Vol. 3, Chapter IV (Cont’d) – Influence and Effect of Monasticism

34. 

The influence of monasticism upon the world, from Anthony and Benedict to Luther and Loyola, is deeply marked in all branches of the history of the church. Here, too, we must distinguish light and shade. The operation of the monastic institution has been to some extent of diametrically opposite kinds, and has accordingly elicited the most diverse judgments. “It is impossible,” says Dean Milman, “to survey monachism in its general influence, from the earliest period of its inworking into Christianity, without being astonished and perplexed with its diametrically opposite effects. Here it is the undoubted parent of the blindest ignorance and the most ferocious bigotry, sometimes of the most debasing licentiousness; there the guardian of learning, the author of civilization, the propagator of humble and peaceful religion.” The apparent contradiction is easily solved. It is not monasticism, as such, which has proved a blessing to the church and the world; for the monasticism of India, which for three thousand years has pushed the practice of mortification to all the excesses of delirium, never saved a single soul, nor produced a single benefit to the race. It was Christianity in monasticism which has done all the good, and used this abnormal mode of life as a means for carrying forward its mission of love and peace. In proportion as monasticism was animated and controlled by the spirit of Christianity, it proved a blessing; while separated from it, it degenerated and became at fruitful source of evil.

At the time of its origin, when we can view it from the most favorable point, the monastic life formed a healthful and necessary counterpart to the essentially corrupt and doomed social life of the Graeco-Roman empire, and the preparatory school of a new Christian civilization among the Romanic and Germanic nations of the middle age. Like the hierarchy and the papacy, it belongs with the disciplinary institutions, which the spirit of Christianity uses as means to a higher end, and, after attaining that end, casts aside. For it ever remains the great problem of Christianity to pervade like leaven and sanctify all human society in the family and the state, in science and art, and in all public life. The old Roman world, which was based on heathenism, was, if the moral portraitures of Salvianus and other writers of the fourth and fifth centuries are even half true, past all such transformation; and the Christian morality therefore assumed at the outset an attitude of downright hostility toward it, till she should grow strong enough to venture upon her regenerating mission among the new and, though barbarous, yet plastic and germinal nations of the middle age, and plant in them the seed of a higher civilization.

Monasticism promoted the downfall of heathenism and the victory of Christianity in the Roman empire and among the barbarians. It stood as a warning against the worldliness, frivolity, and immorality of the great cities, and a mighty call to repentance and conversion. It offered a quiet refuge to souls weary of the world, and led its earnest disciples into the sanctuary of undisturbed communion with God. It was to invalids a hospital for the cure of moral diseases, and at the same time, to healthy and vigorous enthusiasts an arena for the exercise of heroic virtue. It recalled the original unity and equality of the human race, by placing rich and poor, high and low upon the same level. It conduced to the abolition, or at least the mitigation of slavery. It showed hospitality to the wayfaring, and liberality to the poor and needy. It was an excellent school of meditation, self-discipline, and spiritual exercise. It sent forth most of those catholic, missionaries, who, inured to all hardship, planted the standard of the cross among the barbarian tribes of Northern and Western Europe, and afterward in Eastern Asia and South America. It was a prolific seminary of the clergy, and gave the church many of her most eminent bishops and popes, as Gregory I. and Gregory VII. It produced saints like Anthony and Bernard, and trained divines like Chrysostom and Jerome, and the long succession of schoolmen and mystics of the middle ages. Some of the profoundest theological discussions, like the tracts of Anselm, and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, and not a few of the best books of devotion, like the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis, have proceeded from the solemn quietude of cloister life. Sacred hymns, unsurpassed for sweetness, like the Jesu dulcis memoria, or tender emotion, like the Stabat mater dolorosa, or terrific grandeur, like the Dies irae, dies illa, were conceived and sung by medieval monks for all ages to come. In patristic and antiquarian learning the Benedictines, so lately as the seventeenth century, have done extraordinary service. Finally, monasticism, at least in the West, promoted the cultivation of the soil and the education of the people, and by its industrious transcriptions of the Bible, the works of the church fathers, and the ancient classics, earned for itself, before the Reformation, much of the credit of the modern civilization of Europe. The traveller in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and even in the northern regions of Scotland and Sweden, encounters innumerable traces of useful monastic labors in the ruins of abbeys, of chapter houses, of convents, of priories and hermitages, from which once proceeded educational and missionary influences upon the surrounding hills and forests. These offices, however, to the progress of arts and letters were only accessory, often involuntary, and altogether foreign to the intention of the founders of monastic life and institutions, who looked exclusively to the religious and moral education of the soul. In seeking first the kingdom of heaven, these other things were added to them.

But on the other hand, monasticism withdrew from society many useful forces; diffused an indifference for the family life, the civil and military service of the state, and all public practical operations; turned the channels of religion from the world into the desert, and so hastened the decline of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the whole Roman empire. It nourished religious fanaticism, often raised storms of popular agitation, and rushed passionately into the controversies of theological parties; generally, it is true, on the side of orthodoxy, but often, as at the Ephesian “council of robbers,” in favor of heresy, and especially in behalf of the crudest superstition. For the simple, divine way of salvation in the gospel, it substituted an arbitrary, eccentric, ostentatious, and pretentious sanctity. It darkened the all-sufficient merits of Christ by the glitter of the over-meritorious works of man. It measured virtue by the quantity of outward exercises instead of the quality of the inward disposition, and disseminated self-righteousness and an anxious, legal, and mechanical religion. It favored the idolatrous veneration of Mary and of saints, the worship of images and relics, and all sorts of superstitious and pious fraud. It circulated a mass of visions and miracles, which, if true, far surpassed the miracles of Christ and the apostles and set all the laws of nature and reason at defiance. The Nicene age is full of the most absurd monks’ fables, and is in this respect not a whit behind the darkest of the middle ages. Monasticism lowered the standard of general morality in proportion as it set itself above it and claimed a corresponding higher merit; and it exerted in general a demoralizing influence on the people, who came to consider themselves the profanum vulgus mundi, and to live accordingly. Hence the frequent lamentations, not only of Salvian, but of Chrysostom and of Augustine, over the indifference and laxness of the Christianity of the day; hence to this day the mournful state of things in the southern countries of Europe and America, where monasticism is most prevalent, and sets the extreme of ascetic sanctity in contrast with the profane laity, but where there exists no healthful middle class of morality, no blooming family life, no moral vigor in the masses. In the sixteenth century the monks were the bitterest enemies of the Reformation and of all true progress. And yet the greatest of the reformers was a pupil of the convent, and a child of the monastic system, as the boldest and most free of the apostles had been the strictest of the Pharisees.

 

35. Paul of Thebes and St. Anthony

I. Athanasius: Vita S. Antonii (in Greek, Opera, ed. Ben. ii. 793-866). The same in Latin, by Evagrius, in the fourth century. Jerome: Catal. c. 88 (a very brief notice of Anthony); Vita S. Pauli Theb. (Opera, ed. Vallars, ii. p. 1-12). Sozom: H. E. l. i. cap. 13 and 14. Socrat.: H. E. iv. 23, 25.

II. Acta Sanctorum, sub Jan. 17 (tom. ii. p. 107 sqq.). Tillemont: Mem. tom. vii. p. 101-144 (St. Antoine, premier père des solitaires d’Egypte). Butler (R.C.): Lives of the Saints, sub Jan. 17. Möhler (R.C.): Athanasius der Grosse, p. 382-402. Neander: K. G. iii. 446 sqq. (Torrey’s Engl. ed. ii. 229-234). Böhringer: Die Kirche Christi in Biographien, i. 2, p. 122-151. H. Ruffner: l.c. vol. i. p. 247-302 (a condensed translation from Athanasius, with additions). K. Hase: K. Gesch. §64 (a masterly miniature portrait).

The first known Christian hermit, as distinct from the earlier ascetics, is the fabulous Paul of Thebes, in Upper Egypt. In the twenty-second year of his age, during the Decian persecution, a.d. 250, he retired to a distant cave, grew fond of the solitude, and lived there, according to the legend, ninety years, in a grotto near a spring and a palm tree, which furnished him food, shade, and clothing, until his death in 340. In his later years a raven is said to have brought him daily half a loaf, as the ravens ministered to Elijah. But no one knew of this wonderful saint, till Anthony, who under a higher impulse visited and buried him, made him known to the world. After knocking in vain for more than an hour at the door of the hermit, who would receive the visits of beasts and reject those of men, he was admitted at last with a smiling face, and greeted with a holy kiss. Paul had sufficient curiosity left to ask the question, whether there were any more idolaters in the world, whether new houses were built in ancient cities and by whom the world was governed? During this interesting conversation, a large raven came gently flying and deposited a double portion of bread for the saint and his guest. “The Lord,” said Paul, “ever kind and merciful, has sent us a dinner. It is now sixty years since I have daily received half a loaf, but since thou hast come, Christ has doubled the supply for his soldiers.” After thanking the Giver, they sat down by the fountain; but now the question arose who should break the bread; the one urging the custom of hospitality, the other pleading the right of his friend as the elder. This question of monkish etiquette, which may have a moral significance, consumed nearly the whole day, and was settled at last by the compromise that both should seize the loaf at opposite ends, pull till it broke, and keep what remained in their hands. A drink from the fountain, and thanksgiving to God closed the meal. The day afterward Anthony returned to his cell, and told his two disciples: “Woe to me, a sinner, who have falsely pretended to be a monk. I have seen Elijah and John in the desert; I have seen St. Paul in paradise.” Soon afterward he paid St. Paul a second visit, but found him dead in his cave, with head erect and hands lifted up to heaven. He wrapped up the corpse, singing psalms and hymns, and buried him without a spade; for two lions came of their own accord, or rather from supernatural impulse, from the interior parts of the desert, laid down at his feet, wagging their tails, and moaning distressingly, and scratched a grave in the sand large enough for the body of the departed saint of the desert! Anthony returned with the coat of Paul, made of palm leaves, and wore it on the solemn days of Easter and Pentecost.

The learned Jerome wrote the life of Paul, some thirty years afterward, as it appears, on the authority of Anathas and Macarius, two disciples of Anthony. But he remarks, in the prologue, that many incredible things are said of him, which are not worthy of repetition. If he believed his story of the grave-digging lions, it is hard to imagine what was more credible and less worthy of repetition.

In this Paul we have an example, of a canonized saint, who lived ninety years unseen and unknown in the wilderness, beyond all fellowship with the visible church, without Bible, public worship, or sacraments, and so died, yet is supposed to have attained the highest grade of piety. How does this consist with the common doctrine of the Catholic church respecting the necessity and the operation of the means of grace? Augustine, blinded by the ascetic spirit of his age, says even, that anchorets, on their level of perfection, may dispense with the Bible. Certain it is, that this kind of perfection stands not in the Bible, but outside of it.

The proper founder of the hermit life, the one chiefly instrumental in giving it its prevalence, was St. Anthony of Egypt. He is the most celebrated, the most original, and the most venerable representative of this abnormal and eccentric sanctity, the “patriarch of the monks,” and the “childless father of an innumerable seed.”

Anthony sprang from a Christian and honorable Coptic family, and was born about 251, at Coma, on the borders of the Thebaid. Naturally quiet, contemplative, and reflective, he avoided the society of playmates, and despised all higher learning. He understood only his Coptic vernacular, and remained all his life ignorant of Grecian literature and secular science. But he diligently attended divine worship with his parents, and so carefully heard the Scripture lessons, that he retained them in memory. Memory was his library. He afterward made faithful, but only too literal use of single passages of Scripture, and began his discourse to the hermits with the very uncatholic-sounding declaration: “The holy Scriptures give us instruction enough.” In his eighteenth year, about 270, the death of his parents devolved on him the care of a younger sister and a considerable estate. Six months afterward he heard in the church, just as he was meditating on the apostles’ implicit following of Jesus, the word of the Lord to the rich young ruler: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” (Mat_19:21) This word was a voice of God, which determined his life. He divided his real estate, consisting of three hundred acres of fertile land, among the inhabitants of the village, and sold his personal property for the benefit of the poor, excepting a moderate reserve for the support of his sister. But when, soon afterward, he heard in the church the exhortation, “Take no thought for the morrow,” (Mat_6:34) he distributed the remnant to the poor, and intrusted his sister to a society of pious virgins. He visited her only once after — a fact characteristic of the ascetic depreciation of natural ties.

He then forsook the hamlet, and led an ascetic life in the neighborhood, praying constantly, according to the exhortation: “Pray without ceasing;” and also laboring, according to the maxim: “If any will not work, neither should he eat.” What he did not need for his slender support, he gave to the poor. He visited the neighboring ascetics, who were then already very plentiful in Egypt, to learn humbly and thankfully their several eminent virtues; from one, earnestness in prayer; from another, watchfulness; from a third, excellence in fasting; from a fourth, meekness; from all, love to Christ and to fellow men. Thus he made himself universally beloved, and came to be reverenced as a friend of God.

But to reach a still higher level of ascetic holiness, he retreated, after the year 285, further and further from the bosom and vicinity of the church, into solitude, and thus became the founder of an anchoretism strictly so called. At first he lived in a sepulchre; then for twenty years in the ruins of a castle; and last on Mount Colzim, some seven hours from the Red Sea, a three days’ journey east of the Nile, where an old cloister still preserves his name and memory.

In this solitude he prosecuted his ascetic practices with ever-increasing rigor. Their monotony was broken only by basket making, occasional visits, and battles with the devil. In fasting he attained a rare abstemiousness. His food consisted of bread and salt, sometimes dates; his drink, of water. Flesh and wine he never touched. He ate only once a day, generally after sunset, and, like the presbyter Isidore, was ashamed that an immortal spirit should need earthly nourishment. Often he fasted from two to five days. Friends, and wandering Saracens, who always had a certain reverence for the saints of the desert, brought him bread from time to time. But in the last years of his life, to render himself entirely independent of others, and to afford hospitality to travellers, he cultivated a small garden on the mountain, near a spring shaded by palms. Sometimes the wild beasts of the forest destroyed his modest harvest, till he drove them away forever with the expostulation: “Why do you injure me, who have never done you the slightest harm? Away with you all, in the name of the Lord, and never come into my neighborhood again.” He slept on bare ground, or at best on a pallet of straw; but often he watched the whole night through in prayer. The anointing of the body with oil he despised, and in later years never washed his feet; as if filthiness were an essential element of ascetic perfection. His whole wardrobe consisted of a hair shirt, a sheepskin, and a girdle. But notwithstanding all, he had a winning friendliness and cheerfulness in his face.

Conflicts with the devil and his hosts of demons were, as with other solitary saints, a prominent part of Anthony’s experience, and continued through all his life. The devil appeared to him in visions and dreams, or even in daylight, in all possible forms, now as a friend, now as a fascinating woman, now as a dragon, tempting him by reminding him of his former wealth, of his noble family, of the care due to his sister, by promises of wealth, honor, and renown, by exhibitions of the difficulty of virtue and the facility of vice, by unchaste thoughts and images, by terrible threatening of the dangers and punishments of the ascetic life. Once he struck the hermit so violently, Athanasius says, that a friend, who brought him bread, found him on the ground apparently dead. At another time he broke through the wall of his cave and filled the room with roaring lions, howling wolves, growling bears, fierce hyenas, crawling serpents and scorpions; but Anthony turned manfully toward the monsters, till a supernatural light broke in from the roof and dispersed them. His sermon, which he delivered to the hermits at their request, treats principally of these wars with demons, and gives also the key to the interpretation of them: “Fear not Satan and his angels. Christ has broken their power. The best weapon against them is faith and piety …. The presence of evil spirits reveals itself in perplexity, despondency, hatred of the ascetics, evil desires, fear of death …. They take the form answering to the spiritual state they find in us at the time. They are the reflex of our thoughts and fantasies. If thou art carnally minded, thou art their prey; but if thou rejoicest in the Lord and occupiest thyself with divine things, they are powerless …. The devil is afraid of fasting, of prayer, of humility and good works. His illusions soon vanish, when one arms himself with the sign of the cross.”

Only in exceptional cases did Anthony leave his solitude; and then he made a powerful impression on both Christians and heathens with his hairy dress and his emaciated, ghostlike form. In the year 311, during the persecution under Maximinus, he appeared in Alexandria in the hope of himself gaining the martyr’s crown. He visited the confessors in the mines and prisons, encouraged them before the tribunal, accompanied them to the scaffold; but no one ventured to lay hands on the saint of the wilderness. In the year 351, when a hundred years old, he showed himself for the second and last time in the metropolis of Egypt, to bear witness for the orthodox faith of his friend Athanasius against Arianism, and in a few days converted more heathens and heretics than had otherwise been gained in a whole year. He declared the Arian denial of the divinity of Christ worse than the venom of the serpent, and no better than heathenism which worshipped the creature instead of the Creator. He would have nothing to do with heretics, and warned his disciples against intercourse with them. Athanasius attended him to the gate of the city, where he cast out an evil spirit from a girl. An invitation to stay longer in Alexandria he declined, saying: “As a fish out of water, so a monk out of his solitude dies.” Imitating his example, the monks afterward forsook the wilderness in swarms whenever orthodoxy was in danger, and went in long processions with wax tapers and responsive singing through the streets, or appeared at the councils, to contend for the orthodox faith with all the energy of fanaticism, often even with physical force.

Though Anthony shunned the society of men, yet he was frequently visited in his solitude and resorted to for consolation and aid by Christians and heathens, by ascetics, sick, and needy, as a heaven-descended physician of Egypt for body and soul. He enjoined prayer, labor, and care of the poor, exhorted those at strife to the love of God, and healed the sick and demoniac with his prayer. Athanasius relates several miracles performed by him, the truth of which we leave undecided though they are far less incredible and absurd than many other monkish stories of that age. Anthony, his biographer assures us, never boasted when his prayer was heard, nor murmured when it was not, but in either case thanked God. He cautioned monks against overrating the gift of miracles, since it is not our work, but the grace of the Lord; and he reminds them of the word: “Rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.” To Martianus, an officer, who urgently besought him to heal his possessed daughter, he said: “Man, why dost thou call on me? I am a man, as thou art. If thou believest, pray to God, and he will hear thee.” Martianus prayed, and on his return found his daughter whole.

Anthony distinguished himself above most of his countless disciples and successors, by his fresh originality of mind. Though uneducated and limited, he had sound sense and ready mother wit. Many of his striking answers and felicitous sentences have come down to us. When some heathen philosophers once visited him, he asked them: “Why do you give yourselves so much trouble to see a fool?” They explained, perhaps ironically, that they took him rather for a wise man. He replied: “If you take me for a fool, your labor is lost; but if I am a wise man, you should imitate me, and be Christians, as I am.” At another time, when taunted with his ignorance, he asked: “Which is older and better, mind or learning?” The mind, was the answer. “Then,” said the hermit, “the mind can do without learning.” “My book,” he remarked on a similar occasion, “is the whole creation, which lies open before me, and in which I can read the word of God as often as I will.” The blind church-teacher, Didymus, whom he met in Alexandria, he comforted with the words: “Trouble not thyself for the loss of the outward eye, with which even flies see; but rejoice in the possession of the spiritual eye, with which also angels behold the face of God, and receive his light.” Even the emperor Constantine, with his sons, wrote to him as a spiritual father, and begged an answer from him. The hermit at first would not so much as receive the letter, since, in any case, being unable to write, he could not answer it, and cared as little for the great of this world as Diogenes for Alexander. When told that the emperor was a Christian, he dictated the answer: “Happy thou, that thou worshippest Christ. Be not proud of thy earthly power. Think of the future judgment, and know that Christ is the only true and eternal king. Practise justice and love for men, and care for the poor.” To his disciples he said on this occasion: “Wonder not that the emperor writes to me, for he is a man. Wonder much more that God has written the law for man, and has spoken to us by his own Son.”

During the last years of his life the patriarch of monasticism withdrew as much as possible from the sight of visitors, but allowed two disciples to live with him, and to take care of him in his infirm old age. When he felt his end approaching, he commanded them not to embalm his body, according to the Egyptian custom, but to bury it in the earth, and to keep the spot of his interment secret. One of his two sheepskins he bequeathed to the bishop Serapion, the other, with his underclothing, to Athanasius, who had once given it to him new, and now received it back worn out. What became of the robe woven from palm leaves, which, according to Jerome, he had inherited from Paul of Thebes, and wore at Easter and Pentecost, Athanasius does not tell us. After this disposition of his property, Anthony said to his disciples: “Children, farewell; for Anthony goes away, and will be no more with you.” With these words he stretched out his feet and expired with a smiling face, in the year 356, a hundred and five years old. His grave remained for centuries unknown. His last will was thus a protest against the worship of saints and relics, which, however, it nevertheless greatly helped to promote. Under Justinian, in 561, his bones, as the Bollandists and Butler minutely relate, were miraculously discovered, brought to Alexandria, then to Constantinople, and at last to Vienne in South France, and in the eleventh century, during the raging of an epidemic disease, the so-called “holy fire,” or “St. Anthony’s fire,” they are said to have performed great wonders.

Athanasius, the greatest man of the Nicene age, concludes his biography of his friend with this sketch of his character: “From this short narrative you may judge how great a man Anthony was, who persevered in the ascetic life from youth to the highest age. In his advanced age he never allowed himself better food, nor change of raiment, nor did he even wash his feet. Yet he continued healthy in all his parts. His eyesight was clear to the end, and his teeth sound, though by long use worn to mere stumps. He retained also the perfect use of his hands and feet, and was more robust and vigorous than those who are accustomed to change of food and clothing and to washing. His fame spread from his remote dwelling on the lone mountain over the whole Roman empire. What gave him his renown, was not learning nor worldly wisdom, nor human art, but alone his piety toward God …. And let all the brethren know, that the Lord will not only take holy monks to heaven, but give them celebrity in all the earth, however deep they may bury themselves in the wilderness.”

The whole Nicene age venerated in Anthony a model saint. This fact brings out most characteristically the vast difference between the ancient and the modern, the old Catholic and the evangelical Protestant conception of the nature of the Christian religion. The specifically Christian element in the life of Anthony, especially as measured by the Pauline standard, is very small. Nevertheless we can but admire the needy magnificence, the simple, rude grandeur of this hermit sanctity even in its aberration. Anthony concealed under his sheepskin a childlike humility, an amiable simplicity, a rare energy of will, and a glowing love to God, which maintained itself for almost ninety years in the absence of all the comforts and pleasures of natural life, and triumphed over all the temptations of the flesh. By piety alone, without the help of education or learning, he became one of the most remarkable and influential men in the history of the ancient church. Even heathen contemporaries could not withhold from him their reverence, and the celebrated philosopher Synesius, afterward a bishop, before his conversion reckoned Anthony among those rare men, in whom flashes of thought take the place of reasonings, and natural power of mind makes schooling needless.

 

36. Spread of Anchoretism. Hilarion

The example of Anthony acted like magic upon his generation, and his biography by Athanasius, which was soon translated also into Latin, was a tract for the times. Chrysostom recommended it to all as instructive and edifying reading. Even Augustine, the most evangelical of the fathers, was powerfully affected by the reading of it in his decisive religious struggle, and was decided by it in his entire renunciation of the world.

In a short time, still in the lifetime of Anthony, the deserts of Egypt, from Nitria, south of Alexandria, and the wilderness of Scetis, to Libya and the Thebaid, were peopled with anchorets and studded with cells. A mania for monasticism possessed Christendom, and seized the people of all classes like an epidemic. As martyrdom had formerly been, so now monasticism was, the quickest and surest way to renown upon earth and to eternal reward in heaven. This prospect, with which Athanasius concludes his life of Anthony, abundantly recompensed all self-denial and mightily stimulated pious ambition. The consistent recluse must continually increase his seclusion. No desert was too scorching, no rock too forbidding, no cliff too steep, no cave too dismal for the feet of these world-hating and man-shunning enthusiasts. Nothing was more common than to see from two to five hundred monks under the same abbot. It has been supposed, that in Egypt the number of anchorets and cenobites equalled the population of the cities. The natural contrast between the desert and the fertile valley of the Nile, was reflected in the moral contrast between the monastic life and the world.

The elder Macarius introduced the hermit life in the frightful desert of Scetis; Amun or Ammon, on the Nitrian mountain. The latter was married, but persuaded his bride, immediately after the nuptials, to live with him in the strictest abstinence. Before the end of the fourth century there were in Nitria alone, according to Sozomen, five thousand monks, who lived mostly in separate cells or laurae, and never spoke with one another except on Saturday and Sunday, when they assembled for common worship.

From Egypt the solitary life spread to the neighboring countries.

Hilarion, whose life Jerome has written graphically and at large, established it in the wilderness of Gaza, in Palestine and Syria. This saint attained among the anchorets of the fourth century an eminence second only to Anthony. He was the son of pagan parents, and grew up “as a rose among thorns.” He went to school in Alexandria, diligently attended church, and avoided the circus, the gladiatorial shows, and the theatre. He afterward lived two months with St. Anthony, and became his most celebrated disciple. After the death of his parents, he distributed his inheritance among his brothers and the poor, and reserved nothing, fearing the example of Ananias and Sapphira, and remembering the word of Christ: “Whosoever he be of you, that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luk_14:33) He then retired into the wilderness of Gaza, which was inhabited only by robbers and assassins; battled, like Anthony, with obscene dreams and other temptations of the devil; and so reduced his body — the “ass,” which ought to have not barley, but chaff — with fastings and night watchings, that, while yet a youth of twenty years, he looked almost like a skeleton. He never ate before sunset. Prayers, psalm singing, Bible recitations, and basket weaving were his employment. His cell was only five feet high, lower than his own stature, and more like a sepulchre than a dwelling. He slept on the ground. He cut his hair only once a year, at Easter. The fame of his sanctity gradually attracted hosts of admirers (once, ten thousand), so that he had to change his residence several times, and retired to Sicily, then to Dalmatia, and at last to the island of Cyprus, where he died in 371, in his eightieth year. His legacy, a book of the Gospels and a rude mantle, he made to his friend Hesychius, who took his corpse home to Palestine, and deposited it in the cloister of Majumas. The Cyprians consoled themselves over their loss, with the thought that they possessed the spirit of the saint. Jerome ascribes to him all manner of visions and miraculous cures.

 

37. St. Symeon and the Pillar Saints

Respecting St. Symeon, or Simeon Stylites, we have accounts from three contemporaries and eye witnesses, Anthony, Cosmas, and especially Theodoret (Hist. Relig. c. 26). The latter composed his narrative sixteen years before the death the saint.

Evagrius: H. E. i. c. 13. The Acta Sanctorum and Butler, sub Jan. 5. Uhlemann: Symeon, der erste Säulenheilige in Syrien. Leipz. 1846. (Comp. also the fine poem of A. Tennyson: St. Symeon Stylites, a monologue in which S. relates his own experience.)

It is unnecessary to recount the lives of other such anchorets; since the same features, even to unimportant details, repeat themselves in all. But in the fifth century a new and quite original path was broken by Symeon, the father of the Stylites or pillar saints, who spent long years, day and night, summer and winter, rain and sunshine, frost and heat, standing on high, unsheltered pillars, in prayer and penances, and made the way to heaven for themselves so passing hard, that one knows not whether to wonder at their unexampled self-denial, or to pity their ignorance of the gospel salvation. On this giddy height the anchoretic asceticism reached its completion.

St. Symeon the Stylite, originally a shepherd on the borders of Syria and Cilicia, when a boy of thirteen years, was powerfully affected by the beatitudes, which he heard read in the church, and betook himself to a cloister. He lay several days, without eating or drinking, before the threshold, and begged to be admitted as the meanest servant of the house. He accustomed himself to eat only once a week, on Sunday. During Lent he even went through the whole forty days without any food; a fact almost incredible even for a tropical climate. The first attempt of this kind brought him to the verge of death; but his constitution conformed itself, and when Theodoret visited him, he had solemnized six and twenty Lent seasons by total abstinence, and thus surpassed Moses, Elias, and even Christ, who never fasted so but once. Another of his extraordinary inflections was to lace his body so tightly that the cord pressed through to the bones, and could be cut off only with the most terrible pains. This occasioned his dismissal from the cloister. He afterward spent some time as a hermit upon a mountain, with an iron chain upon his feet, and was visited there by admiring and curious throngs. When this failed to satisfy him, he invented, in 423, a new sort of holiness, and lived, some two days’ journey (forty miles) east of Antioch, for six and thirty years, until his death, upon a pillar, which at the last was nearly forty cubits high; for the pillar was raised in proportion as he approached heaven and perfection. Here he could never lie nor sit, but only stand, or lean upon a post (probably a banister), or devoutly bow; in which last posture he almost touched his feet with his head — so flexible had his back been made by fasting. A spectator once counted in one day no less than twelve hundred and forty-four such genuflexions of the saint before the Almighty, and then gave up counting. He wore a covering of the skins of beasts, and a chain about his neck. Even the holy sacrament he took upon his pillar. There St. Symeon stood many long and weary days, and weeks, and months, and years, exposed to the scorching sun, the drenching rain, the crackling frost, the howling storm, living a life of daily death and martyrdom, groaning under the load of sin, never attaining to the true comfort and peace of soul which is derived from a child-like trust in Christ’s infinite merits, earnestly striving after a superhuman holiness, and looking to a glorious reward in heaven, and immortal fame on earth. Alfred Tennyson makes him graphically describe his experience in a monologue to God:

‘Although I be the basest of mankind,

From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,

Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet

For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy,

I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold

Of saintdom, and to clamor, moan, and sob

Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer:

Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.

*   *   *   *   *   *

Oh take the meaning, Lord: I do not breathe,

Not whisper, any murmur of complaint.

Pain heaped ten hundredfold to this, were still

Less burthen, by ten hundredfold, to bear,

Than were those lead-like tons of sin, that crushed

My spirit flat before Thee.

O Lord, Lord,

Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,

For I was strong and hale of body then;

And though my teeth, which now are dropt away,

Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard

Was tagged with icy fringes in the moon,

I drowned the whoopings of the owl with sound

Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw

An angel stand and watch me, as I sang.

Now am I feeble grown: my end draws nigh — 

I hope my end draws nigh: half deaf I am,

So that I scarce can hear the people hum

About the column’s base; and almost blind,

And scarce can recognize the fields I know.

And both my thighs are rotted with the dew,

Yet cease I not to clamor and to cry,

While my stiff spine can hold my weary head,

Till all my limbs drop piecemeal from the stone:

Have mercy, mercy; take away my sin.”

Yet Symeon was not only concerned about his own salvation. People streamed from afar to witness this standing wonder of the age. He spoke to all classes with the same friendliness, mildness, and love; only women he never suffered to come within the wall which surrounded his pillar. From this original pulpit, as a mediator between heaven and earth, he preached repentance twice a day to the astonished spectators, settled controversies, vindicated the orthodox faith, extorted laws even from an emperor, healed the sick, wrought miracles, and converted thousands of heathen Ishmaelites, Iberians, Armenians, and Persians to Christianity, or at least to the Christian name. All this the celebrated Theodoret relates as an eyewitness during the lifetime of the saint. He terms him the great wonder of the world, and compares him to a candle on a candlestick, and to the sun itself, which sheds its rays on every side. He asks the objector to this mode of life to consider that God often uses very striking means to arouse the negligent, as the history of the prophets shows; (Isa_20:2; Jer_1:17; Jer_28:12; Hos_1:2; Hos_3:1; Eze_4:4; Eze_7:5) and concludes his narrative with the remark: “Should the saint live longer, he may do yet greater wonders, for he is a universal ornament and honor of religion.”

He died in 459, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, of a long-concealed and loathsome ulcer on his leg; and his body was brought in solemn procession to the metropolitan church of Antioch.

Even before his death, Symeon enjoyed the unbounded admiration of Christians and heathens, of the common people, of the kings of Persia, and of the emperors Theodosius II., Leo, and Marcian, who begged his blessing and his counsel. No wonder, that, with all his renowned humility, he had to struggle with the temptations of spiritual pride. Once an angel appeared to him in a vision, with a chariot of fire, to convey him, like Elijah, to heaven, because the blessed spirits longed for him. He was already stepping into the chariot with his right foot, which on this occasion he sprained (as Jacob his thigh), when the phantom of Satan was chased away by the sign of the cross. Perhaps this incident, which the Acta Sanctorum gives, was afterward invented, to account for his sore, and to illustrate the danger of self-conceit. Hence also the pious monk Nilus, with good reason, reminded the ostentatious pillar saints of the proverb: “He that exalteth himself shall be abased.”

Of the later stylites the most distinguished were Daniel († 490), in the vicinity of Constantinople, and Symeon the younger († 592), in Syria. The latter is said to have spent sixty-eight years on a pillar. In the East this form of sanctity perpetuated itself, though only in exceptional cases, down to the twelfth century. The West, so far as we know, affords but one example of a stylite, who, according to Gregory of Tours, lived a long time on a pillar near Treves, but came down at the command of the bishop, and entered a neighboring cloister.

 

38. Pachomius and the Cloister life

On St. Pachomius we have a biography composed soon after his death by a monk of Tabennae, and scattered accounts in Palladius, Jerome (Regula Pachomii, Latine reddita, Opp. Hieron. ed. Vallarsi, tom. ii. p. 50 sqq.), Rufinus, Sozomen, etc. Comp. Tillemont, tom. vii. p. 167-235, and the Vit. Sanct. sub Maj. 14.

Though the strictly solitary life long continued in use, and to this day appears here and there in the Greek and Roman churches, yet from the middle of the fourth century monasticism began to assume in general the form of the cloister life, as incurring less risk, being available for both sexes, and being profitable to the church. Anthony himself gave warning, as we have already observed, against the danger of entire isolation, by referring to the proverb: “Woe to him that is alone.” To many of the most eminent ascetics anchoretism was a stepping stone to the coenobite life; to others it was the goal of coenobitism, and the last and highest round on the ladder of perfection.

The founder of this social monachism was Pachomius, a contemporary of Anthony, like him an Egyptian, and little below him in renown among the ancients. He was born about 292, of heathen parents, in the Upper Thebaid, served as a soldier in the army of the tyrant Maximin on the expedition against Constantine and Licinius, and was, with his comrades, so kindly treated by the Christians at Thebes, that he was won to the Christian faith, and, after his discharge from the military service, received baptism. Then, in 313, he visited the aged hermit Palemon, to learn from him the way to perfection. The saint showed him the difficulties of the anchorite life: “Many,” said he, “have come hither from disgust with the world, and had no perseverance. Remember, my son, my food consists only of bread and salt; I drink no wine, take no oil, spend half the night awake, singing psalms and meditating on the Scriptures, and sometimes pass the whole night without sleep.” Pachomius was astounded, but not discouraged, and spent several years with this man as a pupil.

In the year 325 he was directed by an angel, in a vision, to establish on the island of Tabennae, in the Nile, in Upper Egypt, a society of monks, which in a short time became so strong that even before his death (348) it numbered eight or nine cloisters in the Thebaid, and three thousand (according to some, seven thousand), and, a century later, fifty thousand members. The mode of life was fixed by a strict rule of Pachomius, which, according to a later legend, an angel communicated to him, and which Jerome translated into Latin. The formal reception into the society was preceded by a three-years’ probation. Rigid vows were not yet enjoined. With spiritual exercises manual labor was united, agriculture, boat building, basketmaking, mat and coverlet weaving, by which the monks not only earned their own living, but also supported the poor and the sick. They were divided, according to the grade of their ascetic piety, into four and twenty classes, named by the letters of the Greek alphabet. They lived three in a cell. They ate in common, but in strict silence, and with the face covered. They made known their wants by signs. The sick were treated with special care. On Saturday and Sunday they partook of the communion. Pachomius, as abbot, or archimandrite, took the oversight of the whole; each cloister having a separate superior and a steward.

Pachomius also established a cloister of nuns for his sister, whom he never admitted to his presence when she would visit him, sending her word that she should be content to know that he was still alive. In like manner, the sister of Anthony and the wife of Ammon became centres of female cloister life, which spread with great rapidity.

Pachomius, after his conversion never ate a full meal, and for fifteen years slept sitting on a stone. Tradition ascribes to him all sorts of miracles, even the gift of tongues and perfect dominion over nature, so that he trod without harm on serpents and scorpions, and crossed the Nile on the backs of crocodiles! Soon after Pachomius, fifty monasteries arose on the Nitrian mountain, in no respect inferior to those in the Thebaid. They maintained seven bakeries for the benefit of the anchorets in the neighboring Libyan desert, and gave attention also, at least in later days, to theological studies; as the valuable manuscripts recently discovered there evince.

From Egypt the cloister life spread with the rapidity of the irresistible spirit of the age, over the entire Christian East. The most eminent fathers of the Greek church were either themselves monks for a time, or at all events friends and patrons of monasticism. Ephraim propagated it in Mesopotamia; Eustathius of Sebaste in Armenia and Paphlagonia; Basil the Great in Pontus and Cappadocia. The latter provided his monasteries and nunneries with clergy, and gave them an improved rule, which, before his death (379), was accepted by some eighty thousand monks, and translated by Rufinus into Latin. He sought to unite the virtues of the anchorite and coenobite life, and to make the institution useful to the church by promoting the education of youth, and also (as Athanasius designed before him) by combating Arianism among the people. He and his friend Gregory Nazianzen were the first to unite scientific theological studies with the ascetic exercises of solitude. Chrysostom wrote three books in praise and vindication of the monastic life, and exhibits it in general in its noblest aspect.

In the beginning of the fifth century, Eastern monasticism was most worthily represented by the elder Nilus of Sinai, a pupil and venerator of Chrysostom, and a copious ascetic writer, who retired with his son from a high civil office in Constantinople to Mount Sinai, while his wife, with a daughter, travelled to an Egyptian cloister; and by the abbot Isidore, of Pelusium, on the principal eastern mouth of the Nile, from whom we have two thousand epistles. The writings of these two men show a rich spiritual experience, and an extended and fertile field of labor and usefulness in their age and generation.

 

39. Fanatical and Heretical Monastic Societies in the East

Acta Concil. Gangrenensis, in Mansi, ii. 1095 sqq. Epiphan.: Haer. 70, 75 and 80. Socr.: H. E. ii. 43. Sozom.: iv. 24. Theodor.: H. E. iv. 9, 10; Fab. haer. iv. 10, 11. Comp. Neander: iii. p. 468 sqq. (ed. Torrey, ii. 238 sqq.).

Monasticism generally adhered closely to the orthodox faith of the church. The friendship between Athanasius, the father of orthodoxy, and Anthony, the father of monachism, is on this point a classical fact. But Nestorianism also, and Eutychianism, Monophysitism, Pelagianism, and other heresies, proceeded from monks, and found in monks their most vigorous advocates. And the monastic enthusiasm ran also into ascetic heresies of its own, which we must notice here.

1. The Eustathians, so named from Eustathius, bishop of Sebaste and friend of Basil, founder of monasticism in Armenia, Pontus, and Paphlagonia. This sect asserted that marriage debarred from salvation and incapacitated for the clerical office. For this and other extravagances it was condemned by a council at Gangra in Paphlagonia (between 360 and 370), and gradually died out.

2. The Audians held similar principles. Their founder, Audius, or Udo, a layman of Syria, charged the clergy of his day with immorality, especially avarice and extravagance. After much persecution, which he bore patiently, he forsook the church, with his friends, among whom were some bishops and priests, and, about 330, founded a rigid monastic sect in Scythia, which subsisted perhaps a hundred years. They were Quartodecimans in the practice of Easter, observing it on the 14th of Nisan, according to Jewish fashion. Epiphanius speaks favorably of their exemplary but severely ascetic life.

3. The Euchites or Messalians, also called Enthusiasts, were roaming mendicant monks in Mesopotamia and Syria (dating from 360), who conceived the Christian life as an unintermitted prayer, despised all physical labor, the moral law, and the sacraments, and boasted themselves perfect. They taught, that every man brings an evil demon with him into the world, which can only be driven away by prayer; then the Holy Ghost comes into the soul, liberates it from all the bonds of sense, and raises it above the need of instruction and the means of grace. The gospel history they declared a mere allegory. But they concealed their pantheistic mysticism and antinomianism under external conformity to the Catholic church. When their principles, toward the end of the fourth century, became known, the persecution of both the ecclesiastical and the civil authority fell upon them. Yet they perpetuated themselves to the seventh century, and reappeared in the Euchites and Bogomiles of the middle age.

 

40. Monasticism in the West. Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, Martin of Tours

I. Ambrosius: De Virginibus ad Marcellinam sororem suam libri tres, written about 377 (in the Benedictine edition of Ambr. Opera, tom. ii. p. 145-183). Augustinus (a.d. 400): De Opere Monachorum liber unus (in the Bened. ed., tom. vi. p. 476-504). Sulpitius Severus (about a.d. 403): Dialogi tres (de virtutibus monachorum orientalium et de virtutibus B. Martini); and De Vita Beati Martini (both in the Bibliotheca Maxima vet. Patrum, tom. vi. p. 349 sqq., and better in Gallandi’s Bibliotheca vet. Patrum, tom. viii. p. 392 sqq.).

II. J. Mabillon: Observat. de monachis in occidente ante Benedictum (Praef. in Acta Sanct. Ord. Bened.). R. H. Milman: Hist. of Latin Christianity, Lond. 1854, vol. i. ch. vi. p. 409-426: “Western Monasticism.” Count de Montalembert: The Monks of the West, Engl. translation, vol. i. p. 379 sqq.

In the Latin church, in virtue partly of the climate, partly of the national character, the monastic life took a much milder form, but assumed greater variety, and found a larger field of usefulness than in the Greek. It produced no pillar saints, nor other such excesses of ascetic heroism, but was more practical instead, and an important instrument for the cultivation of the soil and the diffusion of Christianity and civilization among the barbarians. Exclusive contemplation was exchanged for alternate contemplation and labor. “A working monk,” says Cassian, “is plagued by one devil, an inactive monk by a host.” Yet it must not be forgotten that the most eminent representatives of the Eastern monasticism recommended manual labor and studies; and that the Eastern monks took a very lively, often rude and stormy part in theological controversies. And on the other hand, there were Western monks who, like Martin of Tours, regarded labor as disturbing contemplation.

Athanasius, the guest, the disciple, and subsequently the biographer and eulogist of St. Anthony, brought the first intelligence of monasticism to the West, and astounded the civilized and effeminate Romans with two live representatives of the semi-barbarous desert-sanctity of Egypt, who accompanied him in his exile in 340. The one, Ammonius, was so abstracted from the world that he disdained to visit any of the wonders of the great city, except the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul; while the other, Isidore, attracted attention by his amiable simplicity. The phenomenon excited at first disgust and contempt, but soon admiration and imitation, especially among women, and among the decimated ranks of the ancient Roman nobility. The impression of the first visit was afterward strengthened by two other visits of Athanasius to Rome, and especially by his biography of Anthony, which immediately acquired the popularity and authority of a monastic gospel. Many went to Egypt and Palestine, to devote themselves there to the new mode of life; and for the sake of such, Jerome afterward translated the rule of Pachomius into Latin. Others founded cloisters in the neighborhood of Rome, or on the ruins of the ancient temples and the forum, and the frugal number of the heathen vestals was soon cast into the shade by whole hosts of Christian virgins. From Rome, monasticism gradually spread over all Italy and the isles of the Mediterranean, even to the rugged rocks of the Gorgon and the Capraja, where the hermits, in voluntary exile from the world, took the place of the criminals and political victims whom the justice or tyranny and jealousy of the emperors had been accustomed to banish thither.

Ambrose, whose sister, Marcellina, was among the first Roman nuns, established a monastery in Milan, one of the first in Italy, and with the warmest zeal encouraged celibacy even against the will of parents; insomuch that the mothers of Milan kept their daughters out of the way of his preaching; whilst from other quarters, even from Mauritania, virgins flocked to him to be consecrated to the solitary life. The coasts and small islands of Italy were gradually studded with cloisters.

Augustine, whose evangelical principles of the free grace of God as the only ground of salvation and peace were essentially inconsistent with the more Pelagian theory of the monastic life, nevertheless went with the then reigning spirit of the church in this respect, and led, with his clergy, a monk-like life in voluntary poverty and celibacy, after the pattern, as he thought, of the primitive church of Jerusalem; but with all his zealous commendation he could obtain favor for monasticism in North Africa only among the liberated slaves and the lower classes. He viewed it in its noblest aspect, as a life of undivided surrender to God, and undisturbed occupation with spiritual and eternal things. But he acknowledged also its abuses; he distinctly condemned the vagrant, begging monks, like the Circumcelliones and Gyrovagi, and wrote a book (De opere monachorum) against the monastic aversion to labor.

Monasticism was planted in Gaul by Martin of Tours, whose life and miracles were described in fluent, pleasing language by his disciple, Sulpitius Severus, a few years after his death. This celebrated saint, the patron of fields, was born in Pannonia (Hungary), of pagan parents. He was educated in Italy, and served three years, against his will, as a soldier under Constantius and Julian the Apostate. Even at that time he showed an uncommon degree of temperance, humility, and love. He often cleaned his servant’s shoes, and once cut his only cloak in two with his sword, to clothe a naked beggar with half; and the next night he saw Christ in a dream with the half cloak, and plainly heard him say to the angels: “Behold, Martin, who is yet only a catechumen, hath clothed me.” He was baptized in his eighteenth year; converted his mother; lived as a hermit in Italy; afterward built a monastery in the vicinity of Poictiers (the first in France); destroyed many idol temples, and won great renown as a saint and a worker of miracles. About the year 370 he was unanimously elected by the people, against his wish, bishop of Tours on the Loire, but in his episcopal office maintained his strict monastic mode of life, and established a monastery beyond the Loire, where he was soon surrounded with eighty monks. He had little education, but a natural eloquence, much spiritual experience, and unwearied zeal. Sulpitius Severus places him above all the Eastern monks of whom he knew, and declares his merit to be beyond all expression. “Not an hour passed,” says he, “in which Martin did not pray …. No one ever saw him angry, or gloomy, or merry. Ever the same, with a countenance full of heavenly serenity, he seemed to be raised above the infirmities of man. There was nothing in his mouth but Christ; nothing in his heart but piety, peace, and sympathy. He used to weep for the sins of his enemies, who reviled him with poisoned tongues when he was absent and did them no harm …. Yet he had very few persecutors, except among the bishops.” The biographer ascribes to him wondrous conflicts with the devil, whom he imagined he saw bodily and tangibly present in all possible shapes. He tells also of visions, miraculous cures, and even, what no oriental anchoret could boast, three instances of restoration of the dead to life, two before and one after his accession to the bishopric; and he assures us that he has omitted the greater part of the miracles which had come to his ears, lest he should weary the reader; but he several times intimates that these were by no means universally credited, even by monks of the same cloister. His piety was characterized by a union of monastic humility with clerical arrogance. At a supper at the court of the tyrannical emperor Maximus in Trier, he handed the goblet of wine, after he himself had drunk of it, first to his presbyter, thus giving him precedence of the emperor. The empress on this occasion showed him an idolatrous veneration, even preparing the meal, laying the cloth, and standing as a servant before him, like Martha before the Lord. More to the bishop’s honor was his protest against the execution of the Priscillianists in Treves. Martin died in 397 or 400: his funeral was attended by two thousand monks, besides many nuns and a great multitude of people; and his grave became one of the most frequented centres of pilgrimage in France.

In Southern Gaul, monasticism spread with equal rapidity. John Cassian, an ascetic writer and a Semipelagian († 432), founded two cloisters in Massilia (Marseilles), where literary studies also were carried on; and Honoratus (after 426, bishop of Arles) established the cloister of St. Honoratus on the island of Lerina.



Vol. 3, Chapter IV (Cont’d) – St. Jerome as a Monk

41. 

S. Eus. Hieronymi: Opera omnia, ed. Erasmus (assisted by Oecolampadius), Bas. 1516-’20, 9 vols. fol.; ed. (Bened.) Martianay, Par. 1693-1706, 5 vols. fol. (incomplete); ed. Vallarsi and Maffei, Veron. 1734-’42, 11 vols. fol., also Venet. 1766 (best edition). Comp. especially the 150 Epistles, often separately edited (the chronological order of which Vallarsi, in tom. i. of his edition, has finally established).

For extended works on the life of Jerome see Du Pin (Nouvelle Biblioth. des auteurs Eccles. tom. iii. p. 100-140); Tillemont (tom. xii. 1-356); Martianay (La vie de St. Jerôme, Par. 1706); Joh. Stilting (in the Acta Sanctorum, Sept. tom. viii. p. 418-688, Antw. 1762); Butler (sub Sept. 30); Vallarsi (in Op. Hieron., tom. xi. p. 1-240); Schröckh (viii. 359 sqq., and especially xi. 3-254); Engelstoft (Hieron. Stridonensis, interpres, criticus, exegeta, apologeta, historicus, doctor, monachus, Havn. 1798); D. v. Cölin (in Ersch and Gruber’s Encycl. sect. ii. vol. 8); Collombet (Histoire de S. Jérôme, Lyons, 1844); and O. Zöckler (Hieronymus, sein Leben und Wirken. Gotha, 1865).

The most zealous promoter of the monastic life among the church fathers was Jerome, the connecting link between Eastern and Western learning and religion. His life belongs almost with equal right to the history of theology and the history of monasticism. Hence the church art generally represents him as a penitent in a reading or writing posture, with a lion and a skull, to denote the union of the literary and anchoretic modes of life. He was the first learned divine who not only recommended but actually embraced the monastic mode of life, and his example exerted a great influence in making monasticism available for the promotion of learning. To rare talents and attainments, indefatigable activity of mind, ardent faith, immortal merit in the translation and interpretation of the Bible, and earnest zeal for ascetic piety, he united so great vanity and ambition, such irritability and bitterness of temper, such vehemence of uncontrolled passion, such an intolerant and persecuting spirit, and such inconstancy of conduct, that we find ourselves alternately attracted and repelled by his character, and now filled with admiration for his greatness, now with contempt or pity for his weakness.

Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus was born at Stridon, on the borders of Dalmatia, not far from Aquileia, between the years 331 and 342. He was the son of wealthy Christian parents, and was educated in Rome under the direction of the celebrated heathen grammarian Donatus, and the rhetorician Victorinus. He read with great diligence and profit the classic poets, orators, and philosophers, and collected a considerable library. On Sundays he visited, with Bonosus and other young friends, the subterranean graves of the martyrs, which made an indelible impression upon him. Yet he was not exempt from the temptations of a great and corrupt city, and he lost his chastity, as he himself afterward repeatedly acknowledged with pain.

About the year 370, whether before or after his literary tour to Treves and Aquileia is uncertain, but at all events in his later youth, he received baptism at Rome and resolved thenceforth to devote himself wholly, in rigid abstinence, to the service of the Lord. In the first zeal of his conversion he renounced his love for the classics, and applied himself to the study of the hitherto distasteful Bible. In a morbid ascetic frame, he had, a few years later, that celebrated dream, in which he was summoned before the judgment seat of Christ, and as a heathen Ciceronian, so severely reprimanded and scourged, that even the angels interceded for him from sympathy with his youth, and he himself solemnly vowed never again to take worldly books into his hands. When he woke, he still felt the stripes, which, as he thought, not his heated fancy, but the Lord himself had inflicted upon him. Hence he warns his female friend Eustochium, to whom several years afterward (a.d. 384) he recounted this experience, to avoid all profane reading: “What have light and darkness, Christ and Belial (2Co_6:14), the Psalms and Horace, the Gospels and Virgil, the Apostles and Cicero, to do with one another? … We cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the demons at the same time.” But proper as this warning may be against overrating classical scholarship, Jerome himself, in his version of the Bible and his commentaries, affords the best evidence of the inestimable value of linguistic and antiquarian knowledge, when devoted to the service of religion. That oath, also, at least in later life, he did not strictly keep. On the contrary, he made the monks copy the dialogues of Cicero, and explained Virgil at Bethlehem, and his writings abound in recollections and quotations of the classic authors. When Rufinus of Aquileia, at first his warm friend, but afterward a bitter enemy, cast up to him this inconsistency and breach of a solemn vow, he resorted to the evasion that he could not obliterate from his memory what he had formerly read; as if it were not so sinful to cite a heathen author as to read him. With more reason he asserted, that all was a mere dream, and a dream vow was not binding. He referred him to the prophets, “who teach that dreams are vain, and not worthy of faith.” Yet was this dream afterward made frequent use of, as Erasmus laments, to cover monastic obscurantism.

