The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

This capital point of the ever-living teaching office he further dwells on:

“The Faith received in the Church we guard in it, which being always from the Spirit of God, like an admirable deposit in a good vessel, is young itself, and makes young the vessel in which it is. For this office on the part of God225 is intrusted to the Church, as the breath of life was given to the body, in order that all the members receiving may be quickened, and in this is placed the communication of Christ, that is, the Holy Spirit, the earnest of incorruption, the confirmation of our faith, and the ladder by which we ascend to God. For, says he, in the Church God has placed Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, and all the remaining operation of the Spirit; of whom all those are not partakers who do not run to the Church, but deprive themselves of life by an evil opinion and a still worse conduct. For where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God: and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace: but the Spirit is Truth. Wherefore they who are not partakers of Him are neither nourished unto life from the breasts of the mother, nor receive that most pure fountain which proceeds from the Body of Christ, but dig out for themselves broken cisterns from earthly ditches, and from the filth drink foul water, avoiding the Faith of the Church lest they be brought back, and rejecting the Spirit that they may not be taught. So estranged from the truth they deservedly wallow in every error, tossed about by it, having different opinions on the same subjects at different times, and never holding one firm mind, choosing rather to be sophists of words than disciples of the truth; for they are not founded upon the one rock, but on the sand, which has in it a multitude of pebbles.”226

And he elsewhere contrasts the certainty within, and the uncertainty without, this teaching power:

“The said heretics, then, being blind to the truth, cannot help walking out of the track into one path after another, and hence it is that the vestiges of their doctrine are scattered about without any rule or sequence. Whereas the road of those who are of the Church goes round the whole world, because it possesses a firm tradition from the Apostles, and gives us to see that all have one and the same faith, where all enjoin one and the same God the Father, believe one disposition of the Son of God's incarnation, know the same gift of the Spirit, meditate on the same precepts, guard the same regimen of ecclesiastical rule, await the same advent of the Lord, and support the same salvation of the whole man, body and soul alike. Now the Church's preaching is true and firm, in whom one and the same way of salvation is shown through the whole world. For to her is intrusted the light of God; and hence the wisdom of God, by which He saves all men, ‘is sung at her entrance, acts with confidence in her streets, is proclaimed on her walls, and speaks ever in the gates of the city.’ For everywhere the Church proclaims the truth: she is the seven-branched candlestick bearing Christ's light.”227

It has been necessary to give at considerable length the very words of S. Irenæus, because they are stronger and more perspicuous than any summary of them can be, and because they exhibit a complete answer not to this particular heresy only, but to all heresy for ever. Such an answer, coming from one who stood at the second generation from S. John, is of the highest value. Thus he meets the gnostic principle that divine truth is acquired by the individual through some process of his own mind, which in this particular case is termed gnosis, but which may bear many other names, by appealing to an external standard, the Rule of Faith in the Church from the beginning, which by its unity points to its origin and lineage from the apostles and Christ. And this serves to bring out the central idea which rules his whole mind, that “where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace: but the Spirit is Truth.” The deposit of which he spoke is not a dead mass, or lump of ore, requiring only safe custody, but a living Spirit dwelling in the Church, the source within her of unity, truth, and grace, using her teaching office, which is set up in her episcopate, for the drawing out and propagation of the deposit from the double fountain of Tradition and Scripture, for these her teachers as such have a divine gift of truth.228 It is thus that he expands without altering the doctrine of his teacher Polycarp's fellow-disciple, “Where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”229 And from it he proceeds to what follows necessarily on such a conception, that this Church must have a visible point of unity. As then he appeals to the churches founded by Apostles as the principal centres of living tradition, so before yet one of these churches had fallen into possession of heretics,230 before yet there was any disagreement between them, he singles out one for its superior principate, on account of which it was necessary for every church to agree with it, which he grounds on its descent from S. Peter and S. Paul, giving every link in the chain of succession during the hundred and ten years which had elapsed between their martyrdom and his own episcopate. He sees an especial prerogative lodged in that church as the means of securing the whole Church's organic unity; and this prerogative is, that it is among churches what S. Peter and S. Paul were among Apostles;231 as the first general western council expressed it, “in it the Apostles sit daily, and their blood without intermission bears witness to the glory of God.”232

Thus the conception expressed by Irenæus, with the greatest emphasis and continual repetition, in order to refute heresy, is that all truth and grace are stored up in the one body of the Church; to which his doctrine of the Roman Primacy is as the keystone to the arch. For everything in his view depends on the unity, the intrinsic harmony, of the truth which he is describing as lodged in the episcopate: the means therefore of securing that unity are part of its conception. Accordingly, to see in its due force his statement that every church must agree with the Roman Church, it must not be severed from the context and taken by itself, but viewed in connexion with the argument as part of which it stands. If the Church is to speak one truth with one mouth, which is his main idea, she must have an organic provision for such a result, which he places in the necessary agreement of all churches with one: and this is his second idea, subsidiary to the first, and completing it.

