CHAPTER 5: THE WAY OF CHRISTIAN LIFE
Le milieu paien, cet immense ocean de superstitions et de reves que le courant chretien dut traverser sans s'y meler. [1]
THE current was threefold. It was a revealed doctrine, it was a thing organised, and it was a special way of life. So far we have been concerned with the fortunes of the doctrine and of the means divinely devised for its propaganda and protection as the current moves slowly through the ocean. The study is incomplete if it neglects some description of how the ideal of Christian life fared during these first momentous centuries.
The foundation of that life was the spirit of renunciation, of good things for the better, of all things for the sake of God, as the gospels describe it. For some of the Christians this knows no limits. Property, marriage, life itself they will gladly renounce to give themselves more fully to the following of Christ, Who is from the beginning the one centre of their new religious life. Others give up less, but something each must give up, for in each disciple there must be that permanent willingness to renounce whatever is asked, whenever it is asked. Renunciation is not cultivated for its own sake, nor with the purpose of perfecting the disciple's own personality. It is an imitation of Christ, made in union with Christ, its purpose ever closer union with Christ. It is an activity of that new life which has come to the disciple through fellowship in the Church and the mystic incorporation with Christ -- a life which never ceases to be dependent on Christ. This life begins with the rite of Baptism; and the chief means through which it is increased and the union between Christ and the disciple consummated, is the rite of the Eucharist. This new mystical, super-natural union with God is the source of the believer's new relation to his fellows. He is to love them as himself, not with the natural love that springs from his appreciation of their natural attractiveness, but with a super-natural love deriving from his new relation to God. God loves them, and therefore the disciple, loving God, loves them for God's sake. This love of the disciple for his fellows is the very mark by which his discipleship is recognisable.
This doctrine, which characterises especially the Gospel of St. John, is also the teaching of the epistles of St. Paul. The two principles of spiritual self-denial and of the constant union between the believer and God are, here again, the foundation on which all is built, although St. Paul’s approach to the subject is not that of St. John. Though the new life is given in Baptism, something of the old survives. Whence a lifelong contest between new and old or, as St. Paul says, between Flesh and Spirit. These terms recur often in St. Paul, and following him they become, for all time, the common coin of spiritual teaching with orthodox and heretic alike. It is important to note the meaning St. Paul gives them. By "Flesh" is not meant merely the temptation to sensuality in matters of sex. The term stands rather for human nature as the fall of the first man affected it, crippled, disordered, no longer answering naturally to reasonable control, and therefore ever afterwards a source of rebellion, a thing which the unaided human will is unable to dominate. Left to itself this fallen human nature is a source of sin. Baptism, making the baptized one with Christ, breaks that ancient dominion of the first sin over human nature, but yet not so completely that it cannot make new bids to recover. Whence the life of the disciple is a continual struggle; and St. Paul has a rich store of comparisons to emphasise this truth. A second obstacle to the disciple's progress is the World -- the mass of men who, for one reason or another, live in habitual disregard of the Spirit, in habitual affection for the Flesh. No disciple can possibly love the World. In St. Paul, too, we see the two classes of disciples with greater or less perfection for their aims, and, as a means to perfection, we find recommended that peculiarly Christian notion of consecrated virginity. The notion involves no disparagement of marriage or of sex. On the contrary, whoever practises continency is considered as denying himself an important good.
In the two centuries or more which separate the Apostles from the convert emperors of the fourth century, the believer never lacked eloquent guides to remind him of the fundamental principles which should control his life. Here is a theme to which every Christian writer of these centuries returns sooner or later. " There are two roads: the road to life, the road to death," begins the Didache, and the parable speedily becomes a commonplace of the primitive moral exhortations. "The road to life" -- the love of God, obedience to His commands, flight from sin, from sexual wrongdoing, perjury, lying, theft, avarice, blasphemy, avoidance of whatever disturbs the unity of the Church, the practice of almsgiving, the care of children, obedience to authority, humility. The apostolic theme of the continual warfare is not neglected, and the never-ceasing persecution gives rise to a whole literature exhorting to patience and constancy in the hour of trial, to confidence in Christ for Whom the martyr is privileged to suffer. To comfort and strengthen the confessor and the martyr all the great writers in turn set their genius, Tertullian, Origen and St. Cyprian very notably. In all this literature the one common, dominating feature is the reference to Christ as the centre and goal of the whole idealism as this is preached and as it is lived. It is no detached theorising about an indubitable but distant God which these theologians present, St. Ignatius, St. Irenaeus and the rest. A vivid faith in His presence in the very hearts of those for whom they write is the very life of their work. And, of course, nowhere is this so manifest as with the martyrs. The martyrs were the crown of every church's achievement.
After the martyrs came another class of spiritual heroes -- the continentes and the virgins, those who bound themselves, for the love of Christ, to a life of perpetual continency. There is no ascetical practice so praised, so exalted by these early writers as this; and the number of those who gave themselves to it is the boast of the Apologists, as it was the marvel of the contemporary Pagans who knew it. The continentes are cited too, and continually, as a powerful force for good among the believers themselves, a living exhortation to the whole Church. Those who so devoted themselves continued, as yet, to live with their families, but very soon they came to form a kind of spiritual aristocracy in every church, along with the widows, who, in a like spirit, made a perpetual consecration of their widowhood. From a very early time so important a matter ceased to be left to the discretion of the individual. The consent of the bishop was essential before the irrevocable life-long dedication was allowed. A ritual of consecration developed, and an age limit was introduced earlier than which no one could be accepted. The care of these specially consecrated believers took up much of a bishop's time, and warnings against the pitfalls that lay before the virgin, the especially insidious temptation to pride, self-esteem, and a contemning of the ordinary folk, fill many pages of the contemporary exhortations Ad Virgines. It was natural, too, at first to recommend, and later to enact, that for their own greater security, and for the seemliness of the thing, such as were thus dedicated should lead a life of retirement. They should not appear at public banquets, nor at weddings, should avoid the public amusements and the baths, should dress soberly, without jewels or cosmetics, and in public always go veiled. To the ordinary fasts which bound the whole Church they added still more, and in their retirement multiplied the hours of prayer, meeting together privately for the purpose. Naturally, occupied with little but the service of God, they soon became the Church's recognised agents for the vast charitable services which were this primitive Christianity's leading activity -- care of the widows, of orphans, of the sick, and the systematic relief of the poor and distressed.
The movement did not progress without serious aberrations showing themselves from time to time. There was the tendency to value these abstinences for their own sake, to declare the use of wine for example, of flesh meat, of marriage, things evil in themselves -- a tendency related, very often, to the theory that matter is necessarily evil. St. Paul had to warn Timothy against such " saints, " but for all authority's faithful adherence to his example the tendency never ceased to show itself. Apocryphal Acts of particular apostles, forged to give a sanction to these theories, did much to make them popular, and no doubt the every day experience of the excesses of contemporary Paganism helped very considerably in the same direction. It is also interesting to notice that rigorism of this kind is associated with all the early heresies, the mark of Montanists, Marcionites and Gnostics alike.
From the tendency to control and regulate the daily life and occupation of the continentes was to come, ultimately, the institution of Christian Monasticism. [2] " Happy the virgin who places herself under a rule," runs a fourth century saying "she shall be as a fruitful vine in a garden. Unhappy is the virgin who will not follow a rule, she is as a ship that lacks a rudder." From St. Jerome (347-420) and St. Ambrose (340-397) we can learn many details of what such a rule was. These ladies live at home a life of seclusion, going out rarely. They wear their hair cut short, their long-sleeved dress is black and they are veiled. They have a round of private prayer at home and certain daily prayers in common in the church. They fast, taking each day one meal only, and that without meat. This meal, too, they often take in common. They serve the poor and they attend the sick. From such a state of things to the life of a convent is but a step. As early as 270 we find St. Antony of Egypt placing his sister in a house where a number of like-minded holy women lived a common life, and by 300 such institutions were fairly numerous.
This was not the only source whence monasticism developed. There were others of the continentes who, although they no longer lived with their families, preferred to live alone, solitaries, on the outskirts of the towns first, and then further away still in the "desert." Of these anchorites or hermits the pioneer is St. Paul of Thebes. More famous, however, is his disciple Antony (c. 250-355). Such was this hermit's fame that, despite his opposition, disciples gathered round him and pursued him into the very depths of the Egyptian deserts, until, in the Nitrian desert, there were, about 325, more than 5,000 solitaries, of both sexes. They lived in separate huts without any common rule, each a law unto himself, meeting at the church on the Sundays for Mass, to receive the Holy Eucharist and a spiritual instruction. They chose their own austerities, each according to his own fancy, and were their own judges as to the extent to which these should be continued. There were hermits who hardly ever ate, or slept, others who stood without movement whole weeks together, or who had themselves sealed up in tombs and remained there for years, receiving only the least of poor nourishment through crevices in the masonry. The fervour of the oriental found in this primitive monasticism all it could crave of opportunity for sacrificial self-despoilment. In the fourth century more especially, when to the persecution there followed an era of comfort, and when, in the saying of a contemporary, there were many more Christians but less Christianity, did the zeal of the more perfect lead them into the desert.
The hermit movement presently had a competitor in the monastic movement properly so-called -- the foundation in the desert of institutes where the members led a common life, working, praying, practising austerities, studying the Sacred Scriptures, under the rule of a superior. In these institutions the will of the superior was the guide and the norm. The austerities, no less than the prayers, were regulated by his discretion. The pioneer of this movement was St. Pachomius, and his first foundation-a monastery for men and one for women -- at Tabennisi dates from about 320.
From Egypt the movement spread to Palestine and here a disciple of St. Antony, Hilary, devised yet a third form of the life, the Laura. The Laura was a village of cells or huts, so that each monk lived alone as did the hermits, but the community was subject to a superior as in the monastery. This system became rapidly popular, and many of these monastic villages counted each its thousand of monks. Jerusalem, in the fourth century, became a great centre for monks of every kind of monastic life, the capital, in fact, of monasticism, and St. Jerome the movement's presiding genius.
Syria had its monks, Asia Minor, too, and here, towards the middle of the fourth century, this eastern monasticism produced the great saint whose rule was to fix its characteristics for the rest of time -- St. Basil (329-79). St. Basil was a reformer of the practical type. He had travelled much, had seen every aspect of contemporary monasticism in one country and another, and when he came to draw up a rule it was much more a code of life than any of the so-called rules which preceded it. He it was who invented the novitiate -- a systematic probation of aspirants, who were to be trained primarily to the renouncement of their own way, obedience being the monk's great virtue and the means of his spiritual progress. And the monasteries were not to be over large -- thirty or forty monks only to each superior. This was in very striking contrast to the monasteries of the Pachomian type where, as with the system of the Laura, the monks were to be numbered by the thousand.
