3. THE PENITENTIAL CONTROVERSY -- ST. CALIXTUS I
The question of Patripassian Monarchianism, or to give it its shorter name Modalism, [1] was not the only controversy in which the pope, St. Calixtus I, was involved. In that controversy he had had for his adversary the subtle, scholarly, and irascible Hippolytus. In the next, which raged round changes in the Church's penitential discipline, his action roused all the bitterness of Tertullian as well. Few men have been called upon to face two such adversaries in a short four years.
Tertullian, at the moment when he composed his bitter attack on St. Calixtus I, was nearing the end of his long and eventful career. He was born at Carthage apparently about the year 160. His father was a centurion, and Tertullian was born and bred a Pagan. It was, however, the Law and not the Army which attracted Tertullian, and it is the Roman lawyer who speaks through all his varied writing. He was converted to Christianity, became a priest of the Church of Carthage, and from 197 he is, for a good quarter of a century, the central figure of literary activity in the Latin Church. Tertullian is always the Roman, sober, practical, contemptuous of philosophy and abstraction. He is, too, always the lawyer, with the lawyer's failing of over-refinement, of quibbling even, in his destructive criticism and in his advocacy. But never was any lawyer less hindered by the dry formalities of his knowledge. For Tertullian's learned advocacy is fired by one of the most passionate of temperaments. Thence results an apologetic of unexampled vigour and violence. Tertullian is master of all the controversial talents, "the most prolific, the most personal of all these Latins", with a gift of apt and biting phrase that sets him side by side with Tacitus himself. Of no man has it ever been truer that the style is the man; and in the works of this convert genius lie the foundations of the theological language of the Latin Church.
Christianity, for Tertullian, is not the crown of all philosophical history, it is not a light to make clear riddles hitherto obscure, but a fact to be proved and a law to be explained and obeyed. Into that explanation he put all the native rigour of his own harsh temperament, all the inflexibility of the civil law in which he was a master. From the chance that it was Tertullian who was the pioneer of the Latin theological language, it gained that tradition of clear cut definition, and the beginnings of that store of terms incapable of any but the one interpretation, which, from the beginning, saved the Western Church centuries of domestic controversy and disputation.
Tertullian's temperament proved, in practice, too much for his logic; and in Montanism his strongly individualistic nature found a home more congenial than the religion of the Church. The Montanist Tertullian spent the last half of his life in reviling the Church as bitterly as he had previously reviled, on its behalf, Pagans and heretics alike. He had been a Catholic perhaps fifteen or sixteen years when Montanism began to seduce his splendid intelligence. Ten years later, when the decree of St. Calixtus roused him to write the De Pudicitia, he was a fully-fledged member of the sect, and so great was his influence upon it that, in subsequent years, it was as Tertullianists that the Montanists were known in Africa.
But it was as a Catholic that he wrote the greatest of all his works the De Praescriptione Hereticorum -- a statement of the old argument which rules heresy out of court unheard, self-condemned, because self-confessed as an innovation. It is St. Irenaeus' argument from tradition, but cast this time in legal form, and gaining enormously in power from Tertullian's superb exposition. Other works poured from his versatile mind, his supple mastery of the old Latin tongue bending it to new uses. Instructions for catechumens, apologies addressed to Pagans, ascetical exhortations for the faithful, and everywhere controversy, panegyrics of virginity and of that patience in which, rather touchingly, he notes himself so sadly lacking "Miserrimus ego semper aeger caloribus impatientiae." Perhaps Tertullian's greatest service to the progress of theological science is his exposition of the mysteries in the Divine Trinity. The attempts of all his predecessors in this field, from St. Justin downwards, are easily surpassed; as Tertullian surpasses, too, all later writers until Nicea. More convincingly, and more clearly, than any of them does he argue the eternal divinity of the Logos, His origin from the substance of the Father, His unity of nature with the Father, and His real distinctness from the Father. More clearly than any writer, Greek or Latin, before St. Athanasius, he explains the necessity of belief in the divinity of the Holy Ghost. But it is his exposition of the mutual relations between the Divine Three, and its unembarrassed understanding that there is no conflict between the truths of Their unity and of the Trinity, that is Tertullian's chief glory as a theologian. All his ease of careful analysis finds scope in the distinction he draws between a division of the Divine Substance and its organisation. The resulting terms of that organisation he recognises as spiritual substances, divine in nature; and, first of all writers, he gives them the name persons. "Unity of Substance, Trinity of Persons" the classic formula in which the traditional faith finds reasoned expression is of Tertullian's very minting. A hundred years before the event he thus anticipates Nicea, and by his immense influence wherever the Latin tongue prevails, he saves the West from years of subtle controversy and disunion. [2]
