The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

Secondly, because God has created man for society, He has implanted in him an irrepressible instinct of communion with his brother men. This instinct it is which, under circumstances of every possible variety, results in one end, the State. The human commonwealth, whatever external shape it wear, whatever division of its powers it make, springs from this. In virtue of this original formation of man, that he is made to live together, and gregariously, not separately, the supreme power of government, the power of life and death, dwells in the community, and obedience to it has a divine sanction. Thus, the commonwealth has a variety of powers which the individual has not, and not only so, but it also has powers which do not arise from the mere aggregation of individuals, rather which belong to it as a community, as a whole, for instance, sovereignty in all the details of its exercise. But now the very object for which Christ became Incarnate was to constitute a divine commonwealth. He is the King: it is the tenderness of a God Incarnate that He calls and makes His Kingdom His Body. The powers, then, which belong to the earthly commonwealth belong, with the changes which the change of subject carries, to the Divine. They who have so great a reverence for human government, who respect in the nation an ultimate irresponsible power, ought, if they were consistent, when they acknowledge Christ as having come in the flesh, to acknowledge His government in the kingdom which He has set up. All that his country is to the patriot, the Church is to the Christian, but in so much higher a degree, as the object for which Christ came is above the needs and cares of this present life. Has the City of God, then, less claim upon Christians than the City of Romulus had upon Romans? Thus, in the natural duty of the citizen, as well as in the compound nature of man, is contained a reminder of the Christian's relation to the Church, and a picture and ensample of the Church's authority.

Thirdly, there is the analogy presented by the transmission of natural life105 through the one flesh of Adam to all his race. As the breath of natural life, once given to Adam, is continued on to all those sprung from his body, the power of the Creator never starting anew, but working in and through the trunk of human nature; so the supernatural life springing from our Lord, as the gift of His Incarnation, is breathed on the day of Pentecost into the whole Body of the Church to be communicated from that Body for ever. Christ is to the one exactly what Adam is to the other. As the Word of God, creating, joined to the inheritance of the flesh of Adam from generation to generation the communication of a spirit such as Adam's, by which double action we have the unity of race, so the Word of God, redeeming, when He had taken our flesh as the first-fruits of human nature, breathed forth from that flesh the communication of His Spirit to the Body of the Church, by which we belong to the race of the Incarnate God, and are become His family, and make His house. Thus that which the body of Adam is naturally, the Body of Christ is spiritually, and the descent of human nature in its unity a picture of the Holy Spirit's unity working through the Body which He has chosen. And this analogy is made the more striking by the statement so often repeated in the Greek Fathers, that with the natural life, as first given to Adam, was conjoined the gift of the Holy Ghost, forfeited afterwards by his sin, and withdrawn from him and his race, and now restored as the special gift of the Incarnate God.106 Thus the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost is a true and real counterpart of the creation of man in Eden; but they who share it are become kindred of God through His flesh, and by so sharing it together, they form that society which failed through Adam's sin. In the first creation, the Omnipotent Creator, in His bounty towards His favourite child, as foreseeing the assumption of that nature by Himself, attached to the gift of natural life the Spirit of sanctification; in the second, having assumed that nature, He gave through His own Body, first taken out of us, then crucified, now risen and exalted, the gift of the Spirit, Who, with all the endowments springing from Him, as the Inspirer of truth and charity, of unity and holiness, dwells in that Body for ever.

Thus in the union of the soul and body, in the constitution and authority of the human commonwealth, and in the race's natural unity, God holds before us three analogies, which each in some respect, and altogether very largely, illustrate His finished work, to which all natural productions of His providence are subordinate, His work of predilection, His work of unbounded love and sovereign magnificence, the creation of that which is at once the Body, the Kingdom, and the Family of the Incarnate Word.

From all that has gone before we gather this conclusion, that to become a Christian was to enter into a spiritual and physical107 unity with Christ by incorporation into that Body which He had created as the result of His becoming man. This it was for the individual to become a Christian. But Christianity itself was neither a mere system of belief, nor an outward order representing that belief; but “the great and glorious Body of Christ,”108 possessing and exhibiting the whole truth of doctrine, possessing and distributing all the means of grace, and presenting together to God those whom it had reconciled with Him, and made one, as the members of the Son by the indwelling of the Spirit.

Let us now trace the exact correspondence of the historical fact with the dogmatic statement just given.

