would have affected him as an irritant; its existence interfered with
the general routine of public affairs. If he were, as a small minority
even of the rich already were, in sympathy with it though not of it, it
would still have concerned him. It was the only exceptional organism of
his uniform time: and it was growing.
This Senator goes into the Curia. He deals with the business of the
day. It includes complaints upon certain assessments of the Imperial
taxes. He consults the lists and sees there (it was the fundamental
conception of the whole of that society) men drawn up in grades of
importance exactly corresponding to the amount of freehold land which
each possessed. He has to vote, perhaps, upon some question of local
repairs, the making of some new street, or the establishment of some
monument. Probably he hears of some local quarrel provoked (he is told)
by the small, segregated Christian body, and he follows the police
report upon it.
He leaves the Curia for his own business and hears at home the accounts
of his many farms, what deaths of slaves there have been, what has been
the result of the harvest, what purchases of slaves or goods have been
made, what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenantry
for the army, and so forth. Such a man was concerned one way or another
with perhaps a dozen large farming centres or villages, and had some
thousands of human beings dependent upon him. In this domestic business
he hardly comes across the Church at all. It was still in the towns. It
was not yet rooted in the countryside.
There might possibly, even at that distance from the frontiers, be
rumors of some little incursion or other of barbarians; perhaps a few
hundred fighting men, come from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge
with a Roman garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of
neighboring barbarians; or perhaps they were attempting to live by
pillage in the neighborhood of the garrison and the soldiers had been
called out against them. He might have, from the hands of a friend in
that garrison, a letter brought to him officially by the imperial post,
which was organized along all the great highways, telling him what had
been done to the marauders or the suppliants; how, too, some had, after
capture, been allotted land to till under conditions nearly servile,
others, perhaps, forcibly recruited for the army. The news would never
for a moment have suggested to him any coming danger to the society in
which he lived.
He would have passed from such affairs to recreations probably
literary, and there would have been an end of his day.
In such a day what we note as most exceptional is the aspect of the
small Catholic body in a then pagan city, and we should remember, if we
are to understand history, that by this time it was already the
phenomenon which contemporaries were also beginning to note most
carefully.
That is a fair presentment of the manner in which a number of local
affairs (including the Catholic Church in his city) would have struck
such a man at such a time.
If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire as a whole, we must
observe certain other things in the landscape, touching the Church and
the society around it, which a local view cannot give us. In the first
place there had been in that society from time to time acute spasmodic
friction breaking out between the Imperial power and this separate
voluntary organism, the Catholic Church. The Church’s partial secrecy,
its high vitality, its claim to independent administration, were the
superficial causes of this. Speaking as Catholics, we know that the
ultimate causes were more profound. The conflict was a conflict between
Jesus Christ with His great foundation on the one hand, and what Jesus
Christ Himself had called “the world.” But it is unhistorical to think
of a “Pagan” world opposed to a “Christian” world at that time. The
very conception of “a Pagan world” requires some external manifest
Christian civilization against which to contrast it. There was none
such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the third century.
The Church had around her a society in which education was very widely
spread, intellectual curiosity very lively, a society largely
skeptical, but interested to discover the right conduct of human life,
and tasting now this opinion, now that, to see if it could discover a
final solution.
It was a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to
speak of its “luxury” or its “cruelty.” A cruel man could be cruel in
it without suffering the punishment which centuries of Christian
training would render natural to our ideas. But a merciful man could
be, and would be, merciful and would preach mercy, and would be
generally applauded. It was a society in which there were many
ascetics—whole schools of thought contemptuous of sensual pleasure—but
a society distinguished from the Christian particularly in this, that
at bottom it _believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief
to be mere opinions_.
Here was the great antithesis between the Church and her surroundings.
It is an antithesis which has been revived today. Today, outside the
Catholic Church, there is no distinction between opinion and faith nor
any idea that man is other than sufficient to himself.
The Church did not, and does not, believe man to be sufficient to
himself, nor naturally in possession of those keys which would open the
doors to full knowledge or full social content. It proposed (and
proposes) its doctrines to be held not as opinions but as a body of
faith.
It differed from—or was more solid than—all around it in this: that it
proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical
facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of
“mysteries” as realities instead of symbols.
A word as to the constitution of the Church. All men with an historical
training know that the Church of the years 200-250 was what I have
described it, an organized society under bishops, and, what is more, it
is evident that there was a central primacy at Rome as well as local
primacies in various other great cities. But what is not so generally
emphasized is the way in which Christian society appears to have
_looked at itself_ at that time.
