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Le milieu paien, cet immense ocean de superstitions et de reves que le
courant chretien dut traverser sans s'y meler. [ ]
THE current was threefold. It was a revealed doctrine, it was a thing
organised, and it was a special way of life. So far we have been
concerned with the fortunes of the doctrine and of the means divinely
devised for its propaganda and protection as the current moves slowly
through the ocean. The study is incomplete if it neglects some
description of how the ideal of Christian life fared during these first
momentous centuries.
The foundation of that life was the spirit of renunciation, of good
things for the better, of all things for the sake of God, as the
gospels describe it. For some of the Christians this knows no limits.
Property, marriage, life itself they will gladly renounce to give
themselves more fully to the following of Christ, Who is from the
beginning the one centre of their new religious life. Others give up
less, but something each must give up, for in each disciple there must
be that permanent willingness to renounce whatever is asked, whenever
it is asked. Renunciation is not cultivated for its own sake, nor with
the purpose of perfecting the disciple's own personality. It is an
imitation of Christ, made in union with Christ, its purpose ever closer
union with Christ. It is an activity of that new life which has come to
the disciple through fellowship in the Church and the mystic
incorporation with Christ -- a life which never ceases to be dependent
on Christ. This life begins with the rite of Baptism; and the chief
means through which it is increased and the union between Christ and
the disciple consummated, is the rite of the Eucharist. This new
mystical, super-natural union with God is the source of the believer's
new relation to his fellows. He is to love them as himself, not with
the natural love that springs from his appreciation of their natural
attractiveness, but with a super-natural love deriving from his new
relation to God. God loves them, and therefore the disciple, loving
God, loves them for God's sake. This love of the disciple for his
fellows is the very mark by which his discipleship is recognisable.
This doctrine, which characterises especially the Gospel of St. John,
is also the teaching of the epistles of St. Paul. The two principles of
spiritual self-denial and of the constant union between the believer
and God are, here again, the foundation on which all is built, although
St. Paul’s approach to the subject is not that of St. John. Though the
new life is given in Baptism, something of the old survives. Whence a
lifelong contest between new and old or, as St. Paul says, between
Flesh and Spirit. These terms recur often in St. Paul, and following
him they become, for all time, the common coin of spiritual teaching
with orthodox and heretic alike. It is important to note the meaning
St. Paul gives them. By "Flesh" is not meant merely the temptation to
sensuality in matters of sex. The term stands rather for human nature
as the fall of the first man affected it, crippled, disordered, no
longer answering naturally to reasonable control, and therefore ever
afterwards a source of rebellion, a thing which the unaided human will
is unable to dominate. Left to itself this fallen human nature is a
source of sin. Baptism, making the baptized one with Christ, breaks
that ancient dominion of the first sin over human nature, but yet not
so completely that it cannot make new bids to recover. Whence the life
of the disciple is a continual struggle; and St. Paul has a rich store
of comparisons to emphasise this truth. A second obstacle to the
disciple's progress is the World -- the mass of men who, for one reason
or another, live in habitual disregard of the Spirit, in habitual
affection for the Flesh. No disciple can possibly love the World. In
St. Paul, too, we see the two classes of disciples with greater or less
perfection for their aims, and, as a means to perfection, we find
recommended that peculiarly Christian notion of consecrated virginity.
The notion involves no disparagement of marriage or of sex. On the
contrary, whoever practises continency is considered as denying himself
an important good.
In the two centuries or more which separate the Apostles from the
convert emperors of the fourth century, the believer never lacked
eloquent guides to remind him of the fundamental principles which
should control his life. Here is a theme to which every Christian
writer of these centuries returns sooner or later. " There are two
roads: the road to life, the road to death," begins the Didache, and
the parable speedily becomes a commonplace of the primitive moral
exhortations. "The road to life" -- the love of God, obedience to His
commands, flight from sin, from sexual wrongdoing, perjury, lying,
theft, avarice, blasphemy, avoidance of whatever disturbs the unity of
the Church, the practice of almsgiving, the care of children, obedience
to authority, humility. The apostolic theme of the continual warfare is
not neglected, and the never-ceasing persecution gives rise to a whole
literature exhorting to patience and constancy in the hour of trial, to
confidence in Christ for Whom the martyr is privileged to suffer. To
comfort and strengthen the confessor and the martyr all the great
writers in turn set their genius, Tertullian, Origen and St. Cyprian
very notably. In all this literature the one common, dominating feature
is the reference to Christ as the centre and goal of the whole idealism
as this is preached and as it is lived. It is no detached theorising
about an indubitable but distant God which these theologians present,
St. Ignatius, St. Irenaeus and the rest. A vivid faith in His presence
in the very hearts of those for whom they write is the very life of
their work. And, of course, nowhere is this so manifest as with the
martyrs. The martyrs were the crown of every church's achievement.
After the martyrs came another class of spiritual heroes -- the
continentes and the virgins, those who bound themselves, for the love
of Christ, to a life of perpetual continency. There is no ascetical
practice so praised, so exalted by these early writers as this; and the
number of those who gave themselves to it is the boast of the
Apologists, as it was the marvel of the contemporary Pagans who knew
it. The continentes are cited too, and continually, as a powerful force
for good among the believers themselves, a living exhortation to the
whole Church. Those who so devoted themselves continued, as yet, to
live with their families, but very soon they came to form a kind of
spiritual aristocracy in every church, along with the widows, who, in a
like spirit, made a perpetual consecration of their widowhood. From a
very early time so important a matter ceased to be left to the
discretion of the individual. The consent of the bishop was essential
before the irrevocable life-long dedication was allowed. A ritual of
consecration developed, and an age limit was introduced earlier than
which no one could be accepted. The care of these specially consecrated
believers took up much of a bishop's time, and warnings against the
pitfalls that lay before the virgin, the especially insidious
temptation to pride, self-esteem, and a contemning of the ordinary
folk, fill many pages of the contemporary exhortations Ad Virgines. It
was natural, too, at first to recommend, and later to enact, that for
their own greater security, and for the seemliness of the thing, such
as were thus dedicated should lead a life of retirement. They should
not appear at public banquets, nor at weddings, should avoid the public
amusements and the baths, should dress soberly, without jewels or
cosmetics, and in public always go veiled. To the ordinary fasts which
bound the whole Church they added still more, and in their retirement
multiplied the hours of prayer, meeting together privately for the
purpose. Naturally, occupied with little but the service of God, they
soon became the Church's recognised agents for the vast charitable
services which were this primitive Christianity's leading activity --
care of the widows, of orphans, of the sick, and the systematic relief
of the poor and distressed.