The Acts of the Apostles exhibit to us the creation of the divine society by the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost. When they were all together, the sound as of a rushing mighty wind was heard, which filled the whole house wherein they were sitting, and tongues as of fire were seen, the tongues apportioned severally, but the fire one,109 which rested upon each, to kindle in all that eternal flame of charity which was to draw into one the hearts of men, the fire of which our Lord had spoken as being that which He was come to light upon the earth. Fire, whose inward nature it is at once to illuminate and warm, to purify and unite, was thus appropriately selected as the outward sign, both expressing and conveying the fourfold office of the Comforter, who came to be “no longer an occasional visitant, but a perpetual Consoler and eternal Inhabitant”110 of this His chosen home. As each in that assembly spoke in the one tongue of the country, he was heard by those present in the several tongues of all the nations of the earth represented at that great feast by the Jews who dwelt in them. And this was the mark, says S. Augustine,111 of the Church which was to be through all nations, and that no one should receive the Holy Spirit, save he who should be jointed into the framework of its unity; the mark which signified that the confusion of Babel, dividing the race into nationalities jealous of each other and perpetual enemies, was to be reversed and overcome by the one Power whose force to unite should be greater than the force of sin to sever; who should gather out of all nations the City of God, fed by the exulting and abounding river of His Spirit, the fountain proper and peculiar to the Church of Christ: the mark of that one truth,112 which conveys and harmonises and works out into all its details the whole revelation of God, and so is the utterance of one voice, the voice of Christ; speaking to all nations, not in the broken languages of their division, but in the Unity of His Person, carried by His Body. We have then in the one Fire the one inward power; in the one language its outward expression, in the assembly its receptacle, the House of God. This Body appears at once as formed and complete. In it sits and prays in her silent tenderness and unapproachable grandeur, as the Mother of the risen Lord and Head, and the Mother too of His race, the most beloved, the most lovable, and the most loving of creatures,113 whose great function in the Church for ever is to pray for the members of her Son, and to solicit the graces of His Spirit, which as the Mother of the sacred race she gains and distributes to all and each that belong to it, a Second Eve who corresponds to the Second Adam, as the First Eve in the divine plan corresponded to the First Adam. In it the Apostles, so long before chosen and designated by their Lord, and having already received from Him portions of their supernatural power on the day of His resurrection and during the forty days of His secret instruction, teach and govern; in it Peter at their head exercises that primacy, which, imaged out by a new name imposed at his first calling, promised at his great confession, and confirmed and conveyed on the sea-shore of the lake of Galilee, is exhibited with such grandeur, as he stood with the eleven and lifted up his voice, to describe to the men of Judea and the inhabitants of Jerusalem the nature of the event which they were witnessing, and the fulfilment of all the promises made through their prophets concerning that presence of God in the pouring out of His Spirit among men in the last days. That first discourse of his at the head of his brethren is the summary as it were of his perpetual office of teaching and promulgating the dispensation of the Christ in the midst of the Church. Its immediate effect was the aggregation of three thousand persons to the Body, who were told that this was the way in which they should receive remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost.114 The subsequent teaching of Peter and the Apostles, accompanied with miraculous cures, produced further aggregations among all ranks of the people. And the mode of salvation for all time is pointedly marked out by the words, “the Lord was adding to the Church day by day such as should be saved.”

We have only to repeat the process which is thus described as having taken place at Jerusalem in the first months after the day of Pentecost, by carrying it through the various cities of the Roman empire, Damascus, Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and between these all round the shores of the Mediterranean, to have a just picture of the mode in which the Divine Society grew and gathered into itself more and more of those who listened to the truth which it announced. What is important to dwell upon is that men uniformly became Christians in one way, by being received into the Divine Body, through which reception forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost were conveyed to them. From the whole account contained in the sacred Scriptures, and from all that remains to us of history, the great fact is established for us that Christianity came into the world at its first beginning a society created by the Holy Ghost, and held together and informed by Him as its soul, who is sent down upon it as the Promise of the Father from the Incarnate Son.

