No More Learning



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140
Theodosius
(378—380
1
of the greatest disaster that had ever yet befallen Rome. When the
Huns came up from the Asiatic steppes, the Goths sought refuge beneath
the shelter of the Roman eagles. But the greed and peculations of
Roman officials drove them to revolt: and when Valens himself with
the whole army of the East encountered them near Hadrianople
(9 Aug. 378) his defeat was overwhelming. Full two-thirds of the
Roman army perished in the slaughter, and the emperor himself was
never heard of more. The blow was crushing : for the first time since
the days of Gallienus, the Empire could place no army in the field.
The care of the whole world now rested on the Western emperor,
Gratian the son of Valentinian, a youth of nineteen. Gratian was a
zealous Christian, and as a Western he held the Nicene faith. His
first step was to proclaim religious liberty in the East, except for
Anomoeans and Photinians—a small sect supposed to have pushed the
doctrine of Marcellus too far. As toleration was still the general law of
the Empire (though Valens might have exiled individual bishops) the
gain of the rescript fell almost entirely to the Nicenes. The exiles
found little difficulty in resuming the government of their flocks, or
even in sending missions to the few places where the Arians were strong,
like that undertaken by Gregory of Nazianzus to Constantinople. The
Semiarians were divided. Numbers of them joined the Nicenes, while
the rest took an independent position. Thus the Homoean power in
the provinces collapsed of itself, and almost without a struggle, before it
was touched by persecution.
Gratian's next step was to share his heavy burden with a colleague,
The new emperor came from the far West of Cauca near Segovia, and to
him was entrusted the Gothic war, and with it the government of
all the provinces east of Sirmium. Theodosius was therefore a Western
and a Nicene, with a full measure of Spanish courage and intolerance.
The war was not very dangerous, for the Goths could do nothing with
their victory, and Theodosius was able to deal with the Church long
before it ended. A dangerous illness early in 380 led to his baptism by
Acholius of Thessalonica ; and this was the natural signal for a more
decided policy. A law dated 27 Feb. 380 commanded all men to follow
the Nicene doctrine, “committed by the apostle Peter to the Romans,
and now professed by Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alexandria,” and
threatened heretics with temporal punishment. In this he seems to
abandon Constantine's test of orthodoxy by subscription to a creed,
returning to Aurelian's requirement of communion with the chief bishops
of Christendom. But the mention of St Peter and the choice both of
Rome and Alexandria, are enough to shew that he was still a stranger
to the state of parties in the East.
Theodosius made his formal entry into Constantinople 24 Nov. 380,
and at once required the bishop either to accept the Nicene faith or to
leave the city. Demophilus honourably refused to give up his heresy,


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381]
Council of Constantinople
141
and adjourned his services to the suburbs. But the mob of Constan-
tinople was Arian, and their stormy demonstrations when the cathedral
of the Twelve Apostles was given up to Gregory of Nazianzus made
Theodosius waver. Not for long. A second edict in Jan. 381 forbade
all heretical assemblies inside cities, and ordered the churches everywhere
to be given up to the Nicenes. Thus was Arianism put down as it had
been set up, by the civil power. Nothing remained but to clear away
the wrecks of the contest.
Once more an imperial summons went forth for a council of the
Eastern bishops to meet at Constantinople in May 381. It was a
sombre gathering: even the conquerors can have had no more hopeful
feeling than that of satisfaction to see the end of the long contest. Only
150 bishops were present—none from the west of Thessalonica. The
Semiarians however mustered 36, under Eleusius of Cyzicus Meletius
of Antioch presided, and the Egyptians were not invited to the earlier
sittings, or at least were not present. Theodosius was no longer neutral
as between the old and new Nicenes. After ratifying the choice of
Gregory of Nazianzus as bishop of Constantinople, the next move was
to sound the Semiarians. They were still a strong party beyond the
Bosphorus, so that their friendship was important. But Eleusius was
not to be tempted. However he might oppose the Anomoeans, he could
not forgive the Nicenes their doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Those of the
Semiarians who were willing to join the Nicenes had already done so,
and the rest were obstinate. They withdrew from the council and gave
up
their churches like the Arians.
Whatever jealousies might divide the conquerors, the contest with
Arianism was now at an end. Pontus and Syria were still divided from
Rome and Egypt on the question of Meletius, and there were germs
of future trouble in the disposition of Alexandria to look to Rome
for help against the upstart see of Constantinople. But against Arianism
the council was united. Its first canon is a solemn ratification of the
Nicene creed in its original form, with an anathema against all the
Arianizing parties. It only remained for the emperor to complete the
work of the council. An edict in the middle of July forbade Arians
of all sorts to build churches even outside cities; and at the end of the
month Theodosius issued an amended definition of orthodoxy. The
true faith was henceforth to be guarded by the demand of communion,
no longer with Rome and Alexandria, but with Constantinople,
Alexandria, and the chief sees of the East: and the choice of cities
is significant. A small place like Nyssa might be included for the
personal eminence of its bishop; but the omission of Hadrianople,
Perinthus, Ephesus and Nicomedia shews the determination to leave
a clear field for the supremacy of Constantinople.
So far as numbers went, the cause of Arianism was not hopeless even
yet. It was fairly strong in Asia, could raise dangerous riots in Con-
CH, V.


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142
Fall of Arianism
(383
stantinople, and had on its side the Western empress-mother Justina.
But its fate was only a question of time. Its cold logic generated no
fiery enthusiasm, its recent origin allowed no venerable traditions to
grow up round it, and its imperial claims cut it off from any appeal
to provincial feeling. So when the last overtures of Theodosius fell
through in 383, Arianism soon ceased to be a religion in the civilised
world. Such existence as it kept up for the next three hundred years
was due to its barbarian converts.


## p. 143 (#173) ############################################

143
CHAPTER VI.
THE ORGANISATION OF THE CHURCH.
*
CHRISTIAN organisation was the means of expressing that which is
behind and beneath all its details, namely the underlying and pene-
trating consciousness of the oneness of the Christian body and the
Christian life. It was the process by which the separate charismata could
be developed and differentiated, while at the same time the unity of the
whole was safeguarded. Looked at in this light, the history of organisa-
tion in the Christian Church is, in its main stream, the history of two
processes, partly successive, partly simultaneous, but always closely
related : the process by which the individual communities became
complete in themselves, sufficient for their own needs, microcosms of the
Church at large; and the process by which the communities thus organised
as units proceeded to combine in an always more formal and more
extensive federation. But these two processes were not merely successive.
Just as there never had been a time when the separate communities, before
they became fully organised, were devoid of outside ministration or
supervision, so there never came a period when the fully organised
communities lived only to themselves : unity was preserved by informal
means, till the growing size and number of the communities, and the
increasing complexity of circumstances, made informal means inadequate
and further formal organisation imperative. And again, though the
formal self-expression of the individual community necessarily preceded
the formal self-expression of the federation of communities, yet the
history of organisation within the single community does not come to an
abrupt end as soon as the community becomes complete in itself: all
functions essential for the Christian life are henceforth there, but as
numbers increase and needs and duties multiply, the superabundant
vitality of the organism shews itself in the differentiation of new, though
always subordinate, functions. And therefore, side by side with the
well-known history of the federation of the Christian churches, it will be
our business to trace also the obscurer and less recognised, but perhaps
not less important, processes which were going on, simultaneously with
the larger processes of federation, in the individual churches and especially
in those of them which were most influential as models to the rest.
:
CH, .


