AND GALILEAN
The three centuries which followed the death of Simon Kepha had no conception of a sovereign in the cathedra Petri. The young Church, one and the same in East and West, believed that the throne of the world is in Heaven. Only quite gradually, in response to the demand that springs from the nature of earthly things, did it con- cern itself with the reflection of that heavenly throne established in the city consecrated by the life blood of the greatest witnesses to Jesus, and long since almost sacrosanct as the centre of the Roman world kingdom. The old Rome was transformed into a new Rome. But the Christian spring was fed also from the soil it had conquered. During the time between Nero and Constantine, the Church rook on a form which had necessarily to lead to Papal monarchy. Those were centuries of vigorous growth in the midst of deterioration. They may be compared to an irregular landscape lying under swift moving clouds which cast their reflection on a harvest scene but also upon the new seedlings hardly yet visible above the furrows which the harrow has smoothed over.
Such great political questions as authority, polity and the order of die community, ancient peoples pondered deeply because they had ex- perienced the importance of these things in their own personal lives. Tasks and ways of performing them come in cycles. This truth Plato had realized and expressed in his myth of the great wheel of cosmic necessity. Nevertheless, history up to the time of Christ does show that although moral ideas fell back again and again into the realm of natural brute force and instinct, there was a continuous strong move- ment toward purified thinking despite the fact that reality seemed so different from the ideal. At bottom the questions were: shall it be might or right, polis or cosmopolis (state or humanity) ? In answer- ing both the objective was ultimately to free the highest of values, the value of religion, from its entanglement in the mqan purposes o political, military and humanitarian action. In East and West the mighty struggle between political forms seems like a push onward to the solution which the Church (catholic in this respect also) found
20
JEWISH THEOCRACY 21
in the all-embracing unity of Her organization. In order to under- stand how this Church came to be, one must bear in mind what it took over from the polity of antiquity and merged with its own inner form. Titus destroyed Jerusalem, but he could not destroy theocracy, the most powerful idea of the Jewish people. The old Israel of Moses* time survived the centuries as the most impressive instance of a human order proceeding directly from God. It had no human law giver, not even a human representative of the reigning Divinity. To obey the will of Jahwe and to keep the covenant with Him were deemed sufficient to insure living of right life a life which one received almost as immediately from Him as if He were still walking in Para- dise, Yet the people of the covenant were also a very human people who could want other things than those God had ordained. And what were God's ordinances? The tables of the Mosaic law could not always satisfy the faithful person who was scrupulously bent on doing what was right in the presence of Jahwe. The law was there- fore expounded, dissected and encrusted with paragraphs until at last the regulations were so numerous that it was impossible to heed them. Though great prophets sank wells deep into the primal glory so that there sprang forth waters purer even than those Moses had known, Israel no longer realized how precious they were. The spirit of man had invaded the Divine Order, had realized that it was free to dwell there or to leave. Theocracy failed, as it has always and everywhere failed. Nevertheless it hovers over its historical ruins as the eternal vista of desire. When Israel surrendered to life in its relative sense and demanded a king of Samuel, last of the Judges, it seemed that a feeling of deterioration, of feeding on substitutes, of being driven into a life of second-rate quality, had overpowered the best of the Jews. This one sees expressed in the Book of Judges, The ancient fable of Jotham casts its tragically powerful, satirical shadow on all monarchy and also on all men who do not know how to exist without an earthly master. The trees desire a king, but when they interrogate the healthy plants which live according to the nature God has given them, they meet with a rebuff. The olive, the fig and the vine are astonished. Can it be that their sap, their sweetness, their juice have lost their power, and that they must now be content to recline on the other trees? The question is then asked of the
22 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
thistle and it assents: "If you then really want to anoint me your king, settle down in my shade!"
The theocratic origins of states and their religions arc discernible on many pages of ancient history. Secretly and openly as well, thinkers and holy men felt a Utopian longing for a time when hu- man society would do what is right and good of its own accord, though they had long since realized that the highest political ideals come to grief because the human horde is always naturally virtuous only when it is not less than naturally virtuous. It lies in the nature of Utopia never to come true; and yet it is precisely the fact that it cannot be realized which gives it tremendous power. It is always a yonder and never a here. It can never be reached, and still it leads us on, lighting the way and begetting history like the pillar of fire into which Jahwe changed Himself so that He might go before His people in the days of their tribulation.
Accordingly the theocratic Utopia embodies a permanently valu- able truth: that earthly things are not in themselves ends, and that the highest nobility of mankind would consist in free submission to His will Who is the boundary and realm of all things. Insight into the dignity of this obedience to the unwritten but nevertheless universally evident law was by no means absent from the antique world. It was Plato's opinion that a state having not a god but some mere mortal as its ruler could not be saved from disaster and misery. It was nec- essary, he said, to appoint the immortal being in ourselves custodian of public as well as of private life. And Aristotle maintained that where this rule of the law-from-within prevails, God and reason are enthroned in sovereignty, and that those who desire that a man shall rule introduce the beast into political life. All the great poets and thinkers from Heraclitus, /Eschylus and Sophocles to the moralists of the Roman Imperial time are filled with a deep yearning that the common weal be fashioned according to the law of the godhead which is knowable to all men because it has been written in their hearts. Yet their pioneer efforts their veiled or open theocratic ideas prove only that the history which was being made roundabout them, a his- tory that consisted in constant progression from a new political form to a new crisis, could not be reconciled with theory. Men sensed and knew what is right, but what they did and what they suffered were
ROMAN THEOCRACY 23
not in consonance with that right. Always Antigone met death at the hands of Creon. It was forever in vain that Socrates attempted to win Callicles over to the truth that our life as it speeds on and chafes insatiably at the bit is not the world as it should be, but rather the world as it ought not to exist.
