Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

Another school of the like kind was set up by Origen at Cæsarea in Palestine, and became famous. Rome also possessed a learned school, founded by Justin, concerning which, however, we know very little.[174] Edessa and Antioch possessed the like. It is apparent how important such schools must have been for the formation of a learned clergy. The more the Christian Church increased, and spread to all ranks of society, the more need there became for learning in its defenders.

But great as was the renown won by these schools, and important as were the services rendered by them to the Christian Church in the advance of learning, in building up that progress from faith to knowledge—that growth of knowledge founded upon faith which marks the whole ante-nicene period—nevertheless the development of the sacred science was connected not so much with a regular course of teaching in the schools as with the vehement struggle for life which the Church was then waging on the one hand against Judaism and heathendom, on the other hand against the great heresies which successively attacked all the main truths of religion and the chief mysteries of Christianity.[175] Also, it must ever be remembered that the gift of infallible teaching, derived from the assistance of the Holy Spirit, is lodged, not in science, even not in theological science, but in the magisterium of the Church.[176] The most accomplished defence during all this period of the Church against the attacks of heathenism is, by common consent, allotted to the work of Origen in reply to Celsus. There is also a like consent that the same author’s work upon Principles is the first attempt at systematic theology; but with all its ability, learning, and acuteness, it is not free from great errors. The one is a pure success, the other shows that the contact with Platonic philosophy had led the author in certain points astray. Again, all his genius and all his zeal did not save Tertullian from falling into Montanism, nor from discharging upon the chief ruler of the Church the sarcasm which he had so often employed against its enemies. In inquiring closely into the belief of some of those whose conversion from heathenism I have above instanced, an illustrious writer says: “It must be considered that the authors whom I have above cited whatever be the authority of some of them, cannot be said to speak ex cathedra, even if they had the right to do so, and do not speak as a Council may speak. When a certain number of men meet together, one of them corrects another, and what is personal and peculiar in each, what is local or belongs to schools, is eliminated.”[177]

But if, as seems to be fully admitted, theology was not treated as an organic body of doctrine up to the Nicene Council, and even much beyond it, and yet, if in this period the Church maintained, as she did maintain, her faith against three great foes, the Jews, the many-sided influence of the Gentile world arrayed with all its powers against her, and the manifold attacks of false doctrines rising from within in the shape of heresies, or in the shape of antichristian systems which simulated Christianity, how was her work accomplished?

I proceed to give as definite an answer as I can to this question.

I have traced above the transmission of spiritual power from the Person of Christ to the College of Apostles presided over by St. Peter, and the planting of bishops throughout the world by the Apostles as a further transmission of that power. The episcopate so appointed formed, instructed, taught, and governed the Christian people, one and identical in itself. This people, with the hierarchy which governed it, the sacraments which contained and dispensed its inward life, most of all the sacrifice wherein was the Lord Himself, made a polity; and the Christian doctrine was, so to say, to that polity what blood is to the body. From the beginning, then, the office of teaching was lodged in those who governed; they conserved, handed down from age to age, all that which constituted the polity, of which doctrine was the life-blood.

Now, I will take as an exponent of this whole belief one who came forth into active life just at the time of the Nicene Council, and whose name has been ever since identified with the defence of that especial doctrine upon which the whole fabric of the Christian faith rested, namely, the Godhead of Christ. St. Athanasius may well stand as the representative of those principles in virtue of which the Church maintained her faith when she could not meet freely in council, when her theology was contained in the form of simple faith rather than drawn out as an organic structure, when her bishops everywhere had to meet the brunt of persecution, when the action of her central and presiding Bishop was hampered by the perpetual jealousy of a hostile government; when, for all these reasons, the unity and impact of the whole body, as one people, were exposed to a severer strain than at any other period.

I take this account of the mind of St. Athanasius from one who has studied his writings with peculiar care, not to say with the affection of a kindred spirit:—

“This renowned Father is in ecclesiastical history the special doctor of the sacred truth which Arius denied, bringing it out into shape and system so fully and luminously, that he may be said to have exhausted his subject, as far as it lies open to the human intellect. But, besides this, writing as a controversialist, not primarily as a priest and teacher, he accompanies his exposition of doctrine with manifestations of character which are of great interest and value.

“The fundamental idea with which he starts in the controversy is a deep sense of the authority of tradition, which he considers to have a definitive jurisdiction even in the interpretation of Scripture, though at the same time he seems to consider that Scripture, thus interpreted, is a document of final appeal in inquiry and in disputation. Hence, in his view of religion, is the magnitude of the evil which he is combating, and which exists prior to that extreme aggravation of it (about which no Catholic can doubt) involved in the characteristic tenet of Arianism itself. According to him, opposition to the witness of the Church, separation from its communion, private judgment overbearing the authorised catechetical teaching, the fact of a denomination, as men now speak,—this is a self-condemnation; and the heretical tenet, whatever it may happen to be, which is its formal life, is a spiritual poison and nothing else, the sowing of the evil one upon the good seed, in whatever age and place it is found; and he applies to all separatists the Apostle’s words, ‘They went out from us, for they were not of us,’ Accordingly, speaking of one Rhetorius, an Egyptian, who, as St. Austin tells us, taught that ‘all heresies were in the right path and spoke truth,’ he says that the impiety of such doctrine is frightful to mention.

“This is the explanation of the fierceness of his language when speaking of the Arians; they were simply, as Elymas, ‘full of all guile and of all deceit, children of the devil, enemies of all justice,’ θεομάχοι—by court influence, by violent persecution, by sophistry, seducing, unsettling, perverting the people of God.