As for the sufferings of the Dirces, there was no doubt about them. People know the colossal group now in the Museum of Naples, called the Toro Farnese,—Amphion and Zethus attaching Dirce to the horns of an unmanageable bull, which is to drag her over the rocks and briers of Cithæron. This mediocre Rhodian marble, brought to Rome in the time of Augustus, was the object of universal admiration. How could there be a finer subject for the hideous art which the cruelty of the time had made in vogue, and which consisted in reproducing the celebrated statues in living tableaux? An inscription and a fresco of Pompeii seem to prove that this terrible scene was frequently repeated in the arenas, when a woman was the sufferer. Naked, attached by the hair to the horns of a furious bull, these poor wretches glutted the eyes of a ferocious people. Some of the Christians immolated in this way were feeble in body: their courage was superhuman. But the infamous crowd had eyes alone for their torn bowels and lacerated bosoms.
After the day when Jesus expired in Golgotha, the fête day in the Gardens of Nero (it may be fixed about the first of August, 64) was the most solemn in the history of Christianity. The solidity of any construction is in proportion to the sum of virtue, of sacrifices, and of devotion which has been laid down at its base. Only fanatics lay foundations. Judaism endures still on account of the intense frenzy of its zealots; Christianity, on account of its first witnesses. The orgy of Nero was the grand baptism of blood which set Rome apart as the city of martyrs in order to play a distinct rôle in the history of Christianity and to be the second Holy City. It was the taking possession of the Vatican Hill by conquerors hitherto unknown there. The odious, hair-brained man who governed the world did not perceive that he was the founder of a new order, and that he signed a charter for the future, the effects of which would be claimed after eighteen hundred years.
IV.
As we have said, it is allowable, without improbability, to connect the deaths of the apostles Peter and Paul with the account which we have just given. The only historical incident known, by which the martyrdom of Peter can be explained, is the episode recounted by Tacitus. Some solid reasons also lead us to believe that Paul suffered the death of a martyr at Rome. It is then natural to suppose that he also died in the massacre of July and August, 64. As to the manner of death of the two apostles, we know with certainty that Peter was crucified. According to some ancient writings, his wife was executed with him, and he saw her led to the sacrifice. One accepted account of the third century says, that, too humble to equal Jesus, he suffered with his head down. The characteristic trait of the butchery of 64 having been the search for odious rarities in torture, it is possible that in truth Peter was shown to the crowd in this hideous attitude. Seneca mentions some cases in which tyrants have been known to turn the heads of the crucified towards the earth. Christian piety has seen a mystical refinement in that which was indeed an odd caprice of the executioner. Perhaps this extract from the Fourth Gospel—"Thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not"—includes some allusion to a peculiarity in the suffering of Peter. Paul, in his quality of honestior, had his head cut off. It is also probable that he was judged regularly, and that he was not included in the summary condemnations of the victims in the fête of Nero. All that, I repeat, is doubtful, and of little importance. True or not, the legend is believed. At the commencement of the third century, near Rome, there were already seen two monuments bearing the names of Peter and Paul. One was situated at the foot of the Vatican Hill, that of St. Peter: the other, in the way to Ostia, was that of St. Paul. They were called in oratorial style the trophies of the apostles. In the fourth century two basilicas were raised above these trophies. One of them is the present basilica of St. Peter: the other, St. Paul-without-the-Walls, has retained its essential features until our own century.
Did the trophies which the Christians venerated about the year 200 designate the spots upon which these apostles suffered? It is possible. It is not unlikely that Paul, toward the end of his life, dwelt in the suburb which extended beyond the Lavernal gate as far as the pine of the Salvian springs in the way to Ostia. The shade of Peter, on the other hand, wanders always, according to the Christian legend, towards the turpentine-tree of the Vatican, not far from the gardens of the Circus of Nero, and especially about the obelisk. It may be that the ancient place of the obelisk in the sacristy of St. Peter, now indicated by an inscription, is nearer to the place where St. Peter upon the cross of his frightful agony surfeited the eyes of a populace greedy to see him suffer. However, that is a secondary question. If the basilica of the Vatican does not really cover the tomb of St. Peter, it points out not the less for our remembrance one of the spots most truly hallowed by Christianity. The place which the seventeenth century surrounded with a theatrical colonnade was a second Calvary; and, even supposing that Peter was not crucified there, at least we cannot doubt the sufferings of the Danaïdes and the Dirces.