The living religions of the Greeks and Romans were less imbued with theocratic ideas than were their political teachings. They were and remained systems which seemed to afford protection to a people's well-being. During the early age of tribal states, the King as the protector of justice and worship represented the god from whom his authority camd. Later a common feeling of solidarity expressed it- self in the god, who then in turn represented the state. In either case the religious relationship was always based on consciousness of a sanc- tioned superiority, to maintain which one expected the help of the gods one served. But with Alexander the Great a different situation arose. To the dislike of all true Greeks, including Aristotle who had coun- selled his famous pupil to make the Hellenes the ruling people of a new epoch and to deal with the Asiatics as if they were plants and beasts now given a master, the conqueror threw round himself a mantle studded with stars, and with the gesture of an Oriental god- king founded a universal reign superseding national boundaries. Thus the way was opened for a conception that all the peoples of earth formed one humanity. Yet the idea of a world monarchy always and everywhere met with resistance when men began to fear that it would bring about the loss of priority and render equalization immi- nent* Caesar, who laid claim to divine honours, took up the sceptre over the world against the will of the Romans. When the crown was given to Augustus, he was wisely cautious and refused to be a god- king or a king-god. As a priest-king or imperial-priest he united principality and pontificate civil and religious authority in his one hand. Therewith he represented the Roman people in the pres- ence of the gods. State worship was now designed to strengthen sentiment for the monarchy but also to surround the ruler himself with a sacred aura. The man who, while still alive, called himself Son of the Gods, Augustus, the Holy One, who was exalted above the sphere of the mortal and the subservient, received after death the honours of apotheosis. The Romans could honestly feel that thek
24 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
saviour and liberator had escaped from the peril o deterioration to the lap of the gods. Now the genius of the living emperor was considered holy and that of the dead emperor was consecrated at a ceremony which loosed toward heaven an eagle, symbol of his spirit, from over a burning wax image of his person. Thus the cult of the ruler maintained its virility and became the imperial religion a bond fostering unity. Of course this sapped the strength of the older, deeper faith even while it overshadowed the new cults and mysteries. But it preserved the concept of imperial authority de- spite the fact that this authority was formless and inwardly hollow and that some of those who exercised it were utterly without dignity. The man who bore the tide of emperor might not be holy but his office nevertheless was. This the people honoured whether the pur- ple had been inherited or stolen, whether he who ascended the throne had previously been the son of a slave, a cowherd, or a Sirmian peasant, whether he had been elected by the senate, elevated by the legions, or pushed to the fore by feminine jealousy. The emperor was the emperor because his office was an office sacrosanct and far beyond the reach of contamination by any despicable person who held it. This realistic faith in a universal, spiritual something as a reality of primary sovereign importance transcending the stream of time came into the possession of the young Church as a heritage from antiquity, and defending it has remained an essential task throughout all the cen- turies of Catholic history.
Nevertheless Christian judgment had always been passed on the Empire: give to Gesar what is Caesar's and to God the things that are God's, This saying, so rich in consequences, was not a revolu- tion. It was more than a revolution! Jesus did not quiver with the bitter hatred which His fellow Jews bore toward the Roman rule, but from a higher point of vantage He wrote Rome and Jerusalem on the same line. In both places the new order that in which all things are dependent on God clashed with earthly dominion, whether it was the real Empire of Rome or the hoped-for Kingdom of Israel. For the law of Christ's Kingdom was not concerned with extending control over the level plain of earthly things, but with digging deep to the places where the power of God sunders good from evil In it salvation depends only on moral decision, not on political forms or
THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION 25
civil power. His disciples are not to be like those that think they rule while playing the masters and doing violence to their subjects. Hereafter, in the all-changing ordering of things, greatness and dis- tinction will rest in the freedom of man who transcends himself by having God only for his master and for his neighbour one like unto himself. This was the gospel of Jesus which, without impinging upon the imperial authority, was a negation of the fundamental as- sumption of the Empire. It was a declaration of separation from the theoretical theocracy of law and from political messianism.
The new message of the coming of Heaven to earth, of the victory of the eternal in the realm of visible time, was a development of Old Testament theocracy in the spirit of its pristine purity, but added unto it was a new beholding of God and of the relationships between Him and man, His image. Thus the law was fulfilled, not abrogated. In quite the same way the historical evolution which led to cosmopolis and empire prepared soil in which there could take root a super-political religion embracing all mankind. Indeed, even the political theories entertained during the earlier stages of that evolution afterward spread like life-giving veins through the body of the Church. Much which then took form necessarily seemed a departure from the Founder's spirit, but the logic of history is not within man's power to control, nor is he permitted to give permanence to any single moment. The whole meaning of time is not isolated on the stage of the theatre nor in the scene of the play we witness. If the movement of historic life takes on logic and consecutiveness when we see that events move toward Christ no matter how violently opposed some may be to His mission, it is then also easy to look upon the fully developed Church from the vantage-point of certainty that the laws of conflict require that every progress toward higher form must be hewn out of the ma- terials of a contradiction. Though man has no freedom in the world of nature to say "Yes" and "No," he has that freedom in the moral order, which cannot be realized without his co-operation. Satan had already been judged, had been cast out into darkness, had been put in bondage by the Kingdom of Gbd and the men who established that Kingdom. Nevertheless Satan remained the prince of this world the restless antagonist of the Kingdom of God, whose dominion he continued to manifest through the very fact that he had been con-
26 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
quered. Satan had fallen from Heaven like lightning, and yet there was given to him the power to winnow the disciples. And the one disciple who succumbed to him dipped his fingers into the same dish with the Master. Thus it was that primitive Christianity understood and read the Gospel, and exactly thus has the Church preached that Gospel through all times, whether of ignominy or of glory.
The worldwide peace of the Empire had not been a social peace, nor had it brought rest to the human heart. Though there was an abundance of earthly goods, man cried out for salvation. Every one of the Oriental enthusiasts and mystagogues who landed in the har- bours of Pozzuoli or Brindisi could expect to find a market in Rome for his teachings. The world they confronted there was not one of urban vice but of the collapse of social and civic life. Capital was the true master of all. It did violence to justice. It destroyed the rich and oppressed the poor. Luxury brought forth nihilism, and hunger did likewise. There were vast estates and usury, slave trade and mass misery, an army of mercenaries which served the business of war and from which the citizen cut himself free with money, a private justice out of which there had developed a code of egoism, and a plutocratic politic based on the ability to buy power. These were ills to which no legislator could call a halt, and which no god any longer drove away. Even the few rulers of great format were powerless to heal this inner moral illness, Hadrian, the most impressive figure of them all, was only a nervous ruler of a house in peril. He spread his vast genius like a protective mantle over the garnered heirlooms of the Latins, the Greeks and the Semites, and joined Greece and Rome in a brilliant cosmopolite union. And still this eternally travelling, administrat- ing builder, this almost sleepless worker, seemed in the end to be a man running away from himself and able to endure the bearing of his own heart only when he could lose himself in the world of affairs.