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144
The Missionary Ministry
רי
(A) In the early days of Christianity the first beginnings of a new
community were of a very simple kind : indeed the local organisation
had at first no need to be anything but rudimentary, just because the
community was never thought of as complete in itself apart from its
apostolic founder or other representatives of the missionary ministry.
“Presbyters ” and “ deacons" no doubt existed in these communities from
the first : “presbyters” were ordained for each church as it was founded
on St Paul's first missionary journey ; " bishops and deacons” constitute,
together with the “ holy people," the church of Philippi. These purely
local officials were naturally chosen from among the first converts
in each district, and to them were naturally assigned the duties of
providing for the permanently recurring needs of Christian life,
especially the sacraments of Baptism-St Paul indicates that baptism
was not normally the work of an apostle—and the Eucharist. But the
evidence of the earlier epistles of St Paul is decisive as to the small
relative importance which this local ministry enjoyed : the true ministry
of the first generation was the ordered hierarchy, “ first apostles, secondly
prophets, thirdly teachers,” of which the apostle speaks with such emphasis
in his first epistle to the Corinthians. Next in due order after the
ranks of the primary ministry came the gifts of miracles—“then powers,
then gifts of healing" and only after these, wrapped up in the obscure
designation of "helps and governments," can we find room for the local
service of presbyters and deacons. Even without the definite evidence of
the Acts and the Pastoral Epistles and St Clement of Rome it would
be already clear enough that the powers of the local ministry were
narrowly limited, and that to the higher ministry, the exercise of
whose gifts was not confined to any one community but was independent
of place altogether, belonged not only the general right of supervision
and ultimate authority over local churches, but also in particular the
imparting of the gift of the Spirit, whether in what we call Confirmation
or in what we call Ordination. In effect the Church of the first
age may almost be said to have consisted of a laity grouped in local
communities, and a ministry that moved about from place to place to do
the work of missionaries to the heathen and of preachers and teachers to
the converts. Most of St Paul's epistles to churches are addressed to
the community, the holy people, the brethren, without any hint in the
title of the existence of a local clergy: the apostle and the Christian
congregation are the two factors of primary account. The Didache
shews us how right down to the end of the first century, in remoter
districts, the communities depended on the services of wandering apostles,
or of prophets and teachers, sometimes wandering sometimes settled, and
how they held by comparison in very light esteem their presbyters and
deacons. Even a well-established church, like that of Corinth, with half
a century of history behind it, was able, however unreasonably, to refuse
to recognise in its local ministry any right of tenure other than the will


## p. 145 (#175) ############################################

The Local Church
145
of the community: and when the Roman church intervened to point out
the gravity of the blow thus struck at the principle of Christian order, it
was still the community of Rome which addressed the community of
Corinth. And this custom of writing in the name, or to the address, of
the community continued, a relic of an earlier age, well into the days of
the strictest monarchical episcopacy: it was not so much the bishop's
headship of the community as the multiplication of the clergy which (as
we shall see) made the real gap between the bishop and his people,
Most of our documents then of the first century shew us the local
churches neither self-sufficient nor self-contained, but dependent for all
special ministries upon the visits of the superior officers of the Church.
On the other hand most of our documents of the second century-in its
earlier years the Ignatian letters, and an ever-increasing bulk of evidence
as the century goes on-shew us the local churches complete in them-
selves, with an officer at the head of each who concentrates in his hands
both the powers of the local ministers and those also which had at first
been reserved exclusively for the “ general ” ministry, but who is himself
as strictly limited in the extent of his jurisdiction to a single church as
were the humbler presbyter-bishops from whom he derived his name.
When we have explained how the supreme powers of the general ministry
were made to devolve on an individual who belonged to the local
ministry, we have explained the origin of episcopacy.
With that
problem of explanation we have not here to deal in detail: we have only
to recognise the result and its importance, when in and with the bishop
the local church sufficed in itself for the extraordinary as well as for the
ordinary functions of church government and Christian life.
In those early days of episcopacy, among the diminutive groups of
Christian “strangers and sojourners” which were dotted over the pagan
world of the second century, we must conceive of a quite special
closeness of relation between a bishop and his people. Regularly in all
cities—and it was in the provinces where city life was most developed
that the Church made quickest progress-a bishop is found at the head
of the community of Christians: and his intimacy with his people was
in those primitive days unhindered by the interposition of any hierarchy
of functionaries or attendants. His flock was small enough for him to
carry out to the letter the pastoral metaphor, and to “call his sbeep by
name. ” If the consent of the Christian people had always been, as Clement
of Rome tells us, a necessary preliminary to the ordination of Christian
ministers, in the case of the appointment of their bishop the people did
not consent merely, they elected: not till the fourth century did the
clergy begin to acquire first a separate and ultimately a predominant share
in the process of choice. Even though the "angel of the church” in the
Apocalypse may not have been, in the mind of the seer, at all intended
to refer to the bishop, yet this quasi-identification of the community
with its representative exactly expresses the ideal of second century
3
C. MED. H. VOL. I. CH. VI.
10


## p. 146 (#176) ############################################

146
Bishop and People
)
you,"
writers. “The whole number of you I welcome in God's Name in the
person of Onesimus," “ in Polybius I beheld the whole multitude of
writes Ignatius to the Christians of Ephesus and Tralles : “ be subject to
the bishop and to one another” is his injunction to the Magnesians: the
power of Christian worship is in “the prayer of the bishop and the whole
church. ” So too to Justin Martyr, “ the brethren as we are called " and
“the president ” are the essential figures in the portraiture of the Christian
society. If it is true that in the first century the apostle-founder and
the community as founded by him are the two outstanding elements of
Christian organisation, it is no less true that in the second century the
twin ideas of bishop and people attain a prominence which throws all}
subordinate distinctions into the background. Even as late as the middle
of the third century we see Cyprian—who is quite misunderstood if he is
looked on only as an innovator in the sphere of organisation—maintaining
and emphasizing at every turn the intimate union, in normal church life,
of bishop and laity, while he also recognises the duty of the laity, in
abnormal circumstances, to separate from the communion of the bishop
who had proved himself unworthy of their choice: “it is the people in the
first place which has the power both of electing worthy bishops and of
spurning the unworthy. ” Similar witness for the East is borne in the
same century by the Didascalia Apostolorum, where bishop and laity
are addressed in turn, and their mutual relations are almost the main
theme of the writer.
But this personal relation of the bishop to his flock, which was the
Ideal of church administrators and thinkers from Ignatius to Cyprian,
could only find effective realisation in a relatively small community: the
very success of the Christian propaganda, and the consequent increase
everywhere of the numbers of the Christian people, made some further
development of organisation imperative. Especially during the long
peace between Severus and Decius (211-249) did recruits pour in.
In the larger towns at least there could be now no question of personal
acquaintance between the president of the community and all its members.
No doubt it might have been possible to preserve the old intimacy at the
cost of unity, and to create a bishop for each congregation. But the sense
of civic unity was an asset of which Christians instinctively availed them-
selves in the service of religion. If practical convenience sometimes
dictated the appointment of bishops in villages, these xwpeTiO KOTOL were
only common in districts where, as in Cappadocia, cities were few, and
where consequently the extent of the territory of each city was unduly
large for supervision by the single bishop of the mois
. Normally,
even in days before there was any idea of the formal demarcation of
territorial jurisdiction, the tódis or civitas with all its dependent lands
was the natural spbere of the individual bishop's authority. And within
the walls of the city it was never so much as conceivable that the ecclesia
should be divided. When the Council of Nicaea was making provision


