The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

by T. W. Allies

Another period of seventy years runs on, and we come to the just-cited testimony of Cyprian, who therefore said nothing new, nor anything exaggerated; but when the truth was assailed in its very citadel, he spoke out and described wherein [pg 350] its strength lay. He gathers up and gives expression to the two hundred and twenty years between the day of Pentecost and his own time. Here are the creative words of our Apostle and High-priest explained and attested and exhibited as having passed into fact by four witnesses, first S. Paul, then S. Ignatius, thirdly S. Irenæus, fourthly S. Cyprian. Between all the five there is no shadow of divergence, between the Master who designed the building and the servants who described its erection; between the Prophet who foretold and the historians who recorded. The one said, Upon this rock I will build my Church; the others pointed out that the work was accomplished.

The original and fundamental conception of all this work is expressed by S. Matthew and S. Mark when they speak of our Lord at His first going forth as “proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.” His three years' ministry is the germ and type of the perpetual mission which He founded. It was to be from first to last a work of personal ministry, beginning from above, not spreading from below; its power and virtue descending from Him through those whom He chose, the people being the work of the Prince, their government a delegation from Him, as their moral condition lay in following Him, and their life and support in feeding on Him. And He declared that the original conception should be carried [pg 351] out to the end, and that “the gospel of the kingdom” should be proclaimed through the whole world as a witness to all nations, until the consummation should come.[295]

The chief events of the third century brought out more and more the unity of the Church and the Primacy of S. Peter's See as the power within the Church by which that unity is produced and maintained.

With this century the great persecutions begin. That of Septimius Severus arose in the year 202. Now a persecution which assaulted the mass of Christians was the occasion of fall and apostasy to some, of martyrdom to others. Hence the question became urgent how those should be treated by the Christian society who through fear of suffering had failed to maintain the confession of their faith. It was necessary to lay down more distinctly rules as to what crimes should be admitted to penance, and what that penance should be. The practice here involved doctrine; it raised immediately the question of the power which the society itself had to grant pardon, and to receive the guilty back into its bosom. And here the authority of the chief Bishop was at once called out. We find as a matter of fact Pope Zephyrinus in the first [pg 352] years of this century determining the rules of penance, and a small party of rigid disciplinarians, among whom Tertullian was conspicuous, who considered his rules as too indulgent. It is in the vehement pamphlet with which Tertullian assails the Pope that we have one of the earliest expressions of the great authority claimed by him. “I hear,” he exclaims, “that an edict has been set forth, and a peremptory one. The Pontifex Maximus, in sooth, that is, the Bishop of Bishops, issues his edict: I pardon to those who have discharged their penance the sins both of adultery and of fornication.”[296] Twenty years later Pope Callistus carried the indulgence yet further, receiving to penance those who had committed murder or idolatry.[297] Once more, after a period of thirty years, the breaking out of the Decian persecution raised afresh the question of admitting great sinners to penance, and the actual discipline of the Roman Church, as established under Zephyrinus and Callistus, is set forth in a letter to Cyprian by Novatian, then one of the most esteemed presbyters of that church. By the discipline which these facts attest it is determined that the Church has lodged in her the power of pardoning any sin whatsoever according to the rules of the penance which she imposes. And it is the Roman Church which herein takes [pg 353] the guidance. She maintained the ancient faith, severity, and discipline, yet tempered with that consideration which the full possession of the truth alone bestows.[298] Thus she received back without hesitation those who returned from heresy or schism, as well as those who had fallen in the conflict with persecution.

For another question of great importance which her guidance determined was that concerning the rebaptisation of heretics; and in this she went against the judgment of Cyprian with his council, of Firmilian, and of other bishops. It had been the custom that those who had received baptism among heretics, provided it was with the proper rite, should, when they sought admission into the Church, be received only by an imposition of hands, not by the iteration of baptism. And though Cyprian and a great majority of African bishops, through their horror of schism and heresy, wished to modify this rule, and to insist that baptism given outside the Church was invalid, Pope Stephen resisted, and maintained the ancient rule, with the decision that nothing save what had been handed down should be done.

