No More Learning

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,


## p. 159 (#189) ############################################

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.


## p. 160 (#190) ############################################

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


## p. 161 (#191) ############################################

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.
11


## p. 162 (#192) ############################################

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.
11-2


## p. 164 (#194) ############################################

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. ”
The earliest notice of separate councils held simultaneously to discuss
a pressing problem of the day is also the earliest indication of the sort
of area from which any one of such councils would naturally be drawn ;
for when, about 196, tension became acute in regard to the attitude of
the bishops of proconsular Asia, who refused to come into line with the
Paschal observances of other churches, councils were held, as we learn
from Eusebius, of the bishops in Palestine and in Pontus and in Gaul
and in Osrhoene. During the course of the third century these local
or provincial councils became more and more a regular and essential
feature of church life and government.
But there was as yet very
little that was stereotyped about the system. It was Cyprian beyond all
others who succeeded, during his brief ten years of episcopate, 248–
258, in forging a very practical weapon for the needs of the time out
of the conciliar movement: and of Cyprian's councils some represented
(proconsular) Africa alone, some Africa and Numidia, some Africa,
Numidia and Mauretania combined ; the meetings were more or less


## p. 165 (#195) ############################################

General Councils
165
annual, but the extent of the area from which the bishops were
summoned depended apparently upon the gravity of the business to
be dealt with. Again, if the civil province was in ordinary cases the
natural model to follow, there was no necessary dependence upon its
boundary lines, where these were artificial or arbitrary. For reasons of
State the senatorial province of proconsular Africa and the imperial
province of Numidia were so arranged that the more civilised districts
and the seaboard belonged to the one, the more backward interior to
the other: but the Numidia of ecclesiastical organisation was the ethnic
Numidia, the country of the Numidians, not the Numidia of political
geography. Perhaps it was just for this reason, because ethnic and
ecclesiastical Numidia was shared between two civil provinces, that in
assemblies of the Numidian bishops the president was not, as elsewhere,
the bishop of the capital or untpóroles of the province, but the bishop
senior by consecration.
Not the least important result of the new direction given by
Constantine to the relations of Church and State was the authorisation
and encouragement of episcopal assemblies on a larger scale than had
in earlier days been possible. Where difficulties, disciplinary or doctrinal,
proved beyond the power of local effort to resolve, councils were planned
of a more than provincial type. The Council of Arles in 314 was a
“ general council,” concilium plenarium, of the Western Church, summoned
by Constantine as lord of the Western Empire, to terminate the quarrel in
Africa between the partisans of Caecilian and the partisans of Donatus.
Judgment went in favour of Caecilian, whose party, because they alone
now remained in communion with the churches outside Africa, were
henceforward the Catholics, while the others became a sect known after
the name of their leader as the Donatists. The dispute between
Alexander and Arius at Alexandria was in its beginning as purely
local as that between Caecilian and Donatus, but the issue soon came to
involve the comparison of the fundamental theologies of the two great
rival schools of Alexandria and Antioch. From a council such as Arles it
was but a step to the conception of a general council of the whole
Church, where bishops from all over the world should meet for como
parison of the forms which the Christian tradition had taken in their
respective communities, for open ventilation of points of controversy,
and for the removal of misunderstanding by personal intercourse.
Constantine, now master of an undivided empire, organised the first
oecumenical council at Nicaea in 325. The great experiment was not
an immediate success : the Nicene council rather opened than closed the
history of Arianism on the larger stage, and it was not till after the
lapse of half a century that wisdom was seen to be justified of its works,
though the very keenness of the struggle made the long delayed and hardly
won triumph more complete in the end. No council ever fastened its hold
on Christian imagination in quite the same way as the Council of Nicaea.
CH, VÍ


## p. 166 (#196) ############################################

166
Surfeit of Councils
Not that there was ever any quarrel between the supporters and the
opponents of the Homoousion as to the rightness of the procedure which
had been called into being. The weapons with which the council and
the creed were fought were rival councils and rival creeds: the verdict
of the court was to be set aside by renewed trials and multiplied appeals
in the hope of modifying somehow the original judgment. Of all these sup-
plementary councils none was strictly general, though on three occasions
--at Sardica and Philippopolis in 343, at Ariminum and Seleucia in 359,
at Aquileia and Constantinople in 381—councils representing separately
the Greek and the Latin episcopate were held more or less at the same
time in East and West. Others, like that of Sirmium in 351, were
held, wherever the emperor happened to be in residence, by the bishops
attached at the moment to the court, the oúvodos évonuoüoa as it was
later called at Constantinople: others again were local and provincial.
The atmosphere of Rome was never perhaps quite congenial to councils :
yet even the Roman Church was swept into the movement, and the
pronouncements of Pope Damasus (366-384) came before the world
under the guise of conciliar decisions.
The experience of the fifty years that followed the Council of Tyre
in 335 taught the lesson that it was possible to have too much even
of a good thing. Pagan historian and Christian saint from different
a
starting-points arrived at the same conclusion. Ammianus Marcellinus,
.
criticising the character and career of the Emperor Constantius, noted
caustically that he threw the coaching system quite out of gear because
so many of the relays were employed in conveying bishops to and from
their councils,“ per synodos quas appellant,” at the expense of the State.
And Gregory of Nazianzus, in the year 382, refused to obey the summons
to a new council, because, he says, he never saw “any good end to
a council nor any remedy of evils, but rather an addition of more evil
as its result. There are always contentions and striving for dominion
.
beyond what words can describe. ”
Perhaps it was partly by a natural reaction against councils, in those
districts especially where they had followed most quickly upon one
another, that the tendency to aggrandise the important sees at the
expense of other bishops and at the expense therefore of the conciliar
movement, since in a council all bishops had an equal vote--seems
about this time to take a sudden leap forward. Valens the Arian and
Theodosius the Catholic alike made communion with some leading bishop
the test of orthodoxy for other bishops. A first edict of Theodosius on
his way from the West to take up the Eastern Empire in 380 expresses
Western conceptions by naming in this connexion only Damasus of Rome
and Peter of Alexandria : a later edict from Constantinople in 381 places
Nectarius of Constantinople before Timothy of Alexandria, and adds half-
a-dozen bishops in Asia Minor and a couple in the Danube lands as
centres of communion for their respective districts.


