Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

The Nicene Council was convoked to terminate the question which Arius had raised as to the Godhead of our Lord. It was the remedy of the Emperor Constantine for the malady which had broken out in the Church. He had just become, by the death of Licinius, sole ruler of the Roman world. Though not yet a Christian by the reception of baptism, he had conceived the highest veneration for the Christian Church. There can be no doubt that he trusted, by means of its spiritual unity, to weld together on a firmer basis the shaken fabric of imperial Rome. Thus he looked with much sorrow and no little perplexity upon the rise of a heresy in the important Church of Alexandria; and when its bishop, in spite of his great authority, as the head of the second Church in the world, which by a most powerful organisation governed the three secular provinces of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis, was unable to expel the mischief, he urged the convocation of a General Council. He convoked it, so far as a secular prince could do so, by giving all the assistance which the public authority could render in a State politically absolute; for he not only invited the bishops to attend, but ordered that they should travel free of cost at the public expense. Pope Sylvester, on his side, assented; he sent his legates to the Council, where they alone represented the whole West, and so by his assent and by the mission of his legates gave the Council its œcumenical character.

By this act the Emperor, who, it should be borne in mind, was still the Pontifex Maximus of heathen worship, and the official head of the old State religion, recognised the Church of Christ as a spiritual kingdom, possessing a doctrine of which it was the sole judge and bearer; recognised in its bishops the representatives of the various powers placed by Christ, its Founder, therein, as those who bore throughout his empire a priesthood, and exercised a spiritual rule and jurisdiction, and preached a doctrine all bound together in one whole; who, moreover, in virtue of this triple character, which came upon them from above, by the institution of Christ and through the medium of consecration, which is to say, by the force of a divine unction, and not by any human authority, represented a people which likewise was spread everywhere, while it was one likewise in virtue of a divine consecration, baptism in the threefold name of God.

Such a recognition is an enormous fact, which reason and imagination flag in their effort to realise. Two hundred and ninety-six years before, a Man had died upon a cross the death of a Roman slave, and the evening before His death He had ordered His disciples to commemorate that death for ever in a certain rite which should constitute the central worship of His people. This Man died by the edict of a Roman procurator, which had been extorted from him by the threats of the people and their rulers over whom he maintained Rome’s supremacy. This Man also died with the record over His head that the cause for which He died was, the assumption of kingship over a people who refused Him for their King, and chose in preference the Roman Emperor. His death was reported to the Emperor of that day; but we know not whether he took any note of the death of one recorded as a pretender to a provincial throne, or of a death enacted at the command of a very subordinate officer of his empire, a mere procurator under the Proconsul of Syria. The twelve disciples of this Man, made up of fishermen, a publican, and afterwards a tent-maker, went forth, carrying with them this rite, which they delivered to other men throughout the empire. Upon this rite grew up a whole fabric of doctrine and worship; rulers who propagated the doctrine and celebrated the rite, and a people which sprung out of both. The Roman emperors, at first superciliously disregarding the seed which had been so silently dropped in their cities, presently turned to persecute this people and their rulers; during ten generations having always persistently discountenanced them, they imprisoned, tormented, or executed a certain portion. They also destroyed the seat and worship of the people who had rejected this Man as their King, and had chosen the Emperor instead. And now, in rather less than three centuries, the Emperor of Rome, the successor of Tiberius, acknowledged this crucified Man for what He declared Himself to be: acknowledged His kingdom; acknowledged as princes in all lands the missionaries whom He had sent forth; acknowledged as one people, bound together in sacraments, those who had believed in His word, or in the word of others derived from Him; acknowledged, moreover, as a living authority, as judges of what was or was not the true doctrine as so derived from Him, men whose sole claim was the consecration received from that Man on the eve of His public execution, and transmitted by the imposition of hands to their successors; acknowledged the rite of sacrifice which He had created by His word in the offering of His Body as the most august, the most tremendous, the most precious thing existing in the world.

Moreover, in the convocation of the Council, the Emperor acknowledged of his own accord the solidarity of the Christian episcopate. St. Cyprian did not express it more plainly in his famous aphorism, “The episcopate is one of which a part is held by each without division of the whole,” than the Emperor in supposing that a point of doctrine on the maintenance of which the whole fabric of revelation rested, since it concerned the Person of the Founder, could be resolved by the common consent of its episcopate. For the decision to be come to would bind the whole as one Body; and herein lay another imperial attestation of Christ’s kingdom. The Emperor of Rome looked upon the Church and treated it, not as a beehive of separable cells, but as a Body the force and life of which lay in its oneness; and in causing a single heresy to be thus judged, he was condemning the principle of every heresy which should at any time arise.