For St. Basil the community type of life is a higher form than the hermit life; and from this moment the hermit life declines in prestige. All the monks are to come together for all the prayers, and the psalms and singing are to be varied to avoid monotony and the boredom that derives from it. The superior gives his monks instruction, confession of faults to him or to another monk is encouraged, and great emphasis is Jaid on the necessity of systematic manual work for each monk. The will of the superior is the monk's law in all that concerns his monastic life. Hence no room is now left for personal eccentricity, whether in the matter of devotions or austerities. All exaggerations, and the trouble they breed, disappear. To guard against pride and vanity no one may go beyond the rule except by the superior's special permission. The abstinence from meat and wine is perpetual. Silence is the law for meals, at the office and during work. The monk never leaves his monastery, except for a just cause, and even then he never goes alone. The sick are to be cared for with every comfort, and hospitality is enjoined as a primary duty. For those who refuse to keep the rule, penalties are provided. But, where St. Pachomius provides floggings and a bread and water diet for serious faults, in St. Basil’s rule there is nothing harsher than a kind of temporary internal excommunication.
In the East, by the end of the fourth century, within a hundred years of its first introduction, Monasticism was established as perhaps the most flourishing of all the Church's activities. In the West, it had developed more slowly. Here, too, in every church, there had been, from the first generations, the spiritual aristocracy of continentes and virgins, and, for example at Rome, such women had begun already to live a common life when, towards the middle of the fourth century, the knowledge began to spread of the marvellous happenings in the Egyptian deserts. One important source of this knowledge was the accidental presence, for several years, in Italy and Gaul of the bishop of Alexandria, St. Athanasius, banished from his see by the Arianising policy of the emperor. None knew better than he the detail of the new movement -- of which he was indeed one of the earliest historians -- and to the presence in the West during so many years of the bishop who was, by his position, the very patriarch of nascent monasticism, and by his temperament a master propagandist, much of the sudden growth of the movement in the West may be ascribed. Another source of the West's knowledge of the ascetic marvels of the eastern Churches was the experience of the thousands of pilgrims who, in the first generations of the Christian Empire, made the long journey to Palestine to venerate the sacred places whence the Faith had come.
Some of these pilgrims, attracted by the life, even stayed on, spiritual exiles for the sake of the more perfect life. Of such westerners who so made themselves easterners the most famous is St. Jerome (347-420), and around his life may be written the whole history of early Roman monasticism. His first experience of monasticism was the five years he spent as a solitary in the desert to the east of Antioch -- a desert so peopled with like-minded souls, that solitude, he found, was the last thing possible. From the desert St. Jerome returned to Rome, and for the next few years he was the centre round which the monastically-minded of the old capital -- women of noble families for the most part -- gathered. In this circle all the stark austerity of the life of the desert found willing adepts, under the learned direction of St. Jerome. There was the inevitable conflict with the less ascetically inclined relatives, and with the still less ascetic Roman clergy, and in the end St. Jerome and his followers left the city, to establish themselves once and for all at Bethlehem (386).
Along with St. Jerome there must also be mentioned his contemporaries the Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose (340-397) and the future Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine (354-430). St. Ambrose did much, by his sermons De Virginibus, to foster the ideal among his people and to encourage the movement. St. Cyprian is here his master, but St. Ambrose breaks entirely new ground when he suggests Our Lady as the type and model of the consecrated virgin. Milan, under St. Ambrose's direction, became in its turn a centre of the monastic life, and with the progress of the movement came the inevitable opposition. The saint's De Virginitate is his reply to it.
In St. Paulinus of Nola, a retired imperial official of high rank who gave himself to the life, monasticism reached another stage of development and with Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli, it began to affect the clergy too. The priests who served the church of Vercelli lived a life in common, whose spirit was the spirit of monasticism. It is with this clerical type of monasticism that the still greater name of St. Augustine is associated. Some of the best known pages of his Confessions record how greatly he was influenced, at the crisis of his life, by the story of the imperial officers whom the example of the hermits in Egypt had won over to monasticism. After his return to Africa the converted scholar, giving up his career and his projected marriage, turned his house at Tagaste into a monastery. There with his friends, their property sold and the proceeds given to the poor, he led a regular life of seclusion, of prayer and study. His ordination in 391 fixed him at Hippo, and at Hippo he once more established a monastery of the same type in which he himself lived. Finally when, in 396, he became Bishop of Hippo he not only continued his own monastic way of life but brought all his clergy into it also. The episcopal palace itself became a monastery -- a monastery whence, as from Marmoutier and Lerins, monks went forth as bishops to rule more than one of the neighbouring sees. St. Augustine has left descriptions of the life of the community in his sermons, a treatise De Sancta Virginitate, another De Opere Monachorum, while, from the letter he wrote to restore peace to a community of holy women, later centuries developed the so-called Rule of St. Augustine.
The opposition to monasticism continued. Its strength lay very largely in what remained of Paganism in the old Roman aristocracy, and more than once the city mob rioted in its anti-monastic zeal. There were also the heretics -- Helvidius, for example, who preached against continency, derided the idea of mortification, and even denied the virginity of Mary. Another such was Jovinian, an ex-monk who, man of the world now and practised debauchee, turned -- first of an unhappy line -- to revile and attack all he once had reverenced. There was, he declared, only one heaven, only one reward for all; and since those validly baptized cannot but be saved, mortifications are but a useless show. He drew replies from St. Ambrose and -- a characteristically waspish one -- from St. Jerome. He was excommunicated by the pope, Siricius (384-398), but his teaching grew, and many apostasies are recorded.
It was, however, in Gaul, and not in Italy, that the first western monks really flourished, where the pioneer was the Bishop of Tours, St. Martin (317-397). St. Martin, born in Pannonia, was the child of a legionary and, despite his early attraction to the hermit life, forced to follow his father into the army. His vocation survived the experiences of the camp, and, once baptized and free of the army (339), he was received into the clergy by St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers. For some years afterwards he lived as a solitary, first near Milan and later on an island in the Mediterranean. St. Hilary, banished to the East for opposition to the Arian Constantius II, returned with a new knowledge of monasticism (361); and it was now that, under his direction, Martin founded at Liguge, close by St. Hilary's cathedral city, the first monastery of the West -- a few huts, one for each monk, grouped round the church in which the monks met for what spiritual exercises they had in common. There was no rule but the mutual good example and the duty of obedience to the superior. St. Martin was still at Liguge when he was elected Bishop of Tours. The new office made no difference to the man. He continued to live his austere life, to sleep on the bare ground, to wear his old clothes, to fast, to pray as before and, within sight of the walls of Tours, he founded Marmoutier -- another and larger Liguge. Here he lived with his community of eighty monks a life very like that of the Egyptian monasteries of St. Pachomius. Very many of the monks whom this austere life attracted were of noble birth, and from Marmoutier came forth a whole series of bishops -- the first monk-bishops in the Church. By an extraordinary paradox this first great monastery of contemplative solitaries became, and almost immediately, the first great centre of that movement to convert the countrysides of Gaul, whose greatest figure is St. Martin.
St. Martin was, however, not an organiser of monasticism, and it was in monasteries founded a little later, in the south of Gaul, that the first monastic legislators of the West arose. Two monasteries in particular must be noticed -- Lerins, an island off the coast of Provence, and the abbey of St. Victor at Marseilles. At Lerins, founded by a wealthy patrician St. Honoratus (429), the rule of St. Pachomius was held in great veneration, and although not followed to the letter, it undoubtedly influenced the life there. Lerins too was a nursery of bishops, supplying indeed so many bishops to the sees of southern Gaul that it became a matter of complaint between the clergy and the Roman See. Marseilles had for its founder an Eastern who had travelled much. This was John Cassian. He was born about 350, was a monk at Bethlehem in the early days of St. Jerome's career there, and after several years in Egypt came to Constantinople, where in 403 he was ordained deacon by St. John Chrysostom. Four years later he was in Rome, carrying to Innocent I St. John’s appeal against his illegal deposition. Finally, in 414, he was ordained priest at Marseilles and founded there the abbey of St. Victor. The rule's inspiration was Eastern, but modified to suit the very different Western conditions. Cassian, however, did much more than found a monastery. He set down his ideas in two books which were to influence monastic thought and theories of spiritual direction for centuries -- his De Coenobiorum Institutis and his Collationes.
The way of the Counsels -- monasticism in the later centuries, the life of the virgines and continentes in the primitive times -- was, however, the privilege of a minority. This elite was vastly outnumbered by the thousands of believers whom necessity and choice bound to the life of the world, and of whom the churches were chiefly composed. To them also, through the Church, the Spirit spoke. In them, too, ran the same supernatural life, fed from the same sources which nourished those especially consecrated, and producing in the activities of ordinary human life the same superhuman fruits. For these Christians, too, the gospel, -- an institution and a belief -- was also a way of living, a code of conduct based on a teaching, and nourished through a cult.
Conformably to the will of Christ its Founder, the Church received its new adepts through the visible ceremonial rite of Baptism. Closely connected with Baptism was the complementary ceremony of the laying on of hands. St. Justin gives us the earliest detailed description of the rite which has survived, and fifty years later Tertullian is evidence that an explanatory and preparatory ceremonial had already gathered round the primitive nucleus. The ceremony takes place at Easter. The water with which it is administered is especially blessed for the purpose. The candidate makes a previous explicit renunciation of the devil. The baptism is followed by an anointing with blessed oil and an imposition of hands. It is the bishop who officiates, and the candidates prepare for their reception by special prayers and fasts. St. Hippolytus, Tertullian's contemporary, speaks also of an anointing of the catechumen before baptism. The heretics, too, had these ceremonies -- the Marcionites, for example, and many of the Gnostics -- which points to their being established in the Church before the heretics broke away, to an origin that is at least as early as the generation which followed the death of the last apostle.
But the preparatory period was not merely a time of special prayer. From a very early date indeed those who wished to be members of the Church were trained in its doctrines and practices, their sincerity and fervour tested by a long systematic course of instruction. This was the Catechumenate, and in every church there came to be a priest appointed for the purpose of instructing and watching over the Catechumens. The Catechumens had their special place in the assemblies, and during the time of their probation they were prepared for baptism by a series of preparatory ceremonies, exorcisms for example, blessings and anointings. After the baptism and the anointing and imposition of hands which followed, the newly-initiated received for the first time the Holy Eucharist.
The minister of these public initiatory rites was, originally, always the bishop. Later the custom gradually made its way that the priests, too, assisted at the actual baptism, the bishop blessing the water and the oils but baptizing only a few of the catechumens though still administering to all the rite of anointing and the imposition of hands. Then most of the baptisms fell to the priests. Still later when, in the fourth century, parishes began to be founded outside the cities, the priests in charge of them were allowed to bless the water for Baptism, to baptize all who came to them and to anoint them also, the bishop reserving to himself the blessing of the oils and the final imposition of hands. Such is the Roman practice, at any rate, from the time of Innocent I (402-417).
The centres of the Church's religious life were the weekly assemblies where the bishop presided and at which all the brotherhood assisted. These took place three times each week, on Sunday the weekly feast day, and on the two days of fasting Wednesday and Friday. To Sunday was transferred the ritual importance of the Jewish Sabbath -- in the days of the Apostles themselves-and the observance of the two weekly fast days goes back, at all events, to the closing years of the first century.
