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HENRY CHADWICK
The Early Church
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
Copyright © Henry Chadwick, 1967
This edition, by arrangement with Penguin Books Ltd., 1968
SBN 340 04307 5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopy, recording, or any informa¬ tion storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in Great Britain for Hodder and Stoughton Limited, St. Paul’s House, Warwick Lane, London, E.C.4, by Cox & Wyman Ltd., London, Reading and Fakenham
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AT CLAREMONT
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The Pelican History of the Church
GENERAL EDITOR: OWEN CHADWICK
1 The Early Church . By Henry Chadwick, Regius Pro¬ fessor of Divinity in the University of Oxford.
2 The Medieval Church. By R. W. Southern, Chichele Pro¬ fessor of Modem History in the University of Oxford.
3 The Reformation. By Owen Chadwick, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge.
4 The Church and the Age of Reason . By Gerald R. Cragg, Professor of Historical Theology at Andover Newton Theological School, Boston, Mass.
5 The Church in an Age of Revolution . By Alec R . Vidler, formerly Fellow and Dean of King’s College, Cambridge.
6 Christian Missions. By Stephen Neill, Professor of Missions in the University of Hamburg.
Contents
1 From Jerusalem to Rome 9
The Jewish background - The earliest Church
- The Gentile Church - Encounter with the Roman Empire
2 Faith and Order 32
The bonds of unity - Gnosticism - The Min¬ istry and the Bible — Forms of the Ministry
3 Expansion and Growth 54
Causes of success — The geographical extension
of the Church - The defence of the Faith
4 Justin and Irenaeus 74
Justin Martyr - Irenaeus
5 Easter, the Monarchian Controversy , and
Tertullian ^4
Easter - The Monarchian Controversy - Tertullian
6 Clement of Alexandria and Origen 94
Clement of Alexandria - Origen
7 Church , State and Society in the Third Century 1 16 The pagan revival and the persecution of Decius — Cyprian — The Great Persecution
and its consequences
\/ 8 Constantine and the Council of Nicaea 125
9 The Arian Controversy after the Council of Nicaea
From Nicaea to the death of Constantine - The Church under the sons of Constantine - From Julian to Theodosius I
133
Contents
i o The Conflict of Paganism and Christianity in the
Fourth Century
ii Church , State and Society from Julian to Theodosius
12 The Ascetic Movement
13 The Controversy about Origen and the Tragedy of John Chrysostom
14 The Problem of the Person of Christ Diodore, Theodore, and Apollinaris - Cyril and Nestorius - The ‘Monophysite* Council of Ephesus and the reaction at Chalcedon - The search for reconciliation - The doctrine of one will
15 The Development of Latin Christian Thought Jerome and the beginnings of maturity - The conversion of Augustine - The Donatist schism and the problem of coercion -‘The City of God’ and the Pelagian controversy - The Holy Trinity
16 The Papacy
1 7 The Church and the Barbarians
1 8 Worship and Art
Liturgy - Daily offices - Early Church music - Christian art
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
I
From Jerusalem to Rome
THE JEWISH BACKGROUND
The first Christians were Jews differentiated from their fellow-countrymen by their faith that in Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah of the nation’s expectation had now come. They took it for granted that his coming, being a fulfilment, must be continuous with the past revelation of God to his people and could not mean a break either with the old covenant made with Abraham, symbolized by circumcision, or with the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. If something new had happened, it was the action of one and the same God, Creator of the world, Lord of history, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve patriarchs. His new word to his people must be consistent with that spoken in the past by the prophets.
Because of this deep sense of continuity, various ideas and attitudes characteristic of traditional Judaism became and have largely remained integral to the structure of Christian thought. The Jews believed in God’s election: God had chosen Israel to be an exclusive society, uncorrupted by heathen influences, yet with the two qualifications that this particularity of providence was not grounded upon any merit in the people chosen but in the sovereign, inscrutable will of God, and that Israel was called to exercise a priestly function in relation to mankind as a whole. Intensely tena¬ cious of their Law, which they held to have been given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Jews adopted a negative attitude towards pagan religion, which they regarded as the cult of evil spirits. In Graeco-Roman society they were a race apart, the object of some degree of vulgar distrust and at times hostile prejudice. They refused to participate in the
10
From Jerusalem to Rome
imperial cult, though they offered daily sacrifice on behalf of the emperor in the temple at Jerusalem and were ready to dedicate synagogues ‘to God in honour of the emperor’. They were socially distinctive, marked out by circumcision and notorious for their abstinence from pork and other un¬ clean food. In the second century b.c. the Maccabean martyrs had preferred to die rather than eat pork. Jews could not eat with Gentiles and could not compromise with any recog¬ nition of pagan deities in official ceremonial.
Foreign domination and the poor economy of Palestine had led to a general emigration of Jews all over the Mediter¬ ranean world, the ‘ Dispersion ’, so that Jewish colonies could be found almost anywhere from Cadiz to the Crimea. At Rome in the first century a.d. they had eleven or twelve synagogues. At Alexandria they formed a particularly large proportion of the population; there were a million Jews in Alexandria and Egypt altogether, and they were always a factor in municipal politics, even though their social exclu¬ siveness prevented them from becoming a pressure-group for the acquisition of power. Everywhere they refused to be merged with the Gentile inhabitants, but adhered to their own beliefs and practices, meeting each Saturday for psalms, readings from their Scriptures followed by an exegetical sermon, and prayers. Users of the Latin Breviary or the English Prayer Book are in important respects legatees of this way of worship. Though dispersed far afield, they re¬ tained their sense of unity with the land of their fathers by frequent pilgrimage to the holy city of Zion and by sending annual contributions for the upkeep of the temple. Some¬ times this export of currency from provinces where Jews were numerous caused difficulty for the Roman fiscal authorities ; but in this as in other matters it was always easier to let the Jews have their own way when a principle of their religion was at stake. There was no area of public life from which the Jews were excluded except by their own choice. But of course not all Jews were as strict as their own religious authorities would have liked; and there were not a few who felt the pressure to conform to the manners of surrounding society.
Nevertheless, the pull was not all in one direction. Al-
The Jewish background 1 1
though circumcision was repellent to Greeks and Romans, there were many Gentiles attracted by monotheism, by the purity of Jewish morality, and by the antiquity (if not by the style) of their sacred books. Without being ascetic, except in some deviationist groups,1 Judaism stood for chastity and stable family life; and among themselves the Jews practised works of charity, visiting the sick, caring for the dead, showing hospitality to strangers, giving alms for the poor. Round many synagogues of the Dispersion there gathered a penumbra of devout Gentiles commonly called ‘God-fearers’ (the term applied to any good synagogue member) . A Gentile might undergo circumcision and, more commonly, the baptism required of would-be proselytes, but this was rare and the hellenized Jews of the Dispersion, to the regret of the stricter Palestinian authorities, were normally content to welcome Gentile adherents without in¬ sisting on circumcision as generally necessary to salvation. Among these Gentile groups the Christian missionaries found their first converts outside the number of the circumcised. They were indeed ripe fruit, for they had the advantage not only of high moral education, but also of instruction in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Judaism was the religion of a book in a way that no other ancient religion was. The reconstruction of Israelite society after the catastrophe of the Babylonian deportation had been firmly based on the Law of Moses. There were no more prophets to proclaim the immediate word of God. God’s revelation to his people was in writing, and needed to be interpreted by learned scribes and ‘lawyers’, so that the original documents were supplemented by exegetical trad¬ ition in the rabbinical schools. (The status of this tradition became a matter of sharp controversy between church and synagogue in the first century.) As the Jews outside Palestine needed the Bible in Greek, a number of translations came into existence. One of these, the Septuagint, or version of the Seventy translators, became the authorized version of the
i. According to Philo and Josephus, the Essenes of the Dead Sea region held celibacy in high regard. The documents of the community at Qumran say nothing of this subject.
12
From Jerusalem to Rome
early Gentile churches. This version had been produced at Alexandria in the third century b.c., according to the trad¬ ition (which there is no very good reason to doubt) under the sponsorship of king Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt. For the Alexandrian Jews the translation became surrounded by an aura. They had an annual liturgical festival to commemorate its production ; and some told wonderful tales of its origin, notably that Ptolemy had appointed seventy-two transla¬ tors and that they produced their version in seventy- two days. Philo believed that the version had been granted divine assistance. The legend of the seventy-two was widely credited and, even where it was not, the Septuagint often ranked as an inspired version enjoying an authority that no other translation possessed. Only after the Christian appeals to its text became embarrassing to the Jews were alternative, more literal translations favoured by the Greek synagogue (below, p. ioi); and some Rabbis, almost as hostile to liberal or hellenized Judaism as to Christianity, regretted that the Bible had ever been translated into Greek and denounced the making of the Septuagint as a sin like the worship of the golden calf.
THE EARLIEST CHURCH
From the first the Church was deeply conscious of its soli- 'S darity with Israel, and of the continuity of God’s action in the past with his present activity in Jesus of Nazareth and in his followers. In St Matthew’s Gospel Christ is the new Moses, with a stormy nativity prefigured by that of Moses in Egypt, and in his teaching laying down ethical principles that were in line with the highest traditions of the best Judaism. The Lord had come not to destroy but to fulfil ; and the mission of the Christians was to bring their fellow-Jews to acknow¬ ledge as God’s anointed or c Messiah ’ him whom in ignorance the authorities had brought to a shameful judicial murder under Pilate the Roman governor. By raising him from the dead, God had vindicated him as ‘Lord and Christ’, the Messiah of expectation. To the objection that the prophets had expected the Messiah to come in glory and power, not
The earliest Church
13
in the weakness of crucifixion, the reply was that Jesus’ sufferings, like those of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah’s prophecy, were redemptive. His death inaugurated a ‘new covenant ’ between God and his people, in accordance with the hope of Jeremiah (xxxi, 31-34).
At first Christianity must certainly have appeared only as one more sect or group within a Judaism that was already accustomed to considerable diversity in religious expression. Judaism was not monolithic. There were differences between the Pharisees and the Sadducees that could become sharp. The Pharisees were the party most anxious to preserve the distinctively religious and theocratic character of Jewish life in defiance of hellenistic influences and Roman domination; they were strict in their observance not only of the Mosaic law but also of the scribal tradition of interpreting the law. The Sadducees, who tended to be drawn from the leading aristocratic families, held only to the Mosaic law and did not feel bound by scribal tradition; moreover, they rejected belief in the resurrection of the dead as a doctrine only found in writings like the book of Daniel, composed long after Moses’ time, which in their view lacked authority. The dis¬ agreement of the Pharisees and Sadducees concerning the after-life enabled St Paul on one occasion to extricate himself from an awkward situation (Acts xxiii, 6-10). Despite the apparently violent conflict with the Pharisees reflected in passages like Matt, xxiii, a number of Pharisees, of whom St Paul was to be the most famous, became Christians.
In addition to the Pharisees and Sadducees there was also a group, perhaps a number of related groups, to whom the tide ‘Essene’ was given. A description of their life is given in Pliny the elder, Philo, and Josephus, of whom the last had some direct contact with them. They were a rigidly separatist society, whose principal settlement lay near the western shores of the Dead Sea, though adherents could be found elsewhere in Judaea. It is probable, but not certain, that the Essenes were, or rather included, the community for whom the Dead Sea Scrolls were written and who had their house at Qumran near the western shores of the Dead Sea. This community rejected the sacrifices and priesthood of the
14 From Jerusalem to Rome
officially recognized worship in the temple at Jerusalem, and looked back to their founder-hero, ‘ the Teacher of Right¬ eousness’, who had been harried by a ‘wicked priest’ who ruled over Israel. In certain respects the Essenes resembled the early church. They were a close-knit body which prac¬ tised property-sharing and distributed money to each accord¬ ing to his need. Their life was frugal, and any member who had two coats gave one away to his needy brother and wore his remaining coat until it was threadbare. They appear to have been divided among themselves about the question of passive resistance. Most of them rejected the carrying of arms, but some of them were Zealots dedicated to the nationalist cause of resistance to the occupying Roman power. The site at Qumran became the scene of bloody fighting in the Jewish war of 66-70. The Essenes rejected slavery in principle as incompatible with the equality of all men before their Creator; and though they did not con¬ demn marriage as wrong, they expected full members of the community to be celibate. Entrance to the community was hedged about with tests and solemn vows preceded by a novitiate, and any delinquency led to expulsion. They prac¬ tised very frequent ritual washings, and had a sacred common meal to which the uninitiated were not admitted. They re¬ jected the use of oaths.
On the other hand, there are important differences be¬ tween the Essenes and the early Church. The Essenes were particularly precise about keeping the sabbath day, and exercised extreme care to avoid any ceremonial pollution. According to our Greek sources, they rose before dawn to offer prayer to the rising sun, and had esoteric teachings about the properties of roots and stones and about the secret names of the angels. They devoted much attention to the exegesis of the inner meaning of scripture, and made predic¬ tions of the future. The Qumran texts and the Greek sources are not in complete harmony in their accounts ; but perhaps the Greek documents present a portrait of the Essenes that reshapes their likeness to resemble Pythagorean ascetics of the hellenistic world. The material from the Dead Sea Scrolls provides relatively litde evidence for the immediate back-
The earliest Church
15
ground of the early Church except in the broad sense that it reveals the existence of a group fervently studying Old Testament prophecy, especially Messianic prophecy, and expecting a great divine intervention in world history. There is a kinship in atmosphere; as for example in the so-called ‘War Scroll5 describing a final battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness which is reminiscent of the Armageddon of the Apocalypse and perhaps also of Ephesians vi. But it is fair to say that in points of detail the number of analogies and parallels between the Qumran documents and the New Testament is not very numerous or impressive; and ‘The Teacher of Righteousness 5 does not play a role in the thought of the Qumran community which is closely com¬ parable to that of Jesus in the faith of the early Church. In short, the New Testament writings and the Qumran Scrolls mutually illuminate one another, but neither group of docu¬ ments can be said to ‘explain5 the other. That individual Essenes became Christians is probable enough, but it is most unlikely that there was any institutional continuity. Sur¬ prisingly the first Christians appear to have adopted a much more positive attitude than the Qumran community to¬ wards the temple worship at Jerusalem (cf. Acts vi, 7). At the same time there is much to suggest that the Christians would have been very impatient with a community so obsessed by the need for ceremonial purity that their day was punctuated at frequent intervals by ritual lustrations.
The initial impact of Christianity on the Jewish people seems to have been fairly considerable. The church probably drew its membership from most of the diverse elements within the heterogeneous society of first century Judaism, apart from the Sadducees. It appealed both to the Pharisees5 sense that the revealed will of God was a matter demanding to be taken with the most intense seriousness and also to the ordinary Jew’s feeling that too much of the Pharisaic scrupulousness about the law had ended in niggling cere¬ monial niceties that missed the central point of religion. Before long there were substantial groups of Christian Jews not only in Jerusalem but also in the surrounding countryside of Judaea. That there were also important groups in the
1 6 From Jerusalem to Rome
north in Galilee is probable enough, but of their relation to the Judaean churches and of their later history we can only guess. They were rural communities in a backward area, and disappear from history. We know, however, that the faith rapidly reached not only Damascus but Antioch, the capital of Syria and third city of the Roman Empire, where the pagans soon gave them the nickname ‘Christians’, which quickly spread as the popular term. (The Jewish term for them remained c Nazarenes ’ ; below, p. 2 1 .) Even some of the strictest adherents of the Mosaic Law and of its traditional interpretation, the Pharisees, were associated with the move¬ ment. Nevertheless, neither the authorities nor the people as a whole came to follow ‘the Way’. On the one hand Christ¬ ianity offered no encouragement to the nationalistic Zealots, awaiting the hour for revolt against Rome ; on the other hand, it was far too revolutionary for the Jewish ‘Establishment’, which pursued a compromising policy of political collabora¬ tion and religious conservatism. Above all, there was the delicate problem of the Christian attitude towards the Gentiles. This was an issue of principle causing deep division of opinion within the Church itself, the beginnings of which may be traced in the story of the ‘Hellenists’ and Stephen told by Luke in Acts vi-vii.
The spread of Christianity northwards into Syria and Cilicia caused such acute anxiety to the synagogues that a counter-movement was provoked, armed with authority from Jerusalem and led by a Cilician Jew who had been a pupil of the famous Rabbi Gamaliel at Jerusalem - Saul or Paul of Tarsus, a Pharisee convinced of the finality and per¬ fection of the Mosaic Law and accordingly a zealous perse¬ cutor of the infant church. Travelling to Damascus he was suddenly confronted by the risen Christ, and thenceforth was an equally convinced Christian - and once again a man of zeal : he had a burning sense of mission to take the Gospel to the Gentiles. Paul was probably not the first to conceive of a Christian mission to the non-Jewish world. But from the start he was undoubtedly the dominant figure in the work, and believed himself to be called in a particular and unique degree as the apostle of the Gentiles, exercising authority
The earliest Church
17
over the Gentile churches by visits and especially by letters (he found that he was more effective on paper than when speaking), and representing their interests in his negotiations with the mother-church at Jerusalem.
While the Pauline letters and the Acts of the Apostles tell us something of the development of the Gentile communities, we know relatively little of the mother-church in Judaea. Most of the twelve disciples disappear from history. Only Peter, John, and James the Lord’s brother are more than names. By the third century romantic legends began, des¬ cribing the missionary travels of the twelve, Thomas in Persia and India, Andrew to the Scythians of South Russia, and so on. But these stories are like the medieval legends which associate James the Apostle with Compostella or Joseph of Arimathea with Glastonbury. They are derived from the apocryphal romances about the apostles which became widespread popular reading in the latter half of the second century.1 Second century traditions with more claim to respect relate that John the son of Zebedee lived in his old age at Ephesus, and that Philip the evangelist with his four prophetess-daughters (Acts xxi, 9) died in Phrygia. This exodus of the Jerusalem church to Asia Minor may have been caused by the Jewish War of 66-70. The fourth Gospel comes from a group of St John’s disciples for whom it en¬ shrined the beloved disciple’s teaching. About 200 we find the churches of Asia Minor looking back to St John as their founder and treasuring his tomb at Ephesus.2
The Ephesians seem to have supposed that the Virgin Mary had lived in St John’s house there (see John xix, 27), and in the fifth century were the first to dedicate a church in her honour. But according to another view, first formulated in 375 by Epiphanius, who speaks of it as a highly esoteric
1. These are translated in M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 2nd edn., 1955). See also E. Hennecke’s New Testament Apo¬ crypha (ed. W. Schneemelcher, transl. R. M. Wilson, 2 vols., London, 1 963-5)
2. Latin writers follow Tertullian and Jerome in relating that St John was cast into boiling oil at Rome and escaped unhurt; in the seventh century this scene was located at the Latin Gate and commemorated on 6 May. The legend is not known to Greek writers.
1 8 From Jerusalem to Rome
mystery of which he is not at all confident, Mary did not go to Ephesus and indeed did not taste death at all.
James the Just, ‘the Lord’s brother’, was president of the Jerusalem Church until his martyrdom in 62 (an event which gave many non-Christian Jews a very bad conscience), when he was succeeded by a cousin of the Lord. The exact relation between James and Peter, the leading apostle to whom the Lord had specially entrusted the church’s mission, is obscure. In the Pauline letters and the Acts the Holy Family and the Apostles appear as distinguished authorities side by side; if there was at any time tension between them (as Mark iii, 31-5 may imply) it was quickly ironed out. According to one strand of tradition (Matt, xvi, 18) the Lord nominated Peter as the rock on which the Church was to be built; perhaps there were some Christians who believed Peter rather than James to be the supreme authority in the Church after the Ascension. The eirenic account of the earliest Church in Acts, probably written a generation or more later, does not allow us to do more than ask unanswerable questions.
Peter’s relation to Paul is also ambiguous. The battle royal between them at Antioch was evidently exceptional or it would not have been recorded in the way it is (Gal. ii, 1 iff.) ; and at least in their death they were not divided - both died at Rome as martyrs in the persecution under Nero.1 No doubt Peter’s presence in Rome in the sixties must indicate a concern for Gentile Christianity, but we have no information whatever about his activity or of the length of his stay there. That he was in Rome for twenty-five years is third-century legend, dependent on the apocryphal Acts of Peter .