The movement did not progress without serious aberrations showing
themselves from time to time. There was the tendency to value these
abstinences for their own sake, to declare the use of wine for example,
of flesh meat, of marriage, things evil in themselves -- a tendency
related, very often, to the theory that matter is necessarily evil. St.
Paul had to warn Timothy against such " saints, " but for all
authority's faithful adherence to his example the tendency never ceased
to show itself. Apocryphal Acts of particular apostles, forged to give
a sanction to these theories, did much to make them popular, and no
doubt the every day experience of the excesses of contemporary Paganism
helped very considerably in the same direction. It is also interesting
to notice that rigorism of this kind is associated with all the early
heresies, the mark of Montanists, Marcionites and Gnostics alike.
From the tendency to control and regulate the daily life and occupation
of the continentes was to come, ultimately, the institution of
Christian Monasticism. [ ] " Happy the virgin who places herself under
a rule," runs a fourth century saying "she shall be as a fruitful vine
in a garden. Unhappy is the virgin who will not follow a rule, she is
as a ship that lacks a rudder." From St. Jerome (347-420) and St.
Ambrose (340-397) we can learn many details of what such a rule was.
These ladies live at home a life of seclusion, going out rarely. They
wear their hair cut short, their long-sleeved dress is black and they
are veiled. They have a round of private prayer at home and certain
daily prayers in common in the church. They fast, taking each day one
meal only, and that without meat. This meal, too, they often take in
common. They serve the poor and they attend the sick. From such a state
of things to the life of a convent is but a step. As early as 270 we
find St. Antony of Egypt placing his sister in a house where a number
of like-minded holy women lived a common life, and by 300 such
institutions were fairly numerous.
This was not the only source whence monasticism developed. There were
others of the continentes who, although they no longer lived with their
families, preferred to live alone, solitaries, on the outskirts of the
towns first, and then further away still in the "desert." Of these
anchorites or hermits the pioneer is St. Paul of Thebes. More famous,
however, is his disciple Antony (c. 250-355). Such was this hermit's
fame that, despite his opposition, disciples gathered round him and
pursued him into the very depths of the Egyptian deserts, until, in the
Nitrian desert, there were, about 325, more than 5,000 solitaries, of
both sexes. They lived in separate huts without any common rule, each a
law unto himself, meeting at the church on the Sundays for Mass, to
receive the Holy Eucharist and a spiritual instruction. They chose
their own austerities, each according to his own fancy, and were their
own judges as to the extent to which these should be continued. There
were hermits who hardly ever ate, or slept, others who stood without
movement whole weeks together, or who had themselves sealed up in tombs
and remained there for years, receiving only the least of poor
nourishment through crevices in the masonry. The fervour of the
oriental found in this primitive monasticism all it could crave of
opportunity for sacrificial self-despoilment. In the fourth century
more especially, when to the persecution there followed an era of
comfort, and when, in the saying of a contemporary, there were many
more Christians but less Christianity, did the zeal of the more perfect
lead them into the desert.
The hermit movement presently had a competitor in the monastic movement
properly so-called -- the foundation in the desert of institutes where
the members led a common life, working, praying, practising
austerities, studying the Sacred Scriptures, under the rule of a
superior. In these institutions the will of the superior was the guide
and the norm. The austerities, no less than the prayers, were regulated
by his discretion. The pioneer of this movement was St. Pachomius, and
his first foundation-a monastery for men and one for women -- at
Tabennisi dates from about 320.
From Egypt the movement spread to Palestine and here a disciple of St.
Antony, Hilary, devised yet a third form of the life, the Laura. The
Laura was a village of cells or huts, so that each monk lived alone as
did the hermits, but the community was subject to a superior as in the
monastery. This system became rapidly popular, and many of these
monastic villages counted each its thousand of monks. Jerusalem, in the
fourth century, became a great centre for monks of every kind of
monastic life, the capital, in fact, of monasticism, and St. Jerome the
movement's presiding genius.
Syria had its monks, Asia Minor, too, and here, towards the middle of
the fourth century, this eastern monasticism produced the great saint
whose rule was to fix its characteristics for the rest of time -- St.
Basil (329-79). St. Basil was a reformer of the practical type. He had
travelled much, had seen every aspect of contemporary monasticism in
one country and another, and when he came to draw up a rule it was much
more a code of life than any of the so-called rules which preceded it.
He it was who invented the novitiate -- a systematic probation of
aspirants, who were to be trained primarily to the renouncement of
their own way, obedience being the monk's great virtue and the means of
his spiritual progress. And the monasteries were not to be over large
-- thirty or forty monks only to each superior. This was in very
striking contrast to the monasteries of the Pachomian type where, as
with the system of the Laura, the monks were to be numbered by the
thousand.
For St. Basil the community type of life is a higher form than the
hermit life; and from this moment the hermit life declines in prestige.
