BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - I WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

I WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?



The history of European civilization is the history of a certain political

institution which united and expressed Europe, and was governed from Rome.

This institution was informed at its very origin by the growing influence

of a certain definite and organized religion: this religion it ultimately

accepted and, finally, was merged in.

The institution--having accepted the religion, having made of that religion

its official expression, and having breathed that religion in through

every part until it became the spirit of the whole--was slowly modified,

spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it did not die.

It was revived by the religion which had become its new soul. It re-arose

and still lives.

This institution was first known among men as Republica; we call it today

"The Roman Empire." The Religion which informed and saved it was then

called, still is called, and will always be called "The Catholic Church."

Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.

It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth whether

it be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or to a man

who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in distance,

in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to examine would

perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as would a man who

was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an intimate part

of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary atheist, some

supposed student in some remote future, reading history in some place from

which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly departed, and to which the

habits and traditions of our civilization will therefore be wholly alien,

would each, in proportion to his science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped

today by the Catholic student who is of European birth, the truth that

Europe and the Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who

do not grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose

special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic Church,

or who have a traditional bias against it.

These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other

anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal

history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists are

innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still dogmatically taught

in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the world.

Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is

anti-Catholic--that concerns another sphere of thought--but that it is

unhistorical.

To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and its

spirit was the sole origin of European civilization; to forget or to

diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a certain

religion; to conceal the fact that this religion was not a vague mood, but

a determinate and highly organized corporation; to present in the first

centuries some non-existant "Christianity" in place of the existant Church;

to suggest that the Faith was a vague agreement among individual holders

of opinions instead of what it historically was, the doctrine of a fixed

authoritative institution; to fail to identify that institution with the

institution still here today and still called the Catholic Church; to

exaggerate the insignificant barbaric influences which came from outside

the Empire and did nothing to modify its spirit; to pretend that the Empire

or its religion have at any time ceased to be--that is, to pretend that

there has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the

present of Europe--all these pretensions are parts of one historical

falsehood.

In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is

nothing which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire, or is not

demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it.

In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic, our building

materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut-stone, our cooking, our staple food

and drink; in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower, the well,

the road, the canal; in expression, the alphabet, the very words of most of

our numerous dialects and polite languages, the order of still more, the

logical sequence of our thought--all spring from that one source. So with

implements: the saw, the hammer, the plane, the chisel, the file, the

spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the ladder; all these we have from

that same origin. Of our institutions it is the same story. The divisions

and the sub-divisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province,

the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the emplacement of

the great European cities, the routes of communication between them, the

universities, the Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence,

all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.

It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations

of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of it, is to

limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.

The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in history

we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but with a

sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave the

province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is equally

baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men must have its

human circumstance of place and time. The Church might have risen under

Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact, spring up in the high

Greek tide of the Levant and carries to this day the noble Hellenic

garb. It might have risen at any time: it did, as a fact, rise just at

the inception of that united Imperial Roman system which we are about to

examine. It might have carried for its ornaments and have had for its

sacred language the accoutrements and the speech of any one of the other

great civilizations, living or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of

China, of the Indies. As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so

circumstanced in its origin and development that its external accoutrement

and its language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and

Rome: of the Empire.

Now those who would falsify history from a conscious or unconscious bias

against the Catholic Church, will do so in many ways, some of which

will always prove contradictory of some others. For truth is one, error

disparate and many.

The attack upon the Catholic Church may be compared to the violent,

continual, but inchoate attack of barbarians upon some civilized fortress;

such an attack will proceed now from this direction, now from that, along

any one of the infinite number of directions from which a single point

may be approached. Today there is attack from the North, tomorrow an

attack from the South. Their directions are flatly contradictory, but the

contradiction is explained by the fact that each is directed against a

central and fixed opponent.

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Empire as a pagan

institution; they will pretend that the Catholic Church was something

alien to that pagan thing; that the Empire was great and admirable before

Catholicism came, weak and despicable upon its acceptation of the Creed.

They will represent the Faith as creeping like an Oriental disease into

the body of a firm Western society which it did not so much transform as

liquefy and dissolve.

Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable

Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous

barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of splendid pagan

qualities--which usually turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant

qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased Catholic body of the

Roman Empire which they are pictured as attacking.

Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat the Empire and its institutions

as dead after a certain date, and discuss the rise of a new society without

considering its Catholic and Imperial origins. Nothing is commoner, for

instance (in English schools), than for boys to be taught that the pirate

raids and settlements of the fifth century in this Island were the "coming

of the English," and the complicated history of Britain is simplified for

them into a story of how certain bold seafaring pagans (full of all the

virtues we ascribe to ourselves today) first devastated, then occupied, and

at last, of their sole genius, developed a land which Roman civilization

had proved inadequate to hold.

There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious or

unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, according to the degree of learning in

him who propagates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe as

though it were something quite apart from the general development of our

civilization.

There are innumerable text-books in which a man may read the whole history

of his own, a European, country, from, say, the fifth to the sixteenth

century, and never hear of the Blessed Sacrament: which is as though a man

were to write of England in the nineteenth century without daring to speak

of newspapers and limited companies. Warped by such historical enormities,

the reader is at a loss to understand the ordinary motives of his

ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the history of the Church

obviously escape him, but much more do the great crises in civil history

escape him.

To set right, then, our general view of history it is necessary to be ready

with a sound answer to the prime question of all, which is this: "What was

the Roman Empire?"

If you took an immigrant coming fresh into the United States today and let

him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil War: if

you gave him of the Civil War itself a partial, confused and very summary

account: if of all that went before it, right away back to the first

colonists, you were to leave him either wholly ignorant or ludicrously

misinformed (and slightly informed at that), what then could he make of the

problems in American Society, or how would he be equipped to understand the

nation of which he was to be a citizen? To give such a man the elements of

civic training you must let him know what the Colonies were, what the War

of Independence, and what the main institutions preceding that event and

created by it. He would have further to know soundly the struggle between

North and South, and the principles underlying that struggle. Lastly,

and most important of all, he would have to see all this in a correct

perspective.

So it is with us in the larger question of that general civilization which

is common to both Americans and Europeans, and which in its vigor has

extended garrisons, as it were, into Asia and Africa. We cannot understand

it today unless we understand what it developed from. What was the origin

from which we sprang? What was the Roman Empire?

The Roman Empire was a united civilization, the prime characteristic of

which was the acceptation, absolute and unconditional, of one common mode

of life by all those who dwelt within its boundaries. It is an idea very

difficult for the modern man to seize, accustomed as he is to a number

of sovereign countries more or less sharply differentiated, and each

separately colored, as it were, by different customs, a different language,

and often a different religion. Thus the modern man sees France, French

speaking, with an architecture, manners, laws of its own, etc.; he saw

(till yesterday) North Germany under the Prussian hegemony, German

speaking, with yet another set of institutions, and so forth. When

he thinks, therefore, of any great conflict of opinion, such as the

discussion between aristocracy and democracy today, he thinks in terms of

different countries. Ireland, for instance, is Democratic, England is

Aristocratic--and so forth.