The services which occupied the assembly were of two kinds. There were first of all the Vigilia, celebrated in the hours before dawn. These consisted of readings from the Sacred Books, and homilies delivered by the bishop interspersed with prayers and hymns. In the plan of this service there was nothing specifically new, and the same is true of the first part of the second service-the assembly for the Holy Eucharist.
Here, too, there is a preparatory element which the Christians took over bodily from the synagogue -- a service of prayers, hymns, readings from the Sacred Books, and a homily. To this the Christians added readings from their own Sacred Books and made it the preface to their own new liturgy the Holy Eucharist. The origin of this is once more the example and the precept of the Church's Founder, and it is in St. Paul’s Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels that we have the earliest description of the rite-in its essentials a special kind of prayer over the bread and wine, a breaking of the bread and a distribution of the "eucharisted" food to those who assisted.
The Didache, recalling the obligation of this Sunday reunion for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, urges the necessity of a good conscience in those who assist, for that at which they assist is the pure sacrifice foretold of old by the prophet Malachi. St. Ignatius is equally explicit, in his witness that the Eucharist is "the flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins, the flesh which the Father in his goodness has raised again." Equally clear is his fidelity to another element of New Testament doctrine on the Eucharist, namely that it is the symbol and the source of the Church's unity and peace.
These three fundamental ideas -- that the Holy Eucharist is sacrifice, food, and principle of unity, being the very body and blood of Jesus Christ -- the later writers do but develop and explain. St. Justin, in his First Apology, and in the Dialogue with Trypho too, gives us the earliest detailed account of the rite which has survived. In it we can see already achieved the combination of synagogue service and Eucharist around which the rich diversity of liturgies is later to grow. In St. Irenaeus we have the definite statement that it is by the words of the consecrating prayer that the change is wrought, while Clement of Alexandria uses a phraseology medieval in its concrete realism "To drink the blood of Jesus is to share in His incorruptibility," and Origen speaks of the Christian altars as "consecrated with the precious blood of Christ." Meanwhile, in the West, St. Hippolytus composed a treatise Should the Eucharist be received daily? and in Africa Tertullian, and above all St. Cyprian, write, with a fullness to which nothing is wanting, of the mystery, of its use, and of its role in the general life of the communicants. The lips with which Christ has been received, shall they turn next to applaud the brutalities of a gladiator? the hands which have held Him proceed to their daily task of making idols?
Universally, at the Sunday assembly the Eucharist was celebrated. The observance on the fast days varied. The fast remained unbroken until the mid-afternoon. In Africa, and at Jerusalem too, the Eucharist was celebrated at the assembly. At Alexandria and in Rome there was no Eucharist -- simply the service of prayers, readings, hymns and a homily. The next day to receive a regular service was Saturday, the one-time holy day. By the fourth century throughout the East, save at Alexandria, there was on Saturday an assembly with celebration of the Eucharist. At Rome, however, the development was in the contrary direction. Saturday became not a new weekly feast but a fast, an extension, in fact, of the fast of Friday. Another Roman peculiarity was the fast celebrated in the first week of each of the four seasons-the fast of the Four Seasons (Quarter-Tense, Ember Week). In these weeks the unusual fasts of Wednesday, Friday and Saturday were kept with the additional solemnity of a Eucharistic service on the first two days and a Vigil and Eucharist on the Saturday. A fifth specially honoured week centred round the annual commemoration of the death and resurrection of Our Lord. Originally this was little more than a fifth Ember Week with a feast on the Thursday to commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist. The commemoration which is the later Easter, goes back to the Apostles, as the evidence of all parties in the famous controversies of the second century goes to show. Pentecost, celebrating the visible outpouring of the promised Holy Spirit upon the first disciples is just as old a feast and was just as universally celebrated as Easter, but with perhaps less solemnity. The third feast of this cycle -- commemorating the Ascension -- is of much later origin. The earliest trace of it dates to about 350.
The great annual penitential season which, in English, is called Lent developed from two elements, the fast in preparation for the feast of Easter and the catechumen's preparation for Baptism. The pre-Easter fast was originally very short indeed -- one or two days in St. Irenaeus -- but, to compensate, it was very severe, for no food at all was taken while it lasted. In Africa, in Tertullian's time, it lasted from the Thursday to the morning of Easter Sunday. At Alexandria, a generation later, every day in that week was a fast day. The earliest mention of the fast of forty days in the spring is in the Canons of Nicea (325). Then, and for long afterwards, this fast was primarily directed to the coming baptism of the catechumens; it was a time of retreat, of recollection and special prayers, during which the candidates passed through the final stages of their probation. The discipline of Lent varied. At Rome the Sundays were considered to be outside the season, at Constantinople the Saturdays too. Lent again brought with it liturgical developments. In the East the Eucharist service on the Wednesdays and Fridays disappeared in Lent, but the number of reunions of the "mass-less" type increased. In the West the opposite happened. The number of mass days was increased, until, in the end, on every day of Lent there was an assembly with the celebration of the Eucharist.
Of the many other feasts which, later, were to enrich the calendar of the Church, we have hardly any record earlier than Constantine's conversion. Christmas, for example, was a Western feast originally and the earliest record of its celebration is at Rome in 336. The East had a similar kind of feast -- the Apparitions (Epiphany) -- commemorating the birth of Our Lord, the coming of the Wise Men, and His baptism, which was kept on January 6. One element in this may go back to a very early date, for about the years 200 the Gnostics kept a feast to celebrate the baptism of Our Lord. Nor are the feasts of Mary the Mother of Our Lord any older. There is no mention of them at Rome before the seventh century, although the feast of the Circumcision, the octave of Christmas, which is an indirect commemoration of her, goes back a century earlier. In this matter the West borrowed from the East where a feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple was kept at Jerusalem from about 370.
The oldest of all the feasts were the annual commemorations of the martyrs -- reunions of the local church, at the tombs of its most distinguished members, those who had testified to the faith with life itself. Of this development the earliest instance on record is the case of the martyred bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp, put to death in 155. A practice so natural grew speedily, and though the martyr cults were in their essence local things, some of the more noted of these Christian heroes -- St. Lawrence of Rome for example, St. Cyprian of Carthage -- soon won a wider renown, and honours in churches other than their own. With the Peace of Constantine the persecution, as a more or less normal incident of Christian life, ended. The heroism which had found its crown in martyrdom now developed in the solitude of the deserts. The new heroes were those who battled in the austerity of the new monasticism; and the next saints to be honoured liturgically after death, their prayers officially besought, were the ascetics, the first of them all in time the great St. Martin of Tours who died in 397.
The religion founded by Our Lord in the Church was then a corporate, social thing, just as truly as it was the sum of the innumerable conquests of the myriad individual souls who made up the mystical body. And from its understanding of its corporate nature there gradually developed its public liturgies, and a Christian art; latest of all there developed an architecture-latest of all, for the first buildings erected for the purpose of containing the Church at prayer, the first churches in the architectural sense of the word, were not built until well on into the third century. Before that time the Christians met for worship in the houses of one or another of the brotherhood. At certain places, in times of persecution, they met in the catacombs -- a Christian adaptation and development, on an immense scale, of the underground cemetery system, which, in all probability, they had borrowed from the Jews. This system of catacombs was especially well developed at Rome, where it grew to be a second underground city, Roma sotteriana cristiana. [3]
The Roman practice by which great families opened their private cemeteries to their dependants; the sacredness in the eye of the Roman law of the tomb and the cult of the dead; the ancient Roman custom of family reunions at the tomb of its deceased members: all these favoured the development. The Christians, once gathered in their cemeteries were secure, not only from mob hostility, but even from the attention of the police during persecutions. These Roman catacombs go back to the days of the Apostles themselves. Still, today, the pilgrim can wander through the miles of their underground galleries and the chambers hewn out of the tufa where, nearly two thousand years ago now, the mass was said and the homilies delivered and the neophytes baptized. He can look upon the sites of the tombs of the earliest martyr-popes, and upon the hundreds of funeral inscriptions that tell the names and qualities of these long dead Christians and that attest so many of the doctrines they professed; and he can look upon the earliest Christian paintings, and study, there again, not merely the quality and development of the artistic inspiration, but the beliefs to which the paintings witness and the religious practices of which they are the mute unchanging record.
In the course of the third century, as will be seen, the persecution of the Church changed its character entirely. It was no longer left to the initiative of private malice to unleash the fury of the persecuting laws. All now depended on the emperor; there were emperors who were favourable to the Church as well as those resolved on its destruction; and between the new, most savage persecutions that now took place, there were long intervals of peace when the Church enjoyed recognition as a lawful religion. It was during this p ace that, in the third century the first churches began to be built. Traces of these first churches still remain, at Rome for example, below the basilica of St. Clement and the church of S. Martino ai Monti, at S. Anastasia, at SS. Giovannie Paolo, and at S. Sabina. These discoveries of archaeology in our own time confirm the witness of the contemporaries who describe this first public appearance of the Church in the public life of the day, whether Christians themselves, like Eusebius of Cesarea, or bitter enemies such as Porphyry.
In all this swarming spiritual activity of Christian life, it is the Church, the whole assembly, which is all important. The newcomer to it is instructed by the Church, and prepared by the common and public prayer of the Church for his reception and baptism, and in the rite itself the collectivity of the life is manifest. It is in the assembly that he makes his progress, and should he fall from grace, his fall is the concern of all his brethren, who assist his penances by their own charitable prayers and good works.
When a Christian marries he is warned to take a Christian for his partner, [4] for there is a Christian law of marriage. [5] The marriage should be with the bishop's consent, [6] or at any rate blessed by the Church. [7] Marriage between Christians is indissoluble, even the adultery of one of the partners cannot break the bond. [8] Though Encratites, like Tatian, condemn marriage as mere fornication, and Marcionites forbid it altogether, the Catholic tradition is constant that perpetual continency is not of obligation, that marriage is lawful, [9] -- more, that it is a holy thing, since it is the figure of the union of Christ and His Church. [10] Second marriages, which the Montanists condemn altogether, although reproved [11] are tolerated, except in the case of the clergy. A second marriage is also a bar to a man's ordination. Marriage is a holy thing, and the mutual rights and duties of the contracting parties are discussed by these first Christian moralists always with reference to the life of the Spirit which, since Baptism, is the most important factor in every Christian's life.