## p. 167 (#197) ############################################

Equality of Bishops
167
a
Here then we must pause for a moment to take into account the second
main element in the history of the federation of the Christian churches.
Every federation has to face this primary problem—the reconcilia-
tion of the equal rights of all participating bodies with the proportional
rights of each according to their greater or less importance. The
difficulty which modern constitutions have tried to solve by the ex-
pedient of a dual organisation, the one part of it giving to all
constituent units an equal representation, the other part of it a
proportionate representation according to population (or whatever
other criterion of value may be selected), was à difficulty which lay
also before the early Church. The unit of the Christian federation
was the community, whose growth and development is described in
the first half of this chapter; and that description has shewn us that
the necessary and only conceivable representative of the individual
community was its bishop. But some communities were small and
insignificant and unknown in history, others were larger in numbers,
or more potent in influence, or more venerable in traditions : were the
bishops of these diverse communities all to enjoy equal weight ?
Such a question was no doubt not consciously put until the scientific
and reflective period of Christian thought began, nor before the complex
process of federation was approaching completeness: that is to say, not
before the end of the fourth century. But in so far as it was put, it
could receive but one answer. In the theory of Christian writers from
St Irenaeus and St Cyprian onwards, all bishops were equal, for they
were all appointed to the same order and invested with the same powers,
whether the sphere in which they exercised them were great or small
and this theory was given its sharpest expression in Jerome's assertion (in
the same 146th letter) that the bishop of Gubbio had the same dignity as
the bishop of Rome, seeing that both were equally successors of the
Apostles, "ubicumque fuerit episcopus, sive Romae sive Eugubii, sive
Constantinopoli sive Rhegii sive Alexandriae sive Tanis, eiusdem meriti
eiusdem est sacerdotii. . . omnes apostolorum successores sunt. ” But in fact,
and side by side with the fullest recognition of this theoretical equality,
the bishops of the greater or more important churches were recognised, as
the rules of the federation were gradually crystallised, to hold positions
of privilege, so that the ministry of the Church came to consist not only of
a hierarchy within each local community, at the head of which stood the
bishop, but of a further hierarchy among the bishops themselves, at the
head of which, in some sense, stood the bishop of Rome. The first steps
towards such a hierarchy were on the one hand the traditional influence
and privileges which had grown up unnoticed round the greater sees, and
on the other hand the position acquired by metropolitans in the working
out of the provincial system.
The canons of the same councils which first provide for regular
meetings of the bishops of each emapxía or province, reveal also the
;
CH, VÌ.


## p. 168 (#198) ############################################

168
Superiority of Metropolitans
rapid aggrandisement of the untpomorítns, or bishop of the metropolis,
who presided over them. If at Nicaea the “commonwealth of bishops,"
TÒ Kolvòv TÔV ÉTTLOKÓmwv, is the authority according to one canon, by
another the “ratification of the proceedings” belongs to the metropolitan.
The canons of Antioch, sixteen years later, lay it down that the com-
pleteness of a synod consists in the presence of the metropolitan, and,
while he is not to act without the rest, they in turn must recognise that
the care of the province is committed to him and must be content to
take no step of any sort outside their own diocese apart from him.
Traditional sanction is already claimed for these prerogatives of the
metropolitan : they are “according to the ancient and still governing
canon of the fathers. "
Things were not so far advanced in this direction, it is true, in the
West. At any point in the first five centuries the Latin Church lagged
far behind the pitch of development attained by its Greek contemporaries.
Christianity had had a century's start in the East, and at the conversion
of Constantine it is probable that if the proportion of Christians in the
whole population was a half, or nearly a half, among Greek-speaking
peoples, it was not more than a fifth, in many parts not more than
a tenth, in the West. The Latin canons of Sardica in 343 shew how
little was as yet known of metropolitans. Although many of the enact-
ments deal with questions of jurisdiction and judicature, the bishop of
the metropolis is mentioned only once, and then in general terms,
coepiscopum nostrum qui in maxima civitate, id est metropoli, con-
sistit. ” The name “ metropolitan " is as foreign to these canons as to the
earliest versions of the Nicene canons, where we meet with just the same
paraphrases, “qui in metropoli sit constitutus," “ qui in ampliori civitate
provinciae videtur esse constitutus, id est in metropoli. ”
With this backwardness of development among the Latins went also
a much smaller degree of subservience to the State: and it resulted from
these two causes combined that their church organisation in the fourth and
fifth centuries reflected the civil polity much less closely than was the
case in the East. The “province ” of the Nicene or Antiochene canons
is the civil province, its metropolitan is the bishop of the civil metropolis,
and it is assumed that every civil province formed also a separate
ecclesiastical unit. It followed logically that the division of a civil
province involved division of the ecclesiastical province as well. When the
Arian emperor Valens, about 372, divided Cappadocia into Prima and
Secunda, it was with the particular object of annoying the metropolitan
of Caesarea, St Basil, and of diminishing the extent of his jurisdiction
by raising Anthimus of Tyana to metropolitan rank; and though Basil
resisted, Anthimus succeeded in the end in establishing his claim.
Before the end of the fourth century not only every province but every
group of provinces formed an ecclesiastical as well as a civil unit: the
provinces of the Roman Empire had by subdivision become so numerous
»