Again, the modern man thinks of a community, however united, as something

bounded by, and in contrast with, other communities. When he writes or

thinks of France he does not think of France only, but of the points in

which France contrasts with England, North Germany, South Germany, Italy,

etc.

Now the men living in the Roman Empire regarded civic life in a totally

different way. All conceivable antagonisms (and they were violent) were

antagonisms within one State. No differentiation of State against State

was conceivable or was attempted.

From the Euphrates to the Scottish Highlands, from the North Sea to the

Sahara and the Middle Nile, all was one State.

The world outside the Roman Empire was, in the eyes of the Imperial

citizen, a sort of waste. It was not thickly populated, it had no

appreciable arts or sciences, it was barbaric. That outside waste

of sparse and very inferior tribes was something of a menace upon the

frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irritation. But

that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of the

menace of a foreign power. It was merely the trouble of preventing a

fringe of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric communities outside the

boundaries from doing harm to a vast, rich, thickly populated, and highly

organized State within.

The members of these communities (principally the Dutch, Frisian, Rhenish

and other Germanic peoples, but also on the other frontiers, the nomads

of the desert, and in the West, islanders and mountaineers, Irish and

Caledonian) were all tinged with the great Empire on which they bordered.

Its trade permeated them. We find its coins everywhere. Its names for most

things became part of their speech. They thought in terms of it. They had

a sort of grievance when they were not admitted to it. They perpetually

begged for admittance.

They wanted to deal with the Empire, to enjoy its luxury, now and then to

raid little portions of its frontier wealth.

They never dreamt of "conquest." On the other hand the Roman administrator

was concerned with getting barbarians to settle in an orderly manner on the

frontier fields, so that he could exploit their labor, with coaxing them

to serve as mercenaries in the Roman armies, or (when there was any local

conflict) with defeating them in local battles, taking them prisoners and

making them slaves.

I have said that the mere number of these exterior men (German, Caledonian,

Irish, Slav, Moorish, Arab, etc.) was small compared with the numbers of

civilization, and, I repeat, in the eyes of the citizens of the Empire,

their lack of culture made them more insignificant still.

At only one place did the Roman Empire have a common frontier with another

civilization, properly so called. It was a very short frontier, not

one-twentieth of the total boundaries of the Empire. It was the Eastern

or Persian frontier, guarded by spaces largely desert. And though a true

civilization lay beyond, that civilization was never of great extent nor

really powerful. This frontier was variously drawn at various times, but

corresponded roughly to the Plains of Mesopotamia. The Mediterranean

peoples of the Levant, from Antioch to Judea, were always within that

frontier. They were Roman. The mountain peoples of Persia were always

beyond it. Nowhere else was there any real rivalry or contact with the

foreigner, and even this rivalry and contact (though "The Persian War" is

the only serious foreign or equal war in the eyes of all the rulers from

Julius Caesar to the sixth century) counted for little in the general life

of Rome.

The point cannot be too much insisted upon, nor too often repeated,

so strange is it to our modern modes of thought, and so essentially

characteristic of the first centuries of the Christian era and the

formative period during which Christian civilization took its shape. Men

lived as citizens of one State which they took for granted and which they

even regarded as eternal. There would be much grumbling against the taxes

and here and there revolts against them, but never a suggestion that the

taxes should be levied by any other than imperial authority, or imposed in

any other than the imperial manner. There was plenty of conflict between

armies and individuals as to who should have the advantage of ruling, but

never any doubt as to the type of function which the "Emperor" filled, nor

as to the type of universally despotic action which he exercised. There

were any number of little local liberties and customs which were the pride

of the separate places to which they attached, but there was no conception

of such local differences being antagonistic to the one life of the one

State. That State was, for the men of that time, the World.

The complete unity of this social system was the more striking from

the fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and

liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions, of religious

practices, and of dialects. There was not even one current official

language for the educated thought of the Empire: there were two, Greek and

Latin. And in every department of human life there co-existed this very

large liberty of individual and local expression, coupled with a complete,

and, as it were, necessary unity, binding the whole vast body together.

Emperor might succeed Emperor, in a series of civil wars. Several Emperors

might be reigning together. The office of Emperor might even be officially

and consciously held in commission among four or more men. But the power of

the Emperor was always one power, his office one office, and the system of

the Empire one system.

It is not the purpose of these few pages to attempt a full answer to the

question of how such a civic state of mind came to be, but the reader must

have some sketch of its development if he is to grasp its nature.

The old Mediterranean world out of which the Empire grew had consisted

(before that Empire was complete--say, from an unknown most distant past

to 50 B.C.) in two types of society: there stood in it as rare exceptions

States, or nations in our modern sense, governed by a central Government,

which controlled a large area, and were peopled by the inhabitants of

many towns and villages. Of this sort was ancient Egypt. But there were

also, surrounding that inland sea, in such great numbers as to form the

predominant type of society, a series of Cities, some of them commercial

ports, most of them controlling a small area from which they drew their

agricultural subsistence, but all of them remarkable for this, that their

citizens drew their civic life from, felt patriotism for, were the

soldiers of, and paid their taxes to, not a nation in our sense but a

municipality.

These cities and the small surrounding territories which they controlled

(which, I repeat, were often no more than local agricultural areas

necessary for the sustenance of the town) were essentially the sovereign

Powers of the time. Community of language, culture, and religion might,

indeed, bind them in associations more or less strict. One could talk

of the Phoenician cities, of the Greek cities, and so forth. But the

individual City was always the unit. City made war on City. The City

decided its own customs, and was the nucleus of religion. The God was the

God of the city. A rim of such points encircled the eastern and central

Mediterranean wherever it was habitable by man. Even the little oasis of

the Cyrenaean land with sand on every side, but habitable, developed its

city formations. Even on the western coasts of the inland ocean, which

received their culture by sea from the East, such City States, though more

rare, dotted the littoral of Algeria, Provence and Spain.

Three hundred years before Our Lord was born this moral equilibrium was

disturbed by the huge and successful adventure of the Macedonian Alexander.

The Greek City States had just been swept under the hegemony of Macedon,

when, in the shape of small but invincible armies, the common Greek culture

under Alexander overwhelmed the East. Egypt, the Levant littoral and much

more, were turned into one Hellenized (that is, "Greecified") civilization.

The separate cities, of course, survived, and after Alexander's death unity

of control was lost in various and fluctuating dynasties derived from the

arrangements and quarrels of his generals. But the old moral equilibrium

was gone and the conception of a general civilization had appeared.

