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The question of Patripassian Monarchianism, or to give it its shorter
name Modalism, [ ] was not the only controversy in which the pope, St.
Calixtus I, was involved. In that controversy he had had for his
adversary the subtle, scholarly, and irascible Hippolytus. In the next,
which raged round changes in the Church's penitential discipline, his
action roused all the bitterness of Tertullian as well. Few men have
been called upon to face two such adversaries in a short four years.
Tertullian, at the moment when he composed his bitter attack on St.
Calixtus I, was nearing the end of his long and eventful career. He was
born at Carthage apparently about the year 160. His father was a
centurion, and Tertullian was born and bred a Pagan. It was, however,
the Law and not the Army which attracted Tertullian, and it is the
Roman lawyer who speaks through all his varied writing. He was
converted to Christianity, became a priest of the Church of Carthage,
and from 197 he is, for a good quarter of a century, the central figure
of literary activity in the Latin Church. Tertullian is always the
Roman, sober, practical, contemptuous of philosophy and abstraction. He
is, too, always the lawyer, with the lawyer's failing of
over-refinement, of quibbling even, in his destructive criticism and in
his advocacy. But never was any lawyer less hindered by the dry
formalities of his knowledge. For Tertullian's learned advocacy is
fired by one of the most passionate of temperaments. Thence results an
apologetic of unexampled vigour and violence. Tertullian is master of
all the controversial talents, "the most prolific, the most personal of
all these Latins", with a gift of apt and biting phrase that sets him
side by side with Tacitus himself. Of no man has it ever been truer
that the style is the man; and in the works of this convert genius lie
the foundations of the theological language of the Latin Church.
Christianity, for Tertullian, is not the crown of all philosophical
history, it is not a light to make clear riddles hitherto obscure, but
a fact to be proved and a law to be explained and obeyed. Into that
explanation he put all the native rigour of his own harsh temperament,
all the inflexibility of the civil law in which he was a master. From
the chance that it was Tertullian who was the pioneer of the Latin
theological language, it gained that tradition of clear cut definition,
and the beginnings of that store of terms incapable of any but the one
interpretation, which, from the beginning, saved the Western Church
centuries of domestic controversy and disputation.
Tertullian's temperament proved, in practice, too much for his logic;
and in Montanism his strongly individualistic nature found a home more
congenial than the religion of the Church. The Montanist Tertullian
spent the last half of his life in reviling the Church as bitterly as
he had previously reviled, on its behalf, Pagans and heretics alike. He
had been a Catholic perhaps fifteen or sixteen years when Montanism
began to seduce his splendid intelligence. Ten years later, when the
decree of St. Calixtus roused him to write the De Pudicitia, he was a
fully-fledged member of the sect, and so great was his influence upon
it that, in subsequent years, it was as Tertullianists that the
Montanists were known in Africa.
But it was as a Catholic that he wrote the greatest of all his works
the De Praescriptione Hereticorum -- a statement of the old argument
which rules heresy out of court unheard, self-condemned, because
self-confessed as an innovation. It is St. Irenaeus' argument from
tradition, but cast this time in legal form, and gaining enormously in
power from Tertullian's superb exposition. Other works poured from his
versatile mind, his supple mastery of the old Latin tongue bending it
to new uses. Instructions for catechumens, apologies addressed to
Pagans, ascetical exhortations for the faithful, and everywhere
controversy, panegyrics of virginity and of that patience in which,
rather touchingly, he notes himself so sadly lacking "Miserrimus ego
semper aeger caloribus impatientiae." Perhaps Tertullian's greatest
service to the progress of theological science is his exposition of the
mysteries in the Divine Trinity. The attempts of all his predecessors
in this field, from St. Justin downwards, are easily surpassed; as
Tertullian surpasses, too, all later writers until Nicea. More
convincingly, and more clearly, than any of them does he argue the
eternal divinity of the Logos, His origin from the substance of the
Father, His unity of nature with the Father, and His real distinctness
from the Father. More clearly than any writer, Greek or Latin, before
St. Athanasius, he explains the necessity of belief in the divinity of
the Holy Ghost. But it is his exposition of the mutual relations
between the Divine Three, and its unembarrassed understanding that
there is no conflict between the truths of Their unity and of the
Trinity, that is Tertullian's chief glory as a theologian. All his ease
of careful analysis finds scope in the distinction he draws between a
division of the Divine Substance and its organisation. The resulting
terms of that organisation he recognises as spiritual substances,
divine in nature; and, first of all writers, he gives them the name
persons. "Unity of Substance, Trinity of Persons" the classic formula
in which the traditional faith finds reasoned expression is of
Tertullian's very minting. A hundred years before the event he thus
anticipates Nicea, and by his immense influence wherever the Latin
tongue prevails, he saves the West from years of subtle controversy and
disunion. [ ]
That a power to forgive sins, and to reconcile the sinner to God, was
left to the Church by its Founder was undoubtedly part of the Tradition
from the very beginning. " Whose sins you shall forgive they are
forgiven them," He had said, "Whose sins you shall retain they are
retained," and "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound
also in Heaven, whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed
also in Heaven." In St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians we have at
least one record of the Apostle's use of his powers. A generation later
we can, however, note a tendency to require that the Church be an
assembly of saints, from which all who sin after their baptism should
be rigorously expelled; a tendency to demand absolute sinlessness as a
normal condition of membership. Baptism could not be repeated.