The primitive tradition that the ruling members of the Church are also the authorised teachers, and the ministers of the Eucharist is faithfully maintained. With these first and essential officers others are now associated; Lectors whose office it is to read the chosen passages of Holy Scripture in the assemblies; Exorcists to whom is entrusted one of the chief functions in the preparation of the catechumen for Baptism; Acolytes who share more closely in the ritual of the Eucharist; and Doorkeepers (Ostiarii) whose mission is the very important one of securing that none but members of the Church are admitted to the different reunions. The rite by which all members of the clergy are commissioned and receive their new spiritual powers is still the primitive imposition of hands, its minister the bishop, and in St. Cyprian we note the first appearance of the regulation that for the consecration of a bishop three bishops are required. Marriage is no bar to ordination, although (Councils of Ancyra, 314, Neo-Cesarea, c. 314-25) it comes to be the law that the deacon, priest or bishop once ordained may not marry. The prestige of continency is bringing about an association in the mind of the Church between its practice and the ministry. The clerical state, in its higher ranks at least, should not lack the virtue which now adorns so many of the flock. And even in the case of those married before ordination it begins to be suggested that, after ordination, husband and wife should be to each other but as brother and sister. This clerical body, for all its undoubted position apart in the Church, is not, in the first three centuries, a way of life that excludes the following of a profession. Its members support themselves, as do the faithful to whom they minister, by a variety of occupations. Nor, for the best part of two centuries after Constantine, is there any suggestion of a special clerical dress, any more than there is evidence of what to-day we call, technically, vestments. When the first attempt to introduce a clerical costume was made it met with little favour, and was in fact severely rebuked by the pope of the time (St. Celestine I, 422-432).
How far had Christianity spread by the time of the conversion of Constantine? The question is much easier to answer definitely than the other question it provokes, how far was the Empire then Christian? At Rome there had been Christians from within a few years of Our Lord's Ascension, and a Pagan historian speaks of them as "a great multitude" at the time of Nero's persecution. From the second century Rome becomes a great centre of expansion, whence southern and central Italy are evangelised. Northern Italy was a much later conquest. Of Christianity in Gaul, our earliest certain attested fact is the persecution of 177 which reveals at Lyons a well-ordered and flourishing church. A hundred and forty years later, at the Council of Arles, sixteen bishops of Gallic sees were present, among them bishops from Bordeaux, Rheims and Rouen. Spain knew the Church as early as the days of St. Paul who was, seemingly, one of its first apostles. But we know nothing of its Christianity until the persecution of Decius (250-251). Fifty years later the Church there had so profited by the long peace which followed Valerian (259) that, at the Council of Elvira (300), forty Spanish bishops assembled. In Britain, too, there were Christians and organised churches, Christians who gave their lives in the persecution of 304-5; and the bishops of York, London and Lincoln sat in the Council of Arles of 314. Of the origin of this British Christianity we know nothing. At the Council of Arles there assisted also bishops from Mainz, Cologne and Treves, the earliest representatives of Christianity among the Germans known to us. Of the conquests of the Church in the lands beyond the Rhine where the Empire never established itself we know scarcely anything.
The first evidence of Christianity in Africa is as late as 189-the martyrdoms at Scillium. The churches in Africa are, by then, already numerous and well-organised. A few years later and Tertullian has been received at Carthage (c. 194) and can urge as one of his pleas for toleration that the Christians are almost the majority in every town of the province. Certainly in the two provinces of Numidia and Proconsular Africa there were, by the beginning of the third century, seventy bishops.
But the real strength of Christianity lay to the east of the Adriatic. Greece, Epirus, Thessaly and Thrace were by the end of the second century very well evangelised. Into the Danube provinces to the north Christianity came later, but not too late to produce martyrs under Diocletian. Dalmatia's conversion began with Titus, and it is in the lands evangelised by St. Paul and his lieutenants that we find Christianity strongest three centuries later. While in Palestine, its first home, Christianity had almost disappeared with the destruction that followed the wars of Titus and Hadrian, Syrian Christianity developed amazingly around that most ancient centre of missionary zeal the city of Antioch. Again, in Asia Minor, while Cappadocia remained unconverted until the time of St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 230-50), Phrygia and Bithynia were Christian from the end of the previous century. It was, however, the province of Asia, whose chief city was Ephesus, that led all the rest, the one really Christian province of the whole Empire. Egypt, too, was largely Christian. By the end of the third century it had fifty-five bishops, and from what we know of Egyptian Christianity in the first century in which it is known to us (Clement of Alexandria to St. Athanasius) it would seem to have been established at a very early date. A list of its bishops is extant that leads back to 61.
Christianity was not, however, confined to the Roman Empire. The buffer State of Edessa was so thoroughly converted in the second century that Christianity became the official religion of the kingdom. Armenia, too, dates its first conversion from about the same time, but the chief agent here was St. Gregory the Illuminator (late third century). He was himself Armenian and under his influence once again Christianity found itself the religion of the State. For all that, the conversion proved superficial. To the south of Egypt lay Ethiopia, and the conversion of Ethiopia counts among St. Athanasius' many titles to remembrance. From Egypt, too, but a century earlier, came the conversion of Arabia. The most flourishing of all these oriental Christianities was however that of Persia. Persia's first missionaries were from Edessa and they built up, in the century which preceded the conversion of Constantine, a really imposing church. This was the century of the great wars between the Roman Empire and the resuscitated Persia of the Sassanid kings, and the religion persecuted in Rome found, if only for political reasons, a protector in the Great King. Constantine's conversion brought to an end this happy state of things. Christianity, the religion of the Roman Emperor, was henceforth banned in Persia and a century of almost uninterrupted persecution followed in which thousands of martyrs perished.
Although the essential organisation of the spreading Christianity remained the same -- the bishop supreme in the local church under the unique hegemony of the Bishop of Rome -- two very important new institutions developed during these first three hundred years, the council of bishops and the ecclesiastical province, i.e. the permanent grouping of sees round a central metropolitan see. The earliest council recorded is that called by the Bishop of Ephesus at the time of the Easter Controversy (189-198). To judge by his letter to the pope the procedure was altogether new, and due entirely to the initiative of Rome. In the next hundred years the institution developed rapidly. Origen records councils at Cesarea in Palestine (230) and in Pisidia. In the same year there is a council at Carthage and in 240 one at Ancyra. in Africa especially was this new organ of government -- L'eveque au pluriel -- made use of, and under a bishop like St. Cyprian, through the council of Africa, the primacy of Carthage developed rapidly. It is, again, through councils that Denis of Alexandria combats the revival of Sabellianism, and that Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch, is convicted of heresy and deposed. The councils secure uniformity of faith and discipline without, as yet, in any way hindering the action of the Roman See, which continues its practice of intervention, even in the case of such great sees as Alexandria and Antioch, intervening always with a tone of authority found nowhere else, commanding as though in no doubt that obedience would be given, holding out sanctions to rebels and the negligent.
The councils, however, even that council of Africa which apparently met every year, were not in permanent session and the new grouping of sees around the metropolitan see -- see of the chief city of the province, mother-see very often whence had sprung the rest -- supplied a machinery for the co-ordination of every day activity. For all that the bishop is supreme in his own church, the local church is not an isolated spiritual kingdom. Outside bishops have a say in its affairs -- in the election of the bishop, for example, and in his consecration -- and, for St. Cyprian, this is a tradition which goes back to the Apostles. The system by which the activities of every bishop are subordinated -- on appeal -- to the collective scrutiny of the other bishops dependent on the same metropolitan see, is already well established by the time of the Council of Nicea (325), whose very important canons do but regulate an already existing institution, adapting it to the new delimitation of provinces accomplished by Diocletian and his successors. Already there is confusion, already rivalry between the great sees. Nicea -- with the whole eastern episcopate assembled for the first time -- is an opportunity to set all in order.
There is no record of either Antioch or Alexandria as a great central see before the third century, nor is there any regularity or uniformity in the way in which the central sees begin to develop. Rome for example -- we are not concerned here with the organisation of its peculiar universal jurisdiction, potentior principalitas -- is gradually revealed as the metropolitan of all central and southern Italy, Carthage of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, Alexandria of Egypt and Libya. Antioch, however, for all its civil importance, has nothing like so definite a power over the sees of the East. Asia Minor too is, by comparison with Egypt, Africa and Italy, poorly organised. Ephesus, for example, despite its apostolic origin, and its civil importance as the capital of the province, has an equal and a rival in every other church. Nor is the original grouping based on the civil divisions.
The rise of Antioch is particularly interesting and it is important in view of the history of the fourth century, to notice the failure of this Church to achieve a real local hegemony. From about 250 Antioch begins to show itself the centre of action for a group of sees which finally becomes the episcopate of The East (i.e. the civil diocese of that name). After the death of Constantine, (337) Antioch became the seat of the imperial residence and it continued to be the de facto capital down to Theodosius (381). These are the years of the Arian supremacy, and that supremacy and Antioch's predominance went together. It was no matter of ecclesiastical legislation, simply the natural effect of the city's new civil importance increasing the influence of its bishops. But Antioch never drew within its sphere of influence either the province of Asia or Egypt, where Alexandria, during the whole of this period, led the fight for Catholicism -- inevitably a fight against Antioch and against the spread of Antioch's influence. It will be seen later how Antioch was the centre of the campaign against St. Athanasius, and how the church of Antioch supplied and consecrated the Arians whom the emperor installed at Alexandria as bishops during St. Athanasius' exile. It is the eternal problem of the East to preserve the Church from this evil of episcopal ambition, so to balance and regulate the relations of sees and metropolitans that no one see shall ever achieve an undue predominance. In its failure to solve that problem, and in the absence of adequate machinery through which the Roman hegemony, functioning continuously, might supply what was lacking to local arrangements, lie the beginnings of the end of Eastern Catholicism. Egypt was organised, Africa and Italy too, while the disorganised East inevitably offered itself to the ambition of first one see and then another. How, finally, Constantinople captured it is what the rest of this history must tell.
The canons of Nicea enact that all the bishops of the province (i.e. the civil province) shall take part in the election of its bishops, that the metropolitan shall have the right of veto; and that, as a check on episcopal misgovernment, the provincial council shall meet twice each year as a court of appeal. But this regime of churches grouped by civil provinces (since Diocletian's reforms these number now ninety-six in all) applies only to the civil dioceses of Asia, Pontus and The East. The council expressly recognises the special and ancient regime which obtains in the (civil) diocese of Egypt -- Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis -- where the Bishop of Alexandria himself chooses all the bishops and consecrates them and, if need be, deposes them. His authority is much more than metropolitan, and his authority extends far beyond the civil provinces. They are the same rights, the council recognises, as those which the Bishop of Rome exercises in Italy. Antioch, too, is mentioned by name, but the council again does no more than confirm existing rights " To Antioch and throughout the other provinces, the privileges proper to metropolitan sees." The bishops at Nicea did not innovate; they made no attempt to centralise the organisation of the immense Christianity which stretched from the Euxine to the Red Sea.
1Lebreton, Origines du Dogme de la Trinite.
2For a masterly, documented study cf. PIERRE DE LABRIOLLE. Les Debuts du Monachisme in F. & M. III 299-370.
3The title of J. B. de Rossi's classic work (1864-1867): catacombs have been discovered elsewhere too, at Naples, in Tuscany, in Sicily, in Africa, at Alexandria and in Asia Minor.
4Tertullian, St. Cyprian, Councils of Elvira (300) and Arles (314).