We shall show in our next assembly how tradition disposes of all these doubts, and how the Church consummates reconciliation between Peter and Paul, which death perhaps began. This was the price of success. The Judæan-Christianity of Peter and the Hellenism of Paul, apparently irreconcilable, were equally necessary to the success of the future work. The Judæan-Christianity represented the conservative spirit without which nothing is solid; Hellenism, advance and progress, without which nothing truly exists. Life is the result of a conflict between two contrary forces. The absence of all revolutionary spirit is as fatal as the excess of revolution.
THIRD CONFERENCE,
London, April 13, 1880.
ROME,
THE CENTRE OF THE FORMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL
AUTHORITY.
THIRD CONFERENCE.
ROME THE CENTRE OF THE FORMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY.
I.
Almost always the nations created to play a part in universal civilization, like Judæa, Greece, and the Italy of the renaissance, exercise their full action upon the world, only after becoming victims to their own grandeur. They must first die; then the world lives on them, assimilates to itself that which they have created at the price of their fever and their sufferings. Nations ought to choose in fact between the long, tranquil, obscure destiny of that which lives for itself, and the troubled, stormy career of that which lives for humanity. The nation which works out social and religious problems in its own bosom is almost always weak politically. Every country which dreams of a kingdom of God, which lives for general ideas, which pursues a work of universal interest, sacrifices through the same its individual destiny, enfeebles and destroys its rôle as a terrestrial country. One can never set himself on fire with impunity. Since Judæa made the religious conquest of the world, it was necessary that she should disappear as a nation. A revolution of extreme violence broke out in this country in the year 66. During four years, this strange race, which seemed created to defy equally that which blessed and that which cursed it, was in a convulsion before which the historian should pause with respect as he would before all mystery.
The causes of this crisis were very old, and the crisis itself was inevitable. The Mosaic law, a work of exalted Utopians possessed of a powerful socialist ideal,—the least politic of men,—was, like the Islam, exclusive of a civil society parallel with a religious society. This law, which appears to have been drawn up, as we now read it, in the seventh century before Jesus Christ, would have been the means of destroying the little kingdom of the descendants of David, even without the Assyrian conquest. Since the preponderance assumed by the prophetic element, the kingdom of Judah—embroiled with all its neighbors, seized with a permanent rage against Tyre, hating Edom, Moab, and Ammon—could no longer survive. I repeat, a nation which devotes itself to social and religious problems neglects its politics. The day in which Israel became "a peculiar people of God, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation," it was written that she should no longer be a nation as other nations. Contrary destinies cannot be united: an exaltation is always expiated by an abasement.
The Achemenidean kingdom gave Israel little repose. This grand feudality, tolerant towards all provincial differences, almost analogous to the Califat of Bagdad and to the Ottoman Empire, was the rule under which the Jews found themselves most at ease. The Ptolemaic rule in the third century before Jesus Christ seemed equally sympathetic to them: there were even no Seleucidæ. Antioch had become an active centre of Hellenic propagandism. Antiochus Epiphanus felt it necessary to set up everywhere the image of Jupiter Olympus as the sign of his power. Then broke out the first great Jewish revolt against profane civilization. Israel had patiently supported the disappearance of its political existence since Nebuchadnezzar. It retained no measure in which it saw a danger to its religious institutions. A race, in general not military, was seized with an access of heroism; without a regular army, without generals, without tactics, it conquered the Seleucidæ, maintained its revealed rights, and created a second period of autonomy. The Asmonean royalty, nevertheless, was always distracted by profound interior vices. It endured but one century. The destiny of the Jewish people was not to constitute a separate nationality. That people dreamed always of something international. Its ideal was not the city, it was the synagogue, the free congregation. The same is true of the Islam, which has created an immense empire, but has destroyed all nationality, in the sense in which we understand it, among the peoples which it has subjugated, and leaves them no other country than the mosque and the Zaouia.
