1. Rome and the Church of Rome
In the brilliant argument which Belloc makes in Europe and the Faith to prove that “the Roman Empire with its institutions and its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization,” he goes so far as to maintain that “the divisions and subdivisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the routes of communication between them ... all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.” He finds in the Church of Rome the medium through which this inheritance has been transmitted. With this Catholic essayist the Protestant historian, Harnack, is in substantial agreement when he writes: “The Empire has not perished, but has only undergone a transformation.... The Roman Church is the old Roman Empire consecrated by the Gospel.”
Before we take up for consideration certain points of resemblance and of difference between our political institutions and those of ancient Rome, it is interesting to stop for a moment to ask ourselves in what respects the tradition and the ideals of the Roman state have been perpetuated by the Church of Rome. In the first place the Church is the lineal successor of the Empire in the sense that she saved Europe from chaos when the political ties which bound its several component parts to Rome were severed, and she conserved with all her power through the Middle Ages the Roman elements which escaped being engulfed by the wave of barbarism. More than that, she kept alive the old tradition of world-empire, no longer of the flesh, but of the spirit. Like the old Empire her domain embraced diverse lands and peoples. She resembled and she resembles the Empire now in the fact that she follows law and tradition strictly. She requires implicit obedience from the individual, and the interests of the individual are subordinated to those of the organization. In all these characteristics she is the true spiritual daughter of the Roman Empire. We noticed a moment ago that the realm of the Church, like that of the Emperor, included many different lands. The territorial parallelism between the two systems goes beyond this general point of resemblance.
As Sohm has put it in his Outlines of Church History, “the city or civitas was the lowest political unit of the Empire. It became the lowest political unit of the Church. In the constitution of the Church the territory of the city appeared as the episcopal diocese. In the constitution of the Empire the province, with the provincial governor, stood above the civitas. The episcopal dioceses were united in like manner under the direction of the metropolitan, the bishop of a provincial capital, forming an ecclesiastical province. In the constitution of the Empire, from the fourth century, several provinces composed an imperial diocese under an imperial governor (vicarius). The imperial diocese also (at least in certain parts of the Eastern Greek Church) formed, after the fourth century, part of the ecclesiastical constitution, as the district of a patriarch, to whom the metropolitans of the imperial dioceses were subordinate. Finally the general union of the churches corresponded to the general union of the Empire, with the imperial Council (the so-called Oecumenical Council) as its legitimate organ.... Thus in its old age the Roman Empire bequeathed its constitution to the young Church.... It was its last great legacy to the future.”
And later Sohm goes on to say: “To this day the diocese of the Catholic bishop is the copy of the Roman civitas; the province of the Catholic archbishop, the copy of the Roman imperial province; and the Catholic Church under a Pope declared omnipotent by law, the copy of the ancient Roman Empire, with its Caesars who claimed the world as their possession.” The Church extended its limits in ancient times and still extends them by new conquests, just as the Empire did. The missionary expeditions of Gregory in the sixth century, like the Jesuit enterprises in North and South America in recent times, were carried out in the spirit of Caesar or Trajan, and, after the Christian conquest of England, Gregory spoke as a Roman Emperor might have spoken, when he said “In one faith He linked the boundaries of the East and the West.” The absolute power of the Emperor in the later period is continued in tradition by the infallibility of the Pope, and the remarks of the city prefect, Themistius, to Theodosius the Great, “thou art the living law,” might be made with propriety to the Pope of today. The title “Pontifex Maximus” is common to both rulers, and there is a striking similarity between other ecclesiastical titles and those in the official Roman list of the Notitia Dignitatum. Latin is the official language of the Church, as it was of the Empire; the Pope consults the College of Cardinals, as the Emperor consulted the Senate; Canon Law, which has been derived in part from Roman Civil law, is codified as Roman Law was; the Councils seem to follow the parliamentary procedure of the Roman Senate, and the dress of Church officials is reminiscent of Roman times. In other words, what is characteristic of the spirit of the organization and of the externals of the Church of Rome is a direct inheritance from the Empire.