All the monks are to come together for all the prayers, and the psalms
and singing are to be varied to avoid monotony and the boredom that
derives from it. The superior gives his monks instruction, confession
of faults to him or to another monk is encouraged, and great emphasis
is Jaid on the necessity of systematic manual work for each monk. The
will of the superior is the monk's law in all that concerns his
monastic life. Hence no room is now left for personal eccentricity,
whether in the matter of devotions or austerities. All exaggerations,
and the trouble they breed, disappear. To guard against pride and
vanity no one may go beyond the rule except by the superior's special
permission. The abstinence from meat and wine is perpetual. Silence is
the law for meals, at the office and during work. The monk never leaves
his monastery, except for a just cause, and even then he never goes
alone. The sick are to be cared for with every comfort, and hospitality
is enjoined as a primary duty. For those who refuse to keep the rule,
penalties are provided. But, where St. Pachomius provides floggings and
a bread and water diet for serious faults, in St. Basil’s rule there is
nothing harsher than a kind of temporary internal excommunication.
In the East, by the end of the fourth century, within a hundred years
of its first introduction, Monasticism was established as perhaps the
most flourishing of all the Church's activities. In the West, it had
developed more slowly. Here, too, in every church, there had been, from
the first generations, the spiritual aristocracy of continentes and
virgins, and, for example at Rome, such women had begun already to live
a common life when, towards the middle of the fourth century, the
knowledge began to spread of the marvellous happenings in the Egyptian
deserts. One important source of this knowledge was the accidental
presence, for several years, in Italy and Gaul of the bishop of
Alexandria, St. Athanasius, banished from his see by the Arianising
policy of the emperor. None knew better than he the detail of the new
movement -- of which he was indeed one of the earliest historians --
and to the presence in the West during so many years of the bishop who
was, by his position, the very patriarch of nascent monasticism, and by
his temperament a master propagandist, much of the sudden growth of the
movement in the West may be ascribed. Another source of the West's
knowledge of the ascetic marvels of the eastern Churches was the
experience of the thousands of pilgrims who, in the first generations
of the Christian Empire, made the long journey to Palestine to venerate
the sacred places whence the Faith had come.
Some of these pilgrims, attracted by the life, even stayed on,
spiritual exiles for the sake of the more perfect life. Of such
westerners who so made themselves easterners the most famous is St.
Jerome (347-420), and around his life may be written the whole history
of early Roman monasticism. His first experience of monasticism was the
five years he spent as a solitary in the desert to the east of Antioch
-- a desert so peopled with like-minded souls, that solitude, he found,
was the last thing possible. From the desert St. Jerome returned to
Rome, and for the next few years he was the centre round which the
monastically-minded of the old capital -- women of noble families for
the most part -- gathered. In this circle all the stark austerity of
the life of the desert found willing adepts, under the learned
direction of St. Jerome. There was the inevitable conflict with the
less ascetically inclined relatives, and with the still less ascetic
Roman clergy, and in the end St. Jerome and his followers left the
city, to establish themselves once and for all at Bethlehem (386).
Along with St. Jerome there must also be mentioned his contemporaries
the Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose (340-397) and the future Bishop of
Hippo, St. Augustine (354-430). St. Ambrose did much, by his sermons De
Virginibus, to foster the ideal among his people and to encourage the
movement. St. Cyprian is here his master, but St. Ambrose breaks
entirely new ground when he suggests Our Lady as the type and model of
the consecrated virgin. Milan, under St. Ambrose's direction, became in
its turn a centre of the monastic life, and with the progress of the
movement came the inevitable opposition. The saint's De Virginitate is
his reply to it.
In St. Paulinus of Nola, a retired imperial official of high rank who
gave himself to the life, monasticism reached another stage of
development and with Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli, it began to affect
the clergy too. The priests who served the church of Vercelli lived a
life in common, whose spirit was the spirit of monasticism. It is with
this clerical type of monasticism that the still greater name of St.
Augustine is associated. Some of the best known pages of his
Confessions record how greatly he was influenced, at the crisis of his
life, by the story of the imperial officers whom the example of the
hermits in Egypt had won over to monasticism. After his return to
Africa the converted scholar, giving up his career and his projected
marriage, turned his house at Tagaste into a monastery. There with his
friends, their property sold and the proceeds given to the poor, he led
a regular life of seclusion, of prayer and study. His ordination in 391
fixed him at Hippo, and at Hippo he once more established a monastery
of the same type in which he himself lived. Finally when, in 396, he
became Bishop of Hippo he not only continued his own monastic way of
life but brought all his clergy into it also. The episcopal palace
itself became a monastery -- a monastery whence, as from Marmoutier and
Lerins, monks went forth as bishops to rule more than one of the
neighbouring sees. St. Augustine has left descriptions of the life of
the community in his sermons, a treatise De Sancta Virginitate, another
De Opere Monachorum, while, from the letter he wrote to restore peace
to a community of holy women, later centuries developed the so-called
Rule of St. Augustine.
The opposition to monasticism continued. Its strength lay very largely
in what remained of Paganism in the old Roman aristocracy, and more
than once the city mob rioted in its anti-monastic zeal. There were
also the heretics -- Helvidius, for example, who preached against
continency, derided the idea of mortification, and even denied the
virginity of Mary. Another such was Jovinian, an ex-monk who, man of
the world now and practised debauchee, turned -- first of an unhappy
line -- to revile and attack all he once had reverenced. There was, he
declared, only one heaven, only one reward for all; and since those
validly baptized cannot but be saved, mortifications are but a useless
show. He drew replies from St. Ambrose and -- a characteristically
waspish one -- from St. Jerome. He was excommunicated by the pope,
Siricius (384-398), but his teaching grew, and many apostasies are
recorded.
It was, however, in Gaul, and not in Italy, that the first western
monks really flourished, where the pioneer was the Bishop of Tours, St.