THE GENTILE CHURCH
In the ancient world everyone knew at least three things about the Jews: they would not be associated either directiy
1. The martyrdom of St Peter is alluded to in St John’s Gospel (xiii, 36; xxi, 18). That it took place at Rome is highly probable from the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Ignatius’ letter to the Romans, and the unanimous tradition of second century writers, besides the memorial monument at the cemetery on the Vatican hill, built about a.d. 160-70 and recently excavated (below, p. 162).
The Gentile Church 19
or indirectly with any pagan cult (which seemed antisocial), they refused to eat not only meat that had been offered in sacrifice to the gods but also all pork (which seemed ridicu¬ lous), and they circumcised their male infants (which seemed repulsive).
If the Church was to undertake a mission to the Gentiles, a ruling on these questions was necessary: Were the same pro¬ hibitions to apply to Gentile converts to Christianity? A conservative group thought that Gentile converts must not merely keep clear of food defiled by idolatrous associations but also accept circumcision as the covenant sign of admis¬ sion to the people of God. Other Christian Jews who believed that the Gospel must be preached to all the world absolutely rejected this conservative view. Circumcision together with the entire ceremonial law of the Pentateuch was limited to the Jewish people, whereas in Christ God had acted for the reconciliation of humanity, to break down the barriers not only between sinful man and his Creator but between one man and another.
The cleavage between conservatives and universalists led to an acute and at times passionate controversy, resulting in a general conference in Jerusalem (Acts xv). The outcome was in some respects a compromise but one which in all decisive points was bound to favour the universalists. The Gentile converts were recognized as truly within the covenant by the mother-church at Jerusalem even if they were uncir¬ cumcised; but they must be careful not to eat food with idolatrous associations (it was customary for Greek dinner¬ parties to be held in temples, the god himself being con¬ sidered as the host) and not to allow sexual relations outside marriage, this being a matter on which Jewish ethic was much stricter than pagan. St Paul’s Corinthian corres¬ pondence casts a vivid light on the social background of these conditions.
The controversy turned on the continued validity of the Mosaic Law. Paul saw that at bottom the question was whether a man attains to heaven on the ground of his merit achieved by obedience to God’s commandments. To this idea of Law Paul opposes the idea of divine mercy and
20
From Jerusalem to Rome
forgiveness, which are freely offered to man in Christ : by bap¬ tism the believer is united with Christ and is ‘justified’ ; he is put into a right relationship with God on the ground of which he does ‘good works’ and advances in holiness. From the law of Moses the Christian is therefore free. Its status is not fixed but provisional : it was a ‘ schoolmaster to bring us to Christ’.
It was Paul’s achievement to vindicate the freedom and equal status of Gentile Christians and to win from the Jeru¬ salem leaders the recognition of his converts as full mem¬ bers of the Church. He understood this also to imply recog¬ nition of his own standing as the apostle of the Gentiles. The claim involved him in painful controversy, in which his most potent argument was the concrete fact of the existence of numerous Gentile converts. Perhaps the chief reason for Paul’s success was his extraordinary versatility and capacity for adapting himself to the situation of his audience: he had the power to translate the Palestinian Gospel into language intelligible to the Greek world, and thereby became the first Christian apologist. The first generation of Palestinian Christians expected the Lord to return with glory very shortly. Paul perceived that the doctrine of the imminent end of the world was a liability rather than an asset in evan¬ gelizing the Greek world where the dominant speculative interest was in the beginning of things. He transferred the emphasis from Christ as the end to Christ as the Wisdom of God in creation, pre-existent from eternity and the immanent power by which the manifold diversity of the cosmos is saved x from disintegration. In particular (he taught) the Lord is immanent within his Church, as the soul in the body, which is therefore ever growing until the final consummation when it is to be coterminous with the human race itself. In these terms the epistle to the Ephesians formulates the idea of the universal Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic. For according to this full Pauline doctrine all Christians are united to one another through union with the Lord in faith and baptism; by him the Church is made a holy society, called out of the world to exercise a priestly function, media¬ ting the Gospel to humanity, universally extended in space
The Gentile Church
2 I
and looking back in time to its apostolic founders. The mother-church of this universal society is Jerusalem. But already in Paul’s mind there is formed the westward look towards the capital of the Gentile world as the potential focus of Gentile Christendom, and as a centre for a mission to Spain (which perhaps he may have succeeded in reaching) .
Paul thought of the Church as a society where the barrier between Jew and Gentile is broken down but which retains a quasi-dual character. But Jewish Christianity failed to convert the Jewish people. Jerusalem was terribly damaged in a.d. 70 and especially in 135, when by Hadrian’s edict all Jews were henceforth excluded by law from Judaea, and Jerusalem became a Greek city, renamed Aelia Capitolina, with pagan temples and theatres. This meant an emancipa¬ tion of Gentile Christendom from its Jewish Christian roots; its sheer weight of numbers and geographic extent over the Mediterranean world ensured its self-confidence and sense of catholicity, while it could look for continuity with the apostles not only to the churches of the East but also to Rome, the scene of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul. Paul’s concept of the quasi-independent status of Gentile Christendom standing over against Jerusalem, existing side by side with Jewish Christendom within the one Church, was in time developed into the idea of the independence (and potential rivalry) of the West over against the East.
Although persecuted by the Jews (1 Thess. ii, 14) the Christians in Palestine long remained a group within Judaism. But the break became inevitable. A sentence in Suetonius’ Life of Claudius 1 could mean that as early as 50 rioting between Jews and Christians had broken out at Rome. In Judaea the Jewish Christians kept the bridges open as long as they could, but they were severely harried and about 85, to make sure of their exclusion, a formal anathema was incorporated in the synagogue liturgy: £May the Naz- arenes and the heretics be suddenly destroyed and removed from the Book of Life.’ The existence of the Gentile mission was an embarrassment in the mission of the Jewish Christians
1. ‘Since the Jews continually made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, Claudius expelled them from Rome.* (Cf. Acts xviii, 2.)
22
From Jerusalem to Rome
to their own countrymen (Rom. xi, 28 illustrates this point) ; and their position was not helped by the attitude of some of their Gentile brethren who had no desire to stress their debt to Judaism and were inclined to the unconciliatory view that the destruction of Jerusalem by the hated Romans in a.d. 70 was nothing but the merited judgement of providence for the murder of Jesus, which was itself only the last of a long line of stiff-necked refusals of God’s word in the prophets. The Jewish nation’s rejection of the Messiah was discovered to be the subject of Old Testament prophecy just as much as the world-wide mission of the Church as the people of the Messiah. Accordingly, there came into being a tradition of interpretation of the Old Testament which concentrated upon prophetic denunciations of mere externalism in religion and upon the observance of feasts and ceremonies. The Old Testament was seen as the history of a people with an ineradi¬ cable capacity for apostasy, despite the continual warnings of the prophets. The Mosaic Law was not God’s permanent will, but a temporary and provisional measure given by God to a hard-hearted people to prevent lapses into worse things, perhaps even an actual punishment for the worship of the golden calf. In short, the Old Testament itself was seen to imply a negative judgement on Judaism.
The Jewish Christians, excluded by their fellow-country¬ men, continued to observe sabbaths, circumcision, and other Jewish feasts. As this distressed many Gentile Christians, they became lonely, unsupported groups. In the fourth century and later there were small Jewish churches in Syria. Jerome translated into Latin their Gospel according to the Hebrews , pre¬ serving traditions slightly diverging from the canonical Greek gospels, and magnifying the position of James the Lord’s brother. But the orthodox Jews could not forgive them for being Christians, and the Gentile majority in the Church could not comprehend their continued observance of the traditional customs and rites of Judaism. Slowly the commu¬ nities lost importance. In Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (below, p. 75) written about 160 it appears that they were still a force. Justin believed that a Jewish Christian was quite free to keep the Mosaic law without in any way com-
Encounter with the Roman Empire 23
promising his Christian faith, and even that a Gentile Christ¬ ian might keep Jewish customs if a Jewish Christian had influenced him to do so ; only it must be held that such obser¬ vances were matters of indifference and of individual con¬ science. But Justin had to admit that other Gentile Christians did not take so liberal a view and believed that those who observed the Mosaic law could not be saved. From Irenaeus onwards Jewish Christianity is treated as a deviationist sect rather than as a form of Christianity with the best claims to continuity with the practice of the primitive church at Jeru¬ salem. The Jewish Christians called themselves Ebionites, a name derived from the Hebrew word meaning ‘ the poor 5 ; it was probably a conscious reminiscence of a very early term which is attested by St Paul’s letters as an almost technical name for the Christians in Jerusalem and Judaea. Since some of them had never accepted the tradition of the virgin birth of Christ, Irenaeus classified the Ebionites with other heresies that denied this; soon Tertullian was supposing that they originated with a person named Ebion, and later anti- heretical writers even felt able to quote from Ebion’s alleged writings.
ENCOUNTER WITH THE ROMAN EMPIRE
A Roman procurator had condemned the Lord to crucifixion like a common criminal. But he had done it to placate the Jews, not because he actually believed Jesus to be guilty of crime against the Roman State. There was still hope of a rapprochement. The Lord himself had said it was possible to render loyal service to Caesar while still being loyal to God. The primitive Church refused to identify itself with the nationalist Jewish ‘zealots5. The Jerusalem community had left the city when the resistance started the war in 66, and they were again harried as potential traitors during the Hadrianic war under Bar-Cochba in 133-5. Committed to the approval of the Gentile mission, they were not disposed to quarrel with the Gentile authorities for whose conversion they prayed. Paul, who possessed dual citizenship both of Tar¬ sus and of Rome, regarded the magistrates as the ministers
24
From Jerusalem to Rome
of divine justice in restraining crime; and on the express authority of the Lord himself, Christians faithfully paid their taxes. The Gentile mission had every interest in the main¬ tenance of public order, and none whatever in adopting an attitude of disaffection towards the State. In the Acts of the Aposdes it is already implied that the Empire, under the providence of God, could be the instrument for the further¬ ance of the Gospel. By the middle of the second century Christians were discerning the hand of God in the fact that Augustus had established the ‘Pax Romana’ at the very time when Christ’s gospel of universal peace and goodwill was given to mankind. What was wrong with the State was its old paganism. Change its religion and all would be well.
The Empire, however, was not disposed to abandon the old gods by whose favour the legions had conquered the world. Philosophic criticism might have destroyed the faith of many ; Epicureans like Lucretius could denounce religion as based on the fear of non-existent bogies after death. But no one proposed to act on his scepticism and to initiate a social revolution. To refuse to participate in the pagan emperor-cult was a political as well as a religious act, and could easily be construed as dangerous disaffection.
Side by side with the official cults of the deified emperor and of the old local deities, the priesthoods of which were held by ordinary citizens, there flourished the eastern mystery religions, which normally possessed a professional priesthood. The most important of these were the cults of Isis (the Egyp¬ tian mother-goddess), Mithras (the Persian god of light), and the grim Anatolian cult of Attis and Cybele. These cults had some popular appeal. The profound emotions evoked by initiation into the exotic mysteries of Isis, the mother nursing her holy child like the Madonna, may be seen in the last book of The Golden Ass by Apuleius. Mithraism, an ascetic religion for men only, appealed especially (but not exclusively) to officers in the army ; it had sacred meals not unlike the Christ¬ ian eucharist and offered souls a way through the seven plan¬ etary spirits which bar the ascent to the Milky Way after death. But it was not a religion of the people. The cult of Cybele was well known for its flagellant, mendicant priests
25
Encounter with the Roman Empire
and for the public ceremonies of 15-27 March when, after fasting and the Day of Blood (22 March) on which Attis was mourned, sorrow was turned into joy with the Hilaria celebrating his resurrection on 25 March (a striking parallel to the Christian Holy Week and Easter).1
No pagan cult was exclusive of any other and the only restriction on initiation into many cults was the expense. By supposing that the various deities were either the same god under different names or local administrators for a supreme deity it was possible to give all cults a loose unity.
The Roman government was in practice tolerant of any cult provided that it did not encourage sedition or weaken morality. Indeed, one reason for Roman military success was believed to be the fact that, while other peoples wor¬ shipped only their own local deities, the Romans worshipped all deities without exclusiveness and had therefore been re¬ warded for their piety. The God of the Jews, who had no images and no sacrifices except at Jerusalem, was harder for the Romans to assimilate. Although the Jews were mono¬ theists and in theory understood that belief to invalidate all forms of religion other than their own, until the revolt of 66-70 they were treated with marked toleration and under Augustus were granted privileges which, after an awkward crisis with Caligula who wanted to set up his statue in the temple at Jerusalem,2 were renewed by Claudius. There seemed no necessary reason why the Christians should not also achieve toleration. They came into conflict with the State in the first instance by accident, not on any fundamental point of principle. In 64 a great fire destroyed much of Rome. Nero had made himself sufficiently unpopular to be suspected of arson, and turned to the Christians to find a scapegoat. The historian Tacitus, writing about fifty years later, did not believe that the Christians were justly accused of the arson, though he saw no harm in the execution of a contemp¬ tible, anti-social group ‘hated for their vices’ - for by his
1. In the fourth century pagan critics accused the Church of plagiarism on this count. Both festivals had an all-night vigil with lights.
2. For the reverberations of this crisis in the New Testament see Mark xiii, 14; 11 Thess. ii, 3-4.
26
From Jerusalem to Rome
time, if not by Nero’s, the Christians were vulgarly thought to practise incest and cannibalism at their nocturnal meet¬ ings. (These charges probably arose from language about universal love and the eucharist.) The Neronian persecu¬ tion was confined to Rome and was not due to any sense of deep ideological conflict between Church and State; it was simply that the emperor had to blame somebody for the fire. Nevertheless, it was a precedent that magistrates had con¬ demned Christians to death because they were Christians and on no other charge.
Probably pressure against the Church continued inter¬ mittently, and no doubt many wavered. Jews and Gentiles who after peaceful adherence to the synagogue had passed over to the Church must have felt tempted to retrace their steps. To some such situation the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews is addressed ; the author, who is evidently a member of the Pauline circle, exhorts the hesitating Roman commu¬ nity to remain confident of the inferiority of Judaism and of the finality of Christianity on the ground that Christ is the unique Son of God; to be mindful of the example of its past leaders and loyal to those now occupying their position; to continue its care for imprisoned brethren; and to take heart from the lull in actual executions.
Under Domitian (81-96) the situation seems again to have become grave. Except for Caligula and Nero the em¬ perors had traditionally discouraged over-enthusiastic sub¬ jects from offering them divine honours. Domitian took the opposite view, styling himself ‘Master and God’, and in¬ clined to suspect of treachery those who looked askance at his cult. The customary oath ‘by the genius of the emperor* became officially obligatory. There is good evidence that this created a crisis for the Jews. It is probable (though not quite certain) that the Church was no less embarrassed. According to the third-century historian Dio, several emi¬ nent Romans with Jewish sympathies were accused of ‘ atheism ’, and on this charge action was taken against Titus Flavius Clemens, consul in 95, and his wife Domitilla. Fourth century Christian tradition counted Domitilla a Christian, and perhaps the phrase ‘atheism and Jewish sympathies’ is
Encounter with the Roman Empire 27
Dio’s polite circumlocution for Christianity.1 The Revelation of St John, with its denunciations of idolatrous, persecuting Rome as the scarlet woman drunk with the blood of saints, may reflect the tension in the churches of Asia Minor at this time.
The emperor Trajan (98-117) did not like his cult being made a compulsory loyalty- test, and the crisis passed. Never¬ theless, about 1 12 the governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, Pliny the younger, asked Trajan for guidance about the procedure for dealing with Christians. His letter is very re¬ vealing. In his province, it appears, Christianity had spread widely not only in towns but also in the countryside; the pagan temples had become empty and the meat of sacri¬ ficial animals practically unsaleable. Local interests had been affected and representations were made to Pliny, who executed some Christians who were not Roman citizens while keeping others who possessed citizenship to be sent to Rome for trial. Pliny was aware that by precedent Christ¬ ians were executed and had acted without hesitation; but he was puzzled about the exact nature of their crime. He asked Trajan whether the mere profession of Christianity was in itself culpable, or if they were charged with the vices asso¬ ciated with the name; whether some mitigation of the punish¬ ment was appropriate in the case of the young or infirm; whether if a man was proved to be a Christian he could purge his crime by recanting. Pliny had no conscience about the executions since the accused had been contumacious in refusing to recant which was much worse than being a Christian. But the sequel had been a tiresome increase in accusations, not merely from an informer, but also from an anonymous pamphlet. On examination, those now accused had either denied that they were Christians at all or, admitting that they had been so in the past (in some cases twenty years previously), denied that they were any longer, and proved
1. Another personage ofhigh rank, Acilius Glabrio, consul in 91, was also executed on this charge - but also on that of fighting as a gladiator. The cruelty and murder of gladiatorial combats were anathema to the Church; but it is conceivable that he was interested in Christianity enough to open himself to Domitian’s attack.
28
From Jerusalem to Rome
their point by offering incense and wine before images of the emperor and the gods and by cursing Christ. These inquiries of lapsed Christians, however, elicited the disconcerting in¬ formation that no enormities were practised. The accused declared that their normal practice had been to attend a meeting before daybreak on a particular day (no doubt Sunday is meant) at which they sang a hymn to Christ as a god, and took an oath (i.e. the baptismal promise?) to abstain from crime rather than to commit it ; thereafter they dispersed, but met again later to cat, not a murdered infant, but ordinary food. This common meal they had suspended of their own accord when Pliny published an imperial edict forbidding secret societies. Disturbed by the discovery that Christianity could appear so innocuous Pliny had examined under torture two deaconesses ; he found only c squalid super¬ stition5, nothing vicious. But at least, he felt, his severity had been justified by the result: the population had returned to the temples.
Trajan’s reply to Pliny shows a reluctance to take the matter too seriously. Pliny, he thought, had proceeded sen¬ sibly, but should pay no heed to anonymous accusations and was not to organize any general inquisition himself. If a proper charge was brought by a responsible individual (who under Roman law had the tables turned on him if his accusa¬ tions were found to be slanderous, which made people chary of bringing a capital charge), then the person accused of Christianity could be tried and, if found guilty, punished. Only, Trajan added, he might be pardoned if he showed that he was not a Christian by offering prayers to the gods, what¬ ever he might have done in the past. Pliny’s principal question Trajan left unanswered. But at least it was clear that the emperor did not regard the Christians as dangerous. The essentials of his reply were reaffirmed by Hadrian about 123 in a letter to Minucius Fundanus, proconsul at Ephesus.