5Athenagoras
6St. Ignatius
7Tertullian
8Hermas, St. Irenaeus Tertullian, St. Cyprian, the Council of Elvira and Rome constantly. The Council of Arles is evidence of a less stringent opinion
9St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Didascalia
10Tertullian
11Athenagoras, St. Theophilus of Antioch, Tertullian, Didascalia
Le milieu paien, cet immense ocean de superstitions et de reves que le courant chretien dut traverser sans s'y meler. [1]
THE current was threefold. It was a revealed doctrine, it was a thing organised, and it was a special way of life. So far we have been concerned with the fortunes of the doctrine and of the means divinely devised for its propaganda and protection as the current moves slowly through the ocean. The study is incomplete if it neglects some description of how the ideal of Christian life fared during these first momentous centuries.
The foundation of that life was the spirit of renunciation, of good things for the better, of all things for the sake of God, as the gospels describe it. For some of the Christians this knows no limits. Property, marriage, life itself they will gladly renounce to give themselves more fully to the following of Christ, Who is from the beginning the one centre of their new religious life. Others give up less, but something each must give up, for in each disciple there must be that permanent willingness to renounce whatever is asked, whenever it is asked. Renunciation is not cultivated for its own sake, nor with the purpose of perfecting the disciple's own personality. It is an imitation of Christ, made in union with Christ, its purpose ever closer union with Christ. It is an activity of that new life which has come to the disciple through fellowship in the Church and the mystic incorporation with Christ -- a life which never ceases to be dependent on Christ. This life begins with the rite of Baptism; and the chief means through which it is increased and the union between Christ and the disciple consummated, is the rite of the Eucharist. This new mystical, super-natural union with God is the source of the believer's new relation to his fellows. He is to love them as himself, not with the natural love that springs from his appreciation of their natural attractiveness, but with a super-natural love deriving from his new relation to God. God loves them, and therefore the disciple, loving God, loves them for God's sake. This love of the disciple for his fellows is the very mark by which his discipleship is recognisable.
This doctrine, which characterises especially the Gospel of St. John, is also the teaching of the epistles of St. Paul. The two principles of spiritual self-denial and of the constant union between the believer and God are, here again, the foundation on which all is built, although St. Paul’s approach to the subject is not that of St. John. Though the new life is given in Baptism, something of the old survives. Whence a lifelong contest between new and old or, as St. Paul says, between Flesh and Spirit. These terms recur often in St. Paul, and following him they become, for all time, the common coin of spiritual teaching with orthodox and heretic alike. It is important to note the meaning St. Paul gives them. By "Flesh" is not meant merely the temptation to sensuality in matters of sex. The term stands rather for human nature as the fall of the first man affected it, crippled, disordered, no longer answering naturally to reasonable control, and therefore ever afterwards a source of rebellion, a thing which the unaided human will is unable to dominate. Left to itself this fallen human nature is a source of sin. Baptism, making the baptized one with Christ, breaks that ancient dominion of the first sin over human nature, but yet not so completely that it cannot make new bids to recover. Whence the life of the disciple is a continual struggle; and St. Paul has a rich store of comparisons to emphasise this truth. A second obstacle to the disciple's progress is the World -- the mass of men who, for one reason or another, live in habitual disregard of the Spirit, in habitual affection for the Flesh. No disciple can possibly love the World. In St. Paul, too, we see the two classes of disciples with greater or less perfection for their aims, and, as a means to perfection, we find recommended that peculiarly Christian notion of consecrated virginity. The notion involves no disparagement of marriage or of sex. On the contrary, whoever practises continency is considered as denying himself an important good.
In the two centuries or more which separate the Apostles from the convert emperors of the fourth century, the believer never lacked eloquent guides to remind him of the fundamental principles which should control his life. Here is a theme to which every Christian writer of these centuries returns sooner or later. " There are two roads: the road to life, the road to death," begins the Didache, and the parable speedily becomes a commonplace of the primitive moral exhortations. "The road to life" -- the love of God, obedience to His commands, flight from sin, from sexual wrongdoing, perjury, lying, theft, avarice, blasphemy, avoidance of whatever disturbs the unity of the Church, the practice of almsgiving, the care of children, obedience to authority, humility. The apostolic theme of the continual warfare is not neglected, and the never-ceasing persecution gives rise to a whole literature exhorting to patience and constancy in the hour of trial, to confidence in Christ for Whom the martyr is privileged to suffer. To comfort and strengthen the confessor and the martyr all the great writers in turn set their genius, Tertullian, Origen and St. Cyprian very notably. In all this literature the one common, dominating feature is the reference to Christ as the centre and goal of the whole idealism as this is preached and as it is lived. It is no detached theorising about an indubitable but distant God which these theologians present, St. Ignatius, St. Irenaeus and the rest. A vivid faith in His presence in the very hearts of those for whom they write is the very life of their work. And, of course, nowhere is this so manifest as with the martyrs. The martyrs were the crown of every church's achievement.
After the martyrs came another class of spiritual heroes -- the continentes and the virgins, those who bound themselves, for the love of Christ, to a life of perpetual continency. There is no ascetical practice so praised, so exalted by these early writers as this; and the number of those who gave themselves to it is the boast of the Apologists, as it was the marvel of the contemporary Pagans who knew it. The continentes are cited too, and continually, as a powerful force for good among the believers themselves, a living exhortation to the whole Church. Those who so devoted themselves continued, as yet, to live with their families, but very soon they came to form a kind of spiritual aristocracy in every church, along with the widows, who, in a like spirit, made a perpetual consecration of their widowhood. From a very early time so important a matter ceased to be left to the discretion of the individual. The consent of the bishop was essential before the irrevocable life-long dedication was allowed. A ritual of consecration developed, and an age limit was introduced earlier than which no one could be accepted. The care of these specially consecrated believers took up much of a bishop's time, and warnings against the pitfalls that lay before the virgin, the especially insidious temptation to pride, self-esteem, and a contemning of the ordinary folk, fill many pages of the contemporary exhortations Ad Virgines. It was natural, too, at first to recommend, and later to enact, that for their own greater security, and for the seemliness of the thing, such as were thus dedicated should lead a life of retirement. They should not appear at public banquets, nor at weddings, should avoid the public amusements and the baths, should dress soberly, without jewels or cosmetics, and in public always go veiled. To the ordinary fasts which bound the whole Church they added still more, and in their retirement multiplied the hours of prayer, meeting together privately for the purpose. Naturally, occupied with little but the service of God, they soon became the Church's recognised agents for the vast charitable services which were this primitive Christianity's leading activity -- care of the widows, of orphans, of the sick, and the systematic relief of the poor and distressed.
The movement did not progress without serious aberrations showing themselves from time to time. There was the tendency to value these abstinences for their own sake, to declare the use of wine for example, of flesh meat, of marriage, things evil in themselves -- a tendency related, very often, to the theory that matter is necessarily evil. St. Paul had to warn Timothy against such " saints, " but for all authority's faithful adherence to his example the tendency never ceased to show itself. Apocryphal Acts of particular apostles, forged to give a sanction to these theories, did much to make them popular, and no doubt the every day experience of the excesses of contemporary Paganism helped very considerably in the same direction. It is also interesting to notice that rigorism of this kind is associated with all the early heresies, the mark of Montanists, Marcionites and Gnostics alike.
From the tendency to control and regulate the daily life and occupation of the continentes was to come, ultimately, the institution of Christian Monasticism. [2] " Happy the virgin who places herself under a rule," runs a fourth century saying "she shall be as a fruitful vine in a garden. Unhappy is the virgin who will not follow a rule, she is as a ship that lacks a rudder." From St. Jerome (347-420) and St. Ambrose (340-397) we can learn many details of what such a rule was. These ladies live at home a life of seclusion, going out rarely. They wear their hair cut short, their long-sleeved dress is black and they are veiled. They have a round of private prayer at home and certain daily prayers in common in the church. They fast, taking each day one meal only, and that without meat. This meal, too, they often take in common. They serve the poor and they attend the sick. From such a state of things to the life of a convent is but a step. As early as 270 we find St. Antony of Egypt placing his sister in a house where a number of like-minded holy women lived a common life, and by 300 such institutions were fairly numerous.
This was not the only source whence monasticism developed. There were others of the continentes who, although they no longer lived with their families, preferred to live alone, solitaries, on the outskirts of the towns first, and then further away still in the "desert." Of these anchorites or hermits the pioneer is St. Paul of Thebes. More famous, however, is his disciple Antony (c. 250-355). Such was this hermit's fame that, despite his opposition, disciples gathered round him and pursued him into the very depths of the Egyptian deserts, until, in the Nitrian desert, there were, about 325, more than 5,000 solitaries, of both sexes. They lived in separate huts without any common rule, each a law unto himself, meeting at the church on the Sundays for Mass, to receive the Holy Eucharist and a spiritual instruction. They chose their own austerities, each according to his own fancy, and were their own judges as to the extent to which these should be continued. There were hermits who hardly ever ate, or slept, others who stood without movement whole weeks together, or who had themselves sealed up in tombs and remained there for years, receiving only the least of poor nourishment through crevices in the masonry. The fervour of the oriental found in this primitive monasticism all it could crave of opportunity for sacrificial self-despoilment. In the fourth century more especially, when to the persecution there followed an era of comfort, and when, in the saying of a contemporary, there were many more Christians but less Christianity, did the zeal of the more perfect lead them into the desert.
The hermit movement presently had a competitor in the monastic movement properly so-called -- the foundation in the desert of institutes where the members led a common life, working, praying, practising austerities, studying the Sacred Scriptures, under the rule of a superior. In these institutions the will of the superior was the guide and the norm. The austerities, no less than the prayers, were regulated by his discretion. The pioneer of this movement was St. Pachomius, and his first foundation-a monastery for men and one for women -- at Tabennisi dates from about 320.
From Egypt the movement spread to Palestine and here a disciple of St. Antony, Hilary, devised yet a third form of the life, the Laura. The Laura was a village of cells or huts, so that each monk lived alone as did the hermits, but the community was subject to a superior as in the monastery. This system became rapidly popular, and many of these monastic villages counted each its thousand of monks. Jerusalem, in the fourth century, became a great centre for monks of every kind of monastic life, the capital, in fact, of monasticism, and St. Jerome the movement's presiding genius.
Syria had its monks, Asia Minor, too, and here, towards the middle of the fourth century, this eastern monasticism produced the great saint whose rule was to fix its characteristics for the rest of time -- St. Basil (329-79). St. Basil was a reformer of the practical type. He had travelled much, had seen every aspect of contemporary monasticism in one country and another, and when he came to draw up a rule it was much more a code of life than any of the so-called rules which preceded it. He it was who invented the novitiate -- a systematic probation of aspirants, who were to be trained primarily to the renouncement of their own way, obedience being the monk's great virtue and the means of his spiritual progress. And the monasteries were not to be over large -- thirty or forty monks only to each superior. This was in very striking contrast to the monasteries of the Pachomian type where, as with the system of the Laura, the monks were to be numbered by the thousand.