Martin (317-397). St. Martin, born in Pannonia, was the child of a
legionary and, despite his early attraction to the hermit life, forced
to follow his father into the army. His vocation survived the
experiences of the camp, and, once baptized and free of the army (339),
he was received into the clergy by St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers. For
some years afterwards he lived as a solitary, first near Milan and
later on an island in the Mediterranean. St. Hilary, banished to the
East for opposition to the Arian Constantius II, returned with a new
knowledge of monasticism (361); and it was now that, under his
direction, Martin founded at Liguge, close by St. Hilary's cathedral
city, the first monastery of the West -- a few huts, one for each monk,
grouped round the church in which the monks met for what spiritual
exercises they had in common. There was no rule but the mutual good
example and the duty of obedience to the superior. St. Martin was still
at Liguge when he was elected Bishop of Tours. The new office made no
difference to the man. He continued to live his austere life, to sleep
on the bare ground, to wear his old clothes, to fast, to pray as before
and, within sight of the walls of Tours, he founded Marmoutier --
another and larger Liguge. Here he lived with his community of eighty
monks a life very like that of the Egyptian monasteries of St.
Pachomius. Very many of the monks whom this austere life attracted were
of noble birth, and from Marmoutier came forth a whole series of
bishops -- the first monk-bishops in the Church. By an extraordinary
paradox this first great monastery of contemplative solitaries became,
and almost immediately, the first great centre of that movement to
convert the countrysides of Gaul, whose greatest figure is St. Martin.
St. Martin was, however, not an organiser of monasticism, and it was in
monasteries founded a little later, in the south of Gaul, that the
first monastic legislators of the West arose. Two monasteries in
particular must be noticed -- Lerins, an island off the coast of
Provence, and the abbey of St. Victor at Marseilles. At Lerins, founded
by a wealthy patrician St. Honoratus (429), the rule of St. Pachomius
was held in great veneration, and although not followed to the letter,
it undoubtedly influenced the life there. Lerins too was a nursery of
bishops, supplying indeed so many bishops to the sees of southern Gaul
that it became a matter of complaint between the clergy and the Roman
See. Marseilles had for its founder an Eastern who had travelled much.
This was John Cassian. He was born about 350, was a monk at Bethlehem
in the early days of St. Jerome's career there, and after several years
in Egypt came to Constantinople, where in 403 he was ordained deacon by
St. John Chrysostom. Four years later he was in Rome, carrying to
Innocent I St. John’s appeal against his illegal deposition. Finally,
in 414, he was ordained priest at Marseilles and founded there the
abbey of St. Victor. The rule's inspiration was Eastern, but modified
to suit the very different Western conditions. Cassian, however, did
much more than found a monastery. He set down his ideas in two books
which were to influence monastic thought and theories of spiritual
direction for centuries -- his De Coenobiorum Institutis and his
Collationes.
The way of the Counsels -- monasticism in the later centuries, the life
of the virgines and continentes in the primitive times -- was, however,
the privilege of a minority. This elite was vastly outnumbered by the
thousands of believers whom necessity and choice bound to the life of
the world, and of whom the churches were chiefly composed. To them
also, through the Church, the Spirit spoke. In them, too, ran the same
supernatural life, fed from the same sources which nourished those
especially consecrated, and producing in the activities of ordinary
human life the same superhuman fruits. For these Christians, too, the
gospel, -- an institution and a belief -- was also a way of living, a
code of conduct based on a teaching, and nourished through a cult.
Conformably to the will of Christ its Founder, the Church received its
new adepts through the visible ceremonial rite of Baptism. Closely
connected with Baptism was the complementary ceremony of the laying on
of hands. St. Justin gives us the earliest detailed description of the
rite which has survived, and fifty years later Tertullian is evidence
that an explanatory and preparatory ceremonial had already gathered
round the primitive nucleus. The ceremony takes place at Easter. The
water with which it is administered is especially blessed for the
purpose. The candidate makes a previous explicit renunciation of the
devil. The baptism is followed by an anointing with blessed oil and an
imposition of hands. It is the bishop who officiates, and the
candidates prepare for their reception by special prayers and fasts.
St. Hippolytus, Tertullian's contemporary, speaks also of an anointing
of the catechumen before baptism. The heretics, too, had these
ceremonies -- the Marcionites, for example, and many of the Gnostics --
which points to their being established in the Church before the
heretics broke away, to an origin that is at least as early as the
generation which followed the death of the last apostle.
But the preparatory period was not merely a time of special prayer.
From a very early date indeed those who wished to be members of the
Church were trained in its doctrines and practices, their sincerity and
fervour tested by a long systematic course of instruction. This was the
Catechumenate, and in every church there came to be a priest appointed
for the purpose of instructing and watching over the Catechumens. The
Catechumens had their special place in the assemblies, and during the
time of their probation they were prepared for baptism by a series of
preparatory ceremonies, exorcisms for example, blessings and
anointings. After the baptism and the anointing and imposition of hands
which followed, the newly-initiated received for the first time the
Holy Eucharist.
The minister of these public initiatory rites was, originally, always
the bishop. Later the custom gradually made its way that the priests,
too, assisted at the actual baptism, the bishop blessing the water and
the oils but baptizing only a few of the catechumens though still
administering to all the rite of anointing and the imposition of hands.
Then most of the baptisms fell to the priests. Still later when, in the
fourth century, parishes began to be founded outside the cities, the
priests in charge of them were allowed to bless the water for Baptism,
to baptize all who came to them and to anoint them also, the bishop
reserving to himself the blessing of the oils and the final imposition
of hands. Such is the Roman practice, at any rate, from the time of
Innocent I (402-417).
The centres of the Church's religious life were the weekly assemblies
where the bishop presided and at which all the brotherhood assisted.
