The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

Nero then bestows the crown of martyrdom on S. Peter and S. Paul, and on what Tacitus calls, even within Rome alone, a vast multitude. But he does more than this. On the first appearance of Christians before the supreme authority he so applies an existing law to their case as to establish their liability under it to capital punishment, and this liability rests upon them henceforth down to the time of Constantine. It is by no means always carried out; it is often suspended, sometimes for many years together, according to the character of the ruling prince, or the maxims of his government, or the state itself of the empire. But it is henceforth the legal position of Christians. It is a danger which besets their condition, and may be called into action at any moment, in any city of the empire, from any motive of private enmity, cupidity, or passion. It is the legal Roman equivalent and interpretation of their Master's words, “You shall be hated of all men for my name's sake.”144

How often, and in how many instances, it was carried out in this period of seventy years we have no means of telling; but another emperor is named as a persecutor. Domitian not only put to death as Christian his cousin, the Consul Flavius Clemens, but, as it would seem, a great many others at Rome, in the latter years of his principate.145 Domitian and Nero are mentioned as persecutors by Melito when addressing Marcus Aurelius, and by Tertullian,146 in the time of Severus, though it was the object of both to make the emperors appear to have been not unfavourable to Christians. But, independent of any general act which would constitute an emperor a persecutor,147 this liability to punishment,148 in virtue of which the confessor or martyr was brought before the local magistrates, was that under which individual Christians, in most peaceful times, and in the reign of emperors generally just and moderate, endured their sufferings. The Emperor Tiberius is said by Tertullian to have brought before the senate a proposition to allow the Christian Faith as a lawful religion. Had this been done, the whole course of Christian history in these three centuries would have been changed. As it was, every one, in becoming a Christian, accepted the chance that he might thereby be called upon to forfeit the possession of wife, children, goods, every civil right, and life itself.

The end of the reign of the first Antonine, in the year 161, furnishes us with a second fitting epoch at which we may estimate the growth and position in the empire of the Christian Faith.

During the sixty years which elapse from the death of S. John to the accession of Marcus, the Roman empire is ruled by three sovereigns, who have each left a fair name and a considerable renown behind them, and who, compared with most of those who preceded or who followed them, may almost be termed great. Trajan by his military successes raised to the highest point the credit of the Roman arms, by his moderation in civil government effaced the remembrance of Domitian's cruelties, and gave the Romans perhaps as much liberty as they could bear. His successor Hadrian, joining great energy, administrative ability, and moderation of his own to the fear and respect for the Roman name, which the powerful arm of Trajan had spread around, was able at once to exercise his army with unwearied discipline, and to maintain the empire at its full tide of power in honourable peace, while Antoninus crowned the forty years of equable and generally just government – bestowed on the Roman world by Trajan and Hadrian – with a further happy period of more than half that length, wherein the glory of the empire may be said to have culminated. Imperial Rome never saw again such a day of power, or such a prospect of security, as when Antoninus celebrated the secular games at the completion of nine hundred years; and for ages afterwards his name carried respect, and men looked back on his reign as on an ideal period of happiness for those whom he ruled.

One of the most competent observers of our time has marked the last ten years of the reign of Pius as the period at which the independent development of Græco-Roman heathenism terminated, when it had exhausted all the forms of its own inward life, since the Neoplatonic philosophy which is the only striking product of intelligence that arises afterwards, is manifestly due to the antagonism with Christianity, and is no pure offspring of the heathen spirit.149 From this time forth Christian influences become unmistakable in their action upon heathen thought and society. This, then, affords another reason why we should endeavour to trace the progress and extension which the Church had reached at this point.

Now a contemporary of Antoninus declares that in his time, that is, about the year 150, there was no race of men, either barbarians or Greeks, none even of Scythian nomads roaming in waggons, or of pastoral tribes dwelling in tents, among whom prayers and thanksgivings were not offered to the Father and Creator of the universe in the name of the crucified Jesus.150 Thus, in a hundred and twenty years the Church had outstripped the limits of the empire. The germ which in the time of S. John was rooted in the chief cities, had spread out thence and increased, taking more and more possession of the soil in all directions. Still we must consider the Christian Church in each place of its occupation as a small minority of the people: nor is there any reason to doubt the statement made by Celsus, that at the period when he wrote, the middle of the second century, the Christian Faith counted few of the educated, distinguished, and rich among its adherents;151 for Origen, in replying to him, alleges no specific example to the contrary. Yet, here too we must consider the justice of Origen's remark,152 that these classes are everywhere few in proportion to the poor and ignorant, and that Christianity being the day-star arising on every soul took of all classes alike. So much, then, as to the Church's material extension: now as to its internal growth.

