“THE MINOR PEACE OF THE CHURCH”
Faithful to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy and the
impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to
anything that, as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him
strongly, Marius informed himself with much pains concerning the church
in Cecilia’s house; inclining at first to explain the peculiarities of
that place by the establishment there of the schola or common hall of
one of those burial-guilds, which then covered so much of the
unofficial, and, as it might be called, subterranean enterprise of
Roman society.
And what he found, thus looking, literally, for the dead among the
living, was the vision of a natural, a scrupulously natural, love,
transforming, by some new gift of insight into the truth of human
relationships, and under the urgency of some new motive by him so far
unfathomable, all the conditions of life. He saw, in all its primitive
freshness and amid the lively facts of its actual coming into the
world, as a reality of experience, that regenerate type of humanity,
which, centuries later, Giotto and his successors, down to the best and
purest days of the young Raphael, working under conditions very
friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an artistic ideal. He
felt there, felt amid the stirring of some wonderful new hope within
himself, the genius, the unique power of Christianity; in exercise
then, as it has been exercised ever since, in spite of many hindrances,
and under the most inopportune circumstances. Chastity,—as he seemed to
understand—the chastity of men and women, amid all the conditions, and
with the results, proper to such chastity, is the most beautiful thing
in the world and the truest conservation of that creative energy by
which men and women were first brought into it. The nature of the
family, for which the better genius of old Rome itself had sincerely
cared, of the family and its appropriate affections—all that love of
one’s kindred by which obviously one does triumph in some degree over
death—had never been so felt before. Here, surely! in its genial
warmth, its jealous exclusion of all that was opposed to it, to its own
immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set around the sacred thing on
every side, this development of the family did but carry forward, and
give effect to, the purposes, the kindness, of nature itself, friendly
to man. As if by way of a due recognition of some immeasurable divine
condescension manifest in a certain historic fact, its influence was
felt more especially at those points which demanded some sacrifice of
one’s self, for the weak, for the aged, for little children, and even
for the dead. And then, for its constant outward token, its significant
manner or index, it issued in a certain debonair grace, and a certain
mystic attractiveness, a courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that
famed Greek “blitheness,” or gaiety, or grace, in the handling of life,
had been, after all, an unrivalled success. Contrasting with the
incurable insipidity even of what was most exquisite in the higher
Roman life, of what was still truest to the primitive soul of goodness
amid its evil, the new creation he now looked on—as it were a picture
beyond the craft of any master of old pagan beauty—had indeed all the
appropriate freshness of a “bride adorned for her husband.” Things new
and old seemed to be coming as if out of some goodly treasure-house,
the brain full of science, the heart rich with various sentiment,
possessing withal this surprising healthfulness, this reality of heart.
“You would hardly believe,” writes Pliny,—to his own wife!—“what a
longing for you possesses me. Habit—that we have not been used to be
apart—adds herein to the primary force of affection. It is this keeps
me awake at night fancying I see you beside me. That is why my feet
take me unconsciously to your sitting-room at those hours when I was
wont to visit you there. That is why I turn from the door of the empty
chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like an excluded lover.”—
There, is a real idyll from that family life, the protection of which
had been the motive of so large a part of the religion of the Romans,
still surviving among them; as it survived also in Aurelius, his
disposition and aims, and, spite of slanderous tongues, in the attained
sweetness of his interior life. What Marius had been permitted to see
was a realisation of such life higher still: and with—Yes! with a more
effective sanction and motive than it had ever possessed before, in
that fact, or series of facts, to be ascertained by those who would.