Henceforward the Syrian, the Jew, the Egyptian saw with Greek eyes and the

Greek tongue was the medium of all the East for a thousand years. Hence

are the very earliest names of Christian things, Bishop, Church, Priest,

Baptism, Christ, Greek names. Hence all our original documents and prayers

are Greek and shine with a Greek light: nor are any so essentially Greek in

idea as the four Catholic Gospels.

Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of accidents very difficult to

follow (since we have only later accounts--and they are drawn from the

city's point of view only), became the chief of the City States in the

Peninsula. Some few it had conquered in war and had subjected to taxation

and to the acceptation of its own laws; many it protected by a sort of

superior alliance; with many more its position was ill defined and perhaps

in origin had been a position of allied equality. But at any rate, a little

after the Alexandrian Hellenization of the East this city had in a slower

and less universal way begun to break down the moral equilibrium of the

City States in Italy, and had produced between the Apennines and the sea

(and in some places beyond the Apennines) a society in which the City

State, though of coarse surviving, was no longer isolated or sovereign, but

formed part of a larger and already definite scheme. The city which had

arrived at such a position, and which was now the manifest capital of the

Italian scheme, was ROME.

Contemporary with the last successes of this development in Italy went

a rival development very different in its nature, but bound to come into

conflict with the Roman because it also was extending. This was the

commercial development of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that is, a

Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life like all the rest. It had

shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had shown for conquest,

for alliances, and in general for a spread of its spirit and for the

domination of its laws and modes of thought. The business of Carthage was

to enrich itself: not indirectly as do soldiers (who achieve riches as but

one consequence of the pursuit of arms), but directly, as do merchants, by

using men indirectly, by commerce, and by the exploitation of contracts.

The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in Spain, and harbors wherever

he could find them, especially in the Western Mediterranean. He employed

mercenary troops. He made no attempt to radiate outward slowly step by

step, as does the military type, but true to the type of every commercial

empire, from his own time to our own, the Carthaginian built up a scattered

hotchpotch of dominion, bound together by what is today called the "Command

of the Sea."

That command was long absolute and Carthaginian power depended on it

wholly. But such a power could not co-exist with the growing strength of

martial Italy. Rome challenged Carthage; and after a prodigious struggle,

which lasted to within two hundred years of the birth of Our Lord, ruined

the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the town itself was destroyed by

the Romans, and its territory turned into a Roman province. So perished for

many hundred years the dangerous illusion that the merchant can master the

soldier. But never had that illusion seemed nearer to the truth than at

certain moments in the duel between Carthage and Rome.

The main consequence of this success was that, by the nature of the

struggle, the Western Mediterranean, with all its City States, with its

half-civilized Iberian peoples, lying on the plateau of Spain behind the

cities of the littoral, the corresponding belt of Southern France, and the

cultivated land of Northern Africa, fell into the Roman system, and became,

but in a more united way, what Italy had already long before become. The

Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, the Roman confederation, with

its ideas of law and government, was supreme in the Western Mediterranean

and was compelled by its geographical position to extend itself inland

further and further into Spain, and even (what was to be of prodigious

consequence to the world) into GAUL.

But before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul we must notice

that in the hundred years after the final fall of Carthage, the Eastern

Mediterranean had also begun to come into line. This Western power, the

Roman, thus finally established, occupied Corinth in the same decade as

that which saw the final destruction of Carthage, and what had once been

Greece became a Roman province. All the Alexandrian or Grecian East--Syria,

Egypt--followed. The Macedonian power in its provinces came to depend

upon the Roman system in a series of protectorates, annexations, and

occupations, which two generations or so before the foundation of the

Catholic Church had made Rome, though her system was not yet complete, the

centre of the whole Mediterranean world. The men whose sons lived to be

contemporary with the Nativity saw that the unity of that world was already

achieved. The World was now one, and was built up of the islands, the

peninsulas, and the littoral of the Inland Sea.

So the Empire might have remained, and so one would think it naturally

would have remained, a Mediterranean thing, but for that capital experiment

which has determined all future history--Julius Caesar's conquest of

Gaul--Gaul, the mass of which lay North, Continental, exterior to the

Mediterranean: Gaul which linked up with the Atlantic and the North Sea:

Gaul which lived by the tides: Gaul which was to be the foundation of

things to come.

It was this experiment--the Roman Conquest of Gaul--and its success which

opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the

world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no

parallel. Something less than a hundred small Celtic States, partially

civilized (but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the

Mediterranean), were occupied, taught, and, as it were, "converted" into

citizens of this now united Roman civilization.

It was all done, so to speak, within the lifetime of a man. The link and

corner-stone of Western Europe, the quadrilateral which lies between the

Pyrenees and the Rhine, between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the

Channel, accepted civilization in a manner so final and so immediate that

no historian has ever quite been able to explain the phenomenon. Gaul

accepted almost at once the Roman language, the Roman food, the Roman

dress, and it formed the first--and a gigantic--extension of European

culture.

We shall later find Gaul providing the permanent and enduring example of

that culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay. Gaul led

to Britain. The Iberian Peninsula, after the hardest struggle which any

territory had presented, was also incorporated. By the close of the first

century after the Incarnation, when the Catholic Church had already been

obscurely founded in many a city, and the turn of the world's history had

come, the Roman Empire was finally established in its entirety. By that

time, from the Syrian Desert to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the Irish

Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine and the Danube, in one great ring

fence, there lay a secure and unquestioned method of living incorporated as

one great State.

This State was to be the soil in which the seed of the Church was to be

sown. As the religion of this State the Catholic Church was to develop.

This State is still present, underlying our apparently complex political

arrangements, as the main rocks of a country underlie the drift of the

surface. Its institutions of property and of marriage; its conceptions of

law; its literary roots of Rhetoric, of Poetry, of Logic, are still the

stuff of Europe. The religion which it made as universal as itself is

still, and perhaps more notably than ever, apparent to all.








II: WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?



So far I have attempted to answer the question, "What Was the Roman

Empire?" We have seen that it was an institution of such and such a

character, but to this we had to add that it was an institution affected

from its origin, and at last permeated by, another institution. This other

institution had (and has) for its name "The Catholic Church."

My next task must, therefore, be an attempt to answer the question, "What

was the Church in the Roman Empire?" for that I have not yet touched.

In order to answer this question we shall do well to put ourselves in the

place of a man living in a particular period, from whose standpoint the

nature of the connection between the Church and the Empire can best be

observed. And that standpoint in time is the generation which lived through

the close of the second century and on into the latter half of the third

century: say from A.D. 190 to A.D. 270. It is the first moment in which we

can perceive the Church as a developed organism now apparent to all.