All this and much more is comprehended in that act of the Emperor Constantino which sanctioned the convocation of the Nicene Council. It was not a Christianity split up into sects, but the solid unity of the Catholic Church in doctrine, discipline, worship, and constitution, which the Emperor looked to for a support to the tottering political fabric of the State, and as a new bond to its maintenance.[113]

But yet again. The Senate of Rome had been in the day of Rome’s freedom a great power. At first representing the authority of a free people who had in course of time established a vast rule, it was a name of dignity and glory on the earth. Next, as the official bestower or ratifier of imperial authority, as even yet representing the Roman people, as collecting in its bosom those who had borne high offices, ruled provinces, gained victories, were the instruments by which the Pax Romana kept the earth quiet and obedient, the Senate was still an august body. But now appeared before the world another council, consisting of men each of whom represented in his person a spiritual community while he carried a divine power. These men were not imposers of taxes or rulers of armies, not enactors of laws for human contracts, but men whose rule was over souls, whose word was divine, who announced not to a particular race but to all races of the earth one God, one Christ, one faith; a rule the centre of which was an act of transcendent worship, and the scope and object holiness. And this council, while it met in the empire of an absolute sovereign, who raised up and put down whom he pleased, the lives and fortunes of whose subjects were entirely in his hands, alone possessed freedom, the freedom to worship what they believed, to obey the commands of their conscience as Christians, to acknowledge a power stretching over the whole range of their most secret life, and in nowise derived from the Roman Emperor nor dependent on him. This power Constantine acknowledged in causing the Council to be convoked; and by so doing he pointed out the Council of the Christian Church as that from the imitation of which every future parliament should spring to construct civil liberty under Christian sovereigns. Assuredly the Council, as a deliberative body, possessed a dignity far transcending that of the Senate whether of free or of imperial Rome.

This is the meaning of the Nicene Council in the great arbitrament between the Spiritual and the Civil Powers, or, in Catholic language, between the Priesthood and the Empire. And it is a meaning put upon it by the Roman Emperor himself. Viewed on this side, the Council is a summary of the whole preceding history from the Day of Pentecost to its convocation, the records of which are as scant as the facts are precious. What know we as to the number of the martyrs and confessors in that interval? What infinitesimal portion of individual lives and sufferings then undergone has been preserved for our love and imitation? Among the Fathers present at the Council there was one, Paphnutius, who had lost an eye in the preceding persecution. We are told the Emperor would kiss the empty socket in token of his veneration. That act symbolised his whole demeanour to the Church for whose faith Paphnutius had suffered. It likewise expressed the witness which the fact of the Council convoked and acknowledged by the Roman Emperor gave to all those sufferings the innumerable incidents of which went to construct that victory of patience over force whereby the Christian kingdom was established in its first field of combat. This was the conflict of the natural society of man, as it existed in the grandest empire of Gentilism, with the supernatural society founded in Christ.

Thus the convocation of the Nicene Council is the definitive declaration by the Roman Empire through the mouth of its chief that it recognised a kingdom of Christ upon earth.

To illustrate the spiritual government of this kingdom, as it had grown up in the three centuries which intervene between the Day of Pentecost and the convocation of the Council, let us touch upon five points: the first shall be the ordered gradation of the hierarchy; the second, the holding of provincial councils; the third, the hearing and the judging of causes; the fourth, the election of the Church’s ministers; the fifth, the administration of her temporal goods.[114]

1. As to the first, the Sixth Canon of the Council ordered that the ancient custom should continue in force, according to which the great mother Churches of Alexandria and Antioch possessed jurisdiction over the whole civil diocese, the one of Egypt and the other of the East, in like manner as the Church of Rome possessed a similar jurisdiction in the West. The ground upon which the Council rests this canon is much to be observed; it does not institute this jurisdiction, but orders it be continued because it was the ancient custom. Now as there had been no other Council prior to that of Nicæa, in which this power of jurisdiction over the Metropolitans in the civil dioceses of Egypt and of the East had been granted to the Bishops of Alexandria and of Antioch, the origin of this ancient custom must be referred to apostolic institution, according to St. Augustine’s rule, “That which is held by the whole Church, which has not been ordered by councils, but always been kept, we are most right in believing to have been handed down by none other than apostolic authority.”[115] Pope Innocent I.,[116] writing to Alexander Bishop of Antioch, about eighty years after the Council, recognises his jurisdiction over not only one province, but over the whole assemblage of provinces which made up the civil jurisdiction of the Prefect of the East, not so much on the ground of the city’s civil dignity as because it had been the first See of the chief of the Apostles. St. Gregory the Great[117] repeatedly in his letters speaks of the See of the chief of the Apostles as being the See of one in three places, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.