The authorities had now discovered that the Christians were virtuous folk, but inexplicably hostile to the old religious tradition and so obstinate in their dissent as to forfeit sym¬ pathy and preclude toleration. Christianity remained a capital offence, and several in the second century suffered
Encounter with the Roman Empire 29
martyrdom : Ignatius bishop of Antioch, Telesphorus bishop of Rome, Poly carp bishop of Smyrna, Justin ‘the Christian phil¬ osopher 5 at Rome some time between 1 62 and 1 68. In 177 an ugly persecution broke out with savage violence against the Christians at Lyons and Vienne in the Rhone valley; the emperor Marcus Aurelius had directed that they should be tortured to death, and no refinement of cruelty was spared. The mob was always ready to believe that catastrophes like floods or bad harvests or barbarian invasions were a sign of the gods’ displeasure at their neglect under the influence of Christian ‘atheism5. Tertullian sarcastically commented:
‘ If the Tiber rises too high or the Nile too low, the cry is “The Christians to the lion55. All of them to a single lion?5 The vulgar charges of incest and cannibalism died slowly. Even as late as the middle of the third century, by which time the main teachings of Christianity were a matter of universal knowledge and discussion, it was possible to meet virtuous pagans who still believed in the stories of secret vice. But persecution was far from being continuous or systematic. Both Trajan and Hadrian had discouraged governors from taking any personal initiative. Much was left to private in¬ formers, and action remained in the discretion of individual governors, which some exercised in the manner of Gallio who ‘cared for none of these things5 (Acts xviii, 15). A few prov¬ incial governors actually protected the church, and grateful Christians believed that despite their paganism they might be rewarded hereafter. By the end of the second century Christianity was penetrating the upper classes of society, and more than one highly placed personage might wake up to find his wife embarrassing him by disappearing to nocturnal vigils and prayers. Marcia, the concubine of the emperor Commodus (180-92), was a Christian, and was able to gain for the church in Rome a considerable measure of relief (below, p. 88). Because the early persecutions were limited they did not seriously slow down the expansion of Christ¬ ianity, but on the contrary tended to give the church the maximum of publicity. Tertullian observed that ‘ the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church \ Many of the records of the early martyrs have a heroic quality about them. At the
30
From Jerusalem to Rome
same time they reveal the temptations of peculiar subtlety to which the martyrs were exposed. Not all were able to rise to the Christ-like simplicity of Stephen who followed his Lord’s example in praying for the forgiveness of his mur¬ derers. Judicial murder is never an easy thing to bear, and the martyrs were at times inclined to seek satisfaction in the thought that they would be avenged in the world to come, or even that it would be an element in the felicity of heaven to contemplate the appropriateness of punishments justly meted out to those responsible for acts of gross injustice in this present life. Moreover, the conviction that martyrdom granted immediate admission to paradise and conferred a victor’s crown, combined with a sombre evaluation of the Roman empire as a political institution, led to a tendency towards acts of provocation on the part of over-enthusiastic believers, especially among the Montanists (below p. 52) who were especially prone to identify reticence with cowardice and moral compromise. Hotheads who provoked the author¬ ities were soon censured by the church as mere suicides de¬ serving no recognition. As, from the middle of the third century onwards, the private commemorations of the martyrs began to pass into the official and public liturgy of the church, control had to be exercised and the claims of an individual martyr were subjected to examination and scrutiny. Even so there were difficulties, mainly because there were different interpretations of what constituted provoca¬ tion. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred at Rome before a.d. 1 1 7, was a man of intense devotion; his warnings that the influen¬ tial Roman Christians should not try to obtain his release so as to deprive him of suffering in union with his Lord, could easily pass into an attitude that would appear provocative to a magistrate. His friend Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who was martyred at the age of 86 not long after the middle of the century (the evidence regarding the date is conflicting)1
1. Eusebius of Caesarea places it in 167-8. A late note appended to the account of the martyrdom dates it ‘in the proconsulship of Statius Quadratus’, i.e. probably 155-6. This earlier date, though attested by inferior evidence, better coheres with Polycarp’s extant correspondence with Ignatius of Antioch and with Irenaeus’s statement that Polycarp had known St John at Ephesus.
Encounter with the Roman Empire 31
was held up as a model on the specific ground that he did nothing to provoke the authorities but quietly waited for them to come and arrest him. The Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who regarded suicide as ethically unobjectionable, felt that it must be done in good style ‘ not, like the Christians, in a spirit of theatricality’.
But there were also temptations in the opposite direction. Some who were influenced by the radically spiritualizing tendencies of Gnostic dualism (below, p. 36) argued that pagan gods were not devils, but simply non-existent ; so it was a matter of complete indifference whether one ate meat that had been offered in sacrifice to idols (cf. 1 Corinthians, viii) or if one offered incense in honour of the emperor. It was a mere formality, and merely external acts did not affect the inner devotion of the mind. One’s conscience could not be held to be polluted by a mere act of respect and loyalty. In the second century most of those who thus argued be¬ longed to gnostic sects. But in Spain by a.d. 300 there were Christians happily holding the distinguished office of Jiamen in the cult of the emperor. They greatly distressed more puritan brethren. At times even the most serious-minded among the orthodox believers were tempted to doubt whether perhaps they were not cranks dying for trivialities, and to ask themselves at what point they could no longer compromise. Between the two extremes of provocation and compromise there were many, such as the twelve simple Christians of Scillium in North Africa condemned at Carthage on 1 7 July 180, the record of whose trial leaves a deep impression of moral protest and integrity. The same may be said of the Acta Proconsularia of Cyprian, or the minutes of Justin’s trial at Rome.
The sporadic nature of persecution, which often depended on local attitudes, and the fact that before the third century the government did not take Christianity seriously, gave the Church breathing space to expand and to deal with critical internal problems.
2
Faith and Order
THE BONDS OF UNITY
The unity of the scattered Christian communities depended on two things - on a common faith and on a common way of ordering their life and worship. They called each other ‘brother5 or ‘sister5. Whatever differences there might be of race, class or education, they felt bound together by their focus of loyalty to the person and teaching of Jesus. The pattern of worship derived all its meaning from its reference to him. The rite of baptism by which they were admitted to the Church was both a commemoration of the moment at the river Jordan when Jesus was filled with the Spirit for his life work, and a once for all renunciation of evil, which St Paul in a powerful metaphor described as ‘being buried with Christ5. Each Sunday they met for their ‘thanksgiving5 in which the baptized ate bread and drank wine in a sacred meal which they spoke of as ‘ eating the body 5 and ‘ drinking the blood5 of Christ. To share in this sacred meal was so deeply felt to be the essential expression of membership of the society that fragments of the broken bread were taken round to any who were absent through illness or imprison¬ ment. A serious moral fault entailed exclusion from sharing in the meal, either permanently or for a time; but those so excluded continued to attend the first part of the service, consisting of psalms, readings and prayers, together with those who were not yet baptized but were ‘ receiving instruc¬ tion5 (catechumenoi) . The penitent under discipline prayed that by the intercession of the faithful they might be granted mercy for their fault.
The determination of which moral faults did or did not involve exclusion, and for how long, was a pastoral problem
Gnosticism
33
that deeply exercised the minds of the Church’s leaders well into the third century. Not less difficult was the thorny question whether and at what point intellectual deviation should lead to censure. The translation of the Gospel into the religious language of the hellenistic world was a task of great intricacy calling for the highest sensitivity and aware¬ ness of responsibility if its structure was not to be altered. The missionaries to the Gentile world were not speaking in a vacuum to people without existing prejudices and expecta¬ tions. The moment they passed outside the ambit of the synagogues of the Jewish dispersion and their loosely attached Gentile adherents, the missionaries were in a twilight world of pagan syncretism, magic, and astrology. Even the appar¬ ently exclusive religion of Judaism had been welcomed into the loose amalgam of polytheism by identifying the God of the Jews with Dionysus or (since they reverenced Saturday) with Saturn. The pagan world was quite accustomed to myths of great heroes, like Heracles or Asclepius, who were elevated to divine rank as a reward for their merits. The Christians amazed the world by the extraordinary claim that the divine redeemer of their story had lately been born of a woman in Judaea, had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, had risen again, and at the last (which they believed to be in the near future) would judge the world. It would all have been less startling to the ancient mind if only the story could be cut free of its historical anchorage and interpreted as a cosmic or psychological myth attached to an esoteric mystery-cult.
GNOSTICISM
Among his Gentile converts Paul soon met doctrinal ten¬ dencies of which he did not approve and which called for delicate but firm correction. At Corinth a spiritual aristo¬ cracy were inclined to pride themselves on the possession of profounder wisdom and deeper mystical experiences than their brethren or even than the apostle himself. Believing themselves to be already perfect, they regarded their fellow- Christians as inferior beings who had not risen to the truly
Faith and Order
34
supernatural heights. They were also dualists, believing that the spirit is everything, the body nothing (if not actually evil) . This belief had immediate moral consequences. Some Corin¬ thians concluded that physical acts were a matter of in¬ difference; taking encouragement from Paul’s doctrine of freedom from the law, and regarding the sacraments as magical guarantees of automatic bliss, they fell into moral licence. A rival group adopted extreme ascetic opinions, so that husbands and wives withheld conjugal rights from one another and betrothed couples abstained from consumma¬ ting their marriage. Consistent with this dualism they re¬ jected as crude the Hebraic doctrine of the resurrection of the body, preferring the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul; in any event, to those who were already perfect, resurrection could add nothing. They saw no harm in eating meat offered in sacrifice to idols, which they knew to be non-existent.
At Colossae in Asia Minor Paul met with graver heresy, a syncretistic amalgam of Christianity with theosophical elements drawn partly from the mystery cults and partly from heterodox Judaism. The Colossian Christians were being persuaded to worship intermediate angelic powers, identified with the heavenly bodies, and believed to possess a power to determine human fate unbroken by the Gospel. Special ceremonies and strict ascetic practices were en¬ joined, with feast-days drawn from the Jewish calendar.
Both these types of heresy, at Corinth and Colossae, belong to the general category commonly labelled £ Gnosti¬ cism’, a phenomenon which became an immense problem and threat to the Church as the personal authority of the first generation of Christian leaders receded into the past. Gnosticism is a generic term used primarily to refer to theo¬ sophical adaptations of Christianity propagated by a dozen or more rival sects which broke with the early church between a.d. 80 and 150. The word is often used in a much wider and vaguer sense to describe an imprecise, syncretistic religiosity diffused widely in the Levantine world, and exist¬ ing independently of and prior to Christianity. Behind this double usage of the word there lies a complicated con-
Gnosticism
35
troversy - whether and in what sense Gnosticism existed before Christianity. The question can be otherwise stated thus: Were the second century heresies the consequence of attempts to superimpose alien theosophical elements on a Christian substratum ? or systems which resulted from fitting bits of Christianity into a prior religious entity, which might take several different forms and could assimilate Mithras or Attis or Judaism with as little trouble as it accepted Jesus? There is no dispute that many of the raw materials of Gnosticism, drawn from Platonism, hellenized Zoroastrian¬ ism, and Judaism, were present before Christianity; but it is unlikely that they had been blended into a systematic or organized body of ‘doctrine9 attached to any particular group or groups of people in space and time, or that a redemp¬ tion myth closely resembling that of Christianity was widely current already.
The term Gnosticism is derived from the ordinary Greek word for knowledge {gnosis) . The second century sects claimed to possess a special ‘knowledge9 which transcended the simple faith of the Church. But in fact their knowledge was not of a philosophical or intellectualist character, but rather a knowledge of the nature and destiny of man, especially Gnostic man, based on a grandiose revelation about the origin of the world which explained how evil had come into being and how one should act in order to gain deliverance from it. What they claimed to ‘know9 consisted of a myth about the creation of the world as the result of a pre-cosmic disaster which accounted for the present misery of man’s lot, and about the way in which the elect few may be re¬ deemed. In the elect, they believed, there was a divine spark that had become imprisoned in matter and had lost its memory of its true, heavenly home. The content of the Gnostic gospel was an attempt to rouse the soul from its sleep-walking condition and to make it aware of the high destiny to which it is called. The present material world the Gnostics regarded as utterly alien to the supreme God and to goodness, and as therefore the creation of inferior powers, either incompetent or malevolent. The natural order of things reflected nothing at all of the divine glory
Faith and Order
36
and of the matchless heavenly beauty, and towards it the Gnostic initiate was taught to acknowledge no responsibility. His ethic was to be one of complete freedom from any con¬ straint or any obligation towards society and government regarding which he entertained the most pessimistic opinions. The world was in the iron control of evil powers whose home was in the seven planets, and after death the elect soul would be faced by a perilous journey through the planetary spheres back to its heavenly home. Much time was therefore devoted to learning the correct magic passwords and the most potent amulets, which would enable the delivered soul to force the monstrous powers barring the ascent to open their doors and allow him to pass onward and upward to the realm of light. The rival sects, which hated one another as much as they hated orthodoxy, used to offer different sets of names and passwords to be learnt, each group claiming to possess the authentic forms, with which alone the soul’s ascent could be successful. The details of the myths of the various sects were widely divergent. But the basic pattern can be seen to be constant. The Gnostic ethic, however, could take one of two forms, both based on the estimate of the natural order as wholly alien from God. The majority of the sects demanded an ascetic life with rules for the mortification of the flesh and a special prohibition on marriage (or at least on procreation), so that the divine soul might be liberated from the bonds of sense and bodily appetite and assisted to turn itself towards higher things. But some groups drew the opposite conclusion from the basic premise, and became notorious for their orgies of immorality. (In the New Testament the epistle of Jude warns against some Gnostic group which was exploiting the agape or love-feast and turning it into riotous licence.) The latter type liked to appeal to St Paul’s doctrine that the Christian is free from the law and lives under grace as a son of the kingdom, and (so far were they from being uneducated crudities) subtly justified their eroticism by appeals to the Symposium of Plato as teaching that love is a mystical commu¬ nion with God.
To the Gnostic myth the cosmogony of Plato’s Timaeus and the first chapters of Genesis contributed in almost equal
Gnosticism
37
proportions. But the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve exercised a deep fascination over the Gnostic imagination. The Fall of Eve was taken to symbolize a pre-cosmic catas¬ trophe in which a female power, the ‘Mother5, went astray from the divinely intended path. Or the story might suggest exciting speculations about the role of the serpent: the Ophites (i.e. serpent worshippers) argued that since through the serpent Adam and Eve had come to have knowledge of good and evil, he was a good power, the Leviathan encir¬ cling the cosmos with his tail in his mouth to symbolize eternity, who had out-manoeuvred the inferior creator and his son Jesus (whom the Ophites solemnly cursed in their liturgy) . Apart from the book of Genesis the main ingredient which Gnosticism derived from Judaism was a transmuted apocalyptic. Jewish apocalyptic painted a dark picture of the present world as the bone of contention between rival angelic armies, good and evil, and as the expected stage of a dramatic divine intervention redeeming God’s elect. The Gnostics eliminated any historical or literalist element from this notion and reinterpreted the apocalyptic world picture of Armageddon as a myth either about the origins of the world or about inward psychological experience.
The principal ingredient which Gnosticism derived from Christianity was the central idea of redemption. But not all the second-century sects included Jesus as the redeemer. Among the Samaritans a popular form of Gnosticism made Simon Magus the redeemer. In another system the Greek hero Heracles appears as the chief bringer of salvation, and Jesus plays a very subordinate role indeed. Even in those sects which stood closest to orthodox Christianity, such as the groups founded by the Egyptian Basilides and by the Plat- onist Valentinus of Rome, the Gnostic attitude to matter as alien to the supreme God required the rejection of any genuine incarnation. The divine Christ (they held) might have appeared to blinded worldlings as if he were tangible flesh and blood, but those with higher insight perceived that he was pure spirit and that the physical appearance was an optical illusion and mere semblance ( dokesis , whence this doctrine is labelled Docetism). It was inconceivable that the
Faith and Order
38
divine Christ could have come c in the flesh 5 in any ultimately true sense. What people would have seen if they had been there at the time would have differed according to their spiritual capacity.
It was the intense stress on the absolute necessity of a redeemer from the divine realm which led the Gnostics to place the natural order at so vast a distance in moral value from the supreme God. The influence of fatalistic ideas drawn from popular astrology and magic became fused with notions derived from Pauline language about predestination to produce a rigidly deterministic scheme. Redemption was from destiny, not from the consequences of responsible action, and was granted to a pre-determined elect in whom alone was the divine spark. Valentinus modified the division of humanity into light and darkness by allowing the existence of some grey twilight in between the two extremes. He took a lead from St Paul’s phrase (1 Thess. v, 23) that man con¬ sists of spirit, soul, and body, and applied the threefold division both to humanity and to the entire cosmos. The Gnostic initiates were the men of the spirit, the elect, whose salvation was certain and indefectible. Ordinary church members, with faith but not ‘knowledge’, were men of psyche , while the heathen were merely earthy clods without even the dimmest ray of light or the faintest hope of salvation. Valentinus allowed his followers to entertain hopes that some moderate degree of twilight happiness hereafter might be granted to the men of psyche. But the classes of men were determined from eternity. The natural man was constitu¬ tionally incapable of discerning the higher things of the spirit.
A further consequence of the Gnostic devaluation of the created order was the depreciation of the Old Testament. This was greatly accentuated by a thorough exploitation of the Pauline antithesis of law and gospel. The Gnostics liked to contrast the God of the Old Testament as the God of justice, whose principle was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, with the loving Father proclaimed by Jesus. This antithesis was especially worked out by Marcion, a figure who stands quite apart from the main stream of Gnosticism
Gnosticism
39
in that his system of thought did not include speculations about cosmogony or the names of the angels, but who in this one respect was the most radical and to the church the most formidable of heretics. Marcion came from Asia Minor to Rome, where the church excommunicated him in 144. He wrote a book entitled Antitheses (to which 1 Tim. vi, 20 could conceivably be an allusion) in which he listed contradictions between the Old and New Testaments to prove that the God of the Jews, the creator of this miserable world, was quite different from the God and Father of Jesus of whose existence the world had no inkling until the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar when Jesus suddenly appeared preaching the Gospel. It was inconceivable that the divine redeemer could ever have been born of a woman, and Marcion rejected the story of the birth and childhood of Christ as a falsification imposed on the authentic story.
Marcion’s attack on the status of the Old Testament de¬ pended on two axioms: the rejection of allegorical inter¬ pretation and the assertion that the first generation of Jewish Christians had misunderstood and misinterpreted the mind of Jesus. If allegory was disallowed, there was much in the Old Testament which appeared distressing. The God of the Jews, Marcion argued, was vacillating: after forbidding the making of images, he told Moses to set up a brazen serpent. He was ignorant : he had to ask Adam where he was and des¬ cended to Sodom and Gomorrah to discover what was going on. Moreover, as the creator of Adam he was responsible for the entrance of evil into the world. In one text of the Old Testament God himself confesses CI create evil5. It was con¬ gruous, thought Marcion, that he should so favour that bloodthirsty and licentious bandit, King David. Moreover, it was this creator who devised the humiliating method of sexual reproduction, the discomforts of pregnancy, and the pains of childbirth, the mere contemplation of which filled Marcion with nausea. The Marcionite community was accordingly strict in its rejection of marriage as helping the inferior creator in his repulsive business. Marcion’s rejection of allegory destroyed any invocation of the argument from the fulfilment of prophecy, for the Old Testament prophets
40
Faith and Order
were not inspired by the kindly Father of J esus. They expected a Jewish national Messiah, and their God was so limited in vision as to have a special favour for the Jewish people. In Marcion’s evaluation of the Old Testament there lurks a constant overtone of anti-Semitism.
The assertion that the first Christians had misinterpreted their Master was necessary to Marcion because it was clear that the New Testament writings presupposed continuity between the Old and the New covenants. Marcion concluded that the documents had been considerably corrupted by the Judaisers of whose insidious methods St Paul complained in the epistle to the Galatians. He therefore set about the task of restoring the true text. St Paul was his hero, but the Pauline epistles he found interpolated and altered by Judaising interests anxious to make the apostle say that the Old Testament contained divine revelation. Even there cuts and restorations had to be made. In the case of the Gospels Marcion could take a shorter way. He took it for granted that only one could be authoritative, and decided that it must be St Luke’s. But in its existing form St Luke’s text showed every sign of acknowledging the validity of the Old Testament revelation and of assuming the continuity of the Gospel with the word spoken in time past to Moses and the prophets. This text also, therefore, had been corrupted by Judaisers. Moreover, the original text, Marcion believed, was the work of Paul himself, and he therefore undertook to establish the authentic text of Paul’s Gospel as it was before his uncomprehending friends and disciples had altered it. Marcion thus became the first person to draw up an exclu¬ sive canonical list of Biblical books, which excluded all the Old Testament and large parts of the New, grounded on the basic assumption that the twelve apostles had not possessed the insight to comprehend the true meaning of Jesus.
Valentinus dealt with the Bible very differently. He did not reject allegory, which to his Platonist mind was pro¬ foundly congenial. Some Valentinians distinguished in the Old Testament between those parts inspired by God, certain sections inserted by Moses by way of concession to the hard¬ ness of men’s hearts, and a third group of inferior passages
4i
The Ministry and the Bible
that had been inserted by the Jewish elders and possessed no authority. But the Valentinians had no special interest in depreciating the Old Testament. Nor did they utter any breath of disparagement against the original apostles of Jesus. The Valentinian mythology, it was claimed, had been secretly taught by Jesus to the disciples, and from them had been passed down by an esoteric oral tradition side by side with the public teaching of the church.