If we take an earlier date we find ourselves in a world where the growing

Church was still but slightly known and by most people unheard of. We can

get no earlier view of it as part of the society around it. It is from

about this time also that many documents survive. I shall show that the

appearance of the Church at this time, from one hundred and fifty to two

hundred and forty years after the Crucifixion, is ample evidence of her

original constitution.

A man born shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through the

violent civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines, surviving

to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and in extreme old age to

perceive the promise, though not the establishment, of an untrammelled

Catholicism (it had yet to pass through the last and most terrible of the

persecutions), would have been able to answer our question well. He would

have lived at the turn of the tide: a witness to the emergence, apparent to

all Society, of the Catholic Church.

Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial family in some great provincial

town such as Lyons. He would then find himself one of a comparatively small

class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the municipal government of

the city. Beneath him he would be accustomed to a large class of citizens,

free men but not senatorial; beneath these again his society reposed upon a

very large body of slaves.

In what proportion these three classes of society would have been found in

a town like Lyons in the second century we have no exact documents to tell

us, but we may infer from what we know of that society that the majority

would certainly have been of the servile class, free men less numerous,

while senators were certainly a very small body (they were the great

landowners of the neighborhood); and we must add to these three main

divisions two other classes which complicate our view of that society.

The first was that of the freed men, the second was made up of perpetual

tenants, nominally free, but economically (and already partly in legal

theory) bound to the wealthier classes.

The freed men had risen from the servile class by the sole act of their

masters. They were bound to these masters very strongly so far as social

atmosphere went, and to no small extent in legal theory as well. This

preponderance of a small wealthy class we must not look upon as a

stationary phenomenon: it was increasing. In another half-dozen generations

it was destined to form the outstanding feature of all imperial society.

In the fourth and fifth centuries when the Roman Empire became from Pagan,

Christian, the mark of the world was the possession of nearly all its soil

and capital (apart from public land) by one small body of immensely wealthy

men: the product of the pagan Empire.

It is next important to remember that such a man as we are conceiving would

never have regarded the legal distinctions between slave and free as a line

of cleavage between different kinds of men. It was a social arrangement and

no more. Most of the slaves were, indeed, still chattel, bought and sold;

many of them were incapable of any true family life. But there was nothing

uncommon in a slave being treated as a friend, in his being a member of the

liberal professions, in his acting as a tutor, as an administrator of his

master's fortune, or a doctor. Certain official things he could not be; he

could not hold any public office, of course; he could never plead; and he

could not be a soldier.

This last point is essential; because the Roman Empire, though it required

no large armed force in comparison with the total numbers of its vast

population (for it was not a system of mere repression--no such system

has ever endured), yet could only draw that armed force from a restricted

portion of the population. In the absence of foreign adventure or Civil

Wars, the armies were mainly used as frontier police. Yet, small as they

were, it was not easy to obtain the recruitment required. The wealthy

citizen we are considering would have been expected to "find" a certain

number of recruits for the service of the army. He found them among his

bound free tenants and enfranchised slaves; he was increasingly reluctant

to find them; and they were increasingly reluctant to serve. Later

recruitment was found more and more from the barbarians outside the Empire;

and we shall see on a subsequent page how this affected the transition from

the ancient world to that of the Dark Ages.

Let us imagine such a man going through the streets of Lyons of a morning

to attend a meeting of the Curia. He would salute, and be saluted, as he

passed, by many men of the various classes I have described. Some, though

slaves, he would greet familiarly; others, though nominally free and

belonging to his own following or to that of some friend, he would regard

with less attention. He would be accompanied, it may be presumed, by a

small retinue, some of whom might be freed men of his own, some slaves,

some of the tenant class, some in legal theory quite independent of

him, and yet by the economic necessities of the moment practically his

dependents.

As he passes through the streets he notes the temples dedicated to a

variety of services. No creed dominated the city; even the local gods were

now but a confused memory; a religious ritual of the official type was to

greet him upon his entry to the Assembly, but in the public life of the

city no fixed philosophy, no general faith, appeared.

Among the many buildings so dedicated, two perhaps would have struck his

attention: the one the great and showy synagogue where the local Jews met

upon their Sabbath, the other a small Christian Church. The first of these

he would look on as one looks today upon the mark of an alien colony in

some great modern city. He knew it to be the symbol of a small, reserved,

unsympathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout the Empire. The Empire

had had trouble with it in the past, but that trouble was long forgotten;

the little colonies of Jews had become negotiators, highly separate from

their fellow citizens, already unpopular, but nothing more.

With the Christian Church it would be otherwise. He would know as an

administrator (we will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was endowed;

that it was possessed of property more or less legally guaranteed. It had a

very definite position of its own among the congregations and corporations

of the city, peculiar, and yet well secured. He would further know as an

administrator (and this would more concern him--for the possession of

property by so important a body would seem natural enough), that to this

building and the corporation of which it was a symbol were attached an

appreciable number of his fellow citizens; a small minority, of course, in

any town of such a date (the first generation of the third century), but a

minority most appreciable and most worthy of his concern from three very

definite characteristics. In the first place it was certainly growing;

in the second place it was certainly, even after so many generations of

growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel; in the third place (and this was

the capital point) it represented a true political organism--the only

subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the Empire.

If the reader will retain no other one of the points I am making in this

description, let him retain this point: it is, from the historical point

of view, the explanation of all that was to follow. The Catholic Church in

Lyons would have been for that Senator a distinct organism; with its own

officers, its own peculiar spirit, its own type of vitality, which, if he

were a wise man, he would know was certain to endure and to grow, and which

even if he were but a superficial and unintelligent spectator, he would

recognize as unique.

Like a sort of little State the Catholic Church included all classes and

kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which it was growing, it

regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it within its own

sphere. The senator, the tenant, the freed man, the slave, the soldier,

in so far as they were members of this corporation, were equally bound to

certain observances. Did they neglect these observances, the corporation

would expel them or subject them to penalties of its own. He knew that

though misunderstandings and fables existed with regard to this body, there

was no social class in which its members had not propagated a knowledge

of its customs. He knew (and it would disturb him to know) that its

organization, though in no way admitted by law, and purely what we should

call "voluntary," was strict and very formidable.

Here in Lyons as elsewhere, it was under a monarchical head called by the

Greek name of Episcopos. Greek was a language which the cultured knew

and used throughout the western or Latin part of the Empire to which he

belonged; the title would not, therefore, seem to him alien any more than

would be the Greek title of Presbyter--the name of the official priests

acting under this monarchical head of the organization--or than would the

Greek title Diaconos, which title was attached to an order, just below

the priests, which was comprised of the inferior officials of the clerical

body.