## p. 169 (#199) ############################################

East and West
169
that Diocletian had grouped them into some dozen dloukńo els or dioeceses,
with an exarch at the head of each, and the Council of Constantinople
in 381 forbids the bishops of one dioecese or exarchate to interfere
with the affairs of "the churches beyond their borders. ” So wholly
modelled upon civil lines was the ecclesiastical organisation throughout
the East, that in the middle of the fifth century the canons of Chalcedon
assume an absolute correspondence of the one with the other. Every
place which by imperial edict might be raised to the rank of a city,
gained ipso facto the right to a bishop (canon 17). Every division for
ecclesiastical purposes of a province which remained for civil purposes
undivided was null and void-even if backed up by an imperial edict
-the “real” metropolis being alone entitled to a metropolitan (canon
12). Civil and public lines must be followed in the arrangement of
ecclesiastical boundaries, τούς πολιτικούς και δημοσίους τύπους και των
εκκλησιαστικών παροικιών ή τάξις ακολουθείτω.
This conception summed itself up in the claim put forward on
behalf of the see of Constantinople at the councils of 381 and 451.
The bishops of these councils, deferring, perhaps not unwillingly, to the
pressure of the local authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, gave to the
bishop of Constantinople the next place after the bishop of Rome, on
the ground that Constantinople was “ New Rome," and that “ the fathers
had assigned precedence to the throne of Old Rome because it was the
Imperial City. "
Nothing was better calculated than such a claim to bring out the
latent divergences of East and West. Both in Church and State the
rift between the Latin and the Hellenic element had begun to widen
perceptibly during the course of the fourth century. Diocletian's
drastic reorganisation of the Imperial government gave the first
official recognition to the bipartite nature of the Roman realm, and
after the death of Julian in 363 the two halves of the Empire, though they
lived under the same laws, obeyed with rare and brief exceptions
separate masters. Parallel tendencies in the ecclesiastical world were
working to the surface about the same time. The Latinisation of the
Western Churches was complete before Constantine: no longer clothed
in the medium of a common language, the ideas and interests of Latin-
speaking and Greek-speaking communities grew unconsciously apart.
The rival ambitions of Rome and Constantinople expressed this
antinomy in its acutest form.
The right of the civil government to be in its own sphere the
accredited representative of Divine power on earth, the duty of the
Christian Society to preserve at all costs its separateness and inde-
pendence as the salt of mankind, the city set upon a hill—these were
fundamental principles which could both appeal to the sanction of the
Christian Scriptures.
To hold the balance evenly between them has
been, through the long centuries since Christianity began to play
CH, VI.


## p. 170 (#200) ############################################

170
Church and State
a leading part upon the political stage, the worthy task of philosophers
and statesmen. That one scale should outweigh the other was perhaps
inevitable in the first attempts, and it was at least instructive for future
generations that the experiment of an over-strained allegiance to each
of the two theories should have been given full trial in one part or
another of Christendom.
To Byzantine churchmen the vision of the Christian State and the
Christian Emperor proved so dazzling that they transferred to them
something of the religious awe with which their ancestors had venerated
the genius of Rome and Augustus. The memory of Constantine was
honoured as of an ioatostolos, a “thirteenth apostle. ” The resentment
of the native Monophysite churches of Syria and Egypt against such of
their fellow-countrymen as remained in communion with Constantinople
concentrated itself in the scornful epithet of Melkite or “ King's man.
The Latins were more moved by the sentiment of the Roman name,
and less by its incarnation in the Emperor. As Romans and Roman
citizens, they felt the majesty of the Roman Respublica to attach to
place even more than to person. If Rome was no longer the abode of
emperors, it was in their eyes not Rome but emperors who lost thereby.
The event which stirred men in the West to the depths of their being
was not the conversion of Constantine but the fall of Rome. When
Alaric led his Goths to the storm of the City in 410, there seemed to be
need for a new theory of life and for revision of first principles. The
great occasion was greatly met. St Augustine wrote his twenty-two
books de Civitate Dei to answer the obvious objection that Rome,
inviolate under her ancestral gods, perished only when she turned to
Christ. True it was that the City of the World had fallen : but it had
fallen in the Divine providence, when the times were ripe for a new and
higher order of things to take its place. The reign of the City of God
had been ushered in.
It was a natural corollary of the principles of Western churchmen
that the Divine Society could not possibly be bound to imitate the
organisation of the earthly society which it was to supplant. Pope
Innocent, in direct opposition to the practice of the East, wrote to
Alexander of Antioch in 415 that the civil division of a province ought
not to carry ecclesiastical division with it; the world might change, not
so the Church, and therefore it was not fitting “ad mobilitatem necessi-
tatum mundanarum Dei ecclesiam commutari. ” Pope Leo refused his
assent to the so-called 28th “canon" of Chalcedon, not merely as an
innovation, but because its deduction of the ecclesiastical primacy of
Rome from her civil position was quite inconsistent with the doctrine
cherished by the popes upon the subject since at least the days of
Damasus.
Here then we have a bifurcation of Eastern and Western ideas,
leading to a clear-cut issue, in which both sides appealed to the truth of
3