For St. Basil the community type of life is a higher form than the hermit life; and from this moment the hermit life declines in prestige. All the monks are to come together for all the prayers, and the psalms and singing are to be varied to avoid monotony and the boredom that derives from it. The superior gives his monks instruction, confession of faults to him or to another monk is encouraged, and great emphasis is Jaid on the necessity of systematic manual work for each monk. The will of the superior is the monk's law in all that concerns his monastic life. Hence no room is now left for personal eccentricity, whether in the matter of devotions or austerities. All exaggerations, and the trouble they breed, disappear. To guard against pride and vanity no one may go beyond the rule except by the superior's special permission. The abstinence from meat and wine is perpetual. Silence is the law for meals, at the office and during work. The monk never leaves his monastery, except for a just cause, and even then he never goes alone. The sick are to be cared for with every comfort, and hospitality is enjoined as a primary duty. For those who refuse to keep the rule, penalties are provided. But, where St. Pachomius provides floggings and a bread and water diet for serious faults, in St. Basil’s rule there is nothing harsher than a kind of temporary internal excommunication.
In the East, by the end of the fourth century, within a hundred years of its first introduction, Monasticism was established as perhaps the most flourishing of all the Church's activities. In the West, it had developed more slowly. Here, too, in every church, there had been, from the first generations, the spiritual aristocracy of continentes and virgins, and, for example at Rome, such women had begun already to live a common life when, towards the middle of the fourth century, the knowledge began to spread of the marvellous happenings in the Egyptian deserts. One important source of this knowledge was the accidental presence, for several years, in Italy and Gaul of the bishop of Alexandria, St. Athanasius, banished from his see by the Arianising policy of the emperor. None knew better than he the detail of the new movement -- of which he was indeed one of the earliest historians -- and to the presence in the West during so many years of the bishop who was, by his position, the very patriarch of nascent monasticism, and by his temperament a master propagandist, much of the sudden growth of the movement in the West may be ascribed. Another source of the West's knowledge of the ascetic marvels of the eastern Churches was the experience of the thousands of pilgrims who, in the first generations of the Christian Empire, made the long journey to Palestine to venerate the sacred places whence the Faith had come.
Some of these pilgrims, attracted by the life, even stayed on, spiritual exiles for the sake of the more perfect life. Of such westerners who so made themselves easterners the most famous is St. Jerome (347-420), and around his life may be written the whole history of early Roman monasticism. His first experience of monasticism was the five years he spent as a solitary in the desert to the east of Antioch -- a desert so peopled with like-minded souls, that solitude, he found, was the last thing possible. From the desert St. Jerome returned to Rome, and for the next few years he was the centre round which the monastically-minded of the old capital -- women of noble families for the most part -- gathered. In this circle all the stark austerity of the life of the desert found willing adepts, under the learned direction of St. Jerome. There was the inevitable conflict with the less ascetically inclined relatives, and with the still less ascetic Roman clergy, and in the end St. Jerome and his followers left the city, to establish themselves once and for all at Bethlehem (386).
Along with St. Jerome there must also be mentioned his contemporaries the Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose (340-397) and the future Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine (354-430). St. Ambrose did much, by his sermons De Virginibus, to foster the ideal among his people and to encourage the movement. St. Cyprian is here his master, but St. Ambrose breaks entirely new ground when he suggests Our Lady as the type and model of the consecrated virgin. Milan, under St. Ambrose's direction, became in its turn a centre of the monastic life, and with the progress of the movement came the inevitable opposition. The saint's De Virginitate is his reply to it.
In St. Paulinus of Nola, a retired imperial official of high rank who gave himself to the life, monasticism reached another stage of development and with Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli, it began to affect the clergy too. The priests who served the church of Vercelli lived a life in common, whose spirit was the spirit of monasticism. It is with this clerical type of monasticism that the still greater name of St. Augustine is associated. Some of the best known pages of his Confessions record how greatly he was influenced, at the crisis of his life, by the story of the imperial officers whom the example of the hermits in Egypt had won over to monasticism. After his return to Africa the converted scholar, giving up his career and his projected marriage, turned his house at Tagaste into a monastery. There with his friends, their property sold and the proceeds given to the poor, he led a regular life of seclusion, of prayer and study. His ordination in 391 fixed him at Hippo, and at Hippo he once more established a monastery of the same type in which he himself lived. Finally when, in 396, he became Bishop of Hippo he not only continued his own monastic way of life but brought all his clergy into it also. The episcopal palace itself became a monastery -- a monastery whence, as from Marmoutier and Lerins, monks went forth as bishops to rule more than one of the neighbouring sees. St. Augustine has left descriptions of the life of the community in his sermons, a treatise De Sancta Virginitate, another De Opere Monachorum, while, from the letter he wrote to restore peace to a community of holy women, later centuries developed the so-called Rule of St. Augustine.
The opposition to monasticism continued. Its strength lay very largely in what remained of Paganism in the old Roman aristocracy, and more than once the city mob rioted in its anti-monastic zeal. There were also the heretics -- Helvidius, for example, who preached against continency, derided the idea of mortification, and even denied the virginity of Mary. Another such was Jovinian, an ex-monk who, man of the world now and practised debauchee, turned -- first of an unhappy line -- to revile and attack all he once had reverenced. There was, he declared, only one heaven, only one reward for all; and since those validly baptized cannot but be saved, mortifications are but a useless show. He drew replies from St. Ambrose and -- a characteristically waspish one -- from St. Jerome. He was excommunicated by the pope, Siricius (384-398), but his teaching grew, and many apostasies are recorded.
It was, however, in Gaul, and not in Italy, that the first western monks really flourished, where the pioneer was the Bishop of Tours, St. Martin (317-397). St. Martin, born in Pannonia, was the child of a legionary and, despite his early attraction to the hermit life, forced to follow his father into the army. His vocation survived the experiences of the camp, and, once baptized and free of the army (339), he was received into the clergy by St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers. For some years afterwards he lived as a solitary, first near Milan and later on an island in the Mediterranean. St. Hilary, banished to the East for opposition to the Arian Constantius II, returned with a new knowledge of monasticism (361); and it was now that, under his direction, Martin founded at Liguge, close by St. Hilary's cathedral city, the first monastery of the West -- a few huts, one for each monk, grouped round the church in which the monks met for what spiritual exercises they had in common. There was no rule but the mutual good example and the duty of obedience to the superior. St. Martin was still at Liguge when he was elected Bishop of Tours. The new office made no difference to the man. He continued to live his austere life, to sleep on the bare ground, to wear his old clothes, to fast, to pray as before and, within sight of the walls of Tours, he founded Marmoutier -- another and larger Liguge. Here he lived with his community of eighty monks a life very like that of the Egyptian monasteries of St. Pachomius. Very many of the monks whom this austere life attracted were of noble birth, and from Marmoutier came forth a whole series of bishops -- the first monk-bishops in the Church. By an extraordinary paradox this first great monastery of contemplative solitaries became, and almost immediately, the first great centre of that movement to convert the countrysides of Gaul, whose greatest figure is St. Martin.
St. Martin was, however, not an organiser of monasticism, and it was in monasteries founded a little later, in the south of Gaul, that the first monastic legislators of the West arose. Two monasteries in particular must be noticed -- Lerins, an island off the coast of Provence, and the abbey of St. Victor at Marseilles. At Lerins, founded by a wealthy patrician St. Honoratus (429), the rule of St. Pachomius was held in great veneration, and although not followed to the letter, it undoubtedly influenced the life there. Lerins too was a nursery of bishops, supplying indeed so many bishops to the sees of southern Gaul that it became a matter of complaint between the clergy and the Roman See. Marseilles had for its founder an Eastern who had travelled much. This was John Cassian. He was born about 350, was a monk at Bethlehem in the early days of St. Jerome's career there, and after several years in Egypt came to Constantinople, where in 403 he was ordained deacon by St. John Chrysostom. Four years later he was in Rome, carrying to Innocent I St. John’s appeal against his illegal deposition. Finally, in 414, he was ordained priest at Marseilles and founded there the abbey of St. Victor. The rule's inspiration was Eastern, but modified to suit the very different Western conditions. Cassian, however, did much more than found a monastery. He set down his ideas in two books which were to influence monastic thought and theories of spiritual direction for centuries -- his De Coenobiorum Institutis and his Collationes.
The way of the Counsels -- monasticism in the later centuries, the life of the virgines and continentes in the primitive times -- was, however, the privilege of a minority. This elite was vastly outnumbered by the thousands of believers whom necessity and choice bound to the life of the world, and of whom the churches were chiefly composed. To them also, through the Church, the Spirit spoke. In them, too, ran the same supernatural life, fed from the same sources which nourished those especially consecrated, and producing in the activities of ordinary human life the same superhuman fruits. For these Christians, too, the gospel, -- an institution and a belief -- was also a way of living, a code of conduct based on a teaching, and nourished through a cult.
Conformably to the will of Christ its Founder, the Church received its new adepts through the visible ceremonial rite of Baptism. Closely connected with Baptism was the complementary ceremony of the laying on of hands. St. Justin gives us the earliest detailed description of the rite which has survived, and fifty years later Tertullian is evidence that an explanatory and preparatory ceremonial had already gathered round the primitive nucleus. The ceremony takes place at Easter. The water with which it is administered is especially blessed for the purpose. The candidate makes a previous explicit renunciation of the devil. The baptism is followed by an anointing with blessed oil and an imposition of hands. It is the bishop who officiates, and the candidates prepare for their reception by special prayers and fasts. St. Hippolytus, Tertullian's contemporary, speaks also of an anointing of the catechumen before baptism. The heretics, too, had these ceremonies -- the Marcionites, for example, and many of the Gnostics -- which points to their being established in the Church before the heretics broke away, to an origin that is at least as early as the generation which followed the death of the last apostle.
But the preparatory period was not merely a time of special prayer. From a very early date indeed those who wished to be members of the Church were trained in its doctrines and practices, their sincerity and fervour tested by a long systematic course of instruction. This was the Catechumenate, and in every church there came to be a priest appointed for the purpose of instructing and watching over the Catechumens. The Catechumens had their special place in the assemblies, and during the time of their probation they were prepared for baptism by a series of preparatory ceremonies, exorcisms for example, blessings and anointings. After the baptism and the anointing and imposition of hands which followed, the newly-initiated received for the first time the Holy Eucharist.
The minister of these public initiatory rites was, originally, always the bishop. Later the custom gradually made its way that the priests, too, assisted at the actual baptism, the bishop blessing the water and the oils but baptizing only a few of the catechumens though still administering to all the rite of anointing and the imposition of hands. Then most of the baptisms fell to the priests. Still later when, in the fourth century, parishes began to be founded outside the cities, the priests in charge of them were allowed to bless the water for Baptism, to baptize all who came to them and to anoint them also, the bishop reserving to himself the blessing of the oils and the final imposition of hands. Such is the Roman practice, at any rate, from the time of Innocent I (402-417).
The centres of the Church's religious life were the weekly assemblies where the bishop presided and at which all the brotherhood assisted. These took place three times each week, on Sunday the weekly feast day, and on the two days of fasting Wednesday and Friday. To Sunday was transferred the ritual importance of the Jewish Sabbath -- in the days of the Apostles themselves-and the observance of the two weekly fast days goes back, at all events, to the closing years of the first century.