The central glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had
attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by
cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went
straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and
appropriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching charity-sermons
on occasions of great public distress; its charity-children in long
file, in memory of the elder empress Faustina; its prototype, under
patronage of Aesculapius, of the modern hospital for the sick on the
island of Saint Bartholomew. But what pagan charity was doing tardily,
and as if with the painful calculation of old age, the church was
doing, almost without thinking about it, with all the liberal
enterprise of youth, because it was her very being thus to do. “You
fail to realise your own good intentions,” she seems to say, to pagan
virtue, pagan kindness. She identified herself with those intentions
and advanced them with an unparalleled freedom and largeness. The
gentle Seneca would have reverent burial provided even for the dead
body of a criminal. Yet when a certain woman collected for interment
the insulted remains of Nero, the pagan world surmised that she must be
a Christian: only a Christian would have been likely to conceive so
chivalrous a devotion towards mere wretchedness. “We refuse to be
witnesses even of a homicide commanded by the law,” boasts the dainty
conscience of a Christian apologist, “we take no part in your cruel
sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we hold that to
witness a murder is the same thing as to commit one.” And there was
another duty almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau brought back
to the degenerate society of a later age. In an impassioned discourse
the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle their own infants; and
there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers, which gratefully record
this proof of natural affection as a thing then unusual. In this matter
too, what a sanction, what a provocative to natural duty, lay in that
image discovered to Augustus by the Tiburtine Sibyl, amid the aurora of
a new age, the image of the Divine Mother and the Child, just then
rising upon the world like the dawn!
Christian belief, again, had presented itself as a great inspirer of
chastity. Chastity, in turn, realised in the whole scope of its
conditions, fortified that rehabilitation of peaceful labour, after the
mind, the pattern, of the workman of Galilee, which was another of the
natural instincts of the catholic church, as being indeed the
long-desired initiator of a religion of cheerfulness, as a true lover
of the industry—so to term it—the labour, the creation, of God.
And this severe yet genial assertion of the ideal of woman, of the
family, of industry, of man’s work in life, so close to the truth of
nature, was also, in that charmed hour of the minor “Peace of the
church,” realised as an influence tending to beauty, to the adornment
of life and the world. The sword in the world, the right eye plucked
out, the right hand cut off, the spirit of reproach which those images
express, and of which monasticism is the fulfilment, reflect one side
only of the nature of the divine missionary of the New Testament.
Opposed to, yet blent with, this ascetic or militant character, is the
function of the Good Shepherd, serene, blithe and debonair, beyond the
gentlest shepherd of Greek mythology; of a king under whom the beatific
vision is realised of a reign of peace—peace of heart—among men. Such
aspect of the divine character of Christ, rightly understood, is indeed
the final consummation of that bold and brilliant hopefulness in man’s
nature, which had sustained him so far through his immense labours, his
immense sorrows, and of which pagan gaiety in the handling of life, is
but a minor achievement. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, of those
two contrasted aspects of its Founder, have, in different ages and
under the urgency of different human needs, been at work also in the
Christian Church. Certainly, in that brief “Peace of the church” under
the Antonines, the spirit of a pastoral security and happiness seems to
have been largely expanded. There, in the early church of Rome, was to
be seen, and on sufficiently reasonable grounds, that satisfaction and
serenity on a dispassionate survey of the facts of life, which all
hearts had desired, though for the most part in vain, contrasting
itself for Marius, in particular, very forcibly, with the imperial
philosopher’s so heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy. It was
Christianity in its humanity, or even its humanism, in its generous
hopes for man, its common sense and alacrity of cheerful service, its
sympathy with all creatures, its appreciation of beauty and daylight.
“The angel of righteousness,” says the Shepherd of Hermas, the most
characteristic religious book of that age, its Pilgrim’s Progress—“the
angel of righteousness is modest and delicate and meek and quiet. Take
from thyself grief, for (as Hamlet will one day discover) ’tis the
sister of doubt and ill-temper. Grief is more evil than any other
spirit of evil, and is most dreadful to the servants of God, and beyond
all spirits destroyeth man. For, as when good news is come to one in
grief, straightway he forgetteth his former grief, and no longer
attendeth to anything except the good news which he hath heard, so do
ye, also! having received a renewal of your soul through the beholding
of these good things. Put on therefore gladness that hath always favour
before God, and is acceptable unto Him, and delight thyself in it; for
every man that is glad doeth the things that are good, and thinketh
good thoughts, despising grief.”—Such were the commonplaces of this new
people, among whom so much of what Marius had valued most in the old
world seemed to be under renewal and further promotion. Some
transforming spirit was at work to harmonise contrasts, to deepen
expression—a spirit which, in its dealing with the elements of ancient
life, was guided by a wonderful tact of selection, exclusion,
juxtaposition, begetting thereby a unique effect of freshness, a grave
yet wholesome beauty, because the world of sense, the whole outward
world was understood to set forth the veritable unction and royalty of
a certain priesthood and kingship of the soul within, among the
prerogatives of which was a delightful sense of freedom.