## p. 147 (#177) ############################################

Episcopacy and Unity
147
for the reinstatement in clerical rank of Novatianist clergy willing to be
reconciled with the Church, the arrangement was subject always to the
maintenance of the principle that there should not be “two bishops
in the city. ” The very rivalries between different claimants of one
episcopal throne serve to bring out the same result-witness the earliest
instances of pope and anti-pope of which we have documentary know-
ledge, those of Cornelius and Novatian in 251, and of Liberius and Felix
about 357. In the latter case Constantius, with a politician's eye to
compromise, recommended the joint recognition of both claimants: but
the Roman people—Theodoret, to whose History we owe the details,
is careful to note that he has recorded the very language used—saluted
the reading of the rescript in the circus with the mocking cry that two
leaders would do very well for the factions at the games, but that there
could be only “one God, one Christ, one bishop. Exactly the same
reason had been given a century earlier in almost the same words, by
the Roman confessors when writing to Cyprian, for their abandonment
of Novatian and adhesion to Cornelius : “ we are not unaware that there
is one God, and one Christ the Lord whom we have confessed, one Holy
Spirit, and therefore only one true bishop in the communion of the
Catholic Church. ” Both in East and West, in the largest cities as well
as in the smallest, the society of the faithful was conceived of as an
indivisible unit; and its oneness was expressed in the person of its one
bishop. The mapouia of Christians in any locality was not like a hive
of bees, which, when numbers multiplied inconveniently, could throw off
a part of the whole, to be henceforward a complete and independent
organism under separate control. The necessity for new organisation
had to be met in some way which would preserve at all costs the oneness
of the body and its head.
It followed that the work and duties which the individual bishop
could no longer perform in person must be shared with, or deputed to,
subordinate officials. New offices came into being in
the coursel
especially of the third century, and the growth of this clerus or clergy,
and its gradual acquisition during the fourth and fifth centuries of the
character of a hierarchy nicely ordered in steps and degrees, is a featurel
of ecclesiastical history of which the importance has not always been
adequately realised.
Of such a hierarchy the germs had no doubt existed from the
beginning; and indeed presbyters and deacons were, as we have seen,
older component parts of the local communities than were the bishops
themselves. In the Ignatian theory bishop, presbyters and deacons are
the three universal elements of organisation,“ without which nothing can
be called a church” (ad Trall. 3). And the distinction between the two
subordinate orders, in their original scope and intention, was just the
distinction between the two sides of clerical office which in the bishop
were in some sort combined, the spiritual and the administrative :
CH 1.
10-2


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148
Presbyters
9
were
presbyters were the associates of the bishop in his spiritual character,
deacons in his administrative functions.
Our earliest documents define the work of presbyters by no language
more commonly than by that which expresses the “pastoral” relation of
a shepherd to his flock : “the flock in which the Holy Ghost hath set
you as overseers to shepherd the Church of God,” “ the presbyters I
exhort. . . shepherd the flock of God among you. . . not as lords of the
ground but as examples of the flock, until the Great Shepherd shall
appear. ” But in proportion as the local organisation became episcopal,
the pastoral idea, and even the name of mounv, concentrated itself upon
lithe bishop. To Ignatius the distinctive function of the presbyters is
rather that of a council, gathered round the bishop as the apostles were
gathered round Christ-an idea not unconnected perhaps with the
position of the presbyters in the Christian assembly; for there is no
reason to doubt that primitive tradition underlies the arrangement of
the early Christian basilicas, where the bishop's chair stood in the centre
of the apse behind the altar, and the consessus presbyterorum extended
right and left in a semicircle, as represented in the Apocalypse. So
too in the Didascalia Apostolorum (Syriac and Latin) the one definite
function allotted to presbyters is that of “consilium et curia ecclesiae. "
Besides pastoral duties, however, the Pauline epistles bring presbyters
into definite relation also with the work of teaching. If “teachers
originally one grade of the general ministry, they would naturally have
settled down in the communities earlier than the itinerant apostles or
prophets : “pastors and teachers ” are already closely connected in the
epistle to the Ephesians: and the first epistle to Timothy shews
speaking and teaching,” λόγος και διδασκαλία, was
function to which some at least of the presbyters might aspire. It is
probable enough that the second-century bishop shared this, as all
other functions of the presbyterate: St Polycarp is described by his
flock as an “apostolic and prophetic teacher": but, as differentiation
progressed, teaching was one of the duties less easily retained in the
bishop's hands, and our third-century authorities are full of references
to the class known in Greek as οι πρεσβύτεροι και διδάσκαλοι, in Latin
as presbyteri doctores.
If presbyters were thus the bishop's counsellors and advisers where
counsel was needed, his colleagues in the rites of Christian worship, his
assistants and representatives in pastoral and teaching duties, the proto-
types of the diaconate are to be found in the Seven of the Acts,
who were appointed to disburden the apostles of the work of poor
relief and charity and to set them free for their more spiritual duties of
“prayer and ministering of the Word. ” Quite similarly in the Suíxovou
or “servants” of the local church, the bishop found ready to hand
a personal staff of clerks and secretaries. The Christian Church in
one not unimportant aspect was a gigantic friendly society: and the
us that "
à


## p. 149 (#179) ############################################

Deacons and Readers
149
( deacons were the relieving officers who, under the direction of the
επίσκοπος
éTiO Kotos or “overseer,” sought out the local members of the society in
their homes, and dispensed to those who were in permanent or temporary
need the contributions of their more fortunate brethren. From their
district-visiting the deacons would derive an intimate knowledge of the
circumstances and characters of individual Christians, and of the way in
which each was living up to his profession: by a very natural develop-
ment it became part of their recognised duties, as we learn from the
Didascalia, to report to the bishop cases calling for the exercise of the
penitential discipline of the Church. Throughout all the early centuries
the closeness of their personal relation with the bishop remains : but
what had been spread over the whole diaconate tends to be concentrated
on an individual, when the office of archdeacon-oculus episcopi, according
to a favourite metaphor-begins to emerge : the earliest instances of
the actual title are c. 370-380, in Optatus (of Caecilian of Carthage)
and in the Gesta inter Liberium et Felicem (of Felix of Rome).
Originally, as it would seem, deacons were not ministers of worship
4
at all: the earliest subordinate office in the liturgy was that of reader.
We need not suppose that ó åvay. voorw in the New Testament means
a distinct official in the Church any more than in the Synagogue: but
the same phrase in Justin's Apology has more of a formal sound, and by
the end of the second century the first of the minor orders had obviously
an established place in church usage. While Ignatius names only
bishop, presbyters and deacons, Tertullian, contrasting the stable orders
of Catholics with the unsettled arrangements of heretics, speaks of bishop,
presbyter, deacon and reader: “ alius hodie episcopus, cras alius ; hodie
diaconus qui cras lector ; hodie presbyter qui cras laicus. ” And in remote
churches or backwardly organised provinces the same four orders were
the minimum recognised long after Tertullian, as in the so-called
A postolic Church Order (third century, perhaps for Egypt) and in the
canons of the Council of Sardica (343, for the Balkan peninsula : the
canon is proposed by the Spaniard Hosius of Cordova).
But the process of transformation by which the diaconate became
more and more a spiritual office began early, and one of its results was to
degrade the readership by ousting it from its proper functions. It was
as attendants on the bishop that the deacons, we may well suppose, were
deputed from the first to take the Eucharist, over which the bishop had
offered the prayers and thanksgivings of the Church, to the absent sick.
In Rome, when Justin wrote, soon after 150, they were already dis-
tributing the consecrated “bread and wine and water” in the Christian
assembly. Not very much later the reading of the Gospel began
to be assigned to them: Cyprian is the last writer to connect the
Gospel still with the reader; by the end of the third century it was
a constant function of the deacon, and the reader had sunk pro-
portionately in rank and dignity.
CH, P.