THE MINISTRY AND THE BIBLE
The basic difficulty raised by these teachers was to know on what authoritative ground their doctrines could be refuted.
In a word the central issue was that of Authority. What was the true interpretation of the Old and New Testaments? Who now occupied the teaching chairs of the apostles and could give clear guidance to bewildered believers? Where could one find reliable evidence of what the apostles had really taught?
Ignatius of Antioch sought to answer the problem of centrifugal movements by insisting upon the local bishop as the focus of unity; without him the lifegiving sacraments could not be administered. He gave this, so to speak, a vertical justification by claiming that the bishop is God’s representative on earth, an earthly counterpart correspond¬ ing to the heavenly Monarch, so that ‘ we ought to regard the bishop as the Lord himself’.
A more permanent justification of ministerial authority came from Rome. About the end of the first century there was a revolution in the Corinthian Church which deposed its old clergy and put new men in their place. In deep fraternal concern a formal and successful letter of protest was sent by the Roman Church, composed by Clement, probably the presiding presbyter or bishop of the Church. The letter, which was written with extreme care and solem¬ nity and claimed to be inspired, besought the Corinthians to preserve ordered unity and to rectify the scandal caused by deposing members of the sacred order who stand in due suc¬ cession from the apostles, even if not actually ordained by
Faith and Order
42
apostles, and who have c blamelessly offered the gifts 5 in the holy rite of the eucharist.
At Corinth Clement found no doctrinal deviation, but in this idea of a succession from the apostles there was a weapon capable of being developed in the subsequent conflicts with Gnosticism. Against any heretical claim to possess secret traditions of what Jesus had told the apostles in the forty days after the resurrection, there was the clear argument that the apostles Peter and Paul could not have failed to impart such doctrines to those whom they had set over the churches, and that by the line of accredited teachers in those churches of apostolic foundation no such heretical notions had been transmitted. The succession argument carried the implica¬ tion that the teaching given by the contemporary bishop ^ of, say, Rome or Antioch was in all respects identical with that of the apostles. This was important, for two reasons. In the first place, the faithful were thereby in some sense assured that revelation was not only knowable by a retrospective historical knowledge derived from either the apostles’ occa¬ sional writings or anecdotal gossip, but had in the bishop a con¬ temporary authority, able and authorized to speak God’s word in the present. In the second place, it enabled the defenders of orthodoxy, especially Irenaeus of Lyons, to oppose to the proliferating Gnostic sects, none of which agreed with one another and all of which were continually modifying their views, the concept of the monolithic church, universally ex¬ tended in space and with unbroken continuity in time, unan¬ imous in its possession of an immutable revelation (below, p. 82).
The second weapon of the orthodox defence was the gradual formation of the New Testament canon. In the first century the Christian Bible had simply been the Old Testa¬ ment (read in the Septuagint version) . Authority resided in this scripture and in the words of the Lord, which long circu¬ lated in oral tradition, as is apparent in the letter of Clement to the Corinthians. The authoritative standing of this oral tradition continued to be high even after the sayings and doings of the Lord had been written down in the c gospel’ according to Mark, Luke, Matthew, or John. Even as late
The Ministry and the Bible 43
as the time of Irenaeus (c. 185-90) this oral tradition of the words of the Lord was regarded as an authority that had not yet been wholly merged with the written gospels. But the controversy with Marcion and the Gnostics gave a sharp impetus to the control of authentic tradition which a written document possessed and which oral transmission did not. Justin Martyr, who probably knew all the four canonical gospels, seems to have used Matthew, Mark, and Luke in a gospel harmony, to which his pupil Tatian added St John to form his Diatessaron (below, p. 62). The synoptic gospels seem to have achieved general acceptance rather earlier than St John’s gospel, the authority of which was disputed by some. The existence of four versions of the gospel was a troublesome puzzle in itself. Marcion (above, p. 39) accepted only one. The Valentinians accepted not only the well known four but many additional documents professing to contain traditions of the secret sayings of Jesus, like the Gospel of Thomas recently recovered from the sands of Egypt. Irenaeus ingeniously vindicated the fourfold gospel on numerological principles. Four, he urged, was a sacred number correspon¬ ding to the four winds, or the four faces of the cherubim in Ezekiel and the Johannine Apocalypse with faces resembling a lion, a calf, a man, and an eagle. But apart from accepted use in church lectionaries the prime criterion was apostolicity. Mark and Luke were set beside Matthew and John as being sanctioned by Peter and Paul respectively.
The Gospel of John caused some controversy because of its evidently discrepant account compared with the other three Gospels, but it was skilfully defended by Irenaeus as being the work of John son of Zebedee, to whom he also ascribed the Revelation.
The strict application of the criterion of apostolicity in Rome led to the exclusion from the western New Testament of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which Roman tradition knew to be non-Pauline, and it was only readmitted in the West more than 200 years later on the authority of the eastern churches. It also led to the eventual exclusion of writings like the Shepherd of Hermas and the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians which did not claim to be apostolic. A fragment
Faith and Order
44
giving the New Testament canon probably of Rome about 200 (the c Muratorian canon’)1 explains that the Shepherd is good private reading, but as its author was neither apostle nor prophet but a recent writer it is disqualified for admission to the lectionary.
Naturally enough, orthodoxy and apostolicity were equated. This made it difficult to detect the non-apostolic authorship of orthodox documents like the second epistle of Peter (which, nevertheless, was debated for a long time). Other disputed arid eventually successful documents were the Revelation of John, the epistles of James and Jude, and the second and third epistles of John. Likewise disputed but unsuccessful candidates on the orthodox side were the Acts of Paul ajid Thecla and the Apocalypse of Peter. Sometimes modern writers wonder at the disagreements. The truly astonishing thing is that so great a measure of agreement was reached so quickly.
The third and last weapon against heresy was the * Rule of Faith’, a tide used by Irenaeus and Tertullian to mean a short summary of the main revelatory events of the redemp¬ tive process. Irenaeus declares that the whole Church believes c in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and the seas and all that is therein, and in one Christ Jesus the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit who through the prophets preached the dispensa¬ tions and the comings and the virgin birth and the passion, and the rising from the dead and the assumption into heaven in his flesh of our beloved Lord Jesus Christ, and his coming from heaven in the glory of the Father ... to raise up all flesh.’ The crux of this summary for polemical purposes lies in its assertion of the unity of the divine plan from Old Testa¬ ment to New, a theme which Irenaeus developed in his doctrine of ‘recapitulation’ or the correspondence between Adam and Christ. The heretics did not believe the supreme God to be maker of heaven and earth and, with their low valuation of the Old Testament, were not interested in the fulfilment of prophecy.
i. So called because it was first printed in 1740 by L. A. Muratori from an eighth-century manuscript at Milan.
/
Forms of the Ministry 45
This Rule (Irenaeus claimed) is what the bishops teach now and therefore comes down from the apostles. In content it is akin to the formulas used in the questions put to candi¬ dates for baptism and is simply the credal pattern based on the New Testament. Tertullian treated it as independent of Scripture because, in argument with heretics, it was a better defence than the Bible, over the interpretation of which one can argue long with the sole effect of bewildering simple folk who want a short and direct answer. Tertullian argued that the Bible is often difficult to interpret. Obscure passages must be interpreted by those which are plain. Moreover, the Bible is old. To appeal to the ftule of Faith is to appeal to what is now being taught by the churches of apostolic foun¬ dation. So Tertullian, following Irenaeus before him but going considerably further, seems here to have distinguished between Scripture and Tradition almost as if they were distinct sources of revelation. Nevertheless, Tertullian was also well aware that the Rule of Faith is derived from Scrip¬ ture: for him to say that the Rule is the key for interpreting the Bible is no different from saying \that obscure passages must be interpreted by the clear. The argument is of course circular: the tradition of Church teaching must be proved orthodox by the biblical revelation; yet doubtful books are admitted to the New Testament canon because they are orthodox by the standards of Church tradition, and only the tradition can ensure that the interpretation of Scripture is sound.
FORMS OF THE MINISTRY
The apostles derived their name and function from the fact of being sent by the Lord as missionaries. They were not the only ones to receive gifts of the Spirit. There were also ‘prophets’, like Agabus (Acts xi, 28; xxi, 7), and teachers, accredited as instructors in the faith. At Corinth the Church especially prized the gift of ecstatic irrational utterance (‘speaking with tongues’). Paul could not afford to deny that the gift of ecstasy was a genuine manifestation of the Spirit, but was alarmed by its divisive possibilities (1 Cor.
Faith and Order
46
xiii) and told the Corinthians that the enthusiastic utterance they especially prized was the last in the graded hierarchy of supernatural gifts: it is preceded by ‘first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, next miracle-workers, then healers, helpers, and administrators 5 (1 Cor. xii, 28). The first three in this sevenfold hierarchy are the chief £ orders 5 of the first missionary generation.
Sixty or seventy years later Ignatius was speaking of Antioch and the Asian churches as possessing a monarchical bishop, together with presbyters and deacons. In his time there were neither apostles nor prophets. The exact history of this transition within two generations from apostles, prophets and teachers to bishop, presbyters and deacons is shrouded in obscurity, though our sources give occasional glimpses of the process. The epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians implies the existence of two distinct orders of ministry, bishops or presbyters (the titles are applied to the same people) and deacons. This twofold order is also apparent in the New Testament: Paul addresses his Philippian epistle to the £ bishops and deacons \ Later New Testament writings (Acts xx, 17; Titus i, 5-7) likewise illustrate the application of £ presbyter 5 and £ bishop 5 to the same person. Evidently the churches established by the travelling missionaries soon came to have local, stationary clergy, subordinate to the general oversight of mobile apostolic authority. For a genera¬ tion or more the apostles and prophets coexisted with this local ministry of bishops and deacons. This situation is in fact reflected in the Didache or ‘Teaching of the Apostles’,1 a document reckoned as Scripture by many early Fathers but which disappeared until 1883 when Archbishop Bryen- nios printed it from a manuscript, now at Jerusalem, dated 1056. The text may have suffered some revision over the centuries before this date. From the beginning the Didache was a composite work, made up of bits and pieces. Its date and purpose have been much debated, and because of the mistaken opinion that it is dependent on the Epistle of Barnabas (probably an Alexandrian work of about 130-40) it has often been thought to be a late fiction. But the situation
1. The title might also be translated ‘Instruction for missionaries*.
Forms of the Ministry 47
regarding Church order presupposed in the Didache makes it hard to find any plausible niche for it in early Christian history other than the period between about 70 and no. It may be odd there, but it is much odder anywhere else.
The Didache begins with moral exhortation for converts, taken from an extant Jewish tract £ The Two Ways ’, followed by directions for baptism, fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays, the correct form of the Lord’s Prayer (to be said thrice daily), and eucharistic prayers, notable (but not very aston¬ ishing) for the lack of reference to the redemptive death of Christ as interpreted by Paul. The last section (possibly a slightly later addition?) is especially sensitive about the dan¬ ger of charlatans; it gives rules concerning hospitality towards apostles and prophets and other visitors with claims upon the community’s generosity, and offers directions con¬ cerning the way to detect false prophets (see below, p. 57), concerning the proper stipend of a prophet who decides to settle permanently with a particular congregation, and con¬ cerning the parallel provision of a local ministry which is not itinerant:
Appoint for yourselves therefore bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men that are meek and not lovers of money, true and reliable; for they also perform for you the ministry of prophets and teachers. Do not despise them therefore; for they are your men of honour together with the prophets and teachers.
The writer evidently feared that the local ministers might not receive the same respect as the itinerant charismatics. As the congregations consolidated, the part played by travel¬ ling missionaries and prophets receded into the background. Inspired utterance in preaching was expected of the regular local ministry. To Ignatius of Antioch the wonder of divine grace was found in the sacramental life of the church gath¬ ered round its bishop, who spoke in the Spirit. It is noteworthy that in the Didache , as in the letter of Clement to Corinth and in the later New Testament writings (see 1 Tim. iii), the local ministry is two-tiered - bishops or presbyters and deacons. Between these two orders, according to all the evi¬ dence, there is a distinction in liturgical function: in the
Faith and Order
48
common eucharist the presbyter-bishop celebrates while the deacon assists. Deacons also helped the bishops in looking after any church property and in administering charitable relief. In the third century the congregations had swollen to such a size that deacons had to maintain proper order; in North Africa in Cyprian’s time the deacon administered the chalice. At Rome in 150, according to Justin Martyr’s evidence, the deacon used to take the consecrated elements to absent brethren who were imprisoned or sick. Later, in some but not in all churches, it was customary for the deacon to read the liturgical Gospel.
It was a natural missionary strategy for the Church to make the towns its first objective, and it became normal to serve the rural congregations, in the region under the civil admin¬ istration of the city (which might be very large), by sending out deacons. During the second and third centuries there must have been many occasions when the deacons actually celebrated the eucharist. This practice was frowned upon and at the Councils of Arles (314) and Nicaea (325) explicitly forbidden. By then it was usual for rural congregations to be served by a resident presbyter.
St Luke’s account of the Seven in Acts vi is probably in¬ tended to recount the origin of the diaconate, though this identification of the Seven with deacons is first made ex¬ plicit by Irenaeus. It is noteworthy that the Roman church always had seven deacons ; and the same number was com¬ mon in the churches of Asia Minor in the third and fourth centuries.
The diaconate was not originally a probationary order for the presbyterate,1 but normally lifelong, unless a deacon were made a bishop. In great cities like Rome the office was powerful. The earliest recorded ‘archdeacon’ appears in North Africa early in the fourth century. An ancient arch¬ deacon was not as today a presbyter, but the senior deacon with large financial and administrative responsibility. Many
1 . The first person known to have been promoted through all orders is Cornelius of Rome (251-3). By the fourth century the idea is well established that clergy may hope to be promoted through the successive grades as steps of a ladder.
Forms of the Ministry 49
deacons and especially archdeacons succeeded to the epis¬ copate.
The charitable (but not the liturgical) side of the diaconate was shared with deaconesses who had special responsibilities for women.
The assistant status of the deacons is evident in the earliest known form of ordination in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippo- lytus (about 200-220) i1 while all the presbyters join with the bishop in laying hands on candidates for the presby- terate, the bishop alone lays hands on the deacon since c he is not ordained for priesthood but for the service of the bishop’.
This two-tiered ministry is integrally linked to the euchar- istic celebration. But among the presbyter-bishops one rose to a position of superiority, and acquired the title ‘bishop’ while his colleagues are called ‘presbyters’. Four factors helped to bring this about. The first distinctive right natur¬ ally assigned to the senior member of the presbyteral college was the power to ordain. This became his prerogative. Second¬ ly, correspondence between churches was normally carried on by the presiding presbyter-bishop. Thirdly, on the solemn occasion of an ordination, leaders from other communities would come as representatives of their own congregations and would take part in the laying on of hands and prayers which conferred the power of the Spirit and the authority of the community as the body of Christ. Frequent exchanges by correspondence and mutual visiting helped the concrete realization of the Church’s unity and universality. Finally, the crisis of the Gnostic sects showed the manifest necessity of a single man as the focus of unity.
At Jerusalem the Church had had from the start a single figure at the head of the body of elders. The correspondence of Ignatius betrays no sign that at Antioch any other system had once prevailed, though the Didache (probably Syrian) would suggest otherwise. The elevation of the episcopate
1. This document survives in a fragmentary Latin version of about 400, and parts are incorporated in other church orders extant in Greek, Ethiopic, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic. Unhappily the textual tradition cannot be traced back earlier than the second half of the fourth century; caution is therefore necessary in using its evidence (below, p. 262).
5° Faith and Order
into an order standing above the presbyterate, while also remaining on a level with it, was taking place in the period when apostolic authority was going or gone. The process may have been helped by the example of the churches of Jerusalem and Antioch. The bishop among his presbyters remained first among equals and for centuries continued to address them as ‘ fellow-presbyters’; presbyters too had authority to celebrate the eucharist and were entrusted with the disciplin¬ ary £ power of the keys 5 (Matt, xvi, 1 9 ; xviii, 1 8 ; John xx, 23) by which the purity of the society was maintained and sinning brethren excluded. At the same time the presbyter inherited the lower role of the ‘teacher5, while the bishop inherited those of the apostle and the prophet : it is primarily the bishop who ordains presbyters, though the presbyters join in the laying on of hands. Some variety of custom appears on the question whether, when the bishop himself is being consecrated, the presbyters of his church share in the laying on of hands. At Alexandria we are told that they did so until the third century and there is no mention of visiting bishops; but at Rome by the time of Hippolytus only the bishops who came from other churches laid hands on the one to be conse¬ crated, the chief consecrator being chosen by the bishops themselves. The service was held on a Sunday. The actual choice of the candidate rested with the whole congregation, clergy and people together, an idealistic system which assumed unanimity but in practice led to faction. Election by the people likewise played a large part in the ordination of presbyters and deacons.1 With the advent of a Christian emperor in the fourth century, especially when the local church was passionately divided, it began to become common for the bishops of important cities to be imperially nominated ; it was soon discovered that no system of election or nomina¬ tion is free of abuses and that even emperors were not always disinterested.
1. process of electing a new bishop could be sharply divisive. Unanimity of choice was sufficiently unusual to be regarded as a special grace. In a few cases the people’s choice was settled by special consider¬ ations. In the middle of the third century Fabian of Rome owed his election to the fact that a dove alighted on his head, and was taken to symbolize the choice of the Spirit.
Forms of the Ministry 5 1
The transition from a missionary ministry to a local and pastoral ministry was going on at the time when the emergence of the bishop as transcendent among his fellow- presbyters was also beginning to become apparent. Partly because of the tendency to idealize the apostolic age, it is often supposed that, besides these two changes, there was also a parallel transition from vitality to formalism, from freedom to rigidity, or even from a lay democracy to a clerical authoritarianism. The truth is not so simple. In fact there have probably been few periods in church history when authority has had comparable difficulty in asserting itself and when freedom so nearly meant anarchy as in the sub-apostolic age. It is true that from the middle of the second century onwards there is a strong reaction towards standardization in both faith and order; diversities in dog¬ matic formulation, in matters of liturgical practice (such as the observance of Easter), and in the text of Scripture began to be smoothed out. The basic presupposition of the process on which all were in principle agreed, was the idea that since the Church is one, its beliefs and practices should be uniform. Variety in church order was a legacy of the missionary beginnings : in some churches one man would have been en¬ trusted with sole authority, in others a single leader might not be available and it would then seem best to put a body of elders in charge. Much missionary enterprise was under¬ taken by individuals acting without special authority from any church or apostle, and the leading sub-apostolic churches had then the task of bringing these congregations into line as members of the federation. The three-tiered system of one bishop in one city, with presbyters and deacons, was attained in the second century without controversy. A further natural development was the provincial system by which in the third century special dignity came to be accorded to the bishop of the metropolis of the imperial province, and yet more trans¬ cendent honour to the bishops of the three greatest cities of the empire, Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, which are nomina¬ ted in the sixth canon of the Council of Nicaea as possessing a jurisdiction beyond that of the civil province (below, p.131). The whole development is a story of transition from
52 Faith and Order
unregulated church organization to a more close-knit arrangement.