The name of theocracy is often applied to such a social condition, and rightly so, if we mean by it that the profound idea of the Semitic religions, and of the empires which came out from them, is the kingdom of God considered as the master of the world, and universal suzerain. But theocracy with these nations was not synonymous with the domination of priests. The priest, properly speaking, plays an unimportant rôle in the history of Judaism and Islamism. The power belongs to the representative of God,—to him whom God inspires, to the prophet, to the holy man, to him who has received his mission from Heaven, and who proves his mission by a miracle, that is to say, by success. In default of a prophet, the power belongs to the author of apocalypses, and of apocryphal books attributed to the ancient prophets, or, better, to the doctor who interprets the divine law, to the head of the synagogue, and, still more, to the head of the family who guards the depository of the law, and transmits it to his children. A civil power, a royalty, has little to do with such social organization. This organization never works better than among spread-out peoples, under the rights of tolerated foreigners, in a grand empire where uniformity does not rule. It is the nature of Judaism to be politically subordinate, since it cannot draw from its own bosom a principle of military power. Its animus has been to form communities with their own laws and their own magistrates in the midst of other states, until modern liberalism introduced the principle of the equality of all before the law.
The Roman rule, established in Judæa sixty-three years before Christ by the armies of Pompey, seemed at first to realize some of the conditions of Jewish life. Rome at this epoch did not pursue the policy of assimilating the countries which she annexed to her vast empire. She robbed them of the right of peace and war, and arrogated to herself only the arbitration in great political questions.
Under the degenerated remains of the Asmonean dynasty and under the Herods, the Jewish nation preserved a half independence, in which its religious state was respected. But the interior feeling of the people was too strong. Beyond a certain degree of religious fanaticism, man is ungovernable. It should be said that Rome strove without ceasing to render her power in the East more effective. The little vassal kingdoms which she had at first preserved, disappeared day by day, and the provinces made returns to the empire pure and simple. The administrative customs of the Romans, even in their most reasonable aspects, were odious to the Jews. In general, the Romans showed the greatest condescension to the fastidious scruples of the nation; but that was not sufficient: things had come to a point where nothing could be done without touching upon a canonical question. These absolute religions, like Islamism and Judaism, allow no participation: if they do not reign, they call themselves persecuted. If they feel themselves protected, they become exacting, and seek to render life impossible to other worships about them.
I should depart from my plan if I recounted to you that strange struggle of which Josephus tells us,—the terror in Jerusalem, Simon Bar-Gioras, commandant in the city, John of Giscala with his assassins, master of the temple. Fanatical movements are far from excluding hate, jealousy, and defiance, from those who take part in them. Very decided and passionate men associated together ordinarily suspect each other, and in this there is a force; for reciprocal suspicion establishes terror among them, binds them as with an iron chain, hinders defections and moments of weakness. Interest creates the coterie. Absolute principles create division, and inspire the temptation to decimate, to expel, to kill enemies. Those who judge human affairs superficially believe that a revolution is quelled when the revolutionists "eat one another," as it is expressed. It is, on the contrary, a proof that the revolution has all its energy, that an impersonal ardor presides over it. This is nowhere more clearly seen than in the terrible drama at Jerusalem. The actors seem to have entered into the compact of death like some infernal rounds, in which, according to the belief of the middle ages, Satan was seen forming a chain to draw into a fantastic gulf numbers of men, dancing, and holding each other by the hand. So revolution allows no one to escape from the dance which it leads. Terror is behind the lukewarm. Turn by turn, exalting some, and exalted by others, they rush into the abyss. None can recede; for behind each one is a concealed sword, which, at the moment that he wishes to draw back, forces him to advance.
The strangest thing of all is that these madmen were not wholly wrong. The fanatics of Jerusalem, who affirmed that Jerusalem was eternal even while it was burning, were nearer the truth than those who regarded them as mere assassins. They deceived themselves upon the military question, but not upon the distant religious result. These troubled days point out, in fact, the moment when Jerusalem became the spiritual capital of the world. The Apocalypse, a burning expression of the love which she inspired, has taken its place among the religious writings of humanity, and has there consecrated the image of the beloved city. Ah, how important it is never to predict the future of a saint or a villain, a fool or a sage! Jerusalem, a city of common people, would have pursued indefinitely its uninteresting history. It is because it had the incomparable honor of being the cradle of Christianity, that it was the victim of the Johns of Giscala, of the Bar-Gioras,—in appearance the scourges of their country, in reality the instruments of its apotheosis. These zealots, whom Josephus treats as brigands and assassins, were politicians of the highest order, but unskilful soldiers: still they lost heroically a country which could not be saved. They lost a material city: they established the spiritual reign of Jerusalem, sitting in her desolation far more glorious than she was in the days of Herod and of Solomon. What did these conservatives, these Sadducees, really desire? They wished something mean,—the continuation of a city of priests like Emesa, Tyane, Comane. Assuredly they did not deceive themselves when they declared that the surging enthusiasm was the ruin of the nation. Revolution and Messianism destroyed the national existence of the Jewish people; but revolution and Messianism were the true vocation of this people,—that by which they contributed to the universal civilization.