After his baptism, Jerome divided his life between the East and the West, between ascetic discipline and literary labor. He removed from Rome to Antioch with a few friends and his library, visited the most celebrated anchorets, attended the exegetical lectures of the younger Apollinaris in Antioch, and then (374) spent some time as an ascetic in the dreary Syrian desert of Chalcis. Here, like so many other hermits, he underwent a grevious struggle with sensuality, which he described ten years after with indelicate minuteness in a long letter to his virgin friend Eustochium. In spite of his starved and emaciated body, his fancy tormented him with wild images of Roman banquets and dances of women; showing that the monastic seclusion from the world was by no means proof against the temptations of the flesh and the devil. Helpless he cast himself at the feet of Jesus, wet them with tears of repentance, and subdued the resisting flesh by a week of fasting and by the dry study of Hebrew grammar (which, according to a letter to Rusticus, he was at that time learning from a converted Jew), until he found peace, and thought himself transported to the choirs of the angels in heaven. In this period probably falls the dream mentioned above, and the composition of several ascetic writings, full of heated eulogy of the monastic life. His biographies of distinguished anchorets, however, are very pleasantly and temperately written. He commends monastic seclusion even against the will of parents; interpreting the word of the Lord about forsaking father and mother, as if monasticism and Christianity were the same. “Though thy mother” — he writes, in 373, to his friend Heliodorus, who had left him in the midst of his journey to the Syrian desert — “with flowing hair and rent garments, should show thee the breasts which have nourished thee; though thy father should lie upon the threshold; yet depart thou, treading over thy father, and fly with dry eyes to the standard of the cross. This is the only religion of its kind, in this matter to be cruel …. The love of God and the fear of hell easily, rend the bonds of the household asunder. The holy Scripture indeed enjoins obedience to parents; but he who loves them more than Christ, loses his soul …. O desert, where the flowers of Christ are blooming! O solitude, where the stones for the new Jerusalem are prepared! O retreat, which rejoices in the friendship of God! What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul greater than the world? How long wilt thou remain in the shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeon of cities? Believe me, I see here more of the light.” The eloquent appeal, however, failed of the desired effect; Heliodorus entered the teaching order and became a bishop.

The active and restless spirit of Jerome soon brought him again upon the public stage, and involved him in all the doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies of those controversial times. He received the ordination of presbyter from the bishop Paulinus in Antioch, without taking charge of a congregation. He preferred the itinerant life of a monk and a student to a fixed office, and about 380 journeyed to Constantinople, where he heard the anti-Arian sermons of the celebrated Gregory Nazianzen, and translated the Chronicle of Eusebius and the homilies of Origen on Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In 382, on account of the Meletian schism, he returned to Rome with Paulinus and Epiphanius. Here he came into close connection with the bishop, Damasus, as his theological adviser and ecclesiastical secretary, and was led by him into new exegetical labors, particularly the revision of the Latin version of the Bible, which he completed at a later day in the East.

At the same time he labored in Rome with the greatest zeal, by mouth and pen, in the cause of monasticism, which had hitherto gained very little foothold there, and met with violent opposition even among the clergy. He had his eye mainly upon the most wealthy and honorable classes of the decayed Roman society, and tried to induce the descendants of the Scipios, the Gracchi, the Marcelli, the Camilli, the Anicii to turn their sumptuous villas into monastic retreats, and to lead a life of self-sacrifice and charity. He met with great success. “The old patrician races, which founded Rome, which had governed her during all her period of splendor and liberty, and which overcame and conquered the world, had expiated for four centuries, under the atrocious yoke of the Caesars, all that was most hard and selfish in the glory of their fathers. Cruelly humiliated, disgraced, and decimated during that long servitude, by the masters whom degenerate Rome had given herself, they found at last in Christian life, such as was practised by the monks, the dignity of sacrifice and the emancipation of the soul. These sons of the old Romans threw themselves into it with the magnanimous fire and persevering energy which had gained for their ancestors the empire of the world. ‘Formerly,’ says St. Jerome, ‘according to the testimony of the apostles, there were few rich, few noble, few powerful among the Christians. Now it is no longer so. Not only among the Christians, but among the monks are to be found a multitude of the wise, the noble, and the rich.’… The monastic institution offered them a field of battle where the struggles and victories of their ancestors could be renewed and surpassed for a loftier cause, and over enemies more redoubtable. The great men whose memory hovered still over degenerate Rome had contended only with men, and subjugated only their bodies; their descendants undertook to strive with devils, and to conquer souls …. God called them to be the ancestors of a new people, gave them a new empire to found, and permitted them to bury and transfigure the glory of their forefathers in the bosom of the spiritual regeneration of the world.”

Most of these distinguished patrician converts of Jerome were women — such widows as Marcella, Albinia, Furia, Salvina, Fabiola, Melania, and the most illustrious of all, Paula, and her family; or virgins, as Eustochium, Apella, Marcellina, Asella, Felicitas, and Demetrias. He gathered them as a select circle around him; he expounded to them the Holy Scriptures, in which some of these Roman ladies were very well read; he answered their questions of conscience; he incited them to celibate life, lavish beneficence, and enthusiastic asceticism; and flattered their spiritual vanity by extravagant praises. He was the oracle, biographer, admirer, and eulogist of these holy women, who constituted the spiritual nobility of Catholic Rome. Even the senator Pammachius, son in-law to Paula and heir to her fortune, gave his goods to the poor, exchanged the purple for the cowl, exposed himself to the mockery of his colleagues, and became, in the flattering language of Jerome, the general in chief of Roman monks, the first of monks in the first of cities. Jerome considered second marriage incompatible with genuine holiness; even depreciated first marriage, except so far as it was a nursery of brides of Christ; warned Eustochium against all intercourse with married women; and hesitated not to call the mother of a bride of Christ, like Paula, a “mother-in-law of God.”

His intimacy with these distinguished women, whom he admired more, perhaps, than they admired him, together with his unsparing attacks upon the immoralities of the Roman clergy and of the higher classes, drew upon him much unjust censure and groundless calumny, which he met rather with indignant scorn and satire than with quiet dignity and Christian meekness. After the death of his patron Damasus, a.d. 384, he left Rome, and in August, 385, with his brother Paulinian, a few monks, Paula, and her daughter Eustochium, made a pilgrimage “from Babylon to Jerusalem, that not Nebuchadnezzar, but Jesus, should reign over him.” With religious devotion and inquiring mind he wandered through the holy places of Palestine, spent some time in Alexandria, where he heard the lectures of the celebrated Didymus; visited the cells of the Nitrian mountain; and finally, with his two female friends, in 386, settled in the birthplace of the Redeemer, to lament there, as he says, the sins of his youth, and to secure himself against others.

In Bethlehem he presided over a monastery till his death, built a hospital for all strangers except heretics, prosecuted his literary studies without cessation, wrote several commentaries, and finished his improved Latin version of the Bible — the noblest monument of his life — but entangled himself in violent literary controversies, not only with opponents of the church orthodoxy like Helvidius (against whom he had appeared before, in 384), Jovinian, Vigilantius, and Pelagius, but also with his long-tried friend Rufinus, and even with Augustine. Palladius says, his jealousy could tolerate no saint beside himself, and drove many pious monks away from Bethlehem. He complained of the crowds of monks whom his fame attracted to Bethlehem. The remains of the Roman nobility, too, ruined by the sack of Rome, fled to him for food and shelter. At the last his repose was disturbed by incursions of the barbarian Huns and the heretical Pelagians. He died in 419 or 420, of fever, at a great age. His remains were afterward brought to the Roman basilica of Maria Maggiore, but were exhibited also and superstitiously venerated in several copies in Florence, Prague, Clugny, Paris, and the Escurial.

The Roman church has long since assigned him one of the first places among her standard teachers and canonical saints. Yet even some impartial Catholic historians venture to admit and disapprove his glaring inconsistencies and violent passions. The Protestant love of truth inclines to the judgment, that Jerome was indeed an accomplished and most serviceable scholar and a zealous enthusiast for all which his age counted holy, but lacking in calm self-control and proper depth of mind and character, and that he reflected, with the virtues, the failings also of his age and of the monastic system. It must be said to his credit, however, that with all his enthusiastic zeal and admiration for monasticism, he saw with a keen eye and exposed with unsparing hand the false monks and nuns, and painted in lively colors the dangers of melancholy, hypochondria, the hypocrisy and spiritual pride, to which the institution was exposed.

 

42. St. Paula

Hieronymus: Epitaphium Paulae matris, ad Eustochium virginem, Ep. cviii. (ed. Vallarsi, Opera, tom. i. p. 684 sqq.; ed. Bened. Ep. lxxxvi). Also the Acta Sanctorum, and Butler’s Lives of Saints, sub Jan. 26.

Of Jerome’s many female disciples, the most distinguished is St. Paula, the model of a Roman Catholic nun. With his accustomed extravagance, he opens his eulogy after her death, in 404, with these words: “If all the members of my body were turned into tongues, and all my joints were to utter human voices, I should be unable to say anything worthy of the holy and venerable Paula.”

She was born in 347, of the renowned stock of the Scipios and Gracchi and Paulus Aemilius, and was already a widow of six and thirty years, and the mother of five children, when, under the influence of Jerome, she renounced all the wealth and honors of the world, and betook herself to the most rigorous ascetic life. Rumor circulated suspicion, which her spiritual guide, however, in a letter to Asella, answered with indignant rhetoric: “Was there, then, no other matron in Rome, who could have conquered my heart, but that one, who was always mourning and fasting, who abounded in dirt, who had become almost blind with weeping, who spent whole nights in prayer, whose song was the Psalms, whose conversation was the gospel, whose joy was abstemiousness, whose life was fasting? Could no other have pleased me, but that one, whom I have never seen eat? Nay, verily, after I had begun to revere her as her chastity deserved, should all virtues have at once forsaken me?” He afterward boasts of her, that she knew the Scriptures almost entirely by memory; she even learned Hebrew, that she might sing the psalter with him in the original; and continually addressed exegetical questions to him, which he himself could answer only in part.

Repressing the sacred feelings of a mother, she left her daughter Ruffina and her little son Toxotius, in spite of their prayers and tears, in the city of Rome, met Jerome in Antioch, and made a pilgrimage to Palestine and Egypt. With glowing devotion, she knelt before the rediscovered cross, as if the Lord were still hanging upon it; she kissed the stone of the resurrection which the angel rolled away; licked with thirsty tongue the pretended tomb of Jesus, and shed tears of joy as she entered the stable and beheld the manger of Bethlehem. In Egypt she penetrated into the desert of Nitria, prostrated herself at the feet of the hermits, and then returned to the holy land and settled permanently in the birthplace of the Saviour. She founded there a monastery for Jerome, whom she supported, and three nunneries, in which she spent twenty years as abbess, until 404.

She denied herself flesh and wine, performed, with her daughter Eustochium, the meanest services, and even in sickness slept on the bare ground in a hair shirt, or spent the whole night in prayer. “I must,” said she, “disfigure my face, which I have often, against the command of God, adorned with paint; torment the body, which has participated in many idolatries; and atone for long laughing by constant weeping.” Her liberality knew no bounds. She wished to die in beggary, and to be buried in a shroud which did not belong to her. She left to her daughter (she died in 419) a multitude of debts, which she had contracted at a high rate of interest for benevolent purposes.

Her obsequies, which lasted a week, were attended by the bishops of Jerusalem and other cities of Palestine, besides clergy, monks, nuns, and laymen innumerable. Jerome apostrophizes her: “Farewell, Paula, and help with prayer the old age of thy adorer!”

 

43. Benedict of Nursia

Gregorius M.: Dialogorum, l. iv. (composed about 594; lib. ii. contains the biography of St. Benedict according to the communications of four abbots and disciples of the saint, Constantine, Honoratus, Valentinian, and Simplicius, but full of surprising miracles). Mabillon and other writers of the Benedictine congregation of St. Maurus: Acta Sanctorum ordinis S. Benedicti in saeculorum classes distributa, fol. Par. 1668-1701, 9 vols. (to the year 1100), and Annales ordinis S. Bened. Par. 1703-’39, 6 vols. fol. (to 1157). Dom (Domnus) Jos. De Mège: Vie de St. Benoit, Par. 1690. The Acta Sanctorum, and Butler, sub Mart. 21. Montalembert: The Monks of the West, vol. ii. book iv.

Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the celebrated order which bears his name, gave to the Western monasticism a fixed and permanent form, and thus carried it far above the Eastern with its imperfect attempts at organization, and made it exceedingly profitable to the practical, and, incidentally, also to the literary interests of the Catholic Church. He holds, therefore, the dignity of patriarch of the Western monks. He has furnished a remarkable instance of the incalculable influence which a simple but judicious moral rule of life may exercise on many centuries.

Benedict was born of the illustrious house of Anicius, at Nursia (now Norcia) in Umbria, about the year 480, at the time when the political and social state of Europe was distracted and dismembered, and literature, morals, and religion seemed to be doomed to irremediable ruin. He studied in Rome, but so early as his fifteenth year he fled from the corrupt society of his fellow students, and spent three years in seclusion in a dark, narrow, and inaccessible grotto at Subiaco. A neighboring monk, Romanus, furnished him from time to time his scanty food, letting it down by a cord, with a little bell, the sound of which announced to him the loaf of bread. He there passed through the usual anchoretic battles with demons, and by prayer and ascetic exercises attained a rare power over nature. At one time, Pope Gregory tells us, the allurements of voluptuousness so strongly tempted his imagination that he was on the point of leaving his retreat in pursuit of a beautiful woman of previous acquaintance; but summoning up his courage, he took off his vestment of skins and rolled himself naked on thorns and briers, near his cave, until the impure fire of sensual passion was forever extinguished. Seven centuries later, St. Francis of Assisi planted on that spiritual battle field two rose trees, which grew and survived the Benedictine thorns and briers. He gradually became known, and was at first taken for a wild beast by the surrounding shepherds, but afterward reverenced as a saint.

After this period of hermit life he began his labors in behalf of the monastery proper. In that mountainous region he established in succession twelve cloisters, each with twelve monks and a superior, himself holding the oversight of all. The persecution of an unworthy priest caused him, however, to leave Subiaco and retire to a wild but picturesque mountain district in the Neapolitan province, upon the boundaries of Samnium and Campania. There he destroyed the remnants of idolatry, converted many of the pagan inhabitants to Christianity by his preaching and miracles, and in the year 529, under many difficulties, founded upon the ruins of a temple of Apollo the renowned cloister of Monte Cassino, the alma mater and capital of his order. Here he labored fourteen years, till his death. Although never ordained to the priesthood, his life there was rather that of a missionary and apostle than of a solitary. He cultivated the soil, fed the poor, healed the sick, preached to the neighboring population, directed the young monks, who in increasing numbers flocked to him, and organized the monastic life upon a fixed method or rule, which he himself conscientiously observed. His power over the hearts, and the veneration in which he was held, is illustrated by the visit of Totila, in 542, the barbarian king, the victor of the Romans and master of Italy, who threw himself on his face before the saint, accepted his reproof and exhortations, asked his blessing, and left a better man, but fell after ten years’ reign, as Benedict had predicted, in a great battle with the Graeco-Roman army under Narses. Benedict died, after partaking of the holy communion, praying, in standing posture, at the foot of the altar, on the 21st of March, 543, and was buried by the side of his sister, Scholastica, who had established, a nunnery near Monte Cassino and died a few weeks before him. They met only once a year, on the side of the mountain, for prayer and pious conversation. On the day of his departure, two monks saw in a vision a shining pathway of stars leading from Monte Cassino to heaven, and heard a voice, that by this road Benedict, the well beloved of God, had ascended to heaven.

His credulous biographer, Pope Gregory I., in the second book of his Dialogues, ascribes to him miraculous prophecies and healings, and even a raising of the dead. With reference to his want of secular culture and his spiritual knowledge, he calls him a learned ignorant and an unlettered sage. At all events he possessed the genius of a lawgiver, and holds the first place among the founders of monastic orders, though his person and life are much less interesting than those of a Bernard of Clairvaux, a Francis of Assisi, and an Ignatius of Loyola.

 

44. The Rule of St. Benedict

The Regula Benedicti has been frequently edited and annotated, best by Holstenius: Codex reg. Monast. tom. i. p. 111-135; by Dom Marténe: Commentarius in regulam S. Benedicti literalis, moralis, historicus, Par. 1690, in 4to.; by Dom Calmet, Par. 1734, 2 vols.; and by Dom Charles Brandes (Benedictine of Einsiedeln), in 3 vols., Einsiedeln and New York, 1857. Gieseler gives the most important articles in his Ch. H. Bd. i. Abtheil. 2, §119. Comp. also Montalembert, l.c. ii. 39 sqq.

The rule of St. Benedict, on which his fame rests, forms an epoch in the history of monasticism. In a short time it superseded all contemporary and older rules of the kind, and became the immortal code of the most illustrious branch of the monastic army, and the basis of the whole Roman Catholic cloister life. It consists of a preface or prologue, and a series of moral, social, liturgical, and penal ordinances, in seventy-three chapters. It shows a true knowledge of human nature, the practical wisdom of Rome, and adaptation to Western customs; it combines simplicity with completeness, strictness with gentleness, humility with courage, and gives the whole cloister life a fixed unity and compact organization, which, like the episcopate, possessed an unlimited versatility and power of expansion. It made every cloister an ecclesiola in ecclesia, reflecting the relation of the bishop to his charge, the monarchical principle of authority on the democratic basis of the equality of the brethren, though claiming a higher degree of perfection than could be realized in the great secular church. For the rude and undisciplined world of the middle age, the Benedictine rule furnished a wholesome course of training and a constant stimulus to the obedience, self-control, order, and industry which were indispensable to the regeneration and healthy growth of social life.

The spirit of the rule may be judged from the following sentences of the prologus, which contains pious exhortations: “Having thus,” he says, “my brethren, asked of the Lord who shall dwell in his tabernacle, we have heard the precepts prescribed to such a one. If we fulfil these conditions, we shall be heirs of the kingdom of heaven. Let us then prepare our hearts and bodies to fight under a holy obedience to these precepts; and if it is not always possible for nature to obey, let us ask the Lord that he would deign to give us the succor of his grace. Would we avoid the pains of hell and attain eternal life, while there is still time, while we are still in this mortal body, and while the light of this life is bestowed upon us for that purpose, let us run and strive so as to reap an eternal reward. We must then form a school of divine servitude, in which, we trust, nothing too heavy or rigorous will be established. But if, in conformity with right and justice, we should exercise a little severity for the amendment of vices or the preservation of charity, beware of fleeing under the impulse of terror from the way of salvation, which cannot but have a hard beginning. When a man has walked for some time in obedience and faith, his heart will expand, and he will run with the unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments. May he grant that, never straying from the instruction of the Master, and persevering in his doctrine in the monastery until death, we may share by patience in the sufferings of Christ, and be worthy to share together his kingdom.” The leading provisions of this rule are as follows:

At the head of each society stands an abbot, who is elected by the monks, and, with their consent, appoints a provost (praepositus), and, when the number of the brethren requires, deans over the several divisions (decaniae), as assistants. He governs, in Christ’s stead, by authority and example, and is to his cloister, what the bishop is to his diocese. In the more weighty matters he takes the congregation of the brethren into consultation; in ordinary affairs only the older members. The formal entrance into the cloister must be preceded by a probation of novitiate of one year (subsequently it was made three years), that no one might prematurely or rashly take the solemn step. If the novice repented his resolution, he could leave the cloister without hindrance; if he adhered to it, he was, at the close of his probation, subjected to an examination in presence of the abbot and the monks, and then, appealing to the saints, whose relics were in the cloister, he laid upon the altar of the chapel the irrevocable vow, written or at least subscribed by his own hand, and therewith cut off from himself forever all return to the world.

From this important arrangement the cloister received its stability and the whole monastic institution derived additional earnestness, solidity, and permanence.

The vow was threefold, comprising stabilitas, perpetual adherence to the monastic order; conversio morum, especially voluntary poverty and chastity, which were always regarded as the very essence of monastic piety under all its forms; and obedientia coram Deo et sanctis ejus, absolute obedience to the abbot, as the representative of God and Christ. This obedience is the cardinal virtue of a monk.

The life of the cloister consisted of a judicious alternation of spiritual and bodily exercises. This is the great excellence of the rule of Benedict, who proceeded here upon the true principle, that idleness is the mortal enemy of the soul and the workshop of the devil. Seven hours were to be devoted to prayer, singing of psalms, and meditation; from two to three hours, especially on Sunday, to religious reading; and from six to seven hours to manual labor in doors or in the field, or, instead of this, to the training of children, who were committed to the cloister by their parents (oblati).

Here was a starting point for the afterward celebrated cloister schools, and for that attention to literary pursuits, which, though entirely foreign to the uneducated Benedict and his immediate successors, afterward became one of the chief ornaments of his order, and in many cloisters took the place of manual labor.

In other respects the mode of life was to be simple, without extreme rigor, and confined to strictly necessary things. Clothing consisted of a tunic with a black cowl (whence the name: Black Friars); the material to be determined by the climate and season. On the two weekly fast days, and from the middle of September to Easter, one meal was to suffice for the day. Each monk is allowed daily a pound of bread and pulse, and, according to the Italian custom, half a flagon (hemina) of wine; though he is advised to abstain from the wine, if he can do so without injury to his health. Flesh is permitted only to the weak and sick, who were to be treated with special care. During the meal some edifying piece was read, and silence enjoined. The individual monk knows no personal property, not even his simple dress as such; and the fruits of his labor go into the common treasury. He should avoid all contact with the world, as dangerous to the soul, and therefore every cloister should be so arranged, as to be able to carry on even the arts and trades necessary for supplying its wants. Hospitality and other works of love are especially commended.

The penalties for transgression of the rule are, first, private admonition, then exclusion from the fellowship of prayer, next exclusion from fraternal intercourse, and finally expulsion from the cloister, after which, however, restoration is possible, even to the third time.

 

45. The Benedictines. Cassiodorus

Benedict had no presentiment of the vast historical importance, which this rule, originally designed simply for the cloister of Monte Cassino, was destined to attain. He probably never aspired beyond the regeneration and salvation of his own soul and that of his brother monks, and all the talk of later Catholic historians about his far-reaching plans of a political and social regeneration of Europe, and the preservation and promotion of literature and art, find no support whatever in his life or in his rule. But he humbly planted a seed, which Providence blessed a hundredfold. By his rule he became, without his own will or knowledge, the founder of an order, which, until in the thirteenth century the Dominicans and Franciscans pressed it partially into the background, spread with great rapidity over the whole of Europe, maintained a clear supremacy, formed the model for all other monastic orders, and gave to the Catholic church an imposing array of missionaries, authors, artists, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes, as Gregory the Great and Gregory VII. In less than a century after the death of Benedict, the conquests of the barbarians in Italy, Gaul, Spain were reconquered for civilization, and the vast territories of Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia incorporated into Christendom, or opened to missionary labor; and in this progress of history the monastic institution, regulated and organized by Benedict’s rule, bears an honorable share.

Benedict himself established a second cloister in the vicinity of Terracina, and two of his favorite disciples, Placidus and St. Maurus, introduced the “holy rule,” the one into Sicily, the other into France. Pope Gregory the Great, himself at one time a Benedictine monk, enhanced its prestige, and converted the Anglo-Saxons to the Roman Christian faith, by Benedictine monks. Gradually the rule found so general acceptance both in old and in new institutions, that in the time of Charlemagne it became a question, whether there were any monks at all, who were not Benedictines. The order, it is true, has degenerated from time to time, through the increase of its wealth and the decay of its discipline, but its fostering care of religion, of humane studies, and of the general civilization of Europe, from the tilling of the soil to the noblest learning, has given it an honorable place in history and won immortal praise. He who is familiar with the imposing and venerable tomes of the Benedictine editions of the Fathers, their thoroughly learned prefaces, biographies, antiquarian dissertations, and indexes, can never think of the order of the Benedictines without sincere regard and gratitude.

The patronage of learning, however, as we have already said, was not within the design of the founder or his rule. The joining of this to the cloister life is duel if we leave out of view the learned monk Jerome, to Cassiodorus, who in 538 retired from the honors and cares of high civil office, in the Gothic monarchy of Italy, to a monastery founded by himself at Vivarium (Viviers), in Calabria in Lower Italy. Here he spent nearly thirty years as monk and abbot, collected a large library, encouraged the monks to copy and to study the Holy Scriptures, the works of the church fathers, and even the ancient classics, and wrote for them several literary and theological text-books, especially his treatise De institutione divinarum literarum, a kind of elementary encyclopedia, which was the code of monastic education for many generations. Vivarium at one time almost rivalled Monte Cassino, and Cassiodorus won the honorary title of the restorer of knowledge in the sixth century.

The Benedictines, already accustomed to regular work, soon followed this example. Thus that very mode of life, which in its founder, Anthony, despised all learning, became in the course of its development an asylum of culture in the rough and stormy times of the migration and the crusades, and a conservator of the literary treasures of antiquity for the use of modern times.

 

46. Opposition to Monasticism. Jovinian

I. Chrysostomus: Πρὸς τοὺς πολεμοῦτας τοῖς ἐπὶ τὸ μονάζειν ἐνάγουσιν (a vindication of monasticism against its opponents, in three books). Hieronymus: Ep. 61, ad Vigilantium (ed. Vallars. tom. i. p. 345 sqq.); Ep. 109, ad Riparium (i. 719 sqq.); Adv. Helvidium (a.d. 383); Adv. Jovinianum (a.d. 392); Adv. Vigilantium (a.d. 406). All these three tracts are in Opera Hieron. tom. ii. p. 206-402. Augustinus: De haeres. cap. 82 (on Jovinian), and c. 84 (on Helvidius and the Helvidians). Epiphanius: Haeres. 75 (on Aerius).

II. Chr. W. F. Walch: Ketzerhistorie (1766), part iii. p. 585 (on Helvidius and the Antidikomarianites); p. 635 sqq. (on Jovinian); and p. 673 sqq. (on Vigilantius). Vogel: De Vigilantio haeretico orthodoxo, Gött. 1756. G. B. Lindner: De Joviniano et Vigilantio purioris doctrinae antesignanis, Lips. 1839. W. S. Gilly: Vigilantius and his Times, Lond. 1844. Comp. also Neander: Der heil. Joh. Chrysostomus, 3d ed. 1848, vol. i. p. 53 sqq.; and Kirchengesch, iii. p. 508 sqq. (Torrey’s translation, ii. p. 265 sqq.). Baur: Die christliche Kirche von 4-6ten Jahrh. 1859, p. 311 sqq.

Although monasticism was a mighty movement of the age, engaging either the cooperation or the admiration of the whole church, yet it was not exempt from opposition. And opposition sprang from very different quarters: now from zealous defenders of heathenism, like Julian and Libanius, who hated and bitterly reviled the monks for their fanatical opposition to temples and idol-worship; now from Christian statesmen and emperors, like Valens, who were enlisted against it by its withdrawing so much force from the civil and military service of the state, and, in the time of peril from the barbarians, encouraging idleness and passive contemplation instead of active, heroic virtue; now from friends of worldly indulgence, who found themselves unpleasantly disturbed and rebuked by the religious earnestness and zeal of the ascetic life; lastly, however, also from a liberal, almost protestant, conception of Christian morality, which set itself at the same time against the worship of Mary and the saints, and other abuses. This last form of opposition, however, existed mostly in isolated cases, was rather negative than positive in its character, lacked the spirit of wisdom and moderation, and hence almost entirely disappeared in the fifth century, only to be revived long after, in more mature and comprehensive form, when monasticism had fulfilled its mission for the world.

To this class of opponents belong Helvidius, Jovinian, Vigilantius, and Aerius. The first three are known to us through the passionate replies of Jerome, the last through the Panarion of Epiphanius. They figure in Catholic church history among the heretics, while they have received from many Protestant historians a place among the “witnesses of the truth” and the forerunners of the Reformation.

We begin with Jovinian, the most important among them, who is sometimes compared, for instance, even by Neander, to Luther, because, like Luther, he was carried by his own experience into reaction against the ascetic tendency and the doctrines connected with it. He wrote in Rome, before the year 390 a work, now lost, attacking monasticism in its ethical principles. He was at that time himself a monk, and probably remained so in a free way until his death. At all events he never married, and according to Augustine’s account, he abstained “for the present distress,” (1Co_7:26) and from aversion to the encumbrances of the married state. Jerome pressed him with the alternative of marrying and proving the equality of celibacy with married life, or giving up his opposition to his own condition. Jerome gives a very unfavorable picture of his character, evidently colored by vehement bitterness. He calls Jovinian a servant of corruption, a barbarous writer, a Christian Epicurean, who, after having once lived in strict asceticism, now preferred earth to heaven, vice to virtue, his belly to Christ, and always strode along as an elegantly dressed bridegroom. Augustine is much more lenient, only reproaching Jovinian with having misled many Roman nuns into marriage by holding before them the examples of pious women in the Bible. Jovinian was probably provoked to question and oppose monasticism, as Gieseler supposes, by Jerome’s extravagant praising of it, and by the feeling against it, which the death of Blesilla (384) in Rome confirmed. And he at first found extensive sympathy. But he was excommunicated and banished with his adherents at a council about the year 390, by Siricius, bishop of Rome, who was zealously opposed to the marriage of priests. He then betook himself to Milan, where the two monks Sarmatio and Barbatian held forth views like his own; but he was treated there after the same fashion by the bishop, Ambrose, who held a council against him. From this time he and his party disappear from history, and before the year 406 he died in exile.

According to Jerome, Jovinian held these four points (1) Virgins, widows, and married persons, who have once been baptized into Christ, have equal merit, other things in their conduct being equal. (2) Those, who are once with full faith born again by baptism, cannot be overcome (subverti) by the devil. (3) There is no difference between abstaining from food and enjoying it with thanksgiving. (4) All, who keep the baptismal covenant, will receive an equal reward in heaven.

He insisted chiefly on the first point; so that Jerome devotes the whole first book of his refutation to this point, while he disposes of all the other heads in the second. In favor of the moral equality of married and single life, he appealed to Gen_2:24, where God himself institutes marriage before the fall; to Mat_19:5, where Christ sanctions it; to the patriarchs before and after the flood; to Moses and the prophets, Zacharias and Elizabeth, and the apostles, particularly Peter, who lived in wedlock; also to Paul, who himself exhorted to marriage, (1Co_7:36, 1Co_7:39) required the bishop or the deacon to be the husband of one wife, (1Ti_3:2, 1Ti_3:12) and advised young widows to marry and bear children. (1Ti_5:14; comp. 1Ti_2:15; Heb_13:4) He declared the prohibition of marriage and of divinely provided food a Manichaean error. To answer these arguments, Jerome indulges in utterly unwarranted inferences, and speaks of marriage in a tone of contempt, which gave offence even to his friends. Augustine was moved by it to present the advantages of the married life in a special work, De bono conjugali, though without yielding the ascetic estimate of celibacy. (2Co_9:6)

Jovinian’s second point has an apparent affinity with the Augustinian and Calvinistic doctrine of the perseverantia sanctorum. It is not referred by him, however, to the eternal and unchangeable counsel of God, but simply based on 1Jo_3:9, and 1Jo_3:18, and is connected with his abstract conception of the opposite moral states. He limits the impossibility of relapse to the truly regenerate, who “plena fide in baptismate renati sunt,” and makes a distinction between the mere baptism of water and the baptism of the Spirit, which involves also a distinction between the actual and the ideal church.

His third point is aimed against the ascetic exaltation of fasting, with reference to Rom_14:20, and 1Ti_4:3. God, he holds, has created all animals for the service of man; Christ attended the marriage feast at Cana as a guest, sat at table with Zaccheus, with publicans and sinners, and was called by the Pharisees a glutton and a wine-bibber; and the apostle says: To the pure all things are pure, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.

He went still further, however, and, with the Stoics, denied all gradations of moral merit and demerit, consequently also all gradations of reward and punishment. He overlooked the process of development in both good and evil. He went back of all outward relations to the inner mind, and lost all subordinate differences of degree in the great contrast between true Christians and men of the world, between regenerate and unregenerate; whereas, the friends of monasticism taught a higher and lower morality, and distinguished the ascetics, as a special class, from the mass of ordinary Christians. As Christ, says he, dwells in believers, without difference of degree, so also believers are in Christ without difference of degree or stages of development. There are only two classes of men, righteous and wicked, sheep and goats, five wise virgins and five foolish, good trees with good fruit and bad trees with bad fruit. He appealed also to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, who all received equal wages. Jerome answered him with such things as the parable of the sower and the different kinds of ground, the parable of the different numbers of talents with corresponding rewards, the many mansions in the Father’s house (by which Jovinian singularly understood the different churches on earth), the comparison of the resurrection bodies with the stars, which differ in glory, and the passage: “He which soweth sparingly, shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully, shall reap also bountifully.” (2Co_9:6)

 

47. Helvidius, Vigilantius, and Aerius

See especially the tracts of Jerome quoted in the preceding section.

Helvidius, whether a layman or a priest at Rome it is uncertain, a pupil, according to the statement of Gennadius, of the Arian bishop Auxentius of Milan, wrote a work, before the year 383, in refutation of the perpetual virginity of the mother of the Lord — a leading point with the current glorification of celibacy. He considered the married state equal in honor and glory to that of virginity. Of his fortunes we know nothing. Augustine speaks of Helvidians, who are probably identical with the Antidicomarianites of Epiphanius. Jerome calls Helvidius, indeed, a rough and uneducated man, but proves by quotations of his arguments, that he had at least some knowledge of the Scriptures, and a certain ingenuity. He appealed in the first place to Mat_1:18, Mat_1:24, Mat_1:25, as implying that Joseph knew his wife not before, but after, the birth of the Lord; then to the designation of Jesus as the “first born” son of Mary, in Mat_1:25, and Luk_2:7; then to the many passages, which speak of the brothers and sisters of Jesus; and finally to the authority of Tertullian and Victorinus. Jerome replies, that the “till” by no means always fixes a point after which any action must begin or cease; (comp. Mat_28:20) that, according to Exo_34:19, Exo_34:20; Num_18:15 sqq., the “first born” does not necessarily imply the birth of other children afterward, but denotes every one, who first opens the womb; that the “brothers” of Jesus may have been either sons of Joseph by a former marriage, or, according to the wide Hebrew use of the term, cousins; and that the authorities cited were more than balanced by the testimony of Ignatius, Polycarp(?), and Irenaeus. “Had Helvidius read these,” says he, “he would doubtless have produced something more skilful.”

This whole question, it is well known, is still a problem in exegesis. The perpetua virginitas of Mary has less support from Scripture than the opposite theory. But it is so essential to the whole ascetic system, that it became from this time an article of the Catholic faith, and the denial of it was anathematized as blasphemous heresy. A considerable number of Protestant divines, however, agree on this point with the Catholic doctrine, and think it incompatible with the dignity of Mary, that, after the birth of the Son of God and Saviour of the world, she should have borne ordinary children of men.

Vigilantius, originally from Gaul, a presbyter of Barcelona in Spain, a man of pious but vehement zeal, and of literary talent, wrote in the beginning of the fifth century against the ascetic spirit of the age and the superstition connected with it. Jerome’s reply, dictated hastily in a single night at Bethlehem in the year 406, contains more of personal abuse and low witticism, than of solid argument. “There have been,” he says, “monsters on earth, centaurs, syrens, leviathans, behemoths …. Gaul alone has bred no monsters, but has ever abounded in brave and noble men, — when, of a sudden, there has arisen one Vigilantius, who should rather be called Dormitantius, contending in an impure spirit against the Spirit of Christ, and forbidding to honor the graves of the martyrs; he rejects the Vigils — only at Easter should we sing hallelujah; he declares abstemiousness to be heresy, and chastity a nursery of licentiousness (pudicitiam, libidinis seminarium) …. This innkeeper of Calagurris mingles water with the wine, and would, according to ancient art, combine his poison with the genuine faith. He opposes virginity, hates chastity, cries against the fastings of the saints, and would only amidst jovial feastings amuse himself with the Psalms of David. It is terrible to bear, that even bishops are companions of his wantonness, if those deserve this name, who ordain only married persons deacons, and trust not the chastity of the single.” Vigilantius thinks it better for a man to use his money wisely, and apply it gradually to benevolent objects at home, than to lavish it all at once upon the poor or give it to the monks of Jerusalem. He went further, however, than his two predecessors, and bent his main efforts against the worship of saints and relics, which was then gaining ascendency and was fostered by monasticism. He considered it superstition and idolatry. He called the Christians, who worshipped the “wretched bones” of dead men, ash-gatherers and idolaters. He expressed himself sceptically respecting the miracles of the martyrs, contested the practice of invoking them and of intercession for the dead, as useless, and declared himself against the Vigils, or public worship in the night, as tending to disorder and licentiousness. This last point Jerome admits as a fact, but not as an argument, because the abuse should not abolish the right use.

The presbyter Aerius of Sebaste, about 360, belongs also among the partial opponents of monasticism. For, though himself an ascetic, he contended against the fast laws and the injunction of fasts at certain times, considering them an encroachment upon Christian freedom. Epiphanius also ascribes to him three other heretical views: denial of the superiority of bishops to presbyters, opposition to the usual Easter festival, and opposition to prayers for the dead. He was hotly persecuted by the hierarchy, and was obliged to live, with his adherents, in open fields and in caves.



Vol. 3, Chapter V. The Hierarchy and Polity of the Church

Comp. in part the literature in vol. i. §105 and 110 (to which should be added now, P. A. de Lagarde: Constitutiones Apostolorum, Lips. and Lond., 1862); also Gibbon, ch. xx.; Milman: Hist. of Ancient Christianity, book iv. c. 1 (Amer. ed. p. 438 sqq.), and the corresponding sections in Bingham, Schröckh, Plank, Neander, Gieseler, Baur, etc. (see the particular literature below).

 

48. Schools of the Clergy

Having in a former section observed the elevation of the church to the position of the state religion of the Roman empire, and the influence of this great change upon the condition of the clergy and upon public morality, we turn now to the internal organization and the development of the hierarchy under its new circumstances. The step of progress which we here find distinguishing the organization of this third period from the episcopal system of the second and the apostolic supervision of the first, is the rise of the patriarchal constitution and of the system of ecumenical councils closely connected with it. But we must first glance at the character and influence of the teaching order in general.

The work of preparation for the clerical office was, on the one hand, materially facilitated by the union of the church with the state, putting her in possession of the treasures, the schools, the learning, and the literature of classic heathendom, and throwing the education of the rising generation into her hands. The numerous doctrinal controversies kept the spirit of investigation awake, and among the fathers and bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries we meet with the greatest theologians of the ancient church. These gave their weighty voices for the great value of a thorough education to the clerical office, and imparted much wholesome instruction respecting the studies proper to this purpose. The African church, by a decree of the council of Carthage, in 397, required of candidates a trial of their knowledge and orthodoxy. A law of Justinian, of the year 541, established a similar test in the East.

But on the other hand, a regular and general system of clerical education was still entirely wanting. The steady decay of the classic literature, the gradual cessation of philosophical and artistic production, the growth of monastic prejudice against secular learning and culture, the great want of ministers in the suddenly expanded field of the church, the uneasy state of the empire, and the barbarian invasions, were so many hinderances to thorough theological preparation. Many candidates trusted to the magical virtue of ordination. Others, without inward call, were attracted to the holy office by the wealth and power of the church. Others had no time or opportunity for preparation, and passed, at the instance of the popular voice or of circumstances, immediately from the service of the state to that of the church, even to the episcopal office; though several councils prescribed a previous test of their capacity in the lower degrees of reader, deacon, and presbyter. Often, however, this irregularity turned to the advantage of the church, and gave her a highly gifted man, like Ambrose, whom the acclamation of the people called to the episcopal see of Milan even before he was baptized. Gregory Nazianzen laments that many priests and bishops came in fresh from the counting house, sunburnt from the plow, from the oar, from the army, or even from the theatre, so that the most holy order of all was in danger of becoming the most ridiculous. “Only he can be a physician,” says he, “who knows the nature of diseases; he, a painter, who has gone through much practice in mixing colors and in drawing forms; but a clergyman may be found with perfect ease, not thoroughly wrought, of course, but fresh made, sown and full blown in a moment, as the legend says of the giants. We form the saints in a day, and enjoin them to be wise, though they possess no wisdom at all, and bring nothing to their spiritual office, except at best a good will.” If such complaints were raised so early as the end of the Nicene age, while the theological activity of the Greek church was in its bloom, there was far more reason for them after the middle of the fifth century and in the sixth, especially in the Latin church, where, even among the most eminent clergymen, a knowledge of the original languages of the Holy Scriptures was a rare exception.

The opportunities which this period offered for literary and theological preparation for the ministry, were the following:

1. The East had four or five theological schools, which, however, were far from supplying its wants.

The oldest and most celebrated was the catechetical school of Alexandria. Favored by the great literary treasures, the extensive commercial relations, and the ecclesiastical importance of the Egyptian metropolis, as well as by a succession of distinguished teachers, it flourished from the middle of the second century to the end of the fourth, when, amidst the Origenistic, Nestorian, and Monophysite confusion, it withered and died. Its last ornament was the blind, but learned and pious Didymus (340-395).

From the Alexandrian school proceeded the smaller institution of Caesarea in Palestine, which was founded by Origen, after his banishment from Alexandria, and received a new but temporary impulse in the beginning of the fourth century from his admirer, the presbyter Pamphilus, and from his friend Eusebius. It possessed the theological library which Eusebius used in the preparation of his learned works.

Far more important was the theological school of Antioch, founded about 290 by the presbyters Dorotheus and Lucian. It developed in the course of the fourth century a severe grammatico-historical exegesis, counter to the Origenistic allegorical method of the Alexandrians; now in connection with the church doctrine, as in Chrysostom; now in a rationalizing spirit, as in Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius.

The seminary at Edessa, a daughter of the Antiochian school, was started by the learned deacon, Ephraim Syrus († 378), furnished ministers for Mesopotamia and Persia, and stood for about a hundred years.

The Nestorians, at the close of the fifth century, founded a seminary at Nisibis in Mesopotamia, which was organized into several classes and based upon a definite plan of instruction.

The West had no such institutions for theological instruction, but supplied itself chiefly from cloisters and private schools of the bishops. Cassiodorus endeavored to engage Pope Agapetus in founding a learned institution in Rome, but was discouraged by the warlike disquietude of Italy. Jerome spent some time at the Alexandrian school under the direction of Didymus.

2. Many priests and bishops, as we have already observed, emanated from the monasteries, where they enjoyed the advantages of retirement from the world, undisturbed meditation, the intercourse of kindred earnest minds, and a large spiritual experience; but, on the other hand, easily sank into a monkish narrowness, and rarely attained that social culture and comprehensive knowledge of the world and of men, which is necessary, especially in large cities, for a wide field of labor.

3. In the West there were smaller diocesan seminaries, under the direction of the bishops, who trained their own clergy, both in theory and in practice, as they passed through the subordinate classes of reader, sub-deacon, and deacon.

Augustine set a good example of this sort, having at Hippo a “monasterium clericorum,” which sent forth many good presbyters and bishops for the various dioceses of North Africa. Similar clerical monasteries or episcopal seminaries arose gradually in the southern countries of Europe, and are very common in the Roman Catholic church to this day.

4. Several of the most learned and able fathers of the fourth century received their general scientific education in heathen schools, under the setting sun of the classic culture, and then studied theology either in ascetic retirement or under some distinguished church teacher, or by the private reading of the Scriptures and the earlier church literature.

Thus Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen were in the high school of Athens at the same time with the prince Julian the Apostate; Chrysostom attended the lectures of the celebrated rhetorician Libanius in Antioch; Augustine studied at Carthage, Rome, and Milan; and Jerome was introduced to the study of the classics by the grammarian Donatus of Rome. The great and invaluable service of these fathers in the development and defence of the church doctrine, in pulpit eloquence, and especially in the translation and exposition of the Holy Scriptures, is the best evidence of the high value of a classical education. And the church has always, with good reason, acknowledged it.

 

49. Clergy and Laity. Elections

The clergy, according to the precedent of the Old Testament, came to be more and more rigidly distinguished, as a peculiar order, from the body of the laity. The ordination, which was solemnized by the laying on of hands and prayer, with the addition at a later period of an anointing with oil and balsam, marked the formal entrance into the special priesthood, as baptism initiated into the universal priesthood; and, like baptism, it bore an indefeasible character (character indelebilis). By degrees the priestly office assumed the additional distinction of celibacy and of external marks, such as tonsure, and sacerdotal vestments worn at first only during official service, then in every-day life. The idea of the universal priesthood of believers retreated in proportion, though it never passed entirely out of sight, but was from time to time asserted even in this age. Augustine, for example, says, that as all are called Christians on account of their baptism, so all believers are priests, because they are members of the one High Priest.

The progress of the hierarchical principle also encroached gradually upon the rights of the people in the election of their pastors. But in this period it did not as yet entirely suppress them. The lower clergy were chosen by the bishops, the bishops by their colleagues in the province and by the clergy. The fourth canon of Nice, probably at the instance of the Meletian schism, directed that a bishop should be instituted and consecrated by all, or at least by three, of the bishops of the province. This was not aimed, however, against the rights of the people, but against election by only one bishop — the act of Meletius. For the consent of the people in the choice of presbyters, and especially of bishops, long remained, at least in outward form, in memory of the custom of the apostles and the primitive church. There was either a formal vote, particularly when there were three or more candidates before the people, or the people were thrice required to signify their confirmation or rejection by the formula: “Worthy,” or “unworthy.” The influence of the people in this period appears most prominently in the election of bishops. The Roman bishop Leo, in spite of his papal absolutism, asserted the thoroughly democratic principle, long since abandoned by his successors: “He who is to preside over all, should be elected by all.” Oftentimes the popular will decided before the provincial bishops and the clergy assembled and the regular election could be held. Ambrose of Milan and Nectarius of Constantinople were appointed to the bishopric even before they were baptized; the former by the people, the latter by the emperor Theodosius; though in palpable violation of the eightieth apostolic canon and the second Nicene. Martin of Tours owed his elevation likewise to the popular voice, while some bishops objected to it on account of his small and wasted form. Chrysostom was called from Antioch to Constantinople by the emperor Arcadius, in consequence of a unanimous vote of the clergy and people. Sometimes the people acted under outside considerations and the management of demagogues, and demanded unworthy or ignorant men for the highest offices. Thus there were frequent disturbances and collisions, and even bloody conflicts, as in the election of Damasus in Rome. In short, all the selfish passions and corrupting influences, which had spoiled the freedom of the popular political elections in the Grecian and Roman republics, and which appear also in the republics of modern times, intruded upon the elections of the church. And the clergy likewise often suffered themselves to be guided by impure motives. Chrysostom laments that presbyters, in the choice of a bishop, instead of looking only at spiritual fitness, were led by regard for noble birth, or great wealth, or consanguinity and friendship. The bishops themselves sometimes did no better. Nectarius, who was suddenly transferred, in 381, by the emperor Theodosius, from the praetorship to the bishopric of Constantinople, even before he was baptized, wished to ordain his physician Martyrius deacon, and when the latter refused, on the ground of incapacity, he replied: “Did not I, who am now a priest, formerly live much more immorally than thou, as thou thyself well knowest, since thou wast often an accomplice of my many iniquities?” Martyrius, however, persisted in his refusal, because he had continued to live in sin long after his baptism, while Nectarius had become a new man since his.

The emperor also, after the middle of the fourth century, exercised a decisive influence in the election of metropolitans and patriarchs, and often abused it in a despotic and arbitrary way.

Thus every mode of appointment was evidently exposed to abuse, and could furnish no security against unworthy candidates, if the electors, whoever they might be, were destitute of moral earnestness and the gift of spiritual discernment.

Toward the end of the period before us the republican element in the election of bishops entirely disappeared. The Greek church after the eighth century vested the franchise exclusively in the bishops. The Latin church, after the eleventh century, vested it in the clergy of the cathedral church, without allowing any participation to the people. But in the West, especially in Spain and France, instead of the people, the temporal prince exerted an important influence, in spite of the frequent protest of the church.

Even the election of pope, after the downfall of the West Roman empire, came largely under control of the secular authorities of Rome; first, of the Ostrogothic kings; then, of the exarchs of Ravenna in the name of the Byzantine emperor; and, after Charlemagne, of the emperor of Germany; till, in 1059, through the influence of Hildebrand (afterward Gregory VII.), it was lodged exclusively with the college of cardinals, which was filled by the pope himself. Yet the papal absolutism of the middle age, like the modern Napoleonic military despotism in the state, found it well, under favorable prospects, to enlist the democratic principle for the advancement of its own interests.

 

50. Marriage and Celibacy of the Clergy

See Lit. on clerical celibacy in vol. ii, especially Theiner, Lea, and von Schulte.

The progress and influence of monasticism, the general exaltation of the ascetic life above the social, and of celibacy above the married state, together with the increasing sharpness of the distinction between clergy and laity, all tended powerfully toward the celibacy of the clergy. What the apostle Paul, expressly discriminating a divine command from a human counsel, left to each one’s choice, and advised, in view of the oppressed condition of the Christians in the apostolic age, as a safer and less anxious state only for those who felt called to it by a special gift of grace, now, though the stress of circumstances was past, was made, at least in the Latin church, an inexorable law. What had been a voluntary, and therefore an honorable exception, now became the rule, and the former rule became the exception. Connubial intercourse appeared incompatible with the dignity and purity of the priestly office and of priestly functions, especially with the service of the altar. The clergy, as the model order, could not remain below the moral ideal of monasticism, extolled by all the fathers of the church, and must exhibit the same unconditional and undivided devotion to the church within the bosom of society, which monasticism exhibited without it. While placed by their calling in unavoidable contact with the world, they must vie with the monks at least in the virtue of sexual purity, and thereby increase their influence over the people. Moreover, the celibate life secured to the clergy greater independence toward the state and civil society, and thus favored the interests of the hierarchy. But, on the other hand, it estranged them more and more from the sympathies and domestic relations of the people, and tempted them to the illicit indulgence of appetite, which, perhaps, did more injury to the cause of Christian morality and to the true influence of the clergy, than the advantage of forced celibacy could compensate.

In the practice of clerical celibacy, however, the Greek and the Latin churches diverged in the fourth century, and are to this day divided. The Greek church stopped halfway, and limited the injunction of celibacy to the higher clergy, who were accordingly chosen generally from the monasteries or from the ranks of widower-presbyters; while the Latin church extended the law to the lower clergy, and at the same time carried forward the hierarchical principle to absolute papacy. The Greek church differs from the Latin, not by any higher standard of marriage, but only by a closer adherence to earlier usage and by less consistent application of the ascetic principle. It is in theory as remote from the evangelical Protestant church as the Latin is, and approaches it only in practice. It sets virginity far above marriage, and regards marriage only in its aspect of negative utility. In the single marriage of a priest it sees in a measure a necessary evil, at best only a conditional good, a wholesome concession to the flesh for the prevention of immorality, (1Co_7:9) and requires of its highest office bearers total abstinence from all matrimonial intercourse. It wavers, therefore, between a partial permission and a partial condemnation of priestly marriage.

In the East, one marriage was always allowed to the clergy, and at first even to bishops, and celibacy was left optional. Yet certain restrictions were early introduced, such as the prohibition of marriage after ordination (except in deacons and subdeacons), as well as of second marriage after baptism; the apostolic direction, that a bishop should be the husband of one wife, (1Ti_3:2, 1Ti_3:12; Tit_1:6) being taken as a prohibition of successive polygamy, and at the same time as an allowance of one marriage. Besides second marriage, the marrying of a concubine, a widow, a harlot, a slave, and an actress, was forbidden to the clergy. With these restrictions, the “Apostolic Constitutions” and “Canons” expressly permitted the marriage of priests contracted before ordination, and the continuance of it after ordination. The synod of Ancyra, in 314, permitted deacons to marry even after ordination, in case they had made a condition to that effect beforehand; otherwise they were to remain single or lose their office. The Synod of New Caesarea, which was held at about the same time, certainly before 325, does not go beyond this, decreeing: “If a presbyter (not a deacon) marry (that is, after ordination), he shall be expelled from the clergy; and if he practise lewdness, or become an adulterer, he shall be utterly thrust out and held to penance.” At the general council of Nice, 325, it was proposed indeed, probably by the Western bishop Hosius, to forbid entirely the marriage of priests; but the motion met with strong opposition, and was rejected. A venerable Egyptian bishop, Paphnutius, though himself a strict ascetic from his youth up, and a confessor who in the last persecution had lost an eye and been crippled in the knee, asserted with impressiveness and success, that too great rigor would injure the church and promote licentiousness and that marriage and connubial intercourse were honorable and spotless things. The council of Gangra in Paphlagonia (according to some, not till the year 380) condemned, among several ascetic extravagances of the bishop Eustathius of Sebaste and his followers, contempt for married priests and refusal to take part in their ministry. The so-called Apostolic Canons, which, like the Constitutions, arose by a gradual growth in the East, even forbid the clergy, on pain of deposition and excommunication, to put away their wives under the pretext of religion. Perhaps this canon likewise was occasioned by the hyper-asceticism of Eustathius.