Further, it was in and by their reception into this society that men received all the fruits of the Incarnation; it was in it that all the gifts of the Holy Ghost dwelt, and through it that they were dispensed. By hearing the truth announced by its ministry penitence was engendered in the listeners, itself a preventing grace of the Holy Ghost, which gave inward effect to the outward word. As a working of this penitence they came, according to the instruction of the teachers, to be baptised. By and in the act of baptism they were received into the divine society, and made partakers of the full operation of the Spirit who dwelt in it. They had the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity infused into them, each according to the measure of the grace accorded to him, and to help the exercise of these virtues, that they might be borne as it were with the wings of a Spirit, the seven-fold gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear, were added to the soul. None of these virtues and gifts were possessed by believers as individuals; all of them came to men as members of her who was dowered with the blood of Christ,115 and whose bridal quality imparted to her children all which that blood had purchased. In her was stored up that great, inexhaustible source of abiding life, the Body and Blood of her Lord and Husband: in her the redeeming Word gave direct from His heart the vivifying stream. In her was the gift of teaching which illumined the understanding, and not only drew from without, as we have seen, those who should be saved from the ignorance of the pagan or the carnalism of the Jew, but which erected in the world the Chair of Truth,116 that is, the rule and standard of right belief, which was the continuance of the pentecostal gift, the illuminating and kindling fire, and the speaking tongue of unity, which the Body of Christ possesses for ever. It was by enjoying these endowments together in her bosom, by the actions of a life pervaded with these principles, by the joint possession and exercise of these supernatural powers which at once opened to the intellect a new field of knowledge and strengthened the will to acts above its inborn force, that men were Christians. And those who remembered what they had been as Jews, and what they had been as heathens, had no difficulty in recognising such a life as the effect of a divine grace, and no temptation to refer it to anything which belonged to them as individuals, since its commencement coincided with their entrance into a divine society, its growth depended on their membership in that Body. Their union with Christ in this Body was something direct and palpable; to them the several degrees of that one ministry constituted by Christ were the joints and articulations of the structure; the teaching thence proceeding as it were the current of life; by their being parts of the structure they were saved from the confusion of errors which swept freely round them without, through the craft of men and the seduction of deceit.117 “Possessing the truth in charity,” or “sanctified in the truth,” was the expression of that divine life in common whereby they were to grow up into one, and be called by the name of their Lord,118 because inseparably united to Him by the nerves and ligaments of one Body.

And this makes manifest to us how Christians, while scattered through every city of the great Roman empire, formed one Body. It was by virtue of the unity of spiritual jurisdiction which directed the whole ministry of that Body. The command of our Lord was, “Go, and make disciples all nations,” “proclaim the gospel to every creature;” the Body assembled and empowered at Pentecost was to carry out this command. How did it do so? The teaching and ruling power was distributed through a ministry wherein those of a particular order were equal as holding that order: bishops as bishops were equal, priests as priests. But not the less by the distribution of the places where the ministry was to be fulfilled, subordination was maintained through the whole Body. Had it been otherwise, as each Bishop had the completeness of the priesthood in himself, his sphere of action, that is, his diocese, would have constituted a distinct body. But no such thing was ever imagined in the Church of those first centuries. The Bishops were, on the contrary, joint possessors of one power, only to be exercised in unity.119 The unity was provided for in the Apostolic body by the creation of the Primacy, without which the Body never acted, the Primate being designated before the Body was made; the Primate invested with his functions on the sea-shore of the lake of Galilee before the Ascension, the Body on which he was to exercise them animated on the day of Pentecost. Spiritual jurisdiction being nothing else but the grant to exercise all spiritual powers, two jurisdictions would make two bodies; a thousand would make a thousand; so that the more the Church grew, the more it would be divided, were it not that the root of all its powers in their exercise is one. A spiritual kingdom is absolutely impossible without this unity of jurisdiction; and in virtue of it the whole Church, from north to south and from east to west, was and is one Body in its teaching and its rule; that is, in the administration of all those gifts which were bestowed at the day of Pentecost, and which have never ceased to be exercised from that day to this, and which shall never cease to the end of the world. Thus as it is through the Body that men are made and kept Christians, so the Primacy is that principle of cohesion and subordination without which the Body cannot exist.

Let us carry on the history of the divine Body to another point. How was the Truth transmitted in it?

