Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom Part 19

[150] Newman's Arians, pp. 45, 46.

[151] See upon this use of the Creed, Mohler, Kirchengeschichte, i.

343-347.

[152] Sermon 212.

[153] On this subject see Newman's Arians, pp. 137-142.

[154] As St. Irenaeus says, 3, 24, and Origen, Contr. Celsus, 6, 48.

[155] See Kleutgen's Theologie der Vorzeit, v. 404-409.

[156] Ibid., pp. 395-404.

[157] For which see Franzelin, De Traditione, pp. 228-237.

[158] Baur observes, p. 432: "Erst die Regierung Nero's fuhrte auf ihrer wurdigen Weise die Christen in die Geschichte ein."

[159] Tertullian, Apol. 21.

[160] Matt. xxiii. 34-36.

[161] Joseph. Antiq., viii. 8; Tacitus, Hist. i. 22.

[162] Baur remarks, p. 433: "Die neronische Verfolgung war der erste Anfang alles dessen, was das Christenthum von dem romischen Staat, so lange er keine andere Ansicht von ihm hatte, bei jeder Gelegenheit auf's Neue erwarten musste."

[163] a?t???sa? ?p? t?? ????????.-St. Clem. 5.

[164] 2 Cor. xi. 24.

[165] Tertullian, Ad Nationes, 14, translation in Clarke's edition.

[166] Acts xxi. 20.

[167] See Schwane, Dogmengeschichte, i. 68.

[168] Tertull. Apol., 5.

[169] Matt. x. 16.

[170] See this learnedly brought out by Hagemann in his introduction to "Die romische Kirche."

[171] See Stockl, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 244.

[172] 2 Peter ii. 14.

[173] Mohler, Patrologie, p. 51.

[174] See Mohler, Patrologie, p. 423.

[175] Heinrich, Dogmatische Theologie, i. 71.

[176] Ibid., i. 70.

[177] Newman, Causes of Success of Arianism, pp. 215, 216.

[178] Newman, Notes on St. Athanasius, pp. 51, 261, 264, 452, 250, 247, 150, 82, 312.

[179] Newman, "Causes of the Rise and Successes of Arianism," p. 252, a treatise which I have found a storehouse of information respecting the Church of the first three centuries.

[180] Magisterio.

[181] Mansi, tom. ii. pp. 469-477.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.

_The Church's Battle for Independence over against the Roman Empire._

In the period before Christ, the two Powers, as well in every polity over the earth as in the vast conglomerate called the Roman Empire, beginning together, grew up in fast alliance. Such a thing as the Civil Power in any particular polity putting under ban and persecuting the religion of its people was unknown. In the Roman city, as originally const.i.tuted, the union with religion, as an everyday work of life, was especially intimate and strong. It subsisted no less when Rome ruled from Newcastle to Babylon; for under the supremacy of the Emperor as Pontifex Maximus all the various nations were allowed the free exercise of their ancestral rites. Such was the state of the relation between the two Powers at the Day of Pentecost; such it had been from the first creation of human society. A foreign conqueror might, it is true, persecute the G.o.ds and the priests of a nation which he conquered, as Cambyses, when, with the zeal of a Persian wors.h.i.+pper of the single Sun-G.o.d, he burst upon the G.o.ds of Egypt; but this state of things usually pa.s.sed away, when conquest became settled into possession; and in the Roman Peace each country and city was in stable possession of its G.o.ds, its rites, its temples, and among the rest the Jew might everywhere have his synagogue for his own people and wors.h.i.+p G.o.d.

Close and permanent as the alliance between the two powers of civil government and religious wors.h.i.+p, founded in the original const.i.tution of human things, had been up to the time of Christ, yet in the minds of the people the two functions of civil government and of wors.h.i.+p had ever been distinct. It is true that in matter of practice the ever growing moral corruption of Gentilism had tended to subordinate wors.h.i.+p to government, the priest to the ruler. Nevertheless, though the Emperor was Imperator to his army, the possessor of tribunitial and consular power in the State, and likewise Pontifex Maximus in religion, such a concentration of distinct powers in his single person did not efface in the minds of the many peoples subjected to his sway the distinction itself of the powers wielded by him. A vast number of various priesthoods subsisted in the different countries untouched and unmeddled with by him. He was, in fact, by virtue of his religious pontificate, annexed to his civil princ.i.p.ate, the conservator of all these rites, religious customs, and priesthoods.

The meddling with them was a violation of his pontificate. Anubis in Egypt, Astarte in Syria, Cybele in Phrygia, Minerva at Athens, no less than Jupiter on the capitol, found their defender and guardian on the Palatine Mount, while Augustus did not disdain to have a daily sacrifice offered for him in the temple at Jerusalem, for the Jewish wors.h.i.+p was part of the Roman const.i.tution. He was patron as well as suppliant.

Thus at the time the Holy Ghost came down upon the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost there was strict alliance in all the provinces of the world-empire between secular rule and religious wors.h.i.+p; an alliance in which wors.h.i.+p was, it is true, subordinate to secular rule, but fostered and guarded by it. The eye of a Trajan would, no doubt, discern a common element in all the religions of which he was the official guardian, and it was even for the security of the immortal G.o.ds at Rome that Anubis should bark in Egypt, though he would not be allowed with impunity to deceive the matrons of Rome,[182] and that Astarte, under the public authority, should have trains of female priestesses in Syria. The fixed idea of the Roman Emperors might be said to have been to keep these party-coloured provinces, with their ancestral G.o.ds and rites, in due and legitimate enjoyment of their own property, without encroaching on that of their neighbours. And Marcus Aurelius was not deterred by his philosophic pantheism from offering mult.i.tudes of white oxen for the success of the Roman arms, but he sanctioned the perpetration of the most fearful tortures upon Christian confessors in the arena of Lyons, and imputed their patience of death to a sort of Galilean obstinacy. Why did he, who sacrificed to Jupiter, while he was an outspoken Positivist, persecute belief in Christ?