The services which occupied the assembly were of two kinds. There were first of all the Vigilia, celebrated in the hours before dawn. These consisted of readings from the Sacred Books, and homilies delivered by the bishop interspersed with prayers and hymns. In the plan of this service there was nothing specifically new, and the same is true of the first part of the second service-the assembly for the Holy Eucharist.
Here, too, there is a preparatory element which the Christians took over bodily from the synagogue -- a service of prayers, hymns, readings from the Sacred Books, and a homily. To this the Christians added readings from their own Sacred Books and made it the preface to their own new liturgy the Holy Eucharist. The origin of this is once more the example and the precept of the Church's Founder, and it is in St. Paul’s Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels that we have the earliest description of the rite-in its essentials a special kind of prayer over the bread and wine, a breaking of the bread and a distribution of the "eucharisted" food to those who assisted.
The Didache, recalling the obligation of this Sunday reunion for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, urges the necessity of a good conscience in those who assist, for that at which they assist is the pure sacrifice foretold of old by the prophet Malachi. St. Ignatius is equally explicit, in his witness that the Eucharist is "the flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins, the flesh which the Father in his goodness has raised again." Equally clear is his fidelity to another element of New Testament doctrine on the Eucharist, namely that it is the symbol and the source of the Church's unity and peace.
These three fundamental ideas -- that the Holy Eucharist is sacrifice, food, and principle of unity, being the very body and blood of Jesus Christ -- the later writers do but develop and explain. St. Justin, in his First Apology, and in the Dialogue with Trypho too, gives us the earliest detailed account of the rite which has survived. In it we can see already achieved the combination of synagogue service and Eucharist around which the rich diversity of liturgies is later to grow. In St. Irenaeus we have the definite statement that it is by the words of the consecrating prayer that the change is wrought, while Clement of Alexandria uses a phraseology medieval in its concrete realism "To drink the blood of Jesus is to share in His incorruptibility," and Origen speaks of the Christian altars as "consecrated with the precious blood of Christ." Meanwhile, in the West, St. Hippolytus composed a treatise Should the Eucharist be received daily? and in Africa Tertullian, and above all St. Cyprian, write, with a fullness to which nothing is wanting, of the mystery, of its use, and of its role in the general life of the communicants. The lips with which Christ has been received, shall they turn next to applaud the brutalities of a gladiator? the hands which have held Him proceed to their daily task of making idols?
Universally, at the Sunday assembly the Eucharist was celebrated. The observance on the fast days varied. The fast remained unbroken until the mid-afternoon. In Africa, and at Jerusalem too, the Eucharist was celebrated at the assembly. At Alexandria and in Rome there was no Eucharist -- simply the service of prayers, readings, hymns and a homily. The next day to receive a regular service was Saturday, the one-time holy day. By the fourth century throughout the East, save at Alexandria, there was on Saturday an assembly with celebration of the Eucharist. At Rome, however, the development was in the contrary direction. Saturday became not a new weekly feast but a fast, an extension, in fact, of the fast of Friday. Another Roman peculiarity was the fast celebrated in the first week of each of the four seasons-the fast of the Four Seasons (Quarter-Tense, Ember Week). In these weeks the unusual fasts of Wednesday, Friday and Saturday were kept with the additional solemnity of a Eucharistic service on the first two days and a Vigil and Eucharist on the Saturday. A fifth specially honoured week centred round the annual commemoration of the death and resurrection of Our Lord. Originally this was little more than a fifth Ember Week with a feast on the Thursday to commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist. The commemoration which is the later Easter, goes back to the Apostles, as the evidence of all parties in the famous controversies of the second century goes to show. Pentecost, celebrating the visible outpouring of the promised Holy Spirit upon the first disciples is just as old a feast and was just as universally celebrated as Easter, but with perhaps less solemnity. The third feast of this cycle -- commemorating the Ascension -- is of much later origin. The earliest trace of it dates to about 350.
The great annual penitential season which, in English, is called Lent developed from two elements, the fast in preparation for the feast of Easter and the catechumen's preparation for Baptism. The pre-Easter fast was originally very short indeed -- one or two days in St. Irenaeus -- but, to compensate, it was very severe, for no food at all was taken while it lasted. In Africa, in Tertullian's time, it lasted from the Thursday to the morning of Easter Sunday. At Alexandria, a generation later, every day in that week was a fast day. The earliest mention of the fast of forty days in the spring is in the Canons of Nicea (325). Then, and for long afterwards, this fast was primarily directed to the coming baptism of the catechumens; it was a time of retreat, of recollection and special prayers, during which the candidates passed through the final stages of their probation. The discipline of Lent varied. At Rome the Sundays were considered to be outside the season, at Constantinople the Saturdays too. Lent again brought with it liturgical developments. In the East the Eucharist service on the Wednesdays and Fridays disappeared in Lent, but the number of reunions of the "mass-less" type increased. In the West the opposite happened. The number of mass days was increased, until, in the end, on every day of Lent there was an assembly with the celebration of the Eucharist.
Of the many other feasts which, later, were to enrich the calendar of the Church, we have hardly any record earlier than Constantine's conversion. Christmas, for example, was a Western feast originally and the earliest record of its celebration is at Rome in 336. The East had a similar kind of feast -- the Apparitions (Epiphany) -- commemorating the birth of Our Lord, the coming of the Wise Men, and His baptism, which was kept on January 6. One element in this may go back to a very early date, for about the years 200 the Gnostics kept a feast to celebrate the baptism of Our Lord. Nor are the feasts of Mary the Mother of Our Lord any older. There is no mention of them at Rome before the seventh century, although the feast of the Circumcision, the octave of Christmas, which is an indirect commemoration of her, goes back a century earlier. In this matter the West borrowed from the East where a feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple was kept at Jerusalem from about 370.
The oldest of all the feasts were the annual commemorations of the martyrs -- reunions of the local church, at the tombs of its most distinguished members, those who had testified to the faith with life itself. Of this development the earliest instance on record is the case of the martyred bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp, put to death in 155. A practice so natural grew speedily, and though the martyr cults were in their essence local things, some of the more noted of these Christian heroes -- St. Lawrence of Rome for example, St. Cyprian of Carthage -- soon won a wider renown, and honours in churches other than their own. With the Peace of Constantine the persecution, as a more or less normal incident of Christian life, ended. The heroism which had found its crown in martyrdom now developed in the solitude of the deserts. The new heroes were those who battled in the austerity of the new monasticism; and the next saints to be honoured liturgically after death, their prayers officially besought, were the ascetics, the first of them all in time the great St. Martin of Tours who died in 397.
The religion founded by Our Lord in the Church was then a corporate, social thing, just as truly as it was the sum of the innumerable conquests of the myriad individual souls who made up the mystical body. And from its understanding of its corporate nature there gradually developed its public liturgies, and a Christian art; latest of all there developed an architecture-latest of all, for the first buildings erected for the purpose of containing the Church at prayer, the first churches in the architectural sense of the word, were not built until well on into the third century. Before that time the Christians met for worship in the houses of one or another of the brotherhood. At certain places, in times of persecution, they met in the catacombs -- a Christian adaptation and development, on an immense scale, of the underground cemetery system, which, in all probability, they had borrowed from the Jews. This system of catacombs was especially well developed at Rome, where it grew to be a second underground city, Roma sotteriana cristiana. [3]
The Roman practice by which great families opened their private cemeteries to their dependants; the sacredness in the eye of the Roman law of the tomb and the cult of the dead; the ancient Roman custom of family reunions at the tomb of its deceased members: all these favoured the development. The Christians, once gathered in their cemeteries were secure, not only from mob hostility, but even from the attention of the police during persecutions. These Roman catacombs go back to the days of the Apostles themselves. Still, today, the pilgrim can wander through the miles of their underground galleries and the chambers hewn out of the tufa where, nearly two thousand years ago now, the mass was said and the homilies delivered and the neophytes baptized. He can look upon the sites of the tombs of the earliest martyr-popes, and upon the hundreds of funeral inscriptions that tell the names and qualities of these long dead Christians and that attest so many of the doctrines they professed; and he can look upon the earliest Christian paintings, and study, there again, not merely the quality and development of the artistic inspiration, but the beliefs to which the paintings witness and the religious practices of which they are the mute unchanging record.
In the course of the third century, as will be seen, the persecution of the Church changed its character entirely. It was no longer left to the initiative of private malice to unleash the fury of the persecuting laws. All now depended on the emperor; there were emperors who were favourable to the Church as well as those resolved on its destruction; and between the new, most savage persecutions that now took place, there were long intervals of peace when the Church enjoyed recognition as a lawful religion. It was during this p ace that, in the third century the first churches began to be built. Traces of these first churches still remain, at Rome for example, below the basilica of St. Clement and the church of S. Martino ai Monti, at S. Anastasia, at SS. Giovannie Paolo, and at S. Sabina. These discoveries of archaeology in our own time confirm the witness of the contemporaries who describe this first public appearance of the Church in the public life of the day, whether Christians themselves, like Eusebius of Cesarea, or bitter enemies such as Porphyry.
In all this swarming spiritual activity of Christian life, it is the Church, the whole assembly, which is all important. The newcomer to it is instructed by the Church, and prepared by the common and public prayer of the Church for his reception and baptism, and in the rite itself the collectivity of the life is manifest. It is in the assembly that he makes his progress, and should he fall from grace, his fall is the concern of all his brethren, who assist his penances by their own charitable prayers and good works.
When a Christian marries he is warned to take a Christian for his partner, [4] for there is a Christian law of marriage. [5] The marriage should be with the bishop's consent, [6] or at any rate blessed by the Church. [7] Marriage between Christians is indissoluble, even the adultery of one of the partners cannot break the bond. [8] Though Encratites, like Tatian, condemn marriage as mere fornication, and Marcionites forbid it altogether, the Catholic tradition is constant that perpetual continency is not of obligation, that marriage is lawful, [9] -- more, that it is a holy thing, since it is the figure of the union of Christ and His Church. [10] Second marriages, which the Montanists condemn altogether, although reproved [11] are tolerated, except in the case of the clergy. A second marriage is also a bar to a man's ordination. Marriage is a holy thing, and the mutual rights and duties of the contracting parties are discussed by these first Christian moralists always with reference to the life of the Spirit which, since Baptism, is the most important factor in every Christian's life.
