the Fall did not dissolve this subordination. The long ages of the Revolt only led up to the Restoration, which was prophesied at the moment of the Revolt, and intended even before it. Thus the Power divinely instituted to carry on the human race – the Power of civil government – the power which represents God in the order of nature, is yet subordinated by Him to the power which He Himself has instituted in the order of Grace.

This second Power at the time of the Restoration springs directly from the Person of the Son; who as He was sent by the Father, so sent His apostles; but He conveyed that power especially to Peter and his heirs in the fulness of a royal priesthood which teaches His faith for ever; so that no power on earth exists so directly instituted by God, and so manifestly vicarious of God’s own power, as that of Peter, viewed in himself and in his heirs; and given with the express promise that all the power of the enemy shall not prevail against it.

In all this God, who cannot be at variance with Himself, made the two Powers to help each other, conferring upon each distinct offices, which concern respectively the natural and the supernatural life of man, but likewise subordinating the natural to the supernatural end in the person and race of the Second Adam, as He had subordinated it in the person of the First Adam.

One of the greatest saints and rulers, who shines in the firmament of the Church with almost unparalleled lustre, has expressed this union under the image of a human body, seeing the natural light by two eyes, but directed by one mind, the mind of Christ. He is the one Head of the two Powers, ruling in temporal sovereignty by the hand of kings, in spiritual by the Priesthood which He has inaugurated. If we imagine the one mind of the God-man thus ruling the Christendom which He has made out of Himself by the two eyes of the kingdom and the priesthood, we reach the divine ideal of the relation between the two Powers. Thus St. Gregory VII. observes in his letter to Rodolph, Duke of Suabia, A.D. 1073:²⁸ “The sovereign reigns most gloriously, and the Church’s vigour is strengthened, when priesthood and empire are joined in the unity of concord. There should be no fiction, no dross, in that concord. Let us then confer together, for as the human body is directed in the natural light by two eyes, so when these two dignities are united in the harmony of pure religion, the body of the Church is shown to be ruled and enlightened with spiritual light. Let us give our best attention to these matters, so that when you have well entered into what is our wish, if you approve of our reasons as just, you may agree with us. But if you would add or subtract anything from the line of conduct which we have marked out, we shall be ready, if God permit, to consent to your counsels.” The words “if God permit” indicate very gently that subordination, grounded upon the pre-eminence of the divine law, and the divine Ruler who upbears it, which, in case of difference, the natural must yield to the supernatural authority. There is the fullest recognition that to temporal sovereignty all things belong which concern natural right. In these few words I think that St. Gregory VII. has summed up the settled view, policy, and practice of all his predecessors and of all his successors upon the relation between the two Powers, and the importance of their agreement for the good of human society. Never has any one of them denied to human sovereignty the exercise of all those rights which belong to natural law. Never has any one of them failed to maintain that all things which belong to natural law are subordinate to those things which touch the salvation of man, and accordingly that when the two orders of things come into conflict, the natural must yield to the supernatural. It is obvious to add how many mixed things there must be, which enter into both domains, and the treatment of which will affect the harmony between the two Powers.

From all the above it results that the denial of the supernatural end in man, individual or collective, constitutes that which is the complete heathenism. In proportion as the bearers of the Temporal Power have more or less approached this heathenism has their opposition to the Spiritual Power been more or less intense; in proportion as they have acknowledged and acted with a due regard to the supernatural end, they have also acknowledged the Spiritual Power and acted in harmony with it.

