fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and
liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions, of
religious practices, and of dialects. There was not even one current
official language for the educated thought of the Empire: there were
two, Greek and Latin. And in every department of human life there
co-existed this very large liberty of individual and local expression,
coupled with a complete, and, as it were, necessary unity, binding the
whole vast body together. Emperor might succeed Emperor, in a series of
civil wars. Several Emperors might be reigning together. The office of
Emperor might even be officially and consciously held in commission
among four or more men. But the power of the Emperor was always one
power, his office one office, and the system of the Empire one system.
It is not the purpose of these few pages to attempt a full answer to
the question of how such a civic state of mind came to be, but the
reader must have some _sketch_ of its development if he is to grasp its
nature.
The old Mediterranean world out of which the Empire grew had consisted
(before that Empire was complete—say, from an unknown most distant past
to 50 B.C.) in two types of society: there stood in it as rare
exceptions _States_, or nations in our modern sense, governed by a
central Government, which controlled a large area, and were peopled by
the inhabitants of many towns and villages. Of this sort was ancient
Egypt. But there were also, surrounding that inland sea, in such great
numbers as to form the predominant type of society, a series of
_Cities_, some of them commercial ports, most of them controlling a
small area from which they drew their agricultural subsistence, but all
of them remarkable for this, that their citizens drew their civic life
from, felt patriotism for, were the soldiers of, and paid their taxes
to, not a nation in our sense but a _municipality_.
These cities and the small surrounding territories which they
controlled (which, I repeat, were often no more than local agricultural
areas necessary for the sustenance of the town) were essentially the
sovereign Powers of the time. Community of language, culture, and
religion might, indeed, bind them in associations more or less strict.
One could talk of the Phoenician cities, of the Greek cities, and so
forth. But the individual City was always the unit. City made war on
City. The City decided its own customs, and was the nucleus of
religion. The God was the God of the city. A rim of such points
encircled the eastern and central Mediterranean wherever it was
habitable by man. Even the little oasis of the Cyrenæan land with sand
on every side, but habitable, developed its city formations. Even on
the western coasts of the inland ocean, which received their culture by
sea from the East, such City States, though more rare, dotted the
littoral of Algeria, Provence and Spain.
Three hundred years before Our Lord was born this moral equilibrium was
disturbed by the huge and successful adventure of the Macedonian
Alexander.
The Greek City States had just been swept under the hegemony of
Macedon, when, in the shape of small but invincible armies, the common
Greek culture under Alexander overwhelmed the East. Egypt, the Levant
littoral and much more, were turned into one Hellenized (that is,
“Greecified”) civilization. The separate cities, of course, survived,
and after Alexander’s death unity of control was lost in various and
fluctuating dynasties derived from the arrangements and quarrels of his
generals. But the old moral equilibrium was gone and the conception of
a general civilization had appeared. Henceforward the Syrian, the Jew,
the Egyptian saw with Greek eyes and the Greek tongue was the medium of
all the East for a thousand years. Hence are the very earliest names of
Christian things, Bishop, Church, Priest, Baptism, Christ, Greek names.
Hence all our original documents and prayers are Greek and shine with a
Greek light: nor are any so essentially Greek in idea as the four
Catholic Gospels.
Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of accidents very difficult to
follow (since we have only later accounts—and they are drawn from the
city’s point of view only), became the chief of the City States in the
Peninsula. Some few it had conquered in war and had subjected to
taxation and to the acceptation of its own laws; many it protected by a
sort of superior alliance; with many more its position was ill defined
and perhaps in origin had been a position of allied equality. But at
any rate, a little after the Alexandrian Hellenization of the East this
city had in a slower and less universal way begun to break down the
moral equilibrium of the City States in Italy, and had produced between
the Apennines and the sea (and in some places beyond the Apennines) a
society in which the City State, though of coarse surviving, was no
longer isolated or sovereign, but formed part of a larger and already
definite scheme. The city which had arrived at such a position, and
which was now the manifest capital of the Italian scheme, was ROME.
Contemporary with the last successes of this development in Italy went
a rival development very different in its nature, but bound to come
into conflict with the Roman because it also was extending. This was
the commercial development of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that
is, a Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life like all the
rest. It had shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had
shown for conquest, for alliances, and in general for a spread of its
spirit and for the domination of its laws and modes of thought. The
business of Carthage was to enrich itself: not indirectly as do
soldiers (who achieve riches as but one consequence of the pursuit of
arms), but directly, as do merchants, by using men indirectly, by
commerce, and by the exploitation of contracts.