## p. 150 (#180) ############################################

150
Minor Orders
But this development of the diaconate is only part of a much larger
movement. (In the greater churches at least an elaborate differentiation
of functions and functionaries was in course of process during the third
century. Under the pressure of circumstances, and the accumulation of
new duties which the increasing size and importance of the Christian
communities thrust upon the bishop, much which he had hitherto done
for himself, and which long remained his in theory, came in practice
to be done for him by the higher clergy. As they moved up to take his
place, they in turn left duties to be provided for: as they drew more
and more to the spiritual side of their work, they left the more secular
duties to new officials in their place. Evidence for Carthage and Rome
in the middle of the third century shews us that, besides the principal
orders of bishop, presbyters and deacons, a large community would now
complete its clerus by two additional pairs of officers, subdeacon and
acolyte, exorcist and reader, making seven altogether. The church of
Carthage, we learn from the Cyprianic correspondence, had exorcists and
readers, apparently at the bottom of the clergy (ep. xxiii. “ praesente de
clero et exorcista et lectore (the words are no doubt ironical] Lucianus
scripsit "); and it had also hypodiaconi and acoliti, who served as the
bearers of letters or gifts from the bishop to his correspondents.
Subdeacons and acolytes were now in fact what deacons had earlier been,
the personal and secretarial staff of the bishop, while exorcists and
readers were the subordinate members of the liturgical ranks. The
combination of all these various offices into a single definitely graduated
hierarchy was the work of the fourth century: but it is at least
adumbrated in the enumeration of the Roman clerus addressed by
Pope Cornelius, Cyprian's contemporary, to Fabius of Antioch in 251.
Besides the bishop, there were at Rome forty-six presbyters, seven
deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes; of exorcists and readers,
together with doorkeepers, there were fifty-two; of widows and afflicted
over fifteen hundred and all this great multitude
: “
necessary
in the church. "
Promotion from one rank of the ministry to another was of course
no new thing. In particular the rise from the diaconate to the
presbyterate, from the more secular to the more spiritual office, was
always recognised as a legitimate reward for good service. “They that
have served well as deacons," wrote St Paul, “purchase for themselves an
honourable step”; though when the Apostolic Church Order interprets
the βαθμός καλός as τόπος ποιμενικός, it is a question whether the
place of a presbyter or that of a bishop is meant. But it was a
serious and far-reaching development when, in the fourth century, the
idea grew up that the Christian clergy consisted of a hierarchy of grades,
through each of which it was necessary to pass in order to reach the
higher offices. The Council of Nicaea had contented itself with the
reasonable prohibition (canon 2) of the ordination of neophytes as bishops
was
a


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The Cursus Honorum
151
>
or presbyters. The Council of Sardica in 343 prescribes for the episcopate
a "prolixum tempus ” of promotions through the “munus” of reader,
the “officium” of deacon, and the “ministerium” of presbyter. But it
was in the church of Rome that the conception of the cursus honorum-
borrowed, we may suppose, consciously or unconsciously from the civil
magistracies of the Roman State—took deepest root. Probably the
oldest known case of particular clerical offices held in succession by the
same individual is the record, in an inscription of Pope Damasus, of
either his own or his father's career—there are variant readings“ pater
and“ puer," but even the son's career must have begun early in the fourth
century—“exceptor, lector, levita, sacerdos. " Ambrosiaster, a Roman
and younger contemporary of Damasus, expresses clearly the conception
of grades of order in which the greater includes the less, so that not only
are presbyters ordained out of deacons and not vice versa, but a presbyter
has in himself all the powers of the inferior ranks of the hierarchy:
" maior enim ordo intra se et apud se habet et minorem, presbyter enim et
diaconi agit officium et exorcistae et lectoris. ” The earliest of the
dated disciplinary decretals that has come down to us, the letter of Pope
Siricius to Himerius of Tarragona in 385 (its prescriptions are repeated
with less precision in that of Zosimus to Hesychius of Salona in 418),
emphasizes the stages and intervals of a normal ecclesiastical career. A
child devoted early to the clerical life is made a reader at once, then
acolyte and subdeacon up to thirty, deacon for five years, and presbyter
for ten, so that forty-five is the minimum age for a bishop: even those
who take orders in later life must spend two years among the readers or
exorcists, and five as acolyte and subdeacon. But the requirements of
Siricius and Zosimus are moderate when brought into comparison with
the pseudo-papal documents which came crowding into being at the
beginning of the sixth century: of the apocryphal councils fathered on
Pope Sylvester the one gives a cursus of 52 years, the other of 55, before
the episcopate.
Two considerations indeed must be borne in mind which qualify the
apparent rigour of the fourth and fifth century cursus. In the first place
we have already traced the beginning of the depreciation of the readership.
In days when liturgical formulae were still unwritten, the reader's office
was the only one that was mechanical : what it had necessarily implied
was a modicum of education, and all who had passed through the office
had at least learned to read. Thus it came about, from the fourth century
onwards, that the readers were the boys who were receiving training and
education in the schools of the Church : according to the canons, for
instance, of the Council of Hippo in 393 readers on attaining the age of
puberty made choice between marriage and permanent readership on the
one hand, celibacy and rise through the various grades of clerical office
on the other. And the second thing to be remembered is that all these
prescriptions of canons or decretals represented a theoretical standard
CH. .


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152
Encroachments of the Clergy
rather than a practice regularly carried out. Canon Law in the fourth
century could still be put aside, by bishop or people, when need arose,
without scruple. Minor orders might be omitted. St Hilary of Poitiers
wanted to ordain Martin a deacon straight off, and only made him an
exorcist instead because he reckoned that Martin's humility would not
allow him to refuse so low an office. Augustine and Jerome were ordained
presbyters direct. Even the salutary Nicene rules about neophytes were
on emergency violated: Ambrose of Milan and Nectarius of Constanti-
nople were both elected as laymen (the former indeed as a catechumen),
and were rushed through the preliminary grades without appreciable
delay; St Ambrose passed from baptism to the episcopate in the course
of a week.
But in spite of any occasional reassertions of the older freedom, it
did nevertheless remain true that the cursus and all it stood for was
gradually establishing itself as a real influence: and it stood for a body
continually growing in size, in articulation, in strength, in dead weight,
which drove in like a wedge between bishop and people, and fortified
itself by encroachments on both sides. Doubtless it would have been
natural in any case that bishop and people, no longer enjoying the old
affectionateness of personal intercourse, should lose the sense of community
and imperceptibly drift apart: but the process was at least hastened and the
gap widened by the interposition of the clerus. It was no longer the
laity, but the clergy alone, who were in direct touch with the bishop.
Even the fundamental right of the people to elect their bishop slipped
gradually from their hands into the hands of the clergy. Within the
clerical class a continual and steady upward pressure was at work. The
minor orders take over the business of the diaconate: deacons assert
themselves against presbyters : presbyters in turn are no longer a body
of counsellors to the bishop acting in common, but, having of necessity
begun to take over all pastoral relations with the laity, tend as parish
priests to a centrifugal independence. The process of entrenchment
within the parochial freehold was still only in its first beginnings : but
already in the fourth century-when theologians and exegetes were
feeling after a formal and scientific basis for what had been natural,
instinctive, traditional—we find presbyters asserting the claim of an
ultimate identity of order with the episcopate.
Such are the summary outlines of the picture, which must now be
filled in, here and there, with more detail. And the details will serve to
reinforce the conclusion that the principal features of the history of
church organisation in the fourth and fifth centuries are not unconnected
accidents, but are to a large extent just different aspects of a single
process, the multiplication and development of the Christian clergy.
1. The people had originally chosen their bishop without serious
possibility of interference from the clergy. Voting by orders in the
modern sense was hardly known: in so far as any check existed on the


