| ### CHAPTER 4: THE CRISES OF THE THIRD CENTURY ###  |

| #### INTRODUCTION |

| #### #### The history of the Church in the second century is very largely the history of its first contacts with the Pagan religions of the time. The effect of that meeting is to bring out, ever more clearly, the new religious thing's well defined form. The reaction by which it emerges unchanged -- and alone unchanged -- from that syncretist century of a hundred religious enthusiasms, is spontaneous. The Church does not find it necessary to add either to its traditional faith, or to the already recognised jurisdiction of its rulers, in order to stem the development within its walls of theories alien to its nature. Sedet aeternumque sedebit -- for such crises was it built. They have been no more than the occasion for its essential nature to show itself in function. They leave the Church no different, save, perhaps, for a clearer consciousness of its own nature and powers. The stress of the century which culminates in the Adversus Haereses of St. Irenaeus was due, primarily, to the influence on the Church of forces bred elsewhere. It was an attempt from outside to pull the Church into line with the day's religious fashions. In the century which follows St. Irenaeus the crisis is wholly different. Catholics are its authors; and the struggle is one for mastery between the episcopate and individuals who, by reason of their theological skill or of the sacrifices they have made for the faith, claim for themselves and their opinions a deciding voice -- as of right -- in matters of discipline that involve points of belief. #### It is one of the fortunate accidents of the story of the next eighty years (190-270) that these disputes involve the Roman Church, whose history over a continuous period of years is now, for the first time, revealed. As the troubles of the second century are a means to inform us what contemporary Catholics believed about the nature of Catholicism, so those of the third century throw a flood of light for us on the position, already traditional, of the Roman Church within the great whole. They supply a commentary of fact to St. Irenaeus' theory, and we are thereby enabled to see at work that superior authority which he noted as the Roman See's peculiar privilege. There is a dispute concerning the calendar, disputes on the explanations of the mysteries of faith, disputes about changes in discipline, and disputes which raise the fundamental question of the relations of the Roman Church to the rest. We meet the first of the anti-popes, and the first schisms in the Roman Church itself. At the same time, thanks to the genius of Plotinus, a last attempt is made to infuse life into Paganism- an attempt which is, also, bitterly anti-Christian. A last new religious revival from the East threatens yet another delay to the Pagan's realisation that Christianity or nothing is his choice. At Alexandria one of the greatest geniuses of all time essays a vast synthesis of philosophy and Christian learning, and founds a tradition of theology which is to endure for centuries. ####  |