## p. 171 (#201) ############################################

The Three Great Sees
171
facts. Which of them represented the genuine Christian tradition ?
Certainly the case of provincial organisation favoured the Eastern view,
for it was taken over bodily from the State. But then it was relatively
modern ; a far higher antiquity attached to the privileged position of
the greater sees, and it was upon the origin and history of their
privileges that the answer really turned.
Of course there never had been a time when some churches had not
V
stood out above the rest, and the bishops of those churches above other
bishops. The Council of Nicaea, side by side with the canons that
prescribed the normal organisation by provinces and metropolitans,
recognised at the same time certain exceptional prerogatives as
guaranteed by "ancient custom,” tà ápxaia čôn. In Egypt especially,
Alexandria eclipsed its neighbour cities to a degree unparalleled
elsewhere in the East; and while it might not have been easy to
sanction the authority, éçovoia, of the Alexandrine bishop over the
whole of “ Egypt Libya and Pentapolis,” if it had been quite unique in
its extent, the Nicene fathers could shelter themselves under the plea
that “the same thing is customary at Rome. ” A gloss in an early Latin
version of the canons interprets the Roman parallel to consist in the
care of the suburbicarian churches,” that is to say, the churches of the
ten provinces of the Vicariate of Rome-central and southern Italy with
the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Over these wider districts the Roman
and Alexandrine popes respectively exercised direct jurisdiction, to the
exclusion in either case of the ordinary powers of metropolitans. The
further prescription of the Nicene canon that “in the case of Antioch
and in the other provinces" the churches were to keep their privileges,
Tà trpeopeia, was understood by Pope Innocent to cover similar direct
jurisdiction of Alexander of Antioch over Cyprus; and a version of the
canons “transcribed at Rome from the copies” of the same pope defines
the sphere of Antioch as “the whole of Coele-Syria. ”
What was it then that had given these three churches of Rome,
Alexandria and Antioch the special position to the antiquity of which
the Nicene council witnesses ? Roman theologians from Damasus
onwards would have answered unhesitatingly that the motive was
deference to the Prince of the Apostles, who had founded the churches
of Rome and Antioch himself, and the church of Alexandria through
his disciple Mark. But this answer is open to two fatal retorts: it does
not explain why Alexandria, the see of the disciple, should rank above
Antioch, a see of the master, and it does not explain why our earliest
authorities, both Roman and non-Roman, so persistently couple the
name of St Paul with the name of St Peter as joint patron of the Roman
Church. Cyprian is the first writer to talk of the “chair of Peter” only.
"
Therefore we are driven back upon the secular prominence of the
three cities as the obvious explanation of their ecclesiastical dignity.
Yet if the appeal to history of the two councils which elevated
79
B. v1.


## p. 172 (#202) ############################################

172
Roman Tradition before Damasus
Constantinople to the second place was thus not without a large
measure of justification, their bald expression of Byzantine theory does
not really, any better than the contemporary Roman view, cover the
whole of the facts. If rank and influence in the ecclesiastical sphere
depended, more than on anything else, on rank and influence in the
civil sphere, it did not depend on it entirely. The personality and
memory of great churchmen went for something. Carthage was no
doubt the civil capital of the dioecese of Africa, and Milan of the
dioecese of Italy: but it would be rash to assert that the inheritance
which St Cyprian left to Carthage and St Ambrose to Milan was quite
worthless or ephemeral. And if this was true of the great bishops of
the third and fourth centuries, it was still more true of the apostles
whom the whole Church united in venerating. Legends of apostolic
foundation were often baseless enough, but their very frequency testified
to the value set upon the thing claimed. Throughout the course of the
long struggle with Gnosticism, the teaching of the apostles was the
unvarying standard of Christian appeal: and evidence of that teaching
was found not only in the written Creed and Scriptures but in the
unwritten tradition of the churches and episcopal successions founded
by apostles. “Percurre ecclesias apostolicas” cries Tertullian confidently
to his adversary: “habemus adnumerare eos qui ab apostolis insti-
tuti sunt episcopi in ecclesiis et successiones eorum usque ad nos ” is
Irenaeus’ rendering of the same argument. And both the Gallican and
the African writer go on to select among apostolic churches the church
of Rome_“ista quam felis ecclesia," * maximae et antiquissimae et
omnibus cognitae ecclesiae traditionem et fidem "-as for themselves
the obvious witness of this teaching. From the second century
onwards a catena of testimony makes and acknowledges the claim of
the Roman Church to be, through its connexion with St Peter and St Paul,
in a special sense the depository and guardian of an apostolic tradition,
a type and model for other churches.
The pontificate of Damasus (366–384) has been more than once
mentioned in the preceding pages as the period of the first definite
self-expression of the papacy. The continuous history of Latin
Christian literature does not commence till after the middle of the
fourth century; the dogmatic and exegetical writings of Hilary in Gaul
(c. 355) and Marius Victorinus in Rome (c. 360) are the first factors in
a henceforward unbroken series. On the beginnings of this new literary
development followed quickly the movement, of which we have already
noticed symptoms in other directions, for interpreting existing conditions
and constructing out of them a coherent and scientific scheme. These
conditions had grown up gradually, naturally, and almost at haphazard :
it now seemed time to try to put them on to a firm theological basis,
and in the process much that had been fluid, immature, tentative, was
crystallised into a hard and fast system. It fell to the able and


## p. 173 (#203) ############################################

Roman Theory under Damasus
173
7
masterful Damasus, in the last years of a long life and a troubled
pontificate, to attempt what his predecessors had not yet attempted,
and to formulate in brief and incisive terms the doctrine of Rome upon
Creed and Bible and Pope. A council of 378 or 379, after reciting the
Nicene symbol, laid down the sober lines of Catholic theology as against
the various forms of one-sided speculation, Eunomian and Macedonian,
Photinian and Apollinarian, to which the confusions of the half-century
since Nicaea had given birth; and the East could do no better than
accept the Tome of Damasus, as seventy years later it accepted the Tome
of Leo. Another council in 382 published the first official Canon
of Scripture in the West—the influence of Jerome, at that time papal
secretary, is traceable in it—and the first official definition of
papal claims.
Roman primacy ("ceteris ecclesiis praelata,” “primatum obtinuit ")
is grounded, with obvious reference to the vote of the council of 381 in
favour of Constantinople, on “no synodal decisions” but directly on the
promise of Christ to Peter recorded in the Gospel. Respect for Roman
tradition imposes next a mention of “the fellowship of the most blessed
Paul ”; but the dominant motif reappears in the concluding paragraph,
and the three sees whose prerogative was recognised at Nicaea are
transformed into a Petrine hierarchy with its “prima sedes” at Rome,
its " secunda sedes” at Alexandria, and its "tertia sedes" at Antioch.
St Augustine's theory of the Civitas Dei was, in germ, that of the
medieval papacy, without the name of Rome. In Rome itself it was
easy to supply the insertion, and to conceive of a dominion still
wielded from the ancient seat of government, as world-wide and almost
as authoritative as that of the Empire. The inheritance of the imperial
traditions of Rome, left begging by the withdrawal of the secular
monarch, fell as it were into the lap of the Christian bishop. In
this connexion it is a significant coincidence that the first description
which history has preserved to us of the outward habit of life of a Roman
pontiff belongs to the same period, probably to the same pope, as the
formulation of the claim to spiritual lordship. Ammianus was a pagan,
but not a bigoted one. He professes, and we need not doubt that he felt,
a genuine respect for simple provincial bishops, whose plain living and
modest exterior “commended them to the Deity and His true worship-
pers. ” But the atmosphere of the capital, the “ostentatio rerum
Urbanarum,” was fatal to unworldliness in religion. After relating
that in the year 366 one hundred and thirty-seven corpses were counted
at the end of the day in the Liberian basilica, on the occasion of the
fight between the opposing factions of Damasus and Ursinus, the
historian grimly adds that the prize was one which candidates might
naturally count it worth any effort to obtain, seeing that an ample
revenue, showered on the Roman bishop by the piety of Roman ladies,
enabled him to dress like a gentleman, to ride in his own carriage,
and to give dinner-parties not less well appointed than the Caesar's.
a
CH. VI.