That a power to forgive sins, and to reconcile the sinner to God, was left to the Church by its Founder was undoubtedly part of the Tradition from the very beginning. " Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them," He had said, "Whose sins you shall retain they are retained," and "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in Heaven, whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed also in Heaven." In St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians we have at least one record of the Apostle's use of his powers. A generation later we can, however, note a tendency to require that the Church be an assembly of saints, from which all who sin after their baptism should be rigorously expelled; a tendency to demand absolute sinlessness as a normal condition of membership. Baptism could not be repeated. Therefore let the baptized be warned. Should they again fall into sin, the Church had no second baptism to raise them a second time. To this ideal the evidence of everyday offered a contradiction of fact. There were Christians who sinned and sinned gravely, and who yet did not fall from their faith in Christ. Did their sins really matter? Gnostic theories that matter and spirit were independent the one of the other, so that sin, deriving from matter, could not affect spirit, would deny to post-baptismal sin any importance at all. The more prevalent opinion in the Church judged it with the utmost severity. Such literature, of the generations immediately following that of the Apostles, as has survived is filled with evidence of this fact. The tendency is to abolish the distinction between precept and counsel, and to impose both alike, as of obligation, on all Christians. In nothing was the new rigorism more rigorous than in what related to sex. Not only, for such extremists, is virginity preferable to marriage, but marriage itself is considered a bar to sanctity. "There is no resurrection except for such as keep their virginity" one pseudo-Pauline maxim declares. True Christianity implies perpetual virginity. Baptism is equivalent to a vow of chastity. Those who uphold these opinions are the Encratites -- never a sect as such, though more than one of the greatest of them ultimately fell away from the Church, but a group whose ideas were for long a feature of public opinion to be constantly reckoned with. Their views on the Church's policy in the matter of forgiving post-baptismal sin were, naturally, extremely rigid.
The Encratite view of things was not, however, the only view to find expression in the second century. There was another school of thought which kept nearer to the spirit of the Gospel. Its chief exponent, in the literature of the time which has come down to us, is the brother of the pope, St. Pius I (140-154), a priest of the Roman Church, Hermas by name. His book-the Shepherd -- is a popular work, practical not speculative, and its aim is to bring home to the ordinary man the truth that there is always pardon for the sinner who repents -- pardon at any rate once. Nor is there any mention of sins so great that they are beyond pardon. The sinner repents and God receives him back. Between the terms of the process a series of actions intervenes. The sinner, turning once more to God, re-enters the Church by acts of penance. But, for Hermas, once and once only is there for the sinner this way of forgiveness. The Encratite current runs too strongly for even Hermas to disregard it. None the less he is a witness, in a question where sources are so scarce as hardly to exist at all, that, in the Roman Church, Encratite theories were viewed with disfavour.
The rigorist reactions from the everyday immorality of Pagan life might carry away the enthusiastic Christian to assail even the lawful use of what he saw so generally abused. Hermas is a witness that not all were carried away, though all perhaps felt the strength of the tide at its full; and that the Roman Church continued to teach that to repentance sin is forgiven
Between the Shepherd of Hermas and the decree of Calixtus I which roused all Tertullian's cantankerousness, there is a period of some seventy years. How the discipline had developed in that time, in some places, can be learnt from a book of Tertullian's written to instruct candidates for Baptism, the De Penitentia. With regard to sins committed after Baptism he teaches the same doctrine as Hermas, but without the hesitation which appears in the Shepherd. There still remains one more opportunity of pardon, and it is given through an external ritual which Tertullian names -- the Exomologesis. This is a laborious, public, penitential act, which the repentant sinner voluntarily performs in atonement for his sin. The sin is declared to the bishop, he fixes the nature and the duration of the penance to be performed, and on its completion receives back the sinner into full communion. Tertullian himself describes these penitents, clad in a special dress, living under a rigorous regime of abstinence and fast, ashes on their heads, their bodies uncared for, who kneel at the door of the church beseeching the prayers of the faithful as they pass in to the services.
