The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

by T. W. Allies

“We must not appeal to the Scriptures, nor try the issue on points on which the victory is either none, or doubtful, or too little doubtful. For though the debate on the Scriptures should not so turn out as to place each party on an equal footing, the order of things requires that that question should be first proposed which is the only one now to be discussed, To whom does the Faith itself belong? Whose are the Scriptures? From whom and through whom, when and to whom, was that discipline by which men become Christians delivered? For wherever the truth of that which is the Christian discipline at once and faith be shown to be, there will be the truth of the Scriptures, of their exposition, and of all Christian traditions. Our Lord Jesus Christ (may He suffer me so to speak for the present), whoever He is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance God and Man, of whatever reward [pg 275] the promiser, Himself declared so long as He was on earth, whether to the people openly, or to the disciples apart, what He was, what He had been, what will of the Father He administered, what duty of man He laid down. Of whom He had attached to his own side twelve in chief, the destined teachers of the nations. One of these having fallen off from Him, He bade the other eleven, on his departure to the Father after the resurrection, go and teach the nations, who were to be baptised into the Father, into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost. The Apostles then forthwith, the meaning of their title being the Sent, assuming by lot Matthias as a twelfth into the place of Judas, by the authority of the prophecy in the psalm of David, when they had obtained the promised power of the Holy Ghost for miracles and utterance, first through Judea bore witness to the Faith in Christ Jesus, and established churches, thence proceeding into the world promulgated the same doctrine of the same Faith to the nations, and thereupon founded churches in every city, from which the other churches thenceforth borrowed the vine-layer of the Faith and the seeds of the doctrine, and are daily borrowing them that they may become churches. And for this cause they are themselves also counted apostolical, as being the offspring of apostolical churches. The whole kind must be classed under its original. And thus these churches so many and so great are that one first from the Apostles, [pg 276] whence they all spring. Thus all are the first, and all apostolical, while all being the one prove unity: whilst there is between them communication of peace, and the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality.[233] And no other principle rules these rights than the one tradition of the same sacrament.”[234]

Here is the summing up of what Irenæus had said with the force, brevity, and incisiveness which characterise Tertullian. Further on he rejects any appeal on the part of heretics to scripture:

“If the truth be in our possession, as many as walk by the rule which the Church has handed down from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and Christ from God, the reasonableness of our proposition is manifest, which lays down that heretics are not to be allowed to enter an appeal to scriptures, since without scriptures we prove them to have no concern with scriptures. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, inasmuch as they do not hold from Christ what they follow by their own choice, and in consequence admit the name of heretics.[235] Therefore not being Christians, they have no right to Christian writings. To whom we may well say, Who are you? when did [pg 277] you come? and whence? What are you, who are not mine, doing in my property? By what right dost thou, Marcion, cut down my wood? By what license dost thou, Valentinus, turn the course of my waters? By what power remove my landmarks? This is my possession: how are you sowing it and feeding on it at your pleasure? It is mine, I repeat: I had it of old; I had it first: I have the unquestioned title-deeds from the first proprietors. I am the heir of the Apostles. According to their will, according to their trust, according to the oath I took from them, I hold it. You, assuredly, they have ever disinherited and renounced, as aliens, as enemies. But why are heretics aliens and enemies to Apostles, save from difference of doctrine, which each at his own pleasure has either brought forward or received against Apostles?”[236]

Thus Tertullian adds the witness of the African church to that of the Asiatic and Gallic churches in Irenæus.