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Episcopal Elections
153
unfettered choice of the laity, it lay in the hands of the neighbouring
bishops from whom the bishop-elect would naturally receive consecration.
Cyprian, it is clear from his whole correspondence, was made bishop
of Carthage by the laity against the decided wishes of his colleagues in
the presbyterate. After the death of Anteros of Rome in 236, we learn
from the story in Eusebius that “all the brethren were gathered together
for the appointment of a successor to the bishopric. ” And this was still
the practice after the middle of the fourth century: the description of
the election of St Ambrose in 374 by his biographer mentions the people
only, “cum populus ad seditionem surgeret in petendo episcopo. . . quia et
Arriani sibi et Catholici sibi episcopum cupiebant superatis alterutris
ordinari. ” Another biography, that of St Martin of Tours by Sulpicius
Severus, depicts a similar scene about the same date: Martin was
elected, in the face of opposition from some of the assembled bishops,
by the persistent vote of the people. The laity too, at least in some
churches, still selected even the candidates for the priesthood. Possidius,
the biographer of St Augustine, relates how Valerius of Hippo put
before the “ plebs dei” the need for an additional presbyter, and how
the Catholic people,“ knowing Saint Augustine's faith and life," seized
hold of him, and, “ut in talibus consuetum est," presented him to the
bishop for ordination. In Rome however the influence of the clergy
was already predominant. The episcopal elections, during the troubled
decade that followed the exile of Liberius in 355, are described
in the Gesta inter Liberium et Felicem : the clergy—“clerus omnis,
id est presbyteri et archidiaconus Felix et ipse Damasus diaconus
et cuncta ecclesiae officia"—first pledge their loyalty to Liberius and
then accept Felix in his place : the opposition, who clung all through to
Liberius and after his death elected Ursinus as his successor, are represented
as mainly a lay party—“ multitudo fidelium,” “ sancta plebs,“ “ fidelis
populus,” “ dei populus ”—yet even in their electoral assembly the clergy
,
receive principal mention,“ presbyteri et diacones. . . cum plebe sancta. "
And though there are some indications that the party of Ursinus had
strong support in the local episcopate, it was Damasus, the candidate of
the majority of the clergy, who secured recognition by the civil power.
At the end of the fourth century a definite place is accorded to the clergy
in the theory of episcopal appointments. The eighth book of the
Apostolic Constitutions distinguishes the three steps of election by the
people, approval by the clergy, consecration by the bishops. Siricius of
Rome, in his decretal letter to Himerius, puts the clergy before the
people, “ si eum cleri ac plebis edecumarit electio”: the phrase "cleri
plebisque" became normal in this connexion, and ultimately meant that
it was for the clergy to elect and for the people to approve.
Fundamental as these changes were, no doubt each stage of them
seemed natural enough at its time. Indirect election was an expedient
unknown as yet: real election by the laity, in view of the dimensions of
7
CH. VI.


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154
Deacon and Presbyter
the Christian population, became more and more difficult, and the
pretence of it tumultuous and unsatisfactory. The members of the
clergy on the other hand were now considerable enough for a genuine
electing body, yet not too unwieldy for control: and the people were
gradually ousted from any effective participation. So far as the influence
.
of the laity still continued to make itself felt, it was through the
interference of the State. Under either alternative Christian feeling
had to content itself with a grave deflection from primitive ideals.
2. The earlier paragraphs of this chapter have already given us
reason to anticipate the developments of the diaconate in the fourth
century. We have seen how the intimate relations of the deacons with
the bishop as his personal staff caused the business of the churches to
pass more and more, as numbers multiplied, through their hands; we
have seen also how from their attendance on the bishop, in church as
well as outside of it, they gradually acquired what they did not originally
possess, a status in Christian worship. It is just on these two lines that
their aggrandisement still proceeded. In Rome and in some of the
Eastern churches (witness the last canon of the Council of Neocaesarea
in Pontus, c. 315), the deacons were limited, on the supposed model
of the Acts, to seven, while the presbyterate admitted of indefinite
increase, and the mere disproportion in numbers exalted the individual
deacon: “ diaconos paucitas honorabiles, presbyteros turba contemptibiles
facit," says Jerome bitterly. But if complaint and criticism focused itself
on the affairs of the church of Rome, where everything was on a larger
scale and on a more prominent stage than elsewhere, the indications all
suggest that the same thing was in lesser measure happening in other
churches.
The legislation of the earliest councils of the fourth century supplies
eloquent testimony to the ambition of deacons in general and Roman
deacons in particular. The Spanish canons of Elvira, c. 305, shew
that a deacon might be in the position of “regens plebem,” in charge, no
,
doubt, of a village congregation: he might (exceptionally) baptize, but
he might not do what “in many places” the bishops of the Council of
Arles, in 314, learnt that he did, namely "offer" the Eucharist. By
a special canon of the same Council of Arles, the deacons of the (Roman)
City are directed not to take so much upon themselves, but to defer to
the presbyters and to act only with their sanction. Both these canons of
Arles are combined and repeated in the 18th canon of Nicaea : but the
reference to Rome is omitted, and the presumptions of the diaconate-
we must suppose that existing conditions in the Eastern churches are
now in view—take the form of administering the Eucharist to presbyters,
receiving the Eucharist before bishops, and sitting down among the
presbyters in church. Later on in the century we find the Roman deacons
wearing the vestment called “ dalmatic," which elsewhere was reserved to
the bishop: and one of them—probably the Mercury who is mentioned


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Presbyter and Bishop
155
in one of Pope Damasus' epigrams—had asserted the absolute equality
of deacons and priests. Ambrosiaster, who may be confidently identified
with the Roman ex-Jew Isaac, the supporter of the Anti-pope Ursinus,
treats in the hundred and first of his Quaestiones “de iactantia Roma-
norum levitarum”: Jerome, in his epistle ad Evangelum presbyterum,
appropriates the arguments of Ambrosiaster and clothes them with his
own incomparable style. The Roman deacons, they tell us, arrogate to
themselves the functions of priests in saying grace when asked out to
dinner, and in getting responses made to themselves in church instead of to
the priests: and this arrogance is made possible because of their influence
with the laity and in the administration of ecclesiastical affairs, “adsiduae
stationes domesticae et officialitas. " But the mind of the Church is clear:
“si auctoritas quaeritur, Orbis maior est Urbe”: even at Rome presbyters
sit, while deacons stand, and if at Rome deacons do not carry the altar
and its furniture or pour water over the hands of the priest—as they do
in every other church-that is only because at Rome there is a “multitude
“
of clerks” to undertake these offices in their place. We do not know
that these indignant remonstrances of Ambrosiaster and Jerome had any
practical results: we do know that in the second half of the fourth
and the beginning of the fifth century three deacons, Felix, Ursinus,
and Eulalius, made vain attempts upon the papal throne—the successful
rivals of the two latter were priests, Damasus and Boniface—while by
the middle of the fifth century, as illustrated in the persons of St Leo
and his successor Hilarius, the archdeacon almost naturally became
pope.
8. As the deacon thus pressed hard on the heels of the presbyter,
so the presbyter in turn put himself into competition with the
bishop. Ambrosiaster and Jerome not only deny any parity of deacon
and presbyter, but assert in opposition a fundamental parity of order
between presbyter and bishop. Both were commentators on St Paul.
Exegesis was one of the most fertile forms of that astonishing intellectual
efflorescence, which, bursting out at the beginning of the fourth century
in the schools of Origen and of Lucian, and in the West fifty years
later, produced during several generations a literary harvest unequalled
throughout the Christian centuries. And the two Latin presbyters
found in the Pastoral Epistles just the historical and scriptural basis for
the establishment of the claims of the presbyterate, that the instinct
of the times called for. The apostle had distinguished clearly enough
between deacons and presbyters or bishops : but he had used—so they
rightly saw—the terms trpeo Bútepos and étrío Kotos for the same order of
the ministry, and it was an easy deduction that presbyter and bishop
must be still essentially one. So Ambrosiaster (on 1 Timothy)“ post
episcopum tamen diaconatus ordinationem subiecit; quare, nisi quia
episcopi et presbyteri una ordinatio est? uterque enim sacerdos est,
sed episcopus primus est ; ut omnis episcopus presbyter sit, non tamen
а
CH, VI.