Therefore let the baptized be warned. Should they again fall into sin,
the Church had no second baptism to raise them a second time. To this
ideal the evidence of everyday offered a contradiction of fact. There
were Christians who sinned and sinned gravely, and who yet did not fall
from their faith in Christ. Did their sins really matter? Gnostic
theories that matter and spirit were independent the one of the other,
so that sin, deriving from matter, could not affect spirit, would deny
to post-baptismal sin any importance at all. The more prevalent opinion
in the Church judged it with the utmost severity. Such literature, of
the generations immediately following that of the Apostles, as has
survived is filled with evidence of this fact. The tendency is to
abolish the distinction between precept and counsel, and to impose both
alike, as of obligation, on all Christians. In nothing was the new
rigorism more rigorous than in what related to sex. Not only, for such
extremists, is virginity preferable to marriage, but marriage itself is
considered a bar to sanctity. "There is no resurrection except for such
as keep their virginity" one pseudo-Pauline maxim declares. True
Christianity implies perpetual virginity. Baptism is equivalent to a
vow of chastity. Those who uphold these opinions are the Encratites --
never a sect as such, though more than one of the greatest of them
ultimately fell away from the Church, but a group whose ideas were for
long a feature of public opinion to be constantly reckoned with. Their
views on the Church's policy in the matter of forgiving post-baptismal
sin were, naturally, extremely rigid.
The Encratite view of things was not, however, the only view to find
expression in the second century. There was another school of thought
which kept nearer to the spirit of the Gospel. Its chief exponent, in
the literature of the time which has come down to us, is the brother of
the pope, St. Pius I (140-154), a priest of the Roman Church, Hermas by
name. His book-the Shepherd -- is a popular work, practical not
speculative, and its aim is to bring home to the ordinary man the truth
that there is always pardon for the sinner who repents -- pardon at any
rate once. Nor is there any mention of sins so great that they are
beyond pardon. The sinner repents and God receives him back. Between
the terms of the process a series of actions intervenes. The sinner,
turning once more to God, re-enters the Church by acts of penance. But,
for Hermas, once and once only is there for the sinner this way of
forgiveness. The Encratite current runs too strongly for even Hermas to
disregard it. None the less he is a witness, in a question where
sources are so scarce as hardly to exist at all, that, in the Roman
Church, Encratite theories were viewed with disfavour.
The rigorist reactions from the everyday immorality of Pagan life might
carry away the enthusiastic Christian to assail even the lawful use of
what he saw so generally abused. Hermas is a witness that not all were
carried away, though all perhaps felt the strength of the tide at its
full; and that the Roman Church continued to teach that to repentance
sin is forgiven
Between the Shepherd of Hermas and the decree of Calixtus I which
roused all Tertullian's cantankerousness, there is a period of some
seventy years. How the discipline had developed in that time, in some
places, can be learnt from a book of Tertullian's written to instruct
candidates for Baptism, the De Penitentia. With regard to sins
committed after Baptism he teaches the same doctrine as Hermas, but
without the hesitation which appears in the Shepherd. There still
remains one more opportunity of pardon, and it is given through an
external ritual which Tertullian names -- the Exomologesis. This is a
laborious, public, penitential act, which the repentant sinner
voluntarily performs in atonement for his sin. The sin is declared to
the bishop, he fixes the nature and the duration of the penance to be
performed, and on its completion receives back the sinner into full
communion. Tertullian himself describes these penitents, clad in a
special dress, living under a rigorous regime of abstinence and fast,
ashes on their heads, their bodies uncared for, who kneel at the door
of the church beseeching the prayers of the faithful as they pass in to
the services.
The Exomologesis lasted a longer or shorter time according to the sin.
Of itself it was merely an offering to God in satisfaction for the
wrong done. But since the Church associated herself with the penitent
who undertook the penance at the bidding of the bishop, the discipline
acquired a new value. The intervention of the Church made it
"efficacious" for, Tertullian explains, the Church is Christ and His
mediation is infallible in its effect. Two last points of Tertullian's
description are to be noticed. Pardon is granted through the
Exomologesis once only. The sinner who relapses must, thereafter,
negotiate his own pardon with the mercy of God. Nor is the Exomologesis
available for every kind of sin. Three sins, notably, are excluded --
idolatry, murder, and fornication. The Church does not teach that these
sins are unforgivable. Merely she will not take it on herself to
forgive those who commit them. They may be admitted to the ranks of the
penitent, there to remain for the rest of their life. Their penance
will avail them much in the sight of God, but the Church does not
formally receive them back into her communion.
It was this reservation in the discipline of the Exomologesis that
Calixtus I now decided to alter. This particular reservation has no
warrant in Scripture, nor does Hermas make any mention of it. In all
probability it was an ecclesiastical regulation of the late second
century, a special provision provoked, it may be, by some special
circumstances of contemporary Pagan morality. Whatever its origin, the
restriction added to the severity of the existing discipline which,
Tertullian is our witness, was already beginning to defeat its own
ends. For very few indeed were they who were prepared to submit to it.
Whence a practice of deferring Baptism, and a crop of secret sinners.
Those who knelt in sackcloth among the penitents were not, apparently,
the only ones guilty of sin. More than one of those at whose knees the
penitents besought prayers might fittingly, in his turn, have
prostrated himself in the dust.
The system was ceasing to fulfil its purpose, and Calixtus I prepared
to modify it. He announced that, henceforward, sin in sexual matters
would also be forgiven through the discipline of the Exomologesis. No
longer would such sinners be permanently cut off from the Sacraments,
but, their penance duly performed, they too would regain their place
among the faithful. Whereupon Tertullian, and Hippolytus, attacked the
pope bitterly and maliciously.
It is important to notice the grounds Calixtus cites as authority for
his action. They are quite simply Our Lord's words to his predecessor
Peter " Upon this rock I will build My Church, to thee will I give the
keys of the kingdom of heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth
shall be bound also in heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth
shall be loosed also in heaven." Calixtus explicitly claims to be the
present heir of Peter's prerogative, and on this basis he acts.
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