4. THE SCHISM OF NOVATIAN
The edict of Calixtus I marks an important stage in the development of the Church's discipline of penance as we know it. Thirty years later one of his successors, St. Cornelius, developing the reform, brought within the system the sin of apostasy. The action of Calixtus had led to controversy; that of Cornelius provoked a schism
The persecution of the Emperor Decius, which had just ceased, had been altogether novel in its systematic organisation, thanks to which hardly any Christians escaped the test, save the tiny minority who had means to fly the country. The result was an unprecedented crop of more or less nominal apostasies, and the anomalous situation arose that in many places the majority of the faithful, guilty of a sin the Church refused to pardon, were out of the Church. It had long been the custom -- St. Calixtus allows for its action in his decree -- that although the Church did not reconcile such apostates through the Exomologesis, she accepted them as reconciled at the intercession of their more steadfast brethren, who in bonds awaited the martyr's death. This custom, owing to the crowds of repentant apostates who now besieged the prisons where the confessors were detained, suddenly threatened to break down the reservation once and for all. If these thousands were to be re-admitted at the prayer of the confessors, how could re-admission be refused any longer to those who sought it by the harder road of the Exomologesis? A further complication arose from the fact that not all these confessors were as docile to authority as they were constant in faith. What authority had allowed as a privilege, some of the confessors now began to claim as a right, and their petitions to the bishops for the reinstatement of the apostates took on more and more the appearance of commands. Communicet ille cum suis is a text which St. Cyprian's indignation has preserved. Not only the penitential discipline of the time was shaken, but there were the beginnings of a threat to episcopal authority also. As the bishops in the second century had had to defend the tradition of authority against the usurpation of learning and of private revelation, so now they faced a new menace which would subordinate their authority to the prestige of individual confessors and martyrs.
It was in Africa that the new troubles began, in the Church of Carthage whose bishop at the moment (250) was St. Cyprian. He protested against the threatened subversion of traditional practice. Such sinners were not admitted to receive the Eucharist until, having performed the appointed penance through the Exomologesis, the bishop and his clergy solemnly laid hands on them. Wherefore he forbids his priests to admit apostates to Communion on the simple presentation of the recommendation of a confessor or a martyr, that is to say, without penance done, without the Exomologesis and without the imposition of hands. The act of the martyr is an act of intercession with the bishop -- an influential intercession no doubt, but no more than that. This intercessory procedure St. Cyprian proceeds to regulate. There must be no more of the collective notes. The martyr must specify by name the person for whom the indulgence is sought, and the person must be someone really known to him. These petitions the bishop will examine publicly, once peace is restored, and thereupon give his decision in each individual case. An exception is made for the apostate in danger of death whom a martyr has recommended and who cannot await the bishop's decision. Him any priest or deacon may reconcile, receiving the acknowledgement of his sin and imposing hands upon him.
These regulations brought to the surface the latent arrogance of the innovators. One martyr sent to St. Cyprian a notification for the reconciliation of all apostates wherever found. Priests were not wanting to support this new revolt, and soon, in one town after another, riots broke out as the crowds of apostates, armed with their letters from the confessors, besieged the churches demanding re-admission from the local clergy. St. Cyprian reminded the rebels that it is the bishop who rules in the Church, and that episcopal rule is the Church's foundation. Also he wrote to Rome an account of his troubles, explaining his point of view and asking for the Roman Church's support.
The Roman reply was encouraging. It explained that the mode of procedure at Rome was substantially that adopted by St. Cyprian, and it endorsed his contention that the bishop alone had jurisdiction in these matters of discipline.
So far, at Rome, no trouble had arisen from any undue interference of the confessors. In its place another question was beginning to arouse discussion. This was the fundamental question, not of how the apostates should be reconciled, but of whether they should be reconciled at all. Calixtus I thirty years before had inaugurated the practice of receiving repentant adulterers through the Exomologesis. Was it now time to extend the same favour to repentant apostates too?
The Roman Church, at the moment of St. Cyprian's letter, was without a head, for the pope, St. Fabian, had been arrested and put to death in the January of 250, and the vigilance of the authorities had, so far, prevented the election of a successor. The reply to St. Cyprian had, then, been the letter of the clergy who governed the see during the vacancy. It was actually written by the priest Novatian -- at that moment the outstanding personality of Christian Rome. In many ways he recalls St. Hippolytus, though he was cast in a smaller mould than that great man. His surviving writings recall Tertullian in their doctrine and in their manner of exposition. In the history of the development of the philosophical explanation of Revelation Novatian has an important place, and his influence on later thinkers was considerable. He is said to have been harsh in disposition, and is accused of vanity. His elevation to the priesthood had not been universally popular, and the criticism continued now while he held the important position of instructor to the catechumens. In the reply to St. Cyprian Novatian had shown signs of a spirit more rigorous than that implied by the system he described, of a fear that, in absolving the apostate, the Roman Church was losing something of its prestige and strength.