The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in Spain, and harbors wherever
he could find them, especially in the Western Mediterranean. He
employed mercenary troops. He made no attempt to radiate outward slowly
step by step, as does the military type, but true to the type of every
commercial empire, from his own time to our own, the Carthaginian built
up a scattered hotchpotch of dominion, bound together by what is today
called the “Command of the Sea.”
That command was long absolute and Carthaginian power depended on it
wholly. But such a power could not co-exist with the growing strength
of martial Italy. Rome challenged Carthage; and after a prodigious
struggle, which lasted to within two hundred years of the birth of Our
Lord, ruined the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the town itself
was destroyed by the Romans, and its territory turned into a Roman
province. So perished for many hundred years the dangerous illusion
that the merchant can master the soldier. But never had that illusion
seemed nearer to the truth than at certain moments in the duel between
Carthage and Rome.
The main consequence of this success was that, by the nature of the
struggle, the Western Mediterranean, with all its City States, with its
half-civilized Iberian peoples, lying on the plateau of Spain behind
the cities of the littoral, the corresponding belt of Southern France,
and the cultivated land of Northern Africa, fell into the Roman system,
and became, but in a more united way, what Italy had already long
before become. The Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, the Roman
confederation, with its ideas of law and government, was supreme in the
Western Mediterranean and was compelled by its geographical position to
extend itself inland further and further into Spain, and even (what was
to be of prodigious consequence to the world) into GAUL.
But before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul we must notice
that in the hundred years after the final fall of Carthage, the Eastern
Mediterranean had also begun to come into line. This Western power, the
Roman, thus finally established, occupied Corinth in the same decade as
that which saw the final destruction of Carthage, and what had once
been Greece became a Roman province. All the Alexandrian or Grecian
East—Syria, Egypt—followed. The Macedonian power in its provinces came
to depend upon the Roman system in a series of protectorates,
annexations, and occupations, which two generations or so before the
foundation of the Catholic Church had made Rome, though her system was
not yet complete, the centre of the whole Mediterranean world. The men
whose sons lived to be contemporary with the Nativity saw that the
unity of that world was already achieved. The World was now one, and
was built up of the islands, the peninsulas, and the littoral of the
Inland Sea.
So the Empire might have remained, and so one would think it naturally
would have remained, a Mediterranean thing, but for that capital
experiment which has determined all future history—Julius Cæsar’s
conquest of Gaul—Gaul, the mass of which lay North, Continental,
exterior to the Mediterranean: Gaul which linked up with the Atlantic
and the North Sea: Gaul which lived by the tides: Gaul which was to be
the foundation of things to come.
It was this experiment—the Roman Conquest of Gaul—and its success which
opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the
world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no
parallel. Something less than a hundred small Celtic States, partially
civilized (but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the
Mediterranean), were occupied, taught, and, as it were, “converted”
into citizens of this now united Roman civilization.
It was all done, so to speak, within the lifetime of a man. The link
and corner-stone of Western Europe, the quadrilateral which lies
between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, between the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic, and the Channel, accepted civilization in a manner so final
and so immediate that no historian has ever quite been able to explain
the phenomenon. Gaul accepted almost at once the Roman language, the
Roman food, the Roman dress, and it formed the first—and a
gigantic—extension of European culture.
We shall later find Gaul providing the permanent and enduring example
of that culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay.
Gaul led to Britain. The Iberian Peninsula, after the hardest struggle
which any territory had presented, was also incorporated. By the close
of the first century after the Incarnation, when the Catholic Church
had already been obscurely founded in many a city, and the turn of the
world’s history had come, the Roman Empire was finally established in
its entirety. By that time, from the Syrian Desert to the Atlantic,
from the Sahara to the Irish Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine
and the Danube, in one great ring fence, there lay a secure and
unquestioned method of living incorporated as one great State.
This State was to be the soil in which the seed of the Church was to be
sown. As the religion of this State the Catholic Church was to develop.
This State is still present, underlying our apparently complex
political arrangements, as the main rocks of a country underlie the
drift of the surface. Its institutions of property and of marriage; its
conceptions of law; its literary roots of Rhetoric, of Poetry, of
Logic, are still the stuff of Europe. The religion which it made as
universal as itself is still, and perhaps more notably than ever,
apparent to all.
II
WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
So far I have attempted to answer the question, “What Was the Roman
Empire?” We have seen that it was an institution of such and such a
character, but to this we had to add that it was an institution
affected from its origin, and at last permeated by, another
institution. This other institution had (and has) for its name “The
Catholic Church.”