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156
Priesthood versus Order
66
omnis presbyter episcopus, hic enim episcopus est qui inter presbyteros
primus est. ” And so Jerome (on Titus) explains that in the apostolic
age presbyters and bishops were the same, until as a safeguard against
dissensions one was chosen out of the presbyters to be set over the rest :
consequently bishops should know “se magis consuetudine quam dis-
positionis dominicae veritate presbyteris esse maiores, et in commune
debere ecclesiam regere. ” The exegesis of Ambrosiaster and Jerome was
undeniably sound: their historical conclusions were, if the picture given
in the earlier pages of this chapter is correct, not so just to the facts as
those of another commentator of the time, perhaps the greatest of them
all, Theodore of Mopsuestia. No doubt the New Testament bishop was
a presbyter : but “those who had authority to ordain, the officers we
now call bishops, were not limited to a single church but presided over a
whole province and were known by the title of apostles. In this way
blessed Paul set Timothy over all Asia, and Titus over Crete, and
doubtless others separately over other provinces. . . so that those who are
now called bishops but were then called apostles bore then the same
relation to the province that they do now to the city and villages for
which they are appointed”: Timothy and Titus “visited cities, just as
bishops to-day visit country parishes. '
Uterque enim sacerdos est. ” In these words lies perhaps the real
inwardness of the movement for equating presbyters with bishops and of
its partial success : “ Priesthood” was taking the place of “ Order. " In
the first centuries, to St Ignatius for instance and to St Cyprian, the
essential principle was that all things must be done within the Unity of
the Church, and of that unity the bishop was the local centre and the
guardian. That alone is a true Eucharist, in the language of Ignatius,
which is under the authority of the bishop or his representative. No rite
or sacrament administered outside this ordered unity had any reality.
Baptism or Laying on of hands schismatically conferred, whether
without the Church among the sects or without the bishop's sanction by
any intruder in his sphere, were simply as though they had not been.
Under the dominance of this conception the position of the bishop was
unique and unassailable. But, as time went on, the single conception of
Order, intense and overmastering as to those early Christians it had been,
was found insufficient: other considerations must be taken into account,
“lest one good custom should corrupt the world. " Breaches were made
in the theory first at one point, then at another. Christian charity
rebelled against the thought of wholly rejecting what was intended,
however imperfectly, to be Christian Baptism: iteration of such Baptism
was felt, and nowhere more clearly than at Rome, to be intolerable. As
with Baptism, so, though much more gradually and uncertainly, with
Holy Orders. The distinction between validity and regularity was
hammered out: “quod fieri non debuit, factum valet” was the expression
of the newer point of view: Augustine, in his writings against the


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Altered use of Sacerdos
157
Donatists, laid down the principles of the revised theology, and later ages
have done little more than develop and systematise his work.
It is obvious that in this conception less stress will be set on the
circumstances of the sacrament, more on the sacrament itself : less on the
jurisdiction of the minister to perform it, more on his inherent capacity :
less, in other words, on Order, more on Priesthood. We are not to
suppose that earlier thought necessarily differed from later on the
question, for instance, to what orders of the ministry was committed the
conduet of the characteristic action of Christian worship, or as to its
sacrificial nature, or as to the priestly function of the ministrants. But
earlier language did certainly differ from later as to the direction in which
sacerdotal terminology was most freely employed. In the general idea of
primitive times the whole congregation took part in the priestly office :
when a particular usage of lepeús or “sacerdos” first came in, and for
several generations afterwards, it meant the bishop and the bishop only.
The phraseology in this respect of St Cyprian is repeated by a whole
chain of writers down to St Ambrose. No doubt the hierarchical
language of the Old Testament was applied to the ministry of the Church
long before the fourth century: but it was either transferred in quite
general terms from the one hierarchy to the other as a whole, or it was
concentrated upon the bishop. Thus in the Didascalia Apostolorum it is
the bishops who inherit the Levites' right to material support, the
bishops who are addressed as “priests to your people and levites who
serve in the house of God, the holy catholic Church,” the bishop again
who is “ the levite and the high priest” (contrast the language of
the Didache). But the detailed comparison of the three orders of the
Jewish ministry and the Christian was so obvious that it can only have
been the traditional use of “sacerdos” for the bishop that retarded the
parallelism. We find “levita” for deacon in the epigrams of Damasus
and in the de Officiis of St Ambrose: but the complete triad of “ levita,
sacerdos, summus sacerdos ” for deacon, presbyter and bishop meets us
first in the pages of the ex-Jew Ambrosiaster. And while Ambrose
employs the Old Testament associations of the levite to exalt the dignity
and calling of the Christian deacon, Ambrosiaster contrasts the “ hewers
of wood and drawers of water” with the priests, and paraphrases the titles
“sacerdos” and “summus sacerdos” as“presbyter” and “primus presbyter. ”
“Summus sacerdos ” is freely used of bishops by Jerome, though the title
was forbidden even to metropolitans by an African canon.
case the new extension of “sacerdos” to the Christian presbyter was too
closely in harmony with existing tendencies not to take root at once.
It is common in both St Jerome and St Augustine: Pope Innocent
speaks of presbyters as “secundi sacerdotes ": and from this time onward
bishop and priest tend more and more to be ranked together as joint
possessors of a common “ sacerdotium. ”
This new emphasis on the “sacerdotium” of Christian presbyters is
But in any
CH. VI.


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158
New Churches built
66
perhaps to be connected with the new position which in the fourth and
following centuries they were beginning to occupy as parish priests. It
was the necessity of the regular administration of the Eucharist which
dictated the commencements of the parochial system. While the custom
of daily Eucharists was neither universal nor perhaps earlier than the
third century-it arose partly out of Christian devotion, partly out of
the allegorical interpretation of the daily bread "—the weekly Eucharist
was both primitive and universal, and the needs in this respect of the
Christian people could ultimately be met only by a wide extension of
the independent action of the presbyterate. Though in the larger cities it
can never have been possible, even at the first, for the Christian people
to meet together at a single Eucharist, the bishop, as Ignatius tells us,
kept under his own control all arrangements for separate services, and
the presbyters, like the head-quarters staff of a general, were sent hither
and thither as occasion demanded. It may have been as definite localities
came to be permanently set apart for Christian worship, that the custom
grew up of attaching particular presbyters to particular churches,
Probably it was during the long peace 211-249 that ground was
first acquired for churches within the walls at Rome: cemeteries were
constructed by the ecclesiastical authorities as soon as the beginning of
the third century, but the earliest mention of church property in the
City is when the Emperor Alexander Severus (222–235), as we learn from
Lampridius, decided a question of disputed ownership of land between
the "christiani " and the “popinarii” in favour of the former, because of
the religious use which they were going to make of it. Certainly by
the time of Diocletian Christian churches throughout the Empire were of
sufficient number and prominence to become, with the sacred vessels and
the sacred books, a special mark for the edict of persecution in 303.
And just as the restoration of peace produced an outburst of calligraphic
skill devoted to the Bible, of which the Vatican and Sinaitic codices are the
enduring monuments, so, too, the ruined buildings were replaced by
others more numerous and more magnificent. Constantine erected
churches over the graves of the Apostles on the Vatican hill and the
Ostian Way, while inside the walls the Lateran basilica of the Saviour
and the Sessorian basilica of the Holy Cross testified further to the
policy of the emperor and the piety of his mother. When Optatus
wrote, fifty years later, there were over forty Roman basilicas, all of
them open to the African Catholics and closed to the Donatists : “inter
quadraginta et quod excurrit basilicas locum ubi colligerent non habe-
bant. ” But this number perhaps includes the cemetery churches, for the
parish churches or “tituli” of the City appear to have been exactly
twenty-five under Pope Hilary (461–468), in its life of whom the Liber
Pontificalis enumerates a service of altar vessels for use within the City,
one golden bowl for the "station” and twenty-five silver bowls (with
twenty-five “amae ” or cruets, and fifty chalices) for the parish churches,