He knew that this particular cult, like the innumerable others that were

represented by the various sacred buildings of the city, had its mysteries,

its solemn ritual, and so forth, in which these, the officials of its body,

might alone engage, and which the mass of the local "Christians"--for such

was their popular name--attended as a congregation. But he would further

know that this scheme of worship differed wholly from any other of the many

observances round it by a certain fixity of definition. The Catholic

Church was not an opinion, nor a fashion, nor a philosophy; it was not

a theory nor a habit; it was a clearly delineated body corporate based

on numerous exact doctrines, extremely jealous of its unity and of its

precise definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time,

with passionate conviction.

By this I do not mean that the Senator so walking to his official duties

could not have recalled from among his own friends more than one who was

attached to the Christian body in a negligent sort of way, perhaps by the

influence of his wife, perhaps by a tradition inherited from his father: he

would guess, and justly guess, that this rapidly growing body counted very

many members who were indifferent and some, perhaps, who were ignorant

of its full doctrine. But the body as a whole, in its general spirit,

and especially in the disciplined organization of its hierarchy, did

differ from everything round it in this double character of precision and

conviction. There was no certitude left and no definite spirit or mental

aim, no "dogma" (as we should say today) taken for granted in the Lyons of

his time, save among the Christians.

The pagan masses were attached, without definite religion, to a number

of customs. In social morals they were guided by certain institutions,

at the foundation of which were the Roman ideas of property in men, land

and goods; patriotism, the bond of smaller societies, had long ago merged

in the conception of a universal empire. This Christian Church alone

represented a complete theory of life, to which men were attached, as they

had hundreds of years before been attached to their local city, with its

local gods and intense corporate local life.

Without any doubt the presence of that Church and of what it stood for

would have concerned our Senator. It was no longer negligible nor a thing

to be only occasionally observed. It was a permanent force and, what is

more, a State within the State.

If he were like most of his kind in that generation the Catholic Church

would have affected him as an irritant; its existence interfered with the

general routine of public affairs. If he were, as a small minority even of

the rich already were, in sympathy with it though not of it, it would still

have concerned him. It was the only exceptional organism of his uniform

time: and it was growing.

This Senator goes into the Curia. He deals with the business of the day.

It includes complaints upon certain assessments of the Imperial taxes. He

consults the lists and sees there (it was the fundamental conception of

the whole of that society) men drawn up in grades of importance exactly

corresponding to the amount of freehold land which each possessed. He has

to vote, perhaps, upon some question of local repairs, the making of some

new street, or the establishment of some monument. Probably he hears of

some local quarrel provoked (he is told) by the small, segregated Christian

body, and he follows the police report upon it.

He leaves the Curia for his own business and hears at home the accounts of

his many farms, what deaths of slaves there have been, what has been the

result of the harvest, what purchases of slaves or goods have been made,

what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenantry for the

army, and so forth. Such a man was concerned one way or another with

perhaps a dozen large farming centres or villages, and had some thousands

of human beings dependent upon him. In this domestic business he hardly

comes across the Church at all. It was still in the towns. It was not yet

rooted in the countryside.

There might possibly, even at that distance from the frontiers, be rumors

of some little incursion or other of barbarians; perhaps a few hundred

fighting men, come from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge with a Roman

garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of neighboring barbarians;

or perhaps they were attempting to live by pillage in the neighborhood of

the garrison and the soldiers had been called out against them. He might

have, from the hands of a friend in that garrison, a letter brought to

him officially by the imperial post, which was organized along all the

great highways, telling him what had been done to the marauders or the

suppliants; how, too, some had, after capture, been allotted land to till

under conditions nearly servile, others, perhaps, forcibly recruited for

the army. The news would never for a moment have suggested to him any

coming danger to the society in which he lived.

He would have passed from such affairs to recreations probably literary,

and there would have been an end of his day.

In such a day what we note as most exceptional is the aspect of the small

Catholic body in a then pagan city, and we should remember, if we are to

understand history, that by this time it was already the phenomenon which

contemporaries were also beginning to note most carefully.

That is a fair presentment of the manner in which a number of local affairs

(including the Catholic Church in his city) would have struck such a man at

such a time.

If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire as a whole, we must observe

certain other things in the landscape, touching the Church and the society

around it, which a local view cannot give us. In the first place there had

been in that society from time to time acute spasmodic friction breaking

out between the Imperial power and this separate voluntary organism, the

Catholic Church. The Church's partial secrecy, its high vitality, its

claim to independent administration, were the superficial causes of this.

Speaking as Catholics, we know that the ultimate causes were more profound.

The conflict was a conflict between Jesus Christ with His great foundation

on the one hand, and what Jesus Christ Himself had called "the world." But

it is unhistorical to think of a "Pagan" world opposed to a "Christian"

world at that time. The very conception of "a Pagan world" requires some

external manifest Christian civilization against which to contrast it.

There was none such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the

third century. The Church had around her a society in which education was

very widely spread, intellectual curiosity very lively, a society largely

skeptical, but interested to discover the right conduct of human life, and

tasting now this opinion, now that, to see if it could discover a final

solution.

It was a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to speak

of its "luxury" or its "cruelty." A cruel man could be cruel in it without

suffering the punishment which centuries of Christian training would render

natural to our ideas. But a merciful man could be, and would be, merciful

and would preach mercy, and would be generally applauded. It was a society

in which there were many ascetics--whole schools of thought contemptuous

of sensual pleasure--but a society distinguished from the Christian

particularly in this, that at bottom it believed man to be sufficient to

himself and all belief to be mere opinions.

Here was the great antithesis between the Church and her surroundings. It

is an antithesis which has been revived today. Today, outside the Catholic

Church, there is no distinction between opinion and faith nor any idea that

man is other than sufficient to himself.

The Church did not, and does not, believe man to be sufficient to himself,

nor naturally in possession of those keys which would open the doors to

full knowledge or full social content. It proposed (and proposes) its

doctrines to be held not as opinions but as a body of faith.

It differed from--or was more solid than--all around it in this: that it

proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical

facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of "mysteries" as

realities instead of symbols.

A word as to the constitution of the Church. All men with an historical

training know that the Church of the years 200-250 was what I have

described it, an organized society under bishops, and, what is more, it is

evident that there was a central primacy at Rome as well as local primacies

in various other great cities. But what is not so generally emphasized is

the way in which Christian society appears to have looked at itself at

that time.

The conception which the Catholic Church had of itself in the early third

century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if we use

the word "Christianity" we are unhistorical. "Christianity" is a term in

the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it connotes an

opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The Christians of the time

of which I speak had no such conception. Upon the contrary, they were

attached to its very antithesis. They were attached to the conception of a

thing: of an organized body instituted for a definite end, disciplined in

a definite way, and remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete

doctrine. One can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of

stoicism, or epicureanism, or neoplatonism; but one cannot talk of

"Christianism" or "Christism." Indeed, no one has been so ignorant

or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase

"Christianity," used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in

the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of "Christianism" or

"Christism;" and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea; it

connotes something historically false; something that never existed.