The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was,
had his visionary aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato’s
peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have
descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated
Christian poetry and art as they came to be under the influence of
Saint Francis of Assisi. But if he dreamed on one of those nights of
the beautiful house of Cecilia, its lights and flowers, of Cecilia
herself moving among the lilies, with an enhanced grace as happens
sometimes in healthy dreams, it was indeed hardly an anticipation. He
had lighted, by one of the peculiar intellectual good-fortunes of his
life, upon a period when, even more than in the days of austere ascêsis
which had preceded and were to follow it, the church was true for a
moment, truer perhaps than she would ever be again, to that element of
profound serenity in the soul of her Founder, which reflected the
eternal goodwill of God to man, “in whom,” according to the oldest
version of the angelic message, “He is well-pleased.”
For what Christianity did many centuries afterwards in the way of
informing an art, a poetry, of graver and higher beauty, we may think,
than that of Greek art and poetry at their best, was in truth
conformable to the original tendency of its genius. The genuine
capacity of the catholic church in this direction, discoverable from
the first in the New Testament, was also really at work, in that
earlier “Peace,” under the Antonines—the minor “Peace of the church,”
as we might call it, in distinction from the final “Peace of the
church,” commonly so called, under Constantine. Saint Francis, with his
following in the sphere of poetry and of the arts—the voice of Dante,
the hand of Giotto—giving visible feature and colour, and a palpable
place among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-establish a
continuity, only suspended in part by those troublous intervening
centuries—the “dark ages,” properly thus named—with the gracious spirit
of the primitive church, as manifested in that first early springtide
of her success. The greater “Peace” of Constantine, on the other hand,
in many ways, does but establish the exclusiveness, the puritanism, the
ascetic gloom which, in the period between Aurelius and the first
Christian emperor, characterised a church under misunderstanding or
oppression, driven back, in a world of tasteless controversy, inwards
upon herself.
Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time was gone by when men
became Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression, and
with all the disturbing results of such a crisis. At this period the
larger number, perhaps, had been born Christians, had been ever with
peaceful hearts in their “Father’s house.” That earlier belief in the
speedy coming of judgment and of the end of the world, with the
consequences it so naturally involved in the temper of men’s minds, was
dying out. Every day the contrast between the church and the world was
becoming less pronounced. And now also, as the church rested awhile
from opposition, that rapid self-development outward from within,
proper to times of peace, was in progress. Antoninus Pius, it might
seem, more truly even than Marcus Aurelius himself, was of that group
of pagan saints for whom Dante, like Augustine, has provided in his
scheme of the house with many mansions. A sincere old Roman piety had
urged his fortunately constituted nature to no mistakes, no offences
against humanity. And of his entire freedom from guile one reward had
been this singular happiness, that under his rule there was no shedding
of Christian blood. To him belonged that half-humorous placidity of
soul, of a kind illustrated later very effectively by Montaigne, which,
starting with an instinct of mere fairness towards human nature and the
world, seems at last actually to qualify its possessor to be almost the
friend of the people of Christ. Amiable, in its own nature, and full of
a reasonable gaiety, Christianity has often had its advantage of
characters such as that. The geniality of Antoninus Pius, like the
geniality of the earth itself, had permitted the church, as being in
truth no alien from that old mother earth, to expand and thrive for a
season as by natural process. And that charmed period under the
Antonines, extending to the later years of the reign of Aurelius
(beautiful, brief, chapter of ecclesiastical history!), contains, as
one of its motives of interest, the earliest development of Christian
ritual under the presidence of the church of Rome.