Accordingly we not unfrequently find in the Oriental church, so late as the fourth and fifth centuries, not only priests, but even bishops living in wedlock. One example is the father of the celebrated Gregory Nazianzen, who while bishop had two sons, Gregory and the younger Caesarius, and a daughter. Others are Gregory of Nyssa, who, however, wrote an enthusiastic eulogy of the unmarried life, and lamented his loss of the crown of virginity; and Synesius († about 430), who, when elected bishop of Ptolemais in Pentapolis, expressly stipulated for the continuance of his marriage connection. Socrates, whose Church History reaches down to the year 439, says of the practice of his time, that in Thessalia matrimonial intercourse after ordination had been forbidden under penalty of deposition from the time of Heliodorus of Trica, who in his youth had been an amatory writer; but that in the East the clergy and bishops voluntarily abstained from intercourse with their wives, without being required by any law to do so; for many, he adds, have had children during their episcopate by their lawful wives. There were Greek divines, however, like Epiphanius, who agreed with the Roman theory. Justinian I. was utterly opposed to the marriage of priests, declared the children of such connection illegitimate, and forbade the election of a married man to the episcopal office (a.d. 528). Nevertheless, down to the end of the seventh century, many bishops in Africa, Libya, and elsewhere, continued to live in the married state, as is expressly said in the twelfth canon of the Trullan council; but this gave offence and was forbidden. From that time the marriage of bishops gradually disappears, while marriage among the lower clergy continues to be the rule.

This Trullan council, which was the sixth ecumenical (a.d. 692), closes the legislation of the Eastern church on the subject of clerical marriage. Here — to anticipate somewhat — the continuance of a first marriage contracted before ordination was prohibited in the case of bishops on pain of deposition, but, in accordance with the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons, allowed in the case of presbyters and deacons (contrary to the Roman practice), with the Old Testament restriction, that they abstain from sexual intercourse during the season of official service, because he who administers holy things must be pure. The same relation is thus condemned in the one case as immoral, in the other approved and encouraged as moral; the bishop is deposed if he retains his lawful wife and does not, immediately after being ordained, send her to a distant cloister; while the presbyter or deacon is threatened with deposition and even excommunication for doing the opposite and putting his wife away.

The Western church, starting from the perverted and almost Manichaean ascetic principle, that the married state is incompatible with clerical dignity and holiness, instituted a vigorous effort at the end of the fourth century, to make celibacy, which had hitherto been left to the option of individuals, the universal law of the priesthood; thus placing itself in direct contradiction to the Levitical law, to which in other respects it made so much account of conforming. The law, however, though repeatedly enacted, could not for a long time be consistently enforced. The canon, already mentioned, of the Spanish council of Elvira in 305, was only provincial. The first prohibition of clerical marriage, which laid claim to universal ecclesiastical authority, at least in the West, proceeded in 385 from the Roman church in the form of a decretal letter of the bishop Siricius to Himerius, bishop of Tarragona in Spain, who had referred several questions of discipline to the Roman bishop for decision. It is significant of the connection between the celibacy of the clergy and the interest of the hierarchy, that the first properly papal decree, which was issued in the tone of supreme authority, imposed such an unscriptural, unnatural, and morally dangerous restriction. Siricius contested the appeal of dissenting parties to the Mosaic law, on the ground that the Christian priesthood has to stand not merely for a time, but perpetually, in the service of the sanctuary, and that it is not hereditary, like the Jewish; and he ordained that second marriage and marriage with a widow should incapacitate for ordination, and that continuance in the married state after ordination should be punished with deposition. And with this punishment he threatened not bishops only, but also presbyters and deacons. Leo the Great subsequently, extended the requirement of celibacy even to the subdiaconate. The most eminent Latin church fathers, Ambrose, Jerome, and even Augustine — though the last with more moderation — advocated the celibacy of priests. Augustine, with Eusebius of Vercella before him (370), united their clergy in a cloister life, and gave them a monastic stamp; and Martin of Tours, who was a monk from the first, carried his monastic life into his episcopal office. The councils of Italy, Africa, Spain, and Gaul followed the lead of Rome. The synod of Clermont, for example (a.d. 535), declared in its twelfth canon: “No one ordained deacon or priest may continue matrimonial intercourse. He is become the brother of her who was his wife. But since some, inflamed with lust, have rejected the girdle of the warfare [of Christ], and returned to marriage intercourse, it is ordered that such must lose their office forever.” Other councils, like that of Tours, 461, were content with forbidding clergymen, who begat children after ordination, to administer the sacrifice of the mass, and with confining the law of celibacy ad altiorem gradum.

But the very fact of the frequent repetition of these enactments, and the necessity of mitigating the penalties of transgression, show the great difficulty of carrying this unnatural restriction into general effect. In the British and Irish church, isolated as it was from the Roman, the marriage of priests continued to prevail down to the Anglo-Saxon period.

But with the disappearance of legitimate marriage in the priesthood, the already prevalent vice of the cohabitation of unmarried ecclesiastics with pious widows and virgins “secretly brought in,” became more and more common. This spiritual marriage, which had begun as a bold ascetic venture, ended only too often in the flesh, and prostituted the honor of the church.

The Nicene council of 325 met the abuse in its third canon with this decree: “The great council utterly forbids, and it shall not be allowed either to a bishop, or a priest, or a deacon, or any other clergyman, to have with him a συνθείσακτος, unless she be his mother, or sister, or aunt, or some such person, who is beyond all suspicion.” This canon forms the basis of the whole subsequent legislation of the church de cohabitatione clericorum et mulierum. It had to be repeatedly renewed and strengthened; showing plainly that it was often disobeyed. The council of Toledo in Spain, a.d. 527 or 531, ordered in its third canon: “No clergyman, from the subdeacon upward, shall live with a female, be she free woman, freed woman, or slave. Only a mother, or a sister, or other near relative shall keep his house. If he have no near relative, his housekeeper must live in a separate house, and shall under no pretext enter his dwelling. Whosoever acts contrary to this, shall not only be deprived of his spiritual office and have the doors of his church closed, but shall also be excluded from all fellowship of Catholics.” The Concilium Agathense in South Gaul, a.d. 506, at which thirty-five bishops met, decreed in the tenth and eleventh canons: “A clergyman shall neither visit nor receive into his house females not of his kin; only with his mother, or sister, or daughter, or niece may he live. Female slaves, also, and freed women, must be kept away from the house of a clergyman.” Similar laws, with penalties more or less severe, were passed by the council of Hippo, 393, of Angers, 453, of Tours, 461, of Lerida in Spain, 524, of Clermont, 535, of Braga, 563, of Orleans, 538, of Tours, 567. The emperor Justinian, in the twenty-third Novelle, prohibited the bishop having any woman at all in his house, but the Trullan council of 692 returned simply to the Nicene law. The Western councils also made attempts to abolish the exceptions allowed in the Nicene canon, and forbade clergymen all intercourse with women, except in presence of a companion.

This rigorism, however, which sheds an unwelcome light upon the actual state of things that made it necessary, did not better the matter, but rather led to such a moral apathy, that the Latin church in the middle age had everywhere to contend with the open concubinage of the clergy, and the whole energy of Gregory VII. was needed to restore in a measure the old laws of celibacy, without being sufficient to prevent the secret and, to morality, far more dangerous violations of it. The later ecclesiastical legislation respecting the mulieres subintroductae is more lenient, and, without limiting the intercourse of clergymen to near kindred, generally excludes only concubines and those women “de quibus possit haberi suspicio.”

 

51. Moral Character of the Clergy in General

Augustine gives us the key to the true view of the clergy of the Roman empire in both light and shade, when he says of the spiritual office: “There is in this life, and especially in this day, nothing easier, more delightful, more acceptable to men, than the office of bishop, or presbyter, or deacon, if the charge be administered superficially and to the pleasure of men; but nothing in the eye of God more wretched, mournful, and damnable. So also there is in this life, and especially in this day, nothing more difficult, more laborious) more hazardous than the office of bishop, or presbyter, or deacon; but nothing in the eye of God more blessed, if the battle be fought in the manner enjoined by our Captain.” We cannot wonder, on the one hand that, in the better condition of the church and the enlarged field of her labor, a multitude of light-minded and unworthy men crowded into the sacred office, and on the other, that just the most earnest and worthy bishops of the day, an Ambrose, an Augustine, a Gregory Nazianzen, and a Chrysostom, trembled before the responsibility of the office, and had to be forced into it in a measure against their will, by the call of the church.

Gregory Nazianzen fled into the wilderness when his father, without his knowledge, suddenly consecrated him priest in the presence of the congregation (361). He afterward vindicated this flight in his beautiful apology, in which he depicts the ideal of a Christian priest and theologian. The priest must, above all, he says, be a model of a Christian, offer himself a holy sacrifice to God, and be a living temple of the living God. Then he must possess a deep knowledge, of souls, and, as a spiritual physician, heal all classes of men of various diseases of sin, restore, preserve, and protect the divine image in them, bring Christ into their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and make them partakers of the divine nature and of eternal salvation. He must, moreover, have at command the sacred philosophy or divine science of the world and of the worlds, of matter and spirit, of good and evil angels, of the all-ruling Providence, of our creation and regeneration, of the divine covenants, of the first and second appearing of Christ, of his incarnation, passion, and resurrection, of the end of all things and the universal judgment, and above all, of the mystery of the blessed Trinity; and he must be able to teach and elucidate these doctrines of faith in popular discourse. Gregory, sets forth Jesus as the perfect type of the priest, and next to him he presents in an eloquent picture the apostle Paul, who lived only for Christ, and under all circumstances and amid all trials by sea and land, among Jews and heathen, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, in freedom and bonds, attested the divine power of the gospel for the salvation of the world. This ideal, however, Gregory found but seldom realized. He gives on the whole a very unfavorable account of the bishops, and even of the most celebrated councils of his day, charging them with ignorance unworthy means of promotion, ambition, flattery, pride, luxury, and worldly mindedness. He says even: “Our danger now is, that the holiest of all offices will become the most ridiculous; for the highest clerical places are gained not so much by virtue, as by iniquity; no longer the most worthy, but the most powerful, take the episcopal chair.” Though his descriptions, especially in the satirical poem “to himself and on the bishops,” composed probably after his resignation in Constantinople (a.d. 381), may be in many points exaggerated, yet they were in general drawn from life and from experience.

Jerome also, in his epistles, unsparingly attacks the clergy of his time, especially the Roman, accusing them of avarice and legacy hunting, and drawing a sarcastic picture of a clerical fop, who, with his fine scented clothes, was more like a bridegroom than a clergyman. Of the rural clergy, however, the heathen Ammianus Marcellinus bears a testimony, which is certainly reliable, to their simplicity, contentment, and virtue.

Chrysostom, in his celebrated treatise on the priesthood, written probably, before his ordination (somewhere between the years 375 and 381), or while he was deacon (between 381 and 386), portrayed the theoretical and practical qualifications, the exalted duties, responsibilities, and honors of this office, with youthful enthusiasm, in the best spirit of his age. He requires of the priest, that he be in every respect better than the monk, though, standing in the world, he have greater dangers and difficulties to contend with. He sets up as the highest object of the preacher, the great principle stated by, Paul, that in all his discourses he should seek to please God alone, not men. “He must not indeed despise the approving demonstrations of men; but as little must he court them, nor trouble himself when his hearers withhold them. True and imperturbable comfort in his labors he finds only in the consciousness of having his discourse framed and wrought out to the approval of God.” Nevertheless the book as a whole is unsatisfactory. A comparison of it with the “Reformed Pastor” of Baxter, which is far deeper and richer in all that pertains to subjective experimental Christianity and the proper care of souls, would result emphatically in favor of the English Protestant church of the seventeenth century.

We must here particularly notice a point which reflects great discredit on the moral sense of many of the fathers, and shows that they had not wholly freed themselves from the chains of heathen ethics. The occasion of this work of Chrysostom was a ruse, by which he had evaded election to the bishopric, and thrust it upon his friend Basil. To justify this conduct, he endeavors at large, in the fifth chapter of the first book, to prove that artifice might be lawful and useful; that is, when used as a means to a good end. “Manifold is the potency of deception, only it must not be employed with knavish intent. And this should be hardly called deception, but rather a sort of accommodation (οἰκονομία), wisdom, art, or sagacity, by which one can find many ways of escape in an exigency, and amend the errors of the soul.” He appeals to biblical examples, like Jonathan and the daughter of Saul, who by deceiving their father rescued their friend and husband; and, unwarrantably, even to Paul, who became to the Jews a Jew, to the Gentiles a Gentile, and circumcised Timothy, though in the Epistle to the Galatians he pronounced circumcision useless. Chrysostom, however, had evidently learned this, loose and pernicious principle respecting the obligation of truthfulness, not from the Holy Scriptures, but from the Grecian sophists. Besides, he by no means stood alone in the church in this matter, but had his predecessors in the Alexandrian fathers, and his followers in Cassian, Jerome, and other eminent Catholic divines.

Jerome made a doubtful distinction between γυμναστικῶς scribere and δογματικῶς scribere, and, with Origen, explained the severe censure of Paul on Peter in Antioch, for example, as a mere stroke of pastoral policy, or an accommodation to the weakness of the Jewish Christians at the expense of truth. But Augustine’s delicate Christian sense of truth revolted at this construction, and replied that such an interpretation undermined the whole authority of Holy Scripture; that an apostle could never lie, even for a good object; that, in extremity, one should rather suppose a false reading, or wrong translation, or suspect his own apprehension; but that in Antioch Paul spoke the truth and justly censured Peter openly for his inconsistency, or for a practical (not a theoretical) error, and thus deserves the praise of righteous boldness, as Peter on the other hand, by his meek submission to the censure, merits the praise of holy humility.

Thus in Jerome and Augustine we have the representatives of two opposite ethical views: one, unduly subjective, judging all moral acts merely by their motive and object, and sanctioning, for example, tyrannicide, or suicide to escape disgrace, or breach of faith with heretics (as the later Jesuitical casuistry does with the utmost profusion of sophistical subtlety); the other, objective, proceeding on eternal, immutable principles and the irreconcilable opposition of good and evil, and freely enough making prudence subservient to truth, but never truth subservient to prudence.

Meantime, in the Greek church also, as early as the fourth century, the Augustinian view here and there made its way; and Basil the Great, in his shorter monastic Rule, rejected even accommodation (οἰκονομία) for a good end, because Christ ascribes the lie, without distinction of kinds, exclusively to Satan. (Joh_8:44) In this respect, therefore, Chrysostom did not stand at the head of his age, but represented without doubt the prevailing view of the Eastern church.

The legislation of the councils with reference to the clergy, shows in general the earnestness and rigor with which the church guarded the moral purity and dignity of her servants. The canonical age was, on the average, after the analogy of the Old Testament, the five-and-twentieth year for the diaconate, the thirtieth for the priesthood and episcopate. Catechumens, neophytes, persons baptized at the point of death, penitents, energumens (such as were possessed of a devil), actors, dancers, soldiers, curials (court, state, and municipal officials), slaves, eunuchs, bigamists, and all who led a scandalous life after baptism, were debarred from ordination. The frequenting of taverns and theatres, dancing and gambling, usury and the pursuit of secular business were forbidden to clergymen. But on the other hand, the frequent repetition of warnings against even the lowest and most common sins, such as licentiousness, drunkenness, fighting, and buffoonery, and the threatening of corporal punishment for certain misdemeanors, yield an unfavorable conclusion in regard to the moral standing of the sacred order. Even at the councils the clerical dignity was not seldom desecrated by outbreaks of coarse passion; insomuch that the council of Ephesus, in 449, is notorious as the “council of robbers.”

In looking at this picture, however, we must not forget that in this, period of the sinking empire of Rome the task of the clergy was exceedingly difficult, and amidst the nominal conversion of the whole population of the empire, their number and education could not keep pace with the sudden and extraordinary expansion of their field of labor. After all, the clerical office was the great repository of intellectual and moral force for the world. It stayed the flood of corruption; rebuked the vices of the times; fearlessly opposed tyrannical cruelty; founded institutions of charity and public benefit; prolonged the existence of the Roman empire; rescued the literary treasures of antiquity; carried the gospel to the barbarians, and undertook to educate and civilize their rude and vigorous hordes. Out of the mass of mediocrities tower the great church teachers of the fourth and fifth centuries, combining all the learning, the talent, and the piety of the time, and through their immortal writings mightily moulding the succeeding ages of the world.

 

52. The Lower Clergy

As the authority and influence of the bishops, after the accession of Constantine, increased, the lower clergy became more and more dependent upon them. The episcopate and the presbyterate were now rigidly distinguished. And yet the memory of their primitive identity lingered. Jerome, at the end of the fourth century, reminds the bishops that they owe their elevation above the presbyters, not so much to Divine institution as to ecclesiastical usage; for before the outbreak of controversies in the church there was no distinction between the two, except that presbyter is a term of age, and bishop a term of official dignity; but when men, at the instigation of Satan, erected parties and sects, and, instead of simply following Christ, named themselves of Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, all agreed to put one of the presbyters at the head of the rest, that by his universal supervision of the churches, he might kill the seeds of division. The great commentators of the Greek church agree with Jerome in maintaining the original identity of bishops and presbyters in the New Testament.

In the episcopal or cathedral churches the Presbyters still formed the council of the bishop. In town and country congregations, where no bishop officiated, they were more independent. Preaching, administration of the sacraments, and care of souls were their functions. In. North Africa they were for a long time not allowed to preach in the presence of the bishop; until Augustine was relieved by his bishop of this restriction. The seniores plebis in the African church of the fourth and fifth centuries were not clergymen, but civil personages and other prominent members of the congregation.

In the fourth century arose the office of archpresbyter, whose duty it was to preside over the worship, and sometimes to take the place of the bishop in his absence or incapacity.

The Deacons, also called Levites, retained the same functions which they had held in the preceding period. In the West, they alone, not the lectors, were allowed to read in public worship the lessons from the Gospels; which, containing the words of the Lord, were placed above the Epistles, or the words of the apostles. They were also permitted to baptize and to preach. After the pattern of the church in Jerusalem, the number of deacons, even in large congregations, was limited to seven; though not rigidly, for the cathedral of Constantinople had, under Justinian I., besides sixty presbyters, a hundred deacons, forty deaconesses, ninety subdeacons, a hundred and ten lectors, twenty-five precentors, and a hundred janitors — a total of five hundred and twenty-five officers. Though subordinate to the presbyters, the deacons frequently stood in close relations with the bishop, and exerted a greater influence. Hence they not rarely looked upon ordination to the presbyterate as a degradation. After the beginning of the fourth century an archdeacon stood at the head of the college, the most confidential adviser of the bishop, his representative and legate, and not seldom his successor in office. Thus Athanasius first appears as archdeacon of Alexandria at the council of Nice, clothed with important influence; and upon the death of the latter he succeeds to the patriarchal chair of Alexandria.

The office of Deaconess, which, under the strict separation of the sexes in ancient times, and especially in Greece, was necessary to the completion of the diaconate, and which originated in the apostolic age, continued in the Eastern church down to the twelfth century. It was frequently occupied by the widows of clergymen or the wives of bishops, who were obliged to demit the married state before entering upon their sacred office. Its functions were the care of the female poor, sick, and imprisoned, assisting in the baptism of adult women, and, in the country churches of the East, perhaps also of the West, the preparation of women for baptism by private instruction. Formerly, from regard to the apostolic precept in 1Ti_5:9, the deaconesses were required to be sixty years of age. The general council of Chalcedon, however, in 451, reduced the canonical age to forty years, and in the fifteenth canon ordered: “No female shall be consecrated deaconess before she is forty years old, and not then without careful probation. If, however, after having received consecration, and having been some time in the service, she marry, despising the grace of God, she with her husband shall be anathematized.” The usual ordination prayer in the consecration of deaconesses, according to the Apostolic Constitutions, runs thus: “Eternal God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of man and woman, who didst fill Miriam and Deborah and Hannah and Huldah with the Spirit, and didst not disdain to suffer thine only-begotten Son to be born of a woman; who also in the tabernacle and the temple didst appoint women keepers of thine holy gates: look down now upon this thine handmaid, who is designated to the office of deacon, and grant her the Holy Ghost, and cleanse her from all filthiness of the flesh and of the spirit, that she may worthily execute the work intrusted to her, to thine honor and to the praise of thine Anointed; to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be honor and adoration forever. Amen.”

The noblest type of an apostolic deaconess, which has come down to us from this period, is Olympias, the friend of Chrysostom, and the recipient of seventeen beautiful epistles from him. She sprang from a respectable heathen family, but received a Christian education; was beautiful and wealthy; married in her seventeenth year (a.d. 384) the prefect of Constantinople, Nebridius; but in twenty months after was left a widow, and remained so in spite of the efforts of the emperor Theodosius to unite her with one of his own kindred. She became a deaconess; lived in rigid asceticism; devoted her goods to the poor; and found her greatest pleasure in doing good. When Chrysostom came to Constantinople, he became her pastor, and guided her lavish benefaction by wise counsel. She continued faithful to him in his misfortune; survived him by several years, and died in 420, lamented by all the poor and needy in the city and in the country around.

In the West, on the contrary, the office of deaconess was first shorn of its clerical character by a prohibition of ordination passed by the Gallic councils in the fifth and sixth centuries; and at last it was wholly abolished. The second synod of Orleans, in 533, ordained in its eighteenth canon: “No woman shall henceforth receive the benedictio diaconalis [which had been substituted for ordinatio], on account of the weakness of this sex.” The reason betrays the want of good deaconesses, and suggests the connection of this abolition of an apostolic institution with the introduction of the celibacy of the priesthood, which seemed to be endangered by every sort of female society. The adoption of the care of the poor and sick by the state, and the cessation of adult baptisms and of the custom of immersion, also made female assistance less needful. In modern times, the Catholic church, it is true, has special societies or orders of women, like the Sisters of Mercy, for the care of the sick and poor, the training of children, and other objects of practical charity; and in the bosom of Protestantism also similar benevolent associations have arisen, under the name of Deaconess Institutes, or Sisters’ Houses, though in the more free evangelical spirit, and without the bond of a vow. But, though quite kindred in their object, these associations are not to be identified with the office of deaconess in the apostolic age and in the ancient church. That was a regular, standing office in every Christian congregation, corresponding to the office of deacon; and has never since the twelfth century been revived, though the local work of charity has never ceased.

To the ordinary clergy there were added in this period sundry extraordinary church offices, rendered necessary by the multiplication of religious functions in large cities and dioceses:

1. Stewards. These officers administered the church property under the supervision of the bishop, and were chosen in part from the clergy, in part from such of the laity as were versed in law. In Constantinople the “great steward” was a person of considerable rank, though not a clergyman. The council of Chalcedon enjoined upon every episcopal diocese the appointment of such officers, and the selection of them from the clergy, “that the economy of the church might not be irresponsible, and thereby the church property be exposed to waste and the clerical dignity be brought into ill repute.” For conducting the litigation of the church, sometimes a special advocate, called the ἔκδικος, or defensor, was appointed.

2. Secretaries, for drawing the protocols in public ecclesiastical transactions (gesta ecclesiastica). They were usually clergymen, or such as had prepared themselves for the service of the church.

3. Nurses or Parabolani, especially in connection with the larger church hospitals. Their office was akin to that of the deacons, but had more reference to the bodily assistance than to the spiritual care of the sick. In Alexandria, by the fifth century, these officers formed a great guild of six hundred members, and were not rarely misemployed as a standing army of episcopal domination. Hence, upon a complaint of the citizens of Alexandria against them, to the emperor Theodosius II., their number were reduced to five hundred. In the West they were never introduced.

4. Buriers of the Dead likewise belonged among these ordines minores of the church. Under Theodosius II. there were more than a thousand of them in Constantinople.

 

53. The Bishops

The bishops now stood with sovereign power at the head of the clergy and of their dioceses. They had come to be universally regarded as the vehicles and propagators of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and the teachers and lawgivers of the church in all matters of faith and discipline. The specific distinction between them and the presbyters was carried into everything; while yet it is worthy of remark, that Jerome, Chrysostom, and Theodoret, just the most eminent exegetes of the ancient church, expressly acknowledged the original identity of the two offices in the New Testament, and consequently derive the proper episcopate, not from divine institution, but only from church usage.

The traditional participation of the people in the election, which attested the popular origin of the episcopal office, still continued, but gradually sank to a mere formality, and at last became entirely extinct. The bishops filled their own vacancies, and elected and ordained the clergy. Besides ordination, as the medium for communicating the official gifts, they also claimed from the presbyters in the West, after the fifth century, the exclusive prerogatives of confirming the baptized and consecrating the chrism or holy ointment used in baptism. In the East, on the contrary, confirmation (the chrism) is performed also by the presbyters, and, according to the ancient custom, immediately follows baptism.

To this spiritual preëminence of the bishops was now added, from the time of Constantine, a civil importance. Through the union of the church with the state, the bishops became at the same time state officials of weight, and enjoyed the various privileges which accrued to the church from this connection. They had thenceforth an independent and legally valid jurisdiction; they held supervision of the church estates, which were sometimes very considerable, and they had partial charge even of the city, property; they superintended the morals of the people, and even of the emperor; and they exerted influence upon the public legislation. They were exempt from civil jurisdiction, and could neither be brought as witnesses before a court nor be compelled to take an oath. Their dioceses grew larger, and their power and revenues increased. Dominus beatissimus (μακαριώτατος), sanctissimus (ἁγιώτατος), or reverendissimus, Beatitudo or Sanctitas tua, and similar high-sounding titles, passed into universal use. Kneeling, kissing of the hand, and like tokens of reverence, came to be shown them by all classes, up to the emperor himself. Chrysostom, at the end of the fourth century, says: “The heads of the empire (hyparchs) and the governors of provinces (toparchs) enjoy no such honor as the rulers of the church. They are first at court, in the society of ladies, in the houses of the great. No one has precedence of them.”

To this position corresponded the episcopal insignia, which from the fourth century became common: the ring, as the symbol of the espousal of the bishop to the church; the crosier or shepherd’s staff (also called crook, because it was generally curved at the top); and the pallium, a shoulder cloth, after the example of the ephod of the Jewish high-priest, and perhaps of the sacerdotal mantle worn by the Roman emperors as pontifices maximi. The pallium is a seamless cloth hanging over the shoulders, formerly of white linen, in the West subsequently of white lamb’s wool, with four red or black crosses wrought in it with silk. According to the present usage of the Roman church the wool is taken from the lambs of St. Agnes, which are every year solemnly blessed and sacrificed by the pope in memory of this pure virgin. Hence the later symbolical meaning of the pallium, as denoting the bishop’s following of Christ, the good Shepherd, with the lost and reclaimed sheep upon his shoulders. Alexandrian tradition traced this vestment to the evangelist Mark; but Gregory Nazianzen expressly says that it was first given by Constantine the Great to the bishop Macarius of Jerusalem. In the East it was worn by all bishops, in the West by archbishops only, on whom, from the time of Gregory I., it was conferred by the pope on their accession to office. At first the investiture was gratuitous, but afterward came to involve a considerable fee, according to the revenues of the archbishopric.

As the bishop united in himself all the rights and privileges of the clerical office, so he was expected to show himself a model in the discharge of its duties and a follower of the great Archbishop and Archshepherd of the sheep. He was expected to exhibit in a high degree the ascetic virtues, especially that of virginity, which, according to Catholic ethics, belongs to the idea of moral perfection. Many a bishop, like Athanasius, Basil, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Martin of Tours, lived in rigid abstinence and poverty, and devoted his income to religious and charitable objects.

But this very power and this temporal advantage of the episcopate became also a lure for avarice and ambition, and a temptation to the lordly and secular spirit. For even under the episcopal mantle the human heart still beat, with all those weaknesses and passions, which can only be overcome by the continual influence of Divine grace. There were metropolitans and patriarchs, especially in Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome, who, while yet hardly past the age of persecution, forgot the servant form of the Son of God and the poverty of his apostles and martyrs, and rivalled the most exalted civil officials, nay, the emperor himself, in worldly pomp and luxury. Not seldom were the most disgraceful intrigues employed to gain the holy office. No wonder, says Ammianus, that for so splendid a prize as the bishopric of Rome, men strive with the utmost passion and persistence, when rich presents from ladies and a more than imperial sumptuousness invite them. The Roman prefect, Praetextatus, declared jestingly to the bishop Damasus, who had obtained the office through a bloody battle of parties, that for such a price he would at once turn Christian himself. Such an example could not but shed its evil influence on the lower clergy of the great cities. Jerome sketches a sarcastic description of the Roman priests, who squandered all their care on dress and perfumery, curled their hair with crisping pins, wore sparkling rings, paid far too great attention to women, and looked more like bridegrooms than like clergymen. And in the Greek church it was little better. Gregory Nazianzen, himself a bishop, and for a long time patriarch of Constantinople, frequently mourns the ambition, the official jealousies, and the luxury of the hierarchy, and utters the wish that the bishops might be distinguished only by a higher grade of virtue.



Vol. 3, Chapter V (Cont’d) – The Papacy

60. 

Literature, as in §55, and vol. i. §110.

At last the Roman bishop, on the ground of his divine institution, and as successor of Peter, the prince of the apostles, advanced his claim to be primate of the entire church, and visible representative of Christ, who is the invisible supreme head of the Christian world. This is the strict and exclusive sense of the title, Pope.

Properly speaking, this claim has never been fully realized, and remains to this day an apple of discord in the history of the church. Greek Christendom has never acknowledged it, and Latin, only under manifold protests, which at last conquered in the Reformation, and deprived the papacy forever of the best part of its domain. The fundamental fallacy of the Roman system is, that it identifies papacy and church, and therefore, to be consistent, must unchurch not only Protestantism, but also the entire Oriental church from its origin down. By the “una sancta catholica apostolica ecclesia” of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed is to be understood the whole body of Catholic Christians, of which the ecclesia Romana, like the churches of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, is only one of the most prominent branches. The idea of the papacy, and its claims to the universal dominion of the church, were distinctly put forward, it is true, so early as the period before us, but could not make themselves good beyond the limits of the West. Consequently the papacy, as a historical fact, or so far as it has been acknowledged, is properly nothing more than the Latin patriarchate run to absolute monarchy.

By its advocates the papacy is based not merely upon church usage, like the metropolitan and patriarchal power, but upon divine right; upon the peculiar position which Christ assigned to Peter in the well-known words: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church.” This passage was at all times taken as an immovable exegetical rock for the papacy. The popes themselves appealed to it, times without number, as the great proof of the divine institution of a visible and infallible central authority in the church. According to this view, the primacy is before the apostolate, the head before the body, instead of the reverse.

But, in the first place, this preëminence of Peter did not in the least affect the independence of the other apostles. Paul especially, according to the clear testimony of his epistles and the book of Acts, stood entirely upon his own authority, and even on one occasion, at Antioch, took strong ground against Peter. Then again, the personal position of Peter by no means yields the primacy to the Roman bishop, without the twofold evidence, first that Peter was actually in Rome, and then that he transferred his prerogatives to the bishop of that city. The former fact rests upon a universal tradition of the early church, which at that time no one doubted, but is in part weakened and neutralized by the absence of any clear Scripture evidence, and by the much more certain fact, given in the New Testament itself, that Paul labored in Rome, and that in no position of inferiority or subordination to any higher authority than that of Christ himself. The second assumption, of the transfer of the primacy to the Roman bishops, is susceptible of neither historical nor exegetical demonstration, and is merely an inference from the principle that the successor in office inherits all the official prerogatives of his predecessor. But even granting both these intermediate links in the chain of the papal theory, the double question yet remains open: first, whether the Roman bishop be the only successor of Peter, or share this honor with the bishops of Jerusalem and Antioch, in which places also Peter confessedly resided; and secondly, whether the primacy involve at the same time a supremacy of jurisdiction over the whole church, or be only an honorary primacy among patriarchs of equal authority and rank. The former was the Roman view; the latter was the Greek.

An African bishop, Cyprian († 258), was the first to give to that passage of the 16th of Matthew, innocently as it were, and with no suspicion of the future use and abuse of his view, a papistic interpretation, and to bring out clearly the idea of a perpetual cathedra Petri. The same Cyprian, however, whether consistently or not, was at the same time equally animated with the consciousness of episcopal equality and independence, afterward actually came out in bold opposition to Pope Stephen in a doctrinal controversy on the validity of heretical baptism, and persisted in this protest to his death.

 

61. Opinions of the Fathers

A complete collection of the patristic utterances on the primacy of Peter and his successors, though from the Roman point of view, may be found in the work of Rev. Jos. Berington and Rev. John Kirk: “The Faith of Catholics confirmed by Scripture and attested by the Fathers of the first five centuries of the Church,” 3d ed., London, 1846, vol. ii. p. 1-112. Comp. the works quoted sub §55, and a curious article of Prof. Ferd. Piper, on Rome, the eternal city, in the Evang. Jahrbuch for 1864, p. 17-120, where the opinions of the fathers on the claims of the urbs aeterna and its many fortunes are brought out.

We now pursue the development of this idea in the church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. In general they agree in attaching to Peter a certain primacy over the other apostles, and in considering him the foundation of the church in virtue of his confession of the divinity of Christ; while they hold Christ to be, in the highest sense, the divine ground and rock of the church. And herein lies a solution of their apparent self-contradiction in referring the petra in Mat_16:18, now to the person of Peter, now to his confession, now to Christ. Then, as the bishops in general were regarded as successors of the apostles, the fathers saw in the Roman bishops, on the ground of the ancient tradition of the martyrdom of Peter in Rome, the successor of Peter and the heir of the primacy. But respecting the nature and prerogatives of this primacy their views were very indefinite and various. It is remarkable that the reference of the rock to Christ, which Augustine especially defended with great earnestness, was acknowledged even by the greatest pope of the middle ages, Gregory VII., in the famous inscription he sent with a crown to the emperor Rudolph: “Petra [i.e., Christ] dedit Petro [i.e., to the apostle], Petrus [the pope] diadema Rudolpho.” It is worthy of notice, that the post-Nicene, as well as the ante-Nicene fathers, with all their reverence for the Roman see, regarded the heathenish title of Rome, urbs aeterna, as blasphemous, with reference to the passage of the woman sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, Rev_17:3. The prevailing opinion seems to have been, that Rome and the Roman empire would fall before the advent of Antichrist and the second coming of the Lord.

1. The views of the Latin fathers.

The Cyprianic idea was developed primarily in North Africa, where it was first clearly pronounced.

Optatus, bishop of Milevi, the otherwise unknown author of an anti-Donatist work about a.d. 384, is, like Cyprian, thoroughly possessed with the idea of the visible unity of the church; declares it without qualification the highest good, and sees its plastic expression and its surest safeguard in the immovable cathedra Petri, the prince of the apostles, the keeper of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, who, in spite of his denial of Christ, continued in that relation to the other apostles, that the unity of the church might appear in outward fact as an unchangeable thing, invulnerable to human offence. All these prerogatives have passed to the bishops of Rome, as the successors of this apostle.

Ambrose of Milan († 397) speaks indeed in very high terms of the Roman church, and concedes to its bishops a religious magistracy like the political power of the emperors of pagan Rome; yet he calls the primacy of Peter only a “primacy of confession, not of honor; of faith, not of rank,” and places the apostle Paul on an equality with Peter. Of any dependence of Ambrose, or of the bishops of Milan in general during the first six centuries, on the jurisdiction of Rome, no trace is to be found.

Jerome († 419), the most learned commentator among the Latin fathers, vacillates in his explanation of the petra; now, like Augustine, referring it to Christ, now to Peter and his confession. In his commentary on Mat_16:1-28, he combines the two interpretations thus: “As Christ gave light to the apostles, so that they were called, after him, the light of the world, and as they received other designations from the Lord; so Simon, because he believed on the rock, Christ, received the name Peter, and in accordance with the figure of the rock, it is justly said to him: ‘I will build my church upon thee (super te).’” He recognizes in the Roman bishop the successor of Peter, but advocates elsewhere the equal rights of the bishops, and in fact derives even the episcopal office, not from direct divine institution, but from the usage of the church and from the presidency in the presbyterium. He can therefore be cited as a witness, at most, for a primacy of honor, not for a supremacy of jurisdiction. Beyond this even the strongest passage of his writings, in a letter to his friend, Pope Damasus (a.d. 376), does not go: “Away with the ambition of the Roman head; I speak with the successor of the fisherman and disciple of the cross. Following no other head than Christ, I am joined in the communion of faith with thy holiness, that is, with the chair of Peter. On that rock I know the church to be built.” Subsequently this father, who himself had an eye on the papal chair, fell out with the Roman clergy, and retired to the ascetic and literary solitude of Bethlehem, where he served the church by his pen far better than he would have done as the successor of Damasus.

Augustine († 430), the greatest theological authority of the Latin church, at first referred the words, “On this rock I will build my church,” to the person of Peter, but afterward expressly retracted this interpretation, and considered the petra to be Christ, on the ground of a distinction between petra (ἐπὶ ταύτῃ τῇ πέτρᾳ) and Petrus (σὺ εἶ Πέτρος); a distinction which Jerome also makes, though with the intimation that it is not properly applicable to the Hebrew and Syriac Cephas. “I have somewhere said of St. Peter” thus Augustine corrects himself in his Retractations at the close of his life — “that the church is built upon him as the rock; a thought which is sung by many in the verses of St. Ambrose:

‘Hoc ipsa petra ecclesiae

Canente, culpam diluit.’

(The Rock of the church himself

In the cock-crowing atones his guilt.)

But I know that I have since frequently said, that the word of the Lord, ‘Thou art Petrus, and on this petra I will build my church,’ must be understood of him, whom Peter confessed as Son of the living God; and Peter, so named after this rock, represents the person of the church, which is founded on this rock and has received the keys of the kingdom of heaven. For it was not said to him: ‘Thou art a rock’ (petra), but, ‘Thou art Peter’ (Petrus); and the rock was Christ, through confession of whom Simon received the name of Peter. Yet the reader may decide which of the two interpretations is the more probable.” In the same strain he says, in another place: “Peter, in virtue of the primacy of his apostolate, stands, by a figurative generalization, for the church …. When it was said to him, ‘I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,’ etc., he represented the whole church, which in this world is assailed by various temptations, as if by floods and storms, yet does not fall, because it is founded upon a rock, from which Peter received his name. For the rock is not so named from Peter, but Peter from the rock (non enim a Petro petra, sed Petrus a petra), even as Christ is not so called after the Christian, but the Christian after Christ. For the reason why the Lord says, ‘On this rock I will build my church’ is that Peter had said: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,’ On this rock, which then hast confessed, says he will build my church. For Christ was the rock (petra enim erat Christus), upon which also Peter himself was built; for other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Thus the church, which is built upon Christ, has received from him, in the person of Peter, the keys of heaven; that is, the power of binding and loosing sins.” This Augustinian interpretation of the petra has since been revived by some Protestant theologians in the cause of anti-Romanism. Augustine, it is true, unquestionably understood by the church the visible Catholic church, descended from the apostles, especially from Peter, through the succession of bishops; and according to the usage of his time he called the Roman church by eminence the sedes apostolica. But on the other hand, like Cyprian and Jerome, he lays stress upon the essential unity of the episcopate, and insists that the keys of the kingdom of heaven were committed not to a single man, but to the whole church, which Peter was only set to represent. With this view agrees the independent position of the North African church in the time of Augustine toward Rome, as we have already observed it in the case of the appeal of Apiarius, and as it appears in the Pelagian controversy, of which Augustine was the leader. This father, therefore, can at all events be cited only as a witness to the limited authority of the Roman chair. And it should also, in justice, be observed, that in his numerous writings he very rarely speaks of that authority at all, and then for the most part incidentally; showing that he attached far less importance to this matter than the Roman divines.

The later Latin fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries prefer the reference of the petra to Peter and his confession, and transfer his prerogatives to the Roman bishops as his successors, but produce no new arguments. Among them we mention Maximus of Turin (about 450), who, however, like Ambrose, places Paul on a level with Peter; then Orosius, and several popes; above all Leo, of whom we shall speak more fully in the following section.

2. As to the Greek fathers: Eusebius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil, the two Gregories, Ephraim, Syrus, Asterius, Cyril of Alexandria, Chrysostom, and Theodoret refer the petra now to the confession, now to the person, of Peter; sometimes to both. They speak of this apostle uniformly in very lofty terms, at times in rhetorical extravagance, calling him the “coryphaeus of the choir of apostles,” the prince of the apostles,” the “tongue of the apostles,” the “bearer of the keys,” the “keeper of the kingdom of heaven,” the “pillar,” the “rock,” the “firm foundation of the church.” But, in the first place, they understand by all this simply an honorary primacy of Peter, to whom that power was but first committed, which the Lord afterward conferred on all the apostles alike; and, in the second place, they by no means favor an exclusive transfer of this prerogative to the bishop of Rome, but claim it also for the bishops of Antioch, where Peter, according to Gal. ii., sojourned a long time, and where, according to tradition, he was bishop, and appointed a successor.

So Chrysostom, for instance, calls Ignatius of Antioch a “successor of Peter, on whom, after Peter, the government of the church devolved,” and in another place says still more distinctly: “Since I have named Peter, I am reminded of another Peter [Flavian, bishop of Antioch], our common father and teacher, who has inherited as well the virtues as the chair of Peter. Yea, for this is the privilege of this city of ours [Antioch], to have first (ἐν ἀρξῇ) had the coryphaeus of the apostles for its teacher. For it was proper that the city, where the Christian name originated, should receive the first of the apostles for its pastor. But after we had him for our teacher, we did not retain him, but transferred him to imperial Rome.”

Theodoret also, who, like Chrysostom, proceeded from the Antiochian school, says of the “great city of Antioch,” that it has the “throne of Peter.” In a letter to Pope Leo he speaks, it is true, in very extravagant terms of Peter and his successors at Rome, in whom all the conditions, external and internal, of the highest eminence and control in the church are combined. But in the same epistle he remarks, that the “thrice blessed and divine double star of Peter and Paul rose in the East and shed its rays in every direction;” in connection with which it must be remembered that he was at that time seeking protection in Leo against the Eutychian robber-council of Ephesus (449), which had unjustly deposed both himself and Flavian of Constantinople.

His bitter antagonist also, the arrogant and overbearing Cyril of Alexandria, descended some years before, in his battle against Nestorius, to unworthy flattery, and called Pope Coelestine “the archbishop of the whole [Roman] world.” The same prelates, under other circumstances, repelled with proud indignation the encroachments of Rome on their jurisdiction.

 

62. The Decrees of Councils on the Papal Authority

Much more important than the opinions of individual fathers are the formal decrees of the councils.

First mention here belongs to the council of Sardica in Illyria (now Sofia in Bulgaria) in 343, during the Arian controversy. This council is the most favorable of all to the Roman claims. In the interest of the deposed Athanasius and of the Nicene orthodoxy it decreed:

(1) That a deposed bishop, who feels he has a good cause, may apply, out of reverence to the memory of the apostle Peter, to the Roman bishop Julius, and shall leave it with him either to ratify the deposition or to summon a new council.

(2) That the vacant bishopric shall not be filled till the decision of Rome be received.

(3) That the Roman bishop, in such a case of appeal, may, according to his best judgment, either institute a new trial by the bishops of a neighboring province, or send delegates to the spot with full power to decide the matter with the bishops.

Thus was plainly committed to the Roman bishops an appellate and revisory jurisdiction in the case of a condemned or deposed bishop even of the East. But in the first place this authority is not here acknowledged as a right already existing in practice. It is conferred as a new power, and that merely as an honorary right, and as pertaining only to the bishop Julius in person. Otherwise, either this bishop would not be expressly named, or his successors would be named with him. Furthermore, the canons limit the appeal to the case of a bishop deposed by his comprovincials, and say nothing of other cases. Finally, the council of Sardica was not a general council, but only a local synod of the West, and could therefore establish no law for the whole church. For the Eastern bishops withdrew at the very beginning, and held an opposition council in the neighboring town of Philippopolis; and the city of Sardica, too, with the praefecture of Illyricum, at that time belonged to the Western empire and the Roman patriarchate: it was not detached from them till 379. The council was intended, indeed, to be ecumenical; but it consisted at first of only a hundred and seventy bishops, and after the recession of the seventy-six Orientals, it had only ninety-four; and even by the two hundred signatures of absent bishops, mostly Egyptian, to whom the acts were sent for their approval, the East, and even the Latin Africa, with its three hundred bishoprics, were very feebly represented. It was not sanctioned by the emperor Constantius, and has by no subsequent authority been declared ecumenical. Accordingly its decrees soon fell into oblivion, and in the further course of the Arian controversy, and even throughout the Nestorian, where the bishops of Alexandria, and not those of Rome, were evidently at the head of the orthodox sentiment, they were utterly unnoticed. The general councils of 381, 451, and 680 knew nothing of such a supreme appellate tribunal, but unanimously enacted, that all ecclesiastical matters, without exception, should first be decided in the provincial councils, with the right of appeal — not to the bishop of Rome, but to the patriarch of the proper diocese. Rome alone did not forget the Sardican decrees, but built on this single precedent a universal right. Pope Zosimus, in the case of the deposed presbyter Apiarius of Sicca (a.d. 417-418), made the significant mistake of taking the Sardican decrees for Nicene, and thus giving them greater weight than they really possessed; but he was referred by the Africans to the genuine text of the Nicene canon. The later popes, however, transcended the Sardican decrees, withdrawing from the provincial council, according to the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, the right of deposing a bishop, which had been allowed by Sardica, and vesting it, as a causa major, exclusively in themselves.

Finally, in regard to the four great ecumenical councils, the first of Nice, the first of Constantinople, that of Ephesus, and that of Chalcedon: we have already presented their position on this question in connection with their legislation on the patriarchal system. We have seen that they accord to the bishop of Rome a precedence of honor among the five officially coequal patriarchs, and thus acknowledge him primus inter pares, but, by that very concession, disallow his claims to supremacy of jurisdiction, and to monarchical authority over the entire church. The whole patriarchal system, in fact, was not monarchy, but oligarchy. Hence the protest of the Roman delegates and of Pope Leo against the decrees of the council of Chalcedon in 451, which coincided with that of Constantinople in 381. This protest was insufficient to annul the decree, and in the East it made no lasting impression; for the subsequent incidental concessions of Greek patriarchs and emperors, like that of the usurper Phocas in 606, and even of the sixth ecumenical council of Constantinople in 680, to the see of Rome, have no general significance, but are distinctly traceable to special circumstances and prejudices.

It is, therefore, an undeniable historical fact, that the greatest dogmatic and legislative authorities of the ancient church bear as decidedly against the specific papal claims of the Roman bishopric, is in favor of its patriarchal rights and an honorary primacy in the patriarchal oligarchy. The subsequent separation of the Greek church from the Latin proves to this day, that she was never willing to sacrifice her independence to Rome, or to depart from the decrees of her own greatest councils.

Here lies the difference, however, between the Greek and the Protestant opposition to the universal monarchy of the papacy. The Greek church protested against it from the basis of the oligarchical patriarchal hierarchy of the fifth century; in an age, therefore, and upon a principle of church organization, which preceded the grand agency of the papacy in the history of the world. The evangelical church protests against it on the basis of a freer conception of Christianity, seeing in the papacy an institution, which indeed formed the legitimate development of the patriarchal system, and was necessary for the training of the Romanic and Germanic Nations of the middle ages, but which has virtually fulfilled its mission and outlived itself. The Greek church never had a papacy; the evangelical historically implies one. The papacy stands between the age of the patriarchal hierarchy and the age of the Reformation, like the Mosaic theocracy between the patriarchal period and the advent of Christianity. Protestantism rejects at once the papal monarchy and the patriarchal oligarchy, and thus can justify the former as well as the latter for a certain time and a certain stage in the progress of the Christian world.

 

63. Leo the Great. a.d. 440-461

I. St. Leo Magnus

Opera omnia (sermones et epistolae), ed. Paschas. Quesnel., Par. 1675, 2 vols. 4to. (Gallican, and defending Hilary against Leo, hence condemned by the Roman Index); and ed. Petr. et Hieron. Ballerini (two very learned brothers and presbyters, who wrote at the request of Pope Benedict XIV.), Venet. 1753-1757, 3 vols. fol. (Vol. i. contains 96 Sermons and 173 Epistles, the two other volumes doubtful writings and learned dissertations.) This edition is reprinted in Migne’s Patrologiae Cursus completus, vol. 54-57, Par. 1846.

Friedrich (old Cath.): Zur ältesten Geschichte des Primates in der Kirche. Bonn, 1879. Jos. Langen (old Cath.): Geschichte der röm. Kirche bis zum Pontificate Leo’s I. Bonn, 1881. Karl Müller in Herzog2, viii. (1881), 551-563. C. Gore, in Smith and Wace, iii. (1882), 652-673. By the same: Leo the Great (Lond. Soc. for Promoting Christ Knowledge, 175 pages). On the literary merits of Leo, see Ebert: Geschichte der christl. Lat. Lit., vol. i. 447-449.

 

II. Acta Sanctorum

sub Apr. 11 (Apr. tom. ii. p. 14-30, brief and unsatisfactory). Tillemont: Mem. t. xv. p. 414-832 (very full). Butler: Lives of the Saints, sub Apr. 11. W. A. Arendt (R.C.): Leo der Grosse u. seine Zeit, Mainz, 1835 (apologetic and panegyric). Edw. Perthel: P. Leo’s I. Leben u. Lehren, Jena, 1843 (Protestant). Fr. Böhringer: Die Kirche Christi u. ihre Zeugen, Zürich, 1846, vol. i. div. 4, p. 170-309. Ph. Jaffé: Regesta Pontif. Rom., Berol. 1851, p. 34 sqq. Comp. also Greenwood: Cathedra Petri, Lond. 1859, vol. i. bk. ii. chap. iv.-vi. (The Leonine Period); and H. H. Milman: Hist. of Latin Christianity, Lond. and New York, 1860, vol. i. bk. ii. ch. iv.

 

Leo the Great

In most of the earlier bishops of Rome the person is eclipsed by the office. The spirit of the age and public opinion rule the bishops, not the bishops them. In the preceding period, Victor in the controversy on Easter, Callistus in that on the restoration of the lapsed, and Stephen in that on heretical baptism, were the first to come out with hierarchical arrogance; but they were somewhat premature, and found vigorous resistance in Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Cyprian, though on all three questions the Roman view at last carried the day.

In the period before us, Damasus, who subjected Illyria to the Roman jurisdiction, and established the authority of the Vulgate, and Siricius, who issued the first genuine decretal letter, trod in the steps of those predecessors. Innocent I. (402-417) took a step beyond, and in the Pelagian controversy ventured the bold assertion, that in the whole Christian world nothing should be decided without the cognizance of the Roman see, and that, especially in matters of faith, all bishops must turn to St. Peter.

But the first pope, in the proper sense of the word, is Leo I., who justly bears the title of “the Great” in the history of the Latin hierarchy. In him the idea of the Papacy, as it were, became flesh and blood. He conceived it in great energy and clearness, and carried it out with the Roman spirit of dominion, so far as the circumstances of the time at all allowed. He marks the same relative epoch in the development of the papacy, as Cyprian in the history of the episcopate. He had even a higher idea of the prerogatives of the see of Rome than Gregory the Great, who, though he reigned a hundred and fifty years later, represents rather the patriarchal idea than the papal. Leo was at the same time the first important theologian in the chair of Rome, surpassing in acuteness and depth of thought all his predecessors, and all his successors down to Gregory I. Benedict XIV. placed him (a.d. 1744) in the small class of doctores ecclesiae, or authoritative teachers of the catholic faith. He battled with the Manichaean, the Priscillianist, the Pelagian, and other heresies, and won an immortal name as the finisher of the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ.

The time and place of the birth and earlier life of Leo are unknown. His letters, which are the chief source of information, commence not before the year 442. Probably a Roman — if not one by birth, he was certainly a Roman in the proud dignity of his spirit and bearing, the high order of his legislative and administrative talent, and the strength and energy of his will — he distinguished himself first under Coelestine (423-432) and Sixtus III. (432-440) as archdeacon and legate of the Roman church. After the death of the latter, and while himself absent in Gaul, he was elected pope by the united voice of clergy, senate, and people, and continued in that office one-and-twenty years (440-461). His feelings at the assumption of this high office, he himself thus describes in one of his sermons: “Lord, I have beard your voice calling me, and I was afraid: I considered the work which was enjoined on me, and I trembled. For what proportion is there between the burden assigned to me and my weakness, this elevation and my nothingness? What is more to be feared than exaltation without merit, the exercise of the most holy functions being intrusted to one who is buried in sin? Oh, you have laid upon me this heavy burden, bear it with me, I beseech you be you my guide and my support.”