The conception which the Catholic Church had of _itself_ in the early
third century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if
we use the word “Christianity” we are unhistorical. “Christianity” is a
term in the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it
connotes an opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The
Christians of the time of which I speak had no such conception. Upon
the contrary, they were attached to its very antithesis. They were
attached to the conception of a _thing_: of an organized body
instituted for a definite end, disciplined in a definite way, and
remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete doctrine. One
can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoic_ism_, or
epicurean_ism_, or neoplaton_ism_; but one cannot talk of
“Christian_ism_” or “Christ_ism_.” Indeed, no one has been so ignorant
or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase
“Christianity,” used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in
the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of “Christianism”
or “Christism;” and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea;
it connotes something historically false; something that never existed.
Let me give an example of what I mean:
Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private house in
Carthage in the year 225. They are all men of culture; all possessed of
the two languages, Greek and Latin, well-read and interested in the
problems and half-solutions of their skeptical time. One will profess
himself Materialist, and will find another to agree with him; there is
no personal God, certain moral duties must be recognized by men for
such and such utilitarian reasons, and so forth. He finds support.
The host is not of that opinion; he has been profoundly influenced by
certain “mysteries” into which he has been “initiated:” That is,
symbolical plays showing the fate of the soul and performed in high
seclusion before members of a society sworn to secrecy. He has come to
feel a spiritual life as the natural life round him. He has curiously
followed, and often paid at high expense, the services of necromancers;
he believes that in an “initiation” which he experienced in his youth,
and during the secret and most vivid drama or “mystery” in which he
then took part, he actually came in contact with the spiritual world.
Such men were not uncommon. The declining society of the time was
already turning to influences of that type.
The host’s conviction, his awed and reticent attitude towards such
things, impress his guests. One of the guests, however, a simple, solid
kind of man, not drawn to such vagaries, says that he has been reading
with great interest the literature of the Christians. He is in
admiration of the traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. He
quotes certain phrases, especially from the four orthodox Gospels. They
move him to eloquence, and their poignancy and illuminative power have
an effect upon his friends. He ends by saying: “For my part, I have
come to make it a sort of rule to act as this Man Christ would have had
me act. He seems to me to have led the most perfect life I ever read
of, and the practical maxims which are attached to His Name seem to me
a sufficient guide to life. That,” he will conclude simply, “is the
groove into which I have fallen, and I do not think I shall ever leave
it.”
Let us call the man who has so spoken, Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have
been a _Christian_? Would the officials of the Roman Empire have called
him a _Christian_? Would he have been in danger of unpopularity where
_Christians_ were unpopular? Would _Christians_ have received him among
themselves as part of their strict and still somewhat secret society?
Would he have counted with any single man of the whole Empire as one of
the _Christian_ body?
The answer is most emphatically _No_.
No Christian in the first three centuries would have held such a man as
coming within his view. No imperial officer in the most violent crisis
of one of those spasmodic persecutions which the Church had to undergo
would have troubled him with a single question. No Christian
congregation would have regarded him as in any way connected with their
body. Opinion of that sort, “Christism,” had no relation to the Church.
How far it existed we cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In so far as
it existed it would have been on all fours with any one of the vague
opinions which floated about the cultured Roman world.
Now it is evident that the term “Christianity” used as a point of view,
a mere mental attitude, would include such a man, and it is equally
evident that we have only to imagine him to see that he had nothing to
do with the Christian _religion_ of that day. For the Christian
religion (then as now) was a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in
what I have called an organism, and that organism was the Catholic
Church.
The reader may here object: “But surely there was heresy after heresy
and thousands of men were at any moment claiming the name of Christian
whom the orthodox Church rejected. Nay, some suffered martyrdom rather
than relinquish the name.”
True; but the very existence of such sects should be enough to prove
the point at issue.
These sects arose precisely because within the Catholic Church (1)
exact doctrine, (2) unbroken tradition, and (3) absolute unity, were,
all three, regarded as the necessary marks of the institution. The
heresies arose one after another, from the action of men who were
prepared to define yet more punctiliously what the truth might be, and
to claim with yet more particular insistence the possession of living
tradition and the right to be regarded as the centre of unity. No
heresy pretended that the truth was vague and indefinite. The whole
gist and meaning of a heresy was that it, the heresy, or he, the
heresiarch, was prepared to make doctrine yet more sharp, and to assert
his own definition.