The Exomologesis lasted a longer or shorter time according to the sin. Of itself it was merely an offering to God in satisfaction for the wrong done. But since the Church associated herself with the penitent who undertook the penance at the bidding of the bishop, the discipline acquired a new value. The intervention of the Church made it "efficacious" for, Tertullian explains, the Church is Christ and His mediation is infallible in its effect. Two last points of Tertullian's description are to be noticed. Pardon is granted through the Exomologesis once only. The sinner who relapses must, thereafter, negotiate his own pardon with the mercy of God. Nor is the Exomologesis available for every kind of sin. Three sins, notably, are excluded -- idolatry, murder, and fornication. The Church does not teach that these sins are unforgivable. Merely she will not take it on herself to forgive those who commit them. They may be admitted to the ranks of the penitent, there to remain for the rest of their life. Their penance will avail them much in the sight of God, but the Church does not formally receive them back into her communion.
It was this reservation in the discipline of the Exomologesis that Calixtus I now decided to alter. This particular reservation has no warrant in Scripture, nor does Hermas make any mention of it. In all probability it was an ecclesiastical regulation of the late second century, a special provision provoked, it may be, by some special circumstances of contemporary Pagan morality. Whatever its origin, the restriction added to the severity of the existing discipline which, Tertullian is our witness, was already beginning to defeat its own ends. For very few indeed were they who were prepared to submit to it. Whence a practice of deferring Baptism, and a crop of secret sinners. Those who knelt in sackcloth among the penitents were not, apparently, the only ones guilty of sin. More than one of those at whose knees the penitents besought prayers might fittingly, in his turn, have prostrated himself in the dust.
The system was ceasing to fulfil its purpose, and Calixtus I prepared to modify it. He announced that, henceforward, sin in sexual matters would also be forgiven through the discipline of the Exomologesis. No longer would such sinners be permanently cut off from the Sacraments, but, their penance duly performed, they too would regain their place among the faithful. Whereupon Tertullian, and Hippolytus, attacked the pope bitterly and maliciously.
It is important to notice the grounds Calixtus cites as authority for his action. They are quite simply Our Lord's words to his predecessor Peter " Upon this rock I will build My Church, to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven." Calixtus explicitly claims to be the present heir of Peter's prerogative, and on this basis he acts.
1 Modalism -- because for those who refused to acknowledge the real distinction between the Father and the Son, Father and Son were simply modes of the Divine Being.
2 Tertullian was, however, considerably less successful in his theories about the divine generation of the Logos and in his argument to prove the consubstantiality of the Logos with the Father.
The question of Patripassian Monarchianism, or to give it its shorter name Modalism, [1] was not the only controversy in which the pope, St. Calixtus I, was involved. In that controversy he had had for his adversary the subtle, scholarly, and irascible Hippolytus. In the next, which raged round changes in the Church's penitential discipline, his action roused all the bitterness of Tertullian as well. Few men have been called upon to face two such adversaries in a short four years.
Tertullian, at the moment when he composed his bitter attack on St. Calixtus I, was nearing the end of his long and eventful career. He was born at Carthage apparently about the year 160. His father was a centurion, and Tertullian was born and bred a Pagan. It was, however, the Law and not the Army which attracted Tertullian, and it is the Roman lawyer who speaks through all his varied writing. He was converted to Christianity, became a priest of the Church of Carthage, and from 197 he is, for a good quarter of a century, the central figure of literary activity in the Latin Church. Tertullian is always the Roman, sober, practical, contemptuous of philosophy and abstraction. He is, too, always the lawyer, with the lawyer's failing of over-refinement, of quibbling even, in his destructive criticism and in his advocacy. But never was any lawyer less hindered by the dry formalities of his knowledge. For Tertullian's learned advocacy is fired by one of the most passionate of temperaments. Thence results an apologetic of unexampled vigour and violence. Tertullian is master of all the controversial talents, "the most prolific, the most personal of all these Latins", with a gift of apt and biting phrase that sets him side by side with Tacitus himself. Of no man has it ever been truer that the style is the man; and in the works of this convert genius lie the foundations of the theological language of the Latin Church.
Christianity, for Tertullian, is not the crown of all philosophical history, it is not a light to make clear riddles hitherto obscure, but a fact to be proved and a law to be explained and obeyed. Into that explanation he put all the native rigour of his own harsh temperament, all the inflexibility of the civil law in which he was a master. From the chance that it was Tertullian who was the pioneer of the Latin theological language, it gained that tradition of clear cut definition, and the beginnings of that store of terms incapable of any but the one interpretation, which, from the beginning, saved the Western Church centuries of domestic controversy and disputation.