Meanwhile an empire was growing very quietly inside the Empire. As soon as there was a David to confront this Goliath of Rome, the giant's fate was sealed if the youthful opponent could find the spot at which the armour was weak. The civil authorities saw clearly that the Christians were a menace. They were measured by entirely dif- ferent standards than those which were applied to protagonists of other new cults. Long after the time of Hadrian the Christians were
THE MARTYRS 27
a sect that stood outside the pale of the law. Their God did not per- mit Himself to be placed in the Pantheon like the other deities of conquered peoples, but like a sovereign He came as One who ruled over all and held everything in His hand. Nor was He the God of any people: He crossed the boundaries of nations and mustered in each the citizens of His super-kingdom. The Christians prayed for Emperor and Empire, but they did not venerate Csesar. They re- fused to render military service and they despised the gods of Rome. In the Roman sense of the term, they were atheists, thus disrupting the sacred foundations of the state and bringing on themselves the blame for public disasters. The worried emperors resorted to persecution in its severest forms, but the power of the Christian enemy could not be destroyed with the sword. Though there were a host of apostates who hoped to seem once more what they no longer were, their numbers availed nothing. The persecuted majority did not lose courage, nor were those who fell aught else than the bearers of an example urging others to resist. It was just as impossible to stifle in blood the convic- tions of a society which looked upon the day a martyr died as his birthday in eternal life, as it was to alter the truth of the dictum of Greek tragedy that life is an act of dying, and that to die means to live. Proscription strengthened the Christian community. The storm which arose from pagan culture passed over it like a life-bringing tem- pest, the winds of which bore seed. The Church had received no mandate either to open its doors to that culture or to close them against it. Vigorous tension characterized that Church from the be- ginning: in it were fought out conflicts between light and darkness, faith and unbelief, fall and resurrection, life and death, heaven and hell. Since, therefore, its consciousness had metaphysical breadth, it possessed the strength and the inner poise needed when the impact of the surrounding world made it imperative that whenever anything was offered by that world which was assimilable to its own inner form it welcomed the accession while repudiating all else. Many shadows fall upon its young growth. Its writings contain yellowed pages, like last year's leaves on spring trees, but the proofs of their power still lie hidden for the most part even as does the virility of roots or seed pods just bursting. The world then had enough of handicraft and of intellectual achievement. Foundations, walls, palaces, basilicas
28 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
still ascended from the level plain. Philosophers, among them the noble Plotinus who dwelt in rapt ecstasy upon the life of the High- est One, erected systems destined to endure as long as the stones of Rome. Yet nothing that was thought or done any longer appealed deeply to this hectically smiling generation. Now the message of man's true salvation spread among the peoples. It was as if a warm gulf-stream, richer in salt and in the blue of the sky, rippled through the cooler ocean, joining the surrounding waters but not blending with them, beneficently affecting even the distant areas of the conti- nent.
As soon as that seemed necessary Rome exacted leadership in the Church. Nothing could have been more natural than that a com- munity which extended from Spain to the Nile and the Euphrates, should have sought to establish a ruling centre. Equally natural was the claim to being that centre which was put forward by the principal city of the Empire. There Peter and Paul were buried. It testifies to the primeval unity and solidity of the widely-spread Christian con- gregations that they only gradually and at first only very seldom con- cerned themselves with the leadership of the Roman sister community or appealed to it for a decision. Yet earlier Rome had apparently of its own initiative raised its voice in the conscious feeling that it possessed the primacy. During this same time, near the close of Domitian's reign, when the Jewish author of the Apocalypse was rallying Chris- tianity against the beast with powerful imagistic language, and when the last great historian of Rome, Cornelius Tacitus, was inditing books so weighted down with foreboding, Clement, bishop of Rome, felt called upon to address the authors of a conflict in the Corinthian Church. This letter is instructive as being the expression of the strong zest for order which from the beginning had characterized the Church, and which now (about the year 95) would unite communities that had been organized as oligarchies under a higher leadership of the whole Church by the Roman See. Clement's letter begins: 'The Church of God, which is seated like a stranger in Rome, to the Church of God, which is seated in Corinth."
The whole document is stamped with the will of one who desires to teach men how to live in the City of Jesus Christ. Primitive en- thusiasm had naturally died down, the spirit of the community had
THE BISHOP OF ROME 29
seemed willing to conform gradually to the ordinary laws of human association so that mere humdrum earthly realities could have their part in the Christian life and the peril of ecstatic self-immolation be warded off. Charisma was now no longer a tongue of fire coming suddenly from heaven, but the simple implication of every personal gift and situation. Strength but also weakness was charisma it sought to be riches but also poverty. In a spirit of solidarity, Chris- tians should seek to equalize their charisma. The strong were to help the weak and the weak were to obey the strong; the rich were to give to the poor and the poor were to pray that a blessing might rest upon their benefactors. The anarchy of all mere urges, the re- ligious urge also, is now subordinated to the desire for form. The words congregation, corpus (society in the sense of the Roman law) , unity, order, sound almost like military terms. Paul, too, had drawn upon the language of the army and of the world of sport in order to characterize the manner in which the inner man must now respond to the commands given by Christ. But the Roman Bishop writing forty-three years later had good reason to set the example of the army before a communion of saints spread over the whole world, divided among nations, threatened by all cults, schools, myths and systems. Thus would the whole receive an impulse to discipline and unity. Christ sent from God is the King. He in turn sent forth His disci- ples, and these disciples selected elders and bishops who in turn chose their successors in office. It is as if a heritage passed from hand to hand, with the assent of the whole community it is true, but not by reason of their choice. The office proceeds from the King, is a power beyond the ken of men, but is lodged in the bearers and after them in the succession of those who receive it and pass it on. The leaders, like their King, also issue commands. Their law, the canon, is the written or oral tradition of faith. Yet Clement speaks as the Bishop of Rome, in the tone of a higher authority. True enough he still spoke in the name of his community when asking for obedience to the coun- sels advanced in his letter. Herewith the foundations of the Catholic Church, which rest on Jewish, antique and primitive Christian ground become plainly visible. They are the rules of faith, the apostolic or- igin and dignity of the episcopal office, the hierarchical ordering of the representatives of the Divine authority who are sundered from the
3 o EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
lay folk, and the claim of Rome to a leading position in the union of Christian communities.