As this period opens, comrades of the Apostles still abound in the churches. We know of several instances wherein such persons hold eminent rank. At Rome, S. Clement is the third successor of S. Peter; and S. Irenæus,153 recording him as such eighty years afterwards, specially notes that he had seen and lived with Apostles, and had their preaching still sounding in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes; at Antioch, S. Ignatius, second after the same S. Peter; in the See of Jerusalem, S. Simeon, the brother of James, still survives; at Smyrna, S. John's disciple Polykarp is bishop. Many more such S. Irenæus declares that there were. This would prepare us for the strength with which the principle of authority and tradition was held, and show how completely the sense of a spiritual government, of cohesion, and continuity of moral life, and of a common doctrine and teaching, the foundation of these, prevailed. But we are not left to inferences, we have the clearest statements on this point about fifteen years after S. John's death. It has been remarked above how in the Apocalypse our Lord himself, addressing the seven churches, gathers them up in their bishops, and speaks of them each collectively as of one person. In the year 116, as is supposed, Ignatius still after forty-eight years bishop of one of the three great mother churches, all of them Sees of Peter, and types and models of church government, whence missions went forth, and the layers of apostolic teaching were propagated, in his seven extant epistles conveys the same idea as that presented by those divine words which S. John had heard in vision, and was commanded to record, but with much greater detail. As he is being led to martyrdom, in the long transit between Antioch and Rome, he pours forth the earnestness of one under sentence of death, glowing at the prospect of shedding his blood for Christ, and being for ever united with Him. These letters remain as a sample of numberless conversations held with the deputations which came to meet him on his way, mingling their tears at his approaching passion with their exultation in his triumph. They are of one tissue throughout. Ignatius dwells with incessant repetition upon union with God and with Christ through obedience to the hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, by maintenance of one faith, in one body of the Church, which is wherever Christ is.154 Let us take one instance from his letter to the Ephesians. After saying that he had “received their whole multitude in the person of Onesimus, their bishop,” he continues: “It is, then, fitting that you should by all means glorify Jesus Christ who has glorified you; that by a uniform obedience you may be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment, and may all speak alike concerning everything, and that being subject to the bishop and the presbytery, you may be altogether sanctified. I am not giving you commands, as if I were any one; for, though I am in bonds for His name, I am not yet perfected in Jesus Christ. For now I begin to learn, and I speak to you as my fellow-disciples, for I had need to be encouraged by you in faith, exhortation, endurance, long-suffering. But since charity suffers me not to be silent to you, I have taken on me to exhort you to run together all with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ, your inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, as also the bishops, placed in their several limits, are the mind of Jesus Christ. Therefore you should run together with the bishop's mind, as indeed you do. So then in your concord and harmonious charity Jesus Christ is sung. And each several one of you makes up the chorus; so that all being harmonious in concord, you take up the melody in unity, and sing with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father, that He may hear you, and perceive by your good works that you are members of His Son. It is good for you then to be in blameless unity, that you may always have fellowship with God.” And then he adds: “For if I in a short time have had such familiarity with your bishop, and that not human, but spiritual, how much more should I think you happy, who are so fused with him as the Church with Jesus Christ, and as Jesus Christ with the Father, that all things may be accordant in unity.”155

This is an incidental passage out of a very short letter, in which the speaker is addressing practical exhortations to the people of a great church, founded by S. Paul about sixty years before, dwelt in by S. John up to about fifteen years of the time at which he was speaking. We should not in such a writing expect S. Ignatius to speak with the scientific correctness of a theologian, nor is he completely exhibiting his subject in a treatise; yet here, as it were at the first moment after the Apostles have left the earth, we have a picture of the Church as a world-wide institution, held together by a divine unity, which has its seat in the Person of Christ as the mind of the Father. It is a composite unity which is contemplated in the image of a harp with its strings pouring forth one song – the song of Christ – to the Father. It is a unity wide as the earth; for the bishops, placed in their several limits, constitute the mind of Christ, who is Himself the Father's mind. It is the unity of the diocese, for it is summed up in the bishop: but it is the unity likewise of the whole Church, for the bishops are linked together in One whose mind they collectively represent, and that One is He from whose Person their authority radiates; in whom, as he says in this same letter, “the old kingdom was being destroyed, God appearing in the form of a man, unto the newness of eternal life.”156 Again, it is not merely an outward unity of government, but an inward unity of the truth held in common, and also held as given by authority: not truth, as a result of the curiosity of the human intellect, rather truth, as a participation in the mind of Christ. Thus the Catholic unity of government is at the same time a unity of belief, which two unities are not, in fact, separable, for their principle is one in the Person of Christ, in respect of whom submission to the Ruler is one and the same thing with belief in the truth revealed by Him, who is King no less than Word, Word no less than King.