II.
The victory of Rome was complete. A captain of our race, of our blood, a man like us, at the head of legions in whose roll, if we could read it, we should meet many of our ancestors, had come to crush the fortress of Semitism, to inflict upon the revealed, accepted law the greatest injury which it had received. It was the triumph of Roman right, or rather rational right, a creation utterly philosophical, presupposing no revelation, above the Jewish Thora, the fruit of a revelation. This right, whose roots were partly Greek, but in which the practical genius of the Latins made so fine a part, was the excellent gift which Rome brought to the vanquished in return for their independence. Each victory for Rome was a victory for right. Rome bore into the world a better principle in several respects than that of the Jews: I mean the profane state, reposing on a purely civil conception of society.
The triumph of Titus was then legitimate in many ways, and still there never was a more useless triumph. The deplorable religious nothingness of Rome rendered its victory unfruitful. This victory did not retard the progress of Judaism a single day: it did not give the religion of the empire an added chance to struggle against this redoubtable rival. The national existence of the Jewish people was lost forever; but that was a blessing. The true glory of Judaism was Christianity, about to be born. The ruin of Jerusalem and the temple was an unequalled good for Christianity.
If the reasoning of Titus according to Tacitus is correctly reported, the victorious general believed that the destruction of the temple would be the ruin of Christianity as well as that of Judaism. No one was ever more completely deceived. The Romans imagined, that, in tearing up the root, they should eradicate the shoot at the same time; but the shoot was already a shrub that lived its own life. If the temple had survived, Christianity would certainly have been arrested in its development. The surviving temple would have continued to be the centre of all Judaic works. It would always have been regarded as the most holy place of the world: pilgrims would have come there, and would there have brought their tributes. The Church of Jerusalem, grouped around by consecrated parvises, would have continued, by the strength of its primacy, to receive the homage of all the world, to persecute the Christians of the Church of Paul, to exact, that, in order to have the right to call one's self the disciple of Jesus, one should practise the circumcision, and observe the Mosaic code. All effectual propagandism would have been interdicted: letters of obedience signed at Jerusalem would have been exacted from the missionary. A centre of irrefragable authority, a patriarchate composed of a sort of college of cardinals under the presidency of men like James, pure Jews belonging to the family of Jesus, would have been established, and would have constituted an immense danger for the new-born Church. When one sees St. Paul after so many mishaps remaining always attached to the Church of Jerusalem, one understands what difficulties a rupture with these holy personages would have presented. Such a schism would have been considered as an enormity. The separation from Judaism would have been impossible; and this separation was the indispensable condition of the existence of the new religion. The mother was about to kill the child. The temple, on the contrary, once destroyed, the Christians thought no more of it: very soon, indeed, they will consider it a profane place: Jesus will be every thing to them. The Christian Church of Jerusalem was by the same stroke reduced to a secondary importance. It was re-organized around the element which made its force, the desposyni, the members of the family of Jesus, the sons of Clopas; but it will reign no more. This centre of hate and exclusion once destroyed, the reconciliation of the opposing parties in the Church of Jesus will become easy. Peter and Paul will be brought into accord, and the terrible duality of the new-born Christianity will cease to be a mortal sore. Lost in the depth of the interior of the Batanæa and the Hauran, the little group which attached itself to James and Clopas becomes the Ebionite sect, and slowly dies.