But it was not only a Roman who thought and felt thus. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, a Syrian of mystical fervour who was at that time travelling to his death as a Roman martyr, wrote a letter to the com- munities from which he was parting. In this there is a picture of the Church which contains all the features of Clement's Roman letter. Even beyond that Ignatius, trembling with anxiety lest all churches in the East and West should lack unity, used for the first time the name for the whole Church which was to remain its title forever. Where the Bishop is, there also shall the people be, just as the Cath- olic Church is there where Christ is; but the seat of priority in this confederation of love shall belong to the Roman community.
The subterranean resting places of the dead offer a symbol of the inner unity in which the living faithful were gathered. These mass graves of the catacombs, long forgotten, rediscovered by a subsequent age and even now replete with puzzles which scholars work at and sometimes solve, indicate through pictures and inscriptions what was written in the hearts of many generations which sought comfort for themselves in the glory of that better world to which their dead be- loved had gone. What they sketched on the walls down there in the stifling air and the silence, were pictorial symbols of the things they believed, hoped and loved. They may have used antique forms, old or new symbols; but their straight-forward language is on the whole no riddle. A little art sufficed to voice the conviction that the Salva- tion of men had appeared the true Master and Shepherd of souls and of peoples. It is all dominated by an apocalyptic mood of realiza- tion that in the turbulent womb of the present there stirs eternal reality, glorious and precious, though none might know whether it would be born in the room of time or revealed as the true life only through death.
But this mood was evoked by an experience of historic events con- stantly swaying up and down, hither and thither, like a sea shaken by a strong wind. It was eminently necessary that youthful Christianity, in itself from the beginning everything else but simple, should find a strong, dependable centre on which it could rest amid the eddies of time and thus find a form consonant with itself. And it was histori- cally logical, therefore, that the Papacy should be based on the See of
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLINE 31
Peter. These things as well as the inner meaning of the history created by the Papacy can be best understood if one is really aware of the poles between which life moves within and without the Church. It then becomes evident that Christianity would never later on con- front opposites more dissonant, or a tension more violent, than it faced in the days when it was first seeking a pathway through the world.
The books of the New Testament agree in affirming a strong re- solve to renew the foundations of the contemporary world. And yet when Paul and the author of the Apocalypse speak of political things they are as disparate as are a peaceful mission and a charge across battlefields. Both points of view continue to find expression through- out the first three centuries of Christendom. Heathen contemporar- ies, even the best and most mature among them, regard the new religion as rebellion, collapse and social peril of the gravest kind. That its own volcanic energy did not become fatal to the new religion may be attributed, humanly speaking, to this resistance from the antique world which assured Christianity the materials for its self- realization, its rebirth of men and things, and its establishment of a firm foundation on which to carry on. It triumphed over Rome, but this Rome could have been conquered only by another Rome. Both powers penetrated each other, but neither lost its identity. Because of the opposition, which nothing has destroyed or will destroy, the Church and the Papacy live under the sign of a conflict which testifies to their unceasing vitality and reveals the nature of their mediation between time and eternity.
So it was from the beginning. In the Emperor and his power Christians beheld brute apotheoses of man and of the dust over which he rules. Nevertheless the new Kingdom from above, which here and now was to be established among men, had to assume the form of a kingdom and govern what was human in its domain with the means required by all human government. Though the Christian Emperor is the supernatural Kyrios Christos, whose rule is mystical and whose kingdom is not of this world, it is nevertheless this world which must be fashioned to resemble His own. Needed are heralds and executors of His law. A visible likeness must be found for His invisible majesty; and His reign has need of an authorized viceroy. When the conquering Church accepted Empire and Emperor as its models, k
3 2 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
ran a great risk. Since this was a world which gave the Emperor things that are God's, the temptation arose to give to God what was given the Emperor, and in the same way. The Kingdom of Heaven which the Galilean had founded yearned towards fulfilment, but the Imperial state in which this fulfilment was to occur forced the simple Dove to become cunning as the serpent. This was the first profound contradiction in the bosom of the Church, and on it Jesus has looked with scorn. Satan could not be driven out with Satan; and a house divided against itself could not stand. A second contradiction was associated with this the contradiction between the Gospel and antique civilization. Both had arisen from religious sources, and the conflict which followed the first confluence of the two realms was very soon looked upon as a quarrel between lovers. The New Testament went its way among the peoples in the common Greek language. Its authors, though virtually all Jews, were not without contact with the thought and the language of pagan culture. When Paul spoke of the "community," he approximated to the political consciousness of the Greeks.
The fourth Gospel opens in the style of Heraclitus. The image of the shepherd and sheep, representing pastor and souls, the sacred signs of bread and wine, were held by Christians in common with the devotees of strange mysteries. Already Paul, and after him many another, had to give warning that Christian must not be confounded with heathen. As Jesus drank from the jug of the pagan woman at the well, the first thinkers of the young Church, which was still so dependent upon urban culture for its terminology, wore the phi- losopher's mantle and discoursed upon the great ideas in the for- mula: in which Socrates, Plato and the Stoics sought to phrase the prob- lems of God, the world and humankind. That objects situated in space and time are only shadows of spiritual reality; that the cosmos rests upon the bosom of Eternal Reason, which orders all things and gives them a purpose: these declarations sounded like ancient fore- bodings of the truth acclaimed in the New Testament. Yes, the Christ who is eternal and who from the beginning spoke as the eternal Logos to the heart of mankind, appeared in human form in Jesus, who is the Revealer and Fulfiller of ideas and intuitions which at the very beginning were given to the human soul but were then half blotted
RELIGION AND GREEK CULTURE 33
out by sin and error. He is the Educator of the human race, the true Orpheus who brings all that is savage into submission with a song that song which in the beginning of time created the harmony of the spheres. Reason is His Image and acting in accordance with reason is the ethic and the aesthetic of Christian life. The first to seek to harmonize the ancient powers of the intellect and the new powers of the soul inside a Catholic Church which opened its arms wide to all things divine and human, were Clement of Alexandria and Origen his great disciple.