The antithesis between immediate inspiration and media¬ ted authority emerges sharply in the Montanist crisis in the seventies of the second century. A Phrygian named Mon- tanus was seized by the Spirit and, together with two women, Prisca and Maximilla, delivered utterances of the Paraclete in a state of ‘ecstasy ’, i.e. not being in possession of his facul¬ ties. It was the peculiar form of these utterances to which other Christians objected: this kind of ecstatic prophecy was not, like that of the biblical prophets, delivered in the third person, but was direct speech by the Spirit himself using the prophet’s mouth as his instrument. The content of the £New Prophecy ’ was hostile to the Gnostic elimination of eschato¬ logical expectation and insisted on the literal resurrection of the flesh and the nearness of the End. As prophesied in the Revelation of St John, the Lord would shortly come to reign on earth with his saints for a thousand years. Local patriotism led the three prophets to claim that the heavenly Jerusalem would descend in Phrygia. The Montanists did not expect all the Lord’s people to be prophets, but rather required their fellow-Christians to £ acknowledge ’ the supernatural nature of the utterances of the Paraclete’s chosen three: to reject them was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. This demand split the churches in Asia Minor, some thinking the New Prophecy divine, others diabolical. The opposition to Mon- tanism eventually won, but at a price. In Thyatira the entire church remained Montanist to a man for nearly a century; and inscriptions show how the sect lived on.1 Though refused recognition by the Church at large (after some hesitations at Rome where both sides competed to win the bishop’s support), its puritanism and revivalist ethics won for it a notable convert in the brilliant African orator Tertullian,
i. The inscriptions show that the Montanists were much more un¬ compromising than their Catholic brethren about making an open confession of their faith before the world. It is virtually only from central Phrygia, a Montanist stronghold, that we have explicitly Christian epitaphs of the third century, often with the challenging formula ‘Christians to Christians*. Elsewhere neutral formulas are used on Christian tombs of this period.
Forms of the Ministry 53
who died fulminating against his former Catholic brethren because they imagined that the Church was constituted by bishops rather than spiritual men.
The orthodox reply, as formulated by Hippolytus of Rome, was unerringly directed against Montanism’s weakest point, namely its divisiveness: the quest for miraculous gifts is well (he thought), but the supreme miracle is conversion and therefore every believer alike has the gifts of the Spirit; the supernatural is discerned in the normal ministry of word and sacrament, not in irrational ecstasies which lead to pride and censoriousness.
The chief effect of Montanism on the Catholic Church was greatly to reinforce the conviction that revelation had come to an end with the apostolic age, and so to foster the creation of a closed canon of the New Testament. Irenaeus is the last writer who can still think of himself as belonging to the eschatological age of miracle and revelation.
Expansion and Growth
CAUSES OF SUCCESS
Even to a writer as early as the author of Acts (probably c. 80) , the expansion of the church seemed an extraordinary chain of improbabilities. Nothing could have been less likely to succeed by any ordinary standard of expectation. It appeared as a long story of strange coincidence in which human intentions played a subordinate role and where the eye of faith was entitled to discern the tranquil operation of a wiser providence.
The pagan writer Celsus (probably c. 180) saw it with the cold eye of a hostile external observer. He picked on the close-knit structure and coherence of the Christians as a social group, and saw in this the principal source of Christian strength. But in his view this social coherence was not the consequence of any internal principle but merely the result of being persecuted : ‘Their agreement is quite amazing, the more so as it may be shown to rest on no trustworthy founda¬ tion. However they have a trustworthy foundation for their unity in social dissidence and the advantage which it brings and in the fear of outsiders — these are factors which streng¬ then their faith.5 The opposition which the Christians pro¬ voked may certainly be accounted an important factor in producing their cohesion, though it is certainly too simple to explain their social drive as resulting from some inner com¬ pensation for being rejected by society. Celsus was also aware that the Christians worshipped in secret for fear of arrest. Publicity was dangerous, and sometimes the smell of a sip of insufficiently diluted wine at the eucharist might lead to betrayal. The earliest churches were simply private houses, gradually converted inside as the congregations
55
Causes of success
grew. It was not till the fourth century that churches ac¬ quired a ‘public’ style of architecture and became recog¬ nizable as such. Nevertheless, it is an illusion to think that persecution drove the Church down to the catacombs and that the sacraments had to be celebrated in a kind of trog¬ lodyte life. Persecution, so far from driving the church under¬ ground, had the opposite effect. When one governor in Asia Minor in the second century began persecuting the Christ¬ ians, the entire Christian population of the region paraded before his house as a manifesto of their faith and as a protest against the injustice. From the start the Christians were a society abnormally sensitive to outside opinion. The enemies that they had to conquer were prejudice and misinformation.
Motives which led to conversions were no doubt as various as they are today. Curiosity about a secretive sect suspected of immorality, the witnessing of a martyrdom, ordinary rela¬ tions of friendship : all were causes for further inquiry. At a deeper level, the Christian Gospel spoke of divine grace in Christ, the remission of sins and the conquest of evil powers for the sick soul, tired of living and scared of dying, seeking for an assurance of immortality and for security and freedom in a world where the individual could rarely do other than submit to his fate. The terms were those of the baptismal vows : a renunciation of sin and everything associated with demonic powers, idols, astrology and magic; and a declara¬ tion of belief in God the Father, in the redemptive acts of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and in the Holy Spirit active in the Church. Though it is improbable that all con¬ verts knew themselves to be sick souls (perhaps relatively few found their way by guilt and tears and there is no evi¬ dence that many were hag-ridden with anxiety in this age more than in others), baptism and admission to the sacred meal meant a break with the past and a gift of grace by which the individual could live up to ideals and moral imperatives recognized by his conscience. In a word, ^Christianity directly answered to the human quest for true happiness - by which more is meant than feeling happy. Ancient Stoicism, nobly represented in the writings of the aristocrat Seneca, in the slave Epictetus, and (with a markedly individual,
56 Expansion and Growth
introspective, brooding mood) in the emperor Marcus Aure¬ lius, taught that happiness is achieved by the suppression of desire for everything that one cannot both get and keep: ‘Before the external disorder of the world and bodily illness, retreat into yourself and find God there.5 The Stoic soul stood proudly erect amidst a sea of troubles, untouched by emo¬ tion. The Christians found much that was congenial in Stoic ethics (‘Seneca often speaks like a Christian,5 remarked Tertullian), and were not disposed to deny their indebted¬ ness to its wisdom. The divergence lay in the Christian stress on the grace of God as making the Christian life possible, on the love of God (rather than the individual’s self-respect) as the object towards which human striving should be directed, and on the outgoing activity of ‘charity5 towards one’s fellow men.
The practical application of charity was probably the most potent single cause of Christian success. The pagan comment ‘See how these Christians love one another5 (re¬ ported by Tertullian) was not irony. Christian charity ex¬ pressed itself in care for the poor, for widows and orphans, in visits to brethren in prison or condemned to the living death of labour in the mines, and in social action in time of calamity like famine, earthquake, pestilence, or war.
A particular service which the community rendered to poor brethren (following synagogue precedent) was to pro¬ vide for their burial. In the second half of the second century, at any rate in Rome and Carthage, the churches began to acquire burial grounds for their members. One of the oldest of these was south of Rome on the Appian Way at a place named Catacumbas (below, p. 88), from which these ceme¬ teries in the form of underground corridors have received the name ‘catacombs’.
Hospitality to travellers was an especially important act of charity: a Christian brother had only to give proof of his faith to be sure of lodging for a period of up to three nights with no more questions asked. The bishop had the prime responsibility of providing such hospitality, especially for travelling missionaries. The bishop accordingly controlled the church revenues.
Causes of success 57
At first clergy stipends were paid on a dividend system (monthly in the time of Cyprian of Carthage) ; it was only much later that the growth of endowments made fixed in¬ comes possible at least in many churches. The proportions distributed among the different claimants on the church’s resources varied in different places. At Rome in the fifth cen¬ tury a quarter of the revenue went to the bishop, while the remaining three quarters was equally divided between the remaining clergy, those on the official list of sick and poor, and the maintenance of the church buildings. The financial independence of each church meant that rural clergy were ill paid while those in great cities or attached to popular shrines became well off. It was always recognized that the prime responsibility of the church treasury was to provide for the needs of the poor, and bishops who preferred to spend money on rich adornments and splendid churches were gen¬ erally disapproved; in any event, there was no question of such elaboration before the time of Constantine.
The distribution of alms was obviously open to abuse. In the first century the author of the Didache was already giving warnings about exploitation by false brethren. A vivid and cruel portrait was painted by the pagan satirist Lucian of Samosata ( c . 170), describing how a charlatan named Pere- grinus Proteus (of whom other second-century pagans wrote more kindly) became a Christian for very worldly reasons, was elevated to the office of bishop and was imprisoned by the governor of Syria; but he so traded on the devotion of his church to their noble confessor that he made a very sub¬ stantial profit before gaining his release and going on to his next adventure. Lucian had a low opinion of the human race, and treated Christianity as merely additional evidence of human absurdity and folly. But he knew that the Christians were unbelievably generous with their money and preferred to be open-handed rather than inquire too closely into the recipients.
By the year 251 the resources of the church in Rome had grown so much that it was supporting from its common purse not only the bishop, 64 presbyters, 7 deacons, 7 subdeacons, 42 acolytes, and 52 exorcists, readers and doorkeepers, but
5^ Expansion and Growth
also more than 1500 widows and needy persons, all of whom were ‘fed by the grace and kindness of the Lord5. The same community was also well known for its generosity to less prosperous Christians in areas that suffered under the rav¬ ages of barbarian invasion during the crisis of the third cen¬ tury. The persecution of 250 under Decius brought a number of refugee bishops to Rome where they could hide in the vast city and rely on the wealth of the Roman church to support them. But the distribution of alms was not confined only to believers. The assistance provided by the church was im¬ pressive in a world where, except for a period during the second century and again during Julian the Apostate’s brief attempt to incorporate the church’s ideals within paganism (below, p. 157), the government did not expect to undertake a general programme of social welfare.
Christianity being illegal, the church could not own prop¬ erty as such. From early in the fourth century, perhaps even as early as Gallienus’ edict of toleration in 260 (below, p. 120), money and land began to be bequeathed to the church by will. A law of Constantine of 32 1 , legalizing such bequests, presupposes that already they were being made and that in some cases their validity had been disputed. In consequence of this law the fourth century saw a great increase in the endowment income of the churches. In Asia Minor and Syria by the end of the fourth century it was common to bequeath a determined proportion (often a third) of one’s property to the church; in the West the proportion set aside for the church was reckoned as the share that would be given to an additional child, so that Western custom paid more regard to the family’s needs. An unusual view was repre¬ sented by Salvian, a presbyter of Marseilles (400-480), who, confronted by vast pauperism under the barbarian invasions, denounced inherited wealth and taught that to bequeath anything to one’s family prejudiced one’s eternal interests.
Christianity seems to have been especially successful among women. It was often through the wives that it pene¬ trated the upper classes of society in the first instance. Christ¬ ians believed in the equality of men and women before God, and found in the New Testament commands that husbands
Causes of success 59
should treat their wives with such consideration and love as Christ manifested for his church. Christian teaching about the sanctity of marriage offered a powerful safeguard to married women.1 The Christian sex ethic differed from the conventional standards of pagan society in that it regarded unchastity in a husband as no less serious a breach of loyalty and trust than unfaithfulness in a wife. The apostle’s doctrine that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. iii, 28) was not taken to mean a programme of political emancipa¬ tion, which in antiquity would have been unthinkable. The social role of women remained that of the home-maker and wife. At the same time, Christianity cut across ordinary social patterns more deeply than any other religion, and encour¬ aged the notion of the responsibility of individual moral choice in a way that was quite exceptional.
Christianity did not give political emancipation to either women or slaves, but it did much to elevate their domestic status by its doctrine that all men are created in God’s image and all alike redeemed in Christ; and they must therefore be treated with sovereign respect. What made the Church conservative about slavery as an institution was not political indifference but respect for the State and for Law as laid down in Romans xiii. That one man should possess property rights over another was recognized as an evil, and therefore held to be a consequence of the fallen state of humanity since Adam. According to St Paul slavery is like a mixed marriage in which the Christian partner should not take the initiative in seeking for its dissolution (1 Cor. vii, 17-24). When St
1. Difficult pastoral problems were raised when a marriage broke down. There were some differences of opinion whether unfaithfulness in a spouse required or only permitted divorce (the latter view prevailing). It was agreed, on the basis of Matt, v, 32 and xix, 9, that it was a ground for dissolution of marriage. There were greater differences of opinion about the remarriage of divorced persons; for an innocent party Augus¬ tine judged it a venial sin, and in the third century there were some bishops who thought that in certain pastoral circumstances it was possible for the church’s blessing to be given. The legislation of the Christian emperors tended to make divorce more difficult out of consideration for the needs of the children, but was not based on a consistent doctrine of marriage, which could hardly be found before the writings of Augus¬ tine.
6o
Expansion and Growth
Paul wrote his brilliant letter, uniting wit and seriousness, returning the (possibly runaway) slave Onesimus to his friends Philemon, Apphia and Archippus, he did not de¬ mand that a Christian should free him as a matter of prin¬ ciple — though in this particular case Paul no doubt hoped that the owner would do so, since he asked for Onesimus to be returned to him ‘for the sake of the gospel’. To free a slave was regarded as a ‘ good work ’ ; the Church treasury would be used to finance the manumission of slaves in bad house¬ holds as also of those who became slaves by being prisoners of war. A Christian master would solemnly affirm his inten¬ tion to free a slave in the presence of the bishop, a practice which Constantine confirmed by giving the ceremony a legal validity equal to that of formal manumission before a magistrate. In the Church masters and slaves were brethren. Several emancipated slaves rose to be bishops, notably Callistus of Rome in the third century (below, p. 88). To¬ wards the end of the fourth century State legislation began to protect property rights by prohibiting the ordination of slaves without leave or financial compensation to the owner. Whereas under Roman law slaves could not contract a legal marriage, the Church regarded marriages between slaves and free as indissoluble. Protests against the institution of slavery as such came in the fourth century when the Chris¬ tians were beginning to be in a position to affect social policy. But bequests had by this time made the fourth-century Church a considerable landowner, already dependent on endowments for clergy stipends and therefore in a weak position for initiating economic changes. These protests were too little and too late to revolutionize the economy of the ancient world and only have the historical significance of outlining a programme for the future.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL EXTENSION OF THE CHURCH
Christianity spread with remarkable rapidity in Syria and north-westwards into Asia Minor and Greece. To the north¬ east, however, it met both the imperial frontier and a lan-
The geographical extension of the Church 61
guage barrier: the kingdom of Osrhoene with its capital at Edessa lay outside the empire until 216 and spoke Syriac, though educated people at Edessa knew Greek also. During the second century a Christian community was established in Edessa. Its most prominent member, Bardesanes, was intimate with King Abgar IX the Great who was also con¬ verted to Christianity. Bardesanes was a cultivated man whose poetry was of such quality as to achieve almost classical status in Syriac literature. Before conversion he had been expert in astrology. A pupil summarized his teaching in a much plagiarized book, based on extensive comparative researches, to prove that the divergent religious customs of the different races invalidate astrological belief but do not, as pagans (like Celsus) were arguing, establish the truth of polytheism against Biblical monotheism. He recognized, however, that not all diversity in worship and not all evils can be attributed simply to free will. Those facts in the world which are not attributable to either nature or human freedom he ascribed to the conflict between angels and demons and to destiny which, he conceded, had some relative power, though not as much as the astrologers thought. At this point a number of Gnostic themes and images began to enter his poetic vision of the world and, though he vigorously opposed the Marcionites in Edessa, his own orthodoxy was not trusted at Antioch. Later Syrian Christians like Ephraem (306-73) regarded him as a dangerous genius. To combat his influence an Edessene Christian named Palut was conse¬ crated to be bishop of Edessa by Serapion, bishop of Antioch, about 200. At first Palut ministered only to a small minority group; but after Edessa became part of the empire, the Palu- tians were able to show that they enjoyed catholic commu¬ nion with Antioch and Rome as the followers of Bardesanes did not.
The third century church at Edessa claimed as its founder one of the 72 disciples of Jesus named Addai, sent in answer to a letter written to Jesus by King Abgar the Black (r. a.d. 9-46). They could produce Jesus’ reply promising Edessa freedom from conquest. The correspondence between Abgar and Jesus came to be a popular amulet, inscribed on houses
62
Expansion and Growth
to avert evil. (The earliest known example comes from fifth century Asia Minor; copies may still be found in twentieth- century Britain.) Incorporation within the empire in 216, and the closer links with Antioch which were thereby fostered, brought in time one important change to the Mesopotamian Christians : though they had an early Syriac version of the separate gospels, they normally used the Gospel Harmony or Diatessaron of Tatian. A Greek fragment of this has been found in the Roman fortress at Dura on the Euphrates where also the spade has disclosed the oldest known house-church (below, p. 279). In the fourth or fifth century the Diatessaron was ousted by the Peshitta or standard Syriac version, and its text has now to be reconstructed from later adaptations in Arabic, Persian, Latin, Dutch, Italian, and Middle English.
Third-century legends in the Acts of Thomas (famous for its wonderful poem, 4 The Hymn of the Soul s) 1 give probable evidence of the existence of Christians not only in Persia but even in India, perhaps on the Malabar coast.
The main stream of missionary work flowed westwards and the fact that St Paul’s eye had been towards Italy and Spain was fateful for the future identification of Christianity with European culture. When the Epistle to the Romans was written there was already a substantial church in Rome, and extension into other Italian cities quickly followed. At Pom¬ peii, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, an in¬ scription has been found in the form of the square :
ROTAS
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR
The letters can be rearranged to give paternoster with A and O, and this could conceivably be a Christian crypto¬ gram;2 if this is correct, there were Christians in Pompeii before 79. By 250 there were about 100 episcopal sees in Italy.
1. M. R. James, Apocryphal New Testament , pp. 364-438.
2. Another example probably of a.d. 107 has recently turned up in the Roman governor’s palace at Aquincum (Budapest), once capital of the province of Pannonia.
The geographical extension of the Church 63
In Gaul, Britain and Spain the mission advanced more slowly. Christianity in Gaul seems to have begun with Paul’s disciple Crescens (11 Tim. iv, 10). In the Rhone Valley in the second century there was a growing community of Greek Christians, having close connexions with Asia Minor, cen¬ tred on a bishop at Lyons, and a mission-church under a deacon at nearby Vienne. They suffered grievously in 177 under the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, and not long afterwards were subjected to an infiltration by Gnostic teachers, which provoked the great work of bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, £A Refutation of the knowledge falsely so-called’. Irenaeus preached in Celtic as well as in Greek, so that the evangelization of the native population had begun. By the beginning of the fourth century several bishoprics were established, including Arles, Vaison, Autun, Rouen, Paris, Bordeaux, Trier and Rheims.
How soon Christianity reached Britain is uncertain. Ter- tullian and Origen speak rhetorically of the gospel’s exten¬ sion even to the distant barbarian island of Britain, but probably the Church had little serious foothold until the middle of the third century. At the Council of Arles (314) three British bishops attended from London, York and either Colchester or Lincoln. British bishops also came to the unhappy council of Ariminum (Rimini) in 359 (below, p. 142) ; we are told that three of them were too poor to pay their own travelling expenses, but apparently the rest could afford it. The story of St Alban’s martyrdom at Verula- mium is thickly encrusted with legend, but probably has at least a substratum of truth since his shrine was a place of pilgrimage by the first half of the fifth century.1 In fact under the protection of Constantius, father of Constantine, Britain did not suffer any more than Gaul in the great persecution. Archaeology has disclosed small basilicas which may be churches at Silchester and Caerwent; a certainly Christian chapel in a wealthy villa of the fourth century has turned up at Lullingstone in Kent. By 400, on the eve of the invasions,
1 . Except for St Alban, not a single martyr ascribed to Britain in the sixth-century Latin Kalendar, viz. the so-called Martyrologium Hiero- nymianum, has any original connexion with this country.
64 Expansion and Growth
Roman Britain was a broadly Christian province within the now orthodox Empire, and the faith had penetrated the native population. The earliest surviving British writer was a Christian of this epoch, the monk Pelagius, and he had like- minded friends among the Britons. The gradual Saxon inva¬ sions had already begun when St Patrick began his mission in Ireland (perhaps about 432). The heathen Saxons were much resented by the native Britons who did little or nothing about evangelizing them, and retired into Cornwall, Wales and Ireland. St Patrick complained that his Irish labours were undermined by hostile British clergy and had to write a formal protest to the Christian prince Coroticus (probably Ceretic son of Cunedda, the founder of Cardigan), whose soldiers had carried off his newly baptized converts to be sold as slaves. Not until 597 was the opportunity offered by the Kentish kingdom seized by Pope Gregory the Great, and a beginning was made with the conversion of the Anglo- Saxons (below, p. 256).