These relatives of Jesus were pious, tranquil, mild, modest, hard-working men, faithful to the severest precepts of Jesus concerning poverty, but at the same time very exact Jews, considering the title of "Child of Israel" before every other advantage. From the year 70 to about the year 110, they really governed the churches beyond the Jordan, and formed a sort of Christian senate. There is no need to demonstrate the immense danger which these pre-occupations, with genealogies, were to the new-born Christianity. A sort of nobility of Christianity was about to be formed. In the political order the nobility is almost a necessity to the state. Politics having elements of gross struggles which render it more material than ideal, a state is very strong only when a certain number of families has, by tradition and privilege, the duty and interest of guarding its welfare, representing and defending it. But, in the order of the ideal government, birth is nothing: each one is valued in proportion to the truth he shows, and the good he does. The institutions which have a religious, literary, moral end, are lost, when considerations of family, caste, heredity, prevail in them. The nephews and cousins of Jesus would have ruined Christianity, if the churches of Paul had not already been strong enough to act as a counterpoise to this aristocracy, the tendency of which would have been to proclaim itself alone respectable, and to treat all converts as intruders. Some pretensions analogous to those of the Alides in Islam were established. Islamism would certainly have perished under the embarrassment caused by the family of the prophet, if the result of the struggles of the first century of the Hegira had not been to reject, upon second thought, all those who were too near the person of the prophet. The true heirs of a great man are those who continue his work, and not his relatives by blood. Considering the tradition of Jesus as his own possession, the little coterie of the Nazarenes, as they are called, would certainly have stifled it. Happily this narrow circle disappeared in good season: the relatives of Jesus were soon forgotten in the interior of the Hauran. They lost all importance, and left Jesus to his true family, the only one which he has recognized,—those of whom he said, "They hear the word of God, and keep it."
III.
According as the Church of Jerusalem sank, the Church of Rome rose, or, rather, a phenomenon was evidently manifested in the years which followed the victory of Titus. It was that the Church of Rome became more and more the inheritor and the substitute of the Church of Jerusalem. The spirit of the two churches was the same: what was a danger at Jerusalem became an advantage at Rome. The taste for tradition and the hierarchy, and the respect for authority, were in some sort transplanted from the parvises of the temple to the Occident. James, the brother of the Lord, had been a sort of pope at Jerusalem. Rome is about to take up the part of James. We shall have the pope at Rome. Without Titus, we should have had the pope in Jerusalem, but with this great difference, that the pope at Jerusalem would have extinguished Christianity in about one or two hundred years, while the Pope of Rome has made it the religion of the universe.
Here appears a very important person, who seems to have been the head of the Roman Church in the early years of the first century, concerning whom I am happy to find myself in accord with one of your most scholarly and enlightened critics, Mr. Lightfoot. I speak of Clement Romanus. In the penumbra in which he remains, enveloped and almost lost in the luminous dust of a beautiful far-off history, Clement is one of the grand figures of early Christianity: one would say that it was the head of an old effaced fresco of Giotto's, recognizable still from his golden aureola, and some dim features of striking purity and sweetness. One thing is beyond doubt: it is the high rank which he held in the utterly spiritual hierarchy of the church of his time, and the unequalled credit with which he sustained it. His approval made the law. All parties clung to him, and wished to shield themselves under his authority. It is probable that he was one of the most energetic agents of the grand work that was about to be accomplished: I mean the posthumous reconciliation of Peter and Paul, without which union the work of Christ could only have perished. His high personality, aggrandized by tradition, was, after that of Peter, the most holy figure of the primitive Christian Rome.
Already the idea of a certain primacy in the Church of Rome began to show itself. The right of advising the other churches and of settling their differences was accorded to this church. It is believed that like privileges had been allowed to Peter among the disciples. Now a still closer bond was established between Peter and Rome. In the time of Clement, great dissensions divided the Church at Corinth. The Roman Church, being applied to in these troubles, replied by an epistle, which has been preserved to us. The epistle is anonymous; but a very ancient tradition teaches that Clement was the author of it. The Church at Corinth had changed but little since St. Paul. It had the same proud, disputant, feeble spirit. It is evident that the principal opposition to the hierarchy was found in this Greek spirit, always mobile, because it was always full of life, undisciplined (and for my part I like it), not knowing how to form a flock from a crowd. The women and the children were in full revolt. Some superior doctors imagined that they possessed a profound sense in every thing, and mystic secrets analogous to the gift of tongues and the discernment of spirits. Those who were honored with these supernatural gifts scorned the ancients, and aspired to replace them. Corinth had a respectable presbytery, which, however, did not receive the highest mysticism. The advanced pretenders cast it in the shade, and put themselves in its place. Some of the presbyteri were even dismissed. The struggle between the established hierarchy and personal revelations began, and this struggle fills the history of the Church; the privileged soul complaining, that, in spite of the favors with which it is honored, a gross clergy, wanting in spiritual life, dominates it officially. We see that this was the heresy of individual mysticism, maintaining the rights of the spirit against authority, pretending to rise above common mortals and the ordinary clergy by right of its direct intercourse with divinity.