These took place three times each week, on Sunday the weekly feast day,
and on the two days of fasting Wednesday and Friday. To Sunday was
transferred the ritual importance of the Jewish Sabbath -- in the days
of the Apostles themselves-and the observance of the two weekly fast
days goes back, at all events, to the closing years of the first
century.
The services which occupied the assembly were of two kinds. There were
first of all the Vigilia, celebrated in the hours before dawn. These
consisted of readings from the Sacred Books, and homilies delivered by
the bishop interspersed with prayers and hymns. In the plan of this
service there was nothing specifically new, and the same is true of the
first part of the second service-the assembly for the Holy Eucharist.
Here, too, there is a preparatory element which the Christians took
over bodily from the synagogue -- a service of prayers, hymns, readings
from the Sacred Books, and a homily. To this the Christians added
readings from their own Sacred Books and made it the preface to their
own new liturgy the Holy Eucharist. The origin of this is once more the
example and the precept of the Church's Founder, and it is in St.
Paul’s Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels that we have the earliest
description of the rite-in its essentials a special kind of prayer over
the bread and wine, a breaking of the bread and a distribution of the
"eucharisted" food to those who assisted.
The Didache, recalling the obligation of this Sunday reunion for the
celebration of the Holy Eucharist, urges the necessity of a good
conscience in those who assist, for that at which they assist is the
pure sacrifice foretold of old by the prophet Malachi. St. Ignatius is
equally explicit, in his witness that the Eucharist is "the flesh of
Our Saviour Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins, the
flesh which the Father in his goodness has raised again." Equally clear
is his fidelity to another element of New Testament doctrine on the
Eucharist, namely that it is the symbol and the source of the Church's
unity and peace.
These three fundamental ideas -- that the Holy Eucharist is sacrifice,
food, and principle of unity, being the very body and blood of Jesus
Christ -- the later writers do but develop and explain. St. Justin, in
his First Apology, and in the Dialogue with Trypho too, gives us the
earliest detailed account of the rite which has survived. In it we can
see already achieved the combination of synagogue service and Eucharist
around which the rich diversity of liturgies is later to grow. In St.
Irenaeus we have the definite statement that it is by the words of the
consecrating prayer that the change is wrought, while Clement of
Alexandria uses a phraseology medieval in its concrete realism "To
drink the blood of Jesus is to share in His incorruptibility," and
Origen speaks of the Christian altars as "consecrated with the precious
blood of Christ." Meanwhile, in the West, St. Hippolytus composed a
treatise Should the Eucharist be received daily? and in Africa
Tertullian, and above all St. Cyprian, write, with a fullness to which
nothing is wanting, of the mystery, of its use, and of its role in the
general life of the communicants. The lips with which Christ has been
received, shall they turn next to applaud the brutalities of a
gladiator? the hands which have held Him proceed to their daily task of
making idols?
Universally, at the Sunday assembly the Eucharist was celebrated. The
observance on the fast days varied. The fast remained unbroken until
the mid-afternoon. In Africa, and at Jerusalem too, the Eucharist was
celebrated at the assembly. At Alexandria and in Rome there was no
Eucharist -- simply the service of prayers, readings, hymns and a
homily. The next day to receive a regular service was Saturday, the
one-time holy day. By the fourth century throughout the East, save at
Alexandria, there was on Saturday an assembly with celebration of the
Eucharist. At Rome, however, the development was in the contrary
direction. Saturday became not a new weekly feast but a fast, an
extension, in fact, of the fast of Friday. Another Roman peculiarity
was the fast celebrated in the first week of each of the four
seasons-the fast of the Four Seasons (Quarter-Tense, Ember Week). In
these weeks the unusual fasts of Wednesday, Friday and Saturday were
kept with the additional solemnity of a Eucharistic service on the
first two days and a Vigil and Eucharist on the Saturday. A fifth
specially honoured week centred round the annual commemoration of the
death and resurrection of Our Lord. Originally this was little more
than a fifth Ember Week with a feast on the Thursday to commemorate the
institution of the Holy Eucharist. The commemoration which is the later
Easter, goes back to the Apostles, as the evidence of all parties in
the famous controversies of the second century goes to show. Pentecost,
celebrating the visible outpouring of the promised Holy Spirit upon the
first disciples is just as old a feast and was just as universally
celebrated as Easter, but with perhaps less solemnity. The third feast
of this cycle -- commemorating the Ascension -- is of much later
origin. The earliest trace of it dates to about 350.
The great annual penitential season which, in English, is called Lent
developed from two elements, the fast in preparation for the feast of
Easter and the catechumen's preparation for Baptism. The pre-Easter
fast was originally very short indeed -- one or two days in St.
Irenaeus -- but, to compensate, it was very severe, for no food at all
was taken while it lasted. In Africa, in Tertullian's time, it lasted
from the Thursday to the morning of Easter Sunday. At Alexandria, a
generation later, every day in that week was a fast day. The earliest
mention of the fast of forty days in the spring is in the Canons of
Nicea (325). Then, and for long afterwards, this fast was primarily
directed to the coming baptism of the catechumens; it was a time of
retreat, of recollection and special prayers, during which the
candidates passed through the final stages of their probation. The
discipline of Lent varied. At Rome the Sundays were considered to be
outside the season, at Constantinople the Saturdays too. Lent again
brought with it liturgical developments. In the East the Eucharist
service on the Wednesdays and Fridays disappeared in Lent, but the
number of reunions of the "mass-less" type increased. In the West the
opposite happened. The number of mass days was increased, until, in the
end, on every day of Lent there was an assembly with the celebration of
the Eucharist.