The primitive tradition that the ruling members of the Church are also the authorised teachers, and the ministers of the Eucharist is faithfully maintained. With these first and essential officers others are now associated; Lectors whose office it is to read the chosen passages of Holy Scripture in the assemblies; Exorcists to whom is entrusted one of the chief functions in the preparation of the catechumen for Baptism; Acolytes who share more closely in the ritual of the Eucharist; and Doorkeepers (Ostiarii) whose mission is the very important one of securing that none but members of the Church are admitted to the different reunions. The rite by which all members of the clergy are commissioned and receive their new spiritual powers is still the primitive imposition of hands, its minister the bishop, and in St. Cyprian we note the first appearance of the regulation that for the consecration of a bishop three bishops are required. Marriage is no bar to ordination, although (Councils of Ancyra, 314, Neo-Cesarea, c. 314-25) it comes to be the law that the deacon, priest or bishop once ordained may not marry. The prestige of continency is bringing about an association in the mind of the Church between its practice and the ministry. The clerical state, in its higher ranks at least, should not lack the virtue which now adorns so many of the flock. And even in the case of those married before ordination it begins to be suggested that, after ordination, husband and wife should be to each other but as brother and sister. This clerical body, for all its undoubted position apart in the Church, is not, in the first three centuries, a way of life that excludes the following of a profession. Its members support themselves, as do the faithful to whom they minister, by a variety of occupations. Nor, for the best part of two centuries after Constantine, is there any suggestion of a special clerical dress, any more than there is evidence of what to-day we call, technically, vestments. When the first attempt to introduce a clerical costume was made it met with little favour, and was in fact severely rebuked by the pope of the time (St. Celestine I, 422-432).
How far had Christianity spread by the time of the conversion of Constantine? The question is much easier to answer definitely than the other question it provokes, how far was the Empire then Christian? At Rome there had been Christians from within a few years of Our Lord's Ascension, and a Pagan historian speaks of them as "a great multitude" at the time of Nero's persecution. From the second century Rome becomes a great centre of expansion, whence southern and central Italy are evangelised. Northern Italy was a much later conquest. Of Christianity in Gaul, our earliest certain attested fact is the persecution of 177 which reveals at Lyons a well-ordered and flourishing church. A hundred and forty years later, at the Council of Arles, sixteen bishops of Gallic sees were present, among them bishops from Bordeaux, Rheims and Rouen. Spain knew the Church as early as the days of St. Paul who was, seemingly, one of its first apostles. But we know nothing of its Christianity until the persecution of Decius (250-251). Fifty years later the Church there had so profited by the long peace which followed Valerian (259) that, at the Council of Elvira (300), forty Spanish bishops assembled. In Britain, too, there were Christians and organised churches, Christians who gave their lives in the persecution of 304-5; and the bishops of York, London and Lincoln sat in the Council of Arles of 314. Of the origin of this British Christianity we know nothing. At the Council of Arles there assisted also bishops from Mainz, Cologne and Treves, the earliest representatives of Christianity among the Germans known to us. Of the conquests of the Church in the lands beyond the Rhine where the Empire never established itself we know scarcely anything.
The first evidence of Christianity in Africa is as late as 189-the martyrdoms at Scillium. The churches in Africa are, by then, already numerous and well-organised. A few years later and Tertullian has been received at Carthage (c. 194) and can urge as one of his pleas for toleration that the Christians are almost the majority in every town of the province. Certainly in the two provinces of Numidia and Proconsular Africa there were, by the beginning of the third century, seventy bishops.
But the real strength of Christianity lay to the east of the Adriatic. Greece, Epirus, Thessaly and Thrace were by the end of the second century very well evangelised. Into the Danube provinces to the north Christianity came later, but not too late to produce martyrs under Diocletian. Dalmatia's conversion began with Titus, and it is in the lands evangelised by St. Paul and his lieutenants that we find Christianity strongest three centuries later. While in Palestine, its first home, Christianity had almost disappeared with the destruction that followed the wars of Titus and Hadrian, Syrian Christianity developed amazingly around that most ancient centre of missionary zeal the city of Antioch. Again, in Asia Minor, while Cappadocia remained unconverted until the time of St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 230-50), Phrygia and Bithynia were Christian from the end of the previous century. It was, however, the province of Asia, whose chief city was Ephesus, that led all the rest, the one really Christian province of the whole Empire. Egypt, too, was largely Christian. By the end of the third century it had fifty-five bishops, and from what we know of Egyptian Christianity in the first century in which it is known to us (Clement of Alexandria to St. Athanasius) it would seem to have been established at a very early date. A list of its bishops is extant that leads back to 61.
Christianity was not, however, confined to the Roman Empire. The buffer State of Edessa was so thoroughly converted in the second century that Christianity became the official religion of the kingdom. Armenia, too, dates its first conversion from about the same time, but the chief agent here was St. Gregory the Illuminator (late third century). He was himself Armenian and under his influence once again Christianity found itself the religion of the State. For all that, the conversion proved superficial. To the south of Egypt lay Ethiopia, and the conversion of Ethiopia counts among St. Athanasius' many titles to remembrance. From Egypt, too, but a century earlier, came the conversion of Arabia. The most flourishing of all these oriental Christianities was however that of Persia. Persia's first missionaries were from Edessa and they built up, in the century which preceded the conversion of Constantine, a really imposing church. This was the century of the great wars between the Roman Empire and the resuscitated Persia of the Sassanid kings, and the religion persecuted in Rome found, if only for political reasons, a protector in the Great King. Constantine's conversion brought to an end this happy state of things. Christianity, the religion of the Roman Emperor, was henceforth banned in Persia and a century of almost uninterrupted persecution followed in which thousands of martyrs perished.
Although the essential organisation of the spreading Christianity remained the same -- the bishop supreme in the local church under the unique hegemony of the Bishop of Rome -- two very important new institutions developed during these first three hundred years, the council of bishops and the ecclesiastical province, i.e. the permanent grouping of sees round a central metropolitan see. The earliest council recorded is that called by the Bishop of Ephesus at the time of the Easter Controversy (189-198). To judge by his letter to the pope the procedure was altogether new, and due entirely to the initiative of Rome. In the next hundred years the institution developed rapidly. Origen records councils at Cesarea in Palestine (230) and in Pisidia. In the same year there is a council at Carthage and in 240 one at Ancyra. in Africa especially was this new organ of government -- L'eveque au pluriel -- made use of, and under a bishop like St. Cyprian, through the council of Africa, the primacy of Carthage developed rapidly. It is, again, through councils that Denis of Alexandria combats the revival of Sabellianism, and that Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch, is convicted of heresy and deposed. The councils secure uniformity of faith and discipline without, as yet, in any way hindering the action of the Roman See, which continues its practice of intervention, even in the case of such great sees as Alexandria and Antioch, intervening always with a tone of authority found nowhere else, commanding as though in no doubt that obedience would be given, holding out sanctions to rebels and the negligent.
The councils, however, even that council of Africa which apparently met every year, were not in permanent session and the new grouping of sees around the metropolitan see -- see of the chief city of the province, mother-see very often whence had sprung the rest -- supplied a machinery for the co-ordination of every day activity. For all that the bishop is supreme in his own church, the local church is not an isolated spiritual kingdom. Outside bishops have a say in its affairs -- in the election of the bishop, for example, and in his consecration -- and, for St. Cyprian, this is a tradition which goes back to the Apostles. The system by which the activities of every bishop are subordinated -- on appeal -- to the collective scrutiny of the other bishops dependent on the same metropolitan see, is already well established by the time of the Council of Nicea (325), whose very important canons do but regulate an already existing institution, adapting it to the new delimitation of provinces accomplished by Diocletian and his successors. Already there is confusion, already rivalry between the great sees. Nicea -- with the whole eastern episcopate assembled for the first time -- is an opportunity to set all in order.
There is no record of either Antioch or Alexandria as a great central see before the third century, nor is there any regularity or uniformity in the way in which the central sees begin to develop. Rome for example -- we are not concerned here with the organisation of its peculiar universal jurisdiction, potentior principalitas -- is gradually revealed as the metropolitan of all central and southern Italy, Carthage of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, Alexandria of Egypt and Libya. Antioch, however, for all its civil importance, has nothing like so definite a power over the sees of the East. Asia Minor too is, by comparison with Egypt, Africa and Italy, poorly organised. Ephesus, for example, despite its apostolic origin, and its civil importance as the capital of the province, has an equal and a rival in every other church. Nor is the original grouping based on the civil divisions.
The rise of Antioch is particularly interesting and it is important in view of the history of the fourth century, to notice the failure of this Church to achieve a real local hegemony. From about 250 Antioch begins to show itself the centre of action for a group of sees which finally becomes the episcopate of The East (i.e. the civil diocese of that name). After the death of Constantine, (337) Antioch became the seat of the imperial residence and it continued to be the de facto capital down to Theodosius (381). These are the years of the Arian supremacy, and that supremacy and Antioch's predominance went together. It was no matter of ecclesiastical legislation, simply the natural effect of the city's new civil importance increasing the influence of its bishops. But Antioch never drew within its sphere of influence either the province of Asia or Egypt, where Alexandria, during the whole of this period, led the fight for Catholicism -- inevitably a fight against Antioch and against the spread of Antioch's influence. It will be seen later how Antioch was the centre of the campaign against St. Athanasius, and how the church of Antioch supplied and consecrated the Arians whom the emperor installed at Alexandria as bishops during St. Athanasius' exile. It is the eternal problem of the East to preserve the Church from this evil of episcopal ambition, so to balance and regulate the relations of sees and metropolitans that no one see shall ever achieve an undue predominance. In its failure to solve that problem, and in the absence of adequate machinery through which the Roman hegemony, functioning continuously, might supply what was lacking to local arrangements, lie the beginnings of the end of Eastern Catholicism. Egypt was organised, Africa and Italy too, while the disorganised East inevitably offered itself to the ambition of first one see and then another. How, finally, Constantinople captured it is what the rest of this history must tell.
The canons of Nicea enact that all the bishops of the province (i.e. the civil province) shall take part in the election of its bishops, that the metropolitan shall have the right of veto; and that, as a check on episcopal misgovernment, the provincial council shall meet twice each year as a court of appeal. But this regime of churches grouped by civil provinces (since Diocletian's reforms these number now ninety-six in all) applies only to the civil dioceses of Asia, Pontus and The East. The council expressly recognises the special and ancient regime which obtains in the (civil) diocese of Egypt -- Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis -- where the Bishop of Alexandria himself chooses all the bishops and consecrates them and, if need be, deposes them. His authority is much more than metropolitan, and his authority extends far beyond the civil provinces. They are the same rights, the council recognises, as those which the Bishop of Rome exercises in Italy. Antioch, too, is mentioned by name, but the council again does no more than confirm existing rights " To Antioch and throughout the other provinces, the privileges proper to metropolitan sees." The bishops at Nicea did not innovate; they made no attempt to centralise the organisation of the immense Christianity which stretched from the Euxine to the Red Sea.
1Lebreton, Origines du Dogme de la Trinite.
2For a masterly, documented study cf. PIERRE DE LABRIOLLE. Les Debuts du Monachisme in F. & M. III 299-370.
3The title of J. B. de Rossi's classic work (1864-1867): catacombs have been discovered elsewhere too, at Naples, in Tuscany, in Sicily, in Africa, at Alexandria and in Asia Minor.
4Tertullian, St. Cyprian, Councils of Elvira (300) and Arles (314).
5Athenagoras
6St. Ignatius
7Tertullian
8Hermas, St. Irenaeus Tertullian, St. Cyprian, the Council of Elvira and Rome constantly. The Council of Arles is evidence of a less stringent opinion
9St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Didascalia
10Tertullian
11Athenagoras, St. Theophilus of Antioch, Tertullian, Didascalia