The Roman Church was always the church of order, of subordination, and of rule. Its fundamental principle was that humility and submission were of more value than the most sublime gifts. Its epistle is the first manifestation in the Christian Church of the principle of authority.
A few years since, there was much surprise when a French archbishop, then a senator, said in the Tribune, "My clergy is my regiment." Clement had said this before him. Order and obedience were the supreme laws of the family and the church. "Let us consider the soldiers who serve under our sovereigns. With what order, what punctuality, what submission, they obey their commands: all are not prefects, nor tribunes, nor centurions; but each one in his rank executes the orders of the emperor and of his chiefs. The great cannot exist without the small, nor the small without the great. In every thing there is a mingling of diverse elements, and by this mingling all advances. Let us take, for example, our bodies. The head is nothing without the feet; the feet are nothing without the head. The smallest of our organs are necessary, and serve the whole body: all conspire, and obey the same principle of subordination for the preservation of the whole."
The history of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is the history of a triple abdication; the community of the faithful first placing all its powers in the hands of the ancients, or presbyteri; the presbyteral body at length delegating its authority to one person who was the episcopos; then the episcopi of the Latin Church recognized as their head one of themselves, who became the pope. This last progress, if we may call it so, was not accomplished until our time. The creation of the episcopate, on the contrary, was the work of the second century. The absorption of the church by the presbyteri was accomplished before the year 100. In the Epistle of Clement Romanus it is not yet with the episcopate, but with the presbytery, that he deals. We find there no trace of a presbyteros superior to the others, and entitled to dethrone them; but the author proclaims positively that the presbytery and the clergy are above the people. The apostles, in establishing churches, chose through the inspiration of the Spirit the "bishops and the deacons of the future believers." The power emanating from the apostles has been transmitted by regular succession. No church has then the right to dethrone its seniors. The privilege of the rich is nothing in the church. Accordingly, those who are favored with mystic gifts, instead of believing themselves above the hierarchy, should be the more submissive. This involves the great problem, "Who exists in the church? Is it the people? Is it the clergy? Is it inspiration?" This problem was already given in the time of St. Paul, who resolved it in the true manner by mutual charity. One epistle trenches upon the question in the sense of pure Catholicism. The apostolic title is every thing: the right of the people is reduced to nothing. We may then safely assert that Catholicism had its origin at Rome, since the Church of Rome laid down its first rules. Prescience pertains to spiritual gifts, to science and distinction: it belongs to the hierarchy, to the powers transmitted through the medium of the canonical ordination, which attaches itself to the apostles by an unbroken chain. The free church as Christ conceived it, and as St. Paul also regarded it, was a Utopia which held nothing for the future. Evangelical liberty had destroyed it; and it was not realized, that, with the hierarchy uniformity and death would come in time.
IV.
Clement had probably not seen either Peter or Paul. His great practical sense showed him that the salvation of the Christian Church demanded the reconciliation of the two founders. Did he influence the author of the Acts which represent to us this reconciliation as accomplished, and with whom he seems to have had some intercourse, or did these two pious souls spontaneously fall into accord on account of the bias which he had given to Christian opinion? We are ignorant for want of proofs. One thing is sure, the reconciliation of Peter and Paul was a Roman work. Rome had two churches,—one coming from Peter, the other from Paul. Those numerous converts who came to Jesus—some through the school of Peter, and some through that of Paul—were tempted to exclaim, "What! Are there, then, two Christs?" It was necessary to be able to reply, "No: Peter and Paul understand each other perfectly: the Christianity of one is the Christianity of the other." Perhaps (this is an ingenious hypothesis of M. Strauss) a light cloud was introduced for this purpose into the evangelical legend of the miraculous fishing. According to the recital of Luke, the nets of Peter would not contain the multitudes of fish which could easily have been taken; Peter was obliged to make a sign to his co-workers to come to his aid. A second bark (Paul and his friends) was filled as the first, and the fishing of the kingdom of God was superabundant.