Of the many other feasts which, later, were to enrich the calendar of
the Church, we have hardly any record earlier than Constantine's
conversion. Christmas, for example, was a Western feast originally and
the earliest record of its celebration is at Rome in 336. The East had
a similar kind of feast -- the Apparitions (Epiphany) -- commemorating
the birth of Our Lord, the coming of the Wise Men, and His baptism,
which was kept on January 6. One element in this may go back to a very
early date, for about the years 200 the Gnostics kept a feast to
celebrate the baptism of Our Lord. Nor are the feasts of Mary the
Mother of Our Lord any older. There is no mention of them at Rome
before the seventh century, although the feast of the Circumcision, the
octave of Christmas, which is an indirect commemoration of her, goes
back a century earlier. In this matter the West borrowed from the East
where a feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple was kept at
Jerusalem from about 370.
The oldest of all the feasts were the annual commemorations of the
martyrs -- reunions of the local church, at the tombs of its most
distinguished members, those who had testified to the faith with life
itself. Of this development the earliest instance on record is the case
of the martyred bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp, put to death in 155. A
practice so natural grew speedily, and though the martyr cults were in
their essence local things, some of the more noted of these Christian
heroes -- St. Lawrence of Rome for example, St. Cyprian of Carthage --
soon won a wider renown, and honours in churches other than their own.
With the Peace of Constantine the persecution, as a more or less normal
incident of Christian life, ended. The heroism which had found its
crown in martyrdom now developed in the solitude of the deserts. The
new heroes were those who battled in the austerity of the new
monasticism; and the next saints to be honoured liturgically after
death, their prayers officially besought, were the ascetics, the first
of them all in time the great St. Martin of Tours who died in 397.
The religion founded by Our Lord in the Church was then a corporate,
social thing, just as truly as it was the sum of the innumerable
conquests of the myriad individual souls who made up the mystical body.
And from its understanding of its corporate nature there gradually
developed its public liturgies, and a Christian art; latest of all
there developed an architecture-latest of all, for the first buildings
erected for the purpose of containing the Church at prayer, the first
churches in the architectural sense of the word, were not built until
well on into the third century. Before that time the Christians met for
worship in the houses of one or another of the brotherhood. At certain
places, in times of persecution, they met in the catacombs -- a
Christian adaptation and development, on an immense scale, of the
underground cemetery system, which, in all probability, they had
borrowed from the Jews. This system of catacombs was especially well
developed at Rome, where it grew to be a second underground city, Roma
sotteriana cristiana. [ ]
The Roman practice by which great families opened their private
cemeteries to their dependants; the sacredness in the eye of the Roman
law of the tomb and the cult of the dead; the ancient Roman custom of
family reunions at the tomb of its deceased members: all these favoured
the development. The Christians, once gathered in their cemeteries were
secure, not only from mob hostility, but even from the attention of the
police during persecutions. These Roman catacombs go back to the days
of the Apostles themselves. Still, today, the pilgrim can wander
through the miles of their underground galleries and the chambers hewn
out of the tufa where, nearly two thousand years ago now, the mass was
said and the homilies delivered and the neophytes baptized. He can look
upon the sites of the tombs of the earliest martyr-popes, and upon the
hundreds of funeral inscriptions that tell the names and qualities of
these long dead Christians and that attest so many of the doctrines
they professed; and he can look upon the earliest Christian paintings,
and study, there again, not merely the quality and development of the
artistic inspiration, but the beliefs to which the paintings witness
and the religious practices of which they are the mute unchanging
record.
In the course of the third century, as will be seen, the persecution of
the Church changed its character entirely. It was no longer left to the
initiative of private malice to unleash the fury of the persecuting
laws. All now depended on the emperor; there were emperors who were
favourable to the Church as well as those resolved on its destruction;
and between the new, most savage persecutions that now took place,
there were long intervals of peace when the Church enjoyed recognition
as a lawful religion. It was during this p ace that, in the third
century the first churches began to be built. Traces of these first
churches still remain, at Rome for example, below the basilica of St.
Clement and the church of S. Martino ai Monti, at S. Anastasia, at SS.
Giovannie Paolo, and at S. Sabina. These discoveries of archaeology in
our own time confirm the witness of the contemporaries who describe
this first public appearance of the Church in the public life of the
day, whether Christians themselves, like Eusebius of Cesarea, or bitter
enemies such as Porphyry.
In all this swarming spiritual activity of Christian life, it is the
Church, the whole assembly, which is all important. The newcomer to it
is instructed by the Church, and prepared by the common and public
prayer of the Church for his reception and baptism, and in the rite
itself the collectivity of the life is manifest. It is in the assembly
that he makes his progress, and should he fall from grace, his fall is
the concern of all his brethren, who assist his penances by their own
charitable prayers and good works.
When a Christian marries he is warned to take a Christian for his
partner, [ ] for there is a Christian law of marriage. [ ] The marriage
should be with the bishop's consent, [ ] or at any rate blessed by the
Church. [ ] Marriage between Christians is indissoluble, even the
adultery of one of the partners cannot break the bond. [ ] Though
Encratites, like Tatian, condemn marriage as mere fornication, and
Marcionites forbid it altogether, the Catholic tradition is constant
that perpetual continency is not of obligation, that marriage is
lawful, [ ] -- more, that it is a holy thing, since it is the figure of
the union of Christ and His Church. [ ] Second marriages, which the
Montanists condemn altogether, although reproved [ ] are tolerated,
except in the case of the clergy. A second marriage is also a bar to a
man's ordination. Marriage is a holy thing, and the mutual rights and
duties of the contracting parties are discussed by these first
Christian moralists always with reference to the life of the Spirit
which, since Baptism, is the most important factor in every Christian's
life.