Both of them were speculative Easterners. It is true that they all but brought the Gospel into subservience to Greek philosophy, but the movement they fostered which the Roman West halted at the right time bequeathed to the whole Church something of great and enduring value. What Paul and John had begun now reached an initial state of perfection. The intellect was summoned to explore the greatest secret of history; science flung itself upon the cosmos of faith. Antique confidence in the strength and dignity of 'reason united itself with the new self-assertion of the soul, and in a time when man despaired of man cleared the path which led to a human- ism in the name of Christ, who was God become Man. Christen- dom surmounted the danger of becoming merely a religion of the slaves and the "lower classes." A faith in the providential guidance of all mankind and its spiritual life, a belief in the unity and con- cordance of histoty, preserved the antique world for the present and the future by reason also of God's word present in it. A cargo of philosophy alone the Church could not have borne. The religion which it was to teach the world was both deed and teaching, not teaching only. Some adopted it because it reasoned in the manner of Plato; others came because they were tired of Plato and wished to exchange speculation for salvation, and Eros for charity. Was not culture declining throughout the Empire because it had become com- mon property and no longer quenched the ultimate thirst? Many a pious person looked upon the ancient thinkers as gossips and sophists who in the empore on the Nile were given honours due those who taught Christ. The Church faced the peril of either sacrificing re- ligion to culture or of sacrificing culture to religion. That was the second conflict of powers that demanded a solution.
34 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
The third, the deepest of all, had its roots in the bosom of the Church itself. It arose then, it has arisen since, and it will arise again and again as long as Christendom remains a human society. It re- sults from the fact that there is a conflict between the rights of the individual and those of society, as a whole, between things as I sec them and as they are in themselves. This kind of man and that kind of man both confront the Church and expect it to be the exact image of themselves. But it was called to embrace all men, even as they all were called to it. In it there shall be many mansions, even as there are in the Heavenly Father's House, who has made not one like unto another; and nevertheless the Church, in order to exist at all, had to become one only fold for the flock of the One Shepherd. If men had had their way, this house would have fallen into ruin and out of the debris hut after hut would have been built according to each one's desire. During the second and third centuries, the grow- ing confederation of Christian communities saw that danger lay in luxuriant growth, in the diversity of peoples and races from East and West who now belonged to the Church. Enthusiasm disrupted the bonds of law, negation of the world looked with hostility upon affirma- tion of the world. Knowledge strove against faith, untrammelled feeling resisted the compulsion of the norm, the God who lived in the individual heart seemed at odds with the God who lived in the law and the priesthood. Every group appealed to Christ and in- sisted that it was His Church. During this difficult contest of forces and men, the mystical body of Christ resisted all pressure from with- out and took on its Catholic form (we shall see what that form is) , and the Church in Rome became the authoritative guide of all others.
The primary concern was for unity of faith and thought as the determining characteristics of Christian life. Debating the great ques- tions of the time, men reached irreconcilable answers. Did this world hail from God, or did it spring from evil? How can the evil in it be reconciled with God's holiness? Is not man the one and only being, himself his God and the inner meaning of heaven and earth? 'Should not all flesh be gainsaid for the spirit's sake, or are flesh and matter so remote from God and the spirit that where they have dominion there is no sin? Who was Jesus and in what sense was He the Christ, the Son of God? A flood of theosophic cults arose between the years
GNOSTICISM 35
1 20 and 1 60 in the form of the Gnostic mass movement. This did not well up suddenly, it was a compound of Greek, Jewish, Persian, Egyptian and Babylonian speculation a potpourri of systems which met, separated and subsided as do the waves. Its waters splashed upon the deck of the vessel of die Church and carried some of its treas- ure overboard. The ark of Christ had never been in such peril of the sea. There were moments when the waves seemed to cover it. Was not Gnosticism Christendom? And was not Christianity Gnos- tic? Many an eye lost sight of the difference between the two.
In Rome, too, the Church beheld the visage of her rival one of many such rivals when Marcion appeared there between 130 and 140. He was the son of a bishop dwelling in the region of the Black Sea, a shipbuilder and a well-to-do man. He gave the Roman Church the equivalent of $10,000, perhaps with the object of removing doubts as to the genuineness of his profession of the Catholic faith. He established contact with the Gnostic leaders in the metropolis; and the Church demanded that he submit to its leaders a written profes- sion of faith. This he did, but it was not his final statement. At heart neither a Christian nor a Gnostic, in the sense that he belonged either to the Christian community or to a Gnostic group, he formed his own teachings out of materials taken from both camps. This was far above the level of current piebald and fantastic systems. It pleased the earnest by being both strict and comforting, it directed words of serious counsel to the frivolous, and enkindled hope in the hearts of die despairing. The Gospel, said Marcion, is a new message to the world, which far surpasses all others, but it has nothing in common with the religion of the Jews. The Old Testament and its law must be thoroughly repudiated, for its God and the God of Jesus are antagonistic deities. The One is the creator of this evil world is jealous, vengeful toward rivals, a Giver of exacting laws, just to the point of cruelty. But above Him and His faulty creation there dwells the God who is really almighty and good: who docs not punish or scold, who is a distant, unfathomed, strange God of whom we should know nothing had it not been for His revelation in Jesus. He is the God of all comfort, as Paul says. He is the stronger, is the Master of the other whose creation He destroys. Jesus, the good God in human form, brought His gende law to a humanity which though
36 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
weak is good at heart. After He had arisen He revealed to Paul, His only Apostle (for the other twelve were mere pretenders, faithless to their trust) the true Gospel of justification through faith without works. The true Christian lives without fear because his God summons no man to judgment. He obeys because he loves. He does not think in terms of reward and punishment. Yet this freedom must not be misunderstood. Let all fast, eating fish and vegetables, and let all abstain from every sexual action, including marriage, which is mere lust, since matter is the source of all evil, and flesh is the spring from which all sin flows. Begetting and being begotten merely lengthen the rime during which the evil world of the Creator God can endure. Only he who renounces these things is ripe for baptism, nor must he expect that virtue will be rewarded here below. The beatitudes arc given to the "poor." The real believer must be prepared to experience misery and suffering, even though he mirror God's love for him in his own kindness toward the rest of men.
