The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

Chapter X. The First Age Of The Martyr Church

“Magnum hæreditatis mysterium! Templum Dei factus est uterus nescientis virum. Non est pollutus ex ea carnem assumens. Omnes gentes venient dicentes, Gloria tibi, Domine.”

Antiphon on Vespers of Circumcision.

The world which Augustus and Tiberius ruled was not conscious of the fact that there was an order of truth, and of morality based upon that truth, the maintenance of which was to be purchased, and cheaply purchased, with the loss of life, or of all that made life valuable. This world was indeed familiar with the thought and with the practice of sacrificing life for one object – an object which collected all the natural affections and interests of a man together, and presented them to him in the most attractive form, his country. Greek and Roman history, and indeed the history of all nations up to that time, had been full of instances in which privations and sufferings were endured, and, if necessary, life itself given up for wife and children, for the dear affections of house and home, for friends, for freedom, for fatherland. Man, civilised and uncivilised, was alike capable of this, and capable of it in profusion. Rome had many a Regulus and Sparta many a Leonidas in the humblest ranks of their citizens: Gaul had thousands as noble as Vercingetorex, and Spain not one but many Numantias. Human nature had never been wanting in the courage to die for the visible goods of human life. But to labour, to combat, to endure pain, sorrow, privations, to suffer in every form for the invisible goods of a future life, to recognise, that is, an inviolable order of religion and morality, so far superior to all that a man can grasp and hold in his possession, to wife, children, goods, friends, freedom, and fatherland, and to life adorned and crowned with these, that any or all of these, and life itself, are to be sacrificed for its preservation; this may be said to be a thought of which the whole heathen world ruled by Augustus and Tiberius was unconscious.132 For other reasons also it was familiar enough with the sacrifice of life, since the continual practice of war and the permanent institution of slavery had made human life the cheapest of all things in its eyes. And further, to die rather than to live dishonoured was still the rule of the nobler among the millions who yielded to the sway of Augustus. But to die for the maintenance of moral truth, that is, for faith, – this was known indeed to the Jews, who had already their “cloud of witnesses” to it; but it was unknown to heathendom, which has in all its ranks and times but one man133 to offer whose death approaches to such a sacrifice, and therefore shines with incomparable lustre among all deeds of purely human heroism. But the death of Socrates found in this no imitators, he created here no line of followers; and he stands alone in this greatness, an exception to an otherwise invariable rule.

However, in our two preceding chapters we have been describing something much more than the exhibition of this order of truth; that is, we have set forth the union of it with a Person, who both exhibits it in Himself, and is the source of it to others. And the difference between these two things is very great. Many at different times have said, “I teach the truth.” One only has said, “I am the Truth:” and to say it is the most emphatic indirect assumption of Godhead which can be conceived. And with it that One also joined a similar expression, containing the same assumption of Godhead, and which equally was never approached by any other teacher, “I am the Life.” The union of the Truth at once and of the Life with His Person, which is thus become the root of both to human nature, was the subject of the last two chapters. Now, as we have said, that there was an order of truth sacred and inviolable above all things, was borne witness to by the Hebrew martyrs, and therefore was not new to the chosen race of Israel, though it was new to heathendom, at the time at which our Lord appeared. But the union of the Truth and of the Life with the Person of One appearing visibly in the world as man, was as new to the Hebrews as to the heathen, was an absolute novelty to human nature. And so the Christian Faith also, as a system of belief and action, that is, as embracing the mind and the will of man, as giving both Truth and Life, is entirely new in this respect; that in this double action it is in its origin and in its whole course and maintenance bound up with a Person. Thus all which it teaches is not naked truth, unlocalised as it were, and impersonal, but is the development of relations in which the disciples of Christ stand to Him; for instance, as King, as God, as Head, as Bridegroom, as Father. As these, He is at once The Truth and the Life. Thus it is that the Christian Faith flows out of the Person of Christ the God-man; and, as its Truth is centered in that Person, so also its continuous Life depends on Him.