Peter and his brethren having received through the great forty days from our Lord the complement of His teaching concerning His kingdom, were empowered by the descent of the Holy Ghost to commence its propagation. And for this work they use the same instrument which their Lord had used – the living spoken word. They labour together for some time; after several years they divide the world between them; but in both these periods they found communities and supply them with everything needful for complete organisation and future increase and progress by their spoken teaching, which therefore contained the whole deposit of the truth. The gospel of which S. Paul so repeatedly speaks was that which he communicated by word of mouth, and S. Peter and all the rest did the same. Communities were planted by Apostolic zeal over a great part of the Roman empire before as yet anything was written by their founders. The whole administration of the sacraments, and the order and matter of the divine service, were arranged by this personal teaching of the living word. All that concerned the Person of our Lord, all that He had taught, done, and suffered, was so communicated. One reason of this is plain. It was not the bare gospel, but the “gospel of the kingdom,”120 which was to be proclaimed to all nations. It was not a naked intellectual truth of which they were the bearers, but a kingdom which they were to build. They were not disseminating a sect of philosophy, but founding an empire. They were a King's heralds, and every king has a realm. Thus the Kingdom of the Word was proclaimed by the word spoken through many voices, but as the outpouring of one Spirit given on the day of Pentecost. This whole body of their teaching, therefore, was one Tradition; that is, a delivery over of the truth to them by inspiration of the Spirit, as the Truth who had become incarnate taught it, and a delivery of this truth from them to the communities which they set up. The first communication of the Christian faith to the individual was never made by writing. How, said the Apostle, should they invoke one whom they did not believe, but how believe in one of whom they had not heard, and how hear without a preacher, and how preach except they were sent?121 It did not occur to him to ask how should they believe in one of whom they had not read. On the contrary, he gives in these few words the whole order of the truth's transmission. He conceived not heralds without a commission, any more than faith without trust in the word of the heralds. But here is the great sending, at and from the day of Pentecost, the root of perpetual mission from which the heralds derive their commission; they are sent, they proclaim, they are heard, they are believed, and this faith opens the door for the admission of subjects into the kingdom, according to the law which they proclaim. Thus are described to us at some length the acts of that wise master-builder whose words we have just cited; but though he laboured more abundantly than all, all acted after the same manner. The Church was founded by personal teaching, of which the living word was the instrument, and the whole truth which was thus communicated was termed the Tradition122 or Delivery.

We now come to the second step. Before the Apostles were taken to their reward, the same Spirit, who had instructed them that they were to found the spiritual kingdom by means of the living word, inspired them to commit to writing a portion of that great tradition which they had already taught by mouth.123 But they never delivered these writings to men not already Christians. One evangelist expressly says that he drew up a narrative in order that his disciple might know the certainty of what he had already been instructed in catechetically, that is, that by that great system of oral teaching by question and answer, that grounding of the truth in the memory, intellect, and will, which Christianity had inaugurated, and that he wrote after the pattern of those who had delivered over the word to us, having been its original eyewitnesses and servants.124 A second evangelist declares that what he was putting into writing was a very small portion indeed of what his Lord had done.125 Another very remarkable thing is that the Apostles are not recorded to have put together what they had written themselves, or others by their direction, so as to make it one whole; far less that they ever declared what was so written to contain the complete tradition of what they had received. But what they did was to leave these writings in the hands of particular churches, having in every case addressed them to those who were already instructed as Christians, and not having left among them any document whatever intended to impart the Christian faith to those who were ignorant of it. These writings were in the strictest sense Scriptures of the Church, which sometimes stated, and always in their form and construction showed that they were adapted to those who had been taught the Christian faith by word of mouth. Moreover, it was left to the Church to gather them together, and make them into one book, which thenceforward should be the Book; it was left to the Church to determine which were to be received as inspired writings, and in accordance with the teaching already diffused in her, and which were not. And this collection of the several writings from the particular Churches to which they were addressed into one mass would seem not to have taken place until at least three or four generations after the whole order and institutions of the Church had been established by oral teaching, which filled as with a flood the whole Christian people. Then, finally, the authority of the Church alone established the canon of Scripture, and separated it off from all other writings.

Now as the planting of the Church by oral teaching was a direction of the Holy Spirit, from whom the whole work of mission proceeded, so all these particulars concerning the degree in which writing was to be employed, and the manner in which that writing was to be attested, and the persons to whom it was to be addressed, were a direction of the same Spirit. That a spiritual kingdom could not have been established save by oral teaching Christians may infer with certainty, because, in fact, that method was pursued. That a portion of the great Tradition should be committed to writing they may for the same reason infer to have been necessary for the maintenance of the truth, because it was so done. That these writings were the property of the Church – her Scriptures – may be inferred with no less truth, because they were addressed only to her children, and presupposed a system of instruction already received by those who were to read them. And, finally, that they were to be understood in their right sense only by the aid of the Spirit who dictated them, is, their being given in this manner once admitted, an inference of just reasoning. It is plain, when once these things are stated, that these writings were not intended to stand alone, as ordinary books, and to be understood by themselves. Not only were they part of a great body of teaching, but a portion of a great institution, to which they incessantly alluded and bore witness. They would speak very differently to those without and to those within the kingdom of which they were documents. They would remind the instructed at every turn of doctrines which they had been taught, corroborating these and themselves explained by them. Some of them indeed were letters, and we all know how different is the meaning of letters to those who know the writer and his allusions, and to those who do not. A word of reference in these documents to a great practice of Christian life would kindle into a flame the affection of those who possessed that practice, while it would pass as a dead letter to those who had it not.126 Such word, therefore, would be absolute proof of the practice to the former, while it would seem vague and indeterminate and no proof at all to the latter.