The perfect ideal relation between the two Powers has been expressed by the term of marriage, in which Christ, the celestial Bridegroom in the Spiritual Power, espouses the temporal order. This image is in remarkable accordance with the origin of the race, and with the prefiguration of Christ in Adam. It is as if the divine order at the Fall fell into the background, and in its slumber the human was taken out of it. But when the human race awoke in the new Adam, the divine order greeted the human as bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, and wooed it to rule the world with it in the stable union of wedlock. This image at least may serve to indicate the various relations which have hitherto existed between the two Powers. It is itself the ideal relation intended by God. Then, as a matter of fact, during the first three centuries the Church, with her divine claims, turns to the Temporal Power inviting it to an alliance. This is the Church’s relation to the heathen State, as it were the time of wooing. Next the Temporal Power accepted this invitation and united itself with the Church, so that each preserving its own domain, they ruled the world together. That was the relation of the Church to the truly Catholic State, a marriage disturbed by no division and separation, when unity of faith preserved the marriage vow unbroken. Each then, indeed, might have misunderstandings, because the bearers of the two Powers, like husband and wife, are human beings; but since there was the stable will in both to preserve the marriage vow undefiled in Christ, such misunderstandings were easily overcome. Perhaps this expresses the whole medieval condition of things in this respect as accurately as can be done. Thirdly, the Temporal Power divorced itself from the Church’s faith, and from obedience to her in divine things; that is the state of broken wedlock. It has various decrees. First, the housewife divorces her husband and breaks the marital band: that in itself constitutes the apostate State. Secondly, she dissolves the marriage by entering into connection with another, to whom she gives power over the household, and with his aid oppresses the lawful husband: that is the position of the heretical State. Thirdly, the housewife will no longer tolerate the single rule of him who has alienated her from her husband; she is willing to have more than one temporary connection, and amongst the many perhaps the husband, if he will accept such terms: that is the position of the indifferent State. Thus we get from this image of marriage²⁹ an adequate measure of all the relations which have hitherto subsisted between Church and State.

But the purpose of the foregoing chapter has been to set forth the ideal relation between the two Powers intended by God in the Incarnation and the Passion of His Son, and springing out of the junction of these two mysteries of His love.

CHAPTER III

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE

Transmission of Spiritual Authority from the Person of Our Lord to Peter and the Apostles, as set forth in the New Testament

The Spiritual Power rests for its origin, so far as all Christians are concerned, upon the transmission of spiritual authority from the Person of our Lord to Peter and the Apostles.

That transmission runs up as a fact by a living unbroken line of men to our Lord Himself. It subsists as a kingdom subsists. As the governments of England, or France, or Russia, or China, occupy a portion of the earth, and by that fact are recognised quite independently of any records which attest their rise and growth, so the far greater and more widely spread government of the Church exists, and is in full daily action, independently of any records which attest its origin. Day by day in the sacrament of Baptism it admits children into the Christian covenant; day by day upon myriads of altars, from the rising to the setting sun, it offers the unbloody sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ; day by day in unnumbered confessionals it exercises in binding and loosing the sacrament of Penance; day by day its priests teach, support, console, uphold, in ways which it would exhaust the power of language to describe, a multitude of its people. This is its vital force as a kingdom, which it has gone on exerting for eighteen hundred and fifty years without a moment’s suspension. This vital force does not proceed from any record which attests it: it is not stored up in any book, but in a divine presence resting on a living succession of men, which perpetuates itself – which, as a fact, goes on increasing in volume and in the effects which it produces from age to age.

Nevertheless, it is desirable to draw out as accurately as we can the account of the first transmission of that spiritual authority by which this kingdom exists, as we have it recorded for us in the writings of the New Testament. For this purpose I shall quote the terms which express it as given in each of the four Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul and in the Apocalypse.

First of all is the institution of that Priesthood which supports the whole spiritual superstructure, and from which, as the stem, all its branches spring. And this is seen to take place at a moment when our Lord’s Passion may be said to have begun – to be, as it were, the first act of it. The fullest record we have is that given by St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which runs thus: (1 Cor. xi. 23) “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you: the Lord Jesus, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread, and giving thanks, broke, and said, Take ye, and eat: this is My Body which shall be delivered for you: this do for the commemoration of Me. In like manner also the chalice, after He had supped, saying, This chalice is the new testament in My Blood: this do ye, as often as ye shall drink, for the commemoration of Me.” The Apostle adds in His own words that this was an everlasting memorial of the Lord’s death, to continue until His second coming, and that it so contained the Lord’s Body and Blood that he who ate or drank unworthily was guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord. “For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink this chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord until He come. Therefore, whosoever shall eat this bread or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord.”