This rigorist spirit was soon to have its opportunity. The persecution ended. The bishops came back to their sees. In Africa a council of bishops adopted St. Cyprian's provisional arrangement as henceforward the permanent law of the Church in the mater. At Rome, after a vacancy of fourteen months, St. Fabian was given a successor, the pope Cornelius (March 5, 251), Novatian had been a candidate, and among his helpers in what we might perhaps call his campaign, were two of St. Cyprian's clergy, excommunicated by him for their share in the revolt of the apostates, and come to Rome to intrigue against him. Novatian was apparently to be the next pope. They joined themselves to him and they shared his disappointment. For Novatian was bitterly disappointed, and with a following among the clergy, the laity and the imprisoned confessors, he now organised a Church of his own and found three bishops to consecrate him. The new sect needed a principle by which to justify its existence. It found it in the question of the treatment of the apostates. Paradoxically, the man whom the envoys of the unreconciled and rebellious apostates of Africa had supported, now declared himself the patron of rigorism. The one point on which Novatian now condemned the Church of Cornelius and of Cyprian was that it offered pardon to the repentant apostates. Novatian not only would refuse them pardon, but, developing his first severity, he denied there was any possibility of their being pardoned at all, no matter what their sorrow, no matter how severe the reparation they made.
The new pope, Cornelius, in the autumn of 251, summoned a council of bishops at Rome -- sixty of them. The teaching of Novatian was condemned and, with his supporters, he was expelled from the Church. The policy of St. Cyprian, which the bishops of Africa had already endorsed, was now adopted by the Roman Council too, and thereafter by all the churches of the world.
The Novatian schism, a conflict of personal ambition to some extent, had been much more the product of a conflict between the rigorism of the Christian pharisees and the more merciful tendency of constitutional authority. Something of that rigorist spirit was to be found in every Church, and hence Novatian, beaten at Rome, and disavowed in a series of echoing condemnations throughout the Church, was yet able to organise a strong minority. The Novatian Church had its hierarchy, its sacraments, its churches, its cemeteries. Its existence was legally recognised by Constantine (326) and not until a century later did it lose its last church in Rome. In the East and in Africa it survived even longer, still divided from the Catholic Church by the one belief that to absolve from crimes such as apostasy was beyond the power of the Church, and as late as the beginning of the seventh century it was still a useful occupation for an Alexandrian theologian to write a lengthy treatise Against the Novatians.
The edict of Calixtus I marks an important stage in the development of the Church's discipline of penance as we know it. Thirty years later one of his successors, St. Cornelius, developing the reform, brought within the system the sin of apostasy. The action of Calixtus had led to controversy; that of Cornelius provoked a schism
The persecution of the Emperor Decius, which had just ceased, had been altogether novel in its systematic organisation, thanks to which hardly any Christians escaped the test, save the tiny minority who had means to fly the country. The result was an unprecedented crop of more or less nominal apostasies, and the anomalous situation arose that in many places the majority of the faithful, guilty of a sin the Church refused to pardon, were out of the Church. It had long been the custom -- St. Calixtus allows for its action in his decree -- that although the Church did not reconcile such apostates through the Exomologesis, she accepted them as reconciled at the intercession of their more steadfast brethren, who in bonds awaited the martyr's death. This custom, owing to the crowds of repentant apostates who now besieged the prisons where the confessors were detained, suddenly threatened to break down the reservation once and for all. If these thousands were to be re-admitted at the prayer of the confessors, how could re-admission be refused any longer to those who sought it by the harder road of the Exomologesis? A further complication arose from the fact that not all these confessors were as docile to authority as they were constant in faith. What authority had allowed as a privilege, some of the confessors now began to claim as a right, and their petitions to the bishops for the reinstatement of the apostates took on more and more the appearance of commands. Communicet ille cum suis is a text which St. Cyprian's indignation has preserved. Not only the penitential discipline of the time was shaken, but there were the beginnings of a threat to episcopal authority also. As the bishops in the second century had had to defend the tradition of authority against the usurpation of learning and of private revelation, so now they faced a new menace which would subordinate their authority to the prestige of individual confessors and martyrs.
It was in Africa that the new troubles began, in the Church of Carthage whose bishop at the moment (250) was St. Cyprian. He protested against the threatened subversion of traditional practice. Such sinners were not admitted to receive the Eucharist until, having performed the appointed penance through the Exomologesis, the bishop and his clergy solemnly laid hands on them. Wherefore he forbids his priests to admit apostates to Communion on the simple presentation of the recommendation of a confessor or a martyr, that is to say, without penance done, without the Exomologesis and without the imposition of hands. The act of the martyr is an act of intercession with the bishop -- an influential intercession no doubt, but no more than that. This intercessory procedure St. Cyprian proceeds to regulate. There must be no more of the collective notes. The martyr must specify by name the person for whom the indulgence is sought, and the person must be someone really known to him. These petitions the bishop will examine publicly, once peace is restored, and thereupon give his decision in each individual case. An exception is made for the apostate in danger of death whom a martyr has recommended and who cannot await the bishop's decision. Him any priest or deacon may reconcile, receiving the acknowledgement of his sin and imposing hands upon him.