Tertullian's temperament proved, in practice, too much for his logic; and in Montanism his strongly individualistic nature found a home more congenial than the religion of the Church. The Montanist Tertullian spent the last half of his life in reviling the Church as bitterly as he had previously reviled, on its behalf, Pagans and heretics alike. He had been a Catholic perhaps fifteen or sixteen years when Montanism began to seduce his splendid intelligence. Ten years later, when the decree of St. Calixtus roused him to write the De Pudicitia, he was a fully-fledged member of the sect, and so great was his influence upon it that, in subsequent years, it was as Tertullianists that the Montanists were known in Africa.
But it was as a Catholic that he wrote the greatest of all his works the De Praescriptione Hereticorum -- a statement of the old argument which rules heresy out of court unheard, self-condemned, because self-confessed as an innovation. It is St. Irenaeus' argument from tradition, but cast this time in legal form, and gaining enormously in power from Tertullian's superb exposition. Other works poured from his versatile mind, his supple mastery of the old Latin tongue bending it to new uses. Instructions for catechumens, apologies addressed to Pagans, ascetical exhortations for the faithful, and everywhere controversy, panegyrics of virginity and of that patience in which, rather touchingly, he notes himself so sadly lacking "Miserrimus ego semper aeger caloribus impatientiae." Perhaps Tertullian's greatest service to the progress of theological science is his exposition of the mysteries in the Divine Trinity. The attempts of all his predecessors in this field, from St. Justin downwards, are easily surpassed; as Tertullian surpasses, too, all later writers until Nicea. More convincingly, and more clearly, than any of them does he argue the eternal divinity of the Logos, His origin from the substance of the Father, His unity of nature with the Father, and His real distinctness from the Father. More clearly than any writer, Greek or Latin, before St. Athanasius, he explains the necessity of belief in the divinity of the Holy Ghost. But it is his exposition of the mutual relations between the Divine Three, and its unembarrassed understanding that there is no conflict between the truths of Their unity and of the Trinity, that is Tertullian's chief glory as a theologian. All his ease of careful analysis finds scope in the distinction he draws between a division of the Divine Substance and its organisation. The resulting terms of that organisation he recognises as spiritual substances, divine in nature; and, first of all writers, he gives them the name persons. "Unity of Substance, Trinity of Persons" the classic formula in which the traditional faith finds reasoned expression is of Tertullian's very minting. A hundred years before the event he thus anticipates Nicea, and by his immense influence wherever the Latin tongue prevails, he saves the West from years of subtle controversy and disunion. [2]
That a power to forgive sins, and to reconcile the sinner to God, was left to the Church by its Founder was undoubtedly part of the Tradition from the very beginning. " Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them," He had said, "Whose sins you shall retain they are retained," and "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in Heaven, whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed also in Heaven." In St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians we have at least one record of the Apostle's use of his powers. A generation later we can, however, note a tendency to require that the Church be an assembly of saints, from which all who sin after their baptism should be rigorously expelled; a tendency to demand absolute sinlessness as a normal condition of membership. Baptism could not be repeated. Therefore let the baptized be warned. Should they again fall into sin, the Church had no second baptism to raise them a second time. To this ideal the evidence of everyday offered a contradiction of fact. There were Christians who sinned and sinned gravely, and who yet did not fall from their faith in Christ. Did their sins really matter? Gnostic theories that matter and spirit were independent the one of the other, so that sin, deriving from matter, could not affect spirit, would deny to post-baptismal sin any importance at all. The more prevalent opinion in the Church judged it with the utmost severity. Such literature, of the generations immediately following that of the Apostles, as has survived is filled with evidence of this fact. The tendency is to abolish the distinction between precept and counsel, and to impose both alike, as of obligation, on all Christians. In nothing was the new rigorism more rigorous than in what related to sex. Not only, for such extremists, is virginity preferable to marriage, but marriage itself is considered a bar to sanctity. "There is no resurrection except for such as keep their virginity" one pseudo-Pauline maxim declares. True Christianity implies perpetual virginity. Baptism is equivalent to a vow of chastity. Those who uphold these opinions are the Encratites -- never a sect as such, though more than one of the greatest of them ultimately fell away from the Church, but a group whose ideas were for long a feature of public opinion to be constantly reckoned with. Their views on the Church's policy in the matter of forgiving post-baptismal sin were, naturally, extremely rigid.