## p. 174 (#204) ############################################

174
Rise of Jerusalem
Some forty or fifty years after Damasus the Roman author of the
original form of the so-called Isidorian collection of canons, incorporating
in his preface the substance of the Damasine definition on the subject of
the three Petrine sees, adds to Rome Alexandria and Antioch mention
also of the honour paid, for the sake of James the brother of the Lord
and of John the apostle and evangelist, to the bishops of Jerusalem and
Ephesus. Mere veneration of the “pillars” of the apostolic Church is
not enough to account for this modification of the original triad ; the
reasons must be sought in the circumstances of the day. If Ephesus is
said to “have a more honourable place in synod than other metropolitans,"
it may be merely that Ephesus, the most distinguished church of those
over which Constantinople, from the time of St John Chrysostom,
asserted jurisdiction, was a convenient stalking-horse for the movement
of resistance to Constantinopolitan claims; but it is also possible that
the phrase was penned after the oecumenical Council of Ephesus in
431, where Memnon of Ephesus was seated next after the bishops of
Alexandria and Jerusalem. If the bishop of Jerusalem is “accounted
honourable by all for the reverence due to so hallowed a spot,” and
nevertheless “the first throne,” sedes prima, “ was never by the ancient
definition of the fathers reckoned to Jerusalem, lest it should be
thought that the throne of our Lord Jesus Christ was on earth and not
in heaven,” we cannot help suspecting that at the back of the writer's
mind hovers an uneasy consciousness that the apostolic traditions of
Rome, which were so readily brought into play against Constantinople,
might find an inconvenient rival in Jerusalem. Not that at Jerusalem,
apart from a certain emphasis on the position of James the Lord's
brother, there was ever any conscious competition with Rome: but it
was true that, about the time that this canonical collection was published,
the see of Jerusalem was just pushing a campaign of aggrandisement,
carried on for over a century, to a triumphant conclusion.
The claims of Jerusalem were comparatively modest at the start,
and it did not occur to Damasus for instance that they need be taken
into serious consideration. Two initial difficulties hampered their early
Although Jerusalem was the mother church of Christendom,
and the home and centre of the first apostolic preaching, Aelia
Capitolina, the Gentile city founded by Hadrian, had no real continuity
with the Jewish city on the ruins of which it rose.
The church of
Jerusalem had been a church of Jewish Christians, the church of Aelia
was a church of Gentile Christians, and for a couple of generations too
obscure to have any history. A probably spurious list of bishops is all
the record that survives of it before the third century. Then came the
taste for pilgrimages-in A. D. 333 a pilgrim made the journey all the
way from Bordeaux-and the growing cult of the Holy Places: Jerusalem
was the scene of the most sacred of Christian memories, and locally at
any rate Aelia was Jerusalem. From the time of Constantine onwards
:


## p. 175 (#205) ############################################

Contentions for higher place
175
the identification was complete. The second difficulty was of a less
archaic kind, and took longer to circumvent. Aelia-Jerusalem did not
even dominate its own district, but was quite outshone by its near
neighbour at Caesarea. Politically Caesarea was capital of the province:
ecclesiastically it was the home of the teaching and the library of
Origen, and the Origenian tradition was kept alive by Pamphilus the
confessor and by Eusebius, bishop of the church at the time of the Nicene
council. It was hardly likely that the council would do anything
derogatory to the friend of Constantine, the most learned ecclesiastic
of the age: and in fact all the satisfaction that the bishop of Jerusalem
obtained at Nicaea was the apparent right to rank as the first of the
suffragans of the province—like Autun in the province of Lyons,
or London in the province of Canterbury. Local patriotism felt the sop
thus thrown to it to be quite unsatisfying, and for a hundred years the
sordid strife " for the first place," nepi apwreiwy as Theodoret calls it,
went on between the bishop of Jerusalem and the bishop of Caesarea.
In the confusion of the doctrinal struggle it was easy enough for an
orthodox bishop to refuse allegiance to an Arianizing metropolitan :
and Caesarea being in close relations with Antioch, it was natural for
the bishops of Jerusalem to turn to their neighbours at Alexandria, nor,
we may suppose, was Alexandria disinclined to favour encroachment
upon the territory of its Antiochene rival. Western churchmen, with
their profound belief in the finality of every decision of Nicaea, looked
coldly on the movement, and it is one of the counts in Jerome's
catalogue of grievances against John of Jerusalem. But at the first
Council of Ephesus, with Cyril of Alexandria in the chair and John of
Antioch absent, Juvenal of Jerusalem secured the second place, though
he still failed to abrogate the metropolitical rights of Caesarea. At the
Latrocinium of Ephesus in 449, again under Alexandrine presidency, he
managed to sit even above Domnus of Antioch. The business of the
Council of Chalcedon was to reverse the proceedings of the Latrocinium,
and it might have been anticipated that with the eclipse of Alexandrine
influence the fortunes of Jerusalem would also suffer. But a timely
tergiversation on the doctrinal issue saved something for Juvenal and
his see: the council decreed a partition of patriarchal rights over the
“ East” between the churches of Antioch and Jerusalem.
Very similar were the proceedings which established the “auto-
cephalous” character of the island church of Cyprus. The Cypriots
too began by renouncing the communion of the Arian bishops of
Antioch: they too espoused the cause of Cyril against John at the
Council of Ephesus, and were rewarded accordingly: and just as the
Empress Helena's discovery of the Cross served the claims of the church of
Jerusalem, so the discovery of the coffin containing the body of Barnabas
the Cypriot, with the autograph of St Matthew's Gospel, was held to
demonstrate finally the right of the Cypriots to ecclesiastical isolation.
H.