Not much evidence survives of the early development of Christianity in Egypt. Papyrus fragments show that in the second century the mission had moved far up the Nile Valley. The character of early Egyptian Christianity appears to have been none too orthodox judged by later standards : surviving fragments of ‘The Gospel according to the Egyp¬ tians’, like many of the apocryphal gospels, tend to the ‘ Encratite ’ view that marriage is incompatible with Christian perfection, but is not otherwise heretical. The story, attested by Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century, that the Alexandrian church was founded by St Mark, the dis¬ ciple of St Peter (cf. 1 Peter v, 13) may echo the establishment of orthodoxy by a mission from Rome about the middle of the second century, at the time when the Roman church was engaged in a life and death struggle with Marcionites and Valentinians. A papyrus find proves that Irenaeus’ refutation of Gnosticism was being read at Oxyrhynchus within a very few years of its publication, which suggests much concern in Egypt for the maintenance of orthodoxy. Not until Clement of Alexandria and Origen is the character of Alexandrian Christianity clear to see.
The geographical extension of the Church 65
In Roman Africa, i.e. the coastal strip looking culturally and economically north, towards Europe, with a natural capital at the old Phoenician trading city of Carthage, the first evidence of Christianity comes from the Latin Acts of the Martyrs of Scillium in Numidia in the year 180. The origins of the mission must go back much earlier. By 200 Tertullian witnesses not only to the vigour of the Church in Carthage and Africa Proconsularis (North Tunisia) but to the existence of churches far afield in the provinces of Byza- cena (South Tunisia), Numidia, and Mauretania (Algeria). And in Tertullian’s time the Christian population was very numerous. Hesterni sumus et vestra omnia implevimus: ‘We are but of yesterday and we have filled all you have - cities, islands, forts, towns, assembly halls, even military camps, tribes, town councils, the palace, senate and forum. We have left you nothing but the temples’.1 The origins of the first missionaries are unknown. Tertullian looked to Rome as a nearby see of apostolic foundation with which African Christianity had close connexions. But Carthage had much trade with the Levant, and the first missionaries may well have come from there. In 200 there were many African Christians whose first language was Greek, and there were differences of custom between the Greek and the Latin brethren. It was perhaps African missionaries who made the first translations of the Bible into Latin, using vulgar and colloquial usages, and probably making their versions not all at one time or in one place but piecemeal as occasion arose. The many individual efforts were united and became the first Latin Bible, and by 400 it was so firmly established as the Authorized Version that Jerome’s Revised Version (the so-called Vulgate) aroused deep opposition.
Apart from St Paul’s proposed journey the first evidence of churches in Spain comes from allusions in Irenaeus and Tertullian. Cyprian mentions churches at the chief cities of Le6n, Astorga, Merida and Saragossa. Early in the fourth century a vivid picture of the by then vast extension of the Church and of its contemporary problems of moral laxity is provided by the canons of the Council of Elvira. A leader at 1. Tertullian, Apol. 37.
66
Expansion and Growth
this Council, Ossius or Hosius of Cordova, became Constan¬ tine’s ecclesiastical adviser.
The Christians themselves wondered at the speed and ex¬ tent of Church expansion before Constantine. It is hardly surprising that the Church felt itself to be riding on the crest of a wave, and faced the world with that confidence which is a marked feature of the early apologists.
THE DEFENCE OF THE FAITH
It inhered in the nature of the church’s existence that from the start it was engaged in debate with critics, and that the formulation of its doctrines was hammered out in an intellec¬ tual dialogue, both within the church itself and also with those outside it. Its first critics were orthodox Jews, and for a surprisingly long period the discussion between church and synagogue occupied the attention of Christian thinkers. It is no accident that the most substantial extant work by a second century Christian is the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew , written by Justin Martyr about 160. This is the longest ex¬ ample of an extensive genre of literature, principally con¬ cerned with the Christian claim to be the universal religion to which the Old Testament prophets had looked forward, and dominated by detailed arguments from particular prophetic texts. Naturally enough, the orthodox Jews re¬ sented the church’s assumption of its continuity with the past history of the elect people of God, and rejected as sophi¬ stry the allegorical interpretations (such as those provided in the Epistle of Barnabas) of the Mosaic laws enjoining the observance of circumcision, sabbaths, sacrifices, and food laws. To the orthodox Jews, the Christians were dangerous trimmers, adjusting the unalterable religion revealed to Moses to make it more palatable to Gentile prejudices. In Christian eyes the intense particularity of Judaism was in¬ compatible with its own monotheistic principles: was not their God the God of the Gentiles also? (cf. Rom. iii, 29-30). The Christians regarded the ceremonial legislation of the Mosaic law as a special discipline temporarily imposed for good reasons but not intended to be taken as God’s first or
The defence of the Faith 67
last word; they liked to look back to the patriarchs before Moses who had no Law to keep other than the moral impera¬ tive of the inward conscience, and argued that Moses was compelled to impose the particular ceremonies of Leviticus because the Jews were showing a tendency to become merged with the heathen Canaanites and needed a strict system to keep them separate and distinct. This need was now past. In the Sermon on the Mount Justin Martyr saw an ethic of universal validity, continuous with the highest aspirations of Judaism, but freed of the shackles of ceremonial rules peculiar to one race among the hundreds of God’s creation.
The Christian attitude was the more disturbing for their insistence that, under the new covenant inaugurated by Jesus the Messiah, a blood relationship to Abraham was of no importance. The orthodox synagogue tended to regard all Jews as possessed of faith at least in germ, simply in virtue of membership of the chosen people, though it could freely concede that there were many Jews who did not make their faith effective in practice. For the Christians, on the other hand, the distinction between belief and unbelief was sharper and more absolute, and assent required a more profound decision of allegiance. Although initiation into the church by baptism was an intensely corporate and social act in rela¬ tion to the Christian community, the act of faith was under¬ stood in a more individualistic way than in Judaism. The gospel of Christ divided families and disturbed traditional patterns of social behaviour. It is not surprising that in some cases the impact of Christianity was to produce emotional excitement and antinomianism, as in the case of the ‘Nico- laitans’ denounced in the Apocalypse of John; and mis¬ understood Pauline language about freedom from the law and the inheritance of the sons of the kingdom might easily make things worse. It was in answer to such dangers of anarchy that a strongly moralistic emphasis appeared in Christian writings of the second century, which it is all too easy to disparage as a falling off from the first vigour of the apostolic age. Round about a.d. ioo it must have seemed that new converts of Gentile origin needed no kind of instruction
68 Expansion and Growth
so urgently as clear moral rules and exhortations to good works.
In spite of the fact that the Christians criticized Judaism for its particularity and exclusiveness, they themselves could not have seemed so much less exclusive to pagan observers. They inherited the Jewish reserve towards the pagan gods and the cult of the emperor. Most of them felt unable in conscience to eat meat that had been offered in sacrifice to idols and then sold in the market. They were withdrawn from society, meeting apart, often in secret, and did not attend public shows and gladiatorial combats provided for the entertainment of the populace. Yet they drew recruits from all groups and classes in imperial society. In pagan eyes eccentric behaviour on religious grounds could be tolerated in the empire provided that it was not morally corrupting or politically dangerous, and provided that the religion was that of a racial group, in which case it could be powerfully defended as an honourable following of ancestral tradition. But in the second century Christianity was widely suspected of secret vice, was normally reserved towards military service in the Roman army, and was conspicuous for its disrespect towards any religious attitudes that could only be defended as ancestral practice. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, the anti-Christian pamphleteer Celsus put the matter succinctly. He cordially disliked and despised the Jews, but declared himself in principle tolerant of their strange religious customs: ‘The religion of the Jews may be highly peculiar, but it is at least the custom of their fathers. * The Christians, on the other hand, followed no ancestral tradition, not even that of the Jews whence they had sprung, and were being dangerously successful in encouraging people all over the empire to abandon the old polytheism which was built into the fabric of society by centuries of usage. Although Celsus upheld the polytheistic tradition, he had an uneasy conscience about it and had clearly been touched by the sceptical arguments of the philosophers. But philosophical scepticism tended to reinforce social and religious conservatism. A sceptic like Cicero explicidy held that, since it is impossible to be certain of anything,
The defence of the Faith 69
one ought strictly to continue the age-old traditions and religious customs of antiquity. To abandon them would mean that one had confidence in one’s reasons for doing so and in the superiority of alternative policies. Gelsus was similarly conservative about tradition and rejected the Christians because they had the wrong prejudices.
It was possible for the Jews to gain greater tolerance than the Christians partly because they were more opposed to any public disparagement of pagan cults. Both Philo and Josephus held that, while the God of the Bible was the only true God, it was wrong to insult the religious feelings of others, and they enjoined courtesy upon their fellow Jews. They were content to ask the imperial government for as much toleration as it accorded to other national religions, but were more inter¬ ested in the defence of Judaism and its liberty of worship than in any active mission to convert pagans and to make them proselytes. For the Christians, by contrast, the raison d’etre of the church consisted in its reconciling role for all mankind, including Jew and Gentile alike, religious and even irreligious alike. Like Philo, St Paul disapproved of insulting pagan temples, but he took the lowest view of poly¬ theistic religion. The paradox of the church was that it was a religious revolutionary movement, yet without a conscious political ideology; it aimed at the capture of society through¬ out all its strata, but was at the same time characteristic for its indifference to the possession of power in this world. Celsus was the first known person to realize that this non-political, quietist, and pacifist community had it in its power to trans¬ form the social and political order of the empire. He con¬ sciously tried to provide the polytheistic tradition with a coherent set of philosophical and theological principles by which it might withstand the Christian onslaught. It is sig¬ nificant that he could only do this by making large con¬ cessions to his Christian opponents and by turning many of the Christian apologists’ arguments to his own use. The future lay with the programme first announced by Justin Martyr, by which the Church would make common cause with Platonic metaphysics and Stoic ethics, while rejecting pagan myth and cult as a demonic, superstitious, counterfeit
70 Expansion and Growth
religion propagated by evil powers and maintained by pre¬ judice and erroneous information about the nature of the Church.
When pressed for evidence of the supernatural origin of Christianity, the second century Church sought an answer principally in the fulfilment by Jesus of Old Testament prophecy and in the visible evidence of the universal diffusion of the faith. Sometimes they also appealed, but with less frequency, to the gospel records of the miracles of J esus as evidence of divine power ; but this argument played a very subordinate role even in popular apologetic. Justin Martyr regarded the fulfilment of ancient prophecy as the most cogent argument known to him. He found there plenty of attacks on merely external legalism : God desired mercy, not sacrifice, and was displeased at the ceremonies of Judaism. He also found plenty of promises of a great restoration with a new covenant and the advent of the Messiah. The Old Testament itself could therefore be taken to supply evidence both for the rejection of Judaism as a permanently ordained system and for the universal extension of the Church which, according to Justin, would occupy the interim between the ascension of Christ and the final consummation towards which the world was moving under providence. Much of the earliest Christian theology consisted in the interpretation of Old Testament prophecy as foreshadowing the gospel, and Justin and his contemporaries found £ types’ or prefigurations of Christ’s redemption in the Exodus from Egypt, in Joshua crossing the Jordan to enter the promised land, in Noah the symbolic figure of a renewed humanity, in the out¬ stretched hands of Moses which made possible the defeat of the Amalekites, and in many others. The importance of this tradition of Old Testament interpretation may be gauged from the fact that for many centuries the exposition of prophecy continued to form the prime content of the instruction given to catechumens when they were taught about the person of Christ. The second century Church knew that their crucified Lord had conquered the powers of evil; but if they were asked to explain how this was so, they quoted prophecies of the passion, especially the
The defence of the Faith 71
suffering servant of Isaiah 53, or the Psalm of dereliction, Ps. 22.
The appeal to the fact of the universal diffusion of the faith within a relatively short time was not quite the simple argument from success that it could be taken to be. It implied a claim that the truth of the gospel was verified in moral ex¬ perience, attested in the conviction of the apostles and the integrity of the martyrs. If the Resurrection had been a fiction, the argument ran, the apostles would not have risked their lives for it. The faith of a handful of ill-educated fisher¬ men had spread with astonishing rapidity to reach from India to Mauretania, from the Caspian to the utterly bar¬ barous tribes of Britain. The agents of this diffusion had not been great orators or subtle reasoners, and they had had to meet the opposition of prejudiced and angry mobs and of a hostile government. Nevertheless, the churches had expan¬ ded with extraordinary and embarrassing speed. When Con¬ stantine was converted early in the fourth century, it seemed like the fulfilment of a dream, and to the contemporary his¬ torian Eusebius of Caesarea ( c . 262-339) the emperor’s faith was an essential step in the diffusion of the gospel throughout the empire, from which it would spread in time to the bar¬ barians beyond. In the first half of the third century there were some who believed that the extension of the Church to become coterminous with the human race was the inward symbolic meaning of the primitive c mythological ’ hope of a second coming of Christ. In the view of Melito, bishop of Sardis (about a.d. 160-70), Augustus’ establishment of peace was a providential part of the divine preparation for the gospel. The destinies of the Church and Empire were somehow bound up in the mysterious purposes of God. Justin Martyr thought that the Roman armies which de¬ stroyed Jerusalem in a.d. 70 were the instruments of judge¬ ment on a nation that had rejected the Messiah and failed to discern the new dispensation, now inaugurated, in which the temple sacrifices were abrogated. Likewise Eusebius of Caesarea saw the conversion of Constantine as a divine act, establishing Christianity in the citadel of governmental de¬ cision as a means to its further extension.
72 Expansion and Growth
Nevertheless, the Christian mission was not directed merely at centres of power. It was consciously aimed at the common people, and the ideals of simplicity and humility were never far from the minds of those who had to propagate their faith. The missionaries took it for granted that the gospel corres¬ ponded exactly to the needs of mortal man, and that they must communicate with ordinary people in direct colloquial language. They wrote hymns and songs for the illiterate to sing, and, in a world that was acutely conscious of rank and class, the separate strata of which were distinguished not only by manner and speech but also by forms of address and clothes, the Christians deliberately set out to treat the poor with dignity and without condescension.
There is no reason to think that the early Christian move¬ ment was ever a political revolution manqut , or that the history of the Church can be told in terms of bourgeois leaders taking over a proletarian uprising and diverting it into innocuous other-worldly mysticism. Such theories can only be maintained by violent and selective use of evidence. But it is certainly true that this essentially religious move¬ ment had deep social and political potentialities, many of which were not fully realized in the Roman imperial period. The old gods of polytheism were essentially local deities venerated by the people of a particular region. Even after the cults of Isis and the Oriental mystery religions had spread from their original homes, there was curiously little sense of universality about their worship. During the second century pagans interpreted these local gods as analogous to prov¬ incial governors, administering the world for the supreme power who is too transcendent to be troubled about details of government; and something like monotheism became general among the educated. In the third century this striving after monotheism became attached to the worship of the sun. It is possible, therefore, to speculate that Chris¬ tianity achieved its success in the empire in part because it answered best to the empire’s need for a universal religion with which it could identify itself. There are Christian writers of the fourth century who assume without discussion that ‘ Roman ’ and c Christian ’ are almost synonymous terms.
The defence of the Faith 73
But in fact the synthesis of Roman imperialism and Chris¬ tianity broke down, partly because the Christians were aware that their gospel had to be carried to the hostile barbarians as well, and partly because of a reassertion of the old tradi¬ tion of a certain detachment and even indifference to the political structure of this transitory world.
4
Justin and Irenaeus
JUSTIN MARTYR
The Gnostic heretics had appealed to the principles of Platonism to provide a philosophical justification for their doctrine that the elect soul must be liberated from the evil inherent in the material realm to escape to its true home and to enjoy the beatific vision. Their deep pessimism about this created order was not quite fairly deduced from the text of Plato, but there was a sufficient plausibility about the argu¬ ment to make it look impressive. The Gnostic appeal to pagan philosophy did not tend to encourage the study of philos¬ ophy among those who feared Gnosticism as a corrupter of the truth. Philosophy came to seem like the mother of heresy. To Irenaeus of Lyons Gnosticism was a ragbag of heathen speculations with bits taken from different phil¬ osophers to dress out a bogus, anti-rational mythology. His successor as an anti-heretical writer, Hippolytus, whose mind was a curious mixture of scholarship and foolishness, wrote a lengthy refutation of the sects based on the pre¬ supposition that each sect had corrupted the authentic gospel by principles drawn from a pagan philosopher; he incidentally preserved thereby many fragments of classical philosophers like Heraclitus which would otherwise have been lost. Tertullian scornfully mocked those who ‘advocate a Stoic or a Platonic or an Aristotelian Christianity5. It was a Gnostic thesis that faith needs supplementation by philo- \/ sophical inquiries. ‘What has Athens in common with Jeru¬ salem ? 5
But in the middle of the second century the atmosphere was very different. Justin Martyr was born early in the second century in Samaritan territory of Greek parentage,
Justin Martyr 75
and as a young man went to Ephesus to study philosophy. He described his quest, in a form which owes something to literary embellishment but may well have a substratum of truth, in his Dialogue with Trypho . He began with a Stoic tutor - still at this period the most popular philosophy - but passed on to an Aristotelian teacher, who disillusioned him by an unphilosophical anxiety about his fee; he then went to a Pythagorean, and finally to a Platonist with whom he was well content, principally because of the religious and mystical side of Platonic aspirations. Plato had written in ecstatic language of the soul’s vision of God. But while meditating in solitude on the seashore Justin met an old man who refuted the Platonic doctrine of the soul, and pro¬ ceeded to tell him about the prophets of the Old Testament who foretold the coming of Christ. Justin was converted, but did not understand this to mean the abandonment of his philosophical inquiries, nor even the renunciation of all that he had learnt from Platonism. He regarded Christianity as ‘the true philosophy’, and accordingly began to wear the recognized costume of a teacher of philosophy (which in this age had something of both the authority and the power to repel which in the modern West has come to be associated with the clerical collar).1 Justin moved from Ephesus to Rome where soon after the year 15 1 he addressed an Apology for Christianity to the emperor Antoninus Pius. Some years later he reissued this work together with a supple¬ ment, commonly called hi s Second Apology, at a critical moment in the fortunes of the Church in Rome when it had been harried by the city prefect, Lollius Urbicus. The Dialogue with Trypho the Jew was written after the first Apology , prob¬ ably about 1 60, but is presented as an account of a discussion which Justin had with Trypho about 135.
Justin vigorously rejected pagan myth and cult as gross superstition infected by evil, but gave the most positive welcome possible to the classical philosophical tradition. The transcendent God of Plato, beyond mortal comprehension, is the God of the Bible. Socrates rightly perceived how corrupt the old religion was, and in consequence was hounded to 1. Christian clergy at this period wore no distinctive dress.
76 Justin and Irenaeus
death by the Athenians - a model of integrity for Christian martyrs. Much else in the Platonic tradition is warmly accep¬ ted by Justin: Plato rightly taught that the soul has a special kinship to God, that man is responsible for his actions, and that in the world to come there is judgement and justice. Justin thinks Plato made some mistakes, e.g. in holding that the soul possesses a natural and inherent immortality in its own right rather than in dependence on the Creator’s will, and in accepting the deterministic myth of transmigration. But in Justin’s eyes it is remarkable how much Plato got right : he at least knew that it is very hard to find God without special help, and probably had to exercise reserve in de¬ claring all that he had perceived, on account of the deep prejudices of the polytheistic society in which he lived. How Plato had achieved these profound insights Justin explains on two hypotheses. The first hypothesis was already a con¬ ventional apologetic theme in the Greek synagogue, namely, that Plato and the Greek sages had had before them the mysterious allegories of the Pentateuch, which provided them with obscure hints of the truth. The second hypothesis was a development of a Pauline theme, namely, the value and validity of the universal moral conscience, quite inde¬ pendent of any special revelation, (cf. Rom. i-ii.) Where St Paul had argued that all men are responsible and ultima¬ tely inexcusable, Justin argues that the light that all men have is implanted by the divine Reason, the Logos of God who was incarnate in Jesus and who is universally active and present in the highest goodness and intelligence wherever they may be found. Justin strikingly interprets in this sense the parable of the Sower. The divine Sower sowed his good seed throughout his creation. Justin does not make rigid and exclusive claims for divine revelation to the Hebrews so as to invalidate the value of other sources of wisdom. Abraham and Socrates are alike ‘Christians before Christ’. But just as the aspirations of the Old Testament prophets found their fulfilment in Christ, so also the correct insights achieved by the Greek philosophers reached their completion in the gospel of Christ who embodies the highest moral ideal. Christ is for Justin the principle of unity and the criterion by which we
Justin Martyr 77
may judge the truth, scattered like divided seeds among the different schools of philosophy in so far as they have dealt with religion and morals.