Irenæus by birth and education represents in all this the witness of the Asiatic churches; as bishop of Lyons, the churches of Gaul.

A few years after Irenæus, Tertullian in a professed treatise against heresy lays down exactly the same principles. With him, too, the main idea is the possession of all truth and grace by the one Body which Christ formed and the Apostles established. This he thus exhibits:

“We must not appeal to the Scriptures, nor try the issue on points on which the victory is either none, or doubtful, or too little doubtful. For though the debate on the Scriptures should not so turn out as to place each party on an equal footing, the order of things requires that that question should be first proposed which is the only one now to be discussed, To whom does the Faith itself belong? Whose are the Scriptures? From whom and through whom, when and to whom, was that discipline by which men become Christians delivered? For wherever the truth of that which is the Christian discipline at once and faith be shown to be, there will be the truth of the Scriptures, of their exposition, and of all Christian traditions. Our Lord Jesus Christ (may He suffer me so to speak for the present), whoever He is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance God and Man, of whatever reward the promiser, Himself declared so long as He was on earth, whether to the people openly, or to the disciples apart, what He was, what He had been, what will of the Father He administered, what duty of man He laid down. Of whom He had attached to his own side twelve in chief, the destined teachers of the nations. One of these having fallen off from Him, He bade the other eleven, on his departure to the Father after the resurrection, go and teach the nations, who were to be baptised into the Father, into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost. The Apostles then forthwith, the meaning of their title being the Sent, assuming by lot Matthias as a twelfth into the place of Judas, by the authority of the prophecy in the psalm of David, when they had obtained the promised power of the Holy Ghost for miracles and utterance, first through Judea bore witness to the Faith in Christ Jesus, and established churches, thence proceeding into the world promulgated the same doctrine of the same Faith to the nations, and thereupon founded churches in every city, from which the other churches thenceforth borrowed the vine-layer of the Faith and the seeds of the doctrine, and are daily borrowing them that they may become churches. And for this cause they are themselves also counted apostolical, as being the offspring of apostolical churches. The whole kind must be classed under its original. And thus these churches so many and so great are that one first from the Apostles, whence they all spring. Thus all are the first, and all apostolical, while all being the one prove unity: whilst there is between them communication of peace, and the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality.233 And no other principle rules these rights than the one tradition of the same sacrament.”234

Here is the summing up of what Irenæus had said with the force, brevity, and incisiveness which characterise Tertullian. Further on he rejects any appeal on the part of heretics to scripture:

“If the truth be in our possession, as many as walk by the rule which the Church has handed down from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and Christ from God, the reasonableness of our proposition is manifest, which lays down that heretics are not to be allowed to enter an appeal to scriptures, since without scriptures we prove them to have no concern with scriptures. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, inasmuch as they do not hold from Christ what they follow by their own choice, and in consequence admit the name of heretics.235 Therefore not being Christians, they have no right to Christian writings. To whom we may well say, Who are you? when did you come? and whence? What are you, who are not mine, doing in my property? By what right dost thou, Marcion, cut down my wood? By what license dost thou, Valentinus, turn the course of my waters? By what power remove my landmarks? This is my possession: how are you sowing it and feeding on it at your pleasure? It is mine, I repeat: I had it of old; I had it first: I have the unquestioned title-deeds from the first proprietors. I am the heir of the Apostles. According to their will, according to their trust, according to the oath I took from them, I hold it. You, assuredly, they have ever disinherited and renounced, as aliens, as enemies. But why are heretics aliens and enemies to Apostles, save from difference of doctrine, which each at his own pleasure has either brought forward or received against Apostles?”236

Thus Tertullian adds the witness of the African church to that of the Asiatic and Gallic churches in Irenæus.