During the time of his pontificate he was almost the only great man in the Roman empire, developed extraordinary activity, and took a leading part in all the affairs of the church. His private life is entirely unknown, and we have no reason to question the purity of his motives or of his morals. His official zeal, and all his time and strength, were devoted to the interests of Christianity. But with him the interests of Christianity were identical with the universal dominion of the Roman church.

He was animated with the unwavering conviction that the Lord himself had committed to him, as the successor of Peter, the care of the whole church. He anticipated all the dogmatical arguments by which the power of the papacy was subsequently established. He refers the petra, on which the church is built, to Peter and his confession. Though Christ himself — to sum up his views on the subject — is in the highest sense the rock and foundation, besides which no other can be laid, yet, by transfer of his authority, the Lord made Peter the rock in virtue of his great confession, and built on him the indestructible temple of his church. In Peter the fundamental relation of Christ to his church comes, as it were, to concrete form and reality in history. To him specially and individually the Lord intrusted the keys of the kingdom of heaven; to the other apostles only in their general and corporate capacity. For the faith of Peter the Lord specially prayed in the hour of his passion, as if the standing of the other apostles would be the firmer, if the mind of their leader remained unconquered. On Peter rests the steadfastness of the whole apostolic college in the faith. To him the Lord, after his resurrection, committed the care of his sheep and lambs. Peter is therefore the pastor and prince of the whole church, through whom Christ exercises his universal dominion on earth. This primacy, however, is not limited to the apostolic age, but, like the faith of Peter, and like the church herself, it perpetuates itself; and it perpetuates itself through the bishops of Rome, who are related to Peter as Peter was related to Christ. As Christ in Peter, so Peter in his successors lives and speaks and perpetually executes the commission: “Feed my sheep.” It was by special direction of divine providence, that Peter labored and died in Rome, and sleeps with thousands of blessed martyrs in holy ground. The center of worldly empire alone can be the center of the kingdom of God. Yet the political position of Rome would be of no importance without the religious considerations. By Peter was Rome, which had been the center of all error and superstition, transformed into the metropolis of the Christian world, and invested with a spiritual dominion far wider than her former earthly empire. Hence the bishopric of Constantinople, not being a sedes apostolica, but resting its dignity on a political basis alone, can never rival the Roman, whose primacy is rooted both in divine and human right. Antioch also, where Peter only transiently resided, and Alexandria, where he planted the church through his disciple Mark, stand only in a secondary relation to Rome, where his bones repose, and where that was completed, which in the East was only laid out. The Roman bishop is, therefore, the primus omnium episcoporum, and on him devolves the plenitudo potestatis, the solicitudo omnium pastorum, and communis cura universalis ecclesiae.

Leo thus made out of a primacy of grace and of personal fitness a primacy of right and of succession. Of his person, indeed, he speaks in his sermons with great humility, but only thereby the more to exalt his official character. He tells the Romans, that the true celebration of the anniversary of his accession is, to recognize, honor, and obey, in his lowly person, Peter himself, who still cares for shepherd and flock, and whose dignity is not lacking even to his unworthy heir. Here, therefore, we already have that characteristic combination of humility and arrogance, which has stereotyped itself in the expressions: “Servant of the servants of God,” “vicar of Christ,” and even “God upon earth.” In this double consciousness of his personal unworthiness and his official exaltation, Leo annually celebrated the day of his elevation to the chair of Peter. While Peter himself passes over his prerogative in silence, and expressly warns against hierarchical assumption, (1Pe_5:3) Leo cannot speak frequently and emphatically enough of his authority. While Peter in Antioch meekly submits to the rebuke of the junior apostle Paul, (Gal_2:11) Leo pronounces resistance to his authority to be impious pride and the sure way to hell. Obedience to the pope is thus necessary to salvation. Whosoever, says he, is not with the apostolic see, that is, with the head of the body, whence all gifts of grace descend throughout the body, is not in the body of the church, and has no part in her grace. This is the fearful but legitimate logic of the papal principle, which confines the kingdom of God to the narrow lines of a particular organization, and makes the universal spiritual reign of Christ dependent on a temporal form and a human organ. But in its very first application this papal ban proved itself a brutum fulmen, when in spite of it the Gallican archbishop Hilary, against whom it was directed, died universally esteemed and loved, and then was canonized. This very impracticability of that principle, which would exclude all Greek and Protestant Christians from the kingdom of heaven, is a refutation of the principle itself.

In carrying his idea of the papacy into effect, Leo displayed the cunning tact, the diplomatic address, and the iron consistency which characterize the greatest popes of the middle age. The circumstances in general were in his favor: the East rent by dogmatic controversies; Africa devastated by the barbarians; the West weak in a weak emperor; nowhere a powerful and pure bishop or divine, like Athanasius, Augustine, or Jerome, in the former generation; the overthrow of the Western empire at hand; a new age breaking, with new peoples, for whose childhood the papacy was just the needful school; the most numerous and last important general council convened; and the system of ecumenical orthodoxy ready to be closed with the decision concerning the relation of the two natures in Christ.

Leo first took advantage of the distractions of the North African church under the Arian Vandals, and wrote to its bishops in the tone of an acknowledged over-shepherd. Under the stress of the times, and in the absence of a towering, character like Cyprian and Augustine, the Africans submitted to his authority (443). He banished the remnants of the Manichaeans and Pelagians from Italy, and threatened the bishops with his anger, if they should not purge their churches of the heresy. In East Illyrian which was important to Rome as the ecclesiastical outpost toward Constantinople, he succeeded in regaining and establishing the supremacy, which had been acquired by Damasus, but had afterward slipped away. Anastasius of Thessalonica applied to him to be confirmed in his office. Leo granted the prayer in 444, extending the jurisdiction of Anastasius over all the Illyrian bishops, but reserving to them a right of appeal in important cases, which ought to be decided by the pope according to divine revelation. And a case to his purpose soon presented itself, in which Leo brought his vicar to feel that he was called indeed to a participation of his care, but not to a plentitude of power (plenitudo potestatis). In the affairs of the Spanish church also Leo had an opportunity to make his influence felt, when Turibius, bishop of Astorga, besought his intervention against the Priscillianists. He refuted these heretics point by point, and on the basis of his exposition the Spaniards drew up an orthodox regula fidei with eighteen anathemas against the Priscillianist error.

But in Gaul he met, as we have already, seen, with a strenuous antagonist in Hilary of Arles, and, though he called the secular power to his aid, and procured from the emperor Valentinian an edict entirely favorable to his claims, he attained but a partial victory. Still less successful was his effort to establish his primacy in the East, and to prevent his rival at Constantinople from being elevated, by the famous twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon, to official equality with himself. His earnest protest against that decree produced no lasting effect. But otherwise he had the most powerful influence in the second stage of the Christological controversy. He neutralized the tyranny of Dioscurus of Alexandria and the results of the shameful robber-council of Ephesus (449), furnished the chief occasion of the fourth ecumenical council, presided over it by his legates (which the Roman bishop had done at neither of the three councils before), and gave the turn to the final solution of its doctrinal problem by that celebrated letter to Flavian of Constantinople, the main points of which were incorporated in the new symbol. Yet he owed this influence by no means to his office alone, but most of all to his deep insight of the question, and to the masterly tact with which he held the Catholic orthodox mean between the Alexandrian and Antiochian, Eutychian and Nestorian extremes. The particulars of his connection with this important dogma belong, however, to the history of doctrine.

Besides thus shaping the polity and doctrine of the church, Leo did immortal service to the city of Rome, in twice rescuing it from destruction. When Attila, king of the Huns, the “scourge of God,” after destroying Aquileia, was seriously threatening the capital of the world (a.d. 452), Leo, with only two companions, crozier in hand, trusting in the help of God, ventured into the hostile camp, and by his venerable form, his remonstrances, and his gifts, changed the wild heathen’s purpose. The later legend, which Raphael’s pencil has employed, adorned the fact with a visible appearance of Peter and Paul, accompanying the bishop, and, with drawn sword, threatening Attila with destruction unless he should desist. A similar case occurred several years after (455), when the Vandal king Genseric, invited out of revenge by the empress Eudoxia, pushed his ravages to Rome. Leo obtained from him the promise that at least he would spare the city the infliction of murder and fire; but the barbarians subjected it to a fourteen days’ pillage, the enormous spoils of which they transported to Carthage; and afterward the pope did everything to alleviate the consequent destitution and suffering, and to restore the churches.

Leo died in 461, and was buried in the church of St. Peter. The day and circumstances of his death are unknown.

The literary works of Leo consist of ninety-six sermons and one hundred and seventy-three epistles, including epistles of others to him. They are earnest, forcible, full of thought, churchly, abounding in bold antitheses and allegorical freaks of exegesis, and sometimes heavy, turgid, and obscure in style. His collection of sermons is the first we have from a Roman bishop. In his inaugural discourse he declared preaching to be his sacred duty. The sermons are short and simple, and were delivered mostly on high festivals and on the anniversaries of his own elevation. Other works ascribed to him, such as that on the calling of all nations, which takes a middle ground on the doctrine of predestination, with the view to reconcile the Semipelagians and Augustinians, are of doubtful genuineness.



Vol. 3, Chapter V (Cont’d) – The Papacy from Leo I to Gregory I. a.d. 461-590

64. 

The first Leo and the first Gregory are the two greatest bishops of Rome in the first six centuries. Between them no important personage appears on the chair of Peter; and in the course of that intervening century the idea and the power of the papacy make no material advance. In truth, they went farther in Leo’s mind than they did in Gregory’s. Leo thought and acted as an absolute monarch; Gregory as first among the patriarchs; but both under the full conviction that they were the successors of Peter.

After the death of Leo, the archdeacon Hilary, who had represented him at the council of Ephesus, was elected to his place, and ruled (461-468) upon his principles, asserting the strict orthodoxy in the East and the authority of the primacy in Gaul.

His successor, Simplicius (468-483), saw the final dissolution of the empire under Romulus Augustulus (476), but, as he takes not the slightest notice of it in his epistles, he seems to have ascribed to it but little importance. The papal power had been rather favored than hindered in its growth by the imbecility of the latest emperors. Now, to a certain extent, it stepped into the imperial vacancy, and the successor of Peter became, in the mind of the Western nations, sole heir of the old Roman imperial succession.

On the fall of the empire the pope became the political subject of the barbarian and heretical (for they were Arian) kings; but these princes, as most of the heathen emperors had done, allowed him, either from policy, or from ignorance or indifference, entire freedom in ecclesiastical affairs. In Italy the Catholics had by far the ascendency in numbers and in culture. And the Arianism of the new rulers was rather an outward profession than an inward conviction. Odoacer, who first assumed the kingdom of Italy (476-493), was tolerant toward the orthodox faith, yet attempted to control the papal election in 483 in the interest of the state, and prohibited, under penalty of the anathema, the alienation of church property by any bishop. Twenty years later a Roman council protested against this intervention of a layman, and pronounced the above prohibition null and void, but itself passed a similar decree against the alienation of church estates.

Pope Felix II., or, according to another reckoning, III. (483-492), continued the war of his predecessor against the Monophysitism of the East, rejected the Henoticon of the emperor Zeno, as an unwarrantable intrusion of a layman in matters of faith, and ventured even the excommunication of the bishop Acacius of Constantinople. Acacius replied with a counter anathema, with the support of the other Eastern patriarchs; and the schism between the two churches lasted over thirty years, to the pontificate of Hormisdas.

Gelasius I. (492-496) clearly announced the principle, that the priestly power is above the kingly and the imperial, and that from the decisions of the chair of Peter there is no appeal. Yet from this pope we have, on the other hand, a remarkable testimony against what he pronounces the “sacrilege” of withholding the cup from the laity, the communio sub una specie.

Anastasius II. (496-498) indulged in a milder tone toward Constantinople, and incurred the suspicion of consent to its heresy.

His sudden death was followed by a contested papal election, which led to bloody encounters. The Ostrogothic king Theodoric (the Dietrich of Bern in the Niebelungenlied), the conqueror and master of Italy (493-526), and, like Odoacer, an Arian, was called into consultation in this contest, and gave his voice for Symmachus against Laurentius, because Symmachus had received the majority of votes, and had been consecrated first. But the party of Laurentius, not satisfied with this, raised against Symmachus the reproach of gross iniquities, even of adultery and of squandering the church estates. The bloody scenes were renewed, priests were murdered, cloisters were burned, and nuns were insulted. Theodoric, being again called upon by the senate for a decision, summoned a council at Rome, to which Symmachus gave his consent; and a synod, convoked by a heretical king, must decide upon the pope! In the course of the controversy several councils were held in rapid succession, the chronology of which is disputed. The most important was the synodus palmaris, the fourth council under Symmachus, held in October, 501. It acquitted this pope without investigation, on the presumption that it did not behove the council to pass judgment respecting the successor of St. Peter. In his vindication of this council — for the opposition was not satisfied with it — the deacon Ennodius, afterward bishop of Pavia († 521), gave the first clear expression to the absolutism upon which Leo had already acted: that the Roman bishop is above every human tribunal, and is responsible only to God himself. Nevertheless, even in the middle age, popes were deposed and set up by emperors and general councils. This is one of the points of dispute between the absolute papal system and the constitutional episcopal system in the Roman church, which was left unsettled even by the council of Trent.

Under Hormisdas (514-523) the Monophysite party in the Greek church was destroyed by the energetic zeal of the orthodox emperor Justin, and in 519 the union of that church with Rome was restored, after a schism of five-and-thirty years.

Theodoric offered no hinderance to the transactions and embassies, and allowed his most distinguished subject to assert his ecclesiastical supremacy over Constantinople. This semi-barbarous and heretical prince was tolerant in general, and very liberal toward the Catholic church; even rising to the principle, which has waited till the modern age for its recognition, that the power of the prince should be restricted to civil government, and should permit no trespass on the conscience of its subjects. “No one,” says he, “shall be forced to believe against his will.” Yet, toward the close of his reign, on mere political suspicion, he ordered the execution of the celebrated philosopher Boethius, with whom the old Roman literature far more worthily closes, than the Roman empire with Augustulus; and on the same ground he caused the death of the senator Symmachus and the incarceration of Pope John I. (523-526).

Almost the last act of his reign was the nomination of the worthy Felix III. (IV.) to the papal chair, after a protracted struggle of contending parties. With the appointment he issued the order that hereafter, as heretofore, the pope should be elected by clergy and people, but should be confirmed by the temporal prince before assuming his office; and with this understanding the clergy and the city gave their consent to the nomination.

Yet, in spite of this arrangement, in the election of Boniface II. (530-532) and John II. (532-535) the same disgraceful quarrelling and briberies occurred; — a sort of chronic disease in the history of the papacy.

Soon after the death of Theodoric (526) the Gothic empire fell to pieces through internal distraction and imperial weakness. Italy was conquered by Belisarius (535), and, with Africa, again incorporated with the East Roman empire, which renewed under Justinian its ancient splendor, and enjoyed a transient after-summer. And yet this powerful, orthodox emperor was a slave to the intriguing, heretical Theodora, whom he had raised from the theatre to the throne; and Belisarius likewise, his victorious general, was completely under the power of his wife Antonina.

With the conquest of Italy the popes fell into a perilous and unworthy dependence on the emperor at Constantinople, who reverenced, indeed, the Roman chair, but not less that of Constantinople, and in reality sought to use both as tools of his own state-church despotism. Agapetus (535-536) offered fearless resistance to the arbitrary course of Justinian, and successfully protested against the elevation of the Eutychian Anthimus to the patriarchal see of Constantinople. But, by the intrigues of the Monophysite empress, his successor, Pope Silverius (a son of Hormisdas, 536-538), was deposed on the charge of treasonable correspondence with the Goths, and banished to the island of Pandataria, whither the worst heathen emperors used to send the victims of their tyranny, and where in 540 he died — whether a natural or a violent death, we do not know.

Vigilius, a pliant creature of Theodora, ascended the papal chair under the military protection of Belisarius (538-554). The empress had promised him this office and a sum of money, on condition that he nullify the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, and pronounce Anthimus and his friends orthodox. The ambitious and doubled-tongued prelate accepted the condition, and accomplished the deposition, and perhaps the death, of Silverius. In his pontificate occurred the violent controversy of the three chapters and the second general council of Constantinople (553). His administration was an unprincipled vacillation between the dignity and duties of his office and subservience to an alien theological and political influence; between repeated condemnation of the three chapters in behalf of a Eutychianizing spirit, and repeated retraction of that condemnation. In Constantinople, where he resided several years at the instance of the emperor, he suffered much personal persecution, but without the spirit of martyrdom, and without its glory. For example, at least according to Western accounts, he was violently torn from the altar, upon which he was holding with both hands so firmly that the posts of the canopy fell in above him; he was dragged through the streets with a rope around his neck, and cast into a common prison; because he would not submit to the will of Justinian and his council. Yet he yielded at last, through fear of deposition. He obtained permission to return to Rome, but died in Sicily, of the stone, on his way thither (554).

Pelagius I. (554-560), by order of Justinian, whose favor he had previously gained as papal legate at Constantinople, was made successor of Vigilius, but found only two bishops ready to consecrate him. His close connection with the East, and his approval of the fifth ecumenical council, which was regarded as a partial concession to the Eutychian Christology, and, so far, an impeachment of the authority of the council of Chalcedon, alienated many Western bishops, even in Italy, and induced a temporary suspension of their connection with Rome. He issued a letter to the whole Christian world, in which he declared his entire agreement with the first four general councils, and then vindicated the fifth as in no way departing from the Chalcedonian dogma. But only by the military aid of Narses could he secure subjection; and the most refractory bishops, those of Aquileia and Milan, he sent as prisoners to Constantinople.

In these two Justinian-made popes we see how much the power of the Roman hierarchy was indebted to its remoteness from the Byzantine despotism, and how much it was injured by contact with it.

With the descent of the Arian Longobards into Italy, after 668, the popes again became more independent of the Byzantine court. They continued under tribute indeed to the ex-archs in Ravenna, as the representatives of the Greek emperors (from 554), and were obliged to have their election confirmed and their inauguration superintended by them. But the feeble hold of these officials in Italy, and the pressure of the Arian barbarians upon them, greatly favored the popes, who, being the richest proprietors, enjoyed also great political consideration in Italy, and applied their influence to the maintenance of law and order amidst the reigning confusion.

In other respects the administrations of John III. (560-573), Benedict I. (574-578), and Pelagius II. (578-590), are among the darkest and the most sterile in the annals of the papacy.

But with Gregory I. (590-604) a new period begins. Next to Leo I. he was the greatest of the ancient bishops of Rome, and he marks the transition of the patriarchal system into the strict papacy of the middle ages. For several reasons we prefer to place him at the head of the succeeding period. He came, it is true, with more modest claims than Leo, who surpassed him in boldness, energy, and consistency. He even solemnly protested, as his predecessor Pelagius II. had done, against the title of universal bishop, which the Constantinopolitan patriarch, John Jejunator, adopted at a council in 587; he declared it an antichristian assumption, in terms which quite remind us of the patriarchal equality, and seem to form a step in recession from the ground of Leo. But when we take his operations in general into view, and remember the rigid consistency of the papacy, which never forgets, we are almost justified in thinking, that this protest was directed not so much against the title itself, as against the bearer of it, and proceeded more from jealousy of a rival at Constantinople, than from sincere humility. From the same motive the Roman bishops avoided the title of patriarch, as placing them on a level with the Eastern patriarchs, and preferred the title of pope, from a sense of the specific dignity of the chair of Peter. Gregory is said to have been the first to use the humble-proud title: “Servant of the servants of God.” His successors, notwithstanding his protest, called themselves “the universal bishops” of Christendom. What he had condemned in his oriental colleagues as antichristian arrogance, the later popes considered but the appropriate expression of their official position in the church universal.

 

List of Popes and Emperors

From Constantine the Great to Gregory the Great, a.d. 314-590

Comp. the lists in vol. ii., and vol. iv.

This list is based upon Jaffé’s Regesta, Potthast’s Biblioth. Hist. Medii Aevi, and Cardinal Hergenröther’s list, in his Kirchengesch., third ed. (1886), vol. iii. 1057 sqq.

 

 

 

a.d. Popes. Emperors a.d.   

311-314, Melchiades. Constantine I., or The Great, 306 (323)-337   

314-335, Silvester I.   

336-337, Marcus. Constantine II. (in Gaul), 337-340.   

337-352, Julius I. Constantius II. (in the East), 337-350.   

Constans (in Italy),   

352-366, Liberius.   

(357, Filix II., Antipope.) Constantius Alone, 350-361   

Julian, 361-363.   

Jovian, 363-364.   

366-384, Damasus. Valentinian I., 364-375.   

Valens, 364-378.   

(366-367, Ursicinus, Antipope.) Gratian, 375-383.   

Valentinian II. (in the West), 375-392.   

385-398, Siricius. Theodosius, 379-395.   

398-402, Anastasius. Arcadius (in the East), 395-408.   

402-417, Innocent I. Honorius (in the West), 395-423.   

417-418, Zosimus. Theodosius II. (E.), 408-450.   

418-422, Bonifacius.   

(418, Dec. 27 Eulalius, Antipope.)   

422-432, Coelestinus I. Valentinian III. (W.), 423-455.   

432-440, Sixtus III.   

440-461, Leo I. the Great Marcian (E.), 450-457   

Maximus Avitus (W.), 455-457.   

Majorian (W.), 457-461.   

Leo I. (E.), 457-474.   

461-468, Hilarus. Severus (W.), 461-465.   

Vacancy (W.), 465-467.   

468-483 Simplicius. Anthemius (W.), 467-472.   

Olybrius (W.), 472-473.   

Glycerius (W.), 473-474.   

Julius Nepos (W.), 474   

Leo II, (E.) 474   

Zeno, (E.) 474-476.   

Basiliscus (E.), 476-477.   

Romulus Augustulus (W.) 475   

End of the Westem Line in Romulus Augustulus, (Henceforth, till a.d. 800, Emperors reigning at Constantinople). 476   

483-492, Felix III. (or II.). Anastasius I., 491-518.   

492-496, Gelasius I.   

496-498, Anastasius II.   

498-514, Symmachus.   

(498-Nov., 501, Laurentius, Antipope)   

514-523, Hormisdas. Justin I., 518-527.   

523-525, John I.   

526-530, Felix IV. (or III.). Justinian, 527-565.   

530-532, Bonifacius III.   

532-535, John II.   

535-536, Agapetus I.   

536-540, Silverius.   

540-554, Vigilius.   

555-560, Pelagius I.   

560-573, John III. Justin II., 565-574.   

574-578, Benedict I. Tiberius II., 574-582.   

578-590, Pelagius II. Maurice, 582-602.   

590-604, Gregory I. the Great. Phocas, 602-610.  

 

 

65. The Synodical System. The Ecumenical Councils

I. The principal sources are the Acts of the Councils, the best and most complete collections of which are those of the Jesuit Sirmond (Rom. 1608-1612, 4 vols. fol.); the so-called Collectio regia (Paris, 1644, 37 vols. fol.; a copy of it in the Astor Libr., New York); but especially those of the Jesuit Hardouin († 1729): Collectio maxima Conciliorum generalium et provincialium (Par. 1715 sqq., 12 vols. fol.), coming down to 1714, and very available through its five copious indexes (tom. i. and ii. embrace the first six centuries; a copy of it, from Van Ess’s library, in the Union Theol. Sem. Library, at New York); and the Italian Joannes Dominicus Mansi (archbishop of Lucca, died 1769): Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collection, Florence, 1759-’98, in 31 (30) vols. fol. This is the most complete and the best collection down to the fifteenth century, but unfinished, and therefore without general indexes; tom. i. contains the Councils from the beginning of Christianity to a.d. 304; tom. ii.-ix. include our period to a.d. 590 (I quote from an excellent copy of this rare collection in the Union Theol. Sem. Libr., at New York, 30 t. James Darling, in his Cyclop. Bibliographica, p. 740-756, gives the list of the contents of an earlier edition of the Councils by Nic. Coleti, Venet., 1728, in 23 vols., with a supplement of Mansi, in 6 vols. 1748-’52, which goes down to 1727, while the new edition of Mansi only reaches to 1509. Brunet, in the “Manuel Du Libraire,” quotes the edition of Mansi, Florence, 1759-1798, with the remark: “Cette collection, dont le dernier volume s’arrête à l’année 1509, est peu commune à Paris ou elle revenait à 600 fr.” Strictly speaking its stops in the middle of the 15th century, except in a few documents which reach further.) Useful abstracts are the Summa Conciliorum of Barth. Caranza, in many editions; and in the German language, the Bibliothek der Kirchenversammlungen (4th and 5th centuries), by Fuchs, Leipz., 1780-1784, 4 vols.

II. Chr. Wilh. Franz Walch (Luth.): Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Kirchenversammlungen, Leipz., 1759. Edw. H. Landon (Anglic.): A manual of Councils of the Holy Catholick Church, comprising the substance of the most remarkable and important canons, alphabetically arranged, 12mo. London, 1846. C. J. Hefele (R.C.): Conciliengeschichte, Freiburg i. B. 1855 sqq.; second revised ed. 1873 sqq., 7 vols., down to the Council of Florence (1447). Comp. my Essay on Oekumenische Concilien, in Dorner’s Annals of Ger. Theol. vol. viii. 326-346.

Above the patriarchs, even above the patriarch of Rome, stood the ecumenical or general councils, the highest representatives, of the unity and authority of the old Catholic church. They referred originally to the Roman empire, but afterward included the adjacent barbarian countries, so far as those countries were represented in them by bishops. They rise up like lofty peaks or majestic pyramids from the plan of ancient church history, and mark the ultimate authoritative settlement of the general questions of doctrine and discipline which agitated Christendom in the Graeco-Roman empire.

The synodical system in general had its rise in the apostolic council at Jerusalem, and completed its development, under its Catholic form, in the course of the first five centuries. Like the episcopate, it presented a hierarchical gradation of orders. There was, first, the diocesan or district council, in which the bishop of a diocese (in the later sense of the word) presided over his clergy; then the provincial council, consisting of the metropolitan or archbishop and the bishops of his ecclesiastical province; next, the patriarchal council, embracing all the bishops of a patriarchal district (or a diocese in the old sense of the term); then the national council, inaccurately styled also general, representing either the entire Greek or the entire Latin church (like the later Lateran councils and the council of Trent); and finally, at the summit stood the ecumenical council, for the whole Christian world. There was besides these a peculiar and abnormal kind of synod, styled σύνοδος ἐνδημοῦσα, frequently held by the bishop of Constantinople with the provincial bishops resident (ἐνδημοῦντες) on the spot.

In the earlier centuries the councils assembled without fixed regularity, at the instance of present necessities, like the Montanist and the Easter controversies in the latter part of the second century. Firmilian of Cappadocia, in his letter to Cyprian, first mentions, that at his time, in the middle of the third century, the churches of Asia Minor held regular annual synods, consisting of bishops and presbyters. From that time we find an increasing number of such assemblies in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Northern Africa, Italy, Spain, and Gaul. The council of Nicaea, a.d. 325, ordained, in the fifth canon, that the provincial councils should meet twice a year: during the fast season before Easter, and in the fall. In regard to the other synods no direction was given.

The Ecumenical councils were not stated, but extraordinary assemblies, occasioned by the great theological controversies of the ancient church. They could not arise until after the conversion of the Roman emperor and the ascendancy of Christianity as the religion of the state. They were the highest, and the last, manifestation of the power of the Greek church, which in general took the lead in the first age of Christianity, and was the chief seat of all theological activity. Hence in that church, as well as in others, they are still held in the highest veneration, and kept alive in the popular mind by pictures in the churches. The Greek and Russian Christians have annually commemorated the seven ecumenical councils, since the year 842, on the first Sunday in Lent, as the festival of the triumph of orthodoxy and they live in the hope that an eighth ecumenical council shall yet heal the divisions and infirmities of the Christian world. Through their symbols of faith those councils, especially of Nice and of Chalcedon, still live in the Western church, both Roman Catholic and Evangelical Protestant.

Strictly speaking, none of these councils properly represented the entire Christian world. Apart from the fact that the laity, and even the lower clergy, were excluded from them, the assembled bishops themselves formed but a small part of the Catholic episcopate. The province of North Africa alone numbered many more bishops than were present at either the second, the third, or the fifth general council. The councils bore a prevailingly oriental character, were occupied with Greek controversies, used the Greek language, sat in Constantinople or in its vicinity, and consisted almost wholly of Greek members. The Latin church was usually represented only by a couple of delegates of the Roman bishop; though these delegates, it is true, acted more or less in the name of the entire West. Even the five hundred and twenty, or the six hundred and thirty members of the council of Chalcedon, excepting the two representatives of Leo I., and two African fugitives accidentally present, were all from the East. The council of Constantinople in 381 contained not a single Latin bishop, and only a hundred and fifty Greek, and was raised to the ecumenical rank by the consent of the Latin church toward the middle of the following century. On the other hand, the council of Ephesus, in 449, was designed by emperor and pope to be an ecumenical council; but instead of this it has been branded in history as the synod of robbers, for its violent sanction of the Eutychian heresy. The council of Sardica, in 343, was likewise intended to be a general council, but immediately after its assembling assumed a sectional character, through the secession and counter-organization of the Eastern bishops.

It is, therefore, not the number of bishops present, nor even the regularity of the summons alone, which determines the ecumenical character of a council, but the result, the importance and correctness of the decisions, and, above all, the consent of the orthodox Christian world.

The number of the councils thus raised by the public opinion of the Greek and Latin churches to the ecumenical dignity, is seven. The succession begins with the first council of Nicaea, in the year 325, which settled the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, and condemned the Arian heresy. It closes with the second council of Nice, in 787, which sanctioned the use of images in the church. The first four of these councils command high theological regard in the orthodox Evangelical churches, while the last three are less important and far more rarely mentioned.

The ecumenical councils have not only an ecclesiastical significance, but bear also a political or state-church character. The very name refers to the οἰκουμένη, the orbis Romanus, the empire. Such synods were rendered possible only by that great transformation, which is marked by the accession of Constantine. That emperor caused the assembling of the first ecumenical council, though the idea was probably suggested to him by friends among the bishops; at least Rufinus says, he summoned the council “ex sacerdotum sententia.” At all events the Christian Graeco-Roman emperor is indispensable to an ecumenical council in the ancient sense of the term; its temporal head and its legislative strength.

According to the rigid hierarchical or papistic theory, as carried out in the middle ages, and still asserted by Roman divines, the pope alone, as universal head of the church, can summon, conduct, and confirm a universal council. But the history of the first seven, or, as the Roman reckoning is, eight, ecumenical councils, from 325 to 867, assigns this threefold power to the Byzantine emperors. This is placed beyond all contradiction, by the still extant edicts of the emperors, the acts of the councils, the accounts of all the Greek historians, and the contemporary Latin sources. Upon this Byzantine precedent, and upon the example of the kings of Israel, the Russian Czars and the Protestant princes of Germany, Scandinavia, and England — be it justly or unjustly — build their claim to a similar and still more extended supervision of the church in their dominions.

In the first place, the call of the ecumenical councils emanated from the emperors. They fixed the place and time of the assembly, summoned the metropolitans and more distinguished bishops of the empire by an edict, provided the means of transit, and paid the cost of travel and the other expenses out of the public treasury. In the case of the council of Nicaea and the first of Constantinople the call was issued without previous advice or consent from the bishop of Rome. In the council of Chalcedon, in 451, the papal influence is for the first time decidedly prominent; but even there it appears in virtual subordination to the higher authority of the council, which did not suffer itself to be disturbed by the protest of Leo against its twenty-eighth canon in reference to the rank of the patriarch of Constantinople. Not only ecumenical, but also provincial councils were not rarely called together by Western princes; as the council of Arles in 314 by Constantine, the council of Orleans in 549 by Childebert, and — to anticipate an instance — the synod of Frankfort in 794 by Charlemagne. Another remarkable fact has been already mentioned: that in the beginning of the sixth century several Orthodox synods at Rome, for the purpose of deciding the contested election of Symmachus, were called by a secular prince, and he the heretical Theodoric; yet they were regarded as valid.

In the second place, the emperors, directly or indirectly, took an active part in all but two of the ecumenical councils summoned by them, and held the presidency. Constantine the Great, Marcian, and his wife Pulcheria, Constantine Progonatus, Irene, and Basil the Macedonian, attended in person; but generally the emperors, like the Roman bishops (who were never present themselves), were represented by delegates or commissioners, clothed with full authority for the occasion. These deputies opened the sessions by reading the imperial edict (in Latin and Greek) and other documents. They presided in conjunction with the patriarchs, conducted the entire course of the transactions, preserved order and security, closed the council, and signed the acts either at the head or at the foot of the signatures of the bishops. In this prominent position they sometimes exercised, when they had a theological interest or opinion of their own, no small influence on the discussions and decisions, though they had no votum; as the presiding officers of deliberative and legislative bodies generally have no vote, except when the decision of a question depends upon their voice.

To this presidency of the emperor or of his commissioners the acts of the councils and the Greek historians often refer. Even Pope Stephen V. (a.d. 817) writes, that Constantine the Great presided in the council of Nice. According to Eusebius, he introduced the principal matters of business with a solemn discourse, constantly attended the sessions, and took the place of honor in the assembly. His presence among the bishops at the banquet, which he gave them at the close of the council, seemed to that panegyrical historian a type of Christ among his saints! This prominence of Constantine in the most celebrated and the most important of all the councils is the more remarkable, since at that time he had not yet even been baptized. When Marcian and Pulcheria appeared with their court at the council of Chalcedon, to confirm its decrees, they were greeted by the assembled bishops in the bombastic style of the East, as defenders of the faith, as pillars of orthodoxy, as enemies and persecutors of heretics; the emperor as a second Constantine, a new Paul, a new David; the empress as a second Helena; with other high-sounding predicates. The second and fifth general councils were the only ones at which the emperor was not represented, and in them the presidency was in the hands of the patriarchs of Constantinople.

But together with the imperial commissioners, or in their absence, the different patriarchs or their representatives, especially the legates of the Roman bishop, the most powerful of the patriarchs, took part in the presiding office. This was the case at the third and fourth, and the sixth, seventh, and eighth universal councils.

For the emperor’s connection with the council had reference rather to the conduct of business and to the external affairs of the synod, than to its theological and religious discussions. This distinction appears in the well-known dictum of Constantine respecting a double episcopate, which we have already noticed. And at the Nicene council the emperor acted accordingly. He paid the bishops greater reverence than his heathen predecessors had shown the Roman senators. He wished to be a servant, not a judge, of the successors of the apostles, who are constituted priests and gods on earth. After his opening address, he “resigned the word” to the (clerical) officers of the council, by whom probably Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, Eustathius of Antioch, and Hosius of Cordova — the latter as special friend of the emperor, and as representative of the Western churches and perhaps of the bishop of Rome — are to be understood. The same distinction between a secular and spiritual presidency meets us in Theodosius II., who sent the comes Candidian as his deputy to the third general council, with full power over the entire business proceedings, but none over theological matters themselves; “for” — wrote he to the council — ,“it is not proper that one who does not belong to the catalogue of most holy bishops, should meddle in ecclesiastical discussions.” Yet Cyril of Alexandria presided at this council, and conducted the business, at first alone, afterward in conjunction with the papal legates; while Candidian supported the Nestorian opposition, which held a council of its own under the patriarch John of Antioch.

Finally, from the emperors proceeded the ratification of the councils. Partly by their signatures, partly by special edicts, they gave the decrees of the council legal validity; they raised them to laws of the realm; they took pains to have them observed, and punished the disobedient with deposition and banishment. This was done by Constantine the Great for the decrees of Nice; by Theodosius the Great for those of Constantinople; by Marcian for those of Chalcedon. The second ecumenical council expressly prayed the emperor for such sanction, since he was present neither in person nor by commission. The papal confirmation, on the contrary, was not considered necessary, until after the fourth general council, in 451. And notwithstanding this, Justinian broke through the decrees of the fifth council, of 553, without the consent, and in fact despite the intimated refusal of Pope Vigilius. In the middle ages, however, the case was reversed. The influence of the pope on the councils increased, and that of the emperor declined; or rather, the German emperor never claimed so preëminent a position in the church as the Byzantine. Yet the relation of the pope to a general council, the question which of the two is above the other, is still a point of controversy between the curialist or ultramontane and the episcopal or Gallican schools.

Apart from this predominance of the emperor and his commissioners, the character of the ecumenical councils was thoroughly hierarchical. In the apostolic council at Jerusalem, the elders and the brethren took part with the apostles, and the decision went forth in the name of the whole congregation. But this republican or democratic element, so to call it, had long since given way before the spirit of aristocracy. The bishops alone, as the successors and heirs of the apostles, the ecclesia docens, were members of the councils. Hence, in the fifth canon of Nice, even a provincial synod is termed “the general assembly of the bishops of the province.” The presbyters and deacons took part, indeed, in the deliberations, and Athanasius, though at the time only a deacon, exerted probably more influence on the council of Nice by his zeal and his gifts, than most of the bishops; but they had no votum decisivum, except when, like the Roman legates, they represented their bishops. The laity were entirely excluded.

Yet it must be remembered, that the bishops of that day were elected by the popular voice. So far as that went, they really represented the Christian people, and were not seldom called to account by the people for their acts, though they voted in their own name as successors of the apostles. Eusebius felt bound to justify, his vote at Nice before his diocese in Caesarea, and the Egyptian bishops at Chalcedon feared an uproar in their congregations.

Furthermore, the councils, in an age of absolute despotism, sanctioned the principle of common public deliberation, as the best means of arriving at truth and settling controversy. They revived the spectacle of the Roman senate in ecclesiastical form, and were the forerunners of representative government and parliamentary legislation.

In matters of discipline the majority decided; but in matters of faith unanimity was required, though, if necessary, it was forced by the excision of the dissentient minority. In the midst of the assembly an open copy of the Gospels lay upon a desk or table, as, a symbol of the presence of Christ, whose infallible word is the rule of all doctrine. Subsequently the ecclesiastical canons and the relics of the saints were laid in similar state. The bishops — at least according to later usage — sat in a circle, in the order of the dates of their ordination or the rank of their sees; behind them, the priests; before or beside them, the deacons. The meetings were opened and closed with religious solemnities in liturgical style. In the ancient councils the various subjects were discussed in open synod, and the Acts of the councils contain long discourses and debates. But in the council of Trent the subjects of action were wrought up in separate committees, and only laid before the whole synod for ratification. The vote was always taken by heads, till the council of Constance, when it was taken by nations, to avoid the preponderance of the Italian prelates.

The jurisdiction of the ecumenical councils covered the entire legislation of the church, all matters of Christian faith and practice (fidei et morum), and all matters of organization arid worship. The doctrinal decrees were called dogmata or symbola; the disciplinary, canones. At the same time, the councils exercised, when occasion required, the highest judicial authority, in excommunicating bishops and patriarchs.

The authority of these councils in the decision of all points of controversy was supreme and final.

Their doctrinal decisions were early invested with infallibility; the promises of the Lord respecting the indestructibleness of his church, his own perpetual presence with the ministry, and the guidance of the Spirit of truth, being applied in the full sense to those councils, as representing the whole church. After the example of the apostolic council, the usual formula for a decree was: Visum est Sprirtui Sancto et nobis. Constantine the Great, in a circular letter to the churches, styles the decrees of the Nicene council a divine command; a phrase, however, in reference to which the abuse of the word divine, in the language of the Byzantine despots, must not be forgotten. Athanasius says, with reference to the doctrine of the divinity of Christ: “What God has spoken by the council of Nice, abides forever.” The council of Chalcedon pronounced the decrees of the Nicene fathers unalterable statutes, since God himself had spoken through them. The council of Ephesus, in the sentence of deposition against Nestorius, uses the formula: “The Lord Jesus Christ, whom he has blasphemed, determines through this most holy council.” Pope Leo speaks of an “irretractabilis consensus” of the council of Chalcedon upon the doctrine of the person of Christ. Pope Gregory the Great even placed the first four councils, which refuted and destroyed respectively the heresies and impieties of Arius, Macedonius, Nestorius, and Eutyches, on a level with the four canonical Gospels. In like manner Justinian puts the dogmas of the first four councils on the same footing with the Holy Scriptures, and their canons by the side of laws of the realm. The remaining three general councils have neither a theological importance, nor therefore an authority, equal to that of those first four, which laid the foundations of ecumenical orthodoxy. Otherwise Gregory would have mentioned also the fifth council, of 553, in the passage to which we have just referred. And even among the first four there is a difference of rank; the councils of Nice and Chalcedon standing highest in the character of their results.

Not so with the rules of discipline prescribed in the canones. These were never considered universally binding, like the symbols of faith; since matters of organization and usage, pertaining rather to the external form of the church, are more or less subject to the vicissitude of time. The fifteenth canon of the council of Nice, which prohibited and declared invalid the transfer of the clergy from one place to another, Gregory Nazianzen, fifty-seven years later (382), reckons among statutes long dead. Gregory himself repeatedly changed his location, and Chrysostom was called from Antioch to Constantinople. Leo I. spoke with strong disrespect of the third canon of the second ecumenical council, for assigning to the bishop of Constantinople the first rank after the bishop of Rome; and for the same reason be protested against the twenty-eighth canon of the fourth ecumenical council. Indeed the Roman church has made no point of adopting all the disciplinary laws enacted by those synods.

Augustine, the ablest and the most devout of the fathers, conceived, in the best vein of his age, a philosophical view of this authority of the councils, which strikes a wise and wholesome mean between the extremes of veneration and disparagement, and approaches the free spirit of evangelical Protestantism. He justly subordinates these councils to the Holy Scriptures, which are the highest and the perfect rule of faith, and supposes that the decrees of a council may be, not indeed set aside and repealed, yet enlarged and completed by, the deeper research of a later day. They embody, for the general need, the results already duly prepared by preceding theological controversies, and give the consciousness of the church, on the subject in question, the clearest and most precise expression possible at the time. But this consciousness itself is subject to development. While the Holy Scriptures present the truth unequivocally and infallibly, and allow no room for doubt, the judgment of bishops may be corrected and enriched with new truths from the word of God, by the wiser judgment of other bishops; the judgment of the provincial council by that of a general; and the views of one general council by those of a later. In this Augustine presumed, that all the transactions of a council were conducted in the spirit of Christian humility, harmony, and love; but had he attended the council of Ephesus, in 431, to which he was summoned about the time of his death, he would, to his grief, have found the very opposite spirit reigning there. Augustine, therefore, manifestly acknowledges a gradual advancement of the church doctrine, which reaches its corresponding expression from time to time through the general councils; but a progress within the truth, without positive error. For in a certain sense, as against heretics, he made the authority of Holy Scripture dependent on the authority of the catholic church, in his famous dictum against the Manichaean heretics: “I would not believe the gospel, did not the authority of the catholic church compel me.” In like manner Vincentius Lerinensis teaches, that the church doctrine passes indeed through various stages of growth in knowledge, and becomes more and more clearly defined in opposition to ever-rising errors, but can never become altered or dismembered.

The Protestant church makes the authority of the general councils, and of all ecclesiastical tradition, depend on the degree of its conformity to the Holy Scriptures; while the Greek and Roman churches make Scripture and tradition coordinate. The Protestant church justly holds the first four general councils in high, though not servile, veneration, and has received their statements of doctrine into her confessions of faith, because she perceives in them, though compassed with human imperfection, the clearest and most suitable expression of the teaching of the Scriptures respecting the Trinity and the divine-human person of Christ. Beyond these statements the judgment of the church (which must be carefully distinguished from theological speculation) has not to this day materially advanced; — the highest tribute to the wisdom and importance of those councils. But this is not saying that the Nicene and the later Athanasian creeds are the non plus ultra of all the church’s knowledge of the articles therein defined. Rather is it the duty of theology and of the church, while prizing and holding fast those earlier attainments, to study the same problems ever anew, to penetrate further and further these sacred fundamental mysteries of Christianity, and to bring to light new treasures from the inexhaustible mines of the Word of God, under the guidance of the same Holy Spirit, who lives and works in the church at this day as mightily as he did in the fifth century and the fourth. Christology, for example, by the development of the doctrine of the two states of Christ in the Lutheran church, and of the three offices of Christ in the Reformed, has been substantially enriched; the old Catholic doctrine, which was fixed with unerring tact at the council of Chalcedon, being directly concerned only with the two natures of Christ, as against the dualism of Nestorius and the monophysitism of Eutyches.

With this provision for further and deeper soundings of Scripture truth, Protestantism feels itself one with the ancient Greek and Latin church in the bond of ecumenical orthodoxy. But toward the disciplinary canons of the ecumenical councils its position is still more free and independent than that of the Roman church. Those canons are based upon an essentially unprotestant, that is, hierarchical and sacrificial conception of church order and worship, which the Lutheran and Anglican reformation in part, and the Zwinglian and Calvinistic almost entirely renounced. Yet this is not to say that much may not still be learned, in the sphere of discipline, from those councils, and that perhaps many an ancient custom or institution is not worthy to be revived in the spirit of evangelical freedom.

The moral character of those councils was substantially parallel with that of earlier and later ecclesiastical assemblies, and cannot therefore be made a criterion of their historical importance and their dogmatic authority. They faithfully reflect both the light and the shade of the ancient church. They bear the heavenly treasure in earthen vessels. If even among the inspired apostles at the council of Jerusalem there was much debate, and soon after, among Peter, Paul, and Barnabas, a violent, though only temporary collision, we must of course expect much worse of the bishops of the Nicene and the succeeding age, and of a church already interwoven with a morally degenerate state. Together with abundant talents, attainments, and virtues, there were gathered also at the councils ignorance, intrigues, and partisan passions, which had already been excited on all sides by long controversies preceding and now met and arrayed themselves, as hostile armies, for open combat. For those great councils, all occasioned by controversies on the most important and the most difficult problems of theology, are, in fact, to the history of doctrine, what decisive battles are to the history of war. Just because religion is the deepest and holiest interest of man, are religious passions wont to be the most violent and bitter; especially in a time when all classes, from imperial court to market stall, take the liveliest interest in theological speculation, and are drawn into the common vortex of excitement. Hence the notorious rabies theologorum was more active in the fourth and fifth centuries than it has been in any other period of history, excepting, perhaps, in the great revolution of the sixteenth century, and the confessional polemics of the seventeenth.

We have on this point the testimony of contemporaries and of the acts of the councils themselves. St. Gregory Nazianzen, who, in the judgment of Socrates, was the most devout and eloquent man of his age, and who himself, as bishop of Constantinople, presided for a time over the second ecumenical council, had so bitter an observation and experience as even to lose, though without sufficient reason, all confidence in councils, and to call them in his poems “assemblies of cranes and geese.” “To tell the truth” thus in 382 (a year after the second ecumenical council, and doubtless including that assembly in his allusion) he answered Procopius, who in the name of the emperor summoned him in vain to a synod — “to tell the truth, I am inclined to shun every collection of bishops, because I have never yet seen that a synod came to a good end, or abated evils instead of increasing them. For in those assemblies (and I do not think I express myself too strongly here) indescribable contentiousness and ambition prevail, and it is easier for one to incur the reproach of wishing to set himself up as judge of the wickedness of others, than to attain any success in putting the wickedness away. Therefore I have withdrawn myself, and have found rest to my soul only in solitude.” It is true, the contemplative Gregory had an aversion to all public life, and in such views yielded unduly to his personal inclinations. And in any case he is inconsistent; for he elsewhere speaks with great respect of the council of Nice, and was, next to Athanasius, the leading advocate of the Nicene creed. Yet there remains enough in his many unfavorable pictures of the bishops and synods of his time, to dispel all illusions of their immaculate purity. Beausobre correctly observes, that either Gregory the Great must be a slanderer, or the bishops of his day were very remiss. In the fifth century it was no better, but rather worse. At the third general council, at Ephesus, 431, all accounts agree that shameful intrigue, uncharitable lust of condemnation, and coarse violence of conduct were almost as prevalent as in the notorious robber-council of Ephesus in 449; though with the important difference, that the former synod was contending for truth, the latter for error. Even at Chalcedon, the introduction of the renowned expositor and historian Theodoret provoked a scene, which almost involuntarily reminds us of the modern brawls of Greek and Roman monks at the holy sepulchre under the restraining supervision of the Turkish police. His Egyptian opponents shouted with all their might: “The faith is gone! Away with him, this teacher of Nestorius!” His friends replied with equal violence: “They forced us [at the robber-council] by blows to subscribe; away with the Manichaeans, the enemies of Flavian, the enemies of the faith! Away with the murderer Dioscurus? Who does not know his wicked deeds? The Egyptian bishops cried again: Away with the Jew, the adversary of God, and call him not bishop!” To which the oriental bishops answered: “Away with the rioters, away with the murderers! The orthodox man belongs to the council!” At last the imperial commissioners interfered, and put an end to what they justly called an unworthy and useless uproar.

In all these outbreaks of human passion, however, we must not forget that the Lord was sitting in the ship of the church, directing her safely through the billows and storms. The Spirit of truth, who was not to depart from her, always triumphed over error at last, and even glorified himself through the weaknesses of his instruments. Upon this unmistakable guidance from above, only set out by the contrast of human imperfections, our reverence for the councils must be based. Soli Deo gloria; or, in the language of Chrysostom: Δόχα τῷ θεῷ πάντων ἕνεκεν!

 

66. List of the Ecumenical Councils of the Ancient Church

We only add, by way of a general view, a list of all the ecumenical councils of the Graeco-Roman church, with a brief account of their character and work.

1. The Concilium Nicaenum I., a.d. 325; held at Nicaea in Bithynia, a lively commercial town near the imperial residence of Nicomedia, and easily accessible by land and sea. It consisted of three hundred and eighteen bishops, besides a large number of priests, deacons, and acolytes, mostly from the East, and was called by Constantine the Great, for the settlement of the Arian controversy. Having become, by decisive victories in 323, master of the whole Roman empire, he desired to complete the restoration of unity and peace with the help of the dignitaries of the church. The result of this council was the establishment (by anticipation) of the doctrine of the true divinity of Christ, the identity of essence between the Son and the Father. The fundamental importance of this dogma, the number, learning, piety and wisdom of the bishops, many of whom still bore the marks of the Diocletian persecution, the personal presence of the first Christian emperor, of Eusebius, “the father of church history,” and of Athanasius, “the father of orthodoxy” (though at that time only archdeacon), as well as the remarkable character of this epoch, combined in giving to this first general synod a peculiar weight and authority. It is styled emphatically “the great and holy council,” holds the highest place among all the councils, especially with the Greeks, and still lives in the Nicene Creed, which is second in authority only to the ever venerable Apostles’ Creed. This symbol was, however, not finally settled and completed in its present form (excepting the still later Latin insertion of filioque), until the second general council. Besides this the fathers assembled at Nicaea issued a number of canons, usually reckoned twenty on various questions of discipline; the most important being those on the rights of metropolitans, the time of Easter, and the validity of heretical baptism.

2. The Concilium Constantinopolitanum I., a.d. 381 summoned by Theodosius the Great, and held at the imperial city, which had not even name in history till five years after the former council. This council, however, was exclusively oriental, and comprised only a hundred and fifty bishops, as the emperor had summoned none but the adherents of the Nicene party, which had become very much reduced under the previous reign. The emperor did not attend it. Meletius of Antioch was president till his death; then Gregory Nazianzen; and, after his resignation, the newly elected patriarch Nectarius of Constantinople. The council enlarged the Nicene confession by an article on the divinity and personality of the Holy Ghost, in opposition to the Macedonians or Pneumatomachists (hence the title Symbolum Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum), and issued seven more canons, of which the Latin versions, however, give only the first four, leaving the genuineness of the other three, as many think, in doubt.

3. The Concilium Ephesinum, a.d. 431; called by Theodosius II., in connection with the Western co-emperor Valentinian III., and held under the direction of the ambitious and violent Cyril of Alexandria. This council consisted of, at first, a hundred and sixty bishops, afterward a hundred and ninety-eight, including, for the first time, papal delegates from Rome, who were instructed not to mix in the debates, but to sit as judges over the opinions of the rest. It condemned the error of Nestorius on the relation of the two natures in Christ, without, stating clearly the correct doctrine. It produced, therefore, but a negative result, and is the least important of the first four councils, as it stands lowest also in moral character. It is entirely rejected by the Nestorian or Chaldaic Christians. Its six canons relate exclusively to Nestorian and Pelagian affairs, and are wholly omitted by Dionysius Exiguus in his collection.