Justin’s debt to Platonic philosophy is important for his theology in one respect of far-reaching importance. He uses the concept of the divine Logos or Reason both to explain how the transcendent Father of all deals with the inferior, created order of things, and to justify his faith in the revela¬ tion made by God through the prophets and in Christ. The divine Logos inspired the prophets, he says, and was present entire in Jesus Christ. This inspiring activity and its culmina¬ tion in the actual incarnation are special cases of divine immanence. It is implicit in Justin’s thesis that the distinc¬ tion between 4 Father’ and ‘Son’ corresponds to the distinc¬ tion between God transcendent and God immanent. The Son-Logos is necessary to mediate between the supreme Father and the material world. Justin therefore insists that the Logos is 4 other than’ the Father, derived from the Father in a process which in no way diminishes or divides the being of the Father, but in the manner in which one torch may be lit from another. He is Light of Light.
Justin was well aware of the existence of Gnostic heresies, and wrote a (lost) treatise refuting them. He believed in the free will of man, and was therefore critical of the Gnostic doctrine that salvation depends on a predestination which is in¬ different to moral virtue ; and his confidence in the power of the argument from fulfilled prophecy set him in radical opposition to Marcion’s disparagement of the Old Testa¬ ment. In criticizing the Gnostic devaluation of the natural and material order Justin stressed that the creation is the work of the supreme God, acting through the Logos as mediator ; that in the incarnation the Logos assumed a com¬ plete manhood, body, soul, and mind, and Christ ‘truly suffered’ in his passion; above all, that the destiny of man hereafter is not a deliverance of an immortal soul from the bondage of the physical frame, but is ‘resurrection’, which Justin interpreted in the most literal way. Accepting the Apocalypse of John as authoritative and inspired, Justin understood the Christian hope to mean the expectation that
78 Justin and Irenaeus
Christ would return to a rebuilt Jerusalem to reign with his saints for a thousand years.1
St Paul’s pregnant phrase that Christ came ‘in the fullness of time’ has come to bear a theological interpretation of history. Justin was the first writer to think of the annals of humanity as a twofold story of sacred and profane history, with a nodal point in the coming of Christ. The principle, basic to Justin’s attitude, that the Creator has implanted seeds of truth in many places, not only in the inspired proph¬ etic writings, was taken further by later Christian writers. Justin himself mentioned prophecies of the end of the world to be found in the Sibylline Oracles and in an Apocalypse composed by hellenized Zoroastrians in the name of King Plystaspes of the Avesta. Likewise Lactantius early in the fourth century had the same Hystaspes Apocalypse before him, and found valuable testimonies to Christian truth in the Sibylline Oracles, large collections of which had been composed by Jewish versifiers and then adapted to Christian use. The thirteenth-century author of the Dies Irae , to whom King David and the Sibyl were alike prophets of the final cosmic catastrophe, was taking up a theme of great antiquity in Christian history. In the Latin world Dante and the medieval church were following a lead given by Constantine the Great himself when they interpreted as a prophecy of Christ the Sibylline oracle contained in the fourth Eclogue of Virgil. The theorists of inspiration might disagree among themselves whether these £ profane ’ prophets were inspired against their will, like Balaam, or without knowing what they
1 . Millenarian belief originated in a fusion of various strands. Baby¬ lonian astrology contributed the notion of millennial periods under the seven planets. Psalm 89.4 (‘A day with the Lord is as a thousand years’) provided a key for the interpretation of the seven days of crea¬ tion in Gen. i; and the Epistle to the Hebrews (iv, 4-9) interpreted the sabbath as a symbol of heavenly rest. By putting these elements together it was natural to form the notion, found in Irenaeus and Hippolytus, that world history will last 6,000 years leading up to a seventh millen¬ nium under the reign of Christ. After Clement of Alexandria and Origen, for whom it was a fundamental error to treat the Apocalypse as providing any basis for chronological calculations, very few Greek Fathers accepted the literal millennial hope, but it survived longer in the West.
Justin Martyr 79
were doing, like Caiaphas. But it was enough for the purposes of argument to find in these oracles a valuable testimony to divine truth. Soon similar witnesses to the majesty of Christ were found in writings claiming to be revelations of ‘Thrice- greatest Hermes’, or in oracles of Apollo himself. The manu¬ facture of such oracular testimonies went on among both opponents and defenders of Christianity. In the third century pagan opponents of Christianity circulated an oracle in which Hecate vouched for the holiness of Christ while deploring the folly of those who worshipped him. Eusebius of Caesarea was glad to find in Plutarch the story that some travellers making a voyage in the time of the emperor Tiber¬ ius (and therefore contemporaneous with the time of Christ’s birth) had heard a great voice crying ‘Great Pan is dead’. By his coming Christ rid the world of evil spirits. But it was long before simple Christians ceased to look for oracles as a source of predictions of the mysterious future. Even Augustine did not deny that the demons had some power to foresee the future, though this predictive power was not (he thought) more supernatural in principle than a physician’s prognosis or a weather forecast.
Justin Martyr occupies a central position in the history of Christian thought of the second century. His generous and optimistic approach to the Greek philosophical tradition was taken up by others. His pupil Tatian from Mesopotamia admittedly gave Justin’s theses a violently anti-hellenic and polemical edge that would have distressed Justin. But Justin’s liberal and eirenic spirit reappeared in a Plea for the Christians by one Athenagoras of Athens who addressed his work to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus about 1 77, and especially in Clement of Alexandria. Justin’s more strictly theological achievements exercised an influence upon Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, who wrote a rambling defence of Christianity addressed to a certain Autolycus about 1 80. Justin also moulded the thinking of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons.
8o
Justin and Irenaeus
IRENAEUS
With Irenaeus the shape of Christian theology became stable and coherent. Apart from fragments two complete works from his pen have been preserved, though neither survives in his original Greek: a short Presentation of the apostolic preaching , written to provide a manual of doctrinal essen¬ tials for a friend, and five books of Refutation and over¬ throw of the knowledge falsely so called which, even after the numerous recent discoveries of Gnostic documents, re¬ main an essential and remarkably fairminded source for the history of the second century sects. Irenaeus directed his \/ polemic principally against Marcion and Valentinus. His anti-Marcionite argument followed the lines laid down by Justin and by other unnamed writers in Asia Minor of the middle years of the second century from whose works Irenaeus gives important quotations. He rested his case on the manifest unity of Old and New Testaments apparent in the fulfilment of ancient prophecy, and especially stressed the parallelism between Adam and Christ which he found in St Paul. The divine plan for the new covenant was a ‘recapitulation5 of the original creation. In Christ the divine Word assumed a humanity such as Adam possessed before he fell. Adam was made in the image and likeness of God. By sin the likeness became lost, though the image has remained untouched. By faith in Christ man may recover the lost likeness. Because Irenaeus regarded salvation as a restora¬ tion of the condition prevailing in paradise before the Fall, it was easy for him to accept Justin’s terrestrial hopes for the millennium. Because he believed that in the Fall only the mor^yikeness to God was lost, not the basic image, he was able to regard the Fall in a way very different from the deep pessimism of the Gnostics. Error came in, he thought, because mankind is growing to maturity, and in the infancy of the race it was natural that mistakes were made by the frail and immature children who were Adam and Eve. God allowed man to fall to quench his pride and to teach him by discipline and experience. So the history of salvation is a progressive education, in which God has gradually brought man forward
Irenaeus
81
step by step in a long process culminating in the incarnation of the divine Word with a universal gospel diffused through¬ out the world by the church. Irenaeus’ scheme does not begin with the Gnostic question : how a world which is the perfect work of a perfect creator can have gone wrong as the present world obviously has. He grants from the start that there is imperfection in the world, but it is like the blun¬ ders made by a growing child, and the purpose of our exist¬ ence is the making of character by the mastery of difficulties and temptations.
By the manner in which he presents revelation as a gradual process Irenaeus was able to turn the edge of the Marcionite arguments against the moral difficulties of the Old Testa¬ ment. But the followers of Valentinus raised other difficulties for him. Irenaeus’ treatment of the Valentinian theology was the most original and independent part of his work. He had taken the trouble to make himself acquainted with the actual tenets of the sect, and saw clearly that the basic question was that of authority. The Valentinians claimed to be able to supplement the writings of the apostles with secret un¬ written traditions and with several additional gospels beside the familiar four of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Ire¬ naeus realized that Marcion was right in one thing - that it was necessary to have a canon or fixed list of authoritative writings of the New Testament. Hitherto the dividing line between books accorded the status of being read in the church lectionary and books that were of approved orthodoxy had not been decisively drawn. Irenaeus drew the line, and is the first writer whose New Testament virtually corresponds to the canon that became accepted as traditional.1 What was original in Irenaeus was not the acceptance of four gospels or of the Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse, but rather the pro¬ vision of reasoned statements for accepting these books and not others. The Valentinian appeal to unwritten tradition Irenaeus answered by appealing to the churches of apostolic foundation. If the apostles really had taught the strange fan¬ tasies of the Valentinian myths, would they not have told the authoritative teachers to whom they entrusted the churches x. Irenaeus never quotes from 3 John, James or 2 Peter.
82
Justin and Irenaeus
they founded ? Would not these teachers have passed on these doctrines to their successors in the episcopal chairs at these places ? Irenaeus explains that he could vindicate orthodoxy by appealing to the succession of teachers in any church of apostolic foundation. He proceeds to quote as an especially good example the list for Rome which could look back to the glorious martyrs Peter and Paul. Since the authentic faith is identical throughout the world, no church disagrees with any other, and diversity of doctrine is inconceivable; never¬ theless, because of its great name the Roman succession pro¬ vides a striking example, and we are assured that the faithful throughout the world will necessarily be in agreement with what is taught there. Accordingly, Irenaeus feels himself justified in citing the list of only one apostolic foundation, and in omitting Ephesus, Corinth, and the rest, though they would prove his point equally well.
Irenaeus perceived that the coherence of Christian doc¬ trine depended upon the tradition of faithful instruction, and that the Gnostic heresies could only be successfully opposed if the scattered statements of scripture were drawn together within a system. But originality was the last thing to be ex¬ pected of a theologian, he urged. It was essential to keep to the path laid down by authority in scripture and in the clear tradition of the apostolic churches which was the best guaran¬ tee of resistance to innovation and dangerous speculation. Heresy was born of the itch for something new. It came of ‘curiosity5, which meant prying into matters which the human mind had neither capacity to know nor authority V even to think about. Irenaeus loved to contrast the unchang¬ ing monolithic Church of orthodoxy, semper eadem , standing on the rock of apostolic foundation, with the fissiparous sects, continually changing their systems, at loggerheads with one another, and possessing a clearly traceable history and de¬ velopment back to the first heretic of all, Simon Magus whom St Peter had resisted both at Samaria (Acts viii, 9-24) and, as traditions recorded, at Rome also. Irenaeus5 work set out to provide a history of the variations of Gnostic heresy, and to compare them with the one true Church, immutable in time and space, guaranteed in its authenticity by its ability
Irenaeus
83
to trace its succession of authoritative teachers to its founding apostles, and by the unanimous consent of believers through¬ out the world.
Irenaeus exercised wide influence on the immediately following generation. Both Hippolytus, the learned pres¬ byter of Rome, and Tertullian of Carthage freely drew on his writings ; and the interest he aroused may be deduced both from the fragments preserved on papyrus and from the fact that his work was translated into Latin during the third or fourth century and then into Armenian in the sixth. But his too literal hope of an earthly millennium made him uncon¬ genial reading in the Greek East (except to Epiphanius of Salamis who transcribed parts of Irenaeus for his vast refu¬ tation of the heresies in 374-5), and it is only in the Latin translation that his work as a whole has been preserved. Even there one line of the manuscript tradition lacks the final chapters of the fifth book, in which Irenaeus attacked those who wanted to interpret the millennial hope as sym¬ bolic of heaven rather than as an earthly reality.
5
Easter , the Monarchian Controversy , and Tertullian
EASTER
Irenaeus had written of the universal Church in idealistic and almost romantic terms, as if it were a body character¬ ized by complete unanimity and possessing a single mind on all subjects. It would not have been to his purpose to analyse and describe the differences in custom and attitude and in theological expression which were to be discerned. It caused him great pain when the churches of Asia Minor, whence he himself had come, became passionately divided about the status of the Montanist prophecy. Moreover, the churches of Asia Minor had preserved the most ancient of all methods of determining the date of Easter : they simply kept it at the same time as the Jewish passover, on the fourteenth day of the J ewish month Nisan whenever that might fall . When Easter was introduced at Rome ( c . 1 60) the feast, as at Alexandria, was celebrated on the Sunday following the Jewish passover, which for practical purposes could be reckoned as the Sunday next after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Ire¬ naeus was shocked when, about 190, bishop Victor of Rome proceeded to make a demand for uniformity in the obser¬ vance of Easter which the churches of Asia Minor regarded as autocratic and offensive. Victor apparently believed that the Roman custom must have been inherited from the in¬ structions of Peter and Paul, and declared that those who observed the feast on any different day could not be regarded as Catholic Christians. Irenaeus recalled how some thirty- five years earlier Polycarp of Smyrna had travelled to Rome to discuss some divergences of custom with bishop Anicetus : at that time Rome did not keep Easter annually, but
The Monarchian Controversy 85
neither regarded the divergence as a ground for breach of communion, and they parted in amicable disagreement. Despite the scandal which it caused to Irenaeus, Victor’s drastic action was not thunder out of a clear sky. There had been sharp controversy in Asia Minor about 1 70 on the related question whether the Last Supper was the Passover meal. Bishop Melito of Sardis vigorously defended the ancient conservative custom of keeping Easter on ‘ the fourteenth day ’ with the Jews. From an Easter sermon by Melito, the full text of which has lately been recovered from three early papyrus codices,1 it is painfully evident that those who cele¬ brated Easter on the same day as the Jewish passover were not motivated by special friendliness towards Judaism (though perhaps it was the sharp charge of ‘Judaising’ which led Melito to over-compensate in his oratorical and at times gruesome description of the Jews’ sad spiritual con¬ dition). Victor of Rome’s intervention turned out to be successful in the sense that his view was eventually to prevail. But it was a long time before those who kept Easter on the fourteenth day (nicknamed Quartodecimans) died out. The group still existed in the ninth century despite the vigour with which church councils deplored them. It was impossible in so weighty a practical question for diversity to be allowed, but there can be little doubt that the Quartodecimans were right in thinking that they had preserved the most ancient and apostolic custom. They had become heretics simply by being behind the times.
THE MONARCHIAN CONTROVERSY
Another controversy broke out at Rome during the episco¬ pate of Victor, but Irenaeus took no part in it and may have died before its repercussions came to the notice of the churches in the Rhone valley. This was the so-called ‘Monarchian controversy’, which originated in a revolt against the Logos theology of Justin and the apologists. Justin had boldly spoken of the divine Logos as ‘another God’ beside the
This sermon became so popular that later it was translated into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and Georgian.
86 Easter , the Monarchian Controversy , and Tertullian
Father, qualified by the gloss ‘other, I mean, in number, not in will*. In arguing against hellenized Jews who held that the divine Logos is distinct from God only in the refined sense in which one can distinguish in thought between sun and sunlight, Justin had urged that the analogy of one torch lit from another was a much more satisfactory picture be¬ cause it did justice to the independence (later theology, from Origen onwards, would have used the technical term hypostasis ) of the Logos. Such language was disturbing. One of the central issues in the conflict with Gnosticism had been the question whether there is more than one ultimate first principle. The orthodox had insisted that there is no first principle other than God the Creator, no coequal devil, no coeternal matter, but a single monarchia . Justin’s language appeared to prejudice this affirmation and to be insufficiently protected against the accusation of ditheism. Theophilus of Antioch, whose language had been gratefully borrowed by Irenaeus, spoke more cautiously of God’s Reason and Wisdom as like two hands put forth for the work of creation. Theophilus was the first to use the term Triad in relation to God, but it is clear from his analogy of the hands that this plurality is secondary to a more ultimate unity. In Irenaeus the Son and the Spirit have successive missions in the divine plan of redemption, and it is in the working out of this plan that the Triad is revealed.
The Monarchian critics of the Logos theology had two courses open to them. Either they could say that God who created the world was so incarnate in Jesus that there is no difference to be discerned between the ‘ Son ’ and the ‘ Father ’ (unless ‘ Son ’ is a name for the physical body or humanity of Christ and ‘Father’ a name for the divine Spirit within); or they could say that Jesus was a man like other men, differ¬ entiated in being indwelt by the Spirit of God to an absolute and unique degree. The latter view might claim a wide basis of support in the synoptic gospels, but had to meet serious objections that had already been stated by Justin Martyr. Justin insisted that Christ was not a mere man but was also God ; at his birth he had been worshipped by the Magi, and there could be no question of a holy life being rewarded
The Monarchian Controversy 87
by elevation to divine rank. The gospel story how the Lord ‘grew in wisdom5 was understood by Justin to mean that his knowledge was always appropriate to the stage of growth reached. He was baptized, not because he needed to be, but for our sakes. He was truly born of the Virgin Mary, and his virgin birth is differentiated from all pagan analogies by the absence of any divine paternity.
The force of these arguments advanced by Justin was bound to become overwhelming as St John’s gospel estab¬ lished its authority throughout the Church in the second half of the second century. But the field was still open for the former alternative according to which the Father and the Son are one and the same, the distinction being merely one of nomenclature to describe different aspects of the same personal being. This was the view propagated early in the third century at Rome by a certain Sabellius, of whose bio¬ graphy and thought so little is actually known that it is paradoxical to find the name of this obscure figure as a constant label attached to this type of theology, at least in the Greek East. In the West the polemical label for it was usually ‘Patripassianism’, i.e. the doctrine that the Father suffers. In modern books the same doctrine is often entitled Modalism, because according to this view Father, Son, and Spirit are modes of the same being, perhaps temporary and successive roles adopted for the purpose of the divine plan of redemption, but in no way corresponding to anything in the ultimate nature of the Godhead, since the three tides are purely adjectival.
