The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

CHAPTER XIV

THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION—THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Even a cursory glance at the institutional history of Christianity is instructive. Beginning as an essentially democratic brotherhood of fellow-believers in which wisdom and experience, rather than authority, guided affairs, the Christian community gradually adopted the political form of the society in which it found itself. The very names of the church officials of whom we read in the later canonical epistles are taken over from the municipal governments of the time. The presbyters, or elders, were old men selected by common consent from the members of the congregation as a sort of advisory council. They were committee-men, ripe in experience and capable of dealing sensibly with the various problems sure to arise from time to time in the social group. From among these elders, overseers, or bishops, were chosen who had administrative functions of an indefinite sort. Besides these officials, there were deacons, prophets and teachers, men who took a more or less conspicuous part in the life of the brotherhood.

As time elapsed, the Christian communities took on a more formal organization, an evolution which was due to the stress of problems which could not be met without a more centralized structure. New heresies were constantly arising and leading the members into confusion; moral disorders, like those against which Paul had to thunder, were continually appearing. It was only too easy for members of unorganized groups to miss that sense of a common outlook which is so important and yet so difficult to maintain in an age of intellectual and moral turmoil. This situation was grasped by leaders who had decided views of their own as to the proper doctrines to be taught and the proper mode of life to follow. Under their guidance, a centralization of authority was evolved. The bishop became the head of the community with power in matters of doctrine and morality. Naturally, the heads of the more important communities, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople, had a prestige which gave their opinions differential weight. Before long, councils of bishops were called to decide questions of doctrine. The period of fixed creeds had arrived. Once this direction was taken, it was no long step to the formation of a church organization comparable in complexity to that of the Roman Empire and as undemocratic in character. Such a development was most natural; and it would, indeed, have been surprising had it not occurred. Institutions always possess the imprint of their age. It is foolish, because unhistorical, to expect ideals out of their time.

The primitive Christian association was more than a church in the modern sense. It was a loyal group of like-minded people. It was a state within the state, a social unit dominating the main part of the lives of its members, and not merely a center for worship. It is this aspect of the early religious associations which I wish to stress; for it is the question, whether this phase of the church still exists to justify the church as an institution, into which I wish to enquire.

In the vast loneliness of the Roman Empire, men felt the need to draw together in order to escape the dreariness of life. The teeming interests and intense loyalties of the old city-state had disappeared and left men stranded in a cosmopolitan State, ordered from above, in which they had no vital participation; it was too gigantic and formal to touch them in a personal fashion and to kindle those enthusiasms which lift men beyond economic cares. It was well to be a Roman citizen, but such an honor did not suffice for the more homely needs of everyday existence. In the days of Athenian greatness, the individual was lost in the citizen; in the Roman Empire, the citizen was lost in the individual. Man is a social animal—to adapt Aristotle's famous expression—and the inhabitants of the various countries sought to create associations of various sorts to fill this gap caused by the destruction of the old political interests. In other words, men tried to weave a new social tissue of a private type to answer their craving for companionship and for the chance to do something worth doing. Remove the business, artistic, political, trades-union, literary and social interests in their present free and varied form from modern life, and we can gain some idea of the unsatisfactoriness of human life under the Empire for the lower and poorer classes. Monotonous as village life is to-day, it is throbbing with life as compared with the village or tenement district of ancient days. The farmer has his newspaper, the farmer's wife the magazine, and the piano, and the trip to town. Small wonder that these men and women of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds formed clubs and associations in which to escape from a disheartening loneliness and feel themselves members one of another.

But the Empire essayed to stamp out these brotherhoods, in order that it might be all in all and receive the loyalty and affection which these private organizations evoked. The ancient state was unable to conceive that division of interests into public and private which is so marked a feature of modern civilization. As Renan points out, the Empire "was trying, out of homage to an exaggerated idea of the State, to isolate the individual, to snap every moral tie between man and man, to defeat a legitimate desire of the poor, the desire to press together in a little corner of their own to keep one another warm. The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life seemed worse than death." Associations, or clubs, in which a complete equality reigned sprang up on every side in spite of the laws against combination. Human relations of the most kindly and intimate sort were established which sweetened life and made death less lonely. Now the Christian communities were just such associations; while they added religious emotions and hopes to the attractions of companionship. They were social units of a humble and spontaneous type within the formal structure of the Empire. They justified themselves in a human as well as in a superhuman way. An adequate psychology of religion remains to be written. Religion has always had its markedly social side.

Upon the foundation of this combined social and religious function, the superstructure of the Church was erected, much as on the political nature of man the Greek city-state arose. Creed and hierarchy were inevitable products whose appearance could have been predicted, but they were expressive of a certain growing cumbersomeness and a slowing up of the thought and action of the mass of the people. Henceforth, one of their religious duties was to believe fanatically what bishops and councils promulgated and to obey the advice of their superiors in matters of conduct. In this way, Christianity became a religion of authority. We must not over-idealize the early Christians—a reading of Paul's epistles would help to guard us against that tendency—but the spirit of the primitive congregations was, beyond much doubt, nobler than that which characterized the mobs of Alexandria and of Byzantium. A perusal of Hypatia, for example, is very apt to sober one's enthusiasm. We must remember that the bars of admission were lowered as Christianity became powerful and popular. Selection, which is one of the most attractive features of a new movement, no longer acted. It was at this period that Christianity developed its cult aspect. It became a religion of the imagination, of the sensuous, as well as of the will and the intellect. Ancient art and liturgy gave their contributions and Christianity moved from the catacombs to the basilica and the cathedral.

As Church and state became reconciled, the early breach between public and private life was filled. The religious interest and its duties joined themselves to those of secular life. For the mass of the people who did not surrender themselves to religion in the intensive way reserved for the clergy, Christianity simply forced a new alignment of social relations and values. The ideal was a Church-directed civilization in which the next world overshadowed this. For ordinary life, however, a practical adjustment was soon reached. Life was lived in a conventional enough way and the compromise was balanced by the efficacy of sacraments administered by the servants of the authoritative Church, the continuation of the incarnation upon the earth.