And further, as the connection of doctrine, or truth, and of life, that is, action, with a Person is the point from which all this movement springs, in which respect we have said it was absolutely new, so the term to which it reaches is the creation of something in both these things correlative to that Person, the creation of a Kingdom, a Temple, a Body, a Mother, a Race, in which respect also the term is as new as that from which it springs. That He is the Truth and the Life is shown in this creation, which has a distinctive character, as He has, an unique existence, and an organic unity with Him.

The subject on which we are now employed is to describe as an historic fact how the duty of maintaining, propagating, and dying for the truth and conduct thus identified with the Person of Christ, was carried out through many generations and under difficulties which seemed to preclude the possibility of its success; and to show the means by which this great creation, starting from the day of Pentecost, made a home and established itself in the Roman empire, by which, after a conflict of nearly three hundred years, it was finally recognised.

The worship of the one true God had been fixed in the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the faith which made them a nation, that is, as the dogma on which their national existence was so based, that through maintaining it they were to continue a people. The Jewish polity lived in and by this belief, and, as a nation, was its prophet. Certainly, this was the noblest form which nationalism has ever assumed. Yet it was nationalism still; and the proselyte who would enter into the full worship of the God of Abraham and all its privileges had to become a Jew. But now, instead of this bond another was substituted, signifying that the King of the Jews who had appeared was come as the saviour of man, not of this or of that nation. The bond is therefore placed at the point which constituted the salvation of the whole race, that is in the Person of the God-man, and by this the corporation was put beyond the bounds of a nationality, and made coextensive with the world. The Christian creed was formed round the Person, the actions, and the sufferings of Christ. Now here, precisely in what constituted the character, the greatness, and the glory of the Christian faith, was seated the principle and the beginning of the persecution which it encountered from the Roman empire. In that empire every species of idolatry134 had a right of homestead as the national or tribe religion of any one of its constituent parts; and the worship of even one God, exclusive as that Jewish worship was of the whole heathen pantheon, was allowed by the laws of Rome to the Jews, because he was considered their national god. But the Christians had no such justification in Roman eyes for their exclusive worship. They were not a nation nor a province of the empire; they had not, therefore, that title for their worship which constituted the charter of toleration to all besides, including the Jew, who worshipped the same God. For the Christians worshipped Him, not as their ancestral God, but as the Father of that Son who had taken human flesh, and become the Saviour of men. Their worship of the one true God was not only exclusive, but in and through the fact of the Incarnation claimed the homage of all men to it. It knew of no bond of brotherhood but in Him who had deigned to call men His brethren. Thus its special character and preëminent glory were the cause of its persecution, and from the moment that it came before the notice of the Roman governor not as a Jewish sect but as a distinct belief, it was considered as not a lawful religion. Thus too it was that the selfsame point which kindled Jewish hatred entailed Roman persecution. The Christian faith was a mortal offence to the Jew because it extended what had been his special privileges to all the Gentiles. He abhorred the substitution of the Person of the God-man for the race of Abraham after the flesh; as the Roman at once despised and hated a worship which not only adhered to one God, but dethroned from his political supremacy the capitoline Jupiter, and whose title rested not on tradition and national inheritance, but on a fact touching the whole race of man, and therefore claiming the allegiance of the whole race – the assumption of human nature by a divine Person. Thus the doctrine in which lay the whole creative force, the truth and the life of Christianity, was that which from the first caused the dislike of the Jew and the persecution of the Gentile – the kingship of Christ, involving the headship of a universal religion, and a power which was not that of Cæsar.

We have, then, now to treat of a period of 280 years, homogeneous in its character from the beginning to the end, which is, that it is the carrying out by a people ever increasing in number and strength of that good confession made before Pontius Pilate – that witness at its proper time of which S. Paul135 in its first stage said that he was the herald and apostle. The course and life of Christians during these ten generations is to be the prolongation of this testimony, the embodiment of this confession. It is as soldiers, imitators, followers of one Chief, that all appear on the scene in their respective order.136 It is by a direct virtue drawn from the cross of that Chief that they move onward to their own passion. They endure and they conquer simply as under His command, and because He endured and conquered before them. Their oath of military fidelity is the bond of their discipline; they prevail because they are His, and because they are one in Him:

The whole process and cause of Christians during this long period, the ground of their accusation, the conduct and principles of the judges, and their judgment, are summed up as in a parable in that scene which passed before Pilate, while the subsequent day of Pentecost is in the same manner an image of the final result won in these three hundred years. For as the crucifixion of the Truth in the Person of Christ is followed by the descent of the Holy Ghost forming the Church, so the persecution and crucifixion of the truth in ten generations of His people is followed by the empire's public recognition of His eternal kingdom – of that Body of Christ seen visibly in a council of its prelates assembling freely from all lands.