The primitive tradition that the ruling members of the Church are also
the authorised teachers, and the ministers of the Eucharist is
faithfully maintained. With these first and essential officers others
are now associated; Lectors whose office it is to read the chosen
passages of Holy Scripture in the assemblies; Exorcists to whom is
entrusted one of the chief functions in the preparation of the
catechumen for Baptism; Acolytes who share more closely in the ritual
of the Eucharist; and Doorkeepers (Ostiarii) whose mission is the very
important one of securing that none but members of the Church are
admitted to the different reunions. The rite by which all members of
the clergy are commissioned and receive their new spiritual powers is
still the primitive imposition of hands, its minister the bishop, and
in St. Cyprian we note the first appearance of the regulation that for
the consecration of a bishop three bishops are required. Marriage is no
bar to ordination, although (Councils of Ancyra, 314, Neo-Cesarea, c.
314-25) it comes to be the law that the deacon, priest or bishop once
ordained may not marry. The prestige of continency is bringing about an
association in the mind of the Church between its practice and the
ministry. The clerical state, in its higher ranks at least, should not
lack the virtue which now adorns so many of the flock. And even in the
case of those married before ordination it begins to be suggested that,
after ordination, husband and wife should be to each other but as
brother and sister. This clerical body, for all its undoubted position
apart in the Church, is not, in the first three centuries, a way of
life that excludes the following of a profession. Its members support
themselves, as do the faithful to whom they minister, by a variety of
occupations. Nor, for the best part of two centuries after Constantine,
is there any suggestion of a special clerical dress, any more than
there is evidence of what to-day we call, technically, vestments. When
the first attempt to introduce a clerical costume was made it met with
little favour, and was in fact severely rebuked by the pope of the time
(St. Celestine I, 422-432).
How far had Christianity spread by the time of the conversion of
Constantine? The question is much easier to answer definitely than the
other question it provokes, how far was the Empire then Christian? At
Rome there had been Christians from within a few years of Our Lord's
Ascension, and a Pagan historian speaks of them as "a great multitude"
at the time of Nero's persecution. From the second century Rome becomes
a great centre of expansion, whence southern and central Italy are
evangelised. Northern Italy was a much later conquest. Of Christianity
in Gaul, our earliest certain attested fact is the persecution of 177
which reveals at Lyons a well-ordered and flourishing church. A hundred
and forty years later, at the Council of Arles, sixteen bishops of
Gallic sees were present, among them bishops from Bordeaux, Rheims and
Rouen. Spain knew the Church as early as the days of St. Paul who was,
seemingly, one of its first apostles. But we know nothing of its
Christianity until the persecution of Decius (250-251). Fifty years
later the Church there had so profited by the long peace which followed
Valerian (259) that, at the Council of Elvira (300), forty Spanish
bishops assembled. In Britain, too, there were Christians and organised
churches, Christians who gave their lives in the persecution of 304-5;
and the bishops of York, London and Lincoln sat in the Council of Arles
of 314. Of the origin of this British Christianity we know nothing. At
the Council of Arles there assisted also bishops from Mainz, Cologne
and Treves, the earliest representatives of Christianity among the
Germans known to us. Of the conquests of the Church in the lands beyond
the Rhine where the Empire never established itself we know scarcely
anything.
The first evidence of Christianity in Africa is as late as 189-the
martyrdoms at Scillium. The churches in Africa are, by then, already
numerous and well-organised. A few years later and Tertullian has been
received at Carthage (c. 194) and can urge as one of his pleas for
toleration that the Christians are almost the majority in every town of
the province. Certainly in the two provinces of Numidia and Proconsular
Africa there were, by the beginning of the third century, seventy
bishops.
But the real strength of Christianity lay to the east of the Adriatic.
Greece, Epirus, Thessaly and Thrace were by the end of the second
century very well evangelised. Into the Danube provinces to the north
Christianity came later, but not too late to produce martyrs under
Diocletian. Dalmatia's conversion began with Titus, and it is in the
lands evangelised by St. Paul and his lieutenants that we find
Christianity strongest three centuries later. While in Palestine, its
first home, Christianity had almost disappeared with the destruction
that followed the wars of Titus and Hadrian, Syrian Christianity
developed amazingly around that most ancient centre of missionary zeal
the city of Antioch. Again, in Asia Minor, while Cappadocia remained
unconverted until the time of St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 230-50),
Phrygia and Bithynia were Christian from the end of the previous
century. It was, however, the province of Asia, whose chief city was
Ephesus, that led all the rest, the one really Christian province of
the whole Empire. Egypt, too, was largely Christian. By the end of the
third century it had fifty-five bishops, and from what we know of
Egyptian Christianity in the first century in which it is known to us
(Clement of Alexandria to St. Athanasius) it would seem to have been
established at a very early date. A list of its bishops is extant that
leads back to 61.
Christianity was not, however, confined to the Roman Empire. The buffer
State of Edessa was so thoroughly converted in the second century that
Christianity became the official religion of the kingdom. Armenia, too,
dates its first conversion from about the same time, but the chief
agent here was St. Gregory the Illuminator (late third century). He was
himself Armenian and under his influence once again Christianity found
itself the religion of the State. For all that, the conversion proved
superficial. To the south of Egypt lay Ethiopia, and the conversion of
Ethiopia counts among St. Athanasius' many titles to remembrance. From
Egypt, too, but a century earlier, came the conversion of Arabia. The
most flourishing of all these oriental Christianities was however that
of Persia. Persia's first missionaries were from Edessa and they built
up, in the century which preceded the conversion of Constantine, a
really imposing church. This was the century of the great wars between
the Roman Empire and the resuscitated Persia of the Sassanid kings, and
the religion persecuted in Rome found, if only for political reasons, a
protector in the Great King. Constantine's conversion brought to an end
this happy state of things. Christianity, the religion of the Roman
Emperor, was henceforth banned in Persia and a century of almost
uninterrupted persecution followed in which thousands of martyrs
perished.