4. The Concilium Chalcedonense, a.d. 451; summoned by the emperor Marcian, at the instance of the Roman bishop Leo; held at Chalcedon in Bithynia, opposite Constantinople; and composed of five hundred and twenty (some say six hundred and thirty) bishops. Among these were three delegates of the bishop of Rome, two bishops of Africa, and the rest all Greeks and Orientals. The fourth general council fixed the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ in opposition to Eutychianism and Nestorianism, and enacted thirty canons (according to some manuscripts only twenty-seven or twenty-eight), of which the twenty-eighth was resisted by the Roman legates and Leo I. This was the most numerous, and next to the Nicene, the most important of all the general councils, but is repudiated by all the Monophysite sects of the Eastern church.

5. The Concilium Constantinopolitanum II. was assembled a full century later, by the emperor Tustinian, a.d. 553, without consent of the pope, for the adjustment of the tedious Monophysite controversy. It was presided over by the patriarch Eutychius of Constantinople, consisted of only one hundred and sixty-four bishops, and issued fourteen anathemas against the three chapters, so called, or the christological views of three departed bishops and divines, Theodore of Mopsueste, Theodoret of Cyros, and Ibas of Edessa, who were charged with leaning toward the Nestorian heresy. The fifth council was not recognized, however, by many Western bishops, even after the vacillating Pope Vigilius gave in his assent to it, and it induced a temporary schism between Upper Italy and the Roman see. As to importance, it stands far below the four previous councils. Its Acts, in Greek, with the exception of the fourteen anathemas, are lost.

Besides these, there are two later councils, which have attained among the Greeks and Latins an undisputed ecumenical authority: the Third Council of Constantinople, under Constantine Progonatus, a.d. 680, which condemned Monothelitism (and Pope Honorius, † 638), and consummated the old Catholic christology; and the Second Council of Nicaea, under the empress Irene, a.d. 787, which sanctioned the image-worship of the Catholic church, but has no dogmatical importance.

Thus Nicaea — now the miserable Turkish hamlet Is-nik — has the honor of both opening and closing the succession of acknowledged ecumenical councils.

From this time forth the Greeks and Latins part, and ecumenical councils are no longer to be named. The Greeks considered the second Trullan (or the fourth Constantinopolitan) council of 692, which enacted no symbol of faith, but canons only, not an independent eighth council, but an appendix to the fifth and sixth ecumenical councils (hence, called the Quinisexta sc. synodus); against which view the Latin church has always protested. The Latin church, on the other hand, elevates the fourth council of Constantinople, a.d. 869, which deposed the patriarch Photius, the champion of the Greek church in her contest with the Latin, to the dignity of an eighth ecumenical council; but this council was annulled for the Greek church by the subsequent restoration of Photius. The Roman church also, in pursuance of her claims to exclusive catholicity, adds to the seven or eight Greek councils twelve or more Latin general councils, down to the Vatican (1870); but to all these the Greek and Protestant churches can concede only a sectional character. Three hundred and thirty-six years elapsed between the last undisputed Graeco-Latin ecumenical council of the ancient church (a.d. 787), and the first Latin ecumenical council of the medieval church (1123). The authority of the papal see had to be established in the intervening centuries.

 

67. Books of Ecclesiastical Law

I. Bibiliotheca juris canonici veteris, ed. Voellus (theologian of the Sorbonne) and Justellus (Justeau, counsellor and secretary to the French king), Par. 1661, 2 vols. fol. (Vol. i. contains the canons of the universal church, Greek and Latin, the ecclesiastical canons of Dionysius Exiguus, or of the old Roman church, the canons of the African church, etc. See a list of contents in Darling’s Cyclop. Bibliographica, p. 1702 sq.)

II. See the literature in vol. ii. §56. The brothers Ballerini: De antiquis tum editis tum ineditis collectionibus et collectoribus canonum ad Gratianum usque in ed. Opp. Leon M. Ven., 1753 sqq. The treatises of Quesnel, Marca, Constant, Drey, Theiner, etc., on the history of the collections of canons. Comp. Ferd. Walther: Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts, p. 109 sqq., 8th ed., 1839.

The universal councils, through their disciplinary enactments or canons, were the main fountain of ecclesiastical law. To their canons were added the decrees of the most important provincial councils of the fourth century, at Ancyra (314), Neo-Caesarea (314), Antioch (341), Sardica (343), Gangra (365), and Laodicea (between 343 and 381); and in a third series, the orders of eminent bishops, popes, and emperors. From these sources arose, after the beginning of the fifth century, or at all events before the council of Chalcedon, various collections of the church laws in the East, in North Africa, in Italy, Gaul, and Spain; which, however, had only provincial authority, and in many respects did not agree among themselves. A codex canonum ecclesiae universae did not exist. The earlier collections because eclipsed by two, which, the one in the West, the other in the East, attained the highest consideration.

The most important Latin collection comes from the Roman, though by descent Scythian, abbot Dionysius Exiguus, who also, notwithstanding the chronological error at the base of his reckoning, immortalized himself by the introduction of the Christian calendar, the “Dionysian Era.” It was a great thought of this “little” monk to view Christ as the turning point of ages, and to introduce this view into chronology. About the year 500 Dionysius translated for the bishop Stephen of Salona a collection of canons from Greek into Latin, which is still extant, with its prefatory address to Stephen. It contains, first, the fifty so-called Apostolic Canons, which pretend to have been collected by Clement of Rome, but in truth were a gradual production of the third and fourth centuries; then the canons of the most important councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, including those of Sardica and Africa; and lastly, the papal decretal letters from Siricius (385) to Anastasius II. (498). The Codex Dionysii was gradually enlarged by additions, genuine and spurious, and through the favor of the popes, attained the authority of law almost throughout the West. Yet there were other collections also in use, particularly in Spain and North Africa.

Some fifty years after Dionysius, John Scholasticus, previously an advocate, then presbyter at Antioch, and after 564 patriarch of Constantinople, published a collection of canons in Greek, which surpassed the former in completeness and convenience of arrangement, and for this reason, as well as the eminence of the author, soon rose to universal authority in the Greek church. In it he gives eighty-five Apostolic Canons, and the ordinances of the councils of Ancyra (314) and Nicaea (325), down to that of Chalcedon (451), in fifty titles, according to the order of subjects. The second Trullan council (Quinisextum, of 692), which passes with the Greeks for ecumenical, adopted the eighty-five Apostolic Canons, while it rejected the Apostolic Constitutions, because, though, like the canons, of apostolic origin, they had been early adulterated. Thus arose the difference between the Greek and Latin churches in reference to the number of the so-called Apostolic canons; the Latin church retaining only the fifty of the Dionysian collection.

The same John, while patriarch of Constantinople, compiled from the Novelles of Justinian a collection of the ecclesiastical state-laws or νόμοι, as they were called in distinction from the synodal church-laws or κανόνες. Practical wants then led to a union of the two, under the title of Nomocanon.

These books of ecclesiastical law served to complete and confirm the hierarchical organization, to regulate the life of the clergy, and to promote order and discipline; but they tended also to fix upon the church an outward legalism, and to embarrass the spirit of progress.



Vol. 3, Chapter VI. Church Discipline and Schisms

68. Decline of Discipline

The principal sources are the books of ecclesiastical law and the acts of councils. Comp. the literature at §67, and at vol. i. §114.

The union of the church with the state shed, in general, an injurious influence upon the discipline of the church; and that, in two opposite directions.

On the one hand it increased the stringency of discipline and led to a penal code for spiritual offences. The state gave her help to the church, lent the power of law to acts of suspension and excommunication, and accompanied those acts with civil penalties. Hence the innumerable depositions and banishments of bishops during the theological controversies of the Nicene and the following age, especially under the influence of the Byzantine despotism and the religious intolerance and bigotry of the times. Even the penalty of death was decreed, at least against the Priscillianists, though under the protest of nobler divines, who clave to the spiritual character of the church and of her weapons. Heresy was regarded as the most grievous and unpardonable crime against society, and was treated accordingly by the ruling party, without respect of creed.

But on the other hand discipline became weakened. With the increasing stringency against heretics, firmness against practical errors diminished. Hatred of heresy and laxity of morals, zeal for purity of doctrine and indifference to purity of life, which ought to exclude each other, do really often stand in union. Think of the history of Pharisaism at the time of Christ, of orthodox Lutheranism in its opposition to Spener and the Pietistic movement, and of prelatical Anglicanism in its conflict with Methodism and the evangelical party. Even in the Johannean age this was the case in the church of Ephesus, which prefigured in this respect both the light and shade of the later Eastern church. The earnest, but stiff, mechanical penitential discipline, with its four grades of penance, which had developed itself during the Dioclesian persecution, continued in force, it is true, as to the letter, and was repeatedly reaffirmed by the councils of the fourth century. But the great change of circumstances rendered the practical execution of it more and more difficult, by the very multiplication and high position, of those on whom it ought to be enforced. In that mighty revolution under Constantine the church lost her virginity, and allied herself with the mass of heathendom, which had not yet experienced an inward change. Not seldom did the emperors themselves, and other persons of authority, who ought to have led the way with a good example, render themselves, with all their zeal for theoretical orthodoxy, most worthy of suspension and excommunication by their scandalous conduct, while they were surrounded by weak or worldly bishops, who cared more for the favor of their earthly masters, than for the honor of their heavenly Lord and the dignity of the church. Even Eusebius, otherwise one of the better bishops of his time, had no word of rebuke for the gross crimes of Constantine, but only the most extravagant eulogies for his merits.

In the Greek church the discipline gradually decayed, to the great disadvantage of public morality, and every one was allowed to partake of the communion according to his conscience. The bishops alone reserved the right of debarring the vicious from the table of the Lord. The patriarch Nectarius of Constantinople, about 390, abolished the office of penitential priest (presbyter poenitentiarius), who was set over the execution of the penitential discipline. The occasion of this act was furnished by a scandalous occurrence: the violation of a lady of rank in the church by a worthless deacon, when she came to submit herself to public penance. The example of Nectarius was soon followed by the other oriental bishops.

Socrates and Sozomen, who inclined to the severity of the Novatians, date the decline of discipline and of the former purity of morals from this act. But the real cause lay further back, in the connection of the church with the temporal power. Had the state been pervaded with the religious earnestness and zeal of Christianity, like the Genevan republic, for example, under the reformation of Calvin, the discipline of the church would have rather gained than lost by the alliance. But the vast Roman state could not so easily and quickly lay aside its heathen traditions and customs; it perpetuated them under Christian names. The great mass of the people received, at best, only John’s baptism of repentance, not Christ’s baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire.

Yet even under these new conditions the original moral earnestness of the church continued, from time to time, to make itself known. Bishops were not wanting to confront even the emperors, as Nathan stood before David after his fall, in fearless rebuke. Chrysostom rigidly insisted, that the deacon should exclude all unworthy persons from the holy communion, though by his vehement reproof of the immoralities of the imperial court, he brought upon himself at last deposition and exile. “Though a captain,” says he to those who administer the communion, “or a governor, nay, even one adorned with the imperial crown, approach [the table of the Lord] unworthily, prevent him; you have greater authority than he …. Beware lest you excite the Lord to wrath, and give a sword instead of food. And if a new Judas should approach the communion, prevent him. Fear God, not man. If you fear man, he will treat you with scorn; if you fear God, you will appear venerable even to men.” Synesius excommunicated the worthless governor of Pentapolis, Andronicus, for his cruel oppression of the poor and contempt of the exhortations of the bishop, and the discipline attained the desired effect. The most noted example of church discipline is the encounter between Ambrose and Theodosius I. in Milan about the year 390. The bishop refused the powerful and orthodox emperor the communion, and thrust him back from the threshold of the church, because in a tempest of rage he had caused seven thousand persons in Thessalonica., regardless of rank, sex, or guilt, to be hewn down by his soldiers in horrible cruelty on account of a riot. Eight months afterward Ambrose gave him absolution at his request, after he had submitted to the public penance of the church and promised in future not to execute a death penalty until thirty days after the pronouncing of it, that he might have time to revoke it if necessary, and to exercise mercy. Here Ambrose certainly vindicated — though perhaps not without admixture of hierarchical loftiness — the dignity and rights of the church against the state, and the claims of Christian temperance and mercy against gross military power.”Thus,” says a modern historians “did the church prove, in a time of unlimited arbitrary power, the refuge of popular freedom, and saints assume the part of tribunes of the people.”

 

69. The Donatist Schism. External History

I. Sources

Augustine: Works against the Donatists (Contra epistolam Parmeniani, libri iii.; De baptismo, contra Donatistas, libri vii.; Contra literas Petiliani, libri iii.; De Unitate Ecclesiae, lib. unus; Contra Cresconium, grammaticum Donat., libri iv.; Breviculus Collationis cum Donatistis; Contra Gaudentium, etc.), in the 9th vol. of his Opera, ed. Bened. (Paris, 1688). Optatus Milevitanus (about 370): De schismate Donatistarum. L. E. Du Pin: Monumenta vett. ad Donatist. Hist. pertinentia, Par. 1700. Excerpta et Scripta vetera ad Donatistarum Historiam pertinentia, at the close of the ninth volume of the Bened. ed. of Augustine’s works.

 

II. Literature

Valesius: De schism. Donat. (appended to his ed. of Eusebius). Walch: Historie der Ketzereien, etc., vol. iv. Neander: Allg. K. G. ii. 1, p. 366 sqq. (Torrey’s Engl. translation, ii. p. 182 sqq.). A. Roux: De Augustine adversario Donat. Lugd. Bat. 1838. F. Ribbeck: Donatus u. Augustinus, oder der erste entscheidende Kampf zwischen Separatismus u. Kirche., Elberf. 1858. (The author was for a short time a Baptist, and then returned to the Prussian established church, and wrote this work against separatism.)

 

The Donatist Schism

Donatism was by far the most important schism in the church of the period before us. For a whole century it divided the North African churches into two hostile camps. Like the schisms of the former period, it arose from the conflict of the more rigid and the more indulgent theories of discipline in reference to the restoration of the lapsed. But through the intervention of the Christianized state, it assumed at the same time an ecclesiastico-political character. The rigoristic penitential discipline had been represented in the previous period especially by the Montanists and Novatians, who were still living; while the milder principle and practice had found its most powerful support in the Roman church, and, since the time of Constantine, had generally prevailed.

The beginnings of the Donatist schism appear in the Dioclesian persecution, which revived that controversy concerning church discipline and martyrdom. The rigoristic party, favored by Secundus of Tigisis, at that time primate of Numidia, and led by the bishop Donatus of Casae Nigrae, rushed to the martyr’s crown with fanatical contempt of death, and saw in flight from danger, or in the delivering up of the sacred books, only cowardice and treachery, which should forever exclude from the fellowship of the church. The moderate party, at whose head stood the bishop Mensurius and his archdeacon and successor Caecilian, advocated the claims of prudence and discretion, and cast suspicion on the motives of the forward confessors and martyrs. So early as the year 305 a schism was imminent, in the matter of an episcopal election for the city of Cita. But no formal outbreak occurred until after the cessation of the persecution in 311; and then the difficulty arose in connection with the hasty election of Caecilian to the bishopric of Carthage. The Donatists refused to acknowledge him, because in his ordination the Numidian bishops were slighted, and the service was performed by the bishop Felix of Aptungis, or Aptunga, whom they declared to be a traditor, that is, one who had delivered up the sacred writings to the heathen persecutors. In Carthage itself he had many opponents, among whom were the elders of the congregation (seniores plebis), and particularly a wealthy and superstitious widow, Lucilla, who was accustomed to kiss certain relics before her daily communion, and seemed to prefer them to the spiritual power of the sacrament. Secundus of Tigisis and seventy Numidian bishops, mostly of the rigoristic school, assembled at Carthage deposed and excommunicated Caecilian, who refused to appear, and elected the lector Majorinus, a favorite of Lucilla, in his place. After his death, in 315, Majorinus was succeeded by Donatus, a gifted man, of fiery energy and eloquence, revered by his admirers as a wonder worker, and styled The Great. From this man, and not from the Donatus mentioned above, the name of the party was derived.

Each party endeavored to gain churches abroad to its side, and thus the schism spread. The Donatists appealed to the emperor Constantine — the first instance of such appeal, and a step which they afterward had to repent. The emperor, who was at that time in Gaul, referred the matter to the Roman bishop Melchiades (Miltiades) and five Gallican bishops, before whom the accused Caecilian and ten African bishops from each side were directed to appear. The decision went in favor of Caecilian, and he was now, except in Africa, universally regarded as the legitimate bishop of Carthage. The Donatists remonstrated. A second investigation, which Constantine intrusted to the council of Arles (Arelate) in 314, led to the same result. When the Donatists hereupon appealed from this ecclesiastical tribunal to the judgment of the emperor himself, he likewise declared against them at Milan in 316, and soon afterward issued penal laws against them, threatening them with the banishment of their bishops and the confiscation of their churches.

Persecution made them enemies of the state whose help they had invoked, and fed the flame of their fanaticism. They made violent resistance to the imperial commissioner, Ursacius, and declared that no power on earth could induce them to hold church fellowship with the “rascal” (nebulo) Caecilian. Constantine perceived the fruitlessness of the forcible restriction of religion, and, by an edict in 321, granted the Donatists full liberty of faith and worship. He remained faithful to this policy of toleration, and exhorted the Catholics to patience and indulgence. At a council in 330 the Donatists numbered two hundred and seventy bishops.

Constans, the successor of Constantine, resorted again to violent measures; but neither threats nor promises made any impression on the party. It came to blood. The Circumcellions, a sort of Donatist mendicant monks, who wandered about the country among the cottages of the peasantry, carried on plunder, arson, and murder, in conjunction with mutinous peasants and slaves, and in crazy zeal for the martyr’s crown, as genuine soldiers of Christ, rushed into fire and water, and threw themselves down from rocks. Yet there were Donatists who disapproved this revolutionary frenzy. The insurrection was suppressed by military force; several leaders of the Donatists were executed, others were banished, and their churches were closed or confiscated. Donatus the Great died in exile. He was succeeded by one Parmenianus.

Under Julian the Apostate the Donatists again obtained, with all other heretics and schismatics, freedom of religion, and returned to the possession of their churches, which they painted anew, to redeem them from their profanation by the Catholics. But under the subsequent emperors their condition grew worse, both from persecutions without and dissensions within. The quarrel between the two parties extended into all the affairs of daily life; the Donatist bishop Faustinus of Hippo, for example, allowing none of the members of his church to bake bread for the Catholic inhabitants.

 

70. Augustine and the Donatists. Their Persecution and Extinction

At the end of the fourth century, and in the beginning of the fifth, the great Augustine, of Hippo, where there was also a strong congregation of the schismatics, made a powerful effort, by instruction and persuasion, to reconcile the Donatists with the Catholic church. He wrote several works on the subject, and set the whole African church in motion against them. They feared his superior dialectics, and avoided him wherever they could. The matter, however, was brought, by order of the emperor in 411, to a three days’ arbitration at Carthage, attended by two hundred and eighty-six Catholic bishops and two hundred and seventy-nine Donatist.

Augustine, who, in two beautiful sermons before the beginning of the disputation, exhorted to love, forbearance and meekness, was the chief speaker on the part of the Catholics Petilian, on the part of the schismatics. Marcellinus, the imperial tribune and notary, and a friend of Augustine, presided, and was to pass the decisive judgment. This arrangement was obviously partial, and secured the triumph of the Catholics. The discussions related to two points: (1) Whether the Catholic bishops Caecilian and Felix of Aptunga were traditors; (2) Whether the church lose her nature and attributes by fellowship with heinous sinners. The balance of skill and argument was on the side of Augustine, though the Donatists brought much that was forcible against compulsion in religion, and against the confusion of the temporal and the spiritual powers. The imperial commissioner, as might be expected, decided in favor of the Catholics. The separatists nevertheless persisted in their view, but their appeal to the emperor continued unsuccessful.

More stringent civil laws were now enacted against them, banishing the Donatist clergy from their country, imposing fines on the laity, and confiscating the churches. In 415 they were even forbidden to hold religious assemblies, upon pain of death.

Augustine himself, who had previously consented only to spiritual measures against heretics, now advocated force, to bring them into the fellowship of the church, out of which there was no salvation. He appealed to the command in the parable of the supper, Luke, Luk_14:23, to “compel them to come in;” where, however, the “compel” (ἀνάγκασον) is evidently but a vivid hyperbole for the holy zeal in the conversion of the heathen, which we find, for example, in the apostle Paul.

New eruptions of fanaticism ensued. A bishop Gaudentius threatened, that if the attempt were made to deprive him of his church by force, he, would burn himself with his congregation in it, and vindicated this intended suicide by the example of Rhazis, in 2 Macc 14.

The conquest of Africa by the Arian Vandals in 428 devastated the African church, and put an end to the controversy, as the French Revolution swept both Jesuitism and Jansenism away. Yet a remnant of the Donatists, as we learn from the letters of Gregory I., perpetuated itself into the seventh century, still proving in their ruins the power of a mistaken puritanic zeal and the responsibility and guilt of state-church persecution. In the seventh century the entire African church sank under the Saracenic conquest.

 

71. Internal History of the Donatist Schism. Dogma of the Church

The Donatist controversy was a conflict between separatism and catholicism; between ecclesiastical purism and ecclesiastical eclecticism; between the idea of the church as an exclusive community of regenerate saints and the idea of the church as the general Christendom of state and people. It revolved around the doctrine of the essence of the Christian church, and, in particular, of the predicate of holiness. It resulted in the completion by Augustine of the catholic dogma of the church, which had been partly developed by Cyprian in his conflict with a similar schism.

The Donatists, like Tertullian in his Montanistic writings, started from an ideal and spiritualistic conception of the church as a fellowship of saints, which in a sinful world could only be imperfectly realized. They laid chief stress on the predicate of the subjective holiness or personal worthiness of the several members, and made the catholicity of the church and the efficacy of the sacraments dependent upon that. The true church, therefore, is not so much a school of holiness, as a society of those who are already holy; or at least of those who appear so; for that there are hypocrites not even the Donatists could deny, and as little could they in earnest claim infallibility in their own discernment of men. By the toleration of those who are openly sinful, the church loses her holiness, and ceases to be church. Unholy priests are incapable of administering sacraments; for how can regeneration proceed from the unregenerate, holiness from the unholy? No one can give what he does not himself possess. He who would receive faith from a faithless man, receives not faith but guilt. It was on this ground, in fact, that they rejected the election of Caecilian: that he had been ordained bishop by an unworthy person. On this ground they refused to recognize the Catholic baptism as baptism at all. On this point they had some support in Cyprian, who likewise rejected the validity of heretical baptism, though not from the separatist, but from the catholic point of view, and who came into collision, upon this question, with Stephen of Rome.

Hence, like the Montanists and Novatians, they insisted on rigorous church discipline, and demanded the excommunication of all unworthy members, especially of such as had denied their faith or given up the Holy Scriptures under persecution. They resisted, moreover, all interference of the civil power in church affairs; though they themselves at first had solicited the help of Constantine. In the great imperial church, embracing the people in a mass, they saw a secularized Babylon, against which they set themselves off, in separatistic arrogance, as the only true and pure church. In support of their views, they appealed to the passages of the Old Testament, which speak of the external holiness of the people of God, and to the procedure of Paul with respect to the fornicator at Corinth.

In opposition to this subjective and spiritualistic theory of the church, Augustine, as champion of the Catholics, developed the objective, realistic theory, which has since been repeatedly reasserted, though with various modifications, not only in the Roman church, but also in the Protestant, against separatistic and schismatic sects. He lays chief stress on the catholicity of the church, and derives the holiness of individual members and the validity of ecclesiastical functions from it. He finds the essence of the church, not in the personal character of the several Christians, but in the union of the whole church with Christ. Taking the historical point of view, he goes back to the founding of the church, which may be seen in the New Testament, which has spread over all the world, and which is connected through the unbroken succession of bishops with the apostles and with Christ. This alone can be the true church. It is impossible that she should all at once disappear from the earth, or should exist only in the African sect of the Donatists. What is all that they may say of their little heap, in comparison with the great catholic Christendom of all lands? Thus even numerical preponderance here enters as an argument; though under other circumstances it may prove too much, and would place the primitive church at a clear disadvantage in comparison with the prevailing Jewish and heathen masses, and the Evangelical church in its controversy with the Roman Catholic.

From the objective character of the church as a divine institution flows, according to the catholic view, the efficacy of all her functions, the Sacraments in particular. When Petilian, at the Collatio cum Donatistis, said: “He who receives the faith from a faithless priest, receives not faith, but guilt,” Augustine answered: “But Christ is not unfaithful (perfidus), from whom I receive faith (fidem), not guilt (reatum). Christ, therefore, is properly the functionary, and the priest is simply his organ.” “My origin,” said Augustine on the same occasion, “is Christ, my root is Christ, my head is Christ. The seed, of which I was born, is the word of God, which I must obey even though the preacher himself practise not what he preaches. I believe not in the minister by whom I am baptized, but in Christ, who alone justifies the sinner and can forgive guilt.”

Lastly, in regard to church discipline, the opponents of the Donatists agreed with them in considering it wholesome and necessary, but would keep it within the limits fixed for it by the circumstances of the time and the fallibility of men. A perfect separation of sinners from saints is impracticable before the final judgment. Many things must be patiently borne, that greater evil may be averted, and that those still capable of improvement may be improved, especially where the offender has too many adherents. “Man,” says Augustine, “should punish in the spirit of love, until either the discipline and correction come from above, or the tares are pulled up in the universal harvest.” In support of this view appeal was made to the Lord’s parables of the tares among the wheat, and of the net which gathered together of every kind (Mat_13:1-58). These two parables were the chief exegetical battle ground of the two parties. The Donatists understood by the field, not the church, but the world, according to the Saviour’s own exposition of the parable of the tares; the Catholics replied that it was the kingdom of heaven or the church to which the parable referred as a whole, and pressed especially the warning of the Saviour not to gather up the tares before the final harvest, lest they root up also the wheat with them. The Donatists, moreover, made a distinction between unknown offenders, to whom alone the parable of the net referred, and notorious sinners. But this did not gain them much; for if the church compromises her character for holiness by contact with unworthy persons at all, it matters not whether they be openly unworthy before men or not, and no church whatever would be left on earth.

On the other hand, however, Augustine, who, no more than the Donatists, could relinquish the predicate of holiness for the church, found himself compelled to distinguish between a true and a mixed, or merely apparent body of Christ; forasmuch as hypocrites, even in this world, are not in and with Christ, but only appear to be. And yet he repelled the Donatist charge of making two churches. In his view it is one and the same church, which is now mixed with the ungodly, and will hereafter be pure, as it is the same Christ who once died, and now lives forever, and the same believers, who are now mortal and will one day put on immortality’.

With some modification we may find here the germ of the subsequent Protestant distinction of the visible and invisible church; which regards the invisible, not as another church, but as the ecclesiola in ecclesia (or ecclesiis), as the smaller communion of true believers among professors, and thus as the true substance of the visible church, and as contained within its limits, like the soul in the body, or the kernel in the shell. Here the moderate Donatist and scholarly theologian, Tychoius, approached Augustine; calling the church a twofold body of Christ, of which the one part embraces the true Christians, the other the apparent. In this, as also in acknowledging the validity of the Catholic baptism, Tychonius departed from the Donatists; while he adhered to their views on discipline and opposed the Catholic mixture of the church and the world. But neither he nor Augustine pursued this distinction to any clearer development. Both were involved, at bottom, in the confusion of Christianity with the church, and of the church with a particular outward organization.

 

72. The Roman Schism of Damasus and Ursinus

Rufinus: Hist. Eccl. ii. 10. Hieronymus: Chron. ad ann. 366. Socrates: H. E. iv. 29 (all in favor of Damasus). Faustinus et Marcellinus (two presbyters of Ursinus): Libellus precum ad Imper. Theodos. in Bibl. Patr. Lugd. v. 637 (in favor of Ursinus). With these Christian accounts of the Roman schism may be compared the impartial statement of the heathen historian Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvii. c. 3, ad ann. 367.

The church schism between Damasus and Ursinus (or Ursicinus) in Rome, had nothing to do with the question of discipline, but proceeded partly from the Arian controversy, partly from personal ambition. For such were the power and splendor of the court of the successor of the Galilean fisherman, even at that time, that the distinguished pagan senator, Praetextatus, said to Pope Damasus: “Make me a bishop of Rome, and I will be a Christian to-morrow.” The schism presents a mournful example of the violent character of the episcopal elections at Rome. These elections were as important events for the Romans as the elections of the emperors by the Praetorian soldiers had formerly been. They enlisted and aroused all the passions of the clergy and the people.

The schism originated in the deposition and banishment of the bishop Tiberius, for his orthodoxy, and the election of the Arian Felix as pope in opposition by the arbitrary will of the emperor Constantius (a.d. 355). Liberius, having in his exile subscribed the Arian creed of Sirmium,  was in 358 reinstated, and Felix retired, and is said to have subsequently repented his defection to Arianism. The parties, however, continued.

After the death of Liberius in 366, Damasus was, by the party of Felix, and Ursinus by the party of Liberius, elected successor of Peter. It came to repeated bloody encounters; even the altar of the Prince of Peace was desecrated, and in a church whither Ursinus had betaken himself, a hundred and thirty-seven men lost their lives in one day. Other provinces also were drawn into the quarrel. It was years before Damasus at last, with the aid of the emperor, obtained undisputed possession of his office, and Ursinus was banished. The statements of the two parties are so conflicting in regard to the priority and legitimacy of election in the two cases, and the authorship of the bloody scenes, that we cannot further determine on which side lay the greater blame. Damasus, who reigned from 367 to 384) is indeed depicted as in other respects a violent man, but he was a man of learning and literary taste, and did good service by his patronage of Jerome’s Latin version of the Bible, and by the introduction of the Latin Psalter into the church song.

 

73. The Meletian Schism at Antioch

Hieronymus: Chron. ad ann. 864. Chrysostomus: Homilia in S. Patrem nostrum Meletium, archiepiscopum magnae Antiochiae (delivered a.d. 386 or 387, in Montfaucon’s ed. of Chrysost. Opera, tom. ii. p. 518-523). Sozomen: H. E. iv. 28; vii. 10, 11. Theodor.: H. E. V. 3, 35. Socrates: H. E. iii. 9; v. 9, 17. Comp. Walch: Ketzerhistorie, part iv. p. 410 sqq.

The Meletian schism at Antioch was interwoven with the Arian controversies, and lasted through more than half a century.

In 361 the majority of the Antiochian church elected as bishop Meletius, who had formerly been an Arian, and was ordained by this party, but after his election professed the Nicene orthodoxy. He was a man of rich persuasive eloquence, and of a sweet and amiable disposition, which endeared him to the Catholics and Arians. But his doctrinal indecision offended the extremists of both parties. When he professed the Nicene faith, the Arians deposed him in council, sent him into exile, and transferred his bishopric to Euzoius, who had formerly been banished with Arius. The Catholics disowned Euzoius, but split among themselves; the majority adhered to the exiled Meletius, while the old and more strictly orthodox party, who had hitherto been known as the Eustathians, and with whom Athanasius communicated, would not recognize a bishop of Arian consecration, though Catholic in belief, and elected Paulinus, a presbyter of high character, who was ordained counter-bishop by Lucifer of Calaris.

The doctrinal difference between the Meletians and the old Nicenes consisted chiefly in this: that the latter acknowledged three hypostases in the divine trinity, the former only three prosopa; the one laying the stress on the triplicity of the divine essence, the other on its unity.

The orthodox orientals declared for Meletius, the occidentals and Egyptians for Paulinus, as legitimate bishop of Antioch. Meletius, on returning from exile under the protection of Gratian, proposed to Paulinus that they should unite their flocks, and that the survivor of them should superintend the church alone; but Paulinus declined, since the canons forbade him to take as a colleague one who had been ordained by Arians. Then the military authorities put Meletius in possession of the cathedral, which had been in the hands of Euzoius. Meletius presided, as senior bishop, in the second ecumenical council (381), but died a few days after the opening of it — a saint outside the communion of Rome. His funeral was imposing: lights were borne before the embalmed corpse, and psalms sung in divers languages, and these honors were repeated in all the cities through which it passed on its transportation to Antioch, beside the grave of St. Babylas. The Antiochians engraved his likeness on their rings, their cups, and the walls of their bedrooms. So St. Chrysostom informs us in his eloquent eulogy on Meletius. Flavian was elected his successor, although Paulinus was still alive. This gave rise to fresh troubles, and excited the indignation of the bishop of Rome. Chrysostom labored for the reconciliation of Rome and Alexandria to Flavian. But the party of Paulinus, after his death in 389, elected Evarius as successor († 392), and the schism continued down to the year 413 or 415, when the bishop Alexander succeeded in reconciling the old orthodox remnant with the successor of Meletius. The two parties celebrated their union by a splendid festival, and proceeded together in one majestic stream to the church.

Thus a long and tedious schism was brought to a close, and the church of Antioch was permitted at last to enjoy that peace which the Athanasian synod of Alexandria in 362 had desired for it in vain.



Vol. 3, Chapter VII. Public Worship and Religious Customs and Ceremonies

I. The ancient Liturgies; the Acts of Councils; and the ecclesiastical writers of the period.

II. The archeological and liturgical works of Martene, Mamachi, Bona, Muratori, Pelicia, Asseman, Renaudot, Binterim, and Staudenmeier, of the Roman Catholic church; and Bingham, Augusti, Siegel, Alt, Piper, Neale, and Daniel, of the Protestant.

 

74. The Revolution in Cultus

The change in the legal and social position of Christianity with reference to the temporal power, produced a mighty effect upon its cultus. Hitherto the Christian worship had been confined to a comparatively small number of upright confessors, most of whom belonged to the poorer classes of society. Now it came forth from its secrecy in private houses, deserts, and catacombs, to the light of day, and must adapt itself to the higher classes and to the great mass of the people, who had been bred in the traditions of heathenism. The development of the hierarchy and the enrichment of public worship go hand in hand. A republican and democratic constitution demands simple manners and customs; aristocracy and monarchy surround themselves with a formal etiquette and a brilliant court-life. The universal priesthood is closely connected with a simple cultus; the episcopal hierarchy, with a rich, imposing ceremonial.

In the Nicene age the church laid aside her lowly servant-form, and put on a splendid imperial garb. She exchanged the primitive simplicity of her cultus for a richly colored multiplicity. She drew all the fine arts into the service of the sanctuary, and began her sublime creations of Christian architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. In place of the pagan temple and altar arose everywhere the stately church and the chapel in honor of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, of martyrs and saints. The kindred ideas of priesthood, sacrifice, and altar became more fully developed and more firmly fixed, as the outward hierarchy grew. The mass, or daily repetition of the atoning sacrifice of Christ by the hand of the priest, became the mysterious center of the whole system of worship. The number of church festivals was increased; processions, and pilgrimages, and a multitude of significant and superstitious customs and ceremonies were introduced. The public worship of God assumed, if we may so speak, a dramatic, theatrical character, which made it attractive and imposing to the mass of the people, who were as yet incapable, for the most part, of worshipping God in spirit and in truth. It was addressed rather to the eye and the ear, to feeling and imagination, than to intelligence and will. In short, we already find in the Nicene age almost all the essential features of the sacerdotal, mysterious, ceremonial, symbolical cultus of the Greek and Roman churches of the present day.

This enrichment and embellishment of the cultus was, on one hand, a real advance, and unquestionably had a disciplinary and educational power, like the hierarchical organization, for the training of the popular masses. But the gain in outward appearance and splendor was balanced by many a loss in simplicity and spirituality. While the senses and the imagination were entertained and charmed, the heart not rarely returned cold and hungry. Not a few pagan habits and ceremonies, concealed under new names, crept into the church, or were baptized only with water, not with the fire and Spirit of the gospel. It is well known with what peculiar tenacity a people cleave to religious usages; and it could not be expected that they should break off in an instant from the traditions of centuries. Nor, in fact, are things which may have descended from heathenism, to be by any means sweepingly condemned. Both the Jewish cultus and the heathen are based upon those universal religious wants which Christianity must satisfy, and which Christianity alone can truly meet. Finally, the church has adopted hardly a single existing form or ceremony of religion, without at the same time breathing into it a new spirit, and investing it with a high moral import. But the limit of such appropriation it is very hard to fix, and the old nature of Judaism and heathenism which has its point of attachment in the natural heart of man, continually betrayed its tenacious presence. This is conceded and lamented by the most earnest of the church fathers of the Nicene and post-Nicene age, the very persons who are in other respects most deeply involved in the Catholic ideas of cultus.

In the Christian martyr-worship and saint-worship, which now spread with giant strides over the whole Christian world, we cannot possibly mistake the succession of the pagan worship of gods and heroes, with its noisy popular festivities. Augustine puts into the mouth of a heathen the question: “Wherefore must we forsake gods, which the Christians themselves worship with us?” He deplores the frequent revels and amusements at the tombs of the martyrs; though he thinks that allowance should be made for these weaknesses out of regard to the ancient custom. Leo the Great speaks of Christians in Rome who first worshipped the rising sun, doing homage to the pagan Apollo, before repairing to the basilica of St. Peter. Theodoret defends the Christian practices at the graves of the martyrs by pointing to the pagan libations, propitiations, gods, and demigods. Since Hercules, Aesculapitis, Bacchus, the Dioscuri, and many other objects of pagan worship were mere deified men, the Christians, he thinks, cannot be blamed for honoring their martyrs — not making them gods but venerating them as witnesses and servants of the only, true God. Chrysostom mourns over the theatrical customs, such as loud clapping in applause, which the Christians at Antioch and Constantinople brought with them into the church. In the Christmas festival, which from the fourth century spread from Rome over the entire church, the holy commemoration of the birth of the Redeemer is associated — to this day, even in Protestant lands — with the wanton merriments of the pagan Saturnalia. And even in the celebration of Sunday, as it was introduced by Constantine, and still continues on the whole continent of Europe, the cultus of the old sun-god Apollo mingles, with the remembrance of the resurrection of Christ; and the widespread profanation of the Lord’s Day, especially on the continent of Europe, demonstrates the great influence which heathenism still exerts upon Roman and Greek Catholic, and even upon Protestant, Christendom.

 

75. The Civil and Religious Sunday

Geo. Holden: The Christian Sabbath. Lond. 1825 (see ch. v.). John T. Baylee: History of the Sabbath. Lond. 1857 (see chs. x.-xiii.). James Aug. Hessey: Sunday, its Origin, History, and present Obligation; Bampton Lectures preached before the University of Oxford. Lond. 1860 (Patristic and high-Anglican). James Gilfillan: The Sabbath viewed in the Light of Reason, Revelation, and History, with Sketches of its Literature. Edinb. and New York, 1862 (The Puritan and Anglo-American view). Robert Cox: The Literature on the Sabbath Question. Edinb. 1865, 2 vols. (Latitudinarian, but very full and learned).

The observance of Sunday originated in the time of the apostles, and ever since forms the basis of public worship, with its ennobling, sanctifying, and cheering influences, in all Christian lands.

The Christian Sabbath is, on the one hand, the continuation and the regeneration of the Jewish Sabbath, based upon God’s resting from the creation and upon the fourth commandment of the decalogue, which, as to its substance, is not of merely national application, like the ceremonial and civil law, but of universal import and perpetual validity for mankind. It is, on the other hand, a new creation of the gospel, a memorial of the resurrection of Christ and of the work of redemption completed and divinely sealed thereby. It rests, we may say, upon the threefold basis of the original creation, the Jewish legislation, and the Christian redemption, and is rooted in the physical, the moral, and the religious wants of our nature. It has a legal and an evangelical aspect. Like the law in general, the institution of the Christian Sabbath is a wholesome restraint upon the people, and a schoolmaster to lead them to Christ. But it is also strictly evangelical: it was originally made for the benefit of man, like the family, with which it goes back beyond the fall to the paradise of innocence, as the second institution of God on earth; it was “a delight” to the pious of the old dispensation (Isa_58:13), and now, under the new, it is fraught with the glorious memories and blessings of Christ’s resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The Christian Sabbath is the ancient Sabbath baptized with fire and the Holy Ghost, regenerated, spiritualized, and glorified. It is the connecting link of creation and redemption, of paradise lost, and paradise regained, and a pledge and preparation for the saints’ everlasting rest in heaven.

The ancient church viewed the Sunday mainly, we may say, one-sidedly and exclusively, from its Christian aspect as a new institution, and not in any way as a continuation of the Jewish Sabbath. It observed it as the day of the commemoration of the resurrection or of the now spiritual creation, and hence as a day of sacred joy and thanksgiving, standing in bold contrast to the days of humiliation and fasting, as the Easter festival contrasts with Good Friday.

So long as Christianity was not recognized and protected by the state, the observance of Sunday was purely religious, a strictly voluntary service, but exposed to continual interruption from the bustle of the world and a hostile community. The pagan Romans paid no more regard to the Christian Sunday than to the Jewish Sabbath.

In this matter, as in others, the accession of Constantine marks the beginning of a new era, and did good service to the church and to the cause of public order and morality. Constantine is the founder, in part at least, of the civil observance of Sunday, by which alone the religious observance of it in the church could be made universal and could be properly secured. In the year 321 he issued a law prohibiting manual labor in the cities and all judicial transactions, at a later period also military exercises, on Sunday. He exempted the liberation of slaves, which as an act of Christian humanity and charity, might, with special propriety, take place on that day. But the Sunday law of Constantine must not be overrated. He enjoined the observance, or rather forbade the public desecration of Sunday, not under the name of Sabbatum or Dies Domini, but under its old astrological and heathen title, Dies Solis, familiar to all his subjects, so that the law was as applicable to the worshippers of Hercules, Apollo, and Mithras, as to the Christians. There is no reference whatever in his law either to the fourth commandment or to the resurrection of Christ. Besides he expressly exempted the country districts, where paganism still prevailed, from the prohibition of labor, and thus avoided every appearance of injustice. Christians and pagans had been accustomed to festival rests. Constantine made these rests to synchronize, and gave the preference to Sunday, on which day Christians from the beginning celebrated the resurrection of their Lord and Saviour. This and no more was implied in the famous enactment of 321. It was only a step in the right direction, but probably the only one which Constantine could prudently or safely take at that period of transition from the rule of paganism to that of Christianity.

For the army, however, he went beyond the limits of negative and protective legislation, to which the state ought to confine itself in matters of religion, and enjoined a certain positive observance of Sunday, in requiring the Christian soldiers to attend Christian worship, and the heathen soldiers, in the open field, at a given signal, with eyes and hands raised towards heaven, to recite the following, certainly very indefinite, form of prayer: “Thee alone we acknowledge as God, thee we reverence as king, to thee we call as our helper. To thee we owe our victories, by thee have we obtained the mastery of our enemies. To thee we give thanks for benefits already received, from thee we hope for benefits to come. We all fall at thy feet, and fervently beg that thou wouldest preserve to us our emperor Constantine and his divinely beloved sons in long life healthful and victorious.”

Constantine’s successors pursued the Sunday legislation which he had initiated, and gave a legal sanction and civil significance also to other holy days of the church, which have no Scriptural authority, so that the special reverence due to the Lord’s Day was obscured in proportion as the number of rival claims increased. Thus Theodosius I. increased the number of judicial holidays to one hundred and twenty-four. The Valentinians, I. and II., prohibited the exaction of taxes and the collection of moneys on Sunday, and enforced the previously enacted prohibition of lawsuits. Theodosius the Great, in 386, and still more stringently the younger Theodosius, in 425, forbade theatrical performances, and Leo and Anthemius, in 460, prohibited other secular amusements, on the Lord’s Day. Such laws, however, were probably never rigidly executed. A council of Carthage, in 401, laments the people’s passion for theatrical and other entertainments on Sunday. The same abuse, it is well known, very generally prevails to this day upon the continent of Europe in both Protestant and Roman Catholic countries, and Christian princes and magistrates only too frequently give it the sanction of their example.

Ecclesiastical legislation in like manner prohibited needless mechanical and agricultural labor, and the attending of theatres and other public places of amusement, also hunting and weddings, on Sunday and on feast days. Besides such negative legislation, to which the state must confine itself, the church at the same time enjoined positive observances for the sacred day, especially the regular attendance of public worship, frequent communion, and the payment of free-will offerings (tithes). Many a council here confounded the legal and the evangelical principles, thinking themselves able to enforce by the threatening of penalties what has moral value only as a voluntary act. The Council of Eliberis, in 305, decreed the suspension from communion of any person living in a town who shall absent himself for three Lord’s Days from church. In the same legalistic spirit, the council of Sardica, in 343, and the Trullan council of 692, threatened with deposition the clergy who should unnecessarily omit public worship three Sundays in succession, and prescribed temporary excommunication for similar neglect among the laity. But, on the other hand, the councils, while they turned the Lord’s Day itself into a legal ordinance handed down from the apostles, pronounced with all decision against the Jewish Sabbatism. The Apostolic Canons and the council of Gangra (the latter, about 450, in opposition to the Gnostic Manichaean asceticism of the Eustathians) condemn fasting on Sunday. In the Greek church this prohibition is still in force, because Sunday, commemorating the resurrection of Christ, is a day of spiritual joy. On the same symbolical ground kneeling in prayer was forbidden on Sunday and through the whole time of Easter until Pentecost. The general council of Nicaeea, in 325, issued on this point in the twentieth canon the following decision: “Whereas some bow the knee on Sunday and on the days of Pentecost [i.e., during the seven weeks after Easter], the holy council, that everything may everywhere be uniform, decrees that prayers be offered to God in a standing posture.” The Trullan council, in 692, ordained in the ninetieth canon: “From Saturday evening to Sunday evening let no one bow the knee.” The Roman church in general still adheres to this practice. The New Testament gives no law for such secondary matters; the apostle Paul, on the contrary, just in the season of Easter and Pentecost, before his imprisonment, following an inward dictate, repeatedly knelt in prayer. (Act_20:36; Act_21:5) The council of Orleans, in 538, says in the twenty-eighth canon: “It is Jewish superstition, that one may not ride or walk on Sunday, nor do anything to adorn the house or the person. But occupations in the field are forbidden, that people may come to the church and give themselves to prayer.”

As to the private opinions of the principal fathers on this subject, they all favor the sanctification of the Lord’s Day, but treat it as a peculiarly Christian institution, and draw a strong, indeed a too strong, line of distinction between it and the Jewish Sabbath; forgetting that they are one in essence and aim, though different in form and spirit, and that the fourth commandment as to its substance — viz., the keeping holy of one day out of seven — is an integral part of the decalogue or the moral law, and hence of perpetual obligation. Eusebius calls Sunday, but not the Sabbath, “the first and chief of days and a day of salvation,” and commends Constantine for commanding that “all should assemble together every week, and keep that which is called the Lord’s Day as a festival, to refresh even their bodies and to stir up their minds by divine precepts and instruction.” Athanasius speaks very highly of the Lord’s Day, as the perpetual memorial of the resurrection, but assumes that the old Sabbath has deceased. Macarius, a presbyter of Upper Egypt (350), spiritualizes the Sabbath as a type and shadow of the true Sabbath given by the Lord to the soul — the true and eternal Sabbath, which is freedom from sin. Hilary represents the whole of this life as a preparation for the eternal Sabbath of the next. Epiphanius speaks of Sunday as an institution of the apostles, but falsely attributes the same origin to the observance of Wednesday and Friday as half fasts. Ambrose frequently mentions Sunday as an evangelical festival, and contrasts it with the defunct legal Sabbath. Jerome makes the same distinction. He relates of the Egyptian coenobites that they “devote themselves on the Lord’s Day to nothing but prayer and reading the Scriptures.” But he mentions also without censure, that the pious Paula and her companions, after returning from church on Sundays, “applied themselves to their allotted works and made garments for themselves and others.” Augustine likewise directly derives Sunday from the resurrection, and not from the fourth commandment. Fasting on that day of spiritual joy he regards, like Ambrose, as a grave scandal and heretical practice. The Apostolical Constitutions in this respect go even still further, and declare: “He that fasts on the Lord’s Day is guilty of sin.” But they still prescribe the celebration of the Jewish Sabbath on Saturday in addition to the Christian Sunday. Chrysostom warns Christians against sabbatizing with the Jews, but earnestly commends the due celebration of the Lord’s Day. Leo the Great, in a beautiful passage — the finest of all the patristic utterances on this subject — lauds the Lord’s Day as the day of the primitive creation, of the Christian redemption, of the meeting of the risen Saviour with the assembled disciples, of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, of the principal Divine blessings bestowed upon the world. But he likewise brings it in no connection with the fourth commandment, and with the other fathers leaves out of view the proper foundation of the day in the eternal moral law of God.

Besides Sunday, the Jewish Sabbath also was distinguished in the Eastern church by the absence of fasting and by standing in prayer. The Western church, on the contrary, especially the Roman, in protest against Judaism, observed the seventh day of the week as a fast day, like Friday. This difference between the two churches was permanently fixed by the fifty-fifth canon of the Trullan council of 692: “In Rome fasting is practised on all the Saturdays of Quadragesima [the forty days’ fast before Easter]. This is contrary to the sixty-sixth apostolic canon, and must no longer be done. Whoever does it, if a clergyman, shall be deposed; if a layman, excommunicated.”

Wednesday and Friday also continued to be observed in many countries as days commemorative of the passion of Christ (dies stationum), with half-fasting. The Latin church, however, gradually substituted fasting on Saturday for fasting on Wednesday.

Finally, as to the daily devotions: the number of the canonical hours was enlarged from three to seven (according to Psa_119:164: “Seven times in a day will I praise thee”). But they were strictly kept only in the cloisters, under the technical names of matina (about three o’clock), prima (about six), tertia (nine), sexta (noon), nona (three in the afternoon), vesper (six), completorium (nine), and mesonyctium or vigilia (midnight). Usually two nocturnal prayers were united. The devotions consisted of prayer, singing, Scripture reading, especially in the Psalms, and readings from the histories of the martyrs and the homilies of the fathers. In the churches ordinarily only morning and evening worship was held. The high festivals were introduced by a night service, the vigils.

 

76. The Church Year

R. Hospinian: Festa Christian. (Tiguri, 1593) Genev. 1675. M. A. Nickel (R.C.): Die heil. Zeiten u. Feste nach ihrer Entstehung u. Feier in der Kath. Kirche, Mainz, 1825 sqq. 6 vols. Pillwitz: Geschichte der heil. Zeiten. Dresden, 1842. E. Ranke: Das kirchliche Pericopensystem aus den ältesten Urkunden dargelegt. Berlin, 1847. Fr. Strauss (late court preacher and professor in Berlin): Das evangelische Kirchenjahr. Berl. 1850. Lisco: Das christliche Kirchenjahr. Berl. (1840) 4th ed. 1850. Bobertag: Das evangelische Kirchenjahr, etc. Breslau, 1857. Comp. also Augusti: Handbuch der Christlichen Archaeologie, vol. i. (1836), pp. 457-595.

After the fourth century, the Christian year, with a cycle of regularly recurring annual religious festivals, comes forth in all its main outlines, though with many fluctuations and variations in particulars, and forms thenceforth, so to speak, the skeleton of the Catholic cultus.

The idea of a religious year, in distinction from the natural and from the civil year, appears also in Judaism, and to some extent in the heathen world. It has its origin in the natural necessity of keeping alive and bringing to bear upon the people by public festivals the memory of great and good men and of prominent events. The Jewish ecclesiastical year was, like the whole Mosaic cultus, symbolical and typical. The Sabbath commemorated the creation and the typical redemption, and pointed forward to the resurrection and the true redemption, and thus to the Christian Sunday. The passover pointed to Easter, and the feast of harvest to the Christian Pentecost. The Jewish observance of these festivals originally bore an earnest, dignified, and significant character, but in the hands of Pharisaism it degenerated very largely into slavish Sabbatism and heartless ceremony, and provoked the denunciation of Christ and the apostles. The heathen festivals of the gods ran to the opposite extreme of excessive sensual indulgence and public vice.

The peculiarity of the Christian year is, that it centres in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and is intended to minister to His glory. In its original idea it is a yearly representation of the leading events of the gospel history; a celebration of the birth, passion, and resurrection of Christ, and of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, to revive gratitude and devotion. This is the festival part, the semestre Domini. The other half, not festal, the semestre ecclesiae, is devoted to the exhibition of the life of the Christian church, its founding, its growth, and its consummation, both is a whole, and in its individual members, from the regeneration to the resurrection of the dead. The church year is, so to speak, a chronological confession of faith; a moving panorama of the great events of salvation; a dramatic exhibition of the gospel for the Christian people. It secures to every important article of faith its place in the cultus of the church, and conduces to wholeness and soundness of Christian doctrine, as against all unbalanced and erratic ideas. It serves to interweave religion with the life of the people by continually recalling to the popular mind the most important events upon which our salvation rests, and by connecting them with the vicissitudes of the natural and the civil year. Yet, on the other hand, the gradual overloading of the church year, and the multiplication of saints’ days, greatly encouraged superstition and idleness, crowded the Sabbath and the leading festivals into the background, and subordinated the merits of Christ to the patronage of saints. The purification and simplification aimed at by the Reformation became an absolute necessity.

