The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

by T. W. Allies

One office remains; His office of King. And here, again, the jurisdiction which He created for His kingdom springs from His Person, and that not only in its origin but in its perpetual derivation. [pg 343] He was Himself[288] the Apostle: as such He first multiplied Himself in the Twelve, whom from Himself He named Apostles. His public life on earth is an image of the whole mission or government which He would set up after His ascension. He lives with the Twelve: He teaches them: He is their Instructor, Father, and Friend. When His Apostles afterwards created Bishops, this form of our Lord's life on earth was exactly reproduced in the earliest dioceses. Thus S. Mark went forth from the side of Peter, and the mode of his living, and the family which he drew around him at Alexandria was after this pattern. He, the Bishop, is the image of Christ, and his twelve presbyters of the Apostles. This model is continually set forth by S. Ignatius as a divine command and institution, he being himself the occupant of the great Mother See of the East, the third See of Peter, and that wherein he first sat.[289] Thus the canonical life was formed by the exactest imitation of our Lord's public life, and its reproduction throughout the various dioceses formed the Church. Such was the life which S. Augustine afterwards practised and reduced to rule; and those who planted the [pg 344] Christian Faith throughout the north, Apostles to new and barbarous races, had this model before them. The diocese was first a family, in which the Bishop as a father presided over his priests, and sent them forth to their work. The Eucharist which he consecrated was from the beginning dispensed from his church to all his flock. The diocese, then, in its earliest form was an image of our Lord's intercourse with the Twelve, wherein the Bishop represents Him, and the priesthood His Apostles.

But the whole Church in its episcopate or mass of dioceses no less represented that His public life. For as He was the Head, the Living Teacher and Guide of His Apostles, and as He came to establish one Kingdom, and one only,[290] wherein the Twelve represented the whole Episcopate, and contained in themselves its powers, so the Primacy which He visibly exercised among them, He delegated, when He left them, to one of their number. Peter, when he received that commission to feed His sheep, took the place on earth of the great Shepherd, and in him the flock remains one.

Thus the double power which expresses the divinely-established government of the Church, the Primacy and the Episcopate, is as close a transcript of the Lord's life on earth with His Apostles as the diocese taken by itself. In His intercourse with His Apostles He is the germ of the Bishop with his priests; in His Vicariate bestowed upon [pg 345] Peter He repeats or rather continues His visible Headship on earth.

But spiritual jurisdiction is the expression of Christ's sovereignty on earth, and in the order just described it is linked with His Person as strictly as the worship exercised by means of His Priesthood, and the spiritual character which every one of His children bears. Surely no kingdom has ever been so contained in its king, no family in its father, no worship in its object, as the Christian kingdom, family, and worship, which together is the Church. Is it, then, any wonder that all Christian hearts from the first were filled with the blessing of belonging to such a creation as this, in which to them their Redeemer lived and reigned, penetrated them with His own life, and gathered them in His kingdom? Are not the words of S. Cyprian just what we should expect those to utter who overflowed with this conviction? At the same time that Cyprian was so writing, Dionysius, the Archbishop of Alexandria, addressed Novatian the antipope in these words: “It was better to suffer any extremity in order not to divide the Church of God. And martyrdom endured to prevent schism were not less glorious than that endured to refuse idolatry, but in my opinion more so. For in the one case a man suffers martyrdom for his own single soul, but in the other for the whole Church.”[291]

But let us trace the chronological sequence in history of that great institution, the real as well as logical coherence of which has just been set forth. The Church was a fact long before its theory became the subject of reflection. It came forth from the mind of the divine Architect and established itself among men through His power; and it is only when this was done that the creative thought according to which it grew could be delineated.

The fact, then, exactly agrees with the theory, and history here interprets dogma.

It is during the great forty days that our Lord founded the Primacy, when He made S. John and the rest of the Apostles sheep of Peter's fold. The period of thirty-eight years which follows is the carrying into effect His design in the first stage. The Church grows around Peter. First in Jerusalem he forms a mass of disciples; then for a certain number of years at Antioch. In the second year of Claudius, the thirteenth after the Ascension, he lays the foundations of the Roman Church. In the sixtieth year of our era he sends forth S. Mark to found the Christian society in Alexandria. Thus he takes possession of the three great cities of the empire, of east, west, and south. In the mean time the labours of S. Paul and the other Apostles, in conjunction with those of Peter and in subordination to them, plant the Christian root in a great number of cities. As S. Paul toils [pg 347] all round the northern circuit of the empire, through Asia Minor, Macedonia, Illyricum, to Spain, his work has a manifest reference to the work of Peter in the metropolis of the east, of the south, and of the west. In the latter he joins his elder brother, and the two Princes of the Apostles offer up their lives together on the same day in that city which was to be the perpetual citadel of the Christian Faith, the immovable Rock of a divine Capitol. Thus was it Peter, “from whom the very Episcopate, and all the authority of this title sprung,”[292] and what Pope Boniface wrote in 422 is a simple fact of history: that “the formation of the universal Church at its birth took its beginning from the honour of blessed Peter, in whose person its regimen and sum consists. For from his fountain the stream of ecclesiastical discipline flowed forth into all churches, as the culture of religion progressively advanced.”[293] Thus the whole initial movement was from above downwards, and S. Cyprian was not only enunciating dogma but speaking history when he wrote that the Lord built the Church upon Peter. In one generation the structure rose above the ground, and during all that time S. Peter's hand directed the work.

Just at the end of this time, on the point of being thrown into prison, whence he only emerged [pg 348] to martyrdom, Paul was at Rome with Peter, and he describes in imperishable words the work which had been already accomplished. Again it is not only dogma but history, not only that which was always to be but that which already was, which he set forth as it were with his dying voice: the one Body, and the one Spirit, the one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism, as there is one God. That Body in which Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers were fixed, that the visible structure might grow up to its final stature, in whose accordant unity was the perpetual safeguard against error. When Paul so wrote,[294] the Body was formed, and its headship was incontestably with Peter. He had no need to remind them of the man with whom he was labouring, of whose work the whole Church from Rome to Antioch and Alexandria was the fruit. But he places the maintenance of truth, and the perpetual fountain of grace, in the unity of the Church, which was before those to whom he wrote an accomplished fact.

Two generations pass and the aged S. Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom, attests the same fact. “Where is Jesus Christ,” he says, “there is the Catholic Church.” The King is in His Kingdom; the Master in His House; the Lord in His Temple. The bishops throughout the world inseparably linked together are His mind: and the presidency of charity, which is the inner life of [pg 349] all this spiritual empire, is at Rome. S. Ignatius and the author of the letter to Diognetus write just after the expiration of the apostolic period; and they both regard Christians as one mass throughout the world, living under a divine form of spiritual government. No one who studies their words can doubt that the one Body and the one Spirit were as visible to their eyes and as dear to their heart as to S. Paul.

We pass two generations further and S. Irenæus repeats the same testimony. The interval has been filled by incessant attacks of heresies, and the Bishop of Lyons dwells upon the fact that the Church speaks with one voice through all the regions of the earth as being one House of God, and that the seat of this its unity is in the great See founded by the Princes of the Apostles at Rome. He reproduces at great length the statements of S. Paul that the safeguard of truth lies in the one apostolic ministry, for which he runs up to the fountain-head in Rome. It is in the living voice and the teaching office of the Church that he sees a perpetual preservative against whatever error may arise. Thus it has been up to his time, and thus it will ever be.