Let me give an example of what I mean:

Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private house in

Carthage in the year 225. They are all men of culture; all possessed of the

two languages, Greek and Latin, well-read and interested in the problems

and half-solutions of their skeptical time. One will profess himself

Materialist, and will find another to agree with him; there is no personal

God, certain moral duties must be recognized by men for such and such

utilitarian reasons, and so forth. He finds support.

The host is not of that opinion; he has been profoundly influenced by

certain "mysteries" into which he has been "initiated:" That is, symbolical

plays showing the fate of the soul and performed in high seclusion before

members of a society sworn to secrecy. He has come to feel a spiritual

life as the natural life round him. He has curiously followed, and often

paid at high expense, the services of necromancers; he believes that in

an "initiation" which he experienced in his youth, and during the secret

and most vivid drama or "mystery" in which he then took part, he actually

came in contact with the spiritual world. Such men were not uncommon. The

declining society of the time was already turning to influences of that

type.

The host's conviction, his awed and reticent attitude towards such things,

impress his guests. One of the guests, however, a simple, solid kind of

man, not drawn to such vagaries, says that he has been reading with great

interest the literature of the Christians. He is in admiration of the

traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. He quotes certain

phrases, especially from the four orthodox Gospels. They move him to

eloquence, and their poignancy and illuminative power have an effect upon

his friends. He ends by saying: "For my part, I have come to make it a sort

of rule to act as this Man Christ would have had me act. He seems to me to

have led the most perfect life I ever read of, and the practical maxims

which are attached to His Name seem to me a sufficient guide to life.

That," he will conclude simply, "is the groove into which I have fallen,

and I do not think I shall ever leave it."

Let us call the man who has so spoken, Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have

been a Christian? Would the officials of the Roman Empire have called

him a Christian? Would he have been in danger of unpopularity where

Christians were unpopular? Would Christians have received him among

themselves as part of their strict and still somewhat secret society? Would

he have counted with any single man of the whole Empire as one of the

Christian body?

The answer is most emphatically No.

No Christian in the first three centuries would have held such a man as

coming within his view. No imperial officer in the most violent crisis of

one of those spasmodic persecutions which the Church had to undergo would

have troubled him with a single question. No Christian congregation would

have regarded him as in any way connected with their body. Opinion of that

sort, "Christism," had no relation to the Church. How far it existed we

cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In so far as it existed it would have

been on all fours with any one of the vague opinions which floated about

the cultured Roman world.

Now it is evident that the term "Christianity" used as a point of view, a

mere mental attitude, would include such a man, and it is equally evident

that we have only to imagine him to see that he had nothing to do with

the Christian religion of that day. For the Christian religion (then as

now) was a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in what I have called an

organism, and that organism was the Catholic Church.

The reader may here object: "But surely there was heresy after heresy and

thousands of men were at any moment claiming the name of Christian whom

the orthodox Church rejected. Nay, some suffered martyrdom rather than

relinquish the name."

True; but the very existence of such sects should be enough to prove the

point at issue.

These sects arose precisely because within the Catholic Church (1) exact

doctrine, (2) unbroken tradition, and (3) absolute unity, were, all three,

regarded as the necessary marks of the institution. The heresies arose

one after another, from the action of men who were prepared to define yet

more punctiliously what the truth might be, and to claim with yet more

particular insistence the possession of living tradition and the right to

be regarded as the centre of unity. No heresy pretended that the truth was

vague and indefinite. The whole gist and meaning of a heresy was that it,

the heresy, or he, the heresiarch, was prepared to make doctrine yet more

sharp, and to assert his own definition.

What you find in these foundational times is not the Catholic Church

asserting and defining a thing and then, some time after, the heresiarch

denying this definition; no heresy comes within a hundred miles of such

a procedure. What happens in the early Church is that some doctrine not

yet fully defined is laid down by such and such a man, that his final

settlement clashes with the opinion of others, that after debate and

counsel, and also authoritative statement on the part of the bishops, this

man's solution is rejected and an orthodox solution is defined. From that

moment the heresiarch, if he will not fall into line with defined opinion,

ceases to be in communion; and his rejection, no less than his own original

insistence upon his doctrine, are in themselves proofs that both he and

his judges postulate unity and definition as the two necessary marks of

Catholic truth.

No early heretic or no early orthodox authority dreams of saying to his

opponent: "You may be right! Let us agree to differ. Let us each form his

part of 'Christian society' and look at things from his own point of view."

The moment a question is raised it must of its nature, the early Church

being what it was, be defined one way or the other.

Well, then, what was this body of doctrine held by common tradition and

present everywhere in the first years of the third century?

Let me briefly set down what we know, as a matter of historical and

documentary evidence, the Church of this period to have held. What we

know is a very different matter from what we can guess. We may amplify it

from our conceptions of the probable according to our knowledge of that

society--as, for instance, when we say that there was probably a bishop at

Marseilles before the middle of the second century. Or we may amplify it by

guesswork, and suppose, in the absence of evidence, some just possible but

exceedingly improbable thing: as, that an important canonical Gospel has

been lost. There is an infinite range for guesswork, both orthodox and

heretical. But the plain and known facts which repose upon historical and

documentary evidence, and which have no corresponding documentary evidence

against them, are both few and certain.

Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what was certainly

true of his time.

Tertullian was a man of about forty in the year 200. The Church then taught

as an unbroken tradition that a Man who had been put to death about 170

years before in Palestine--only 130 years before Tertullian's birth--had

risen again on the third day. This Man was a known and real person with

whom numbers had conversed. In Tertullian's childhood men still lived who

had met eye witnesses of the thing asserted.

This Man (the Church said) was also the supreme Creator God. There you have

an apparent contradiction in terms, at any rate a mystery, fruitful in

opportunities for theory, and as a fact destined to lead to three centuries

of more and more particular definition.

This Man, Who also was God Himself, had, through chosen companions called

Apostles, founded a strict and disciplined society called the Church. The

doctrines the Church taught professed to be His doctrines. They included

the immortality of the human soul, its redemption, its alternative of

salvation and damnation.

Initiation into the Church was by way of baptism with water in the name of

The Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Before His death this Man Who was also God had instituted a certain rite

and Mystery called the Eucharist. He took bread and wine and changed them

into His Body and Blood. He ordered this rite to be continued. The central

act of worship of the Christian Church was therefore a consecration of

bread and wine by priests in the presence of the initiated and baptized

Christian body of the locality. The bread and wine so consecrated were

certainly called (universally) the Body of the Lord.

The faithful also certainly communicated, that is, eat the Bread and drank

the Wine thus changed in the Mystery.