Take first the seventy years which form the Apostolic age. What do we find as the result when S. John, the last apostle, is taken away? In a large number of cities throughout the Roman empire a community has been planted after the pattern of that which we have described as arising at Jerusalem, and by the same means, the power of oral teaching. Every such community has at its head its bishop, or angel, who sums up and represents in his own person the people over which he presides. This is exactly the picture presented to us at the close of this period by S. John in the Apocalypse, when he is directed by our Lord personally appearing to him to write seven letters to as many bishops of cities on the seaboard of the province of Asia. Each, with his people, is addressed as a unit. One, “I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy endurance, and how thou canst not bear those which are evil;” a second, “Fear not what thou art about to suffer; behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison;” a third, “I have against thee some few things, that thou hast there some who hold the doctrine of Balaam.”137 Each has around him his council of priests, his ministering deacons, his faithful people. The last apostle is still living; but in all these communities many exist, both of teachers and taught, who have learned Christian doctrine, either from the mouth of an apostle or the comrade of an apostle – a Mark, a Luke, a Silvanus, a Clemens. Thus they live mainly upon oral teaching: the voice which went forth from the day of Pentecost is sounding freshly in their ears. Doctrine is in the stage of simple tradition and authority. The writings of the New Testament are completed, but being addressed to various parts of the Church, are best known to those for whom they were written. They are not yet collected and made the common patrimony of the whole Church. S. John leaves the earth without performing any such function; without setting the seal of his apostolical authority upon the New Testament as a whole; nay, the authorship of some of his own writings, as we now receive them, will be partially contested after his death before their final reception. Of the absolute number of these Christian communities, and of the multitude they severally embrace, we have no account; we can form no estimate, save to infer that the whole number of the faithful, at the end of this period, was very small in comparison with the mass out of which they had been drawn. Still it was a germ with a living force of expansion, planted in every considerable spot of the empire; and wherever it was planted, a Christian people, in the full sense of the word, existed, having a complete spiritual life of its own, possessing the sacraments which insured the beginning and the continuance of that life, an order of worship based on the great central fact which made them a people, and a ministry charged with the power to teach and to convey on to their successors the doctrines delivered to them.