Again as in one of those mystical, quaint visions of the Shepherd of
Hermas, “the aged woman was become by degrees more and more youthful.
And in the third vision she was quite young, and radiant with beauty:
only her hair was that of an aged woman. And at the last she was
joyous, and seated upon a throne—seated upon a throne, because her
position is a strong one.” The subterranean worship of the church
belonged properly to those years of her early history in which it was
illegal for her to worship at all. But, hiding herself for awhile as
conflict grew violent, she resumed, when there was felt to be no more
than ordinary risk, her natural freedom. And the kind of outward
prosperity she was enjoying in those moments of her first “Peace,” her
modes of worship now blossoming freely above-ground, was re-inforced by
the decision at this point of a crisis in her internal history.
In the history of the church, as throughout the moral history of
mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either of which it is possible
to maintain—two conceptions, under one or the other of which we may
represent to ourselves men’s efforts towards a better
life—corresponding to those two contrasted aspects, noted above, as
discernible in the picture afforded by the New Testament itself of the
character of Christ. The ideal of asceticism represents moral effort as
essentially a sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of human nature to
another, that it may live the more completely in what survives of it;
while the ideal of culture represents it as a harmonious development of
all the parts of human nature, in just proportion to each other. It was
to the latter order of ideas that the church, and especially the church
of Rome in the age of the Antonines, freely lent herself. In that
earlier “Peace” she had set up for herself the ideal of spiritual
development, under the guidance of an instinct by which, in those
serene moments, she was absolutely true to the peaceful soul of her
Founder. “Goodwill to men,” she said, “in whom God Himself is
well-pleased!” For a little while, at least, there was no forced
opposition between the soul and the body, the world and the spirit, and
the grace of graciousness itself was pre-eminently with the people of
Christ. Tact, good sense, ever the note of a true orthodoxy, the
merciful compromises of the church, indicative of her imperial vocation
in regard to all the varieties of human kind, with a universality of
which the old Roman pastorship she was superseding is but a prototype,
was already become conspicuous, in spite of a discredited, irritating,
vindictive society, all around her.
Against that divine urbanity and moderation the old error of Montanus
we read of dimly, was a fanatical revolt—sour, falsely anti-mundane,
ever with an air of ascetic affectation, and a bigoted distaste in
particular for all the peculiar graces of womanhood. By it the desire
to please was understood to come of the author of evil. In this
interval of quietness, it was perhaps inevitable, by the law of
reaction, that some such extravagances of the religious temper should
arise. But again the church of Rome, now becoming every day more and
more completely the capital of the Christian world, checked the nascent
Montanism, or puritanism of the moment, vindicating for all Christian
people a cheerful liberty of heart, against many a narrow group of
sectaries, all alike, in their different ways, accusers of the genial
creation of God. With her full, fresh faith in the Evangele—in a
veritable regeneration of the earth and the body, in the dignity of
man’s entire personal being—for a season, at least, at that critical
period in the development of Christianity, she was for reason, for
common sense, for fairness to human nature, and generally for what may
be called the naturalness of Christianity.—As also for its comely
order: she would be “brought to her king in raiment of needlework.” It
was by the bishops of Rome, diligently transforming themselves, in the
true catholic sense, into universal pastors, that the path of what we
must call humanism was thus defined.
And then, in this hour of expansion, as if now at last the catholic
church might venture to show her outward lineaments as they really
were, worship—“the beauty of holiness,” nay! the elegance of
sanctity—was developed, with a bold and confident gladness, the like of
which has hardly been the ideal of worship in any later age. The tables
in fact were turned: the prize of a cheerful temper on a candid survey
of life was no longer with the pagan world. The æsthetic charm of the
catholic church, her evocative power over all that is eloquent and
expressive in the better mind of man, her outward comeliness, her
dignifying convictions about human nature:—all this, as abundantly
realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by the great medieval
church-builders, by the great ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the
masters of sacred music in the middle age—we may see already, in dim
anticipation, in those charmed moments towards the end of the second
century. Dissipated or turned aside, partly through the fatal mistake
of Marcus Aurelius himself, for a brief space of time we may discern
that influence clearly predominant there. What might seem harsh as
dogma was already justifying itself as worship; according to the sound
rule: Lex orandi, lex credendi—Our Creeds are but the brief abstract of
our prayer and song.