## p. 176 (#206) ############################################

176
Solid work of Councils
>
With this evidence before us, it is hard to deny that the history of
the generations which first experienced the “fatal gift” of Constantine
supplied only too good ground for St Gregory's complaint of contentions
and strivings for dominion among Christian bishops. But though these
contentions disturbed the work of councils, councils did not create them
and Gregory was hardly fair if he laid on councils the responsibility for
them: rather, in this direction lay the remedy and counterpoise, seeing
that councils represented the parliamentary and democratic side of church
government-stood, that is to say, in idea at least, for free and open
discussion as against the untrammelled decrees of authority, and for the
equality of churches as against the preponderance of metropolitan or
patriarch or pope. No more grandiloquent utterance of these principles
could indeed possibly be found than the words with which the Council of
Ephesus concludes its examination of the Cypriot claim. “ Let none of
the most reverend bishops annex a province which has not been from
the first under the jurisdiction of himself and his predecessors; and
so the canons of the fathers shall not be overstepped, nor pride of
worldly power creep in under the guise of priesthood, nor we lose little
by little, without knowing it, that freedom which our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Liberator of all men, purchased for us with his blood. ”
And councils really were, at any rate in two main departments of
their activity, the organ through which the mind of the federated Christian
communities did arrive at some definite and lasting self-expression,
namely in the Creed and in the Canon Law. In both directions, it is
true, East and West moved only a certain part of the way together :
in both too, while the impulse was given by councils, the influence of
the great churches added something to the completeness of the work :
in the case of the Creed, what became a universal usage in the liturgy
was at first only a usage of Antioch and Constantinople; in the case of
the Canon Law the collective decisions of councils were supplemented
by the individual judgments of popes or doctors before the corpus of
either Western or Eastern Law was complete. Nevertheless it remains
the fact that it was from and out of the conciliar movement that
Church Law, as such, came into being at all; that the canons of certain
fourth and fifth century councils are the only part of this Law common
to both East and West; and that again the only common formulation
of Christian doctrine was also the joint work of councils, which for
that very reason enjoy the name of oecumenical, Nicaea, Constantinople
and Chalcedon.
1. The origins of the Christian Creed or Symbolum are lost in the
obscurity which hangs over the sub-apostolic age. We know it first in
a completed form as used in the Roman church about the middle of the
second century. From Rome it spread through the West, taking the
shape ultimately of our Apostles' Creed; and one view of its history
would make this Roman Creed the source of all Eastern Creeds as well.


## p. 177 (#207) ############################################

1
Councils and the Creed
177
use.
But a summary statement of Christian belief for the use of catechumens
must have been wanted from very early times, and it is possible that what
St Paul " handed over at the first” to his Corinthian converts (1 Cor.
xv. 3) was nothing else than a primitive form of the Creed. Anyhow,
from whatever source it was derived, a common nucleus was expanded
or modified to meet the needs of different churches and different genera-
tions, so that a family likeness existed between all early Creeds, but
identity between none of them.
At the Council of Nicaea the Creed was for the first time given an
official and authoritative form, and was at the same time put to a novel
The baptismal Creed of the church of Palestinian Caesarea, itself
a much more technically theological document than any corresponding
Creed in the West, was propounded by Eusebius : out of this Creed the
Council constructed its own confession of faith, no longer for baptismal
and general use, but as the “form of sound words” by acceptance of
which the bishops of the churches throughout the world were to exclude
the Arian conception of Christianity. The example of the Creed of
Nicaea on the orthodox side was followed in the next generation by
numerous conciliar formularies expressing one shade or another of
opposing belief. When the Nicene cause finally triumphed, the Nicene
Creed was received all the world over as the expression of the Catholic
Faith; and the Council of Ephesus condemned as derogatory to it the
composition of any new formula, however orthodox.
The Council of Ephesus represented the Alexandrine position: at
Constantinople, however, a new Creed was already in use, which was
like enough to the Nicene Creed to pass as an expanded form of it, and was
destined in the end to annex both its name and fame. This Creed of
Constantinople had been developed out of some older Creed, probably
that of Jerusalem, by the help of the test phrases of the Nicaenum and
of further phrases aimed at the opposite heresies of the semi-Sabellian
Marcellus and the semi-Arian Macedonius. It may be supposed that
this Creed had been laid before the fathers of the council of 381 :
for at the Council of Chalcedon, where of course Constantinopolitan
influences were dominant, it was recited as the Creed of the 150 fathers
of Constantinople, on practically equal terms with the Creed of the 318
fathers of Nicaea. In another fifty years the two Creeds were beginning
to be hopelessly confused, at least in the sphere of Constantinople, and
the Constantinopolitanum was introduced into the liturgy as the actual
Creed of Nicaea. In the course of the sixth century it became not only
the liturgical but also the baptismal Creed throughout the East. In
the West it never superseded the older baptismal Creeds—except
apparently for a time under Byzantine influence in Rome—but as
a liturgical Creed it was adopted in Spain on the occasion of the
conversion of King Reccared and his Arian Visigoths in 589, and spread
thence in the course of time through Gaul and Germany to Rome.
C. MED. H. VOL. I. CH. VI.
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178
Origins of Church Law
and case.
2. Canon Law, even more clearly than the Creed, owed its develop-
ment to the work of councils.
The conception of a Church Law, ius ecclesiasticum, ius canonicum,
was not matured till the fourth century, and then largely as a result of
the new position of the Church in relation to the State, and in conscious
or unconscious imitation of the Civil Law. Down to the close of the
era of persecutions the discipline of the Church was administered under
consensual jurisdiction without any written code other than the Scrip-
tures, in general subordination to the unwritten kavov or regula, the
“ rule of truth,” “ the ecclesiastical tradition. ” Primitive books like the
Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apostolic Church Order give us a naive
picture of the unfettered action of the bishop as judge with his presbyters
as assessors. But as time went on the questions to be dealt with grew
more and more complex ; it became no longer possible to keep the world
at arm's length, and the relations of Christians with the heathen society
round them required an increasingly delicate adjustment; the simplicity
of the rigorist discipline, by which in the second century all sins of
idolatry, murder, fraud and unchastity were visited with lifelong
exclusion from communion, yielded at one point after another to the
demands of Christian charity and to the need of distinctions between case
The problem became pressing when the persecution of Decius
suddenly broke up the long peace, and multitudes of professing
Christians were tempted or driven to a momentary apostasy. The
Novatianist minority seceded rather than hold out to these unwilling
idolaters the hope of any readmission to the sacraments : the Church
was forced to face the situation, and it was obviously undesirable that
individual bishops should adjudicate upon similar circumstances in
wholly different ways. It was here that St Cyprian struck out his
successful line: his first councils were called to deal with the dis-
organisation which the persecution left behind it, and the bishops at
least of Africa were induced to agree upon a common policy worked out
on a uniform scale of treatment.
There is, however, nothing to shew that at Cyprian's councils any
canons were committed to writing, to serve as a permanent standard
of church discipline. That crucial step was only taken fifty years
later, as the persecution initiated by Diocletian relaxed and the bishops
of various localities could meet to take common counsel for the repair
of moral and material damage. During the decade 305-315 the
bishops of Spain met at Elvira, the bishops of Asia Minor at Ancyra
and at Neocaesarea, the Western bishops generally at Arles ; and the
codes of these four councils are the earliest material preserved in later
Canon Law.
The decisions of such councils had however no currency, in the first
instance, outside their own localities, and even the Council of Arles was a
concilium plenarium only of the West; but the feeling was already gaining


