BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - 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.
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?