It is evident that the question of penance and that of rebaptisation touched the whole Christian society, and here accordingly we find the superior Principate of the Roman Church exert itself. In fact, the right decision as to both these questions involved the right conception of the Church herself, her constitution, power, and prerogatives. The rigorism[299] with which some had endeavoured to exclude certain sinners from the faculty of receiving penance, and the view which led them to confine the validity itself of baptism to its reception within the one Church, led when fully developed in the following century to the obstinate schism and heresy of the Donatists. These dangerous tendencies were resisted, when they first appeared, by the Roman See, and we owe to such resistance the application by Tertullian to the Pope of the title of “Pontifex Maximus” and “Bishop of Bishops,” about the year 202, as the expression of the power which he then claimed and exercised.

Another question likewise touching the whole Christian society, which the Roman Pontiff had already decided against the practice of the influential and ancient churches of Asia Minor, was the time of holding Easter. Pope Victor insisted that the practice of the Roman Church must be followed, which kept the day of the Crucifixion invariably on the Friday, and that of the Resurrection on the Sunday, and not the Jewish practice of [pg 355] the Asiatics, which took the 14th and the 16th days of the month Nisan, on whatever days of the week they might fall, for that purpose. And here in the peremptory tone of Pope Victor, and in the threat of excommunication which he issued, the consciousness was shown that the right to determine lay with him, while subsequent times justified his judgment and followed it. Nor was it of little importance that the greatest festival of the Church should be celebrated by all her children both on the same day and in the same spirit.

We have then now traced up to the end of the third century the inner growth and constituent principles of that great institution, which out of every language, tribe, and religion in the empire or beyond it had formed and welded together one people, the bearer of that Truth and that Grace which the Son of God in assuming manhood had conveyed to the world. It remains rapidly to review the relations of the empire with this people during seventy-eight years, from the death of Alexander Severus in 235 to the edict of toleration in 313.

II. The seizure of the empire by Maximin was accompanied by a violent attack upon Christians, whom Alexander was held to have favoured. It is on this occasion that we learn from Origen[300] that churches were burnt, and thus their existence as public buildings is attested. The clergy were [pg 356] especially threatened, and amongst them Ambrosius, the friend of Origen, and Origen himself. But Maximin after reigning three years with extraordinary cruelty was slain by his own soldiers. And then during eleven years a period of comparative tranquillity for Christians ensued.

It is with the accession of Decius that the severest trials of the Church commence. In the sixty-four years which elapse from this to the edict of toleration, the force of the empire is five times directed by its rulers against the Christian name. The cause of this is disclosed to us by S. Cyprian mentioning incidentally the very words of that emperor whose name is associated with the bitterest hatred to Christians. He praises Pope Cornelius,[301] who when Pope “Fabian's place, that is,” he says, “the place of Peter and the rank of the sacerdotal chair was vacant,” “sat fearless in that chair at Rome at the moment when the tyrant who hated God's priests uttered every horrible threat, and with much more patience and endurance heard the rise of a rival prince than the appointment of God's priest at Rome.” But why should Decius regard with such dislike the nomination of a Roman Bishop? Why, but that the emperors had [pg 357] now come clearly to discern the organisation of the Church as a visible kingdom of Christ, at the head of which the Roman Bishop stood. That kingdom, the whole moral and religious doctrine of which, together with the life founded upon it, they felt to be in contradiction with the heathen life and the maxims of polity on which from time immemorial the empire had been based, that kingdom Decius saw to be summed up and represented in him who held, to use the words of Cyprian, “Peter's place.” With that religious association which Decius saw extending round him on every side, and gradually drawing into its bosom the best of the two sexes, there was no way of dealing but either to yield to those new maxims which it set forth, or to destroy it. In proportion as the emperors were zealous for the worship of the Roman gods, and instinct with the old discipline of the state, they inclined to the latter alternative, and none more decisively than Decius, who prided himself on following the spirit of Trajan. The persecution which he set on foot reached and slew Pope Fabian, and caused the election of a successor to be deferred for sixteen months. When at the end of that time Cornelius was chosen, Cyprian praises him “as to be reckoned among the glorious confessors and martyrs, who sat so long awaiting his butchers, ready either to slay him with the sword, or crucify him, or burn him, or tear open and maim his body with any unheard-of kind of [pg 358] punishment.”[302] Decius indeed was slain by the Goths in battle after less than two years' reign, but the persecution was renewed by Gallus, and again by Valerian, so that in ten years no less than five Pontiffs, holding that place of Peter, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephen, and Sistus, offered up their lives for the faith. Then it was that the ten years' noble episcopate of S. Cyprian after many minor sufferings ended in martyrdom: and then too the deacon Laurence wore out in the agony of fire all the malignity of the enemy, and gained his almost matchless crown.[303]