But in the mean time how had the empire treated it? In these seventy years it has traversed the seven last years of the Emperor Tiberius, and the whole principates of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero; the revolutionary crisis in which Galba, Otho, and Vitellius reigned for an instant, and then the settled time of Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, and Nerva. Now, during this period its treatment by the empire has been a singular reproduction of what passed in the hall of Pilate. For the Jewish religion was one allowed by Roman law. The profession of it entailed no penalty. Now the first heralds of the Gospel, as Jews, preached their message boldly and publicly, and in doing so it does not seem that Roman law would have interfered with them.138 At this stage it looked upon Christians as a sect of Jews. As no authority of the empire had interfered with the public ministry of our Lord, so it would seem to have left the ministry of His disciples in the first instance free. It is from another quarter that opposition arises. The Jew in his jealous anger at the promulgation of a Messiah and a spiritual kingdom which is not after Jewish taste, both because it is a kingdom not of this world, and because it raises the Gentile to coinheritance with the race of Abraham, drags the Christian missionary before the tribunal of the Roman magistrate and imputes to him “sedition.” Then many a Gallio, many a Felix, many a Festus have as it were unwillingly to enter into and decide these questions of the Jewish law. It would seem that converts to the Christian faith in these its earliest days might long have escaped the notice of the magistrate, as belonging to a Jewish sect, but for this enmity of the Jews themselves. But as the teachers of the new faith everywhere addressed themselves first to their countrymen, so everywhere they found these countrymen alive to their progress and bitterly set against it.139 This state of things is pretty well expressed by that answer of the Roman Jews to S. Paul when he excuses himself before them for having been compelled to appeal to the Emperor Nero: “as concerning this sect, we know that it is spoken against everywhere.”140 This, however, was Jewish, not Roman, contradiction. So far as everywhere Jewish hatred and jealousy could malign and counterwork the progress of the Christian Faith, and bring suffering on its teachers, it had been done. But nevertheless with this exception it would seem that for thirty-five years after the day of Pentecost that Faith had been freely and publicly taught throughout the empire. It was through the malignity of his own countrymen, stirring up a dangerous conspiracy against him, that S. Paul felt himself compelled to appeal to the emperor, and the result of his appeal was that he was set free. But in the year 64 another state of things had arisen. The ruin of a large part of Rome by fire had brought a great odium upon Nero. Now his wife Poppæa is said to have been a Jewish proselyte, he himself to have been surrounded by Jewish influences, and nothing is more probable than that Jewish hatred, which had tracked the Christians everywhere, pursued them especially here, and suggested them to him both as authors of the conflagration, and as convenient scapegoats whereon to divert the odium against himself which had arisen from it. Thus he took the opportunity of exposing to shame and torment, as victims of the popular dislike, and in popular opinion guilty of “hatred of the human race,” or of being hated by them, “a vast multitude”141 of Christians, who, says the heathen historian, were put to the most exquisite suffering, being wrapt in the skins of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or clothed in garments of pitch and set on fire to illuminate the night. Thus it is, as decorations of Nero's games, in his gardens of the Vatican, where the obelisk from Heliopolis, once the ornament of his circus, now bears witness to the victory of Christ, that Christians first come before us in the pages of Roman historians, just at the middle of the period we are now describing, thirty-five years after the Ascension.

It may be considered part of this first persecution that the two great Apostles – Peter, who had founded the Roman Church, and Paul, who after its first foundation had helped to build it up – were condemned in the last year of Nero, and by his deputies142 during his absence, to suffer as Christians, the one the death of a Roman citizen by the sword, and the other that of a slave by crucifixion. Thus the two great brethren by enduring together the martyr's death, the highest mark of Christian charity, sealed their joint foundation of Christian Rome, that like as the Rome which had gained the conquest of the world by the strong hand of violence, had been planted in the blood of one brother shed by another, so the Rome which was to be the centre of Christ's kingdom, and in the words of S. Ignatius “preside over charity,” should have for her founders brethren in supernatural love, pouring forth their blood together for the seat of that Christian unity which binds the earth in one.

But this persecution by Nero is not transitory in its consequences. The emperor had judged that Christians as such professed a religion not allowed by the Roman laws, and were guilty therein of a capital crime. This crime, if technically expressed, would amount to sacrilege and treason;143 for they could not acknowledge the Roman gods as gods, nor the emperor as Pontifex Maximus; nor could they swear by his genius, which was the oath expressing fidelity to the Roman constitution in its civil and religious aspect. This was that “hatred of the human race,” that is, in other words, of the Roman empire, of which in the eyes of Tacitus and Pliny, of Nero now and of Trajan afterwards, they were guilty as Christians. But the singular thing is this, that the Jew, who was the first to drag them before the Roman tribunal, who was their omnipresent, ever-ready antagonist and traducer, though he worshipped one only God, though he abhorred the whole Roman polytheism, though he swore not by the genius of the emperor, was exempt from punishment: his religion was recognised by Roman law and the senate its interpreter, because it was the national and time-honoured religion of a constituent part of the empire. On the same ground the vilest Egyptian, Asiatic, African idol was allowed the worship of those who claimed it as their ancestral god. The Christian Faith was the sole exception to this universal tolerance, because it was not the religion of a subject nation, because it was new, because, in fine, it rested on principles which, if carried out, would sweep away the whole fabric of polytheism on which the Roman State rested. And the act of Nero had its great importance in that it formally distinguished the Christian from the Jewish religion, and took away from it by a legal decision of the State's highest authority the claim to be considered “licit.”