It was the central rite of the Church thus to take the Body of the Lord.

There was certainly at the head of each Christian community a bishop:

regarded as directly the successor of the Apostles, the chief agent of the

ritual and the guardian of doctrine.

The whole increasing body of local communities kept in touch through their

bishops, held one doctrine and practiced what was substantially one ritual.

All that is plain history.

The numerical proportion of the Church in the city of Carthage, where

Tertullian wrote, was certainly large enough for its general suppression to

be impossible. One might argue from one of his phrases that it was a tenth

of the population. Equally certainly did the unity of the Christian Church

and its bishops teach the institution of the Eucharist, the Resurrection,

the authority of the Apostles, and their power of tradition through the

bishops. A very large number of converts were to be noted and (to go back

to Tertullian) the majority of his time, by his testimony, were recruited

by conversion, and were not born Christians.

Such is known to have been, in a very brief outline, the manner of the

Catholic Church in these early years of the third century. Such was the

undisputed manner of the Church, as a Christian or an inquiring pagan would

have been acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and onwards.

I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the moment in which

Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale. Many of the

points I have set down are, of course, demonstrably anterior to the third

century. I mean by "demonstrably" anterior, proved in earlier documentary

testimony. That ritual and doctrine firmly fixed are long anterior to the

time in which you find them rooted is obvious to common sense. But there

are documents as well.

Thus, we have Justin Martyr. He was no less than sixty years older than

Tertullian. He was as near to the Crucifixion as my generation is to the

Reform Bill--and he gave us a full description of the Mass.

We have the letters of St. Ignatius. He was a much older man than St.

Justin--perhaps forty or fifty years older. He stood to the generations

contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the generation of Gladstone,

Bismarck, and, early as he is, he testifies fully to the organization of

the Church with its Bishops, the Eucharistic Doctrine, and the Primacy in

it of the Roman See.

The literature remaining to us from the early first century and a half

after the Crucifixion is very scanty. The writings of what are called

"Apostolic" times--that is, documents proceeding immediately from men who

could remember the time of Our Lord, form not only in their quantity (and

that is sufficiently remarkable), but in their quality, too, a far superior

body of evidence to what we possess from the next generation. We have

more in the New Testament than we have in the writings of these men who

came just after the death of the Apostles. But what does remain is quite

convincing. There arose from the date of Our Lord's Ascension into heaven,

from, say, A. D. 30 or so, before the death of Tiberius and a long lifetime

after the Roman organization of Gaul, a definite, strictly ruled and highly

individual Society, with fixed doctrines, special mysteries, and a

strong discipline of its own. With a most vivid and distinct personality,

unmistakeable. And this Society was, and is, called "The Church."

I would beg the reader to note with precision both the task upon which we

are engaged and the exact dates with which we are dealing, for there is no

matter in which history has been more grievously distorted by religious

bias.

The task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a portion of history

as it was. I am not writing here from a brief. I am concerned to set forth

a fact. I am acting as a witness or a copier, not as an advocate or lawyer.

And I say that the conclusion we can establish with regard to the Christian

community on these main lines is the conclusion to which any man must come

quite independently of his creed. He will deny these facts only if he has

such bias against the Faith as interferes with his reason. A man's belief

in the mission of the Catholic Church, his confidence in its divine origin,

do not move him to these plain historical conclusions any more than

they move him to his conclusions upon the real existence, doctrine and

organization of contemporary Mormonism. Whether the Church told the truth

is for philosophy to discuss: What the Church in fact was is plain

history. The Church may have taught nonsense. Its organization may have

been a clumsy human thing. That would not affect the historical facts.

By the year 200 the Church was--everywhere, manifestly and in ample

evidence throughout the Roman world--what I have described, and taught the

doctrines I have just enumerated: but it stretches back one hundred and

seventy years before that date and it has evidence to its title throughout

that era of youth.

To see that the state of affairs everywhere widely apparent in A.D. 200 was

rooted in the very origins of the institution one hundred and seventy years

before, to see that all this mass of ritual, doctrine and discipline starts

with the first third of the first century, and the Church was from its

birth the Church, the reader must consider the dates.

We know that we have in the body of documents contained in the "canon"

which the Church has authorized as the "New Testament," documents

proceeding from men who were contemporaries with the origin of the

Christian religion. Even modern scholarship with all its love of phantasy

is now clear upon so obvious a point. The authors of the Gospels, the Acts,

and the Epistles, Clement also, and Ignatius also (who had conversed with

the Apostles) may have been deceived, they may have been deceiving. I am

not here concerned with that point. The discussion of it belongs to another

province of argument altogether. But they were contemporaries of the

things they said they were contemporaries of. In other words, their

writings are what is called "authentic."

If I read in the four Gospels (not only the first three) of such and such

a miracle, I believe it or I disbelieve it. But I am reading the account of

a man who lived at the time when the miracle is said to have happened.

If you read (in Ignatius' seven certainly genuine letters) of Episcopacy

and of the Eucharist, you may think him a wrong-headed enthusiast. But you

know that you are reading the work of a man who personally witnessed the

beginnings of the Church; you know that the customs, manners, doctrines and

institutions he mentions or takes for granted, were certainly those of his

time, that is, of the origin of Catholicism, though you may think the

customs silly and the doctrines nonsense.

St. Ignatius talking about the origin and present character of the Catholic

Church is exactly in the position--in the matter of dates--of a man of our

time talking about the rise and present character of the Socialists or of

the rise and present character of Leopold's Kingdom of Belgium, of United

Italy, the modern. He is talking of what is, virtually, his own time.

Well, there comes after this considerable body of contemporary

documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very spring

and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first founders), a gap

which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a man.

This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast mass of its documentary

evidence has, of course, perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient

writing. The little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and

fragments. But after this gap, from somewhat before the year 200, we come

to the beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing in volume,

of documentary evidence. Not, I repeat, of evidence to the truth of

supernatural doctrines, but of evidence to what these doctrines and their

accompanying ritual and organization were: evidence to the way in which the

Church was constituted, to the way in which she regarded her mission, to

the things she thought important, to the practice of her rites.

That is why I have taken the early third century as the moment in which we

can first take a full historical view of the Catholic Church in being, and

this picture is full of evidence to the state of the Church in its origins

three generations before.

I say, again, it is all-important for the reader who desires a true

historical picture to seize the sequence of the dates with which we are

dealing, their relation to the length of human life and therefore to the

society to which they relate.

It is all-important because the false history which has had its own way for

so many years is based upon two false suggestions of the first magnitude.

The first is the suggestion that the period between the Crucifixion and

the full Church of the third century was one in which vast changes could

proceed unobserved, and vast perversions of original ideas be rapidly

developed; the second is that the space of time during which those changes

are supposed to have taken place was sufficient to account for them.