At Rome the controversy became heated under Victor’s successor Zephyrinus (198-217). Sabellius represented one extreme in the Roman community. The opposite extreme was defended by Hippolytus, for whom it was essential to say that the Father and the Logos are two distinct c persons’ or prosopa. (Hippolytus applied the title c Son’ only to the in¬ carnate, not to the pre-existent Lord.) Between them, as a man of the middle way, stood a deacon named Callistus, who, if Hippolytus is to be believed, had been in youth a slave to a wealthy Christian in the imperial household, for whom he had administered a bank that attracted large deposits from
88 Easter , the Monarchian Controversy , and Tertullian
members of the church. But the young Callistus found him¬ self in financial embarrassment and was held responsible for embezzlement by his master. By the intercession of members of the church he was released by his master from humiliating punishment, and gained credit by a stupid prank in the Jewish synagogue for which he was arraigned before the city prefect and sent to the mines of Sardinia. Together with other confessors he was released at the time when Marcia, the emperor Commodus5 concubine, successfully interceded for the Christians, and under bishop Zephyrinus was put in charge of a new cemetery on the Appian Way near the place called Catacumbas (above, p. 56). Callistus5 role in the doctrinal debate was not intended to look very honourable in the account given by Hippolytus, but prob¬ ably much must be set down to the distrust and dislike that Hippolytus felt towards him. According to Hippolytus Callistus distinguished his position from the unacceptable views of Sabellius by acknowledging a real differentiation between the Father and the Son; but the difference was that the ‘Father5 was the name for the divine Spirit indwelling the ‘Son5 who is the human body of Jesus. Callistus pub¬ licly denounced Hippolytus5 view as sheer ditheism. In 217, to Hippolytus5 horror, Callistus succeeded Zephyrinus as bishop of Rome. Hippolytus felt unable to be in communion with such a man, and thought his worst suspicions confirmed when Callistus proceeded to explain that, since the church was prefigured by Noah’s ark in which there were both clean and unclean beasts, it was proper for the church to grant reconciliation to those who had fallen into any sin after baptism. Callistus also recognized unions between upper class women and men of inferior social status, whose marriage was possible only subject to grave penalties under Roman law. The recognition of monogamous concubinage is impor¬ tant evidence of the social position of Roman Christians at this time, but it would be going beyond the evidence to assume that there was more than a single such case. Hippoly¬ tus had separated from Callistus5 communion in 2 1 7, and it may have been for his own independent congregation that he wrote the church order, the Apostolic Tradition , containing
The Monarchian Controversy 89
valuable evidence on the early development of the liturgy (below p. 262). Perhaps also it was his own group which commissioned a statue on the base of which his principal works were recorded. The lower half of the statue was re¬ covered in 1551 and now stands in the Vatican Library.
The Monarchian controversy was not ended by the un¬ satisfying formulas proposed by Callistus, and in one form or another continued to disturb the church throughout the third century. It was the need to combat Monarchianism which led Tertullian in Africa to write his tract against Praxeas, a Monarchian from Asia Minor who also offended Tertullian by his vehement hostility to Montanism, and who had been influential in preventing the Roman church from granting any degree of recognition to the New Prophecy. In Tertullian’s view Praxeas accomplished two bits of the devil’s business: he ‘expelled the Paraclete and crucified the Father’. Tertullian follows the line suggested by Ire- naeus in seeing the threeness of Father, Son, and Spirit as a plurality revealed in the working out of the divine plan in history.1 ‘All three’, he says, ‘are one ( unus ).’ But Tertullian felt that it must be possible to answer the question ‘Three what?’ or even ‘One what?’ He therefore proposed to say that God is ‘one substance consisting in three persons’. The precise meaning of the Latin words substantia and persona is not easy to determine in Tertullian’s usage. He was a well educated orator rather than a meticulous philosopher, and it is probably a mistake to try to interpret his terminology within a rigorous Aristotelian framework. He had been in¬ fluenced by Stoicism with its doctrine that the immaterial is simply the non-existent, and was prepared to explain that God in all three ‘ Persons’ is ‘ Spirit’, which he seems to have interpreted as an invisible and intangible but not ultimately immaterial vital force. He therefore imported into the philo¬ sophical use of substantia a materialistic overtone. At the back of his mind there is always the Greek term ousia3 ‘being’. Likewise his term persona was probably suggested by the
1. The Greek word for this divine plan was oikonomia , or economy; whence this doctrine of God is sometimes labelled by the shorthand jargon ‘economic Trinitarianism*.
go Easter , the Monarchian Controversy , and Tertullian
Greek word prosopon , which Hippolytus applied to the Father and the Son. Hippolytus and Tertullian were contemporar¬ ies, and there is no means of discovering whether one in¬ fluenced the other and which had the priority. In Tertullian substantia could be used in the sense of character or nature. Speaking of Christ he could say that he is ‘ one person ’ uniting ‘two substances’, divine and human, which retain their distinctness of being and even of activity while being con¬ stituted as a single persona .
In his tract against Praxeas Tertullian determined the terminology of Latin theology for the future. He was the first Christian to write in Latin (though he had equal facility in Greek, and published some of his works in that language for the many Christians in North Africa who were Greek¬ speaking). Hippolytus was the last Western theologian to write in Greek. Until the beginning of the third century the Roman church had consisted principally of the Greek¬ speaking population of the city. In the third century, as the church’s mission penetrated the upper classes, the proportion of Latin-speaking Christians in Rome began to outweigh the Greeks. In the middle of the third century the Roman pres¬ byter Novatian wrote in confident, well composed Latin a tract On the Trinity which summarized the doctrine of Tertullian, but purged it of both Stoic materialism and Montanist enthusiasm. The cool temper in which Novatian wrote is evidence that the heated debates at Rome of which Hippolytus gave a vivid account had now become a thing of the past.
TERTULLIAN
North Africa was a province of great importance to the empire as one of its principal sources of grain and, in the West, Carthage had come to rank second only to Rome itself. The old Punic and Berber population was still strong in the countryside, but the cities together with the landowners and administrative classes were Roman. A substantial propor¬ tion of the population spoke Greek (as late as the last quarter of the fourth century a.d. there was a Greek bishop of the
Tertullian
9*
important city of Hippo who spoke Latin with difficulty and embarrassment ; below p.218). They came of immigrant stock either from the East or from South Italy and Sicily. How Christianity reached this region is not clear, but it is probable that there was a vigorous movement of missionary activity about the middle of the second century. In 180, twelve Christians of Scillium suffered martyrdom at Carthage. There was more trouble in 202 when under the emperor Septimius Severus sharp persecution broke out at Carthage. In the amphitheatre at Carthage there died Perpetua and Felicitas, the extant account of whose martyrdom incor¬ porates a priceless document, viz. Perpetua’ s diary of her imprisonment. But Tertullian’s numerous writings reveal little of the public and external history of the North African church. They compensate for that by disclosing much of its internal discussion and above all by their revelation of Tertullian himself: brilliant, exasperating, sarcastic, and intolerant, yet intensely vigorous and incisive in argument, delighting in logical tricks and with an advocate’s love of a clever sophistry if it will make the adversary look foolish, but a powerful writer of splendid, torrential prose. In his Apology of about 197 he makes not a merely defensive reply to popular or philosophical objections but a militant and tren¬ chant attack on the corruption, irrationality, and political injustice of polytheistic society. Every page is written with the joy of inflicting discomfort on his adversaries for their error and unreasonableness, but in such a manner as to embarrass his own friends and supporters.
Some of Tertullian’s most interesting writing is concerned with the proper behaviour for a Christian in a society per¬ vaded by pagan customs. Tertullian demanded that Christ¬ ians should keep themselves wholly unspotted from the world’s idolatrous corruption. They must keep away from the cruel public shows; but that would be self-evident. Ter¬ tullian’s most stringent demands for purity forbid his fellow Christians to serve in the army, or in the civil service, or even in schools. A Christian may not even earn his living in an occupation producing anything that might indirectly min¬ ister to idolatry. Tertullian’s conception of the Christian
92 Easter , the Monarchian Controversy , and Tertullian
life is first and foremost as a battle with the devil. This led him to oppose the least compromise with ‘ idolatry 5, even in what might seem the most innocuous forms of merely conven¬ tional habit, and also to conceive of the intellectual task of the Christian thinker as a conflict with diabolical forces. Because he understood his intellectual role in this way he had no hesitation about using arguments that were falla¬ cious if only they would gain him the victory over his imme¬ diate adversary. If he could outmanoeuvre the devil by dialectical subtlety, so much the better. Moreover, he was indifferent to public approval. He was never happier than when advocating the cause of a tiny rigorist minority, and his friends might have predicted that he would take up the Montanist prophecy with its fiercely puritan ethic. For a considerable time his advocacy of Montanism was conducted from within the catholic Church, but as it became clear that the Church was not going to grant recognition to the New Prophecy Tertullian passed outside the Church, condemning it as unspiritual, institutionalized and compromised by world¬ liness. Tertullian was appalled when an authority in the cath¬ olic Church, whom he does not name but describes as ‘ bishop of bishops5 and a veritable ‘pontifex maximus5, issued an edict declaring that the Church had power to grant remission even in the gravest sins after baptism such as adultery or apostasy. It is possible that he was alluding to Callistus of Rome ; but perhaps the authority was the bishop of Carthage.
In spite of the fact that he ended his days outside the Church, Tertullian continued to exercise strong influence on later Western theology. Jerome relates an anecdote that Cyprian called him simply ‘the master5 and used to study his writings every day. Many turns of phrase and terminology from the tract against Praxeas came to form a permanent part of the Western vocabulary for discussing the doctrines of the Trinity and of the person of Christ, and were to be echoed in documents like the fifth-century Tome of Pope Leo the Great which came to enjoy high authority. In the fiery zeal of his moral essays there is an intense ethical serious¬ ness and passion which go far to reward the reader who can be patient with his tortuous arguments and his merciless
Tertullian
93
impaling of opponents. In some passages, usually in anti- Gnostic contexts, he writes scornfully of the power of phil¬ osophers to instruct anyone in truth, and cries in tones of ringing defiance ‘I believe because it is absurd’. But in fact Tertullian was a well educated man with a considerable amateur knowledge of philosophical debate, and his estimate of the ‘ natural man ’ apart from grace was not pessimistic. He believed that, although humanity had inherited from Adam a flawed nature, nevertheless the image of God had only been obscured, not annihilated, and that many traces of original righteousness and goodness were to be discerned. He saw an intuitive feeling after the truth in the unthinking interjec¬ tions of ordinary people (‘ Good God’) which could be taken to betray an unconscious recognition of divine truth. The gospel he saw as a stripping away of the encrusting prejudices of pagan custom, setting the soul free to attain a natural ful¬ filment corresponding to the Creator’s intention. He did not always write with a Kierkegaard ian delight in paradox.
6
Clement of Alexandria and Origen
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
The history of the church in Egypt is veiled in mist before the sudden emergence of Clement of Alexandria in the last decade of the second century. His biography is almost un¬ known except as it may be deduced from his writings, which (apart from fragmentary quotations in later writers) consist of an exposition of the gospel story of the rich young ruler, some occasional notes on Valentinian Gnosticism and on biblical exegesis, and the substantial trilogy - the Exhortation to Conversion {Protrepticus) , the Tutor {Paedagogus) , and the Miscellanies {Stromateis) which he never completed. The Protrepticus stands in the tradition of apologetic writing, with an attacking note criticizing the superstition, crudity, and eroticism of pagan cults and myths, and observing that the great philosophers, despite their realization of the corruption of paganism, had failed to break with it. The Paedagogus is a guide to ethics and etiquette for a Christian moving in a cultivated society. Clement intended that the third volume of his trilogy should be entitled the ‘Teacher9, and that it should contain a systematic exposition of Christian doctrine. Clement never wrote the intended study. He felt that high matters of theology should be treated with reverence as being concerned with divine mysteries, and it would be dangerous to put into writing a full and extended statement for all to read. Instead, therefore, he decided to write a work of a very different character. Several pagan writers of this age published miscellaneous collections of antiquarian and philosophical interest, the form being deliberately unsyste¬ matic so that the subject would entirely change after a few pages. An extant Latin example of the second century is the
Clement of Alexandria 95
Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, and similar works were pro¬ duced by Plutarch, Aelian, and Athenaeus. Clement decided to use this form partly no doubt because of contemporary literary fashion, but mainly because the style particularly suited his purpose, which was to suggest rather than to prescribe, to throw out exploratory hints for the reader to investigate and consider at leisure rather than to tell all that was in his heart and so cast his pearls promiscuously before unworthy and swinish readers. The content of the Stromateis may certainly be taken to consist of as much dogmatic state¬ ment as Clement felt it safe to make, but the matter is wrapped in a deliberately misty and allusive style that prefers to put things in the form of a poetic reminiscence rather than in plain and straightforward prose. The style, however, was more than a mere literary form adopted for tactical reasons ; it corresponded in some degree to Clement’s view of the very nature of theology that he should seek to express it in terms which suggested a reality transcending the verbal symbol. Religious language, he felt, is akin to poetry. A certain diffidence is proper to it.
Clement was not born at Alexandria. He had come there after various travels in the course of which he had learnt from a number of different Christian teachers. The main attraction at Alexandria was a certain Pantaenus, a convert to Christianity from Stoicism who is reported (credibly) to have visited India. Clement says that Pantaenus had the outstanding merit of combining high intelligence with fidelity to the apostolic tradition - not a common phenome¬ non in second-century Alexandria where the influence of Valentinian Gnosticism was certainly very powerful. As Christianity penetrated the well educated society of Alex¬ andria, the choice for the convert seemed too often to be be¬ tween clever, eloquendy defended heresy on the one side and a dim, obscurantist orthodoxy on the other. It was one of Clement’s principal achievements to render this dilemma unreal and irrelevant, and Pantaenus seems to have helped him to discover the right way. At Alexandria Clement found a church afraid and on the defensive against Greek philosophy and pagan literature. Gnosticism had made philosophy
96 Clement of Alexandria and Origen
suspect; and pagan religion so permeated classical literature that it was not easy to disentangle a literary education from an acceptance of pagan values and polytheistic myth. The method of the Stromateis, written with very positive convic¬ tions about the truth contained in Greek philosophy and the value of classical poetry, enabled Clement to present his position to the fearful Christian reader in such a way as to diminish any anxieties. He saw that philosophy, so far from giving support to Gnosticism, provided a rational method for its destruction ; the Gnostics talked much of a higher reason, but did not in fact exercise it. So the Stromateis move from statements pressing the need for the study of philosophy to statements attacking the Gnostic heretics, and at the same time provide an acute and well constructed interpretation of Biblical themes in language and categories familiar to the educated Greek world. Apologetic motifs addressed to the pagan outsider mingle with a defence of the true faith against Gnostic perversions of it. At one moment Clement will be explaining that Plato plagiarized Moses and the prophets without making proper acknowledgements; at the next that Greek philosophy, like the Law of Moses according to St Paul, was given as a tutor to bring the Greeks to Christ and as a restraint on sin ; and at the next that Gnostic doctrines of love and freedom ignore the fact that no serious ethic can dispense with giving a place to rules, or that Gnosticism places far too wide a gulf between God and the world and far too narrow a gulf between God and the soul. Moreover, Clement was sensitive to the difficulty that educated Greeks felt when confronted by the simple and popular style of the scriptures. In one passage, by a tour de force , he presents a summary of the moral teaching of the Sermon on the Mount translated into the language of Neopythagorean gnomic wisdom. Yet he felt it necessary to reassure any anxious Christian readers that, although the form of expression was not scriptural and there was no invocation of Biblical texts, yet the content of teaching would be found on examination to correspond with the New Testament.
Clement found it hard to use the word c orthodox 5 without a half-ironic apology. He was not sure that he was perfectiy
Clement of Alexandria 97
happy to be associated with those commonly so entitled. Yet he knew himself to be a committed defender of the aposto¬ lic tradition, which he believed to include a ‘ true knowledge 5 quite opposed to the false ‘knowledge5 offered by the sects. The ‘ true gnostic 5 was not afraid of philosophy ; he could use it for his purposes, to understand what he had come to believe within the church, and to refute any adulteration. The higher life of the spirit is for Clement a moral and spiritual ascent. It was characteristic of the Gnostic heretics that they were little interested in virtue or in training of character. Clement’s true gnostic knows that spiritual insight is given to the pure in heart, to those humble enough to walk with God as a child with his father, to those whose motive for ethical action passes beyond fear of punishment or hope of reward to a love of the good for its own sake. It is an ascent from faith through knowledge to the beatific vision beyond this life, when the redeemed are one with God in a ‘deification5 symbolized by the holy of holies in the Mosaic tabernacle, or by Moses5 entrance into the darkness on Sinai. The ground of this possibility of mystical union is the image of God im¬ planted by creation.
The central principle of Clement’s thinking is the doctrine of Creation. This is the ground of Redemption. Moreover, because God had implanted the good seeds of truth in all his rational creatures, Clement was confident that there is much to be learnt from Platonic metaphysics, and from Stoic ethics, and from Aristotelian logic. All truth and goodness, wherever found, come from the Creator. On the same ground Clement opposed the Gnostics who disparaged the created order by making matter wholly alien from the supreme God, with ethical consequences leading either to rabid asceticism or to antinomian eroticism. In a long review of the Christian sex ethic Clement vigorously opposed the Gnostic thesis that sex is either irrelevant to or incompatible with the higher spiritual life. While affirming all respect for individual voca¬ tions to celibacy, he dismisses any suggestion that marriage is an inherently inferior spiritual status. On the same prin¬ ciples he rejected demands that all Christians ought to be teetotallers or vegetarians ; it was for him a matter of individual
Clement of Alexandria and Origen
conscience, not of universal prohibition. But Clement was very far from a naturalistic hedonism when writing of delight in the goodness of the created world. The good things of the material order were, he directed, to be used with gratitude but also with detachment, on the conditions given by the Creator and with restraint.
Clement wrote a special discourse to help Christians puzzled about the right use of their money and troubled especially by the absolute command of the Lord to the rich young ruler, cIf you would be perfect, sell all you have . . .’ On a rapid reading it might seem as if Clement were merely a compromiser trying to wriggle out of the plain meaning of a commandment. But a fairer reading of his tract shows that he did not see the gospel ethic as imposing legalistic obliga¬ tions but rather as a statement of God’s highest purpose for those who follow him to the utmost. What really matters is the use rather than the accident of possession. Accordingly Clement laid down a guide for the wealthy converts of the Alexandrian church, which imposed a most strenuous stan¬ dard of frugality and self-discipline. Clement passionately opposed any luxury or ostentation, and much that he pro¬ tested to be lawful he regarded as highly inexpedient.
The exposition of the saying to the rich young ruler and several passages in the P aedagogus and Stromateis show Clement acting as a spiritual director. It lay in the nature of his view of the Christian life as a progress towards the likeness of God in Christ that he saw it both as a dynamic advance in the comprehension of the nature of Christian doctrine and also as a process of education in which the aspirant would make mistakes calling for penitence. The church he described as a school ’, with many grades and differing abilities among its pupils, where all the elect were equal, but some were 6 more elect than others. Accordingly Clement could take a view of the church which allowed room for the restoration of the lapsed and at the same time held the highest demands before all Christians. The seventh book of the Stromateis (the last that he lived to complete, since the so-called eighth book consists of scattered notes on logic probably found among his papers after his death) portrays the spiritual ideal of the
Clement of Alexandria 99
true gnostic in terms which blend the high aspirations of St Paul (Philippians iii) with Platonic language about the soul’s assimilation to God and Stoic ideals of passionlessness. It seems to have been from St Paul rather than from the Platonists that he had learnt to regard the knowledge of God as a dynamic advance rather than a static possession. He once declared that if the true gnostic were required to choose between eternal salvation and the knowledge of God, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter.
Because Clement understood the spiritual life as a never- ending progress, he did not think that the process of divine education came to an end with death. His sense of indebted¬ ness to Justin and Irenaeus was not so strong as to make him look kindly on their all too literal belief in a physical resurrec¬ tion to participate in Christ’s reign for a thousand years on earth. For the sinner there is burning fire, destructive not of the image of God but of the wood, hay and stubble of sins. None in this life can achieve such holiness that he will not need to be purified by the wise fire so that he may be fitted for the presence of God.
Clement’s personal reticence allowed him to reveal little of himself, but his personal ideals are clear to see. In cultural background and in temperament he could hardly be further removed from the militant zeal of Tertullian. Yet in between the lines of urbane dinner-party conversation reflected in his pages there is to be discerned a moral passion in no way cooler than Tertullian’s. Clement is equally reti¬ cent about the external life of the church to which he belongs. He never mentions the contemporary bishop of Alexandria, Demetrius, and relatively little can be deduced from his text which helps to explain the institutional development of the community. Like Justin Martyr, he did his chief work as a layman, working as an independent teacher of * the Christian philosophy’, instructing pupils in grammar, rhetoric and etiquette as well as in specifically religious matters. An un¬ certain scrap of evidence suggests that he may have been or¬ dained presbyter before his death soon after 215. If he was ordained, the fact of his ordination may reasonably be inter¬ preted as the expression of