The order of the church year is founded in part upon the history of Jesus and of the apostolic church; in part, especially in respect to Easter and Pentecost, upon the Jewish sacred year; and in part upon the natural succession of seasons; for the life of nature in general forms the groundwork of the higher life of the spirit, and there is an evident symbolical correspondence between Easter and spring, Pentecost and the beginning of harvest, Christmas and the winter solstice, the nativity of John the Baptist and the summer solstice.

The Christian church year, however, developed itself spontaneously from the demands of the Christian worship and public life, after the precedent of the Old Testament cultus, with no positive direction from Christ or the apostles. The New Testament contains no certain traces of annual festivals; but so early as the second century we meet with the general observance of Easter and Pentecost, founded on the Jewish passover and feast of harvest, and answering to Friday and Sunday in the weekly cycle. Easter was a season of sorrow, in remembrance of the passion; Pentecost was a time of joy, in memory of the resurrection of the Redeemer and the outpouring of the Holy Ghost. These two festivals form the heart of the church year. Less important was the feast of the Epiphany, or manifestation of Christ as Messiah. In the fourth century the Christmas festival was added to the two former leading feasts, and partially took the place of the earlier feast of Epiphany, which now came to be devoted particularly to the manifestation of Christ among the Gentiles. And further, in Easter the πάσχα σταυρώσιμον and ἀναστάσιμον came to be more strictly distinguished, the latter being reckoned a season of joy.

From this time, therefore, we have three great festival cycles, each including a season of preparation before the feast and an after-season appropriate: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. The lesser feasts of Epiphany and Ascension arranged themselves under these. All bear originally a christological character, representing the three stages of the redeeming work of Christ: the beginning, the prosecution, and the consummation. All are for the glorification of God in Christ.

The trinitarian conception and arrangement of the festal half of the church year is of much later origin, cotemporary with the introduction of the festival of the Trinity (on the Sunday after Pentecost). The feast of Trinity dates from the ninth or tenth century, and was first authoritatively established in the Latin church by Pope John XXII., in 1334, as a comprehensive closing celebration of the revelation of God the Father, who sent His Son (Christmas), of the Son, who died for us and rose again (Easter), and of the Holy Ghost, who renews and sanctifies us (Pentecost). The Greek church knows nothing of this festival to this day, though she herself, in the Nicene age, was devoted with special earnestness and zeal to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. The reason of this probably is, that there was no particular historical fact to give occasion for such celebration, and that the mystery of the holy Trinity, revealed in Christ, is properly the object of adoration in all the church festivals and in the whole Christian cultus.

But with these three great feast-cycles the ancient church was not satisfied. So early as the Nicene age it surrounded them with feasts of Mary, of the apostles, of martyrs, and of saints, which were at first only local commemorations, but gradually assumed the character of universal feasts of triumph. By degrees every day of the church year became sacred to the memory of a particular martyr or saint, and in every case was either really or by supposition the day of the death of the saint, which was significantly called his heavenly birth-day. This multiplication of festivals has at bottom the true thought, that the whole life of the Christian should be one unbroken spiritual festivity. But the Romish calendar of saints anticipates an ideal condition, and corrupts the truth by exaggeration, as the Pharisees made the word of God “of none effect” by their additions. It obliterates the necessary distinction between Sunday and the six days of labor, to the prejudice of the former, and plays into the hands of idleness. And finally, it rests in great part upon uncertain legends and fantastic myths, which in some cases even eclipse the miracles of the gospel history, and nourish the grossest superstition.

The Greek oriental church year differs from the Roman in this general characteristic: that it adheres more closely to the Jewish ceremonies and customs, while the Roman attaches itself to the natural year and common life. The former begins in the middle of September (Tisri), with the first Sunday after the feast of the Holy Cross; the latter, with the beginning of Advent, four weeks before Christmas. Originally Easter was the beginning of the church year, both in the East and in the West; and the Apostolic Constitutions and Eusebius call the month of Easter the “first month” (corresponding to the month Nisan, which opened the sacred year of the Jews, while the first of Tisri, about the middle of our September, opened their civil year). In the Greek church also the lectiones continuae of the Holy Scriptures, after the example of the Jewish Parashioth and Haphthoroth, became prominent and the church year came to be divided according to the four Evangelists; while in the Latin church, since the sixth century, only select sections from the Gospels, and Epistles, called pericopes, have been read. Another peculiarity of the Western church year, descending from the fourth century, is the division into four portions, of three months each, called Quatember, separated from each other by a three days’ fast. Pope Leo I. delivered several sermons on the quarterly Quatember fast, and urges especially on that occasion charity to the poor. Instead of this the Greek church has a division according to the four Gospels, which are read entire in course; Matthew next after Pentecost, Luke beginning on the fourteenth of September, Mark at the Easter fast, and John on the first Sunday after Easter.

So early as the fourth century the observance of the festivals was enjoined under ecclesiastical penalties, and was regarded as an established divine ordinance. But the most eminent church teachers, a Chrysostom, a Jerome, and an Augustine, expressly insist, that the observance of the Christian festivals must never be a work of legal constraint, but always an act of evangelical freedom; and Socrates, the historian, says, that Christ and the apostles have given no laws and prescribed no penalties concerning it.

The abuse of the festivals soon fastened itself on the just use of them and the sensual excesses of the pagan feasts, in spite of the earnest warnings of several fathers, swept in like a wild flood upon the church. Gregory Nazianzen feels called upon, with reference particularly to the feast of Epiphany, to caution his people against public parade, splendor of dress, banquetings, and drinking revels, and says: “Such things we will leave to the Greeks, who worship their gods with the belly; but we, who adore the eternal Word, will find our only satisfaction in the word and the divine law, and in the contemplation of the holy object of our feast.” On the other hand, however, the Catholic church, especially after Pope Gregory I. (the “pater caerimoniarum”), with a good, but mistaken intention, favored the christianizing of heathen forms of cultus and popular festivals, and thereby contributed unconsciously to the paganizing of Christianity in the Middle Age. The calendar saints took the place of the ancient deities, and Rome became a second time a pantheon. Against this new heathenism, with its sweeping abuses, pure Christianity was obliged with all earnestness and emphasis to protest.

 

Notes

The Reformation of the sixteenth century sought to restore the entire cultus, and with it the Catholic church year, to its primitive Biblical simplicity; but with different degrees of consistency. The Lutheran, the Anglican, and the German Reformed churches — the latter with the greater freedom — retained the chief festivals, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, together with the system of pericopes, and in some cases also the days of Mary and the apostles (though these are passing more and more out of use); while the strictly Calvinistic churches, particularly the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, rejected all the yearly festivals as human institutions, but, on the other hand, introduced a proportionally stricter observance of the weekly day of rest instituted by God Himself. The Scotch General Assembly of August 6th, 1575, resolved: “That all days which heretofore have been kept holy, besides the Sabbath-days, such as Yule day [Christmas], saints’ days, and such others, may be abolished, and a civil penalty be appointed against the keepers thereof by ceremonies, banqueting, fasting, and such other vanities.” At first, the most of the Reformers, even Luther and Bucer, were for the abolition of all feast days, except Sunday; but the genius and long habits of the people were against such a radical reform. After the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the strict observance of Sunday developed itself in Great Britain and North America; while the Protestantism of the continent of Europe is much looser in this respect, and not essentially different from Catholicism. It is remarkable, that the strictest observance of Sunday is found just in those countries where the yearly feasts have entirely lost place in the popular mind: Scotland and New England. In the United States, however, for some years past, the Christmas and Easter festivals have regained ground without interfering at all with the strict observance of the Lord’s day, and promise to become regular American institutions. Good Friday and Pentecost will follow. On Good Friday of the year 1864 the leading ministers of the different evangelical churches in New York (the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Dutch and German Reformed, Lutheran, Congregational, Methodist, and Baptist) freely united in the celebration of the atoning death of their common Saviour and in humiliation and prayer to the great edification of the people. It is acknowledged more and more that the observance of the great facts of the evangelical history to the honor of Christ is a common inheritance of primitive Christianity and inseparable from Christian worship. “These festivals” (says Prof. Dr. Henry B. Smith in his admirable opening sermon of the Presbyterian General Assembly, N. S., of 1864, on Christian Union and Ecclesiastical Re-union), “antedate, not only our (Protestant) divisions, but also the corruptions of the Papacy; they exalt the Lord and not man; they involve a public and solemn recognition of essential Christian facts, and are thus a standing protest against infidelity; they bring out the historic side of the Christian faith, and connect us with its whole history; and all in the different denominations could unite in their observance without sacrificing any article of their creed or discipline.” There is no danger that American Protestantism will transgress the limits of primitive evangelical simplicity in this respect, and ever return to the papal Mariolatry and Hagiolatry. The Protestant churches have established also many new annual festivals, such as the feasts of the Reformation, of Harvest-home, and of the Dead in Germany; and in America, the frequent days of fasting and prayer, besides the annual Thanksgiving-day, which originated in Puritan New England, and has been gradually adopted in almost all the states of the Union, and quite recently by the general government itself, as a national institution. With the pericopes, or Scripture lessons, the Reformed church everywhere deals much more freely than the Lutheran, and properly reserves the right to expound the whole word of Scripture in any convenient order according to its choice. The Gospels and Epistles may be read as a regular part of the Sabbath service; but the minister should be free to select his text from any portion of the Canonical Scriptures; only it is always advisable to follow a system and to go, if possible, every year through the whole plan and order of salvation in judicious adaptation to the church year and the wants of the people.

 

77. The Christmas Cycle

Besides the general literature given in the previous section, there are many special treatises on the origin of the Christmas festival, by Bynaeus, Kindler, Ittig, Vogel, Wernsdorf, Jablonsky, Planck, Hagenbach, P. Cassel, etc. Comp. Augusti: Archaeol. i. 533.

The Christmas festival is the celebration of the incarnation of the Son of God. It is occupied, therefore, with the event which forms the center and turning-point of the history of the world. It is of all the festivals the one most thoroughly interwoven with the popular and family life, and stands at the head of the great feasts in the Western church year. It continues to be, in the entire Catholic world and in the greater part of Protestant Christendom, the grand jubilee of children, on which innumerable gifts celebrate the infinite love of God in the gift of his only-begotten Son. It kindles in mid-winter a holy fire of love and gratitude, and preaches in the longest night the rising of the Sun of life and the glory of the Lord. It denotes the advent of the true golden age, of the freedom and equality of all the redeemed before God and in God. No one can measure the joy and blessing which from year to year flow forth upon all ages of life from the contemplation of the holy child Jesus in his heavenly innocence and divine humility.

Notwithstanding this deep significance and wide popularity, the festival of the birth of the Lord is of comparatively late institution. This may doubtless be accounted for in the following manner: In the first place, no corresponding festival was presented by the Old Testament, as in the case of Easter and Pentecost. In the second place, the day and month of the birth of Christ are nowhere stated in the gospel history, and cannot be certainly determined. Again: the church lingered first of all about the death and resurrection of Christ, the completed fact of redemption, and made this the center of the weekly worship and the church year. Finally: the earlier feast of Epiphany afforded a substitute. The artistic religious impulse, however, which produced the whole church year, must sooner or later have called into existence a festival which forms the groundwork of all other annual festivals in honor of Christ. For, as Chrysostom, some ten years after the introduction of this anniversary in Antioch, justly said, without the birth of Christ there were also no baptism, passion, resurrection, or ascension, and no outpouring of the Holy Ghost; hence no feast of Epiphany, of Easter, or of Pentecost.

The feast of Epiphany had spread from the East to the West. The feast of Christmas took the opposite course. We find it first in Rome, in the time of the bishop Liberius, who on the twenty-fifth of December, 360, consecrated Marcella, the sister of St. Ambrose, nun or bride of Christ, and addressed her with the words: “Thou seest what multitudes are come to the birth-festival of thy bridegroom.” This passage implies that the festival was already existing and familiar. Christmas was introduced in Antioch about the year 380; in Alexandria, where the feast of Epiphany was celebrated as the nativity of Christ, not till about 430. Chrysostom, who delivered the Christmas homily in Antioch on the 25th of December, 386, already calls it, notwithstanding its recent introduction (some ten years before), the fundamental feast, or the root, from which all other Christian festivals grow forth.

The Christmas festival was probably the Christian transformation or regeneration of a series of kindred heathen festivals — the Saturnalia, Sigillaria, Juvenalia, and Brumalia — which were kept in Rome in the month of December, in commemoration of the golden age of universal freedom and equality, and in honor of the unconquered sun, and which were great holidays, especially for slaves and children. This connection accounts for many customs of the Christmas season, like the giving of presents to children and to the poor, the lighting of wax tapers, perhaps also the erection of Christmas trees, and gives them a Christian import; while it also betrays the origin of the many excesses in which the unbelieving world indulges at this season, in wanton perversion of the true Christmas mirth, but which, of course, no more forbid right use, than the abuses of the Bible or of any other gift of God. Had the Christmas festival arisen in the period of the persecution, its derivation from these pagan festivals would be refuted by the then reigning abhorrence of everything heathen; but in the Nicene age this rigidness of opposition between the church and the world was in a great measure softened by the general conversion of the heathen. Besides, there lurked in those pagan festivals themselves, in spite of all their sensual abuses, a deep meaning and an adaptation to a real want; they might be called unconscious prophecies of the Christmas feast. Finally, the church fathers themselves confirm the symbolical reference of the feast of the birth of Christ, the Sun of righteousness, the Light of the world, to the birth-festival of the unconquered sun, which on the twenty-fifth of December, after the winter solstice, breaks the growing power of darkness, and begins anew his heroic career. It was at the same time, moreover, the prevailing opinion of the church in the fourth and fifth centuries, that Christ was actually born on the twenty-fifth of December; and Chrysostom appeals, in behalf of this view, to the date of the registration under Quirinius (Cyrenius), preserved in the Roman archives. But no certainty respecting the birthday of Christ can be reached from existing data.

Around the feast of Christmas other festivals gradually gathered, which compose, with it, the Christmas Cycle. The celebration of the twenty-fifth of December was preceded by the Christmas Vigils, or Christmas Night, which was spent with the greater solemnity, because Christ was certainly born in the night. (Luk_2:8)

After Gregory the Great the four Sundays before Christmas began to be devoted to the preparation for the coming of our Lord in the flesh and for his second coming to the final judgment. Hence they were called Advent Sundays. With the beginning of Advent the church year in the West began. The Greek church reckons six Advent Sundays, and begins them with the fourteenth of November. This Advent season was designed to represent and reproduce in the consciousness of the church at once the darkness and the yearning and hope of the long ages before Christ. Subsequently all noisy amusements and also weddings were forbidden during this season. The pericopes are selected with reference to the awakening of repentance and of desire after the Redeemer.

From the fourth century Christmas was followed by the memorial days of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr (Dec. 26), of the apostle and evangelist John (Dec. 27), and of the Innocents of Bethlehem (Dec. 28), in immediate succession; representing a threefold martyrdom: martyrdom in will and in fact (Stephen), in will without the fact (John), and in fact without the will, an unconscious martyrdom of infanthe innocence. But Christian martyrdom in general was regarded by the early church as a heavenly birth and a fruit of the earthly birth of Christ. Hence the ancient festival hymn for the day of St. Stephen, the leader of the noble army of martyrs: “Yesterday was Christ born upon earth, that to-day Stephen might be born in heaven.” The close connection of the feast of John the Evangelist with that of the birth of Christ arises from the confidential relation of the beloved disciple to the Lord, and from the fundamental thought of his Gospel: “The Word was made flesh.” The innocent infant-martyrs of Bethlehem, “the blossoms of martyrdom, the rosebuds torn off by the hurricane of persecution, the offering of first-fruits to Christ, the tender flock of sacrificial lambs,” are at the same time the representatives of the innumerable host of children in heaven. More than half of the human race are said to die in infancy, and yet to children the word emphatically applies: “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The mystery of infant martyrdom is constantly repeated. How many children are apparently only born to suffer, and to die; but in truth the pains of their earthly birth are soon absorbed by the joys of their heavenly birth, and their temporary cross is rewarded by an eternal crown.

Eight days after Christmas the church celebrated, though not till after the sixth or seventh century, the Circumcision and the Naming of Jesus. Of still later origin is the Christian New Year’s festival, which falls on the same day as the Circumcision. The pagan Romans solemnized the turn of the year, like the Saturnalia, with revels. The church teachers, in reaction, made the New Year a day of penance and prayer. Thus Augustine, in a sermon: “Separate yourselves from the heathen, and at the change of the year do the opposite of what they do. They give each other gifts; give ye alms instead. They sing worldly songs; read ye the word of God. They throng the theatre, come ye to the church. They drink themselves drunken; do ye fast.”

The feast of Epiphany on the contrary, on the sixth of January, is older, as we have already observed, than Christmas itself, and is mentioned by Clement of Alexandria. It refers in general to the manifestation of Christ in the world, and originally bore the twofold character of a celebration of the birth and the baptism of Jesus. After the introduction of Christmas, it lost its reference to the birth. The Eastern church commemorated on this day especially the baptism of Christ, or the manifestation of His Messiahship, and together with this the first manifestation of His miraculous power at the marriage at Cana. The Westem church, more Gentile-Christian in its origin, gave this festival, after the fourth century, a special reference to the adoration of the infant Jesus by the wise men from the east, (Mat_2:1-11) under the name of the feast of the Three Kings, and transformed it into a festival of Gentile missions; considering the wise men as the representatives of the nobler heathen world. Thus at the same time the original connection of the feast with the birth of Christ was preserved. Epiphany forms the close of the Christmas Cycle. It was an early custom to announce the term of the Easter observance on the day of Epiphany by the so-called Epistolae paschales, or γράμματα πασχάλια. This was done especially by the bishop of Alexandria, where astronomy most flourished, and the occasion was improved for edifying instructions and for the discussion of important religious questions of the day.

 

78. The Easter Cycle

Easter is the oldest and greatest annual festival of the church. As to its essential idea and observance, it was born with the Christian Sunday on the morning of the resurrection. Like the passover with the Jews, it originally marked the beginning of the church year. It revolves entirely about the person and the work of Christ, being devoted to the great saving fact of his passion and resurrection. We have already spoken of the origin and character of this festival, and shall confine ourselves here to the alterations and enlargements which it underwent after the Nicene age.

The Easter festival proper was preceded by a forty days’ season of repentance and fasting, called Quadragesima, at least as early as the year 325; for the council of Nice presupposes the existence of this season. This fast was an imitation of the forty days’ fasting of Jesus in the wilderness, which itself was put in typical connection with the forty days’ fasting of Moses (Exo_34:28) and Elijah, (1Ki_19:8) and the forty years’ wandering of Israel through the desert. At first a free-will act, it gradually assumed the character of a fixed custom and ordinance of the church. Respecting the length of the season much difference prevailed, until Gregory I. (590-604) fixed the Wednesday of the sixth week before Easter, Ash Wednesday as it is called, as the beginning of it. On this day the priests and the people sprinkled themselves with dust and ashes, in token of their perishableness and their repentance, with the words: “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and unto dust thou must return; repent, that thou mayest inherit eternal life.” During Quadragesima criminal trials and criminal punishments, weddings, and sensual amusements were forbidden; solemn, earnest silence was imposed upon public and private life; and works of devotion, penances and charity were multiplied. Yet much hypocrisy was practised in the fasting; the rich compensating with exquisite dainties the absence of forbidden meats. Chrysostom and Augustine are found already lamenting this abuse. During the days preceding the beginning of Lent, the populace gave themselves up to unrestrained merriment, and this abuse afterward became legitimized in all Catholic countries, especially in Italy (flourishing most in Rome, Venice, and Cologne), in the Carnival.

The six Sundays of Lent are called Quadragesima prima, secunda, and so on to sexta. They are also named after the initial words of the introit in the mass for the day: Invocabit (Psa_111:1-10:15), Reminiscere, (Psa_25:6), Oculi (Psa_34:15), Laetare (Isa_66:10), Judica (Psa_63:1), Palmarum (from Mat_21:8). The three Sundays preceding Quadragesima are called respectively Estomihi (from Psa_31:2) or Quinquagesima (i.e., Dominica quinquagesimae diei, viz., before Easter), Sexagesima, and Septuagesima; which are, however, inaccurate designations. These three Sundays were regarded as preparatory to the Lenten season proper. In the larger cities it became customary to preach daily during the Quadragesimal fast; and the usage of daily Lenten sermons (Quadragesimales, or sermones Quadragesimales) has maintained itself in the Roman church to this day.

The Quadragesimal fast culminates in the Great, or Silent, or Holy Week, which is especially devoted to the commemoration of the passion and death of Jesus, and is distinguished by daily public worship, rigid fasting, and deep silence. This week, again, has its prominent days. First Palm Sunday, which has been, in the East since the fourth century, in the West since the sixth, observed in memory of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem for His enthronement on the cross. Next follows Maundy Thursday, in commemoration of the institution of the Holy Supper, which on this day was observed in the evening, and was usually connected with a love feast, and also with feet-washing. The Friday of the Holy Week is distinguished from all others as Good Friday, the day of the Saviour’s death; the day of the deepest penance and fasting of the year, stripped of all Sunday splendor and liturgical pomp, veiled in the deepest silence and holy sorrow; the communion omitted (which had taken place the evening before), altars unclothed, crucifixes veiled, lights extinguished, the story of the passion read, and, instead of the church hymns, nothing sung but penitential psalms. Finally the Great Sabbath, the day of the Lord’s repose in the grave and descent into Hades; the favorite day in all the year for the administration of baptism, which symbolizes participation in the death of Christ. (Rom_6:4-6) The Great Sabbath was generally spent as a fast day, even in the Greek church, which usually did not fast on Saturday.

In the evening of the Great Sabbath began the Easter Vigils, which continued, with Scripture reading, singing, and prayer, to the dawn of Easter morning, and formed the solemn transition from the πάσχα σταυρώσιμον to the πάσχα ἀναστάσιμον, and from the deep sorrow of penitence over the death of Jesus to the joy of faith in the resurrection of the Prince of life. All Christians, and even many pagans, poured into the church with lights, to watch there for the morning of the resurrection. On this night the cities were splendidly illuminated, and transfigured in a sea of fire; about midnight a solemn procession surrounded the church, and then triumphally entered again into the “holy gates,” to celebrate Easter. According to an ancient tradition, it was expected that on Easter night Christ would come again to judge the world.

The Easter festival itself began with the jubilant salutation, still practized in the Russian church: “The Lord is risen !” and the response: “He is truly risen! Then the holy kiss of brotherhood scaled the newly fastened bond of love in Christ. It was the grandest and most joyful of the feasts. It lasted a whole week, and closed with the following Sunday, called the Easter Octave, or White Sunday, when the baptized appeared in white garments, and were solemnly incorporated into the church.

 

79. The Time of the Easter Festival

Comp. the Literature in vol. i. at §99; also L. Ideler: Handbuch der Chronologie. Berlin, 1826. Vol. ii. F. Piper: Geschichte des Osterfestes. Berlin, 1845. Hefele: Conciliengeschichte. Freiburg, 1855. Vol. i. p. 286 ff.

The time of the Easter festival became, after the second century, the subject of long and violent controversies and practical confusions, which remind us of the later Eucharistic disputes, and give evidence that human passion and folly have sought to pervert the great facts and institutions of the New Testament from holy bonds of unity into torches of discord, and to turn the sweetest honey into poison, but, with all their efforts, have not been able to destroy the beneficent power of those gifts of God.

These Paschal controversies descended into the present period, and ended with the victory of the Roman and Alexandrian practice of keeping Easter, not, like Christmas and the Jewish Passover, on a fixed day of the month, whatever day of the week it might be, but on a Sunday, as the day of the resurrection of our Lord. Easter thus became, with all the feasts depending on it, a movable feast; and then the different reckonings of the calendar led to many inconveniences and confusions. The exact determination of Easter Sunday is made from the first full moon after the vernal equinox; so that the day may fall on any Sunday between the 22d day of March and the 25th of April.

The council of Arles in 314 had already decreed, in its first canon, that the Christian Passover be celebrated “uno die et uno tempore per omnem orbem,” and that the bishops of Rome should fix the time. But as this order was not universally obeyed, the fathers of Nicaea proposed to settle the matter, and this was the second main object of the first ecumenical council in 325. The result of the transactions on this point, the particulars of which are not known to us, does not appear in the canons (probably out of consideration for the numerous Quartodecimanians), but is doubtless preserved in the two circular letters of the council itself and the emperor Constantine. The feast of the resurrection was thenceforth required to be celebrated everywhere on a Sunday, and never on the day of the Jewish passover, but always after the fourteenth of Nisan, on the Sunday after the first vernal full moon. The leading motive for this regulation was opposition to Judaism, which had dishonored the passover by the crucifixion of the Lord. “We would,” says the circular letter of Constantine in reference to the council of Nice, “we would have nothing in common with that most hostile people, the Jews; for we have received from the Redeemer another way of honoring God [the order of the days of the week], and harmoniously adopting this method, we would withdraw ourselves from the evil fellowship of the Jews. For what they pompously assert, is really utterly absurd: that we cannot keep this feast at all without their instruction …. It is our duty to have nothing in common with the murderers of our Lord.” This bitter tone against Judaism runs through the whole letter.

At Nicaea, therefore, the Roman and Alexandrian usage with respect to Easter triumphed, and the Judaizing practice of the Quartodecimanians, who always celebrated Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan, became thenceforth a heresy. Yet that practice continued in many parts of the East, and in the time of Epiphanius, about a.d. 400, there were many, Quartodecimanians, who, as he says, were orthodox, indeed, in doctrine, but in ritual were addicted to Jewish fables, and built upon the principle: “Cursed is every one who does not keep his passover on the fourteenth of Nisan.” They kept the day with the Communion and with fasting till three o’clock. Yet they were divided into several parties among themselves. A peculiar offshoot of the Quartodecimanians was the rigidly ascetic Audians, who likewise held that the passover must be kept at the very same time (not after the same manner) with the Jews, on the fourteenth of Nisan, and for their authority appealed to their edition of the Apostolic Constitutions.

And even in the orthodox church these measures did not secure entire uniformity. For the council of Nicaea, probably from prudence, passed by the question of the Roman and Alexandrian computation of Easter. At least the Acts contain no reference to it. At all events this difference remained: that Rome, afterward as before, fixed the vernal equinox, the terminus a quo of the Easter full moon, on the 18th of March, while Alexandria placed it correctly on the 21st. It thus occurred, that the Latins, the very year after the Nicene council, and again in the years 330, 333, 340, 341, 343, varied from the Alexandrians in the time of keeping Easter. On this account the council of Sardica, as we learn from the recently discovered Paschal Epistles of Athanasius, took the Easter question again in hand, and brought about, by mutual concessions, a compromise for the ensuing fifty years, but without permanent result. In 387 the difference of the Egyptian and the Roman Easter amounted to fully five weeks. Later attempts also to adjust the matter were in vain, until the monk Dionysius Exiguus, the author of our Christian calendar, succeeded in harmonizing the computation of Easter on the basis of the true Alexandrian reckoning; except that the Gallican and British Christians adhered still longer to the old custom, and thus fell into conflict with the Anglo-Saxon. The introduction of the improved Gregorian calendar in the Western church in 1582 again produced discrepancy; the Eastern and Russian church adhered to the Julian calendar, and is consequently now about twelve days behind us. According to the Gregorian calendar, which does not divide the months with astronomical exactness, it sometimes happens that the Paschal full moon is put a couple of hours too early, and the Christian Easter, as was the case in 1825, coincides with the Jewish Passover, against the express order of the council of Nicaea.

 

80. The Cycle of Pentecost

The whole period of seven weeks from Easter to Pentecost bore a joyous, festal character. It was called Quinquagesima, or Pentecost in the wider sense, and was the memorial of the exaltation of Christ at the right hand of the Father, His repeated appearances during the mysterious forty days, and His heavenly headship and eternal presence in the church. It was regarded as a continuous Sunday, and distinguished by the absence of all fasting and by standing in prayer. Quinquagesima formed a marked contrast with the Quadragesima which preceded. The deeper the sorrow of repentance had been in view of the suffering and dying Saviour, the higher now rose the joy of faith in the risen and eternally living Redeemer. This joy, of course, must keep itself clear of worldly amusements, and be sanctified by devotion, prayer, singing, and thanksgiving; and the theatres, therefore, remained closed through the fifty days. But the multitude of nominal Christians soon forgot their religious impressions, and sought to compensate their previous fasting with wanton merry-making.

The seven Sundays after Easter are called in the Latin church, respectively, Quasimodo-geniti, Misericordia Domini, Jubilate, Cantate, Rogate, (or, Vocem jucunditatis), Exaudi, and Pentecoste. In the Eastern church the Acts of the Apostles are read at this season.

Of the fifty festival days, the fortieth and the fiftieth were particularly prominent. The fortieth day after Easter, always a Thursday, was after the fourth century dedicated to the exaltation of Christ at the right hand of God, and hence named Ascension Day. The fiftieth day, or the feast of Pentecost in the stricter sense, was the kernel and culminating point of this festival season, as Easter day was of the Easter cycle. It was the feast of the Holy Ghost, who on this day was poured out upon the assembled disciples with the whole fulness of the accomplished redemption; and it was at the same time the birth-day of the Christian church. Hence this festival also was particularly prized for baptisms and ordinations. Pentecost corresponded to the Jewish feast of that name, which was primarily the feast of first-fruits, and afterward became also the feast of the giving of the law on Sinai, and in this twofold import was fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Ghost and the founding of the Christian church.”Both revelations of the divine law,” writes Jerome to Fabiola, “took place on the fiftieth day after the passover; the one on Sinai, the other on Zion; there the mountain was shaken, here the temple; there, amid flames and lightnings, the tempest roared and the thunder rolled, here, also with mighty wind, appeared tongues of fire; there the sound of the trumpet pealed forth the words of the law, here the cornet of the gospel sounded through the mouth of the apostles.”

The celebration of Pentecost lasted, at least ultimately, three days or a whole week, closing with the Pentecostal Octave, which in the Greek church (so early as Chrysostom) was called The Feast of all Saints and Martyrs, because the martyrs are the seed and the beauty of the church. The Latin church, on the contrary, though not till the tenth century, dedicated the Sunday after Pentecost to the Holy Trinity, and in the later times of the Middle Age, further added to the festival part of the church year the feast of Corpus Christi, in celebration of the mystery of transubstantiation, on the Thursday after Trinity. It thus invested the close of the church year with a purely dogmatic import. Protestantism has retained the feast of Trinity, in opposition to the Antitrinitarians; but has, of course, rejected the feast of Corpus Christi.

In the early church, Pentecost was the last great festival of the Christian year. Hence the Sundays following it, till Advent, were counted from Whitsunday. The number of the Sundays in the second half of the church year therefore varies between twenty-seven and twenty-two, according to the time of Easter. In this part of the year we find even in the old lectionaries and sacramentaries some subordinate, feasts in memory of great men of the church; such as the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, the founders of the church (June 29); the feast of the chief martyr, Laurentius, the representative of the church militant (August, 10); the feast of the archangel Michael, the representative of the church triumphant (September 29).



Vol. 3, Chapter VII – The Exaltation of the Virgin. Mariology

81. 

Canisius (R.C.): De Maria Virgine libri quinque. Ingolst. 1577. Lamberertini (R.C.): Comment. dum De J. Christi, matrisque ejus festis. Patav. 1751. Perrone (R.C.): De Immaculata B. V. Mariae conceptu. Rom. 1848. (In defence of the new papal dogma of the sinless conception of Mary.) F. W. Genthe: Die Jungfrau Maria, ihre Evangelien u. ihre Wunder. Halle, 1852. Comp. also the elaborate article, “Maria, Mutter des Herrn,” by Steitz, in Herzog’s Protest. Real-Encycl. (vol. ix. p. 74 ff.), and the article, “Maria, die heil. Jungfrau,” by Reithmayr (R.C.) in Wetzer u. Welte’s Kathol. Kirchenlex. (vi. 835 ff.); also the Eirenicon-controversy between Pusey and J. H. Newman, 1866.

Into these festival cycles a multitude of subordinate feasts found their way, at the head of which stand the festivals of the holy Virgin Mary, honored as queen of the army of saints.

The worship of Mary was originally only a reflection of the worship of Christ, and the feasts of Mary were designed to contribute to the glorifying of Christ. The system arose from the inner connection of the Virgin with the holy mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God; though certainly, with this leading religious and theological interest other motives combined. As mother of the Saviour of the world, the Virgin Mary unquestionably holds forever a peculiar position among all women, and in the history of redemption. Even in heaven she must stand peculiarly near to Him whom on earth she bore nine months under her bosom, and whom she followed with true motherly care to the cross. It is perfectly natural, nay, essential, to sound religious feeling, to associate with Mary the fairest traits of maidenly and maternal character, and to revere her as the highest model of female purity, love, and piety. From her example issues a silent blessing upon all generations, and her name and memory are, and ever will be, inseparable from the holiest mysteries and benefits of faith. For this reason her name is even wrought into the Apostles’ Creed, in the simple and chaste words: “Conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.”

The Catholic church, however, both Latin and Greek, did not stop with this. After the middle of the fourth century it overstepped the wholesome Biblical limit, and transformed the mother of the Lord” into a mother of God, the humble handmaid of the Lord” into a queen of heaven, the “highly favored” into a dispenser of favors, the “blessed among women” into an intercessor above all women, nay, we may almost say, the redeemed daughter of fallen Adam, who is nowhere in Holy Scripture excepted from the universal sinfulness, into a sinlessly holy co-redeemer. At first she was acquitted only of actual sin, afterward even of original; though the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin was long contested, and was not established as an article of faith in the Roman church till 1854. Thus the veneration of Mary gradually degenerated into the worship of Mary; and this took so deep hold upon the popular religious life in the Middle Age, that, in spite of all scholastic distinctions between latria, and dulia, and hyrerdulia, Mariolatry practically prevailed over the worship of Christ. Hence in the innumerable Madonnas of Catholic art the human mother is the principal figure, and the divine child accessory. The Romish devotions scarcely utter a Pater Noster without an Ave Maria, and turn even more frequently and naturally to the compassionate, tender-hearted mother for her intercessions, than to the eternal Son of God, thinking that in this indirect way the desired gift is more sure to be obtained. To this day the worship of Mary is one of the principal points of separation between the Graeco-Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. It is one of the strongest expressions of the fundamental Romish error of unduly exalting the human factors or instruments of redemption, and obstructing, or rendering needless, the immediate access of believers to Christ, by thrusting in subordinate mediators. Nor can we but agree with nearly all unbiased historians in regarding the worship of Mary as an echo of ancient heathenism. It brings plainly to mind the worship of Ceres, of Isis, and of other ancient mothers of the gods; as the worship of saints and angels recalls the hero-worship of Greece and Rome. Polytheism was so deeply rooted among the people, that it reproduced itself in Christian forms. The popular religious want had accustomed itself even to female deities, and very naturally betook itself first of all to Mary, the highly favored and blessed mother of the divine-human Redeemer, as the worthiest object of adoration.

Let us trace now the main features in the historical development of the Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry.

The New Testament contains no intimation of any worship or festival celebration of Mary. On the one hand, Mary, is rightly called by Elizabeth, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, “the mother of the Lord” — but nowhere “the mother of God,” which is at least not entirely synonymous — and is saluted by her, as well as by the angel Gabriel, as “blessed among women;” nay, she herself prophesies in her inspired song, which has since resounded through all ages of the church, that “henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.” Through all the youth of Jesus she appears as a devout virgin, full of childlike innocence, purity, and humility; and the few traces we have of her later life, especially the touching scene at the cross, (Joh_19:25-27) confirm this impression. But, on the other hand, it is equally unquestionable, that she is nowhere in the New Testament excepted from the universal sinfulness and the universal need of redemption, and represented as immaculately holy, or as in any way an object of divine veneration. On the contrary, true to the genuine female character, she modestly stands back throughout the gospel history, and in the Acts and the Epistles she is mentioned barely once, and then simply as the “mother of Jesus;” (Act_1:14) even her birth and her death are unknown. Her glory fades in holy humility before the higher glory of her Son. In truth, there are plain indications that the Lord, with prophetic reference to the future apotheosis of His mother according to the flesh, from the first gave warning against it. At the wedding in Cana He administered to her, though leniently and respectfully, a rebuke for premature zeal mingled perhaps with maternal vanity. On a subsequent occasion he put her on a level with other female disciples, and made the carnal consanguinity subordinate to the spiritual kinship of the doing of the will of God. (Mat_12:46-50) The well-meant and in itself quite innocent benediction of an unknown woman upon His mother He did not indeed censure, but He corrected it with a benediction upon all who hear the word of God and keep it, and thus forestalled the deification of Mary by confining the ascription within the bounds of moderation.

In striking contrast with this healthful and sober representation of Mary in the canonical Gospels are the numerous apocryphal Gospels of the third and fourth centuries, which decorated the life of Mary with fantastic fables and wonders of every kind, and thus furnished a pseudo-historical foundation for an unscriptural Mariology and Mariolatry. The Catholic church, it is true, condemned this apocryphal literature so early as the Decrees of Gelasius; yet many of the fabulous elements of it — such as the names of the parents of Mary, Joachim (instead of Eli, as in Luk_3:23) and Anna, the birth of Mary in a cave, her education in the temple, and her mock marriage with the aged Joseph — passed into the Catholic tradition.

The development of the orthodox Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry originated as early as the second century in an allegorical interpretation of the history of the fall, and in the assumption of an antithetic relation of Eve and Mary, according to which the mother of Christ occupies the same position in the history of redemption as the wife of Adam in the history of sin and death. This idea, so fruitful of many errors, is ingenious, but unscriptural, and an apocryphal substitute for the true Pauline doctrine of an antitypical parallel between the first and second Adam. It tends to substitute Mary for Christ. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, are the first who present Mary as the counterpart of Eve, as a “mother of all living” in the higher, spiritual sense, and teach that she became through her obedience the mediate or instrumental cause of the blessings of redemption to the human race, as Eve by her disobedience was the fountain of sin and death. Irenaeus calls her also the “advocate of the virgin Eve,” which, at a later day, is understood in the sense of intercessor. On this account this father stands as the oldest leading authority in the Catholic Mariology; though with only partial justice; for he was still widely removed from the notion of the sinlessness of Mary, and expressly declares the answer of Christ in Joh_2:4, to be a reproof of her premature haste. In the same way Tertullian, Origen, Basil the Great, and even Chrysostom, with all their high estimate of the mother of our Lord, ascribe to her on one or two occasions (Joh_2:3; Mat_13:47) maternal vanity, also doubt and anxiety, and make this the sword (Luk_2:35) which, under the cross, passed through her soul. In addition to this typological antithesis of Mary and Eve, the rise of monasticism supplied the development of Mariology a further motive in the enhanced estimate of virginity, without which no true holiness could be conceived. Hence the virginity of Mary, which is unquestioned for the part of her life before the birth of Christ, came to be extended to her whole life, and her marriage with the aged Joseph to be regarded as a mere protectorate, and, therefore, only a nominal marriage. The passage, Mat_1:25, which, according to its obvious literal meaning (the ἕως and πρωτότοκος ), seems to favor the opposite view, was overlooked or otherwise explained; and the brothers of Jesus, who appear fourteen or fifteen times in the gospel history and always in close connection with His mother, were regarded not as sons of Mary subsequently born, but either as sons of Joseph by a former marriage (the view of Epiphanius), or, agreeably to the wider Hebrew use of the term אָח, cousins of Jesus (Jerome). It was felt — and this feeling is shared by many devout Protestants — to be irreconcilable with her dignity and the dignity of Christ, that ordinary children should afterward proceed from the same womb out of which the Saviour of the world was born. The name perpetua virgo, ἀεὶ παρθένος, was thenceforth a peculiar and inalienable predicate of Mary. After the fourth century it was taken not merely in a moral sense, but in the physical also, as meaning that Mary conceived and produced the Lord clauso utero. This, of course, required the supposition of a miracle, like the passage of the risen Jesus through the closed doors. Mary, therefore, in the Catholic view, stands entirely alone in the history of the world in this respect, as in others: that she was a married virgin, a wife never touched by her husband.

Epiphanius, in his seventy-eighth Heresy, combats the advocates of the opposite view in Arabia toward the end of the fourth century (367), as heretics under the title of Antidikomarianites, opposers of the dignity of Mary, i.e., of her perpetual virginity. But, on the other hand, he condemns, in the seventy-ninth Heresy, the contemporaneous sect of the Collyridians in Arabia, a set of fanatical women, who, as priestesses, rendered divine worship to Mary, and, perhaps in imitation of the worship of Ceres, offered little cakes (κολλυρίδες) to her; he claims adoration for God and Christ alone. Jerome wrote, about 383, with indignation and bitterness against Helvidius and Jovinian, who, citing Scripture passages and earlier church teachers, like Tertullian, maintained that Mary bore children to Joseph after the birth of Christ. He saw in this doctrine a desecration of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and he even compares Helvidius to Erostratus, the destroyer of the temple at Ephesus. The bishop Bonosus of Sardica was condemned for the same view by the Illyrican bishops, and the Roman bishop Siricius approved the sentence, a.d. 392.

Augustine went a step farther. In an incidental remark against Pelagius, he agreed with him in excepting Mary, “propter honorem Domini,” from actual (but not from original) sin. This exception he is willing to make from the sinfulness of the race, but no other. He taught the sinless birth and life of Mary, but not her immaculate conception. He no doubt assumed, as afterward Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, a sanctificatio in utero, like that of Jeremiah (Jer_1:5) and John the Baptist (Luk_1:15), whereby, as those two men were fitted for their prophetic office, she in a still higher degree was sanctified by a special operation of the Holy Ghost before her birth, and prepared to be a pure receptacle for the divine Logos. The reasoning of Augustine backward from the holiness of Christ to the holiness of His mother was an important turn, which was afterward pursued to further results. The same reasoning leads as easily to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, though also, just as well, to a sinless mother of Mary herself, and thus upward to the beginning, of the race, to another Eve who never fell. Augustine’s opponent, Pelagius, with his monastic, ascetic idea of holiness and his superficial doctrine of sin, remarkably outstripped him on this point, ascribing to Mary perfect sinlessness. But, it should be remembered, that his denial of original sin to all men, and his excepting of sundry saints of the Old Testament besides Mary, such as Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Melchizedek, Samuel, Elijah, Daniel, from actual sin, so that πάντες in Rom_5:12, in his view, means only a majority, weaken the honor he thus appears to confer upon the mother of the Lord. The Augustinian view long continued to prevail; but at last Pelagius won the victory on this point in the Roman church.

Notwithstanding this exalted representation of Mary, there appear no clear traces of a proper worship of Mary, as distinct from the worship of saints in general, until the Nestorian controversy of 430. This dispute formed an important turning-point not only in Christology, but in Mariology also. The leading interest in it was, without doubt, the connection of the virgin with the mystery of the incarnation. The perfect union of the divine and human natures seemed to demand that Mary might be called in some sense the mother of God, θεοτόκος, Deipara; for that which was born of her was not merely the man Jesus, but the God-Man Jesus Christ. The church, however, did, of course, not intend by that to assert that she was the mother of the uncreated divine essence — for this would be palpably absurd and blasphemous — nor that she herself was divine, but only that she was the human point of entrance or the mysterious channel for the eternal divine Logos. Athanasius and the Alexandrian church teachers of the Nicene age, who pressed the unity of the divine and the human in Christ to the verge of monophysitism, had already used this expression frequently and without scruple, and Gregory Nazianzen even declares every one impious who denies its validity. Nestorius, on the contrary, and the Antiochian school, who were more devoted to the distinction of the two natures in Christ, took offence at the predicate θεοτόκος, saw in it a relapse into the heathen mythology, if not a blasphemy against the eternal and unchangeable Godhead, and preferred the expression Χριστοτόκος, mater Christi. Upon this broke out the violent controversy between him and the bishop Cyril of Alexandria, which ended in the condemnation of Nestorianism at Ephesus in 431.

Thenceforth the θεοτόκος was a test of orthodox Christology, and the rejection of it amounted to the beginning or the end of all heresy. The overthrow of Nestorianism was at the same time the victory of Mary-worship. With the honor of the Son, the honor also of the Mother was secured. The opponents of Nestorius, especially Proclus, his successor in Constantinople († 447), and Cyril of Alexandria († 444), could scarcely find predicates enough to express the transcendent glory of the mother of God. She was the crown of virginity, the indestructible temple of God, the dwelling place of the Holy Trinity, the paradise of the second Adam, the bridge from God to man, the loom of the incarnation, the sceptre of orthodoxy; through her the Trinity is glorified and adored, the devil and demons are put to flight, the nations converted, and the fallen creature raised to heaven. The people were all on the side of the Ephesian decision, and gave vent to their joy in boundless enthusiasm, amidst bonfires, processions, and illuminations.

With this the worship of Mary, the mother of God, the queen of heaven, seemed to be solemnly established for all time. But soon a reaction appeared in favor of Nestorianism, and the church found it necessary to condemn the opposite extreme of Eutychianism or Monophysitism. This was the office of the council of Chalcedon in 451: to give expression to the element of truth in Nestorianism, the duality of nature in the one divine-human person of Christ. Nevertheless the θεοτόκος was expressly retained, though it originated in a rather monophysite view.

 

82. Mariolatry

Thus much respecting the doctrine of Mary. Now the corresponding practice. From this Mariology follows Mariolatry. If Mary is, in the strict sense of the word, the mother of God, it seems to follow as a logical consequence, that she herself is divine, and therefore an object of divine worship. This was not, indeed, the meaning and purpose of the ancient church; as, in fact, it never asserted that Mary was the mother of the essential, eternal divinity of the Logos. She was, and continues to be, a created being, a human mother, even according to the Roman and Greek doctrine. But according to the once prevailing conception of her peculiar relation to deity, a certain degree of divine homage to Mary, and some invocation of her powerful intercession with God, seemed unavoidable, and soon became a universal practice.

The first instance of the formal invocation of Mary occurs in the prayers of Ephraim Syrus († 379), addressed to Mary and the saints, and attributed by the tradition of the Syrian church, though perhaps in part incorrectly, to that author. The first more certain example appears in Gregory Nazianzen († 389), who, in his eulogy on Cyprian, relates of Justina that she besought the virgin Mary to protect her threatened virginity, and at the same time disfigured her beauty by ascetic self-tortures, and thus fortunately escaped the amours of a youthful lover (Cyprian before his conversion). But, on the other hand, the numerous writings of Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, and Augustine, furnish no example of an invocation of Mary. Epiphanius even condemned the adoration of Mary, and calls the practice of making offerings to her by the Collyridian women, blasphemous and dangerous to the soul. The entire silence of history respecting the worship of the Virgin down to the end of the fourth century, proves clearly that it was foreign to the original spirit of Christianity, and belongs among the many innovations of the post-Nicene age.

In the beginning of the fifth century, however, the worship of saints appeared in full bloom, and then Mary, by reason of her singular relation to the Lord, was soon placed at the head, as the most blessed queen of the heavenly host. To her was accorded the hyperdulia (ὑπερδουλεία) — to anticipate here the later scholastic distinction sanctioned by the council of Trent — that is, the highest degree of veneration, in distinction from mere dulia (δουλεία), which belongs to all saints and angels, and from latria (λατρεία), which, properly speaking, is due to God alone. From that time numerous churches and altars were dedicated to the holy Mother of God, the perpetual Virgin; among them also the church at Ephesus in which the anti-Nestorian council of 431 had sat. Justinian I., in a law, implored her intercession with God for the restoration of the Roman empire, and on the dedication of the costly altar of the church of St. Sophia he expected all blessings for church and empire from her powerful prayers. His general, Narses, like the knights in the Middle Age, was unwilling to go into battle till he had secured her protection. Pope Boniface IV. in 608 turned the Pantheon in Rome into a temple of Mary ad martyres: the pagan Olympus into a Christian heaven of gods. Subsequently even her images (made after an original pretending to have come from Luke) were divinely worshipped, and, in the prolific legends of the superstitious Middle Age, performed countless miracles, before some of which the miracles of the gospel history grow dim. She became almost coördinate with Christ, a joint redeemer, invested with most of His own attributes and acts of grace. The popular belief ascribed to her, as to Christ, a sinless conception, a sinless birth, resurrection and ascension to heaven, and a participation of all power in heaven and on earth. She became the center of devotion, cultus, and art, the popular symbol of power, of glory, and of the final victory of catholicism over all heresies. The Greek and Roman churches vied throughout the Middle Age (and do so still) in the apotheosis of the human mother with the divine-human child Jesus in her arms, till the Reformation freed a large part of Latin Christendom from this unscriptural semi-idolatry and concentrated the affection and adoration of believers upon the crucified and risen Saviour of the world, the only Mediator between God and man.

A word more: respecting the favorite prayer to Mary, the angelic greeting, or the Ave Maria, which in the Catholic devotion runs parallel to the Pater Noster. It takes its name from the initial words of the salutation of Gabriel to the holy Virgin at the annunciation of the birth of Christ. It consists of three parts:

(1) The salutation of the angel (Luk_1:28):

Ave Maria, gratiae plena, Dominus tecum!

(2) The words of Elizabeth (Luk_1:2):

Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.

(3) The later unscriptural addition, which contains the prayer proper, and is offensive to the Protestant and all sound Christian feeling:

Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis. Amen.

Formerly this third part, which gave the formula the character of a prayer, was traced back to the anti-Nestorian council of Ephesus in 431, which sanctioned the expression mater Dei, or Dei genitrix (θεοτόκος). But Roman archeologists now concede that it is a much later addition, made in the beginning of the sixteenth century (1508), and that the closing words, nunc et in hora mortis, were added even after that time by the Franciscans. But even the first two parts did not come into general use as a standing formula of prayer until the thirteenth century. From that date the Ave Maria stands in the Roman church upon a level with the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed, and with them forms the basis of the rosary.

 

83. The Festivals of Mary

This mythical and fantastic, and, we must add, almost pagan and idolatrous Mariology impressed itself on the public cultus in a series of festivals, celebrating the most important facts and fictions of the life of the Virgin, and in some degree running parallel with the festivals of the birth, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.

1. The Annunciation of Mary commemorates the announcement of the birth of Christ by the archangel Gabriel, (Luk_1:26-39) and at the same time the conception of Christ; for in the view of the ancient church Mary conceived the Logos (Verbum) through the ear by the word of the angel. Hence the festival had its place on the 25th of March, exactly nine months before Christmas; though in some parts of the church, as Spain and Milan, it was celebrated in December, till the Roman practice conquered. The first trace of it occurs in Proclus, the opponent and successor of Nestorius in Constantinople after 430; then it appears more plainly in several councils and homilies of the seventh century.

2. The Purification of Mary or Candlemas, in memory of the ceremonial purification of the Virgin, forty days after the birth of Jesus, therefore on the 2d of February (reckoning from the 25th of December); and at the same time in memory of the presentation of Jesus in the temple and his meeting of Simeon and Anna. (Luk_2:22-38) This, like the preceding, was thus originally as much a festival of Christ as of Mary, especially in the Greek church. It is supposed to have been introduced by Pope Gelasius in 494, though by some said not to have arisen till 542 under Justinian I., in consequence of a great earthquake and a destructive pestilence. Perhaps it was a Christian transformation of the old Roman lustrations or expiatory sacrifices (Februa, Februalia), which from the time of Numa took place in February, the month of purification or expiation. To heathen origin is due also the use of lighted tapers, with which the people on this festival marched, singing, out of the church through the city. Hence the name Candlemas.

3. The Ascension, or Assumption rather, of Mary is celebrated on the 15th of August. The festival was introduced by the Greek emperor Mauritius (582-602); some say, under Pope Gelasius († 496). In Rome, after the ninth century, it is one of the principal feasts, and, like the others, is distinguished with vigil and octave.

It rests, however, on a purely apocryphal foundation.