The wonderful liturgical spirit of the church, her wholly unparalleled
genius for worship, being thus awake, she was rapidly re-organising
both pagan and Jewish elements of ritual, for the expanding therein of
her own new heart of devotion. Like the institutions of monasticism,
like the Gothic style of architecture, the ritual system of the church,
as we see it in historic retrospect, ranks as one of the great,
conjoint, and (so to term them) necessary, products of human mind.
Destined for ages to come, to direct with so deep a fascination men’s
religious instincts, it was then already recognisable as a new and
precious fact in the sum of things. What has been on the whole the
method of the church, as “a power of sweetness and patience,” in
dealing with matters like pagan art, pagan literature was even then
manifest; and has the character of the moderation, the divine
moderation of Christ himself. It was only among the ignorant, indeed,
only in the “villages,” that Christianity, even in conscious triumph
over paganism, was really betrayed into iconoclasm. In the final
“Peace” of the Church under Constantine, while there was plenty of
destructive fanaticism in the country, the revolution was accomplished
in the larger towns, in a manner more orderly and discreet—in the Roman
manner. The faithful were bent less on the destruction of the old pagan
temples than on their conversion to a new and higher use; and, with
much beautiful furniture ready to hand, they became Christian
sanctuaries.
Already, in accordance with such maturer wisdom, the church of the
“Minor Peace” had adopted many of the graces of pagan feeling and pagan
custom; as being indeed a living creature, taking up, transforming,
accommodating still more closely to the human heart what of right
belonged to it. In this way an obscure synagogue was expanded into the
catholic church. Gathering, from a richer and more varied field of
sound than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies, some notes
of which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after generations of
interrupted development, formed into the Gregorian music, she was
already, as we have heard, the house of song—of a wonderful new music
and poesy. As if in anticipation of the sixteenth century, the church
was becoming “humanistic,” in an earlier, and unimpeachable
Renaissance. Singing there had been in abundance from the first; though
often it dared only be “of the heart.” And it burst forth, when it
might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical music; the Jewish
psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now, gradually, from
Greek into Latin—broken Latin, into Italian, as the ritual use of the
rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the earlier authorised
language of the Church. Through certain surviving remnants of Greek in
the later Latin liturgies, we may still discern a highly interesting
intermediate phase of ritual development, when the Greek and the Latin
were in combination; the poor, surely!—the poor and the children of
that liberal Roman church—responding already in their own “vulgar
tongue,” to an office said in the original, liturgical Greek. That hymn
sung in the early morning, of which Pliny had heard, was kindling into
the service of the Mass.
The Mass, indeed, would appear to have been said continuously from the
Apostolic age. Its details, as one by one they become visible in later
history, have already the character of what is ancient and venerable.
“We are very old, and ye are young!” they seem to protest, to those who
fail to understand them. Ritual, in fact, like all other elements of
religion, must grow and cannot be made—grow by the same law of
development which prevails everywhere else, in the moral as in the
physical world. As regards this special phase of the religious life,
however, such development seems to have been unusually rapid in the
subterranean age which preceded Constantine; and in the very first days
of the final triumph of the church the Mass emerges to general view
already substantially complete. “Wisdom” was dealing, as with the dust
of creeds and philosophies, so also with the dust of outworn religious
usage, like the very spirit of life itself, organising soul and body
out of the lime and clay of the earth. In a generous eclecticism,
within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power
within her, she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other matters so
in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various sources—Gnostic,
Jewish, Pagan—to adorn and beautify the greatest act of worship the
world has seen. It was thus the liturgy of the church came to be—full
of consolations for the human soul, and destined, surely! one day,
under the sanction of so many ages of human experience, to take
exclusive possession of the religious consciousness.
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