Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

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 constituted, 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 gods and the priests of a nation which he conquered, as Cambyses, when, with the zeal of a Persian worshipper of the single Sun-god, he burst upon the gods of Egypt; but this state of things usually passed away, when conquest became settled into possession; and in the Roman Peace each country and city was in stable possession of its gods, its rites, its temples, and among the rest the Jew might everywhere have his synagogue for his own people and worship God.

Close and permanent as the alliance between the two powers of civil government and religious worship, founded in the original constitution 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 worship had ever been distinct. It is true that in matter of practice the ever growing moral corruption of Gentilism had tended to subordinate worship 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 principate, 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 worship was part of the Roman constitution. 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 worship; an alliance in which worship 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 gods 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 gods 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 multitudes 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 worship, which existed in the Roman world, whatever the particular gods worshipped, 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 proprætor, 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 God, 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 mass of Jews, a religion of universal import, which was founded on the Person of a Redeemer, the God-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 establishing the illicitness of the Christian faith, in the sight of Roman law. The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, as the seat of Jewish worship, 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 constituents of belief, of worship, 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 identity of substance. The dark mysterious forms of Egyptian gods, the gods of Greece arrayed in human shapes of consummate loveliness, the voluptuous rites of Syrian goddesses, 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 worship 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 God 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 God 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 God who was Creator, was proclaimed to be Redeemer. And, further, the name of this God, communicated in the very rite which admitted into membership with the religion, disclosed a third Divine Person, whose work was pre-eminently a work belonging to the one God 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 God 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 gods, male and female, to whom various functions, down to the lowest employments in the service of mankind, were assigned, according to the caprice or the inherited traditions of their worshippers.