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Parish Clergy in Rome
159
“scyphus stationarius," "scyphi per titulos. ” The “station” thus opposed
to the “parishes” is the reunion, on certain days of the year, of the
whole body of the Roman clergy and faithful under the pope at some
particular church: it was a corrective to the growth of parochial
separatism, like the custom of sending round every Sunday, from the
pope's mass to the mass of every church within the walls, the “fermentum "
or portion of the consecrated bread. So Innocent writes, in 416, in
his decretal letter to Decentius of Gubbio: “presbyteri quia die ipso
propter plebem sibi creditam nobiscum convenire non possunt, idcirco
fermentum a nobis confectum per acolythos accipiunt, ut se a nostra
communione maxima illa die non iudicent separatos; quod per parochias”
[= in other dioceses] “ fieri debere non puto, quia non longe portanda
sunt sacramenta, nec nos per coemeteria diversa constitutis presbyteris
destinamus. "
It was part of the same careful guard against the over-development
of parochial independence, that, though there were parish clergy at Rome
in the fourth and fifth centuries, there was as yet no parish priest.
When Ambrosiaster wrote, it was the custom to allot two priests to
each church in 1 Tim. iii. 12, 13)“ septem diaconos esse oportet, et
aliquantos presbyteros ut bini sint per ecclesias, et unus in civitate
episcopus. ” At a council under Pope Symmachus in 499, sixty-seven
priests of the City subscribe, each with his “title,” “Gordianus presbyter
tituli Pammachii” and so on : but the “tituli” are not more than thirty,
some of them having as many as four or five priests attached to them.
Indeed, thirty is perhaps too high a figure, for some “tituli” may appear
under more than one name—an original name from the donor or the
reigning pope, and a supplementary name in honour of a saint. Of the
fourth century popes Damasus had named a church after St Lawrence,
and Siricius after St Clement: the basilica built under Pope Liberius
became St Mary Major under Xystus III (432–440), and the two
basilicas founded under Pope Julius (337–352) became in time the
Holy Apostles and St Mary across Tiber.
But if the parochial system with its single rector was thus no part of
Roman organisation as late as the end of the fifth century, it was in full
vigour at Alexandria two centuries earlier. Epiphanius tells us that,
though all the churches belonging to the catholic body in Alexandria
(he gives the names of eight) were under one archbishop, presbyters were
appointed to each of them for the ecclesiastical necessities of the inhabitants
'in the several districts. The history of Arius takes the parochial system
fifty or sixty years behind Epiphanius : it was as parish priest of the
church and quarter named Baucalis that he was enabled to organise his
revolt against the theology dominant at head-quarters under the bishop
Alexander. The failure of the presbyter and victory of the bishop
may have reacted unfavourably upon the position of the Alexandrine
presbyters generally; the historian Socrates expressly tells us that after
CH. 1.


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160
Parish Clergy in Alexandria
the Arian trouble presbyters were not allowed to preach there. At any
rate it is just down to the time of Alexander and his successor, Athanasius,
that those writers who testify to peculiar privileges of the Alexandrine
presbyterate in the appointment of the patriarch suppose them to have
survived. The most precise evidence comes from a tenth century writer,
Eutychius, who relates that by ordinance of St Mark twelve presbyters
were to assist the patriarch, and at his death to elect and lay hands
upon one of themselves as his successor, Athanasius being the first to
be appointed by the bishops. Severus of Antioch, in the sixth century,
mentions that “in former days” the bishop was “appointed” by presbyters
at Alexandria. Jerome (in the same letter that was cited above, but
independent for the moment of Ambrosiaster) deduces the essential
equality of priest and bishop from the consideration that the Alexandrine
bishop“ down to Heraclas and Dionysius” (232–265) was chosen by the
presbyters from among themselves without any special form of con-
secration. Earlier than any of these is the story told in connexion with
the hermit Poemen in the Apophthegms of the Egyptian monks. Poemen
was visited one day by heretics who began to criticise the archbishop
of Alexandria as having only presbyterian ordination, ás ótc Tapà
πρεσβυτέρων έχοι την χειροτονίαν. Unfortunately the hermit declined
.
to argue with them, gave them their dinner, and promptly dismissed
them.
It is clear that an Alexandrine bishop of the fourth century slandered
by heretics can be no one but Athanasius; and therefore this, the
earliest evidence for presbyterian ordination at Alexandria, is just that
which is most demonstrably false. For Athanasius was neither elected
nor consecrated by presbyters: not more than ten or twelve years after
the event, the bishops of Egypt affirmed categorically that the electors
the whole multitude and the whole people ” and that the con-
secrators were “the greater number of ourselves. "
emphasis on the part of the supporters of Athanasius reveals one line
of the Arian campaign against him; and the conjecture may be there-
fore hazarded that it was by Arian controversialists that the allegations
of Alexandrine “presbyterianism ” were first circulated, and that their
real origin lay in the desire to turn the edge of any argument that
might be based upon the solidarity of the episcopate. If the Catholics
called upon the bishops of the East not to champion a rebellious
presbyter, their opponents would, on this view, “ go one better” in their
enthusiasm for episcopacy, and swer that Athanasius was no more
than a presbyter himself. It is difficult for us, who have to reconstruct
the history of the fourth century out of Catholic material, to form any
just conception either of the mass of the lost Arian literature-exegetical
and historical, as well as doctrinal and polemical—or of its almost
exclusive vogue for the time being throughout the East, and of the
influence which, in a thousand indirect ways, it must have exerted
were
Yet this very