Such were the ideas of the first reformer. He repudiated all books of the Sacred Scriptures which did not fit into his system, and those he accepted he expounded in his own way. Thus he established free biblical inquiry. Personal Christianity now existed side by side with universal Christianity. The founder of a sect had termed his work the true and better Church. Therewith the Roman community saw a movement arise and grow, which surpassed in strength all the dis- sident cliques, lodges and esoteric schools. The breach came during the summer of 144. The Presbytery under Bishop Pius demanded of Marcion that he renounce his errors, excommunicated him, and re- turned the money he had given. His followers regarded this day as the founding-day of their counter church. Once when the aged Polycarp met Marcion he answered the latter's query if he knew him by saying, "Yes, I know the first-born of Satan!"
The ship-owner's church maintained itself long and impressively against the Church of the Fisherman. Yet Catholicism gained in firmness and awareness of its own powers as a result of this struggle* It would also profit by later similar struggles. It answered the theory of a supreme God and a subordinate God by proclaiming the unity of God who is good and just, manifest in grace and law. Against the teaching that broke up history into conflicting acts of good and evil
THE CHURCH CONQUERS MARCION 37
principles, it established the doctrine of the unity of history. It grew more clearly aware of the law of its own form; and because it warded off the attack of alien forces, recognized as such in the light of tradi- tion, it was able to formulate a definition of heresy. This term had been applied to sectarianism and false teaching already in the New Testament. Even the aged Plato had phrased in The Laws his re- pudiation of heresy and contentiousness, his endorsement of unity and truth, with such passionate conviction that compared to his contempt for merely individualistic doctrines and his condemnation of those who desire novelty at any price, the Church's condemnation of irre- ligion and free thought seemed the mild reproaches of a mother to her children. She could not hesitate to expel from her midst what was alien and incompatible if she possessed a real character, a form and a law o life. Thus the Church appears from the beginning as a formed so- ciety, firmly knit and carefully defined. Roundabout her there ex- tends the kingdom of continuous becoming wherein the spirit follows its whim and sows wheat and weeds together. The expanding Church may absorb much of what is outside and may thus really or conceivably be in peril of laxity that verges on worldliness. Or in the act of repudiation she may risk becoming narrow and rigid. Ever since the days of the Gnostics and therefore almost from the very begin- ning the Church has had to wrestle with the opposition of the continuously modern, which is free thought and the right to heretical opinions* This modernity has always sought to find a way into the Church, thus proving that the Church is strong. The fact that all heretics seek primarily to conquer Rome demonstrates that they know who is the helmsman of the Ship.
The priority of the Roman Church in the Empire did not, however, imply all those rights of the Bishop of Rome which later times associate with the Papacy. An incident which occurred about the year 190, in the time of relative quiet which followed the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius, showed clearly that the will to govern was characteristic not only of the Roman community but also of Rome's Bishop in person. Yet the same incident testifies also to the resistance offered by the Eastern Churches. There some Churches celebrated the Feast of Easter on the day of the old Jewish Passover. Elsewhere, also in Rome, it was customary to observe the Feast on the Sunday following. A
38 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
generation previous die aged Polycarp had not thought it too much trouble to journey to Rome in order to discuss the problem with his fellow priests. It was impossible to reach an agreement and so it was decided that both days were proper. But later the Bishop of Rome endeavoured to enforce unity of observance, basing his position on a synodal resolution which decreed the excommunication of the non-conforming Churches. This somewhat dictatorial attitude was resented by the Asiatics. They answered that the Bishop should re- main mindful of peace, harmony and brotherly love. The old Bishop of Ephesus dealt lightly with this Roman decision: One mightier than he had said that God must be obeyed rather than man. Pope Victor was also counselled not to place whole congregations under the ban because they clung to an ancient traditional custom by Irenaeus of Lyons, though this bishop had advocated die priority of Rome more vigorously than anyone before his time. His pen had rendered busy service in the struggle against the Gnostics, These, he said, built not upon the One Rock, but upon quicksand in which there were many little stones. This defense against them rested firmly on the teaching and the custom which prevailed everywhere in the churches of the East and West. Though he was born in Asia and kept sacred the remembrance of Polycarp, John's disciple and the unforgettable light of his own early years, throughout his mature and later life in the Occident he sought to bring about unity under the monarchical au- thority of the Roman Church. Rome had always been, he said, the central point of the whole Church as well as the source of unity in belief; and so it was meet that each congregation, that is, the faithful in each place, should acknowledge its higher authority. Irenaeus himself decided to conform to Roman usage in the Easter observance, but he nevertheless petitioned the Romans to exercise clemency in matters that did not affect unity of belief. Victor was unable to prevail, but a hundred years later, when at least a part of the East conceded this point, his deeper political insight was borne out.
Inner Christian tension of thought as well as of living sometimes evoked crises in which an authoritative pronouncement was necessary. The cathedra Petri> more and more conscious of the rights that grew out of its priority, felt itself called upon to make these pronouncements and therewith automatically became a sign of contradiction.
ROMAN PRIMACY 39
Though much that occurred during the century prior to Constantine may seem merely the bickering of prelates and theologians, there was really taking place below the surface a ferment the settling of which into a genuinely Catholic wine must henceforth be the unceasing concern of the Church. The forty or fifty peaceful years between Caracalla's reign and the universal persecutions under the Emperors Decius and Valerian (who already confronted a state within a state so powerful that Decius could say he would be less concerned over a rival emperor than over a new bishop) were times when Christianity grew stronger and in which the Roman community came to number about 150 clerics of higher and lower rank. Then some of the Popes (for this word was already used) , began to advocate vigorously the idea of Roman primacy. This conformed with their responsibilities in the shadow of imperial Caesar and in the city whence the Empire was ruled. In this sense spoke Calixtus, the bishop whom the Roman authorities held under grave suspicion but had freed from bondage. He quoted as the basis for his claim Christ's words to Peter. Stephen I and Dionysius were likewise not averse to upholding the authority of Rome in matters of teaching. Yet Rome was, then as well as later on, not so much the creator as the guardian of religious life, which seems to grow most abundantly outside the city in fields of greater fertility. If one wishes to list the foremost Christian personages of the third century, one must begin with the Africans, Cyprian and Tertullian, who also represented the two divergent attitudes of objec- tive Catholicism and personal romantic religion. During the conflict which they engendered and brought to a solution, the Church began to formulate a new definition of its nature.