It is only because those days are remote from ours that such suggestions

can be made. If we put ourselves by an effort of the imagination into

the surroundings of that period, we can soon discover how false these

suggestions are.

The period was not one favorable to the interruption of record. It was

one of a very high culture. The proportion of curious, intellectual, and

skeptical men which that society contained was perhaps greater than in any

other period with which we are acquainted. It was certainly greater than

it is today. Those times were certainly less susceptible to mere novel

assertion than are the crowds of our great cities under the influence of

the modern press. It was a period astonishingly alive. Lethargy and decay

had not yet touched the world of the Empire. It built, read, traveled,

discussed, and, above all, criticized, with an enormous energy.

In general, it was no period during which alien fashions could rise within

such a community as the Church without their opponents being immediately

able to combat them by an appeal to the evidence of the immediate past.

The world in which the Church arose was one; and that world was intensely

vivid. Anyone in that world who saw such an institution as Episcopacy

(for instance) or such a doctrine as the Divinity of Christ to be a novel

corruption of originals could have, and would have, protested at once. It

was a world of ample record and continual communication.

Granted such a world let us take the second point and see what was the

distance in mere time between this early third century of which I speak and

what is called the Apostolic period; that is, the generation which could

still remember the origins of the Church in Jerusalem and the preaching of

the Gospel in Grecian, Italian, and perhaps African cities. We are often

told that changes "gradually crept in;" that "the imperceptible effect of

time" did this or that. Let us see how these vague phrases stand the test

of confrontation with actual dates.

Let us stand in the years 200-210, consider a man then advanced in years,

well read and traveled, and present in those first years of the third

century at the celebration of the Eucharist. There were many such men who,

if they had been able to do so, would have reproved novelties and denounced

perverted tradition. That none did so is a sufficient proof that the main

lines of Catholic government and practice had developed unbroken and

unwarped from at least his own childhood. But an old man who so witnessed

the constitution of the Church and its practices as I have described them

in the year 200, would correspond to that generation of old people whom we

have with us today; the old people who were born in the late twenties and

thirties of the nineteenth century; the old people who can just remember

the English Reform Bill, and who were almost grown up during the troubles

of 1848 and the establishment of the second Empire in Paris: the old people

in the United States who can remember as children the election of Van Buren

to the office of President: the old people whose birth was not far removed

from the death of Thomas Jefferson, and who were grown men and women when

gold was first discovered in California.

Well, pursuing that parallel, consider next the persecution under Nero. It

was the great event to which the Christians would refer as a date in the

early history of the Church. It took place in Apostolic times. It affected

men who, though aged, could easily remember Judea in the years connected

with Our Lord's mission and His Passion. St. Peter lived to witness, in

that persecution, to the Faith. St. John survived it. It came not forty

years later than the day of Pentecost. But the persecution under Nero was

to an old man such as I have supposed assisting at the Eucharist in the

early part of the third century, no further off than the Declaration of

Independence is from the old people of our generation. An old man in the

year 200 could certainly remember many who had themselves been witnesses

of the Apostolic age, just as an old man today remembers well men who saw

the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The old people who had

surrounded his childhood would be to St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John what

the old people who survived, say, to 1845, would have been to Jefferson, to

Lafayette, or to the younger Pitt. They could have seen and talked to that

first generation of the Church as the corresponding people surviving in the

early nineteenth century could have seen and talked with the founders of

the United States.

It is quite impossible to imagine that the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Rite

of Initiation (Baptism in the name of the Trinity), the establishment of an

Episcopacy, the fierce defence of unity and orthodoxy, and all those main

lines of Catholicism which we find to be the very essence of the Church in

the early third century, could have risen without protest. They cannot have

come from an innocent, natural, uncivilized perversion of an original so

very recent and so open to every form of examination.

That there should have been discussion as to the definition and meaning of

undecided doctrines is natural, and fits in both with the dates and with

the atmosphere of the period and with the character of the subject. But

that a whole scheme of Christian government and doctrine should have

developed in contradiction of Christian origins and yet without protest in

a period so brilliantly living, full of such rapid intercommunication, and,

above all, so brief, is quite impossible.

That is what history has to say of the early Church in the Roman Empire.

The Gospels, the Acts, the Canonical Epistles and those of Clement and

Ignatius may tell a true or a false story; their authors may have written

under an illusion or from a conscious self-deception; or they may have been

supremely true and immutably sincere. But they are contemporary. A man

may respect their divine origin or he may despise their claims to instruct

the human race; but that the Christian body from its beginning was not

"Christianity" but a Church and that that Church was identically one with

what was already called long before the third century [Footnote: The

Muratorian Fragment is older than the third century, and St. Ignatius, who

also uses the word Catholic, was as near to the time of the Gospels as I

am to the Crimean War.] the Catholic Church, is simply plain history,

as plain and straightforward as the history, let us say, of municipal

institutions in contemporary Gaul. It is history indefinitely better

proved, and therefore indefinitely more certain than, let us say, modern

guesswork on imaginary "Teutonic Institutions" before the eighth century or

the still more imaginary "Aryan" origins of the European race, or any other

of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which still try to pass for historical

truth.

So much for the Catholic Church in the early third century when first we

have a mass of evidence upon it. It is a highly disciplined, powerful

growing body, intent on unity, ruled by bishops, having for its central

doctrine the Incarnation of God in an historical Person, Jesus Christ, and

for its central rite a Mystery, the transformation of Bread and Wine by

priests into the Body and Blood which the faithful consume.

This "State within the States" by the year 200 already had affected the

Empire: in the next generation it permeated the Empire; it was already

transforming European civilization. By the year 200 the thing was done. As

the Empire declined the Catholic Church caught and preserved it.

What was the process of that decline?

To answer such a question we have next to observe three developments that

followed: (1) The great increase of barbarian hired soldiery within the

Empire; (2) The weakening of the central power as compared with the local

power of the small and increasingly rich class of great landowners; (3)

The rise of the Catholic Church from an admitted position (and soon a

predominating position) to complete mastery over all society.

All these three phenomena developed together; they occupied about two

hundred years--roughly from the year 300 to the year 500. When they had run

their course the Western Empire was no longer governed as one society from

one Imperial centre. The chance heads of certain auxiliary forces in the

Roman Army, drawn from barbaric recruitment, had established themselves in

the various provinces and were calling themselves "Kings." The Catholic

Church was everywhere the religion of the great majority; it had everywhere

alliance with, and often the use of, the official machinery of government

and taxation which continued unbroken. It had become, far beyond all other

organisms in the Roman State, the central and typical organism which gave

the European world its note. This process is commonly called "The Fall of

the Roman Empire;" what was that "fall?" What really happened in this great

transformation?








BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - I WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?