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Universal Church Law
179
strength, and it was quite in accordance with the ecclesiastical policy of
Constantine, that uniformity was desirable even in many matters where
it was not essential, and an oecumenical council offered unique oppor-
tunities of arriving at a common understanding. So we find the Council
of Nicaea issuing, side by side with its doctrinal definition, a series of
disciplinary regulations, among which are incorporated, often in a greatly
modified form, some canons of the Eastern Council of Ancyra and some
canons of the Western Council of Arles.
These Nicene canons are the earliest code that can be called Canon
Law of the whole Church, and at least in the West they enjoyed
something like the same finality in the realm of discipline that the
Nicene Creed enjoyed in the realm of doctrine. “ Other canon than the
Nicene canons the Roman church receives not,” “the Nicene canons alone
is the Catholic Church bound to recognise and to follow," writes
Innocent of Rome in the cause of St Chrysostom. Leo does not exclude
quite so rigorously the possibility of additions to the Church's code:
but the Nicene fathers still exercise an authority unhampered by time
or place, “mansuras usque in finem mundi leges ecclesiasticorum canonum
condiderunt, et apud nos et in toto orbe terrarum. ”
The principle was simplicity itself, but it came to be worked
out with a naive disregard of facts. On the one hand the genuine
Nicene code was not accepted quite entire, and where Western tradition
and Nicene rules were inconsistent, it was not always the tradition that
went under: the canon against kneeling at Eastertide is, in all early
versions that we can connect with Rome, entirely absent; the canon
against the validity of Paulianist baptism was misinterpreted to mean
that the Paulianists did not employ the baptismal formula. On the
other hand many early codes that had no sort of real connexion with the
Nicene council sheltered themselves under its name and shared its
authority. The canons of Ancyra, Neocaesarea and Gangra, possibly
also those of Antioch, were all included as Nicene in the early
Gallican collection. The canons of Sardica, probably because of the
occurrence in them of the name of Hosius of Cordova, are in most of
the oldest collections joined without break to the canons of Nicaea :
and a rather acrimonious controversy was carried on between Rome and
Carthage in the years 418 and 419, because Pope Zosimus cited the
Sardican canons as Nicene, and the Africans neither found these canons
in their own copies nor could learn anything about them in the East.
The original form of the collection known as Isidore's was apparently
translated from the Greek under Roman auspices at about this time:
the canons of Nicaea are those “quas sancta Romana recipit ecclesia,"
the codes of the six Greek councils Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra,
Antioch, Laodicea and Constantinople follow, and then the Sardican
canons under the heading “concilium Nicaenum xx episcoporum, quae in
graeco non habentur sed in latino inveniuntur ita. ” A Gallican editor of
CH, P.
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180
Codification of Church Law
this version, later in the fifth century, combines the newer material with
the older tradition in the shape of a canon proposed by Hosius, giving
the sanction of the Nicene or Sardican council to the three codes of
Ancyra, Neocaesarea and Gangra.
We must not suppose that all this juggling with the name Nicene
was in the strict sense fraudulent: we need not doubt the good faith of
St Ambrose when he quoted a canon against digamous clergy as Nicene,
though it is really Neocaesarean, or of St Augustine when he concludes
that the followers of Paul of Samosata did not observe the “rule of
baptism,” because the Nicene canons ordered them to be baptized, or for
that matter of popes Zosimus and Boniface because they made the
most of the Sardican prescriptions about appeals to Rome, which their
manuscripts treated as Nicene. The fact was that the twenty canons of
Nicaea were not sufficient to form a system of law: the new wine must
burst the old bottles, and by hook or by crook the code of authoritative
rules must be enlarged, if it was to be a serviceable guide for the
uniform exercise of church discipline. The spurious canon which the
Gallican Isidore fathers on Hosius puts just this point; “quoniam
multa praetermissa sunt quae ad robur ecclesiasticum pertinent, quae
iam priori synodo. . . constituta sunt,” let these other acts too receive
sanction. In the fourth century the councils had committed their canons
to writing. In the fifth century came the impulse to collect and codify
the extant material into a corpus of Canon Law.
The first steps were taken, as might be expected, in the East.
Somewhere about the year 400, and in the sphere of Constantinople-
Antioch, the canons of half-a-dozen councils, held in that part of
the world during the preceding century, were brought together into a
Vsingle collection and numbered continuously throughout. The editio
princeps, so to say, of this Greek code contained the canons of Nicaea
(20), Ancyra (25), Neocaesarea (14), Gangra (20), Antioch (25), and
Laodicea (59): it was rendered into Latin by the Isidorian collector,
and it was used by the officials of the church of Constantinople at the
Council of Chalcedon, for in the fourth session canons 4 and 5 of Antioch
canon 83” and “
canon 84,” and in the eleventh session
canons 16 and 17 of Antioch as “canon 95" and "canon 96. " The canons
of Constantinople were the first appendix to the code: they are trans-
lated in the Isidorian collection, and they are cited in the acts of
Chalcedon, but in neither case under the continuous numeration.
When Dionysius Exiguus, early in the sixth century, made a quasi-
official book of Canon Law for the Roman church, he found the canons
of Constantinople numbered with the rest, bringing up the total to 165
chapters: his two other Greek authorities, the canons of the Apostles and
the canons of Chalcedon, were numbered independently. The earliest
Syriac version adds to the original nucleus only those of Constantinople
and Chalcedon, with a double system of numeration, the one separate
were read
as