There was a generation's difference of age between the two Africans. Tertullian, who in his early years had been the steward of an estate in Rome, abjured heathenism after a youth of excesses. Cyprian, teacher of rhetoric, was nearly fifty when he became a Christian about 246. Two or three years later he was consecrated Bishop of Carthage. The writings of the elder were to be the daily bread of the younger man: and yet each one's life work was as a whole as different from the other's as were their personal characters. Common to both was the chialistic mood: resistance against a world caught in the bondage of evil, a desire to reconstruct all in the Christian sense, and opposition to the forces
4 o EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
which sought to degrade the Living God into a human idea or to divide Him into mythical opponent deities, whose prey was the world. Nevertheless human differences made one the antithesis of the other in a number of ways. Tertullian was of a passionate and unsettled nature, unable by reason of his very gifts to acquire form or to give form to other things. The flame which consumed him blew hither and thither, seeking victims for his combative passion. Retiring into himself he could write most beautifully about patience, yet it is just as if a sick man were talking of health. The sensory world was his element, so much so that for him, too, the eternal spirit of God was inconceivable apart from a body. On the other hand the manner in which everything spiritual is tangled up with the flesh Carthage, the heathen atmosphere, the bedraggled world which had pushed itself through the gates of the Church aroused in him a feverish longing for escape from the realm of sense. And so he (like so many of his followers) looked back longingly at the pure simplicity of the primitive. The beginnings of the Christian world had already become so remote that a romantic spirit could be tempted to yearn for the true and im- maculate greatness of yesterday. This romanticism struggled in Ter- tullian's soul with a rationalism which recognized the necessity of historical development.
In powerful, brilliant apologies for Christianity and in calmly rea- soned tracts against heresy, he took heed of the imperfection of all earthly things, which since they have been created have the defects that are inherent in the process of becoming, and urged patience in the presence of God who lets ripen for us through the seasons what in Him- self, who is hidden from our view, is already finished and perfected. Yet Tertullian the thinker did not prevail in the end over Tertullian the man of passion. He cursed heathenism but also came to blows with the Church of his day. He detested the dead weight of human nature that was so obvious in the Church's structure. With Stoic faith he had sensed the divine nerve of the cosmos. He had written the immortally great dictum that the soul is naturally Christian. But now he refused to be patient with the moment in Christian history contemporary with himself. He yearned to fling the wheel of time back to the glory of Christian origins, or hurry forward toward the
TERTULLIAN 41
judgment that is to follow at the world's end. He summoned the divine pneuma upon a nature unredeemed. The storm from on high shall, he vowed, tear the Christian loose from his slothful self. Revela- tion has not ceased, it never will cease to be given as an exciting dis- covery to him who has renounced living in the world. Away, there- fore, with science, with art, with games, and with gymnastics. He frowned likewise on military service, flight from persecution, and re- marriage after the spouse's death. Tertullian, the enthusiast, would preach a Church of the spirit against the Church of bishops and priests. He severed himself from the Catholic community and joined the party of the Rigorists who owe their name and ideal to the sombre Phrygian Montanus. Tertullian, prophet of an anarchical Christianity seeking direct individual communion with God, hated the hierarchical Church to the end. Contesting its power to bind and to loose, he hurled one of the last of his frigidly sarcastic declarations at the Roman Ponti- fex Maximus Calixtus, Bishop of all Bishops, accusing him of for- giving unforgivable sins, such as adultery and fornication. The Church is indebted forever to her greatest Apologist before Augustine's time, but he was also the greatest of apostates prior to Luther. Ter- tullian was the creator of her style. But the danger which he personi- fied, the danger of destruction in the name of God, was also rightly discerned by the Papacy, as time has shown.
Cyprian was a man of the world and remained one after he had become a man of the Church, He was solid, pious, cultivated the virtus Romana in Christian form. As a teacher and shepherd he gave his time the perfect definition of Catholicism. Latin genius gave her the basic text of a political order which the Greek East could not have provided. A decade of catastrophes proved Cyprian's mettle as a born leader in public life. During the persecution of Deems, com- pared with which all those which had preceded were mere pogroms, the new bishop fled from Carthage in 249. His reason for doing so was to keep his flocks from being without a shepherd. Many now doubted his courage, but he soon found opportunity to demonstrate that. He ruled his diocese from his hiding place and saved whatever could be saved. During the peaceful reigns of the Syrian emperors, many had flocked into the Church; and now, under the blows of the
42 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
flail, they flew as chaff does from the wheat. This was characteristic of Rome, Carthage and the Empire as a whole. After the storm was over, many who had lapsed wished to be Christians again. How were they to be dealt with? Were they to be cast off forever? Were they to be accepted on the petition of confessors of the Faith who had earned a kind of consecration and authority by their steadfastness under torment, or was it sufficient that they expressed contrition and were ready to undergo specified forms of penance and ecclesiastical dis- cipline?
The problem created a schism in Rome. Just as the anti-bishop Hippolytus had opposed Calixtus on doctrinal grounds, so Novatian die Rigorist now rose up against Pope Cornelius. But already there had been a sharp cleavage of opinion in Carthage, and this had been aired in writings and addresses. The question plumbed to the depths of human nature, and it also involved the government of the Church. The antique world had not been ignorant of the nature of crime and punishment. It had known Moses and the Prophets, the tragedy of Prometheus who had in voluntary penitence placed a crown of reeds upon his head as a symbolic fetter. It had beheld the pious throng to Delphi and seen thousands come to the Mysteries. Now it was the Church's obligation to weigh sin and penance in its scales. The effort to find the right medium between harshness and laxity was part of the effort to reach a definition of ecclesiastical authority. These questions and the schism that grew out of them forced both Rome and Carthage to reach a decision. When Cyprian returned in 251, he dealt with them in word and deed. He forbade all those not having authority to assume the rights of the bishop. He let the apostates realize the fullness of their guilt, but he did not ex- communicate them forever. Then he wrote his great treatise con- cerning the unity of the Catholic Church. There is one God and He dwells in the One Christ. This One Christ, however, lives in One Church which professes one faith. The apostles of this Church are, by reason of the word addressed by Christ to Peter the Rock, the bishops in their unity and unison. Therefore there is no salva- tion excepting it be in the Church. None can have God for his Father unless he first have the Church for his Mother. By reason of her legitimate succession to the theocracy of the Old Testament,
SAINT CYPRIAN 43
she is the indispensable house of healing for all men and times. The many single churches are not merely joined together in outward union, but they are rather branches of an organism in which flows divine vitality. And the Pope in Rome? Cyprian felt and accepted an honorary priority of the See of that Peter, to whom Christ gave, as the first though not the only follower, apostolic powers. He spoke of the principality of the Roman Church, which is the mother and root of all the rest. Yet he was no special pleader, supporting the gradu- ally awakening belief that Rome's bishop possesses the highest power and that his is the position of a monarch over and above the mon- archistic units of Catholicism that is, over the unity of all episcopal churches. He saw, it would appear, above the whole Church a crown that is the invisible dominion of Christ Himself.