These regulations brought to the surface the latent arrogance of the innovators. One martyr sent to St. Cyprian a notification for the reconciliation of all apostates wherever found. Priests were not wanting to support this new revolt, and soon, in one town after another, riots broke out as the crowds of apostates, armed with their letters from the confessors, besieged the churches demanding re-admission from the local clergy. St. Cyprian reminded the rebels that it is the bishop who rules in the Church, and that episcopal rule is the Church's foundation. Also he wrote to Rome an account of his troubles, explaining his point of view and asking for the Roman Church's support.
The Roman reply was encouraging. It explained that the mode of procedure at Rome was substantially that adopted by St. Cyprian, and it endorsed his contention that the bishop alone had jurisdiction in these matters of discipline.
So far, at Rome, no trouble had arisen from any undue interference of the confessors. In its place another question was beginning to arouse discussion. This was the fundamental question, not of how the apostates should be reconciled, but of whether they should be reconciled at all. Calixtus I thirty years before had inaugurated the practice of receiving repentant adulterers through the Exomologesis. Was it now time to extend the same favour to repentant apostates too?
The Roman Church, at the moment of St. Cyprian's letter, was without a head, for the pope, St. Fabian, had been arrested and put to death in the January of 250, and the vigilance of the authorities had, so far, prevented the election of a successor. The reply to St. Cyprian had, then, been the letter of the clergy who governed the see during the vacancy. It was actually written by the priest Novatian -- at that moment the outstanding personality of Christian Rome. In many ways he recalls St. Hippolytus, though he was cast in a smaller mould than that great man. His surviving writings recall Tertullian in their doctrine and in their manner of exposition. In the history of the development of the philosophical explanation of Revelation Novatian has an important place, and his influence on later thinkers was considerable. He is said to have been harsh in disposition, and is accused of vanity. His elevation to the priesthood had not been universally popular, and the criticism continued now while he held the important position of instructor to the catechumens. In the reply to St. Cyprian Novatian had shown signs of a spirit more rigorous than that implied by the system he described, of a fear that, in absolving the apostate, the Roman Church was losing something of its prestige and strength.
This rigorist spirit was soon to have its opportunity. The persecution ended. The bishops came back to their sees. In Africa a council of bishops adopted St. Cyprian's provisional arrangement as henceforward the permanent law of the Church in the mater. At Rome, after a vacancy of fourteen months, St. Fabian was given a successor, the pope Cornelius (March 5, 251), Novatian had been a candidate, and among his helpers in what we might perhaps call his campaign, were two of St. Cyprian's clergy, excommunicated by him for their share in the revolt of the apostates, and come to Rome to intrigue against him. Novatian was apparently to be the next pope. They joined themselves to him and they shared his disappointment. For Novatian was bitterly disappointed, and with a following among the clergy, the laity and the imprisoned confessors, he now organised a Church of his own and found three bishops to consecrate him. The new sect needed a principle by which to justify its existence. It found it in the question of the treatment of the apostates. Paradoxically, the man whom the envoys of the unreconciled and rebellious apostates of Africa had supported, now declared himself the patron of rigorism. The one point on which Novatian now condemned the Church of Cornelius and of Cyprian was that it offered pardon to the repentant apostates. Novatian not only would refuse them pardon, but, developing his first severity, he denied there was any possibility of their being pardoned at all, no matter what their sorrow, no matter how severe the reparation they made.
The new pope, Cornelius, in the autumn of 251, summoned a council of bishops at Rome -- sixty of them. The teaching of Novatian was condemned and, with his supporters, he was expelled from the Church. The policy of St. Cyprian, which the bishops of Africa had already endorsed, was now adopted by the Roman Council too, and thereafter by all the churches of the world.
The Novatian schism, a conflict of personal ambition to some extent, had been much more the product of a conflict between the rigorism of the Christian pharisees and the more merciful tendency of constitutional authority. Something of that rigorist spirit was to be found in every Church, and hence Novatian, beaten at Rome, and disavowed in a series of echoing condemnations throughout the Church, was yet able to organise a strong minority. The Novatian Church had its hierarchy, its sacraments, its churches, its cemeteries. Its existence was legally recognised by Constantine (326) and not until a century later did it lose its last church in Rome. In the East and in Africa it survived even longer, still divided from the Catholic Church by the one belief that to absolve from crimes such as apostasy was beyond the power of the Church, and as late as the beginning of the seventh century it was still a useful occupation for an Alexandrian theologian to write a lengthy treatise Against the Novatians.