St. Luke in the Gospel mentions the institution in terms similar to those of St. Paul, especially in that he uses in respect of the Body the sacrificial words, “Do or offer this in commemoration of Me,” which St. Paul uses of the chalice also, while St. Luke omits them. St. Matthew and St. Mark record it more briefly still, not giving the sacrificial words in either case; and St. John passes over the institution itself of the Blessed Sacrament, while he adds very largely to the record of what was said by our Lord on the eve of his Passion, and gives three whole chapters which might almost be considered as a comment upon that act of divine love. Indeed, the opening words, “I am the true Vine,” seem to point to the rite as having just been accomplished, and to give a divine interpretation of the graces stored up in it. On the whole, it must be said of these four accounts, even including that of St. Paul, that they are rather an allusion to a thing otherwise well known to those for whom it was written than a description of it. When St. Paul wrote, the Priesthood and the Sacrifice had been in daily operation for twenty-five or thirty years, and every Christian knew by the evidence of his senses the full detail, both as to Priesthood and to Sacrament, of that to which reference was made. This is a consideration which it is requisite to bear in mind. Nothing could be further removed from the truth than to suppose that we were intended to obtain our knowledge of what the Priesthood, the Divine Sacrifice, and the Blessed Sacrament were, merely or mainly from the record of them in the Gospel narrative. When this was first published in writing, they were institutions upon which the Church had been already founded; every detail of them was imprinted upon the heart of every Christian, associated with his daily life, and enshrined in his practice. To a heathen reading the Gospel, the words, “Do this in commemoration of Me,” might be an enigma; while to a Christian they carried the power of which his whole spiritual being was the growth.

The institution of the Blessed Sacrament and of the Priesthood which is to offer the Sacrifice is enacted by our Lord on the eve of His Passion before the Apostles collected together, as He is about to make the offering in commemorating which forever, until His final coming, the Priesthood consists. Thus the moment of the institution is so chosen as to connect it most intimately not only with His Person, but with that act of our Lord wherein He is our High Priest, and in reference to which His own words of institution carry so deep a significance. That which was given by our Lord to His Apostles, that which they were to receive themselves and give to others to the end of the world, was precisely that which was to be offered on the same day for the sin of the world, which is very exactly intimated in the tense used in the original; not a future but a present tense: “Take, eat: this is My Body which is being broken for you;” as if the action of His immolation had begun.

As the whole divine mission of our Lord is collected up in his Priesthood, and no less the whole power which He left to His Church, every circumstance of time, place, and occasion which belongs to its institution has to be noted, and this in particular, that it is bestowed before His death, and that it is the only power which is recorded to have been actually bestowed before it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that His death is the crowning act of the eucharistic institution, and accompanies the institution, understanding in this sense the words of St. John, “Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should pass out of this world to the Father, He loved them unto the end,” words by which he introduces the account of that last evening of our Lord’s life.

The basis of the whole structure being thus laid in the act which began our Lord’s Passion and commemorates it for ever, we proceed to the testimony of the several Gospels as to the investiture of the Church’s rulers which followed the Passion.

1. The words in which St. Matthew records the transmission of spiritual power from the Person of our Lord after His resurrection are the following: – “The eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them… And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All power is given to Me in heaven and in earth. Go forth, therefore, and make disciples all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.”

The power thus given, as recorded by St. Matthew, comes direct from Christ, as an outflowing of His all-power in heaven and on earth: it is an universal power, co-extensive with all the purposes for which the Church has been created, and enduring so long as the Church endures, through the accompanying presence of the Lord; and it is given to the Apostles collectively as to one body.

But St. Matthew, in a former part of his Gospel, had recorded a most remarkable and singular promise made to Peter, or rather a group of four promises forming one mass: the first, that he should be the Rock on which Christ would build His Church; the second, that against this the gates of hell should not prevail; the third, that Christ would give to him the keys of the kingdom of heaven; the fourth, that whatsoever he should bind on earth should be bound in heaven, and whatsoever he should loose on earth should be loosed in heaven. Matthew (xviii. 17, 18) had also recorded, a little later, a promise made to the Apostles collectively, in which our Lord, after referring to the Church as an authoritative tribunal for all His people, had added, “Amen, I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven.” This promise then contained a part of the fourfold promise already made to Peter, with the limitation, however, not only that it was made to the Apostles conjointly, whereas it had been made to Peter singly, but also that it was detached from the other part of the promise so given to Peter. With respect to the first point, a power vested in a Body, with the condition that it be exercised by common consent, differs greatly from the same power vested in the Head of that Body, to be exercised by him singly. It differs, as far as the conception of aristocracy differs from the conception of monarchy. And the second point above noted, that the promise thus given to the Apostles is detached from the other parts of the promise which had been given to Peter, corroborates this distinction. The powers which indicate monarchy lie in those parts of the promise which were not given to the Apostles conjointly.

The whole testimony of Matthew, therefore, consists in the promise of powers which he records to have been made before the Resurrection, and in the giving of powers which he records to have been made after it.