Let us endeavour to give a distinct and adequate answer to this question.

The subsisting alliance between civil authority and religious wors.h.i.+p, which existed in the Roman world, whatever the particular G.o.ds wors.h.i.+pped, and rites and customs practised in the various countries composing it might be, was interrupted and snapped asunder by the proclamation of the Gospel as an universal religion. It is true that in the first twelve years, while the Apostles addressed themselves to the Jewish people, wherever they might be, inviting them to accept Jesus as the Christ, the liberty to do this, within the various synagogues, might be covered by the liberty accorded to the Jewish race everywhere on Roman soil to practise their own religion as a thing handed down to them from their ancestors. So long as it was a question of Jewish law-in the words of the Roman propraetor, the brother of Seneca, at Corinth-the protection of an undoubtedly sanctioned religion, to use the phrase of Tertullian, would veil from censure the action of the Apostles; but as soon as, and in proportion as the kingdom of Christ came forth to the Gentiles as an universal religion-so soon as Christ was declared to them to be the Son of G.o.d, the Saviour of the world-so soon as men were distinguished as Christians, as they were already at Antioch, that is, recognised to be not a Jewish sect, but the adherents of a substantive religion with distinct belief, which was repudiated by the ma.s.s of Jews, a religion of universal import, which was founded on the Person of a Redeemer, the G.o.d-man who had come into the world, lived as a man, died, and risen again, and who called upon all men to be His followers, whether Jews or Gentiles, it became evident that the toleration, nay more, the support and guarantee for all religions which were subsisting equally for the various peoples of the Roman Empire, did not apply to the followers of the new religion. St. Paul, for instance, as a ringleader of the Galilean sect, was punishable and was punished by the Jewish Sanhedrim, as infringing what they considered the orthodox Jewish belief, and this conduct of the Jewish authority, everywhere pursued towards the Christians, drew upon them the attention of the Roman magistrates. The culmination of this conduct and policy was seen as to its result in the persecution set on foot by Nero, under Jewish instigation, and the act of Nero seems to have had the permanent effect of establis.h.i.+ng the illicitness of the Christian faith, in the sight of Roman law. The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, as the seat of Jewish wors.h.i.+p, completely established the severance of the Christian people from the Jews, and gave them religious independence with all its honour and all its perils.

For what was their position towards that universal heathendom which surrounded them on all sides?

Take the three great const.i.tuents of belief, of wors.h.i.+p, and of government, which we been have considering in their several departments, in their relations with each other, and in their co-inherence.

Heathendom, under the sway of Tiberius, lay stretched out over the vast regions of the empire in numberless varieties of costume which covered an ident.i.ty of substance. The dark mysterious forms of Egyptian G.o.ds, the G.o.ds of Greece arrayed in human shapes of consummate loveliness, the voluptuous rites of Syrian G.o.ddesses, the sober and homely deities of ancient Rome vested somewhat awkwardly in the robes of their Grecian congeners, the local deities, mountain oreads and river naiads, which had their seat in every city and district of civilised or semi-barbarous provinces, the representatives of oriental traditions, philosophies, and religions,-all these had part in a wors.h.i.+p offered by some or other subjects of Rome. And now went forth from city to city preachers who proclaimed to all who would hear them that there was one G.o.d alone who had made out of nothing, by an act of the purest free-will, the heavens and the earth, and that He made also of one blood the human inhabitants of this earth. And they declared that this one G.o.d was not only the Creator of all matter and of all spirit, of all men in all nations, but that in order to redeem them from a terrible slavery into which they had fallen, He had sent His own Son, one in nature with Himself, in human form among them, to die the death of a malefactor upon the cross, which was the legal punishment of the slave in the Roman law for capital crimes; nor only to die, but by rising again in the same body in which He had died, to attest the truth of His mission, and to gather all men together, the freeman and the slave, the Roman conqueror and the most abject of his serfs, in one religious community. Thus the same one G.o.d who was Creator, was proclaimed to be Redeemer. And, further, the name of this G.o.d, communicated in the very rite which admitted into members.h.i.+p with the religion, disclosed a third Divine Person, whose work was pre-eminently a work belonging to the one G.o.d alone, for it was to sanctify, by His presence in their hearts, all its members.

Thus these preachers proclaimed, as the basis of all they taught to their hearers, belief in a G.o.d who was One[183] and who was Three; who was single and alone, but outside the conception of number, and who was at once Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier altogether.

And they proclaimed this to peoples who had every conceivable variety of G.o.ds, male and female, to whom various functions, down to the lowest employments in the service of mankind, were a.s.signed, according to the caprice or the inherited traditions of their wors.h.i.+ppers.

What was the position of these preachers towards the various deities and their wors.h.i.+ppers who occupied the Roman empire? It is obvious that it was one of an absolute uncompromising hostility. And it is plain that, on the other side, all who did not closely and impartially examine their doctrine, would count them to be "G.o.dless," and treat them accordingly.

This, the barest outline of the primary and fundamental belief as to the all-important being of G.o.d, on which all further development of teaching rested, is sufficient to exhibit the intense opposition between Christianity and that which it was attempting to displace in the matter of belief.