The entire silence of the apostles and the primitive church teachers respecting the departure of Mary stirred idle curiosity to all sorts of inventions, until a translation like Enoch’s and Elijah’s was attributed to her. In the time of Origen some were inferring from Luk_2:35, that she had suffered martyrdom. Epiphanius will not decide whether she died and was buried, or not. Two apocryphal Greek writings de transitu Mariae, of the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, and afterward pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory of Tours († 595), for the first time contain the legend that the soul of the mother of God was transported to the heavenly paradise by Christ and His angels in presence of all the apostles, and on the following morning her body also was translated thither on a cloud and there united with the soul. Subsequently the legend was still further embellished, and, besides the apostles, the angels and patriarchs also, even Adam and Eve, were made witnesses of the wonderful spectacle.

Still the resurrection and ascension of Mary are in the Roman church only a matter of “devout and probable opinion,” not an article of faith; and a distinction is made between the ascensio of Christ (by virtue of His divine nature) and the assumptio of Mary (by the power of grace and merit).

But since Mary, according to the most recent Roman dogma, was free even from original sin, and since death is a consequence of sin, it should strictly follow that she did not die at all, and rise again, but, like Enoch and Elijah, was carried alive to heaven.

In the Middle Age — to anticipate briefly — yet other festivals of Mary arose: the Nativity of Mary, after a.d. 650; the Presentation of Mary, after the ninth century, founded on the apocryphal tradition of the eleven years’ ascetic discipline of Mary in the temple at Jerusalem; the Visitation of Mary in memory of her visit to Elizabeth; a festival first mentioned in France in 1247, and limited to the western church; and the festival of the Immaculate Conception, which arose with the doctrine of the sinless conception of Mary, and is interwoven with the history of that dogma down to its official and final promulgation by Pope Pius IX. in 1854.

 

84. The Worship of Martyrs and Saints

I. Sources

The Memorial Discourses of Basil the Great on the martyr Mamas (a shepherd in Cappadocia, † about 276), and on the forty martyrs (soldiers, who are said to have suffered in Armenia under Licinius in 320); of Gregory Naz. on Cyprian († 248), on Athanasius († 372), and on Basil († 379); of Gregory Of Nyssa on Ephraim Syrus († 378), and on the megalomartyr Theodorus; of Chrysostom on Bernice and Prosdoce, on the Holy Martyrs, on the Egyptian Martyrs, on Meletius of Antioch; several homilies of Ambrose, Augustine, Leo the Great, Peter Chrysologus Caesarius, etc.; Jerome against Vigilantius. The most important passages of the fathers on the veneration of saints are conveniently collected in: The Faith of Catholics on certain points of controversy, confirmed by Scripture and attested by the Fathers. By Berington and Kirk, revised by Waterworth.” 3d ed. 1846, vol. iii. pp. 322-416.

 

II. The Later Literature

(1) On the Roman Catholic side: The Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, thus far 58 vols. fol. (1643-1858, coming down to the 22d of October). Theod. Ruinart: Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta. Par. 1689 (confined to the first four centuries). Laderchio: S. patriarcharum et prophetarum, confessorum, cultus perpetuus, etc. Rom. 1730. (2) On the Protestant side: J. Dallaeus: Adversus Latinorum de cultus religiosi objecto traditionem. Genev. 1664. Isaac Taylor: Ancient Christianity. 4th ed. Lond. 1844, vel. ii. p. 173 ff. (“Christianized demonolatry in the fourth century.”)

 

The Worship of Martyrs and Saints

The system of saint-worship, including both Hagiology and Hagiolatry, developed itself at the same time with the worship of Mary; for the latter is only the culmination of the former.

The New Testament is equally ignorant of both. The expression ἅγιοι, sancti, saints, is used by the apostles not of a particular class, a spiritual aristocracy of the church, but of all baptized and converted Christians without distinction; because they are separated from the world, consecrated to the service of God, washed from the guilt of sin by the blood of Christ, and, notwithstanding all their remaining imperfections and sins, called to perfect holiness. The apostles address their epistles to “the saints” i.e., the Christian believers, “at Rome, Corinth, Ephesus,” etc. (Comp. Act_9:13, Act_9:32, Act_9:41; Act_26:10; Rom_1:7; Rom_12:13; Rom_15:25, Rom_15:26; 1Co_1:2; 1Co_6:1; Eph_1:1, Eph_1:15, Eph_1:18; Eph_4:12; Phi_1:1; Phi_4:21, Phi_4:22; Rev_8:7, Rev_8:10, etc.)

After the entrance of the heathen masses into the church the title came to be restricted to bishops and councils and to departed heroes of the Christian faith, especially the martyrs of the first three centuries. When, on the cessation of persecution, the martyr’s crown, at least within the limits of the Roman empire, was no longer attainable, extraordinary ascetic piety, great service to the church, and subsequently also the power of miracles, were required as indispensable conditions of reception into the Catholic calendar of saints. The anchorets especially, who, though not persecuted from without, voluntarily crucified their flesh and overcame evil spirits, seemed to stand equal to the martyrs in holiness and in claims to veneration. A tribunal of canonization did not yet exist. The popular voice commonly decided the matter, and passed for the voice of God. Some saints were venerated only in the regions where they lived and died; others enjoyed a national homage; others, a universal.

The veneration of the saints increased with the decrease of martyrdom, and with the remoteness of the objects of reverence. “Distance lends enchantment to the view;” but “familiarity” is apt “to breed contempt.” The sins and faults of the heroes of faith were lost in the bright haze of the past, while their virtues shone the more, and furnished to a pious and superstitious fancy the richest material for legendary poesy.

Almost all the catholic saints belong to the higher degrees of the clergy or to the monastic life. And the monks were the chief promoters of the worship of saints. At the head of the heavenly chorus stands Mary, crowned as queen by the side of her divine Son; then come the apostles and evangelists, who died a violent death, the protomartyr Stephen, and the martyrs of the first three centuries; the patriarchs and prophets also of the Old Covenant down to John the Baptist; and finally eminent hermits and monks, missionaries, theologians, and bishops, and those, in general, who distinguished themselves above their contemporaries in virtue or in public service. The measure of ascetic self-denial was the measure of Christian virtue. Though many of the greatest saints of the Bible, from the patriarch Abraham to Peter, the prince of the apostles, lived in marriage, the Romish ethics, from the time of Ambrose and Jerome, can allow no genuine holiness within the bonds of matrimony, and receives only virgines and some few vidui and viduae into its spiritual nobility. In this again the close connection of saint-worship with monasticism is apparent.

To the saints, about the same period, were added angels as objects of worship. To angels there was ascribed in the church from the beginning a peculiar concern with the fortunes of the militant church, and a certain oversight of all lands and nations. But Ambrose is the first who expressly exhorts to the invocation of our patron angels, and represents it as a duty. In favor of the guardianship and interest of angels appeal was rightly made to several passages of the Old and New Testaments: Dan_10:13, Dan_10:20, Dan_10:21; Dan_12:1; Mat_18:10; Luk_15:7; Heb_1:14; Act_12:15. But in Col_2:18, and Rev_19:10; Rev_22:8, Rev_22:9, the worship of angels is distinctly rebuked.

Out of the old Biblical notion of guardian angels arose also the idea of patron saints for particular countries, cities, churches, and classes, and against particular evils and dangers. Peter and Paul and Laurentius became the patrons of Rome; James, the patron of Spain; Andrew, of Greece; John, of theologians; Luke, of painters; subsequently Phocas, of seamen; Ivo, of jurists; Anthony, a protector against pestilence; Apollonia, against tooth-aches; etc.

These different orders of saints and angels form a heavenly hierarchy, reflected in the ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth. Dionysius the Areopagite, a fantastical Christian Platonist of the fifth-century, exhibited the whole relation of man to God on the basis of the hierarchy; dividing the hierarchy into two branches, heavenly and earthly, and each of these again into several degrees, of which every higher one was the mediator of salvation to the one below it.

These are the outlines of the saint-worship of our period. Now to the exposition and estimate of it, and then the proofs.

The worship of saints proceeded originally, without doubt, from a pure and truly Christian source, to wit: a very deep and lively sense of the communion of saints, which extends over death and the grave, and embraces even the blessed in heaven. It was closely connected with love to Christ, and with gratitude for everything great and good which he has done through his instruments for the welfare of posterity. The church fulfilled a simple and natural duty of gratitude, when, in the consciousness of unbroken fellowship with the church triumphant, she honored the memory of the martyrs and confessors, who had offered their life for their faith, and had achieved victory for it over all its enemies. She performed a duty of fidelity to her own children, when she held up for admiration and imitation the noble virtues and services of their fathers. She honored and glorified Christ Himself when she surrounded Him with an innumerable company of followers, contemplated the reflection of His glory in them, and sang to His praise in the Ambrosian Te Deum:

“The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee;

The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee;

The noble army of Martyrs praise thee;

The holy church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee;

The Father, of an infinite majesty;

Thine adorable, true, and only Son;

Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

Thou art the King of glory, O Christ;

Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.

When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man, thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb;

When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.”

In the first three centuries the veneration of the martyrs in general restricted itself to the thankful remembrance of their virtues and the celebration of the day of their death as the day of their heavenly birth. This celebration usually took place at their graves. So the church of Smyrna annually commemorated its bishop Polycarp, and valued his bones more than gold and gems, though with the express distinction: “Christ we worship as the Son of God; the martyrs we love and honor as disciples and successors of the Lord, on account of their insurpassable love to their King and Master, as also, we wish to be their companions and fellow disciples.” Here we find this veneration as yet in its innocent simplicity.

But in the Nicene age it advanced to a formal invocation of the saints as our patrons (patroni) and intercessors (intercessores, mediatores) before the throne of grace, and degenerated into a form of refined polytheism and idolatry. The saints came into the place of the demigods, Penates and Lares, the patrons of the domestic hearth and of the country. As once temples and altars to the heroes, so now churches and chapels came to be built over the graves of the martyrs, and consecrated to their names (or more precisely to God through them). People laid in them, as they used to do in the temple of Aesculapius, the sick that they might be healed, and hung in them, as in the temples of the gods, sacred gifts of silver and gold. Their graves were, as Chrysostom says, move splendidly adorned and more frequently visited than the palaces of kings. Banquets were held there in their honor, which recall the heathen sacrificial feasts for the welfare of the manes. Their relics were preserved with scrupulous care, and believed to possess miraculous virtue. Earlier, it was the custom to pray for the martyrs (as if they were not yet perfect) and to thank God for their fellowship and their pious example. Now such intercessions for them were considered unbecoming, and their intercession was invoked for the living.

This invocation of the dead was accompanied with the presumption that they take the deepest interest in all the fortunes of the kingdom of God on earth, and express it in prayers and intercessions. This was supposed to be warranted by some passages of Scripture, like Luk_15:10, which speaks of the angels (not the saints) rejoicing over the conversion of a sinner, and Rev_8:3, Rev_8:4, which represents an angel as laying the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne of God. But the New Testament expressly rebukes the worship of the angels (Col_2:18; Rev_19:10; Rev_22:8, Rev_22:9), and furnishes not a single example of an actual invocation of dead men; and it nowhere directs us to address our prayers to any creature. Mere inferences from certain premises, however plausible, are, in such weighty matters, not enough. The intercession of the saints for us was drawn as a probable inference from the duty of all Christians to pray for others, and the invocation of the saints for their intercession was supported by the unquestioned right to apply to living saints for their prayers, of which even the apostles availed themselves in their epistles.

But here rises the insolvable question: How can departed saints hear at once the prayers of so many Christians on earth, unless they either partake of divine omnipresence or divine omniscience? And is it not idolatrous to clothe creatures with attributes which belong exclusively to Godhead? Or, if the departed saints first learn from the omniscient God our prayers, and then bring them again before God with their powerful intercessions, to what purpose this circuitous way? Why not at once address God immediately, who alone is able, and who is always ready, to hear His children for the sake of Christ?

Augustine felt this difficulty, and concedes his inability to solve it. He leaves it undecided, whether the saints (as Jerome and others actually supposed) are present in so many places at once, or their knowledge comes through the omniscience of God, or finally it comes through the ministry of angels. He already makes the distinction between λατρεία, or adoration due to God alone, and the invocatio (δουλεία) of the saints, and firmly repels the charge of idolatry, which the Manichaean Faustus brought against the catholic Christians when he said: “Ye have changed the idols into martyrs, whom ye worship with the like prayers, and ye appease the shades of the dead with wine and flesh.” Augustine asserts that the church indeed celebrates the memory of the martyrs with religious solemnity, to be stirred up to imitate them, united with their merits, and supported by their prayers, but it offers sacrifice and dedicates altars to God alone. Our martyrs, says he, are not gods; we build no temples to our martyrs, as to gods; but we consecrate to them only memorial places, as to departed men, whose spirits live with God; we build altars not to sacrifice to the martyrs, but to sacrifice with them to the one God, who is both ours and theirs.

But in spite of all these distinctions and cautions, which must be expected from a man like Augustine, and acknowledged to be a wholesome restraint against excesses, we cannot but see in the martyr-worship, as it was actually practised, a new form of the hero-worship of the pagans. Nor can we wonder in the least. For the great mass of the Christian people came, in fact, fresh from polytheism, without thorough conversion, and could not divest themselves of their old notions and customs at a stroke. The despotic form of government, the servile subjection of the people, the idolatrous homage which was paid to the Byzantine emperors and their statues, the predicates divina, sacra, coelestia, which were applied to the utterances of their will, favored the worship of saints. The heathen emperor Julian sarcastically reproached the Christians with reintroducing polytheism into monotheism, but, on account of the difference of the objects, revolted from the Christian worship of martyrs and relics, as from the “stench of graves and dead men’s bones.” The Manichaean taunt we have already mentioned. The Spanish presbyter Vigilantius, in the fifth century, called the worshippers of martyrs and relics, ashes-worshippers and idolaters, and taught that, according to the Scriptures, the living only should pray with and for each other. Even some orthodox church teachers admitted the affinity of the saint-worship with heathenism, though with the view of showing that all that is good in the heathen worship reappears far better in the Christian. Eusebius cites a passage from Plato on the worship of heroes, demi-gods, and their graves, and then applies it to the veneration of friends of God and champions of true religion; so that the Christians did well to visit their graves, to honor their memory there, and to offer their prayers. The Greeks, Theodoret thinks, have the least reason to be offended at what takes place at the graves of the martyrs; for the libations and expiations, the demi-gods and deified men, originated with themselves. Hercules, Aesculapius, Bacchus, the Dioscuri, and the like, are deified men; consequently it cannot be a reproach to the Christians that they — not deify, but — honor their martyrs as witnesses and servants of God. The ancients saw nothing censurable in such worship of the dead. The saints, our helpers and patrons, are far more worthy of such honor. The temples of the gods are destroyed, the philosophers, orators, and emperors are forgotten, but the martyrs are universally known. The feasts of the gods are now replaced by the festivals of Peter, Paul, Marcellus, Leontius, Antonins, Mauricius, and other martyrs, not with pagan pomp and sensual pleasures, but with Christian soberness and decency.

Yet even this last distinction which Theodoret asserts, sometimes disappeared. Augustine laments that in the African church banqueting and revelling were daily practised in honor of the martyrs, but thinks that this weakness must be for the time indulged from regard to the ancient customs of the pagans.

In connection with the new hero-worship a new mythology also arose, which filled up the gaps of the history of the saints, and sometimes even transformed the pagan myths of gods and heroes into Christian legends. The superstitious imagination, visions, and dreams, and pious fraud famished abundant contributions to the Christian legendary poesy.

The worship of the saints found eloquent vindication and encouragement not only, in poets like Prudentius (about 405) and Paulinus of Nola (died 431), to whom greater freedom is allowed, but even in all the prominent theologians and preachers of the Nicene and post-Nicene age. It was as popular as monkery, and was as enthusiastically commended by the leaders of the church in the East and West.

The two institutions, moreover, are closely connected and favor each other. The monks were most zealous friends of saint-worship in their own cause. The church of the fifth century already went almost as far in it as the Middle Age, at all events quite as far as the council of Trent; for this council does not prescribe the invocation of the saints, but confines itself to approving it as “good and useful” (not as necessary) on the ground of their reigning with Christ in heaven and their intercession for us, and expressly remarks that Christ is our only, Redeemer and Saviour. This moderate and prudent statement of the doctrine, however, has not yet removed the excesses which the Roman Catholic people still practise in the worship of the saints, their images, and their relics. The Greek church goes even further in theory than the Roman; for the confession of Peter Mogilas (which was subscribed by the four Greek patriarchs in 1643, and again sanctioned by the council of Jerusalem in 1672), declares it duty and propriety (χρέος) to implore the intercession (μεσιτεία) of Mary and the saints with God for us.

We now cite, for proof and further illustration, the most important passages from the church fathers of our period on this point. In the numerous memorial discourses of the fathers, the martyrs are loaded with eulogies, addressed as present, and besought for their protection. The universal tone of those productions is offensive to the Protestant taste, and can hardly be reconciled with evangelical ideas of the exclusive and all-sufficient mediation of Christ and of justification by pure grace without the merit of works. But it must not be forgotten that in these discourses very much is to be put to the account of the degenerate, extravagant, and fulsome rhetoric of that time. The best church fathers, too, never separated the merits of the saints from the merits of Christ, but considered the former as flowing out of the latter.

We begin with the Greek fathers. Basil the Great calls the forty soldiers who are said to have suffered martyrdom under Licinius in Sebaste about 320, not only a “holy choir,” an “invincible phalanx,” but also “common patrons of the human family, helpers of our prayers and most mighty intercessors with God.”

Ephraim Syrus addresses the departed saints, in general, in such words as these: “Remember me, ye heirs of God, ye brethren of Christ, pray to the Saviour for me, that I through Christ may be delivered from him who assaults me from day to day;” and the mother of a martyr: “O holy, true, and blessed mother, plead for me with the saints, and pray: ‘Ye triumphant martyrs of Christ, pray for Ephraim, the least, the miserable,’ that I may find grace, and through the grace of Christ may be saved.”

Gregory of Nyssa asks of St. Theodore, whom he thinks invisibly present at his memorial feast, intercessions for his country, for peace, for the preservation of orthodoxy, and begs him to arouse the apostles Peter and Paul and John to prayer for the church planted by them (as if they needed such an admonition!). He relates with satisfaction that the people streamed to the burial place of this saint in such multitudes that the place looked like an ant hill. In his Life of St. Ephraim, he tells of a pilgrim who lost himself among the barbarian posterity of Ishmael, but by the prayer, “St. Ephraim, help me!” and the protection of the saint, happily found his way home. He himself thus addresses him at the close: “Thou who standest at the holy altar, and with angels servest the life-giving and most holy Trinity, remember us all, and implore for us the forgiveness of sins and the enjoyment of the eternal kingdom.”

Gregory Nazianzen is convinced that the departed Cyprian guides and protects his church in Carthage more powerfully by his intercessions than he formerly did by his teachings, because he now stands so much nearer the Deity; he addresses him as present, and implores his favor and protection. In his eulogy on Athanasius, who was but a little while dead, he prays: “Look graciously down upon us, and dispose this people to be perfect worshippers of the perfect Trinity; and when the times are quiet, preserve us — when they are troubled, remove us, and take us to thee in thy fellowship.”

Even Chrysostom did not rise above the spirit of the time. He too is an eloquent and enthusiastic advocate of the worship of the saints and their relics. At the close of his memorial discourse on Sts. Bernice and Prosdoce — two saints who have not even a place in the Roman calendar — he exhorts his hearers not only on their memorial days but also on other days to implore these saints to be our protectors: “For they have great boldness not merely during their life but also after death, yea, much greater after death. For they now bear the stigmata of Christ [the marks of martyrdom], and when they show these, they can persuade the King to anything.” He relates that once, when the harvest was endangered by excessive rain, the whole population of Constantinople flocked to the church of the Apostles, and there elected the apostles Peter and Andrew, Paul and Timothy, patrons and intercessors before the throne of grace. Christ, says he on Heb_1:14, redeems us as Lord and Master, the angels redeem us as ministers.

Asterius of Amasia calls the martyr Phocas, the patron of mariners, “a pillar and foundation of the churches of God in the world, the most renowned of the martyrs, who draws men of all countries in hosts to his church in Sinope, and who now, since his death, distributes more abundant nourishment than Joseph in Egypt.”

Among the Latin fathers, Ambrose of Milan is one of the first and most decided promoters of the worship of saints. We cite a passage or two. “May Peter, who so successfully weeps for himself, weep also for us, and turn upon us the friendly look of Christ. The angels, who are appointed to guard us, must be invoked for us; the martyrs, to whose intercession we have claim by the pledge of their bodies, must be invoked. They who have washed away their sins by their own blood, may pray for our sins. For they are martyrs of God, our high priests, spectators of our life and our acts. We need not blush to use them as intercessors for our weakness; for they also knew the infirmity of the body when they gained the victory over it.”

Jerome disputes the opinion of Vigilantius, that we should pray for one another in this life only, and that the dead do not hear our prayers, and ascribes to departed saints a sort of omnipresence, because, according to Rev_14:4, they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. He thinks that their prayers are much more effectual in heaven than they were upon earth. If Moses implored the forgiveness of God for six hundred thousand men, and Stephen, the first martyr, prayed for his murderers after the example of Christ, should they cease to pray, and to be heard, when they are with Christ?

Augustine infers from the interest which the rich man in hell still had in the fate of his five surviving brothers (Luk_16:27), that the pious dead in heaven must have even far more interest in the kindred and friends whom they have left behind. He also calls the saints our intercessors, yet under Christ, the proper and highest Intercessor, as Peter and the other apostles are shepherds under the great chief Shepherd. In a memorial discourse on Stephen, he imagines that martyr, and St. Paul who stoned him, to be present, and begs them for their intercessions with the Lord with whom they reign. He attributes miraculous effects, even the raising of the dead, to the intercessions of Stephen. But, on the other hand, he declares, as we have already observed, his inability to solve the difficult question of the way in which the dead can be made acquainted with our wishes and prayers. At all events, in Augustine’s practical religion the worship of the saints occupies a subordinate place. In his “Confessions” and “Soliloquies” he always addresses himself directly to God, not to Mary nor to martyrs.

The Spanish poet Prudentius flees with prayers and confessions of sin to St. Laurentius, and considers himself unworthy to be heard by Christ Himself.

The poems of Paulinus of Nola are full of direct prayers for the intercessions of the saints, especially of St. Felix, in whose honor he erected a basilica, and annually composed an ode, and whom he calls his patron, his father, his lord. He relates that the people came in great crowds around the wonder-working relics of this saint on his memorial day, and could not look on them enough.

Leo the Great, in his sermons, lays great stress on the powerful intercession of the apostles Peter and Paul, and of the Roman martyr Laurentius.

Pope Gregory the Great, at the close of our period, went much farther.

According to this we cannot wonder that the Virgin Mary and the saints are interwoven also in the prayers of the liturgies, and that their merits and intercession stand by the side of the merits of Christ as a ground of the acceptance of our prayers.



Vol. 3, Chapter VII (Cont’d) – The Exaltation of the Virgin. Mariology

81. 

Canisius (R.C.): De Maria Virgine libri quinque. Ingolst. 1577. Lamberertini (R.C.): Comment. dum De J. Christi, matrisque ejus festis. Patav. 1751. Perrone (R.C.): De Immaculata B. V. Mariae conceptu. Rom. 1848. (In defence of the new papal dogma of the sinless conception of Mary.) F. W. Genthe: Die Jungfrau Maria, ihre Evangelien u. ihre Wunder. Halle, 1852. Comp. also the elaborate article, “Maria, Mutter des Herrn,” by Steitz, in Herzog’s Protest. Real-Encycl. (vol. ix. p. 74 ff.), and the article, “Maria, die heil. Jungfrau,” by Reithmayr (R.C.) in Wetzer u. Welte’s Kathol. Kirchenlex. (vi. 835 ff.); also the Eirenicon-controversy between Pusey and J. H. Newman, 1866.

Into these festival cycles a multitude of subordinate feasts found their way, at the head of which stand the festivals of the holy Virgin Mary, honored as queen of the army of saints.

The worship of Mary was originally only a reflection of the worship of Christ, and the feasts of Mary were designed to contribute to the glorifying of Christ. The system arose from the inner connection of the Virgin with the holy mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God; though certainly, with this leading religious and theological interest other motives combined. As mother of the Saviour of the world, the Virgin Mary unquestionably holds forever a peculiar position among all women, and in the history of redemption. Even in heaven she must stand peculiarly near to Him whom on earth she bore nine months under her bosom, and whom she followed with true motherly care to the cross. It is perfectly natural, nay, essential, to sound religious feeling, to associate with Mary the fairest traits of maidenly and maternal character, and to revere her as the highest model of female purity, love, and piety. From her example issues a silent blessing upon all generations, and her name and memory are, and ever will be, inseparable from the holiest mysteries and benefits of faith. For this reason her name is even wrought into the Apostles’ Creed, in the simple and chaste words: “Conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.”

The Catholic church, however, both Latin and Greek, did not stop with this. After the middle of the fourth century it overstepped the wholesome Biblical limit, and transformed the mother of the Lord” into a mother of God, the humble handmaid of the Lord” into a queen of heaven, the “highly favored” into a dispenser of favors, the “blessed among women” into an intercessor above all women, nay, we may almost say, the redeemed daughter of fallen Adam, who is nowhere in Holy Scripture excepted from the universal sinfulness, into a sinlessly holy co-redeemer. At first she was acquitted only of actual sin, afterward even of original; though the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin was long contested, and was not established as an article of faith in the Roman church till 1854. Thus the veneration of Mary gradually degenerated into the worship of Mary; and this took so deep hold upon the popular religious life in the Middle Age, that, in spite of all scholastic distinctions between latria, and dulia, and hyrerdulia, Mariolatry practically prevailed over the worship of Christ. Hence in the innumerable Madonnas of Catholic art the human mother is the principal figure, and the divine child accessory. The Romish devotions scarcely utter a Pater Noster without an Ave Maria, and turn even more frequently and naturally to the compassionate, tender-hearted mother for her intercessions, than to the eternal Son of God, thinking that in this indirect way the desired gift is more sure to be obtained. To this day the worship of Mary is one of the principal points of separation between the Graeco-Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. It is one of the strongest expressions of the fundamental Romish error of unduly exalting the human factors or instruments of redemption, and obstructing, or rendering needless, the immediate access of believers to Christ, by thrusting in subordinate mediators. Nor can we but agree with nearly all unbiased historians in regarding the worship of Mary as an echo of ancient heathenism. It brings plainly to mind the worship of Ceres, of Isis, and of other ancient mothers of the gods; as the worship of saints and angels recalls the hero-worship of Greece and Rome. Polytheism was so deeply rooted among the people, that it reproduced itself in Christian forms. The popular religious want had accustomed itself even to female deities, and very naturally betook itself first of all to Mary, the highly favored and blessed mother of the divine-human Redeemer, as the worthiest object of adoration.

Let us trace now the main features in the historical development of the Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry.

The New Testament contains no intimation of any worship or festival celebration of Mary. On the one hand, Mary, is rightly called by Elizabeth, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, “the mother of the Lord” — but nowhere “the mother of God,” which is at least not entirely synonymous — and is saluted by her, as well as by the angel Gabriel, as “blessed among women;” nay, she herself prophesies in her inspired song, which has since resounded through all ages of the church, that “henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.” Through all the youth of Jesus she appears as a devout virgin, full of childlike innocence, purity, and humility; and the few traces we have of her later life, especially the touching scene at the cross, (Joh_19:25-27) confirm this impression. But, on the other hand, it is equally unquestionable, that she is nowhere in the New Testament excepted from the universal sinfulness and the universal need of redemption, and represented as immaculately holy, or as in any way an object of divine veneration. On the contrary, true to the genuine female character, she modestly stands back throughout the gospel history, and in the Acts and the Epistles she is mentioned barely once, and then simply as the “mother of Jesus;” (Act_1:14) even her birth and her death are unknown. Her glory fades in holy humility before the higher glory of her Son. In truth, there are plain indications that the Lord, with prophetic reference to the future apotheosis of His mother according to the flesh, from the first gave warning against it. At the wedding in Cana He administered to her, though leniently and respectfully, a rebuke for premature zeal mingled perhaps with maternal vanity. On a subsequent occasion he put her on a level with other female disciples, and made the carnal consanguinity subordinate to the spiritual kinship of the doing of the will of God. (Mat_12:46-50) The well-meant and in itself quite innocent benediction of an unknown woman upon His mother He did not indeed censure, but He corrected it with a benediction upon all who hear the word of God and keep it, and thus forestalled the deification of Mary by confining the ascription within the bounds of moderation.

In striking contrast with this healthful and sober representation of Mary in the canonical Gospels are the numerous apocryphal Gospels of the third and fourth centuries, which decorated the life of Mary with fantastic fables and wonders of every kind, and thus furnished a pseudo-historical foundation for an unscriptural Mariology and Mariolatry. The Catholic church, it is true, condemned this apocryphal literature so early as the Decrees of Gelasius; yet many of the fabulous elements of it — such as the names of the parents of Mary, Joachim (instead of Eli, as in Luk_3:23) and Anna, the birth of Mary in a cave, her education in the temple, and her mock marriage with the aged Joseph — passed into the Catholic tradition.

The development of the orthodox Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry originated as early as the second century in an allegorical interpretation of the history of the fall, and in the assumption of an antithetic relation of Eve and Mary, according to which the mother of Christ occupies the same position in the history of redemption as the wife of Adam in the history of sin and death. This idea, so fruitful of many errors, is ingenious, but unscriptural, and an apocryphal substitute for the true Pauline doctrine of an antitypical parallel between the first and second Adam. It tends to substitute Mary for Christ. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, are the first who present Mary as the counterpart of Eve, as a “mother of all living” in the higher, spiritual sense, and teach that she became through her obedience the mediate or instrumental cause of the blessings of redemption to the human race, as Eve by her disobedience was the fountain of sin and death. Irenaeus calls her also the “advocate of the virgin Eve,” which, at a later day, is understood in the sense of intercessor. On this account this father stands as the oldest leading authority in the Catholic Mariology; though with only partial justice; for he was still widely removed from the notion of the sinlessness of Mary, and expressly declares the answer of Christ in Joh_2:4, to be a reproof of her premature haste. In the same way Tertullian, Origen, Basil the Great, and even Chrysostom, with all their high estimate of the mother of our Lord, ascribe to her on one or two occasions (Joh_2:3; Mat_13:47) maternal vanity, also doubt and anxiety, and make this the sword (Luk_2:35) which, under the cross, passed through her soul. In addition to this typological antithesis of Mary and Eve, the rise of monasticism supplied the development of Mariology a further motive in the enhanced estimate of virginity, without which no true holiness could be conceived. Hence the virginity of Mary, which is unquestioned for the part of her life before the birth of Christ, came to be extended to her whole life, and her marriage with the aged Joseph to be regarded as a mere protectorate, and, therefore, only a nominal marriage. The passage, Mat_1:25, which, according to its obvious literal meaning (the ἕως and πρωτότοκος ), seems to favor the opposite view, was overlooked or otherwise explained; and the brothers of Jesus, who appear fourteen or fifteen times in the gospel history and always in close connection with His mother, were regarded not as sons of Mary subsequently born, but either as sons of Joseph by a former marriage (the view of Epiphanius), or, agreeably to the wider Hebrew use of the term אָח, cousins of Jesus (Jerome). It was felt — and this feeling is shared by many devout Protestants — to be irreconcilable with her dignity and the dignity of Christ, that ordinary children should afterward proceed from the same womb out of which the Saviour of the world was born. The name perpetua virgo, ἀεὶ παρθένος, was thenceforth a peculiar and inalienable predicate of Mary. After the fourth century it was taken not merely in a moral sense, but in the physical also, as meaning that Mary conceived and produced the Lord clauso utero. This, of course, required the supposition of a miracle, like the passage of the risen Jesus through the closed doors. Mary, therefore, in the Catholic view, stands entirely alone in the history of the world in this respect, as in others: that she was a married virgin, a wife never touched by her husband.

Epiphanius, in his seventy-eighth Heresy, combats the advocates of the opposite view in Arabia toward the end of the fourth century (367), as heretics under the title of Antidikomarianites, opposers of the dignity of Mary, i.e., of her perpetual virginity. But, on the other hand, he condemns, in the seventy-ninth Heresy, the contemporaneous sect of the Collyridians in Arabia, a set of fanatical women, who, as priestesses, rendered divine worship to Mary, and, perhaps in imitation of the worship of Ceres, offered little cakes (κολλυρίδες) to her; he claims adoration for God and Christ alone. Jerome wrote, about 383, with indignation and bitterness against Helvidius and Jovinian, who, citing Scripture passages and earlier church teachers, like Tertullian, maintained that Mary bore children to Joseph after the birth of Christ. He saw in this doctrine a desecration of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and he even compares Helvidius to Erostratus, the destroyer of the temple at Ephesus. The bishop Bonosus of Sardica was condemned for the same view by the Illyrican bishops, and the Roman bishop Siricius approved the sentence, a.d. 392.

Augustine went a step farther. In an incidental remark against Pelagius, he agreed with him in excepting Mary, “propter honorem Domini,” from actual (but not from original) sin. This exception he is willing to make from the sinfulness of the race, but no other. He taught the sinless birth and life of Mary, but not her immaculate conception. He no doubt assumed, as afterward Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, a sanctificatio in utero, like that of Jeremiah (Jer_1:5) and John the Baptist (Luk_1:15), whereby, as those two men were fitted for their prophetic office, she in a still higher degree was sanctified by a special operation of the Holy Ghost before her birth, and prepared to be a pure receptacle for the divine Logos. The reasoning of Augustine backward from the holiness of Christ to the holiness of His mother was an important turn, which was afterward pursued to further results. The same reasoning leads as easily to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, though also, just as well, to a sinless mother of Mary herself, and thus upward to the beginning, of the race, to another Eve who never fell. Augustine’s opponent, Pelagius, with his monastic, ascetic idea of holiness and his superficial doctrine of sin, remarkably outstripped him on this point, ascribing to Mary perfect sinlessness. But, it should be remembered, that his denial of original sin to all men, and his excepting of sundry saints of the Old Testament besides Mary, such as Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Melchizedek, Samuel, Elijah, Daniel, from actual sin, so that πάντες in Rom_5:12, in his view, means only a majority, weaken the honor he thus appears to confer upon the mother of the Lord. The Augustinian view long continued to prevail; but at last Pelagius won the victory on this point in the Roman church.

Notwithstanding this exalted representation of Mary, there appear no clear traces of a proper worship of Mary, as distinct from the worship of saints in general, until the Nestorian controversy of 430. This dispute formed an important turning-point not only in Christology, but in Mariology also. The leading interest in it was, without doubt, the connection of the virgin with the mystery of the incarnation. The perfect union of the divine and human natures seemed to demand that Mary might be called in some sense the mother of God, θεοτόκος, Deipara; for that which was born of her was not merely the man Jesus, but the God-Man Jesus Christ. The church, however, did, of course, not intend by that to assert that she was the mother of the uncreated divine essence — for this would be palpably absurd and blasphemous — nor that she herself was divine, but only that she was the human point of entrance or the mysterious channel for the eternal divine Logos. Athanasius and the Alexandrian church teachers of the Nicene age, who pressed the unity of the divine and the human in Christ to the verge of monophysitism, had already used this expression frequently and without scruple, and Gregory Nazianzen even declares every one impious who denies its validity. Nestorius, on the contrary, and the Antiochian school, who were more devoted to the distinction of the two natures in Christ, took offence at the predicate θεοτόκος, saw in it a relapse into the heathen mythology, if not a blasphemy against the eternal and unchangeable Godhead, and preferred the expression Χριστοτόκος, mater Christi. Upon this broke out the violent controversy between him and the bishop Cyril of Alexandria, which ended in the condemnation of Nestorianism at Ephesus in 431.

Thenceforth the θεοτόκος was a test of orthodox Christology, and the rejection of it amounted to the beginning or the end of all heresy. The overthrow of Nestorianism was at the same time the victory of Mary-worship. With the honor of the Son, the honor also of the Mother was secured. The opponents of Nestorius, especially Proclus, his successor in Constantinople († 447), and Cyril of Alexandria († 444), could scarcely find predicates enough to express the transcendent glory of the mother of God. She was the crown of virginity, the indestructible temple of God, the dwelling place of the Holy Trinity, the paradise of the second Adam, the bridge from God to man, the loom of the incarnation, the sceptre of orthodoxy; through her the Trinity is glorified and adored, the devil and demons are put to flight, the nations converted, and the fallen creature raised to heaven. The people were all on the side of the Ephesian decision, and gave vent to their joy in boundless enthusiasm, amidst bonfires, processions, and illuminations.

With this the worship of Mary, the mother of God, the queen of heaven, seemed to be solemnly established for all time. But soon a reaction appeared in favor of Nestorianism, and the church found it necessary to condemn the opposite extreme of Eutychianism or Monophysitism. This was the office of the council of Chalcedon in 451: to give expression to the element of truth in Nestorianism, the duality of nature in the one divine-human person of Christ. Nevertheless the θεοτόκος was expressly retained, though it originated in a rather monophysite view.

 

82. Mariolatry

Thus much respecting the doctrine of Mary. Now the corresponding practice. From this Mariology follows Mariolatry. If Mary is, in the strict sense of the word, the mother of God, it seems to follow as a logical consequence, that she herself is divine, and therefore an object of divine worship. This was not, indeed, the meaning and purpose of the ancient church; as, in fact, it never asserted that Mary was the mother of the essential, eternal divinity of the Logos. She was, and continues to be, a created being, a human mother, even according to the Roman and Greek doctrine. But according to the once prevailing conception of her peculiar relation to deity, a certain degree of divine homage to Mary, and some invocation of her powerful intercession with God, seemed unavoidable, and soon became a universal practice.

The first instance of the formal invocation of Mary occurs in the prayers of Ephraim Syrus († 379), addressed to Mary and the saints, and attributed by the tradition of the Syrian church, though perhaps in part incorrectly, to that author. The first more certain example appears in Gregory Nazianzen († 389), who, in his eulogy on Cyprian, relates of Justina that she besought the virgin Mary to protect her threatened virginity, and at the same time disfigured her beauty by ascetic self-tortures, and thus fortunately escaped the amours of a youthful lover (Cyprian before his conversion). But, on the other hand, the numerous writings of Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, and Augustine, furnish no example of an invocation of Mary. Epiphanius even condemned the adoration of Mary, and calls the practice of making offerings to her by the Collyridian women, blasphemous and dangerous to the soul. The entire silence of history respecting the worship of the Virgin down to the end of the fourth century, proves clearly that it was foreign to the original spirit of Christianity, and belongs among the many innovations of the post-Nicene age.

In the beginning of the fifth century, however, the worship of saints appeared in full bloom, and then Mary, by reason of her singular relation to the Lord, was soon placed at the head, as the most blessed queen of the heavenly host. To her was accorded the hyperdulia (ὑπερδουλεία) — to anticipate here the later scholastic distinction sanctioned by the council of Trent — that is, the highest degree of veneration, in distinction from mere dulia (δουλεία), which belongs to all saints and angels, and from latria (λατρεία), which, properly speaking, is due to God alone. From that time numerous churches and altars were dedicated to the holy Mother of God, the perpetual Virgin; among them also the church at Ephesus in which the anti-Nestorian council of 431 had sat. Justinian I., in a law, implored her intercession with God for the restoration of the Roman empire, and on the dedication of the costly altar of the church of St. Sophia he expected all blessings for church and empire from her powerful prayers. His general, Narses, like the knights in the Middle Age, was unwilling to go into battle till he had secured her protection. Pope Boniface IV. in 608 turned the Pantheon in Rome into a temple of Mary ad martyres: the pagan Olympus into a Christian heaven of gods. Subsequently even her images (made after an original pretending to have come from Luke) were divinely worshipped, and, in the prolific legends of the superstitious Middle Age, performed countless miracles, before some of which the miracles of the gospel history grow dim. She became almost coördinate with Christ, a joint redeemer, invested with most of His own attributes and acts of grace. The popular belief ascribed to her, as to Christ, a sinless conception, a sinless birth, resurrection and ascension to heaven, and a participation of all power in heaven and on earth. She became the center of devotion, cultus, and art, the popular symbol of power, of glory, and of the final victory of catholicism over all heresies. The Greek and Roman churches vied throughout the Middle Age (and do so still) in the apotheosis of the human mother with the divine-human child Jesus in her arms, till the Reformation freed a large part of Latin Christendom from this unscriptural semi-idolatry and concentrated the affection and adoration of believers upon the crucified and risen Saviour of the world, the only Mediator between God and man.

A word more: respecting the favorite prayer to Mary, the angelic greeting, or the Ave Maria, which in the Catholic devotion runs parallel to the Pater Noster. It takes its name from the initial words of the salutation of Gabriel to the holy Virgin at the annunciation of the birth of Christ. It consists of three parts:

(1) The salutation of the angel (Luk_1:28):

Ave Maria, gratiae plena, Dominus tecum!

(2) The words of Elizabeth (Luk_1:2):

Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.

(3) The later unscriptural addition, which contains the prayer proper, and is offensive to the Protestant and all sound Christian feeling:

Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis. Amen.

Formerly this third part, which gave the formula the character of a prayer, was traced back to the anti-Nestorian council of Ephesus in 431, which sanctioned the expression mater Dei, or Dei genitrix (θεοτόκος). But Roman archeologists now concede that it is a much later addition, made in the beginning of the sixteenth century (1508), and that the closing words, nunc et in hora mortis, were added even after that time by the Franciscans. But even the first two parts did not come into general use as a standing formula of prayer until the thirteenth century. From that date the Ave Maria stands in the Roman church upon a level with the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed, and with them forms the basis of the rosary.

 

83. The Festivals of Mary

This mythical and fantastic, and, we must add, almost pagan and idolatrous Mariology impressed itself on the public cultus in a series of festivals, celebrating the most important facts and fictions of the life of the Virgin, and in some degree running parallel with the festivals of the birth, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.

1. The Annunciation of Mary commemorates the announcement of the birth of Christ by the archangel Gabriel, (Luk_1:26-39) and at the same time the conception of Christ; for in the view of the ancient church Mary conceived the Logos (Verbum) through the ear by the word of the angel. Hence the festival had its place on the 25th of March, exactly nine months before Christmas; though in some parts of the church, as Spain and Milan, it was celebrated in December, till the Roman practice conquered. The first trace of it occurs in Proclus, the opponent and successor of Nestorius in Constantinople after 430; then it appears more plainly in several councils and homilies of the seventh century.

2. The Purification of Mary or Candlemas, in memory of the ceremonial purification of the Virgin, forty days after the birth of Jesus, therefore on the 2d of February (reckoning from the 25th of December); and at the same time in memory of the presentation of Jesus in the temple and his meeting of Simeon and Anna. (Luk_2:22-38) This, like the preceding, was thus originally as much a festival of Christ as of Mary, especially in the Greek church. It is supposed to have been introduced by Pope Gelasius in 494, though by some said not to have arisen till 542 under Justinian I., in consequence of a great earthquake and a destructive pestilence. Perhaps it was a Christian transformation of the old Roman lustrations or expiatory sacrifices (Februa, Februalia), which from the time of Numa took place in February, the month of purification or expiation. To heathen origin is due also the use of lighted tapers, with which the people on this festival marched, singing, out of the church through the city. Hence the name Candlemas.

3. The Ascension, or Assumption rather, of Mary is celebrated on the 15th of August. The festival was introduced by the Greek emperor Mauritius (582-602); some say, under Pope Gelasius († 496). In Rome, after the ninth century, it is one of the principal feasts, and, like the others, is distinguished with vigil and octave.

It rests, however, on a purely apocryphal foundation.

The entire silence of the apostles and the primitive church teachers respecting the departure of Mary stirred idle curiosity to all sorts of inventions, until a translation like Enoch’s and Elijah’s was attributed to her. In the time of Origen some were inferring from Luk_2:35, that she had suffered martyrdom. Epiphanius will not decide whether she died and was buried, or not. Two apocryphal Greek writings de transitu Mariae, of the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, and afterward pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory of Tours († 595), for the first time contain the legend that the soul of the mother of God was transported to the heavenly paradise by Christ and His angels in presence of all the apostles, and on the following morning her body also was translated thither on a cloud and there united with the soul. Subsequently the legend was still further embellished, and, besides the apostles, the angels and patriarchs also, even Adam and Eve, were made witnesses of the wonderful spectacle.

Still the resurrection and ascension of Mary are in the Roman church only a matter of “devout and probable opinion,” not an article of faith; and a distinction is made between the ascensio of Christ (by virtue of His divine nature) and the assumptio of Mary (by the power of grace and merit).

But since Mary, according to the most recent Roman dogma, was free even from original sin, and since death is a consequence of sin, it should strictly follow that she did not die at all, and rise again, but, like Enoch and Elijah, was carried alive to heaven.

In the Middle Age — to anticipate briefly — yet other festivals of Mary arose: the Nativity of Mary, after a.d. 650; the Presentation of Mary, after the ninth century, founded on the apocryphal tradition of the eleven years’ ascetic discipline of Mary in the temple at Jerusalem; the Visitation of Mary in memory of her visit to Elizabeth; a festival first mentioned in France in 1247, and limited to the western church; and the festival of the Immaculate Conception, which arose with the doctrine of the sinless conception of Mary, and is interwoven with the history of that dogma down to its official and final promulgation by Pope Pius IX. in 1854.

 

84. The Worship of Martyrs and Saints

I. Sources

The Memorial Discourses of Basil the Great on the martyr Mamas (a shepherd in Cappadocia, † about 276), and on the forty martyrs (soldiers, who are said to have suffered in Armenia under Licinius in 320); of Gregory Naz. on Cyprian († 248), on Athanasius († 372), and on Basil († 379); of Gregory Of Nyssa on Ephraim Syrus († 378), and on the megalomartyr Theodorus; of Chrysostom on Bernice and Prosdoce, on the Holy Martyrs, on the Egyptian Martyrs, on Meletius of Antioch; several homilies of Ambrose, Augustine, Leo the Great, Peter Chrysologus Caesarius, etc.; Jerome against Vigilantius. The most important passages of the fathers on the veneration of saints are conveniently collected in: The Faith of Catholics on certain points of controversy, confirmed by Scripture and attested by the Fathers. By Berington and Kirk, revised by Waterworth.” 3d ed. 1846, vol. iii. pp. 322-416.

 

II. The Later Literature

(1) On the Roman Catholic side: The Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, thus far 58 vols. fol. (1643-1858, coming down to the 22d of October). Theod. Ruinart: Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta. Par. 1689 (confined to the first four centuries). Laderchio: S. patriarcharum et prophetarum, confessorum, cultus perpetuus, etc. Rom. 1730. (2) On the Protestant side: J. Dallaeus: Adversus Latinorum de cultus religiosi objecto traditionem. Genev. 1664. Isaac Taylor: Ancient Christianity. 4th ed. Lond. 1844, vel. ii. p. 173 ff. (“Christianized demonolatry in the fourth century.”)

 

The Worship of Martyrs and Saints

The system of saint-worship, including both Hagiology and Hagiolatry, developed itself at the same time with the worship of Mary; for the latter is only the culmination of the former.

The New Testament is equally ignorant of both. The expression ἅγιοι, sancti, saints, is used by the apostles not of a particular class, a spiritual aristocracy of the church, but of all baptized and converted Christians without distinction; because they are separated from the world, consecrated to the service of God, washed from the guilt of sin by the blood of Christ, and, notwithstanding all their remaining imperfections and sins, called to perfect holiness. The apostles address their epistles to “the saints” i.e., the Christian believers, “at Rome, Corinth, Ephesus,” etc. (Comp. Act_9:13, Act_9:32, Act_9:41; Act_26:10; Rom_1:7; Rom_12:13; Rom_15:25, Rom_15:26; 1Co_1:2; 1Co_6:1; Eph_1:1, Eph_1:15, Eph_1:18; Eph_4:12; Phi_1:1; Phi_4:21, Phi_4:22; Rev_8:7, Rev_8:10, etc.)

After the entrance of the heathen masses into the church the title came to be restricted to bishops and councils and to departed heroes of the Christian faith, especially the martyrs of the first three centuries. When, on the cessation of persecution, the martyr’s crown, at least within the limits of the Roman empire, was no longer attainable, extraordinary ascetic piety, great service to the church, and subsequently also the power of miracles, were required as indispensable conditions of reception into the Catholic calendar of saints. The anchorets especially, who, though not persecuted from without, voluntarily crucified their flesh and overcame evil spirits, seemed to stand equal to the martyrs in holiness and in claims to veneration. A tribunal of canonization did not yet exist. The popular voice commonly decided the matter, and passed for the voice of God. Some saints were venerated only in the regions where they lived and died; others enjoyed a national homage; others, a universal.

The veneration of the saints increased with the decrease of martyrdom, and with the remoteness of the objects of reverence. “Distance lends enchantment to the view;” but “familiarity” is apt “to breed contempt.” The sins and faults of the heroes of faith were lost in the bright haze of the past, while their virtues shone the more, and furnished to a pious and superstitious fancy the richest material for legendary poesy.

Almost all the catholic saints belong to the higher degrees of the clergy or to the monastic life. And the monks were the chief promoters of the worship of saints. At the head of the heavenly chorus stands Mary, crowned as queen by the side of her divine Son; then come the apostles and evangelists, who died a violent death, the protomartyr Stephen, and the martyrs of the first three centuries; the patriarchs and prophets also of the Old Covenant down to John the Baptist; and finally eminent hermits and monks, missionaries, theologians, and bishops, and those, in general, who distinguished themselves above their contemporaries in virtue or in public service. The measure of ascetic self-denial was the measure of Christian virtue. Though many of the greatest saints of the Bible, from the patriarch Abraham to Peter, the prince of the apostles, lived in marriage, the Romish ethics, from the time of Ambrose and Jerome, can allow no genuine holiness within the bonds of matrimony, and receives only virgines and some few vidui and viduae into its spiritual nobility. In this again the close connection of saint-worship with monasticism is apparent.

To the saints, about the same period, were added angels as objects of worship. To angels there was ascribed in the church from the beginning a peculiar concern with the fortunes of the militant church, and a certain oversight of all lands and nations. But Ambrose is the first who expressly exhorts to the invocation of our patron angels, and represents it as a duty. In favor of the guardianship and interest of angels appeal was rightly made to several passages of the Old and New Testaments: Dan_10:13, Dan_10:20, Dan_10:21; Dan_12:1; Mat_18:10; Luk_15:7; Heb_1:14; Act_12:15. But in Col_2:18, and Rev_19:10; Rev_22:8, Rev_22:9, the worship of angels is distinctly rebuked.

Out of the old Biblical notion of guardian angels arose also the idea of patron saints for particular countries, cities, churches, and classes, and against particular evils and dangers. Peter and Paul and Laurentius became the patrons of Rome; James, the patron of Spain; Andrew, of Greece; John, of theologians; Luke, of painters; subsequently Phocas, of seamen; Ivo, of jurists; Anthony, a protector against pestilence; Apollonia, against tooth-aches; etc.

These different orders of saints and angels form a heavenly hierarchy, reflected in the ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth. Dionysius the Areopagite, a fantastical Christian Platonist of the fifth-century, exhibited the whole relation of man to God on the basis of the hierarchy; dividing the hierarchy into two branches, heavenly and earthly, and each of these again into several degrees, of which every higher one was the mediator of salvation to the one below it.

These are the outlines of the saint-worship of our period. Now to the exposition and estimate of it, and then the proofs.

The worship of saints proceeded originally, without doubt, from a pure and truly Christian source, to wit: a very deep and lively sense of the communion of saints, which extends over death and the grave, and embraces even the blessed in heaven. It was closely connected with love to Christ, and with gratitude for everything great and good which he has done through his instruments for the welfare of posterity. The church fulfilled a simple and natural duty of gratitude, when, in the consciousness of unbroken fellowship with the church triumphant, she honored the memory of the martyrs and confessors, who had offered their life for their faith, and had achieved victory for it over all its enemies. She performed a duty of fidelity to her own children, when she held up for admiration and imitation the noble virtues and services of their fathers. She honored and glorified Christ Himself when she surrounded Him with an innumerable company of followers, contemplated the reflection of His glory in them, and sang to His praise in the Ambrosian Te Deum:

“The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee;

The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee;

The noble army of Martyrs praise thee;

The holy church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee;

The Father, of an infinite majesty;

Thine adorable, true, and only Son;

Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

Thou art the King of glory, O Christ;

Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.

When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man, thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb;

When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.”

In the first three centuries the veneration of the martyrs in general restricted itself to the thankful remembrance of their virtues and the celebration of the day of their death as the day of their heavenly birth. This celebration usually took place at their graves. So the church of Smyrna annually commemorated its bishop Polycarp, and valued his bones more than gold and gems, though with the express distinction: “Christ we worship as the Son of God; the martyrs we love and honor as disciples and successors of the Lord, on account of their insurpassable love to their King and Master, as also, we wish to be their companions and fellow disciples.” Here we find this veneration as yet in its innocent simplicity.