## p. 181 (#211) ############################################

Greek Canon Law
181
for each council, the other continuous throughout the whole series.
And in the digest of Canon Law, published about the middle of the
sixth century by John Scholasticus of Antioch (afterwards intruded as
patriarch of Constantinople), the “great synods of the fathers after the
apostles” are ten in number—i. e. not counting the Apostolic Canons the
councils proper are brought up to ten by the inclusion of Sardica,
Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon-and“ besides these, many
canonical rules were laid down by Basil the Great. ”
Two features in the work of John the Lawyer illustrate the transition
from earlier to later Canon Law. In the first place the list of authorities
is no longer confined strictly to councils, to whose decrees alone canonical
validity as yet attached in the fourth and fifth centuries: a new element
is introduced with the Canons of St Basil, and by the time we arrive at
the end of the seventh century, when the constituent parts of Eastern
Canon Law were finally settled at the Quinisextine council in Trullo, the
enumeration of Greek councils is followed by the enumeration of
individual doctors of the Greek Church, and an equal authority is
attributed to the rules or canons of both. In the second place John
represents a new movement for the arrangement of the material of
Church Law, not on the older historical and chronological method,
by which all the canons of each council were kept together, but on
a system of subject-matter headings, so that in every chapter all the
appropriate rules, however different in date or inconsistent in character,
would be set down in juxtaposition. Three of John's contemporaries
were doing the same sort of thing for Latin Church Law that he had
done for Greek—the deacon Ferrandus of Carthage in his Breviatio
Canonum, Cresconius, also an African, in his Concordia Canonum, and
Martin, bishop of Braga in north-western Spain, in his Capitula. But
the day of the great medieval systematisers was not yet : these tentative
efforts after an orderly system seem to have met at most with local
success, and the business of canonists was still directed in the main to
the enlargement of their codes, rather than to the coordination of the
diverse elements existing side by side in them.
Early Greek Church Law was simple and homogeneous enough, for it
consisted of nothing but Greek councils: even the first beginnings of the
corpus
of Latin Church Law were more complex, because not one element
but three went to its composition. We have seen that its nucleus
consisted in the universal acceptance of the canons of Nicaea, and in the
grafting of the canons of other early councils on to the Nicene stock.
Thus, whereas Greek canon law admitted no purely Latin element (and
in that way had no sort of claim to universality), Latin canon law not
only admitted but centred round Greek material
. Of course, as soon as
the idea of a corpus of ecclesiastical law took shape in the West, a Latin
element was bound to add itself to the Greek; and this Latin element
took two forms. The natural supplement to Greek councils were Latin
CH. 11.


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182
Latin Canon Law
that a group
of
some
councils: and every local collector would add to his Greek code the councils
of his own part of the world, Gallic, Spanish, African, as the case might
be. But just about the same time with the commencement of the continu-
ous series of councils whose canons were taken up into our extant Latin
codes, commences a parallel series of papal decretals: the African
councils begin with the Council of Carthage in 390 and the Council
of Hippo in 393, the decretals with the letter of Pope Siricius to
Himerius of Tarragona in 385. Such decretal letters were issued to
churches in most parts of the European West, Illyria included, but
not to north Italy, which looked to Milan, and not to Africa, which
depended on Carthage. As their immediate destination was local,
not one of them is found in the early Western codes so universally as the
Greek councils; on the other hand their circulation was larger than
that of
any
local Western council, and some or others of them are found
in almost every collection. It would even appear
eight decretals of Siricius and Innocent, Zosimus and Celestine, had been
put together and published as a sort of authoritative handbook before
the papacy of Leo (441-461). Outside Rome, there were thus three
elements normally present in a Western code, the Greek, the local,
and the papal. In a Roman collection, the decretals were themselves
the local element: thus Dionysius Exiguus' edition consists of two
parts, the first containing the Greek councils (and by exception the
Carthaginian council of 419), the second containing papal letters from
Siricius down to Gelasius and Anastasius II. But even the code of
Dionysius, though superior to all others in accuracy and convenience,
was made only for Roman use, and for more than two centuries had
only a limited vogue elsewhere. Each district in the West had its
separate Church Law as much as its separate liturgy or its separate
political organisation; and it was not till the union of Gaul and Italy
under one head in the person of Charles the Great, that the collection
of Dionysius, as sent to Charles by Pope Hadrian in 774, was given official
position throughout the Frankish dominions.


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