We have noted the great church of Alexandria as a most complete instance of the growth whereby from the mother see the hierarchy took possession of a land. But the principle of such growth was the ecclesiastical rule, and its strength the energy with which that rule was preserved. This rule was twofold: the rule of discipline, or outward regimen, what we now call a constitution; and the rule of Faith. What the church of Alexandria was in discipline has been seen above: and now just at this time we have in the first great teacher of this church, who has come down to us, the most decisive exhibition of this rule as a defence against this same gnostic heresy. “As,” says Clement, “a man like those under the enchantment of Circe should become a beast, so whoever has kicked against the tradition of the Church, and started aside into the opinions of human heresies, has ceased to be a man of God, and faithful to the Lord.” … “There are three states of the soul, ignorance, opinion, knowledge. Those who are in ignorance, are the Gentiles; those in knowledge, the true Church; those in opinion, the adherents of heresies.” … “We have learnt that bodily pleasure is one thing, which we give to the Gentiles; strife a second, which we adjudge to heresies; joy a third, which is the property of the Church.” Again, he speaks of those who “not using the divine words well, but perversely, neither enter themselves into the kingdom of heaven, nor suffer those whom they have deceived to attain the truth. They have not indeed the key to the entrance, but rather a false key, whereby they do not enter as we do through the Lord's tradition, drawing back the veil, but cutting out a side way, and secretly digging through the Church's wall, they transgress the truth, and initiate into rites of error the soul of the irreligious. For that they have made their human associations later than the Catholic Church, it needs not many words to show.” Then, after referring to the origin and propagation “of the Lord's teaching,”237 exactly after the mode of Irenæus and Tertullian, he concludes, “So it is clear from the most ancient and true Church, that these heresies coming in subsequently to it, and others still later, are innovations from it, as coins of adulterate stamp. From what has been said, then, I consider it manifest that the true Church, the really ancient Church, is one, in which are enrolled all who are just according to (God's) purpose. For inasmuch as there is one God and one Lord, therefore that which is most highly precious is praised for being alone, since it is an imitation of the one Principle. The one Church, then, which they try by force to cut up into many heresies, falls under the same category as the nature of the One. So then we assert that the ancient and Catholic Church is one alone in its foundation, in its idea, in its origin, and in its excellence, collecting by the will of the one God, through the one Lord, into the unity of one Faith, according to the peculiar covenants, or rather to the one covenant at different times, the preordained whom God predestined, having known before the foundation of the world that they would be just. But the excellence of the Church, as the principle of the whole construction, is in unity, surpassing all other things, and having nothing similar or equal to itself.”238

One other writer remains, the larger part of whose life falls within this period, greater in renown than either of the foregoing; and into whatever particular errors Origen may have fallen, he did not swerve from their doctrine as to the mode of meeting error itself. “Since,” says he, “there are many who think that they hold the tenets of Christ, while some of them hold different tenets from those who went before them, let the ecclesiastical preaching as handed down by the order of succession from the Apostles, and maintained even to the present time in the churches, be preserved: that alone is to be believed as truth which in nothing is discordant from the ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition.”239 And the ground for such a principle he has given elsewhere:

“The divine words assert that the whole Church of God is the Body of Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body as a whole are particular believers: since as the soul quickens and moves the body, whose nature it is not to have the movement of life from itself, so the Word moving to what is fitting, and working in, the whole body, the Church, moves likewise each member of the Church, who does nothing without the Word.”240

The four great writers, then, of this period, Irenæus, Tertullian, Clement, and Origen, none of them indeed from Rome, but representing the churches of Asia, Gaul, Africa, and Egypt, exactly concur in the principle by which they refuted heresy, the propagation, that is, of the rule of Faith in its purity and integrity, by those who possessed the succession of the Apostles and their office of teaching, in which lay a divine gift of the truth.

But to those who proceeded from this basis it was a further labour to set forth the true knowledge against the false. And we may trace the following results of heresy, quite unintended by itself, in its operation on the Church.

1. In the first place, S. Augustine continually remarks that the more accurate enucleation of true doctrine usually proceeded from the attacks of heresy; and this happened so continually that it seems to him a special instance of that law of divine Providence which educes good from evil. “If the truth,” says he, “had not lying adversaries, it would be examined with less carefulness,” and so “a question started by an opponent becomes to the disciple an occasion of learning.”241 And he observes that “we have found by experience that every heresy has brought into the Church its own questions, against which the divine Scripture was defended with greater care than if no such necessity had existed.”242 Thus the doctrine of the Trinity owed its perfect treatment to the Arian assault on it; the doctrine of penance to that of Novatian; the doctrine of baptism to those who wished to introduce the practice of rebaptising; even the unity of Christ was brought out with greater clearness by the attempt to rend it, and the doctrine of one Catholic Church diffused through the whole world cleared from its objectors by showing that the mixture of evil men in it does not prejudice the good.243 And he illustrates his meaning by a very picturesque image: “When heretics calumniate, the young of the flock are disturbed; in their disturbance they inquire; so the young lamb butts its mother's udder till it gets sufficient nutriment for its thirst.”244 For the doctors of the Church being called upon for an answer supply the truth which before was latent. And there is no more signal instance of the great writer's remark than himself; for the attacks of the most various heresies led him during forty years of unwearied mental activity into almost every question of theology.