We have, then, here the principle of authority and tradition as seated in the hierarchy, and at the same time the whole order and unity of the Church as girdling the world by its chain of the Episcopate, and as possessing the truth and exhibiting it in its quality of an institution. It is before us and at work in its succession of men, in its sacraments which they administer,157 in its truth which is imparted by the one and delivered by the other. It is no vague congeries of opinions held by individuals with the diversity of individuals, but a body strongly organised, and possessing an imperishable life, the life of its Author. And we have all this mentioned as fulfilled at the distance of one life from our Lord's ascension, while indeed his kinsman and elder in age, S. Simeon, is still bishop of Jerusalem, and mentioned by one of whom a beautiful though insufficiently grounded legend says that he was that child whom our Lord had called and placed before His disciples as the model of those who should enter into His kingdom. He was at least so near in time to Christ that this could be said of him. He is the bishop of Antioch; he is on his way to be thrown to the beasts in the Colosseum at Rome;158 he is welcomed on his way by church after church, and he sees and describes the bishops, in their several boundaries through the earth, as each maintaining the mind of Christ in the unity of his Body.

Such is the Church merely stated as a fact towards the beginning of the second century.

And the trial which in these sixty years the Church was going through was well calculated to test her constitution. It is against the spread of false doctrine that S. Ignatius in these epistles so constantly appeals, to the unity of the faithful among each other.159 He warns them to use only Christian nourishment, and to abstain from strange food, which is heresy.160 The Church was then continually receiving into her bosom converts at all ages of life, some from the Jews, many more from the Gentiles; among these, therefore, minds brought up in Jewish prejudices, and others which had run havoc in eastern superstitions and systems of philosophy. In the course of these sixty years she probably multiplied many times over in number; and the multiplication was rather by the accession of adults than by the education of children born of Christian parents. The Church was composed of a small minority of the general population scattered at wide intervals over an immense empire; and, so far from being assisted by the civil power, was under constant persecution from it. Whatever force her spiritual government possessed could be exercised only by the voluntary submission of her members. Let us weigh the fact that, under these circumstances, a number of heresies arose. Some were of Jewish, some of Gentile parentage. But we are not here concerned either with their cause or with their matter: we dwell at present only on the fact of their existence. In number they were many; in character most diverse; they arose and flourished in different places. Hardly anywhere was the Church free from them. Let us ask only one question here: by what power were they resisted? The human mind had then the fullest liberty of action in Christians. It was by a free choice – a choice accompanied with danger, and persisted in through suffering – that men became Christians. The liberty which men exercised in becoming Christians they could use further against Christian doctrine, by innovating; by mixing it up with other doctrines, with which, perhaps, their minds had been familiar before their conversion; by developing it after their own fashion. The desire of fame, the self-will of genius, the mere luxury of thought, would offer a continual temptation to such a course. Many, from one motive or another, fell into it. The question which we repeat is, what power prevented the one Church from breaking up under this process of free thought into fragments? These heresies began even while the Apostles were teaching. S. Peter, S. Paul, and S. John speak strongly against them. They swarm in the two generations succeeding the death of S. John. How is it that, at the accession of Marcus Aurelius, Christians having passed the limits of the empire, and being found so far as the wandering tribes of the north, there is still one Church, surrounded, indeed, by a multitude of sects, differing from her and from each other, but herself distinguished and unmistakable among them all? We think the epistles of S. Ignatius furnish us with a reply to this question. As we have seen above, he views the Church in each place as a community closely bound together under a spiritual government which is summed up in the bishop, while the bishops in their several dioceses are as closely linked to each other, and all form one society, wherein is Jesus Christ. And these two truths are not separated from each other, but the unity of the part is deduced from the unity of the whole, and is subordinate to it. See, first, with what force he states the unity of the diocese.161 “Avoid divisions, as the beginning of evils. Follow all of you the bishop as Jesus Christ the Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles, and reverence the deacons as God's command. Let no one without the bishop do aught of what appertains to the Church. Let that be deemed a sure Eucharist which is under the bishop, or under him who has the bishop's authority for it. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the multitude (of the faithful) be.” But this strict unity of the diocese is derived from that of the whole Church; for he adds as the reason of the foregoing, “just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”162 This is the first time when the word “catholic” is known to be used, and it is applied to the Church as its distinctive character, to convey the two attributes of unity and universality, in connection with the Person of Christ, exactly as it has been used, an unique term for an unique object, from that day to this. S. Ignatius further views the Church in each place as having one faith; and not only so, but the same faith in every place; one faith at Antioch, one at Rome, one at every city between them, beyond them, around them. Here, then, is a double unity, inward and outward. As the double unity of body and spirit makes the man, so the double unity of government and of faith makes the Church. As neither mind nor body alone make the man, so neither faith nor government alone make the Church, but the coherence of both. The Incarnation is the joining a human soul and body with the Person of the Divine Word; after which pattern the Church, which is His special creation, is the joining of one faith and one government in a moral unity. It is by this force, by the same hierarchy everywhere guarding the same faith, by the principle of authority and tradition planted in this one living organisation throughout the earth, that the attacks of heresy are everywhere resisted. What S. Paul163 lays down in dogma, history exhibits in fact. A hundred years after his words are written, the Church has stretched her limits beyond the empire, has multiplied incessantly, has been attacked by a crowd of heresies striving to adulterate her doctrine, and has cast them out of her by this double unity of her faith and her government, and so is one Body and one Spirit. Her victory lies not in being without heresies, but in standing among them as a contrast and a condemnation.