My next task must, therefore, be an attempt to answer the question,
“What was the Church in the Roman Empire?” for that I have not yet
touched.
In order to answer this question we shall do well to put ourselves in
the place of a man living in a particular period, from whose standpoint
the nature of the connection between the Church and the Empire can best
be observed. And that standpoint in time is the generation which lived
through the close of the second century and on into the latter half of
the third century: say from A.D. 190 to A.D. 270. It is the first
moment in which we can perceive the Church as a developed organism now
apparent to all.
If we take an earlier date we find ourselves in a world where the
growing Church was still but slightly known and by most people unheard
of. We can get no earlier view of it as part of the society around it.
It is from about this time also that many documents survive. I shall
show that the appearance of the Church at this time, from one hundred
and fifty to two hundred and forty years after the Crucifixion, is
ample evidence of her original constitution.
A man born shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through
the violent civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines,
surviving to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and in
extreme old age to perceive the promise, though not the establishment,
of an untrammelled Catholicism (it had yet to pass through the last and
most terrible of the persecutions), would have been able to answer our
question well. He would have lived at the turn of the tide: a witness
to the emergence, apparent to all Society, of the Catholic Church.
Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial family in some great
provincial town such as Lyons. He would then find himself one of a
comparatively small class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the
municipal government of the city. Beneath him he would be accustomed to
a large class of citizens, free men but not senatorial; beneath these
again his society reposed upon a very large body of slaves.
In what proportion these three classes of society would have been found
in a town like Lyons in the second century we have no exact documents
to tell us, but we may infer from what we know of that society that the
majority would certainly have been of the servile class, free men less
numerous, while senators were certainly a very small body (they were
the great landowners of the neighborhood); and we must add to these
three main divisions two other classes which complicate our view of
that society. The first was that of the freed men, the second was made
up of perpetual tenants, nominally free, but economically (and already
partly in legal theory) bound to the wealthier classes.
The freed men had risen from the servile class by the sole act of their
masters. They were bound to these masters very strongly so far as
social atmosphere went, and to no small extent in legal theory as well.
This preponderance of a small wealthy class we must not look upon as a
stationary phenomenon: it was increasing. In another half-dozen
generations it was destined to form the outstanding feature of all
imperial society. In the fourth and fifth centuries when the Roman
Empire became from Pagan, Christian, the mark of the world was the
possession of nearly all its soil and capital (apart from public land)
by one small body of immensely wealthy men: the product of the pagan
Empire.
It is next important to remember that such a man as we are conceiving
would never have regarded the legal distinctions between slave and free
as a line of cleavage between different kinds of men. It was a social
arrangement and no more. Most of the slaves were, indeed, still
chattel, bought and sold; many of them were incapable of any true
family life. But there was nothing uncommon in a slave being treated as
a friend, in his being a member of the liberal professions, in his
acting as a tutor, as an administrator of his master’s fortune, or a
doctor. Certain official things he could not be; he could not hold any
public office, of course; he could never plead; and he could not be a
soldier.
This last point is essential; because the Roman Empire, though it
required no large armed force in comparison with the total numbers of
its vast population (for it was not a system of mere repression—no such
system has ever endured), yet could only draw that armed force from a
restricted portion of the population. In the absence of foreign
adventure or Civil Wars, the armies were mainly used as frontier
police. Yet, small as they were, it was not easy to obtain the
recruitment required. The wealthy citizen we are considering would have
been expected to “find” a certain number of recruits for the service of
the army. He found them among his bound free tenants and enfranchised
slaves; he was increasingly reluctant to find them; and they were
increasingly reluctant to serve. Later recruitment was found more and
more from the barbarians outside the Empire; and we shall see on a
subsequent page how this affected the transition from the ancient world
to that of the Dark Ages.
Let us imagine such a man going through the streets of Lyons of a
morning to attend a meeting of the Curia. He would salute, and be
saluted, as he passed, by many men of the various classes I have
described. Some, though slaves, he would greet familiarly; others,
though nominally free and belonging to his own following or to that of
some friend, he would regard with less attention. He would be
accompanied, it may be presumed, by a small retinue, some of whom might
be freed men of his own, some slaves, some of the tenant class, some in
legal theory quite independent of him, and yet by the economic
necessities of the moment practically his dependents.
As he passes through the streets he notes the temples dedicated to a
variety of services. No creed dominated the city; even the local gods
were now but a confused memory; a religious ritual of the official type
was to greet him upon his entry to the Assembly, but in the public life
of the city no fixed philosophy, no general faith, appeared.