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Effects of Arian struggle
161
:
upon Catholic writers of the next generations. Jerome, writing amid
Syrian surroundings, would eagerly accept the there current presentation
of the Alexandrine tradition, though his knowledge of the later facts
caused him to throw back the dates from the known to the unknown, from
Athanasius and Alexander to Dionysius and Heraclas. Of course there
is no smoke without fire; and presumably the Alexandrine presbyterate,
in the generations immediately preceding the Council of Nicaea, must
have possessed some unusual powers in the appointment of their
patriarch. But it seems as likely that these were the powers which
elsewhere belonged to the people as that they were the powers which
elsewhere belonged to the bishops.
The explanation here offered would no doubt have to be disallowed,
if it were true, as has sometimes been alleged, that Arianism all the world
over stood for the rights of presbyters, while the cause of Athanasius was
bound up with the aggrandisement of the episcopate. But the connexion
was purely adventitious at Alexandria, or at any rate local, and the
conditions did not reproduce themselves elsewhere. There is no reason
at all to suppose any general alliance between presbyters and Arianism,
or between the episcopate and orthodoxy: on the contrary, all the
evidence goes to shew that in Syria and Asia Minor, and perhaps
elsewhere, the bishops were less Catholic than their flocks. At Antioch,
for instance, where Arian bishops were dominant during half a century,
orthodox zeal was kept alive by the exertions of Flavian and Diodorus,
originally as laymen, afterwards as priests. In so far as the doctrinal
issue affected the development of organisation at all, it must on the
whole, both because of the general confusion of discipline and also
because of the ill repute which the tergiversations of so many bishops
earned for their order, have enhanced the tendency towards the emanci-
pation of presbyters from episcopal control.
Whatever special conditions may have affected the course of develop-
ment at Rome or Alexandria, it may be taken as generally true that, by
the end of the fourth century the Christian presbyter's right to celebrate
the Eucharist was coming to be regarded as inherent in his sacerdotium
rather than as devolved upon him by the bishop. With this right went
also the right to be served by deacons as ministri or útnpétat, and ulti-
mately the right to preach. While the 18th canon of Nicaea still regards
the deacons as “ministers ” of the bishop only, later in the fourth century
the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions speaks of tñs após
åppotépous dlakovías “ their service to both bishops and priests,” and
Ambrosiaster is aghast at the audacity of trying to put presbyters and
their servants on a par, "presbyteris ministros ipsorum pares facere. ” The
“
right to preach had never been formally associated with any order of the
Christian ministry: Ambrosiaster was certainly interpreting the docu-
ments on his own account, rather than recording tradition, when he
asserts (in Eph. iv. 11, 12) “omnibus inter initia concessum est et
C. MED. H. VOL. I. CH. VI.
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162
The Right of Preaching
evangelizare et baptizare et scripturas in ecclesia explanare," but it is
clear that in early times even a layman, like Origen, might at the
bishop's request expound Scripture to the congregation. Nevertheless,
though the right might be thus deputed, the sermon (ómiaia, tractatus) was
part of the Eucharistic service, and Justin Martyr no doubt describes
the normal practice when he makes the president of the assembly in
person expound and apply the lections just read from Prophets or
Gospels. In the fourth century it was treated as axiomatic that the
right to preach, as part of the liturgy, could not even be deputed save to
those to whom could also be deputed the right to offer the Eucharist
itself. It is true that in many parts of the West the archdeacon did
compose and pronounce a solemn thanksgiving once a year, at the
lighting of the Paschal candle on Easter Even : but even this extra-
liturgical sermon de laudibus cerei was unknown at Rome, and Jerome,
or whoever was the author of the letter addressed in 384 to a deacon of
Piacenza (printed in the appendix to Vallarsi's edition), finds in it a gross
violation of Church order, “tacente episcopo, et presbyteris quodammodo
in plebeium cultum redactis, levita loquitur docetque quod paene non
didicit, et festivissimo praedicans tempore toto dehinc anno iustitium
vocis eius indicitur. ” Even the rights of presbyters in this respect were
inchoate and still strictly circumscribed. In the Eastern churches it was
customary for some of them to preach in the presence of the bishop and
for the bishop to preach after them: and Valerius of Hippo was
consciously introducing an Eastern use into Africa—he was himself
a Greek, and therefore unable to speak fluently to his Latin flock—when
he commissioned his presbyter Augustine “ against the custom of the
African churches” to expound the Gospel and preach frequently in his
presence. To Jerome, familiar with the Eastern custom, it was “pessimae
consuetudinis” that in some (doubtless Western) churches presbyters kept
silence in the presence of their bishop: their right to preach attached
directly to the pastoral office which they held, according to him, in
common with the bishop.
But because presbyters might preach in the bishop's church, where
he could note and correct at once any defects in their teaching, it does
not necessarily follow that they might preach in the parish churches,
and there does not seem to be any clear indication in the fourth and
fifth centuries that they did in fact do so. For Rome indeed this is
hardly surprising: we have seen how jealously parochial independence
was there limited, and even at the bishop's mass, if we may believe
the historian Sozomen, there were no sermons either by priest or bishop.
In fact St Leo's sermons—he became pope just about the time that Sozo-
men published his Church History--are the first of which we hear after
Justin's time in Rome. But in Gaul too, and as late as the beginning
of the sixth century, only the city priests, the priests, that is, who served
in the bishop's church, had the right to preach : the second canon of the


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Bishops at Home and Abroad
163
second Council of Vaison in 529 extends the right, apparently for the
first time, to country parishes, “placuit ut non solum in civitatibus sed
etiam in omnibus parrociis verbum faciendi daremus presbyteris potes-
tatem "; if the priest is at any time unable to preach through illness, the
deacon is to read to the people “homilies of the holy fathers. ”
It is perhaps surprising at first sight to find that in the fourth and
fifth centuries presbyters are establishing a new independence in face of
the bishop, rather than bishops exerting a new and stricter authority
over presbyters. The conclusion has been reached by direct evidence ;
but it is also the conclusion clearly indicated by the analogy of the
whole upward movement which we have seen at work in respect both to
the minor orders and to the diaconate.
But if this movement exerted so powerful an influence on the one
hand upon minor orders and diaconate, and on the other hand upon the
priesthood, we could not expect that bishops should be exempt from it.
How and where it led in their case it will be part of our business, in the
second half of this chapter, to trace. It was outside their own borders
that the bishops of the great churches were tempted to look for a wider
field of activity and a more commanding position. From the very first
the bishop of each community had represented it in its relation to other
Christian communities, had been, so to say, its minister for foreign
affairs. The Visions of Hermas were to be communicated to the cities
outside" by Clement, “ for that function belongs to him,” ékeivợ yap
επιτέτραπται. The complex developments of this function, from the
second century to the fifth, must now engage our attention.
(B) So far we have been dealing only with the internal development
of the individual Christian community. But there is an external as well
as an internal development to trace; the separate communities were
always in intimate touch with one another, and the common feeling of
the mass of them formed an authority which, from the beginning, the law of
Christian brotherhood made supreme. “If one member suffer, all the
members suffer," "we have no such custom, neither the churches of God”:
the principles are laid down in our earliest Christian documents, and the
organisation of the Catholic Church was an attempt to work them out
in practice. No doubt the result only imperfectly embodied the idea,
and in the process of translation into concrete form the means came
sometimes to
of more value than the end.
The history of the second century shews how naturally the formal
processes of federation grew out of what was at first the spontaneous
response to the calls of membership of the great Society, the natural
effort to express the reality of Christian union and fellowship. The
Roman community, under the leadership of St Clement, writes a letter
of expostulation when traditions of stability and order are threatened
by the dissensions between the Corinthian community and its presbyters.
appear
CH. VI.
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164
Local Councils
St Ignatius addresses separate epistles to the churches of several cities in
Asia Minor, on or near his road to Rome, exhorting them to hold fast
to the traditional teaching and world-wide organisation of the Christian
Society. The church of Smyrna announces to the church of Philomelium
the martyrdom of its bishop Polycarp: the churches of Lyons and
Vienne send to their brethren in Asia and Phrygia an account of the
great persecution of 177, and the confessors from the same cities
intervene with Pope Eleutherus in favour of a sympathetic treatment of
the Montanist movement. Correspondence was reinforced by personal
intercourse : Polycarp journeyed to Rome to discuss the Easter difficulty
with Pope Anicetus; Hegesippus, Melito and Abercius travelled widely
among different churches ; Clement of Alexandria had sat at the feet of
half-a-dozen teachers. Never was the impulse to unity, the desire to
test the doctrine of one church or of one teacher by its agreement with
the doctrine of the rest, stronger than in the days when formal methods
of arriving at the general sense of the scattered communities had not as
yet been hammered out. The Christian statesmen of the
age
of the
councils were only attempting to provide a more scientific means of
attaining an end which was vividly before the minds of their pre-
decessors in the sub-apostolic generations.
The crucial step in the direction of organised action was taken when
the bishops of neighbouring communities began to meet together for
mutual counsel. Such cúvodou or concilia were no doubt, in the first
instance, called for specific purposes and at irregular times. Tertullian
alludes to decisions of church councils unfavourable to the canonicity
of the Shepherd of Hermas, and makes special mention on another
occasion of councils in Greece: “illa certis in locis concilia ex universis
ecclesiis, per quae et altiora quaeque in commune tractantur, et ipsa
repraesentatio totius nominis christiani magna veneratione celebratur.