The Encratite view of things was not, however, the only view to find expression in the second century. There was another school of thought which kept nearer to the spirit of the Gospel. Its chief exponent, in the literature of the time which has come down to us, is the brother of the pope, St. Pius I (140-154), a priest of the Roman Church, Hermas by name. His book-the Shepherd -- is a popular work, practical not speculative, and its aim is to bring home to the ordinary man the truth that there is always pardon for the sinner who repents -- pardon at any rate once. Nor is there any mention of sins so great that they are beyond pardon. The sinner repents and God receives him back. Between the terms of the process a series of actions intervenes. The sinner, turning once more to God, re-enters the Church by acts of penance. But, for Hermas, once and once only is there for the sinner this way of forgiveness. The Encratite current runs too strongly for even Hermas to disregard it. None the less he is a witness, in a question where sources are so scarce as hardly to exist at all, that, in the Roman Church, Encratite theories were viewed with disfavour.
The rigorist reactions from the everyday immorality of Pagan life might carry away the enthusiastic Christian to assail even the lawful use of what he saw so generally abused. Hermas is a witness that not all were carried away, though all perhaps felt the strength of the tide at its full; and that the Roman Church continued to teach that to repentance sin is forgiven
Between the Shepherd of Hermas and the decree of Calixtus I which roused all Tertullian's cantankerousness, there is a period of some seventy years. How the discipline had developed in that time, in some places, can be learnt from a book of Tertullian's written to instruct candidates for Baptism, the De Penitentia. With regard to sins committed after Baptism he teaches the same doctrine as Hermas, but without the hesitation which appears in the Shepherd. There still remains one more opportunity of pardon, and it is given through an external ritual which Tertullian names -- the Exomologesis. This is a laborious, public, penitential act, which the repentant sinner voluntarily performs in atonement for his sin. The sin is declared to the bishop, he fixes the nature and the duration of the penance to be performed, and on its completion receives back the sinner into full communion. Tertullian himself describes these penitents, clad in a special dress, living under a rigorous regime of abstinence and fast, ashes on their heads, their bodies uncared for, who kneel at the door of the church beseeching the prayers of the faithful as they pass in to the services.
The Exomologesis lasted a longer or shorter time according to the sin. Of itself it was merely an offering to God in satisfaction for the wrong done. But since the Church associated herself with the penitent who undertook the penance at the bidding of the bishop, the discipline acquired a new value. The intervention of the Church made it "efficacious" for, Tertullian explains, the Church is Christ and His mediation is infallible in its effect. Two last points of Tertullian's description are to be noticed. Pardon is granted through the Exomologesis once only. The sinner who relapses must, thereafter, negotiate his own pardon with the mercy of God. Nor is the Exomologesis available for every kind of sin. Three sins, notably, are excluded -- idolatry, murder, and fornication. The Church does not teach that these sins are unforgivable. Merely she will not take it on herself to forgive those who commit them. They may be admitted to the ranks of the penitent, there to remain for the rest of their life. Their penance will avail them much in the sight of God, but the Church does not formally receive them back into her communion.
It was this reservation in the discipline of the Exomologesis that Calixtus I now decided to alter. This particular reservation has no warrant in Scripture, nor does Hermas make any mention of it. In all probability it was an ecclesiastical regulation of the late second century, a special provision provoked, it may be, by some special circumstances of contemporary Pagan morality. Whatever its origin, the restriction added to the severity of the existing discipline which, Tertullian is our witness, was already beginning to defeat its own ends. For very few indeed were they who were prepared to submit to it. Whence a practice of deferring Baptism, and a crop of secret sinners. Those who knelt in sackcloth among the penitents were not, apparently, the only ones guilty of sin. More than one of those at whose knees the penitents besought prayers might fittingly, in his turn, have prostrated himself in the dust.
The system was ceasing to fulfil its purpose, and Calixtus I prepared to modify it. He announced that, henceforward, sin in sexual matters would also be forgiven through the discipline of the Exomologesis. No longer would such sinners be permanently cut off from the Sacraments, but, their penance duly performed, they too would regain their place among the faithful. Whereupon Tertullian, and Hippolytus, attacked the pope bitterly and maliciously.
It is important to notice the grounds Calixtus cites as authority for his action. They are quite simply Our Lord's words to his predecessor Peter " Upon this rock I will build My Church, to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven." Calixtus explicitly claims to be the present heir of Peter's prerogative, and on this basis he acts.
1 Modalism -- because for those who refused to acknowledge the real distinction between the Father and the Son, Father and Son were simply modes of the Divine Being.
2 Tertullian was, however, considerably less successful in his theories about the divine generation of the Logos and in his argument to prove the consubstantiality of the Logos with the Father.