Among the many buildings so dedicated, two perhaps would have struck
his attention: the one the great and showy synagogue where the local
Jews met upon their Sabbath, the other a small Christian Church. The
first of these he would look on as one looks today upon the mark of an
alien colony in some great modern city. He knew it to be the symbol of
a small, reserved, unsympathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout
the Empire. The Empire had had trouble with it in the past, but that
trouble was long forgotten; the little colonies of Jews had become
negotiators, highly separate from their fellow citizens, already
unpopular, but nothing more.
With the Christian Church it would be otherwise. He would know as an
administrator (we will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was
_endowed_; that it was possessed of property more or less legally
guaranteed. It had a very definite position of its own among the
congregations and corporations of the city, peculiar, and yet well
secured. He would further know as an administrator (and this would more
concern him—for the possession of property by so important a body would
seem natural enough), that to this building and the corporation of
which it was a symbol were attached an appreciable number of his fellow
citizens; a small minority, of course, in any town of such a date (the
first generation of the third century), but a minority most appreciable
and most worthy of his concern from three very definite
characteristics. In the first place it was certainly growing; in the
second place it was certainly, even after so many generations of
growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel; in the third place (and this
was the capital point) it represented a true political organism—_the
only subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the
Empire_.
If the reader will retain no other one of the points I am making in
this description, let him retain this point: it is, from the historical
point of view, the explanation of all that was to follow. The Catholic
Church in Lyons would have been for that Senator a distinct organism;
with its own officers, its own peculiar spirit, its own type of
vitality, which, if he were a wise man, he would know was certain to
endure and to grow, and which even if he were but a superficial and
unintelligent spectator, he would recognize as unique.
Like a sort of little State the Catholic Church included all classes
and kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which it was
growing, it regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it
within its own sphere. The senator, the tenant, the freed man, the
slave, the soldier, in so far as they were members of this corporation,
were equally bound to certain observances. _Did they neglect these
observances, the corporation would expel them or subject them to
penalties of its own_. He knew that though misunderstandings and fables
existed with regard to this body, there was no social class in which
its members had not propagated a knowledge of its customs. He knew (and
it would disturb him to know) that its organization, though in no way
admitted by law, and purely what we should call “voluntary,” was strict
and very formidable.
Here in Lyons as elsewhere, it was under a monarchical head called by
the Greek name of _Episcopos_. Greek was a language which the cultured
knew and used throughout the western or Latin part of the Empire to
which he belonged; the title would not, therefore, seem to him alien
any more than would be the Greek title of _Presbyter_—the name of the
official priests acting under this monarchical head of the
organization—or than would the Greek title _Diaconos_, which title was
attached to an order, just below the priests, which was comprised of
the inferior officials of the clerical body.
He knew that this particular cult, like the innumerable others that
were represented by the various sacred buildings of the city, had its
mysteries, its solemn ritual, and so forth, in which these, the
officials of its body, might alone engage, and which the mass of the
local “Christians”—for such was their popular name—attended as a
congregation. But he would further know that this scheme of worship
differed wholly from any other of the many observances round it _by a
certain fixity of definition_. The Catholic Church was not an opinion,
nor a fashion, nor a philosophy; it was not a theory nor a habit; it
was a _clearly delineated body corporate based on numerous exact
doctrines_, extremely jealous of its unity and of its precise
definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time, with
passionate conviction.
By this I do not mean that the Senator so walking to his official
duties could not have recalled from among his own friends more than one
who was attached to the Christian body in a negligent sort of way,
perhaps by the influence of his wife, perhaps by a tradition inherited
from his father: he would guess, and justly guess, that this rapidly
growing body counted very many members who were indifferent and some,
perhaps, who were ignorant of its full doctrine. But the body as a
whole, in its general spirit, and _especially in the disciplined
organization of its hierarchy_, did differ from everything round it in
this double character of precision and conviction. There was no
certitude left and no definite spirit or mental aim, no “dogma” (as we
should say today) taken for granted in the Lyons of his time, save
among the Christians.
The pagan masses were attached, without definite religion, to a number
of customs. In social morals they were guided by certain institutions,
at the foundation of which were the Roman ideas of property in men,
land and goods; patriotism, the bond of smaller societies, had long ago
merged in the conception of a universal empire. This Christian Church
alone represented a complete theory of life, to which men were
attached, as they had hundreds of years before been attached to their
local city, with its local gods and intense corporate local life.
Without any doubt the presence of that Church and of what it stood for
would have concerned our Senator. It was no longer negligible nor a
thing to be only occasionally observed. It was a permanent force and,
what is more, a State within the State.