But in the Nicene age it advanced to a formal invocation of the saints as our patrons (patroni) and intercessors (intercessores, mediatores) before the throne of grace, and degenerated into a form of refined polytheism and idolatry. The saints came into the place of the demigods, Penates and Lares, the patrons of the domestic hearth and of the country. As once temples and altars to the heroes, so now churches and chapels came to be built over the graves of the martyrs, and consecrated to their names (or more precisely to God through them). People laid in them, as they used to do in the temple of Aesculapius, the sick that they might be healed, and hung in them, as in the temples of the gods, sacred gifts of silver and gold. Their graves were, as Chrysostom says, move splendidly adorned and more frequently visited than the palaces of kings. Banquets were held there in their honor, which recall the heathen sacrificial feasts for the welfare of the manes. Their relics were preserved with scrupulous care, and believed to possess miraculous virtue. Earlier, it was the custom to pray for the martyrs (as if they were not yet perfect) and to thank God for their fellowship and their pious example. Now such intercessions for them were considered unbecoming, and their intercession was invoked for the living.

This invocation of the dead was accompanied with the presumption that they take the deepest interest in all the fortunes of the kingdom of God on earth, and express it in prayers and intercessions. This was supposed to be warranted by some passages of Scripture, like Luk_15:10, which speaks of the angels (not the saints) rejoicing over the conversion of a sinner, and Rev_8:3, Rev_8:4, which represents an angel as laying the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne of God. But the New Testament expressly rebukes the worship of the angels (Col_2:18; Rev_19:10; Rev_22:8, Rev_22:9), and furnishes not a single example of an actual invocation of dead men; and it nowhere directs us to address our prayers to any creature. Mere inferences from certain premises, however plausible, are, in such weighty matters, not enough. The intercession of the saints for us was drawn as a probable inference from the duty of all Christians to pray for others, and the invocation of the saints for their intercession was supported by the unquestioned right to apply to living saints for their prayers, of which even the apostles availed themselves in their epistles.

But here rises the insolvable question: How can departed saints hear at once the prayers of so many Christians on earth, unless they either partake of divine omnipresence or divine omniscience? And is it not idolatrous to clothe creatures with attributes which belong exclusively to Godhead? Or, if the departed saints first learn from the omniscient God our prayers, and then bring them again before God with their powerful intercessions, to what purpose this circuitous way? Why not at once address God immediately, who alone is able, and who is always ready, to hear His children for the sake of Christ?

Augustine felt this difficulty, and concedes his inability to solve it. He leaves it undecided, whether the saints (as Jerome and others actually supposed) are present in so many places at once, or their knowledge comes through the omniscience of God, or finally it comes through the ministry of angels. He already makes the distinction between λατρεία, or adoration due to God alone, and the invocatio (δουλεία) of the saints, and firmly repels the charge of idolatry, which the Manichaean Faustus brought against the catholic Christians when he said: “Ye have changed the idols into martyrs, whom ye worship with the like prayers, and ye appease the shades of the dead with wine and flesh.” Augustine asserts that the church indeed celebrates the memory of the martyrs with religious solemnity, to be stirred up to imitate them, united with their merits, and supported by their prayers, but it offers sacrifice and dedicates altars to God alone. Our martyrs, says he, are not gods; we build no temples to our martyrs, as to gods; but we consecrate to them only memorial places, as to departed men, whose spirits live with God; we build altars not to sacrifice to the martyrs, but to sacrifice with them to the one God, who is both ours and theirs.

But in spite of all these distinctions and cautions, which must be expected from a man like Augustine, and acknowledged to be a wholesome restraint against excesses, we cannot but see in the martyr-worship, as it was actually practised, a new form of the hero-worship of the pagans. Nor can we wonder in the least. For the great mass of the Christian people came, in fact, fresh from polytheism, without thorough conversion, and could not divest themselves of their old notions and customs at a stroke. The despotic form of government, the servile subjection of the people, the idolatrous homage which was paid to the Byzantine emperors and their statues, the predicates divina, sacra, coelestia, which were applied to the utterances of their will, favored the worship of saints. The heathen emperor Julian sarcastically reproached the Christians with reintroducing polytheism into monotheism, but, on account of the difference of the objects, revolted from the Christian worship of martyrs and relics, as from the “stench of graves and dead men’s bones.” The Manichaean taunt we have already mentioned. The Spanish presbyter Vigilantius, in the fifth century, called the worshippers of martyrs and relics, ashes-worshippers and idolaters, and taught that, according to the Scriptures, the living only should pray with and for each other. Even some orthodox church teachers admitted the affinity of the saint-worship with heathenism, though with the view of showing that all that is good in the heathen worship reappears far better in the Christian. Eusebius cites a passage from Plato on the worship of heroes, demi-gods, and their graves, and then applies it to the veneration of friends of God and champions of true religion; so that the Christians did well to visit their graves, to honor their memory there, and to offer their prayers. The Greeks, Theodoret thinks, have the least reason to be offended at what takes place at the graves of the martyrs; for the libations and expiations, the demi-gods and deified men, originated with themselves. Hercules, Aesculapius, Bacchus, the Dioscuri, and the like, are deified men; consequently it cannot be a reproach to the Christians that they — not deify, but — honor their martyrs as witnesses and servants of God. The ancients saw nothing censurable in such worship of the dead. The saints, our helpers and patrons, are far more worthy of such honor. The temples of the gods are destroyed, the philosophers, orators, and emperors are forgotten, but the martyrs are universally known. The feasts of the gods are now replaced by the festivals of Peter, Paul, Marcellus, Leontius, Antonins, Mauricius, and other martyrs, not with pagan pomp and sensual pleasures, but with Christian soberness and decency.

Yet even this last distinction which Theodoret asserts, sometimes disappeared. Augustine laments that in the African church banqueting and revelling were daily practised in honor of the martyrs, but thinks that this weakness must be for the time indulged from regard to the ancient customs of the pagans.

In connection with the new hero-worship a new mythology also arose, which filled up the gaps of the history of the saints, and sometimes even transformed the pagan myths of gods and heroes into Christian legends. The superstitious imagination, visions, and dreams, and pious fraud famished abundant contributions to the Christian legendary poesy.

The worship of the saints found eloquent vindication and encouragement not only, in poets like Prudentius (about 405) and Paulinus of Nola (died 431), to whom greater freedom is allowed, but even in all the prominent theologians and preachers of the Nicene and post-Nicene age. It was as popular as monkery, and was as enthusiastically commended by the leaders of the church in the East and West.

The two institutions, moreover, are closely connected and favor each other. The monks were most zealous friends of saint-worship in their own cause. The church of the fifth century already went almost as far in it as the Middle Age, at all events quite as far as the council of Trent; for this council does not prescribe the invocation of the saints, but confines itself to approving it as “good and useful” (not as necessary) on the ground of their reigning with Christ in heaven and their intercession for us, and expressly remarks that Christ is our only, Redeemer and Saviour. This moderate and prudent statement of the doctrine, however, has not yet removed the excesses which the Roman Catholic people still practise in the worship of the saints, their images, and their relics. The Greek church goes even further in theory than the Roman; for the confession of Peter Mogilas (which was subscribed by the four Greek patriarchs in 1643, and again sanctioned by the council of Jerusalem in 1672), declares it duty and propriety (χρέος) to implore the intercession (μεσιτεία) of Mary and the saints with God for us.

We now cite, for proof and further illustration, the most important passages from the church fathers of our period on this point. In the numerous memorial discourses of the fathers, the martyrs are loaded with eulogies, addressed as present, and besought for their protection. The universal tone of those productions is offensive to the Protestant taste, and can hardly be reconciled with evangelical ideas of the exclusive and all-sufficient mediation of Christ and of justification by pure grace without the merit of works. But it must not be forgotten that in these discourses very much is to be put to the account of the degenerate, extravagant, and fulsome rhetoric of that time. The best church fathers, too, never separated the merits of the saints from the merits of Christ, but considered the former as flowing out of the latter.

We begin with the Greek fathers. Basil the Great calls the forty soldiers who are said to have suffered martyrdom under Licinius in Sebaste about 320, not only a “holy choir,” an “invincible phalanx,” but also “common patrons of the human family, helpers of our prayers and most mighty intercessors with God.”

Ephraim Syrus addresses the departed saints, in general, in such words as these: “Remember me, ye heirs of God, ye brethren of Christ, pray to the Saviour for me, that I through Christ may be delivered from him who assaults me from day to day;” and the mother of a martyr: “O holy, true, and blessed mother, plead for me with the saints, and pray: ‘Ye triumphant martyrs of Christ, pray for Ephraim, the least, the miserable,’ that I may find grace, and through the grace of Christ may be saved.”

Gregory of Nyssa asks of St. Theodore, whom he thinks invisibly present at his memorial feast, intercessions for his country, for peace, for the preservation of orthodoxy, and begs him to arouse the apostles Peter and Paul and John to prayer for the church planted by them (as if they needed such an admonition!). He relates with satisfaction that the people streamed to the burial place of this saint in such multitudes that the place looked like an ant hill. In his Life of St. Ephraim, he tells of a pilgrim who lost himself among the barbarian posterity of Ishmael, but by the prayer, “St. Ephraim, help me!” and the protection of the saint, happily found his way home. He himself thus addresses him at the close: “Thou who standest at the holy altar, and with angels servest the life-giving and most holy Trinity, remember us all, and implore for us the forgiveness of sins and the enjoyment of the eternal kingdom.”

Gregory Nazianzen is convinced that the departed Cyprian guides and protects his church in Carthage more powerfully by his intercessions than he formerly did by his teachings, because he now stands so much nearer the Deity; he addresses him as present, and implores his favor and protection. In his eulogy on Athanasius, who was but a little while dead, he prays: “Look graciously down upon us, and dispose this people to be perfect worshippers of the perfect Trinity; and when the times are quiet, preserve us — when they are troubled, remove us, and take us to thee in thy fellowship.”

Even Chrysostom did not rise above the spirit of the time. He too is an eloquent and enthusiastic advocate of the worship of the saints and their relics. At the close of his memorial discourse on Sts. Bernice and Prosdoce — two saints who have not even a place in the Roman calendar — he exhorts his hearers not only on their memorial days but also on other days to implore these saints to be our protectors: “For they have great boldness not merely during their life but also after death, yea, much greater after death. For they now bear the stigmata of Christ [the marks of martyrdom], and when they show these, they can persuade the King to anything.” He relates that once, when the harvest was endangered by excessive rain, the whole population of Constantinople flocked to the church of the Apostles, and there elected the apostles Peter and Andrew, Paul and Timothy, patrons and intercessors before the throne of grace. Christ, says he on Heb_1:14, redeems us as Lord and Master, the angels redeem us as ministers.

Asterius of Amasia calls the martyr Phocas, the patron of mariners, “a pillar and foundation of the churches of God in the world, the most renowned of the martyrs, who draws men of all countries in hosts to his church in Sinope, and who now, since his death, distributes more abundant nourishment than Joseph in Egypt.”

Among the Latin fathers, Ambrose of Milan is one of the first and most decided promoters of the worship of saints. We cite a passage or two. “May Peter, who so successfully weeps for himself, weep also for us, and turn upon us the friendly look of Christ. The angels, who are appointed to guard us, must be invoked for us; the martyrs, to whose intercession we have claim by the pledge of their bodies, must be invoked. They who have washed away their sins by their own blood, may pray for our sins. For they are martyrs of God, our high priests, spectators of our life and our acts. We need not blush to use them as intercessors for our weakness; for they also knew the infirmity of the body when they gained the victory over it.”

Jerome disputes the opinion of Vigilantius, that we should pray for one another in this life only, and that the dead do not hear our prayers, and ascribes to departed saints a sort of omnipresence, because, according to Rev_14:4, they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. He thinks that their prayers are much more effectual in heaven than they were upon earth. If Moses implored the forgiveness of God for six hundred thousand men, and Stephen, the first martyr, prayed for his murderers after the example of Christ, should they cease to pray, and to be heard, when they are with Christ?

Augustine infers from the interest which the rich man in hell still had in the fate of his five surviving brothers (Luk_16:27), that the pious dead in heaven must have even far more interest in the kindred and friends whom they have left behind. He also calls the saints our intercessors, yet under Christ, the proper and highest Intercessor, as Peter and the other apostles are shepherds under the great chief Shepherd. In a memorial discourse on Stephen, he imagines that martyr, and St. Paul who stoned him, to be present, and begs them for their intercessions with the Lord with whom they reign. He attributes miraculous effects, even the raising of the dead, to the intercessions of Stephen. But, on the other hand, he declares, as we have already observed, his inability to solve the difficult question of the way in which the dead can be made acquainted with our wishes and prayers. At all events, in Augustine’s practical religion the worship of the saints occupies a subordinate place. In his “Confessions” and “Soliloquies” he always addresses himself directly to God, not to Mary nor to martyrs.

The Spanish poet Prudentius flees with prayers and confessions of sin to St. Laurentius, and considers himself unworthy to be heard by Christ Himself.

The poems of Paulinus of Nola are full of direct prayers for the intercessions of the saints, especially of St. Felix, in whose honor he erected a basilica, and annually composed an ode, and whom he calls his patron, his father, his lord. He relates that the people came in great crowds around the wonder-working relics of this saint on his memorial day, and could not look on them enough.

Leo the Great, in his sermons, lays great stress on the powerful intercession of the apostles Peter and Paul, and of the Roman martyr Laurentius.

Pope Gregory the Great, at the close of our period, went much farther.

According to this we cannot wonder that the Virgin Mary and the saints are interwoven also in the prayers of the liturgies, and that their merits and intercession stand by the side of the merits of Christ as a ground of the acceptance of our prayers.



Vol. 3, Chapter VII (Cont’d) – Festivals of the Saints

85. 

The system of saint-worship, like that of the worship of Mary, became embodied in a series of religious festivals, of which many had only a local character, some a provincial, some a universal. To each saint a day of the year, the day of his death, or his heavenly birthday, was dedicated, and it was celebrated with a memorial oration and exercises of divine worship, but in many cases desecrated by unrestrained amusements of the people, like the feasts of the heathen gods and heroes.

The most important saints’ days which come down from

the early church, and bear a universal character, are the following:

1. The feast of the two chief apostles Peter and Paul, on the twenty-ninth of June, the day of their martyrdom. It is with the Latins and the Greeks the most important of the feasts of the apostles, and, as the homilies for the day by Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, and Leo the Great show, was generally introduced as early as the fourth century.

2. Besides this, the Roman church has observed since the fifth century a special feast in honor of the prince of the apostles and for the glorification of the papal office: the feast of The See of Peter on the twenty-second of February, the day on which, according to tradition, he took possession of the Roman bishopric. With this there was also an Antiochian St. Peter’s day on the eighteenth of January, in memory of the supposed episcopal reign of this apostle in Antioch. The Catholic liturgists dispute which of the two feasts is the older. After Leo the Great, the bishops used to keep their Natales. Subsequently the feast of the Chains of Peter was introduced in memory of the chains which Peter wore, according to Act_12:6, under Herod at Jerusalem, and, according to the Roman legend, in the prison at Rome under Nero.

3. The feast of John, the apostle and evangelist, on the twenty-seventh of December, has already been mentioned in connection with the Christmas cycle.

4. Likewise the feast of the protomartyr Stephen, on the twenty-sixth of December, after the fourth century.

5. The feast of John the Baptist, the last representative of the saints before Christ. This was, contrary to the general rule, a feast of his birth, not his martyrdom, and, with reference to the birth festival of the Lord on the twenty-fifth of December, was celebrated six months earlier, on the twenty-fourth of June, the summer solstice. This was intended to signify at once his relation to Christ and his well-known word: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” He represented the decreasing sun of the ancient covenant; Christ, the rising sun of the new. In order to celebrate more especially the martyrdom of the Baptist, a feast of the Beheading of John, on the twenty-ninth of August, was afterward introduced; but this never became so important and popular as the feast of his birth.

6. To be just to all the heroes of the faith, the Greek church, after the fourth century, celebrated a feast of All Saints on the Sunday after Pentecost (the Latin festival of the Trinity). The Latin church, after 610, kept a similar feast, the Festum Omnium Sanctorum, on the first of November; but this did not come into general use till after the ninth century.

7. The feast of the Archangel Michael, the leader of the hosts of angels, and the representative of the church triumphant, (Rev_12:7-9; comp. Jude, Jud_1:9) on the twenty-ninth of September. This owes its origin to some miraculous appearances of Michael in the Catholic legends. The worship of the angels developed itself simultaneously with the worship of Mary and the saints, and churches also were dedicated to angels, and called after their names. Thus Constantine the Great built a church to the archangel Michael on the right bank of the Black Sea, where the angel, according to the legend, appeared to some ship-wrecked persons and rescued them from death. Justinian I. built as many as six churches to him. Yet the feast of Michael, which some trace back to Pope Gelasius I., a.d. 493, seems not to have become general till after the ninth century.

 

86. The Christian Calendar. The Legends of the Saints. The Acta Sanctorum

This is the place for some observations on the origin and character of the Christian calendar with reference to its ecclesiastical elements, the catalogue of saints and their festivals.

The Christian calendar, as to its contents, dates from the fourth and later centuries; as to its form, it comes down from classical antiquity, chiefly from the Romans, whose numerous calendars contained, together with astronomical and astrological notes, tables also of civil and religious festivals and public sports. Two calendars of Christian Rome still extant, one of the year 354, the other of the year 448, show the transition. The former contains for the first time the Christian week beginning with Sunday, together with the week of heathen Rome; the other contains Christian feast days and holidays, though as yet very few, viz., four festivals of Christ and six martyr days. The oldest purely Christian calendar is a Gothic one, which originated probably in Thrace in the fourth century. The fragment still extant contains thirty-eight days for November and the close of October, among which seven days are called by the names of saints (two from the Bible, three from the church universal, and two from the Gothic church).

There are, however, still earlier lists of saints’ days, according to the date of the holiday; the oldest is a Roman one of the middle of the fourth century, which contains the memorial days of twelve bishops of Rome and twenty-four martyrs, together with the festival of the birth of Christ and the festival of Peter on the twenty-second of February.

Such tables are the groundwork of the calendar and the martyrologies. At first each community or province had its own catalogue of feasts, hence also its own calendar. Such local registers were sometimes called diptycha (δίπτυχα), because they were recorded on tables with two leaves; yet they commonly contained, besides the names of the martyrs, the names also of the earlier bishops and still living benefactors or persons, of whom the priests were to make mention by name in the prayer before the consecration of the elements in the eucharist. The spread of the worship of a martyr, which usually started from the place of his martyrdom, promoted the interchange of names. The great influence of Rome gave to the Roman festival-list and calendar the chief currency in the West.

Gradually the whole calendar was filled up with the names of saints. As the number of the martyrs exceeded the number of days in the year, the commemoration of several must fall upon the same day, or the canonical hours of cloister devotion must be given up. The oriental calendar is richer in saints from the Old Testament than the occidental.

With the calendars are connected the Martyrologia, or Acta Martyrum, Acta Sanctorum, called by the Greeks Menologia and Menaea. There were at first only “Diptycha” and “Calendaria martyrum,” i.e., lists of the names of the martyrs commemorated by the particular church in the order of the days of their death on the successive days of the year, with or without statements of the place and manner of their passion. This simple skeleton became gradually animated with biographical sketches, coming down from different times and various authors, containing a confused mixture of history and fable, truth and fiction, piety and superstition, and needing to be used with great critical caution. As these biographies of the saints were read on their annual days in the church and in the cloisters for the edification of the people, they were called Legenda.

The first Acts of the Martyrs come down from the second and third centuries, in part from eye-witnesses, as, for example, the martyrdom of Polycarp (a.d. 167), and of the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne in South Gaul; but most of them originated, at least in their present form, in the post-Constantinian age. Eusebius wrote a general martyrology, which is lost. The earliest Latin martyrology is ascribed to Jerome, but at all events contains many later additions; this father, however, furnished valuable contributions to such works in his “Lives of eminent Monks” and his “Catalogue of celebrated Church Teachers.” Pope Gelasius thought good to prohibit or to restrict the church reading of the Acts of the Saints, because the names of the authors were unknown, and superfluous and incongruous additions by heretics or uneducated persons (idiotis) might be introduced. Gregory the Great speaks of a martyrology in use in Rome and elsewhere, which is perhaps the same afterward ascribed to Jerome and widely spread. The present Martyrologium Romanum, which embraces the saints of all countries, is an expansion of this, and was edited by Baronius with a learned commentary at the command of Gregory XIII. and Sixtus V. in 1586, and afterward enlarged by the Jesuit Heribert Rosweyd.

Rosweyd († 1629) also sketched, toward the close of the sixteenth century, the plan for the celebrated “Acta Sanctorum, quotquot toto orbe coluntur,” which Dr. John van Bolland († 1665) and his companions and continuators, called Bollandists (Henschen, † 1681; Papenbrök, † 1714; Sollier, † 1740; Stiltinck, † 1762, and others of inferior merit), published at Antwerp in fifty-three folio volumes, between the years 1643 and 1794 (including the two volumes of the second series), under the direction of the Jesuits, and with the richest and rarest literary aids. This work contains, in the order of the days of the year, the biography of every saint in the Catholic calendar, as composed by the Bollandists, down to the fifteenth of October, together with all the acts of canonization, papal bulls, and other ancient documents belonging thereto, with learned treatises and notes; and that not in the style of popular legends, but in the tone of thorough historical investigation and free criticism, so far as a general accordance with the Roman Catholic system of faith would allow. It was interrupted in 1773 by the abolition of the order of the Jesuits, then again in 1794, after a brief resumption of labor and the publication of two more volumes (the fifty-second and fifty-third), by the French Revolution and invasion of the Netherlands and the partial destruction of the literary material; but since 1845 (or properly since 1837) it has been resumed at Brussels under the auspices of the same order, though not with the same historical learning and critical acumen, and proceeds tediously toward completion. This colossal and amazing work of more than two centuries of pious industry and monkish learning will always remain a rich mine for the system of martyr and saint-worship and the history of Christian life.

 

87. Worship of Relics. Dogma of the Resurrection. Miracles of Relics

Comp. the Literature at §84. Also J. Mabillon (R.C.): Observationes de sanctorum reliquiis (Praef. ad Acta s. Bened. Ordinis). Par. 1669. Barrington and Kirk (R.C.): The Faith of Catholics, etc. Lond. 1846. Vol. iii. pp. 250-307. On the Protestant side, J. H. Jung: Disquisitio antiquaria de reliqu. et profanis et sacris earumque cultu, ed. 4. Hannov. 1783.

The veneration of martyrs and saints had respect, in the first instance, to their immortal spirits in heaven, but came to be extended, also, in a lower degree, to their earthly remains or relics. By these are to be understood, first, their bodies, or rather parts of them, bones, blood, ashes; then all which was in any way closely connected with their persons, clothes, staff, furniture, and especially the instruments of their martyrdom. After the time of Ambrose the cross of Christ also, which, with the superscription and the nails, are said to have been miraculously discovered by the empress Helena in 326, was included, and subsequently His crown of thorns and His coat, which are preserved, the former, according to the legend, in Paris, and the latter in Treves. Relics of the body of Christ cannot be thought of, since He arose without seeing corruption, and ascended to heaven, where, above the reach of idolatry and superstition, He is enthroned at the right hand of the Father. His true relics are the Holy Supper and His living presence in the church to the end of the world.

The worship of relics, like the worship of Mary and the saints, began in a sound religious feeling of reverence, of love, and of gratitude, but has swollen to an avalanche, and rushed into all kinds of superstitious and idolatrous excess. “The most glorious thing that the mind conceives,” says Goethe, “is always set upon by a throng of more and more foreign matter.”

As Israel could not sustain the pure elevation of its divinely revealed religion, but lusted after the flesh pots of Egypt and coquetted with sensuous heathenism so it fared also with the ancient church.

The worship of relics cannot be derived from Judaism; for the Levitical law strictly prohibited the contact of bodies and bones of the dead as defiling. Yet the isolated instance of the bones of the prophet Elisha quickening by their contact a dead man who was cast into his tomb, was quoted in behalf of the miraculous power of relics; though it should be observed that even this miracle did not lead the Israelites to do homage to the bones of the prophet nor abolish the law of the uncleanness of a corpse.

The heathen abhorred corpses, and burnt them to ashes, except in Egypt, where embalming was the custom and was imitated by the Christians on the death of martyrs, though St. Anthony protested against it. There are examples, however, of the preservation of the bones of distinguished heroes like Theseus, and of the erection of temples over their graves.

The Christian relic worship was primarily a natural consequence of the worship of the saints, and was closely connected with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which was an essential article of the apostolic tradition, and is incorporated in almost all the ancient creeds. For according to the gospel the body is not an evil substance, as the Platonists, Gnostics, Manichaeans held, but a creature of God; it is redeemed by Christ; it becomes by the regeneration an organ and temple of the Holy Ghost; and it rests as a living seed in the grave, to be raised again at the last day, and changed into the likeness of the glorious body of Christ. The bodies of the righteous “grow green” in their graves, to burst forth in glorious bloom on the morning of the resurrection. The first Christians from the beginning set great store by this comforting doctrine, at which the heathen, like Celsus and Julian, scoffed. Hence they abhorred also the heathen custom of burning, and adopted the Jewish custom of burial with solemn religious ceremonies, which, however, varied in different times and countries.

But in the closer definition of the dogma of the resurrection two different tendencies appeared: a spiritualistic, represented by the Alexandrians, particularly by Origen and still later by the two Gregories; the other more realistic, favored by the Apostles’ Creed, advocated by Tertullian, but pressed by some church teachers, like Epiphanius and Jerome, in a grossly materialistic manner, without regard to the σῶμα πνευματικόν of Paul and the declaration that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” The latter theory was far the more consonant with the prevailing spirit of our period, entirely supplanted the other, and gave the mortal remains of the saints a higher value, and the worship of them a firmer foundation.

Roman Catholic historians and apologists find a justification of the worship and the healing virtue of relics in three facts of the New Testament: the healing of the woman with the issue of blood by the touch of Jesus’ garment; (Mat_9:20) the healing of the sick by the shadow of Peter; (Act_5:14, Act_5:15) and the same by handkerchiefs from Paul. (Act_19:11, Act_19:12)

These examples, as well as the miracle wrought by the bones of Elisha, were cited by Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and other fathers, to vindicate similar and greater miracles in their time. They certainly mark the extreme limit of the miraculous, beyond which it passes into the magical. But in all these cases the living and present person was the vehicle of the healing power; in the second case Luke records merely the popular belief, not the actual healing; and finally neither Christ nor the apostles themselves chose that method, nor in any way sanctioned the superstitions on which it was based. At all events, the New Testament and the literature of the apostolic fathers know nothing of an idolatrous veneration of the cross of Christ or the bones and chattels of the apostles. The living words and acts of Christ and the apostles so completely absorbed attention that we have no authentic accounts of the bodily appearance, the incidental externals, and transient possessions of the founders of the church. Paul would know Christ after the spirit, not after the flesh. Even the burial places of most of the apostles and evangelists are unknown. The traditions of their martyrdom and their remains date from a much later time, and can claim no historical credibility.

The first clear traces of the worship of relics appear in the second century in the church of Antioch, where the bones of the bishop and martyr Ignatius († 107) were preserved as a priceless treasure; and in Smyrna, where the half-burnt bones of Polycarp († 167) were considered “more precious than the richest jewels and more tried than gold.” We read similar things in the Acts of the martyrs Perpetua and Cyprian. The author of the Apostolic Constitutions exhorts that the relics of the saints, who are with the God of the living and not of the dead, be held in honor, and appeals to the miracle of the bones of Elisha, to the veneration which Joseph showed for the remains of Jacob, and to the bringing of the bones of Joseph by Moses and Joshua into the promised land. (Comp. Gen_50:1, Gen_50:2, Gen_50:25, Gen_50:26; Exo_13:19; Jos_24:32; Act_7:16.) Eusebius states that the episcopal throne of James of Jerusalem was preserved to his time, and was held in great honor.

Such pious fondness for relics, however, if it is confined within proper limits, is very natural and innocent, and appears even in the Puritans of New England, where the rock in Plymouth, the landing place of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, has the attraction of a place of pilgrimage, and the chair of the first governor of Massachusetts is scrupulously preserved, and is used at the inauguration of every new president of Harvard University.

But toward the middle of the fourth century the veneration of relics simultaneously with the worship of the saints, assumed a decidedly superstitious and idolatrous character. The earthly remains of the martyrs were discovered commonly by visions and revelations, often not till centuries after their death, then borne in solemn processions to the churches and chapels erected to their memory, and deposited under the altar; and this event was annually celebrated by a festival. The legend of the discovery of the holy cross gave rise to two church festivals: The Feast of the Invention of the Cross on the third of May, which has been observed in the Latin church since the fifth or sixth century; and The Feast of the Elevation of the Cross, on the fourteenth of September, which has been observed in the East and the West, according to some since the consecration of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335, according to others only since the reconquest of the holy cross by the emperor Heraclius in 628. The relics were from time to time displayed to the veneration of the believing multitude, carried about in processions, preserved in golden and silver boxes, worn on the neck as amulets against disease and danger of every kind, and considered as possessing miraculous virtue, or more strictly, as instruments through which the saints in heaven, in virtue of their connection with Christ, wrought miracles of healing and even of raising the dead. Their number soon reached the incredible, even from one and the same original; there were, for example, countless splinters of the pretended cross of Christ from Jerusalem, while the cross itself is said to have remained, by a continued miracle, whole and undiminished! Veneration of the cross and crucifix knew no bounds, but can, by no means, be taken as a true measure of the worship of the Crucified; on the contrary, with the great mass the outward form came into the place of the spiritual intent, and the wooden and silver Christ was very often a poor substitute for the living Christ in the heart.

Relics became a regular article of trade, but gave occasion, also, for very many frauds, which even such credulous and superstitious relic-worshippers as St. Martin of Tours and Gregory the Great lamented. Theodosius I., as early as 386, prohibited this trade; and so did many councils; but without success. On this account the bishops found themselves compelled to prove the genuineness of the relics by historical tradition, or visions, or miracles.

At first, an opposition arose to this worship of dead men’s bones. St. Anthony, the father of monasticism († 356), put in his dying protest against it, directing that his body should be buried in an unknown place. Athanasius relates this with approbation, and he caused several relics which had been given to him to be fastened up, that they might be out of the reach of idolatry. But the opposition soon ceased, or became confined to inferior or heretical authors, like Vigilantius and Eunomius, or to heathen opponents like Porphyry and Julian. Julian charges the Christians, on this point, with apostasy from their own Master, and sarcastically reminds them of His denunciation of the Pharisees, who were like whited sepulchres, beautiful without, but within full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. This opposition, of course, made no impression, and was attributed to sheer impiety. Even heretics and schismatics, with few exceptions, embraced this form of superstition, though the Catholic church denied the genuineness of their relics and the miraculous virtue of them

The most and the best of the church teachers of our period, Hilary, the two Gregories, Basil, Chrysostom, Isidore of Pelusium, Theodoret, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Leo, even those who combated the worship of images on this point, were carried along by the spirit of the time, and gave the weight of their countenance to the worship of relics, which thus became an essential constituent of the Greek and Roman Catholic religion. They went quite as far as the council of Trent, which expresses itself more cautiously, on the worship of relics as well as of saints, than the church fathers of the Nicene age. With the good intent to promote popular piety by sensible stimulants and tangible supports, they became promoters of dangerous errors and gross superstition.

To cite some of the most important testimonies:

Gregory Nazianzen thinks the bodies of the saints can as well perform miracles, as their spirits, and that the smallest parts of the body or of the symbols of their passion are as efficacious as the whole body.

Chrysostom values the dust and ashes of the martyrs more highly than gold or jewels, and ascribes to them the power of healing diseases and putting death to flight. In his festal discourse on the translation of the relics of the Egyptian martyrs from Alexandria to Constantinople, he extols the bodies of the saints in eloquent strains as the best ramparts of the city against all visible enemies and invisible demons, mightier than walls, moats, weapons, and armies.

“Let others,” says Ambrose, “heap up silver and gold; we gather the nails wherewith the martyrs were pierced, and their victorious blood, and the wood of their cross.” He himself relates at large, in a letter to his sister, the miraculous discovery of the bones of the twin brothers Gervasius and Protasius, two otherwise wholly unknown and long-forgotten martyrs of the persecution under Nero or Domitian. This is one of the most notorious relic miracles of the early church. It is attested by the most weighty authorities, by Ambrose and his younger contemporaries, his secretary and biographer Paulinus, the bishop Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine, who was then in Milan; it decided the victory of the Nicene orthodoxy over the Arian opposition of the empress Justina; yet is it very difficult to be believed, and seems at least in part to rest on pious frauds.

The story is, that when Ambrose, in 386, wished to consecrate the basilica at Milan, he was led by a higher intimation in a vision to cause the ground before the doors of Sts. Felix and Nahor to be dug up, and there he found two corpses of uncommon size, the heads severed from the bodies (for they died by the sword), the bones perfectly preserved, together with a great quantity of fresh blood. These were the saints in question. They were exposed for two days to the wondering multitude, then borne in solemn procession to the basilica of Ambrose, performing on the way the healing of a blind man, Severus by name, a butcher by trade, and afterward sexton of this church. This, however, was not the only miracle which the bones performed. “The age of miracles returned,” says Ambrose. “How many pieces of linen, how many portions of dress, were cast upon the holy relics and were recovered with the power of healing from that touch. It is a source of joy to all to touch but the extremest portion of the linen that covers them; and whoso touches is healed. We give thee thanks, O Lord Jesus, that thou hast stirred up the energies of the holy martyrs at this time, wherein thy church has need of stronger defence. Let all learn what combatants I seek, who are able to contend for us, but who do not assail us, who minister good to all, harm to none.” In his homily De inventione SS. Gervasii et Protasii, he vindicates the miracle of the healing of the blind man against the doubts of the Arians, and speaks of it as a universally acknowledged and undeniable fact: The healed man, Severus, is well known, and publicly testifies that he received his sight by the contact of the covering of the holy relics.

Jerome calls Vigilantius, for his opposition to the idolatrous veneration of ashes and bones, a wretched man, whose condition cannot be sufficiently pitied, a Samaritan and Jew, who considered the dead unclean; but he protects himself against the charge of superstition. We honor the relics of the martyrs, says he, that we may adore the God of the martyrs; we honor the servants, in order thereby to honor the Master, who has said: “He that receiveth you, receiveth me.” The saints are not dead; for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not a God of the dead, but of the living. Neither are they enclosed in Abraham’s bosom as in a prison till the day of Judgment, but they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.

Augustine believed in the above-mentioned miraculous discovery of the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius, and the healing of the blind man by contact with them, because he himself was then in Milan, in 386, at the time of his conversion, and was an eye-witness, not indeed of the discovery of the bones — for this he nowhere says — but of the miracles, and of the great stir among the people.

He gave credit likewise to the many miraculous cures which the bones of the first martyr Stephen are said to have performed in various parts of Africa in his time. These relics were discovered in 415, nearly four centuries after the stoning of Stephen, in an obscure hamlet near Jerusalem, through a vision of Gamaliel, by a priest of Lucian; and some years afterward portions of them were transported to Uzali, not far from Utica, in North Africa, and to Spain and Gaul, and everywhere caused the greatest ado in the superstitious populace.

But Augustine laments, on the other hand, the trade in real and fictitious relics, which was driven in his day, and holds the miracles to be really superfluous, now that the world is converted to Christianity, so that he who still demands miracles, is himself a miracle. Though he adds, that to that day miracles were performed in the name of Jesus by the sacraments or by the saints, but not with the same lustre, nor with the same significance and authority for the whole Christian world. Thus he himself furnishes a warrant and an entering wedge for critical doubt in our estimate of those phenomena.

 

88. Observations on the Miracles of the Nicene Age

Comp. on the affirmative side especially John H. Newman (now R.C., then Romanizing Anglican): Essay on Miracles, in the 1st vol. of the English translation of Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History, Oxford, 1842; on the negative, Isaac Taylor (Independent): Ancient Christianity, Lond. 4th ed. 1844. Vol. ii. pp. 233-365. Dr. Newman previously took the negative side on the question of the genuineness of the church miracles in a contribution to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 1830.

In the face of such witnesses as Ambrose and Augustine, who must be accounted in any event the noblest and most honorable men of the early church, it is venturesome absolutely to deny all the relic-miracles, and to ascribe them to illusion and pious fraud. But, on the other hand, we should not be bribed or blinded by the character and authority of such witnesses, since experience sufficiently proves that even the best and most enlightened men cannot wholly divest themselves of superstition and of the prejudices of their age Hence, too, we should not ascribe to this whole question of the credibility of the Nicene miracles an undue dogmatic weight, nor make the much wider issue between Catholicism and Protestantism dependent on it. In every age, as in every man, light and shade in fact are mingled, that no flesh should exalt itself above measure. Even the most important periods of church history, among which the Nicene age, with all its faults, must be numbered, have the heavenly treasure in earthen vessels, and reflect the spotless glory of the Redeemer in broken colors.

The most notorious and the most striking of the miracles of the fourth century are Constantine’s vision of the cross (a.d. 312), the finding of the holy cross (a.d. 326), the frustration of Julian’s building of the temple (a.d. 363) the discovery of the relics of Protasius and Gervasius (a.d. 386), and subsequently (a.d. 415) of the bones of St. Stephen, with a countless multitude of miraculous cures in its train. Respecting the most important we have already spoken at large in the proper places.

We here offer some general remarks on this difficult subject.

The possibility of miracles in general he only can deny who does not believe in a living God and Almighty Maker of heaven and earth. The laws of nature are organs of the free will of God; not chains by which He has bound Himself forever, but elastic threads which He can extend and contract at His pleasure. The actual occurrence of miracles is certain to every believer from Holy Scripture, and there is no passage in the New Testament to limit it to the apostolic age. The reasons which made miracles necessary as outward proofs of the divine mission of Christ and the apostles for the unbelieving Jews of their time, may reappear from time to time in the unbelieving heathen and the skeptical Christian world; while spiritual miracles are continually taking place in regeneration and conversion. In itself, it is by no means unworthy and incredible that God should sometimes condescend to the weakness of the uneducated mass, and should actually vouchsafe that which was implored through the mediation of saints and their relics.

But the following weighty considerations rise against the miracles of the Nicene and post-Nicene age; not warranting, indeed, the rejection of all, yet making us at least very cautious and doubtful of receiving them in particular:

1. These miracles have a much lower moral tone than those of the Bible, while in some cases they far exceed them in outward pomp, and make a stronger appeal to our faculty of belief. Many of the monkish miracles are not so much supernatural and above reason, as they are unnatural and against reason, attributing even to wild beasts of the desert, panthers and hyenas, with which the misanthropic hermits lived on confidential terms, moral feelings and states, repentance and conversion of which no trace appears in the New Testament.

2. They serve not to confirm the Christian faith in general, but for the most part to support the ascetic life, the magical virtue of the sacrament, the veneration of saints and relics, and other superstitious practices, which are evidently of later origin, and are more or less offensive to the healthy evangelical mind.

3. The further they are removed from the apostolic age, the more numerous they are, and in the fourth century alone there are more miracles than in all the three preceding centuries together, while the reason for them, as against the power of the heathen world, was less.

4. The church fathers, with all the worthiness of their character in other respects, confessedly lacked a highly cultivated sense of truth, and allowed a certain justification of falsehood ad majorem Dei gloriam, or fraus pia, under the misnomer of policy or accommodation; with the solitary exception of Augustine, who, in advance of his age, rightly condemned falsehood in every form.

5. Several church fathers like Augustine, Martin of Tours, and Gregory I., themselves concede that in their time extensive frauds with the relics of saints were already practised; and this is confirmed by the fact that there were not rarely numerous copies of the same relics, all of which claimed to be genuine.

6. The Nicene miracles met with doubt and contradiction even among contemporaries, and Sulpitius Severus makes the important admission that the miracles of St. Martin were better known and more firmly believed in foreign countries than in his own.

7. Church fathers, like Chrysostom and Augustine, contradict themselves in a measure, in sometimes paying homage to the prevailing faith in miracles, especially in their discourses on the festivals of the martyrs, and in soberer moments, and in the calm exposition of the Scriptures, maintaining that miracles, at least in the Biblical sense, had long since ceased.

We must moreover remember that the rejection of the Nicene miracles by no means justifies the inference of intentional deception in every case, nor destroys the claim of the great church teachers to our respect. On the contrary, between the proper miracle and fraud there lie many intermediate steps of self-deception, clairvoyance, magnetic phenomena and cures, and unusual states of the human soul, which is full of deep mysteries, and stands nearer the invisible spirit-world than the everyday mind of the multitude suspects. Constantine’s vision of the cross, for example, may be traced to a prophetic dream; and the frustration of the building of the Jewish temple under Julian, to a special providence, or a historical judgment of God. The mytho-poetic faculty, too, which freely and unconsciously produces miracles among children, may have been at work among credulous monks in the dreary deserts and magnified an ordinary event into a miracle. In judging of this obscure portion of the history of the church we must, in general, guard ourselves as well against shallow naturalism and skepticism, as against superstitious mysticism, remembering that

“There are more things in heaven and on earth,

Than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

 

89. Processions and Pilgrimages

Early Latin dissertations on pilgrimages by J. Gretser, Mamachi, Lazari, J. H. Heidegger, etc. J. Marx (R.C.): Das Wallfahren in der katholischen Kirche, historisch-kritisch dargestellt. Trier, 1842. Comp. the relevant sections in the church archeologies of Bingham, Augusti, Binterim, etc.

Solemn religious processions on high festivals and special occasions had been already customary among the Jews, and even among the heathen. They arise from the love of human nature for show and display, which manifests itself in all countries in military parades, large funerals, and national festivities.

The oppressed condition of the church until the time of Constantine made such public demonstrations impossible or unadvisable.

In the fourth century, however, we find them in the East and in the West, among orthodox and heretics, on days of fasting and prayer, on festivals of thanksgiving, at the burial of the dead, the induction of bishops, the removal of relics, the consecration of churches, and especially in times of public calamity. The two chief classes are thanksgiving and penitential processions. The latter were also called cross-processions, litanies.

The processions moved from church to church, and consisted of the clergy, the monks, and the people, alternately saying or singing prayers, psalms, and litanies. In the middle of the line commonly walked the bishop as leader, in surplice, stole, and pluvial, with the mitre on his head, the crozier in his left hand, and with his right hand blessing the people. A copy of the Bible, crucifixes, banners, images and relics, burning tapers or torches, added solemn state to the procession.

Regular annual processions occurred on Candlemas, and on Palm Sunday. To these was added, after the thirteenth century, the procession on Corpus Christi, in which the sacrament of the altar is carried about and worshipped.

Pilgrimages are founded in the natural desire to see with one’s own eyes sacred or celebrated places, for the gratification of curiosity, the increase of devotion, and the proving of gratitude. These also were in use before the Christian era. The Jews went up annually to Jerusalem at their high festivals as afterward the Mohammedans went to Mecca. The heathen also built altars over the graves of their heroes and made pilgrimages thither. To the Christians those places were most interesting and holy of all, where the Redeemer was born, suffered, died, and rose again for the salvation of the world.

Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land appear in isolated cases even in the second century, and received a mighty impulse from the example of the superstitiously pious empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. In 326, at the age of seventy-nine, she made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was baptized in the Jordan, discovered the holy cross, removed the pagan abominations and built Christian churches on Calvary and Olivet, and at Bethany. In this she was liberally supported by her son, in whose arms she died at Nicomedia in 327. The influence of these famous pilgrims’ churches extended through the whole middle age, to the crusades, and reaches even to most recent times.

The example of Helena was followed by innumerable pilgrims who thought that by such journeys they made the salvation of their souls more sure. They brought back with them splinters from the pretended holy cross, waters from the Jordan, earth from Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and other genuine and spurious relics, to which miraculous virtue was ascribed.

Several of the most enlightened church fathers, who approved pilgrimages in themselves, felt it necessary to oppose a superstitious estimate of them, and to remind the people that religion might be practised in any place. Gregory of Nyssa shows that pilgrimages are nowhere enjoined in the Scriptures, and are especially unsuitable and dangerous for women, and draws a very unfavorable picture of the immorality prevailing at places of such resort. “Change of place,” says he, “brings God no nearer. Where thou art, God will come to thee, if the dwelling of thy soul is prepared for him.” Jerome describes with great admiration the devout pilgrimage of his friend Paula to the East, and says that he himself, in his Bethlehem, had adored the manger and birthplace of the Redeemer; but he also very justly declares that Britain is as near heaven as Jerusalem, and that not a journey to Jerusalem, but a holy living there, is the laudable thing.

Next to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other localities of the Holy Land, Rome was a preëminent place of resort for pilgrims from the West and East, who longed to tread the threshold of the princes of the apostles (limina apostolorum). Chrysostom regretted that want of time and health prevented him from kissing the chains of Peter and Paul, which made devils tremble and angels rejoice.

In Africa, Hippo became a place of pilgrimage on account of the bones of St. Stephen; in Campania, the grave of St. Felix, at Nola; in Gaul, the grave of St. Martin of Tours († 397). The last was especially renowned, and was the scene of innumerable miracles. Even the memory of Job drew many pilgrims to Arabia to see the ash heap, and to kiss the earth, where the man of God endured so much.

In the Roman and Greek churches the practice of pilgrimage to holy places has maintained itself to the present day. Protestantism has divested the visiting of remarkable places, consecrated by great men or great events, of all meritoriousness and superstitious accessories, and has reduced it to a matter of commendable gratitude and devout curiosity. Within these limits even the evangelical Christian cannot view without emotion and edification the sacred spots of Palestine, the catacombs of Rome, the simple slabs over Luther and Melanchthon in the castle-church of Wittenberg, the monuments of the English martyrs in Oxford, or the rocky landing-place of the Puritanic pilgrim fathers in Massachusetts. He feels himself nearer to the spirit of the great dead; but he knows that this spirit continues not in their dust, but lives immortally with God and the saints in heaven.

 

90. Public Worship of the Lord’s Day. Scripture-Reading and Preaching

J. A. Schmidt: De primitive ecclesiae lectionibus. Helmst. 1697. E. Ranke: Das kirchliche Perikopensystem aus den Ältesten Urkunden der röm. Liturgie. Berlin, 1847. H. T. Tzschirner: De claris Eccles. vet. oratoribus Comment. i.-ix. Lips. 1817 sqq. K. W. F. Paniel: Pragmatische Geschichte der christl. Beredtsamkeit. Leipz. 1839 ff.

The order and particular parts of the ordinary public worship of God remain the same as they were in the previous period. But the strict separation of the service of the Catechumens, consisting of prayer, scripture reading, and preaching, from the service of the faithful, consisting of the communion, lost its significance upon the universal prevalence of Christianity and the union of church and state. Since the fifth century the inhabitants of the Roman empire were now considered as Christians at least in name and confession and could attend even those parts of the worship which were formerly guarded by secrecy against the profanation of pagans. The Greek term liturgy, and the Latin term mass, which is derived from the customary formula of dismission, was applied, since the close of the fourth century (398), to the communion service or the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice. This was the divine service in the proper sense of the term, to which all other parts were subordinate. We shall speak of it more fully hereafter. We have to do at present with those parts which were introductory to the communion and belong to the service of the catechumens as well as to that of the communicants.

The reading of a portion of the Holy Scriptures continued to be an essential constituent of divine service. Upon the close of the church canon, after the Council of Carthage in 397, and other synods, the reading of uncanonical books (such as writings of the apostolic fathers) was forbidden, with the exception of the legends of the martyrs on their memorial days.

There was as yet no obligatory system of pericopes, like that of the later Greek and Roman churches. The lectio continua, or the reading and exposition of whole books of the Bible, remained in practice till the fifth century, and the selection of books for the different parts and services of the church year was left to the judgment of the bishop. At high festivals, however, such portions were read as bore special reference to the subject of the celebration. By degrees, after the example of the Jewish synagogue, a more complete yearly course of selections from the New Testament for liturgical use was arranged, and the selections were called lessons or pericopes. In the Latin church this was done in the fifth century; in the Greek, in the eighth. The lessons were taken from the Gospels and from the Epistles, or the Apostle (in part also from the Prophets), and were therefore called the Gospel and the Epistle for the particular Sunday or festival. Some churches, however, had three, or even four lessons, a Gospel, an Epistle, and a section from the Old Testament and from the Acts. Many manuscripts of the New Testament contained only the pericopes or lessons for public worship, and many of these again, only the Gospel pericopes. The Alexandrian deacon Euthalius, about 460, divided the Gospel and the Apostle, excepting the Revelation, into fifty-seven portions each, for the Sundays and feast days of the year; but they were not generally received, and the Eastern church still adhered for a long time to the lectio continua. Among the Latin lectionaries still extant, the Lectionarium Gallicanum, dating from the sixth or seventh century, and edited by Mabillon, and the so-called Comes (i.e., Clergyman’s Companion) or Liber Comitis, were in especial repute. The latter is traced by tradition to the learned Jerome, and forms the groundwork of the Roman lectionary and the entire Western System of pericopes, which has passed from the Latin church into the Anglican and the Lutheran, but has undergone many changes in the course of time. This selection of Scripture portions was in general better fitted to the church year, but had the disadvantage of withholding large parts of the holy Scriptures from the people.

The lessons were read from the ambo or reading desk by the lector, with suitable formulas of introduction; usually the Epistle first, and then the Gospel; closing with the doxology or the singing of a psalm. Sometimes the deacon read the Gospel from the altar, to give it special distinction as the word of the Lord Himself.

The church fathers earnestly enjoined, besides this, diligent private reading of the Scriptures; especially Chrysostom, who attributed all corruption in the church to the want of knowledge of the Scriptures. Yet he already found himself compelled to combat the assumption that the Bible is a book only for clergy and monks, and not for the people; an assumption which led in the middle age to the notorious papal prohibitions of the Scriptures in the popular tongues. Strictly speaking, the Bible has been made what it was originally intended to be, really a universal book of the people, only by the invention of the art of printing, by the spirit of the Reformation, and by the Bible Societies of modern times. For in the ancient church, and in the middle age, the manuscripts of the Bible were so rare and so dear, and the art of reading was so limited, that the great mass were almost entirely dependent on the fragmentary reading of the Scriptures in public worship. This fact must be well considered, to forestall too unfavorable a judgment of that early age.

The reading of the Scripture was followed by the sermon, based either on the pericope just read, or on a whole book, in consecutive portions. We have from the greatest pulpit orators of antiquity, from Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil the Great, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, connected homilies on Genesis, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles. But on high festivals a text was always selected suitable and usual for the occasion. There was therefore in the ancient church no forced conformity to the pericopes; the advantages of a system of Scripture lessons and a consecutive exposition of entire books of Scripture were combined. The reading of the pericopes belongs properly to the altar-service, and must keep its connection with the church year; preaching belongs to the pulpit, and may extend to the whole compass of the divine word.

Pulpit eloquence in the fourth and fifth centuries reached a high point in the Greek church, and is most worthily represented by Gregory Nazianzen and Chrysostom. But it also often degenerated there into artificial rhetoric, declamatory bombast, and theatrical acting. Hence the abuse of frequent clapping and acclamations of applause among the people. As at this day, so in that, many went to church not to worship God, but to hear a celebrated speaker, and left as soon as the sermon was done. The sermon, they said, we can hear only in the church, but we can pray as well at home. Chrysostom often raised his voice against this in Antioch and in Constantinople. The discourses of the most favorite preachers were often written down by stenographers and multiplied by manuscripts, sometimes with their permission, sometimes without.

In the Western church the sermon was much less developed, consisted in most cases of a simple practical exhortation, and took the background of the eucharistic sacrifice. Hence it was a frequent thing there for the people to leave the church at the beginning of the sermon; so that many bishops, who had no idea of the free nature of religion and of worship, compelled the people to hear by closing the doors.

The sermon was in general freely delivered from the bishop’s chair or from the railing of the choir (the cancelli), sometimes from the reading-desk. The duty of preaching devolved upon the bishops; and even popes, like Leo I. and Gregory I., frequently preached before the Roman congregation. Preaching was also performed by the presbyters and deacons. Leo I. restricts the right of preaching and teaching to the ordained clergy; yet monks and hermits preached not rarely in the streets, from pillars (like St. Symeon), roofs, or trees; and even laymen, like the emperor Constantine and some of his successors, wrote and delivered (though not in church) religious discourses to the faithful people.