Although the essential organisation of the spreading Christianity
remained the same -- the bishop supreme in the local church under the
unique hegemony of the Bishop of Rome -- two very important new
institutions developed during these first three hundred years, the
council of bishops and the ecclesiastical province, i.e. the permanent
grouping of sees round a central metropolitan see. The earliest council
recorded is that called by the Bishop of Ephesus at the time of the
Easter Controversy (189-198). To judge by his letter to the pope the
procedure was altogether new, and due entirely to the initiative of
Rome. In the next hundred years the institution developed rapidly.
Origen records councils at Cesarea in Palestine (230) and in Pisidia.
In the same year there is a council at Carthage and in 240 one at
Ancyra. in Africa especially was this new organ of government --
L'eveque au pluriel -- made use of, and under a bishop like St.
Cyprian, through the council of Africa, the primacy of Carthage
developed rapidly. It is, again, through councils that Denis of
Alexandria combats the revival of Sabellianism, and that Paul of
Samosata, Bishop of Antioch, is convicted of heresy and deposed. The
councils secure uniformity of faith and discipline without, as yet, in
any way hindering the action of the Roman See, which continues its
practice of intervention, even in the case of such great sees as
Alexandria and Antioch, intervening always with a tone of authority
found nowhere else, commanding as though in no doubt that obedience
would be given, holding out sanctions to rebels and the negligent.
The councils, however, even that council of Africa which apparently met
every year, were not in permanent session and the new grouping of sees
around the metropolitan see -- see of the chief city of the province,
mother-see very often whence had sprung the rest -- supplied a
machinery for the co-ordination of every day activity. For all that the
bishop is supreme in his own church, the local church is not an
isolated spiritual kingdom. Outside bishops have a say in its affairs
-- in the election of the bishop, for example, and in his consecration
-- and, for St. Cyprian, this is a tradition which goes back to the
Apostles. The system by which the activities of every bishop are
subordinated -- on appeal -- to the collective scrutiny of the other
bishops dependent on the same metropolitan see, is already well
established by the time of the Council of Nicea (325), whose very
important canons do but regulate an already existing institution,
adapting it to the new delimitation of provinces accomplished by
Diocletian and his successors. Already there is confusion, already
rivalry between the great sees. Nicea -- with the whole eastern
episcopate assembled for the first time -- is an opportunity to set all
in order.
There is no record of either Antioch or Alexandria as a great central
see before the third century, nor is there any regularity or uniformity
in the way in which the central sees begin to develop. Rome for example
-- we are not concerned here with the organisation of its peculiar
universal jurisdiction, potentior principalitas -- is gradually
revealed as the metropolitan of all central and southern Italy,
Carthage of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, Alexandria of Egypt and
Libya. Antioch, however, for all its civil importance, has nothing like
so definite a power over the sees of the East. Asia Minor too is, by
comparison with Egypt, Africa and Italy, poorly organised. Ephesus, for
example, despite its apostolic origin, and its civil importance as the
capital of the province, has an equal and a rival in every other
church. Nor is the original grouping based on the civil divisions.
The rise of Antioch is particularly interesting and it is important in
view of the history of the fourth century, to notice the failure of
this Church to achieve a real local hegemony. From about 250 Antioch
begins to show itself the centre of action for a group of sees which
finally becomes the episcopate of The East (i.e. the civil diocese of
that name). After the death of Constantine, (337) Antioch became the
seat of the imperial residence and it continued to be the de facto
capital down to Theodosius (381). These are the years of the Arian
supremacy, and that supremacy and Antioch's predominance went together.
It was no matter of ecclesiastical legislation, simply the natural
effect of the city's new civil importance increasing the influence of
its bishops. But Antioch never drew within its sphere of influence
either the province of Asia or Egypt, where Alexandria, during the
whole of this period, led the fight for Catholicism -- inevitably a
fight against Antioch and against the spread of Antioch's influence. It
will be seen later how Antioch was the centre of the campaign against
St. Athanasius, and how the church of Antioch supplied and consecrated
the Arians whom the emperor installed at Alexandria as bishops during
St. Athanasius' exile. It is the eternal problem of the East to
preserve the Church from this evil of episcopal ambition, so to balance
and regulate the relations of sees and metropolitans that no one see
shall ever achieve an undue predominance. In its failure to solve that
problem, and in the absence of adequate machinery through which the
Roman hegemony, functioning continuously, might supply what was lacking
to local arrangements, lie the beginnings of the end of Eastern
Catholicism. Egypt was organised, Africa and Italy too, while the
disorganised East inevitably offered itself to the ambition of first
one see and then another. How, finally, Constantinople captured it is
what the rest of this history must tell.
The canons of Nicea enact that all the bishops of the province (i.e.
the civil province) shall take part in the election of its bishops,
that the metropolitan shall have the right of veto; and that, as a
check on episcopal misgovernment, the provincial council shall meet
twice each year as a court of appeal. But this regime of churches
grouped by civil provinces (since Diocletian's reforms these number now
ninety-six in all) applies only to the civil dioceses of Asia, Pontus
and The East. The council expressly recognises the special and ancient
regime which obtains in the (civil) diocese of Egypt -- Egypt, Libya,
and Pentapolis -- where the Bishop of Alexandria himself chooses all
the bishops and consecrates them and, if need be, deposes them. His
authority is much more than metropolitan, and his authority extends far
beyond the civil provinces. They are the same rights, the council
recognises, as those which the Bishop of Rome exercises in Italy.
Antioch, too, is mentioned by name, but the council again does no more
than confirm existing rights " To Antioch and throughout the other
provinces, the privileges proper to metropolitan sees." The bishops at
Nicea did not innovate; they made no attempt to centralise the
organisation of the immense Christianity which stretched from the
Euxine to the Red Sea.
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