Indeed this pioneer advocate of unity lived to see the day when he would flatly contradict the Pope. Once more a question that con- cerned the nature of the Church had arisen. The Catholic and hereti- cal congregations both administered baptism according to the Biblical formula. If a person abandoned heresy and became a child of the Church, was his baptism to be considered valid or was he to be baptized again? Later theologians would put the question thus: is the sacra- ment valid by reason of the fact that it has been performed in the proper way, or docs the validity depend upon the right faith and moral character o r 'he one who atLnir , seers k? This was in all truth the prelude of a conflict that would embroil the Church through centuries. Stephen, the Pope, said that the baptism of the heretics was valid be- cause it was the baptism of Christ and had been administered in his name. Cyprian, and with him other bishops of Africa and Asia, adopted the point of view that since the sacraments belonged to the one Church only, the rebaptism of a convert must be insisted upon. Stephen appealed to tradition and demanded conformity with the Roman practice. A mission was sent from Carthage to dissuade the successor of Peter from making erroneous use of his powers, but this was sent back and the Primate of Africa together with his supporters were threatened with the ban, Cyprian resisted and a schism seemed inevitable. Then the Pope died, just as a new persecution under Valerian was about to begin. Sixtnis II, his successor, agreed at last to permit the questionable practice. Then he was arrested during
44 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
Divine service in the catacombs, and added to the victims of the Roman power. A few weeks later Cyprian, too, was imprisoned. Not far from his city he met death manfully and nobly after a hearing marked by lapidary questions and answers. The fame of Cyprian, the martyr, and the writings of Cyprian, the Father of the Church, endure. They have been read almost as much as the Latin Bible. The Papacy owed to this great defender of episcopal authority no mere weak justifica- tion of its position but a doctrine of the Church which proved, in part as result of the conflict between Africa and Rome, that the Papacy was absolutely necessary. For the Church of Cyprian was no longer a community held together by sacred enthusiasm. The rushing wind of the primitive Christian Pentecost could still be heard in the dis- tance, but it now beat against a structure that was as firmly welded as a state. The growing body needed a stronger skeleton; the rhythm of feeling required the static element of discipline in ecclesiastical practice. The anarchical urge of the soul hearkening to itself stood in need of association with a leadership from without. Finally, the opposition of a powerful Empire sufficed to compel the masses, which partly or wholly separated from it to join a community based on new ideals, to look upon the Church as a structure formed like the Empire. Cyprian declared that not only was the bishop in the Church, but that the Church was also in the bishop. Justice, law and office be- come for the people of God a kind of skeleton supporting a Kingdom not of this world but nevertheless destined to realization in this world. Unless all the witnesses err, the strength of the best men in the Church consisted in these things: faith, deep awareness of the Kingdom of God, and personal possession of the new reality which dispelled the old as morning ends a dream. Cyprian and countless others round about him went to the place of judgment knowing that the sun was setting for them over the Empire and all earthly things, but confident within that theirs was a universe having neither beginning nor ending and resting upon itself as firmly as the ground over which a stream flows. The Church of the Kyrios was "from above." It enshrined God's way with man, it knew the meaning of yesterday, today and tomorrow. In order to bring about the fulfilment of that Church, the order of eternity would have to be implanted in a world of time
THE VICTORY OVER ROME 45
and space forever at odds with eternity. This would always be the nature and the mission of the Church. This was and would remain the theme of her history, dark and bright alike.
About 250 Origen predicted that the whole Roman Empire would gradually become Christian as the result of quiet missionary endeavour. Sixty years later his prophecy had come true. A cosmopolitan state, losing its nationalistic consciousness, at the same time permitted its citizens to group together freely under other forms for other purposes. About the year 300 a poorly-devised plan to strengthen the Empire by destroying the Church led to persecution. But Diocletian, son of a Dalmatian slave, who gladly believed in his Jupiter when he looked about at the miserable Christians, found that when he put his own army in motion against Cross and Bible, it contained thousands of dissidents who termed Jesus Christ their Saviour. He severed the Empire into two parts and when he did so the inner connection be- tween religion and state was destroyed. Later on, after he had ab- dicated and retired to his estate, this Emperor regarded all the persecu- tion and blood-letting which had been visited upon the "new people" as fruitless effort. His successor, who possessed the insight of a statesman, could not avoid combining the idea of the old Empire with the new conception of a divine society to which millions of Christian citizens subscribed.
This was the achievement of Constantine the Great. It was not without real sympathy that this young Augustus approached the Church. He believed honestly in the power of its God, who had seemed to answer his petition by granting a victory over Maxentius, the master of Italy and Africa. Constantine placed the Cross upon the shields of his soldiers and his own effigy in a Roman square bore the same sign in one hand. Yet this new ally of the Galilean did not cease to be Emperor. Ambitious to carry out a plan for a universal monarchy, he knew how to appreciate, as political factors, the Christian cult and the creative energies of its divinely established society. The Catholic Church might now be termed the Imperial Church and was soon to see that the good fortune of its liberation concealed the mis- fortune of a new bondage. Constantine's edict of toleration inaugu- rated an era of struggle with the worldly power, in the sense that the
46 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
Church was now to fight in her own bosom with varying success the bitter conflict with the powers of this world. The Papacy, which guides the Church, as Peter did the flock of the elect, can only relive above the grave of the Fisherman the hours of his greatness and weakness.
CONSULS