The solidity of internal organisation, and the definiteness of the One Faith which animated it, kept pace with the material increase of numbers. At the expiration of this period it is probable that among all the contemporaries and immediate disciples of the Apostles one only of high rank remained, that Polykarp, joint-hearer with Ignatius of S. John, and to whom in his passage the martyr addressed a letter as well as to his Church; whose own letter written at the time of the martyr's combat, and commemorating the wonderful patience therein shown forth, is yet extant. But in the mean time in every Church the transmission of authoritative teaching passed to those who had grown up themselves in the bishop's council – his presbytery, which Ignatius loved to represent as being to each bishop what the Council of Apostles was to their Lord. And as the death of Apostles themselves had caused no break in this living chain, so the gradual departure of their immediate disciples was made up by the careful handing-on of the same deposit, lodged securely in its receptacle, the succession of men, which carried on the teaching office of the Church.164

In the mean time, what was the attitude of the empire to the Christian Faith under Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius? Domitian's reign had ended in active persecution, to which Nerva had put a stop on his accession.165 But though Domitian's edicts had been reversed, like those of Nero, one of the most ancient laws of the Roman empire forbad the worship of any god not approved by the Senate.166 This, as we have said above, was the sword perpetually suspended over the heads of Christians, without any fresh action on the part of the emperors. By virtue of this, even when it was forbidden to accuse them, yet if they were brought before justice it was forbidden to absolve them.167 And even senators,168 if accused, were not exempt from this severity. We find Trajan acting upon this law in the year 111, when Pliny, being governor of Bithynia, brings expressly the case of the Christians before him. And the terms in which he does this show at once the temper of the Roman magistrate in such cases and the state of the law.

“I have never been present,” he says, “at the trials of Christians, and therefore do not know either the nature of their crime, or the degree of the punishment, or how far examination should go. And I have been in great hesitation whether age made any difference, or the tender should not be distinguished from the strong; whether they should be pardoned upon repentance, or, when once a man had been a Christian, ceasing to be so should not profit him; or whether the mere profession without any crime, or whether the crimes involved in the profession should be punished. In the mean time, with regard to those brought before me as Christians, my practice has been this: I asked them if they were Christians. If they admitted it, I put the question a second and a third time, threatening them with death. If they persevered, I ordered them to be led away to execution.169 For whatever it was which they were confessing, I had no doubt that stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy deserved punishment. There were others of a like infatuation, but as being Roman citizens I directed them to be sent to the city. Presently the crime spreading, from being under prosecution, as is usual, several incidents happened. An anonymous delation was sent in to me, containing the names of many who say that they are not Christians, nor ever were. As at my instance they invoked the gods, and made supplication with frankincense and wine to your image, which I had ordered for that purpose to be brought, together with the statues of the gods, and as moreover they reviled Christ, none of which things, it is said, real Christians can be induced to do, I thought they might be let go. Others, being accused by a witness, admitted that they were Christians, and presently said that they had been, some three years before, some many years, and some even twenty, but were no longer. All venerated your image and the statues of the gods, and reviled Christ. But they alleged that the utmost of their fault or error was this: They were accustomed to meet before dawn on a stated day, and addressed themselves in a certain form to Christ as to a god, binding themselves by oath not to any crime, but not to commit theft, robbery, adultery, the breaking of their word, or the refusal to restore a deposit. After this they were wont to separate, and then reassemble to take a common and harmless meal. This, however, they had ceased to do from the publication of my edict forbidding, according to your command, private assemblies. I therefore thought it the more necessary to examine into the truth by putting to the torture two female slaves, who were said to be deaconesses among them. I found, however, nothing but a perverse and immoderate superstition, and so, adjourning the inquiry, I took refuge in consulting you. For the matter seemed to me worthy of consultation, specially on account of the number of those involved in danger. For many of every age, every rank, both sexes, have been already, and will be endangered, since the contagion of this superstition has spread not only through cities but through villages and country. And it seems capable of being arrested and corrected. At all events there is proof that the almost deserted temples have begun to be frequented, and the long intermitted rites renewed, and victims for sacrifice are found ready, whereof hitherto there were very few purchasers. Hence it is easy to form an opinion what a number of persons may be reclaimed if pardon be allowed.”170