The gnostic heresy, then, presents us with the first instance of a law which will run all through the Church's history. Peter, the first Apostle, meets and refutes Simon Magus, the first propagator of falsehood, who receives divine sacraments and then claims against the giver to be “the great power of God.” This fact is likewise the symbol of a long line of action, wherein it is part of the divine plan to make the perpetual restlessness of error subserve the complete exhibition of truth. The Gnostics denied the divine monarchy; at once mutilated and misinterpreted Scripture; claimed to themselves a secret tradition of truth. We owe to them in consequence the treatises of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement, and a written exhibition of the Church's divine order, succession, and unity, as well as a specific mention of the tie which held that unity together; and the mention of this tie at so early a period might otherwise have been wanting to us. But these three writers do but represent to us partially an universal result. The danger which from gnostic influence beset all the chief centres of ecclesiastical teaching marks the transition from the first state of simple faith to that of human learning, inquiry, and thought, turned upon the objects of Christian belief. The Gnostics had a merit which they little imagined for themselves. They formed the first doctors of post-apostolic times. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement are a great advance upon the more simple and external exhibition of Christianity which we find in the apologists. In them the Church is preparing to encounter the deepest questions moved against her by Greek philosophy. They are her first champions in that contest with Hellenic culture which was a real combat of mind, not a mere massacre of unresisting victims, and which lasted for five hundred years.

2. Secondly, when the gnostic attack began, the canon of the New Testament was still unfixed. Nothing can be more certain than that the Apostles did not set forth any official collection of their writings, and that no such collection existed shortly after their death. This fact most plainly shows that the Christian religion at their departure did not rest for its maintenance upon writings. Not only had our Lord written no word Himself, but He left no command to His Apostles to write. His command was to propagate His Gospel and to found His kingdom by oral teaching; and His promise was that the Holy Ghost should accompany, follow upon, and continue with, this their action. What we find is, that they did this, and that the writings which besides they left, being from the first kept and venerated by the several churches to which they were addressed, gradually became known through the whole body of the Church. With the lapse of time they would become more and more valuable. Moreover, when the Gnostics set themselves to interpolate and corrupt them, and to fabricate false writings, the need of a genuine collection became more and more urgent. It is from the three writers above mentioned, towards the end of the second century, that we learn that such a collection existed, in forming which these principles were followed: only to admit writings which tradition attested to spring from an Apostle or a witness of our Lord's life,245 among whom Paul was specially counted: secondly, only such writings as were attested by some church of apostolical foundation: and thirdly, only such writings the doctrine contained in which did not differ from the rule of faith orally handed down in the churches of apostolic origin, or in the one Catholic Church, excluding all such as were at variance with the doctrine hitherto received. Thus in the settlement of the Canon authority as well as tradition intervened; an authority which felt itself in secure possession of the same Holy Spirit who had inspired the Apostles, and of the same doctrine which they had taught.246

With the reception of a book into the Canon of Scripture was joined a belief in its inspiration, which rested on what was a part of oral tradition, that is, that the Apostles as well in their oral as in their written teaching had enjoyed the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is evident that such a tradition reposes, in the last instance, upon the authority of the Church.247

If by means of the gnostic attacks the Canon of the New Testament, as we now possess it, was not absolutely completed, it had at least advanced a very great way towards that completion, which we have finally attested as of long standing in a Council held at Carthage in 397.248

3. Another result of the gnostic attack was the setting forth the tradition of the Faith, seated and maintained in the apostolic churches, as the rule for interpreting Scripture. The Gnostics in two ways impeached this rule, by claiming a private tradition of their own, and by interpreting such scripture as they chose to acknowledge after their own pleasure. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement found an adequate answer to both errors by showing that the Faith which the Apostles had set forth in their writings could not contradict the Faith which they had established in the Church. These were two sources of the same doctrine; but it is by the permanent connection and interpenetration of the two that the truth is maintained; and that which holds both together, that which utters and propagates the truth which they jointly contain, is the Teaching office, the mouth of the Church. Hence the force of the appeal in Irenæus to the succession of the episcopate, and to the divine gift of truth which the Apostles had handed down therein with their teaching office. Hence Tertullian's exclusion of heretics from the right to possess scriptures which belong only to the Church. Hence Clement's description of the only true Gnostic, as “one who has grown old in the study of the Scriptures, while he preserves the apostolic and ecclesiastical standard of doctrine.”249 For neither in founding churches, nor in teaching orally, nor in writing, did the Apostles exhaust or resign the authority committed to them.250 The authority itself, which was the source of all this their action, after all that they had founded, taught, or written, continued complete and entire in them, and was transmitted on to their successors, for the maintenance of the work assigned to it. It is this perpetual living power which Irenæus so strongly testifies,251 to which he attaches the gift of the Spirit, not scripture, nor tradition, but that which carries both scripture and tradition through the ages, which is “as the breath of life to the body, which is always from the Spirit of God, wherein is placed the communication of Christ, which is always young, and makes young the vessel in which it is.”252 The writings which the Holy Ghost has inspired, and the tradition of the Faith which He has established, would be subject, the one to misinterpretation, the other to alteration and corruption, without that particular presence of His, in which consists the divine gift of truth, the teaching office, “the making disciples all nations.”