The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

by T. W. Allies

The gnostic heresy, then, presents us with the first instance of a law which will run all through the Church's history. Peter, the first Apostle, [pg 283] meets and refutes Simon Magus, the first propagator of falsehood, who receives divine sacraments and then claims against the giver to be “the great power of God.” This fact is likewise the symbol of a long line of action, wherein it is part of the divine plan to make the perpetual restlessness of error subserve the complete exhibition of truth. The Gnostics denied the divine monarchy; at once mutilated and misinterpreted Scripture; claimed to themselves a secret tradition of truth. We owe to them in consequence the treatises of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement, and a written exhibition of the Church's divine order, succession, and unity, as well as a specific mention of the tie which held that unity together; and the mention of this tie at so early a period might otherwise have been wanting to us. But these three writers do but represent to us partially an universal result. The danger which from gnostic influence beset all the chief centres of ecclesiastical teaching marks the transition from the first state of simple faith to that of human learning, inquiry, and thought, turned upon the objects of Christian belief. The Gnostics had a merit which they little imagined for themselves. They formed the first doctors of post-apostolic times. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement are a great advance upon the more simple and external exhibition of Christianity which we find in the apologists. In them the Church is preparing to encounter the deepest questions moved [pg 284] against her by Greek philosophy. They are her first champions in that contest with Hellenic culture which was a real combat of mind, not a mere massacre of unresisting victims, and which lasted for five hundred years.

2. Secondly, when the gnostic attack began, the canon of the New Testament was still unfixed. Nothing can be more certain than that the Apostles did not set forth any official collection of their writings, and that no such collection existed shortly after their death. This fact most plainly shows that the Christian religion at their departure did not rest for its maintenance upon writings. Not only had our Lord written no word Himself, but He left no command to His Apostles to write. His command was to propagate His Gospel and to found His kingdom by oral teaching; and His promise was that the Holy Ghost should accompany, follow upon, and continue with, this their action. What we find is, that they did this, and that the writings which besides they left, being from the first kept and venerated by the several churches to which they were addressed, gradually became known through the whole body of the Church. With the lapse of time they would become more and more valuable. Moreover, when the Gnostics set themselves to interpolate and corrupt them, and to fabricate false writings, the need of a genuine collection became more and more urgent. It is from the three writers above mentioned, [pg 285] towards the end of the second century, that we learn that such a collection existed, in forming which these principles were followed: only to admit writings which tradition attested to spring from an Apostle or a witness of our Lord's life,[245] among whom Paul was specially counted: secondly, only such writings as were attested by some church of apostolical foundation: and thirdly, only such writings the doctrine contained in which did not differ from the rule of faith orally handed down in the churches of apostolic origin, or in the one Catholic Church, excluding all such as were at variance with the doctrine hitherto received. Thus in the settlement of the Canon authority as well as tradition intervened; an authority which felt itself in secure possession of the same Holy Spirit who had inspired the Apostles, and of the same doctrine which they had taught.[246]

With the reception of a book into the Canon of Scripture was joined a belief in its inspiration, which rested on what was a part of oral tradition, that is, that the Apostles as well in their oral as in their written teaching had enjoyed the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is evident that such a tradition reposes, in the last instance, upon the authority of the Church.[247]

If by means of the gnostic attacks the Canon [pg 286] of the New Testament, as we now possess it, was not absolutely completed, it had at least advanced a very great way towards that completion, which we have finally attested as of long standing in a Council held at Carthage in 397.[248]

3. Another result of the gnostic attack was the setting forth the tradition of the Faith, seated and maintained in the apostolic churches, as the rule for interpreting Scripture. The Gnostics in two ways impeached this rule, by claiming a private tradition of their own, and by interpreting such scripture as they chose to acknowledge after their own pleasure. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement found an adequate answer to both errors by showing that the Faith which the Apostles had set forth in their writings could not contradict the Faith which they had established in the Church. These were two sources of the same doctrine; but it is by the permanent connection and interpenetration of the two that the truth is maintained; and that which holds both together, that which utters and propagates the truth which they jointly contain, is the Teaching office, the mouth of the Church. Hence the force of the appeal in Irenæus to the succession of the episcopate, and to the divine gift of truth which the Apostles had handed down therein with their teaching office. Hence Tertullian's exclusion of heretics from the right to possess scriptures which belong only to the [pg 287] Church. Hence Clement's description of the only true Gnostic, as “one who has grown old in the study of the Scriptures, while he preserves the apostolic and ecclesiastical standard of doctrine.”[249] For neither in founding churches, nor in teaching orally, nor in writing, did the Apostles exhaust or resign the authority committed to them.[250] The authority itself, which was the source of all this their action, after all that they had founded, taught, or written, continued complete and entire in them, and was transmitted on to their successors, for the maintenance of the work assigned to it. It is this perpetual living power which Irenæus so strongly testifies,[251] to which he attaches the gift of the Spirit, not scripture, nor tradition, but that which carries both scripture and tradition through the ages, which is “as the breath of life to the body, which is always from the Spirit of God, wherein is placed the communication of Christ, which is always young, and makes young the vessel in which it is.”[252] The writings which the Holy Ghost has inspired, and the tradition of the Faith which He has established, would be subject, the one to misinterpretation, the other to alteration and corruption, without that particular presence of His, in which consists the divine gift [pg 288] of truth, the teaching office, “the making disciples all nations.”