What you find in these foundational times is not the Catholic Church
asserting and defining a thing and then, some time after, the
heresiarch denying this definition; no heresy comes within a hundred
miles of such a procedure. What happens in the early Church is that
some doctrine not yet fully defined is laid down by such and such a
man, that his final settlement clashes with the opinion of others, that
after debate and counsel, and also authoritative statement on the part
of the bishops, this man’s solution is rejected and an orthodox
solution is defined. From that moment the heresiarch, if he will not
fall into line with defined opinion, ceases to be in communion; and his
rejection, no less than his own original insistence upon his doctrine,
are in themselves proofs that both he and his judges postulate unity
and definition as the two necessary marks of Catholic truth.
No early heretic or no early orthodox authority dreams of saying to his
opponent: “You may be right! Let us agree to differ. Let us each form
his part of ‘Christian society’ and look at things from his own point
of view.” The moment a question is raised it must of its nature, the
early Church being what it was, be defined one way or the other.
Well, then, what was this body of doctrine held by common tradition and
present everywhere in the first years of the third century?
Let me briefly set down what we know, as a matter of historical and
documentary evidence, the Church of this period to have held. What we
know is a very different matter from what we can guess. We may amplify
it from our conceptions of the _probable_ according to our knowledge of
that society—as, for instance, when we say that there was probably a
bishop at Marseilles before the middle of the second century. Or we may
amplify it by guesswork, and suppose, in the absence of evidence, some
just possible but exceedingly improbable thing: as, that an important
canonical Gospel has been lost. There is an infinite range for
guesswork, both orthodox and heretical. But the plain and known facts
which repose upon historical and documentary evidence, and which have
no corresponding documentary evidence against them, are both few and
certain.
Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what was certainly
true of his time.
Tertullian was a man of about forty in the year 200. The Church then
taught as an unbroken tradition that a Man who had been put to death
about 170 years before in Palestine—only 130 years before Tertullian’s
birth—had risen again on the third day. This Man was a known and real
person with whom numbers had conversed. In Tertullian’s childhood men
still lived who had met eye witnesses of the thing asserted.
This Man (the Church said) was also the supreme Creator God. There you
have an apparent contradiction in terms, at any rate a mystery,
fruitful in opportunities for theory, and as a fact destined to lead to
three centuries of more and more particular definition.
This Man, Who also was God Himself, had, through chosen companions
called Apostles, founded a strict and disciplined society called the
Church. The doctrines the Church taught professed to be His doctrines.
They included the immortality of the human soul, its redemption, its
alternative of salvation and damnation.
Initiation into the Church was by way of baptism with water in the name
of The Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Before His death this Man Who was also God had instituted a certain
rite and _Mystery_ called the Eucharist. He took bread and wine and
changed them into His Body and Blood. He ordered this rite to be
continued. The central act of worship of the Christian Church was
therefore a consecration of bread and wine by priests in the presence
of the initiated and baptized Christian body of the locality. The bread
and wine so consecrated were certainly called (universally) the Body of
the Lord.
The faithful also certainly communicated, that is, eat the Bread and
drank the Wine thus changed in the _Mystery_.
It was the central rite of the Church thus to take the Body of the
Lord.
There was certainly at the head of each Christian community a bishop:
regarded as directly the successor of the Apostles, the chief agent of
the ritual and the guardian of doctrine.
The whole increasing body of local communities kept in touch through
their bishops, held one doctrine and practiced what was substantially
one ritual.
All that is plain history.
The numerical proportion of the Church in the city of Carthage, where
Tertullian wrote, was certainly large enough for its general
suppression to be impossible. One might argue from one of his phrases
that it was a tenth of the population. Equally certainly did the unity
of the Christian Church and its bishops teach the institution of the
Eucharist, the Resurrection, the authority of the Apostles, and their
power of tradition through the bishops. A very large number of converts
were to be noted and (to go back to Tertullian) the majority of his
time, by his testimony, were recruited by conversion, and were not born
Christians.
Such is known to have been, in a very brief outline, the manner of the
Catholic Church in these early years of the third century. Such was the
undisputed manner of the Church, as a Christian or an inquiring pagan
would have been acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and onwards.
I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the moment in which
Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale. Many of
the points I have set down are, of course, _demonstrably_ anterior to
the third century. I mean by “demonstrably” anterior, proved in earlier
documentary testimony. That ritual and doctrine firmly fixed are long
anterior to the time in which you find them rooted is obvious to common
sense. But there are documents as well.