We have noted the great church of Alexandria as a most complete instance of the growth whereby from the mother see the hierarchy took possession of a land. But the principle of such growth was the ecclesiastical rule, and its strength the energy with which that rule was preserved. This rule was twofold: the rule of discipline, or outward regimen, what we now call a constitution; and the rule of Faith. What the church of Alexandria [pg 278] was in discipline has been seen above: and now just at this time we have in the first great teacher of this church, who has come down to us, the most decisive exhibition of this rule as a defence against this same gnostic heresy. “As,” says Clement, “a man like those under the enchantment of Circe should become a beast, so whoever has kicked against the tradition of the Church, and started aside into the opinions of human heresies, has ceased to be a man of God, and faithful to the Lord.” ... “There are three states of the soul, ignorance, opinion, knowledge. Those who are in ignorance, are the Gentiles; those in knowledge, the true Church; those in opinion, the adherents of heresies.” ... “We have learnt that bodily pleasure is one thing, which we give to the Gentiles; strife a second, which we adjudge to heresies; joy a third, which is the property of the Church.” Again, he speaks of those who “not using the divine words well, but perversely, neither enter themselves into the kingdom of heaven, nor suffer those whom they have deceived to attain the truth. They have not indeed the key to the entrance, but rather a false key, whereby they do not enter as we do through the Lord's tradition, drawing back the veil, but cutting out a side way, and secretly digging through the Church's wall, they transgress the truth, and initiate into rites of error the soul of the irreligious. For that they have made their human associations later than [pg 279] the Catholic Church, it needs not many words to show.” Then, after referring to the origin and propagation “of the Lord's teaching,”[237] exactly after the mode of Irenæus and Tertullian, he concludes, “So it is clear from the most ancient and true Church, that these heresies coming in subsequently to it, and others still later, are innovations from it, as coins of adulterate stamp. From what has been said, then, I consider it manifest that the true Church, the really ancient Church, is one, in which are enrolled all who are just according to (God's) purpose. For inasmuch as there is one God and one Lord, therefore that which is most highly precious is praised for being alone, since it is an imitation of the one Principle. The one Church, then, which they try by force to cut up into many heresies, falls under the same category as the nature of the One. So then we assert that the ancient and Catholic Church is one alone in its foundation, in its idea, in its origin, and in its excellence, collecting by the will of the one God, through the one Lord, into the unity of one Faith, according to the peculiar covenants, or rather to the one covenant at different times, the preordained whom God predestined, having known before the foundation of the world that they would be just. But the excellence of the Church, as the principle of the whole construction, is in unity, [pg 280] surpassing all other things, and having nothing similar or equal to itself.”[238]

One other writer remains, the larger part of whose life falls within this period, greater in renown than either of the foregoing; and into whatever particular errors Origen may have fallen, he did not swerve from their doctrine as to the mode of meeting error itself. “Since,” says he, “there are many who think that they hold the tenets of Christ, while some of them hold different tenets from those who went before them, let the ecclesiastical preaching as handed down by the order of succession from the Apostles, and maintained even to the present time in the churches, be preserved: that alone is to be believed as truth which in nothing is discordant from the ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition.”[239] And the ground for such a principle he has given elsewhere:

“The divine words assert that the whole Church of God is the Body of Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body as a whole are particular believers: since as the soul quickens and moves the body, whose nature it is not to have the movement of life from itself, so the Word moving to what is fitting, and working in, the whole body, the Church, moves likewise [pg 281] each member of the Church, who does nothing without the Word.”[240]

The four great writers, then, of this period, Irenæus, Tertullian, Clement, and Origen, none of them indeed from Rome, but representing the churches of Asia, Gaul, Africa, and Egypt, exactly concur in the principle by which they refuted heresy, the propagation, that is, of the rule of Faith in its purity and integrity, by those who possessed the succession of the Apostles and their office of teaching, in which lay a divine gift of the truth.

But to those who proceeded from this basis it was a further labour to set forth the true knowledge against the false. And we may trace the following results of heresy, quite unintended by itself, in its operation on the Church.

1. In the first place, S. Augustine continually remarks that the more accurate enucleation of true doctrine usually proceeded from the attacks of heresy; and this happened so continually that it seems to him a special instance of that law of divine Providence which educes good from evil. “If the truth,” says he, “had not lying adversaries, it would be examined with less carefulness,” and so “a question started by an opponent becomes to the disciple an occasion of learning.”[241] And he observes that “we have found by experience that every heresy has brought into the [pg 282] Church its own questions, against which the divine Scripture was defended with greater care than if no such necessity had existed.”[242] Thus the doctrine of the Trinity owed its perfect treatment to the Arian assault on it; the doctrine of penance to that of Novatian; the doctrine of baptism to those who wished to introduce the practice of rebaptising; even the unity of Christ was brought out with greater clearness by the attempt to rend it, and the doctrine of one Catholic Church diffused through the whole world cleared from its objectors by showing that the mixture of evil men in it does not prejudice the good.[243] And he illustrates his meaning by a very picturesque image: “When heretics calumniate, the young of the flock are disturbed; in their disturbance they inquire; so the young lamb butts its mother's udder till it gets sufficient nutriment for its thirst.”[244] For the doctors of the Church being called upon for an answer supply the truth which before was latent. And there is no more signal instance of the great writer's remark than himself; for the attacks of the most various heresies led him during forty years of unwearied mental activity into almost every question of theology.