4. And the action of heresy, which was so effective in bringing out the function of the teaching church, was not without force in extending and corroborating the function of the ruling church. The first synods of which we have mention are those assembled in Asia Minor towards the end of the second century against the diffusion of Montanism.[253] But what through the loss of records has been mentioned only in this one case must have taken place generally, since it is obvious that as soon as erroneous doctrines spread from one diocese to another, they would call forth joint action against them. Since then heresies have been the frequent, almost the exclusive, cause of councils. The parallel is fruitful in thought, which is suggested between the action of error in eliciting the more precise expression of the truth which it abhors, and its action in strengthening the governing power of the body which it assaults. In the one case and in the other the result is that which it least desires and intends; heresy, disbelieving and disobeying, is made to perfect the faith and build up the hierarchy.

Now to sum up our sketch of the internal history of the Christian Faith in the seventy-four years which elapse from the accession of Marcus [pg 289] Aurelius to the death of Alexander Severus. At the first-named date we find that it had spread beyond the confines of the Roman empire, and taken incipient possession of all the great centres of human intercourse by founding its hierarchy in them. At the second date it has subdued the powerful and widespread family of heresies which threatened to distort and corrupt its doctrines, and has done this by the vigour of its teaching office, which combined in one expression the yet fresh apostolic tradition stored up in its churches, and the doctrine of its sacred scriptures; while it has well-nigh determined the number and genuineness of these, severing them off from all other writings. The episcopate in which its teaching office resides appears not as a number of bishops, each independent and severed, and merely governing his diocese upon a similar rule, but with a bond recognised among them, the superior principate of the Roman See. That is, as the teaching office itself is in them all the voice of living teachers, so its highest expression is the voice of the living Peter in his see. And this bond as discerned and recognised by the Asiatic disciple of S. Polycarp, the bishop of the chief city of Gaul, is so strong that he uses for it rather the term denoting physical necessity than moral fitness:[254] as if he [pg 290] would say: As Christ has made the Church, it must agree from one end to the other in doctrine and communion with the doctrine and communion of the Church in which Peter, to whom He has committed His sheep, speaks and rules. And so powerful is the derivation of this authority that he who sits in the place of Mark, whom Peter sent, punishes by degradation a bishop who disregards his sentence in the case of a great writer, the brightest genius of the Church in that day. And when we look at the spiritual state of the world at the commencement of the third century, we find that Christianity, having formed and made its place in human society, is penetrating through it more and more in every direction. It is then that we discern the first beginnings of that great spiritual creation, in which Reason has been applied to Faith under the guidance of Authority, which the Christian Church, alone being in possession of these three constituents, could alone produce, and has carried on from that day to this. Alexandria was at this time the seat of a Jewish religious philosophy; it had just become the seat likewise of a heathen religious philosophy; there was within its church a great catechetical school, in which the Faith as taught by the apostolical and ecclesiastical tradition according to the scriptures [pg 291] was communicated. It was to be expected that its teachers, such men as Pantænus, Clement, and Origen, would be led on from the more elementary work of imparting the rudiments of the Faith to the scientific consideration of its deeper mysteries; and even the sight of what was going on around them among Jews and Greeks would invite them to attempt the construction of a Christian religious philosophy.

Moreover Gnosticism, of which Alexandria was the chief focus, had raised the question of the unity and nature of the Godhead, and professed a false gnosis as the perfection of religion. By this also thoughtful minds were led to consider the true relation of knowledge to faith, and hence to attempt the first rudiments of a Theology, the Science of Faith.

To refute heathenism both as a Philosophy and as a Religion, and to set forth Christianity as the absolute truth, was the very function of such men as Clement and Origen; and the former in his work entitled The Pedagogue exhibits the conduct of life according to the principles and doctrines of Christianity; while his Stromata, or Tapestries, exhibit the building up of science on the foundation of faith.[255] We can hardly realise now the difficulties which beset his great pupil Origen, when, carrying on the master's thought, he endeavoured to found a theology. The fact that he was among [pg 292] the first to venture on such a deep, is the best excuse that can be made for those speculative errors into which he fell.

III. And now we turn to the conduct of the empire towards this religion which has grown up in its bosom.