Thus, we have Justin Martyr. He was no less than sixty years older than
Tertullian. He was as near to the Crucifixion as my generation is to
the Reform Bill—and he gave us a full description of the Mass.
We have the letters of St. Ignatius. He was a much older man than St.
Justin—perhaps forty or fifty years older. He stood to the generations
contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the generation of Gladstone,
Bismarck, and, early as he is, he testifies fully to the organization
of the Church with its Bishops, the Eucharistic Doctrine, and the
Primacy in it of the Roman See.
The literature remaining to us from the early first century and a half
after the Crucifixion is very scanty. The writings of what are called
“Apostolic” times—that is, documents proceeding immediately from men
who could remember the time of Our Lord, form not only in their
quantity (and that is sufficiently remarkable), but in their quality,
too, a far superior body of evidence to what we possess from the next
generation. We have more in the New Testament than we have in the
writings of these men who came just after the death of the Apostles.
But what does remain is quite convincing. There arose from the date of
Our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, from, say, A. D. 30 or so, before the
death of Tiberius and a long lifetime after the Roman organization of
Gaul, a definite, strictly ruled and highly individual _Society_, with
fixed doctrines, special mysteries, and a strong discipline of its own.
With a most vivid and distinct personality, unmistakeable. And this
Society was, and is, called “The Church.”
I would beg the reader to note with precision both the task upon which
we are engaged and the exact dates with which we are dealing, for there
is no matter in which history has been more grievously distorted by
religious bias.
The task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a portion of
history as it was. I am not writing here from a brief. I am concerned
to set forth a fact. I am acting as a witness or a copier, not as an
advocate or lawyer. And I say that the conclusion we can establish with
regard to the Christian community on these main lines is the conclusion
to which any man must come quite independently of his creed. He will
deny these facts only if he has such bias against the Faith as
interferes with his reason. A man’s belief in the mission of the
Catholic Church, his confidence in its divine origin, do not move him
to these plain historical conclusions any more than they move him to
his conclusions upon the real existence, doctrine and organization of
contemporary Mormonism. Whether the Church told the truth is for
philosophy to discuss: What the Church in fact _was_ is plain history.
The Church may have taught nonsense. Its organization may have been a
clumsy human thing. That would not affect the historical facts.
By the year 200 the Church was—everywhere, manifestly and in ample
evidence throughout the Roman world—what I have described, and taught
the doctrines I have just enumerated: but it stretches back one hundred
and seventy years before that date and it has evidence to its title
throughout that era of youth.
To see that the state of affairs everywhere widely apparent in A.D. 200
was rooted in the very origins of the institution one hundred and
seventy years before, to see that all this mass of ritual, doctrine and
discipline starts with the first third of the first century, and the
Church was from its birth the Church, the reader must consider the
dates.
We know that we have in the body of documents contained in the “canon”
which the Church has authorized as the “New Testament,” documents
proceeding from men who were contemporaries with the origin of the
Christian religion. Even modern scholarship with all its love of
phantasy is now clear upon so obvious a point. The authors of the
Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, Clement also, and Ignatius also
(who had conversed with the Apostles) may have been deceived, they may
have been deceiving. I am not here concerned with that point. The
discussion of it belongs to another province of argument altogether.
But they were _contemporaries_ of the things they said they were
contemporaries of. In other words, their writings are what is called
“authentic.”
If I read in the four Gospels (not only the first three) of such and
such a miracle, I believe it or I disbelieve it. But I am reading the
account of a man who lived at the time when the miracle is _said_ to
have happened. If you read (in Ignatius’ seven certainly genuine
letters) of Episcopacy and of the Eucharist, you may think him a
wrong-headed enthusiast. But you know that you are reading the work of
a man who _personally_ witnessed the beginnings of the Church; you know
that the customs, manners, doctrines and institutions he mentions or
takes for granted, were certainly those of his time, that is, of the
_origin_ of Catholicism, though you may think the customs silly and the
doctrines nonsense.
St. Ignatius talking about the origin and present character of the
Catholic Church is exactly in the position—in the matter of dates—of a
man of our time talking about the rise and present character of the
Socialists or of the rise and present character of Leopold’s Kingdom of
Belgium, of United Italy, the modern. He is talking of what is,
virtually, his own time.
Well, there comes after this considerable body of _contemporary_
documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very
spring and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first
founders), a gap which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a
man.