The life of the apostles begins to become obscure. All those who have seen them have disappeared: most of them left no writings. One had entire liberty to embroider on this virgin canvas still. Friends and enemies profited by the unknown to set up arguments in support of their theses, and to satisfy their hates. Towards the year 130, that is to say about sixty-six years after the death of the apostles, a vast Ebionite legend was produced at Rome, and designated by the title of the preaching, or the travels, of Peter. The missions of the chief of the apostles were recounted there, principally those along the coast of Phœnicia; the conversions which he had made; above all, his struggles against the great anti-Christ, Simon the Magician, who was at this epoch the spectre of the Christian conscience. But frequently under this abhorred name another person was concealed: it was the false apostle Paul, the enemy of the law, the veritable destroyer of the Church. The true Church was that at Jerusalem, presided over by James, the brother of the Lord. No apostolate was of any value, if it could not show letters emanating from this central college. Paul had none: therefore he was an intruder. He was the "man enemy," who came behind to sow the tares in the steps of the true sower. With what fury Peter gave the denial to his impostures, to his false allegations of personal revelations, his ascension to the third heaven, his, pretension of knowing about Jesus some things which the hearers of the gospel had not understood, the exaggerated manner in which he and his disciples interpreted the divinity of Jesus!
These strange ideas of half ignorant sectaries would have been without consequences outside of Rome; but every thing which related to Peter assumed importance in the capital of the world. In spite of its heresies, "The Preachings of Peter" had much interest for the orthodox. The primacy of Peter was there proclaimed. St. Paul was thus injured; but a few retouches extenuated what was shocking in these attacks. Several attempts were made to diminish the peculiarities of the new book, and adapt it to the Catholics. This mode of re-modelling books to suit the sect to which one belonged was the order of the day. Little by little the force of things was understood: all sensible men saw that there was safety for the work of Jesus only in the perfect reconciliation of the two heads of the Christian doctrine. Paul had, even in the sixth century, some bitter enemies: he had always some enthusiastic followers like Marcion. Outside of these obstinate men of the right and left, there was a union of the moderate masses, who, before their Christianism in one of the schools, fully recognized the right of the other to be called Christian. James, the partisan of absolute Judaism, was sacrificed, although he had been the true chief of the circumcision. Peter, who was much less objectionable to the disciples of Paul, was preferred before him. James retained no devoted partisans outside of the Judæan-Christians.
It is difficult to say who gained the most in this reconciliation. The concessions came principally from the side of Paul: all Paul's disciples received the others without difficulty, while those of Peter repulsed the followers of Paul. But concessions usually come from the strong. In truth, each day confirmed Paul's victory.
Each Gentile convert weighted the balance on his side. Outside of Syria, the Judæan-Christians were swallowed up by the wave of new converts. The churches of Paul prospered: they had good judgment, solidity of mind, and some pecuniary resources which the others had not. The Ebionite churches, on the contrary, grew poorer each day. The money of the churches of Paul was spent in the support of some glorious poor men, who were unable to earn any thing, but who possessed the traditional life of the primitive spirit. The elevated piety and severe manners of these last were admired by the Christian communities of Pagan origin, who imitated and assimilated themselves to these customs. It soon happened that no distinction was manifest: the sweet and conciliatory spirit of St. Luke and Clement Romanus prevailed. The compact of peace was sealed. It was agreed that Peter had converted the first-fruits of the Gentiles, that he had first absolved them from the yoke of the law. It was admitted that Peter and Paul had been the two heads, the founders of the Church of Rome; Peter and Paul became the halves of an inseparable couple,—two luminaries, like the sun and moon. What one taught, the other taught also. They had always been in accord: they had opposed the same enemies, had been victims of Simon the Magician. At Rome they lived like brothers; the Church of Rome was their common work. The supremacy of this church was established for ages.
Thus, from the reconciliation of these parties, the settlement of these primitive struggles, there came forth a grand unity,—the Catholic Church, the Church of Peter and of Paul, a stranger to the rivalries which had marked the first century.
It was, above all, the death of the two apostles which pre-occupied the parties, and gave an opportunity for the most diverse combinations. The tissue of tradition grew in this respect, by an instinctive travail, almost as imperious as that which had presided at the construction of the legend of Jesus. The end of the life of Peter and of Paul was commanded à priori. It was maintained that Christ had predicted the martyrdom of Peter, as he had announced the death of the sons of Zebedee. The need was felt of associating in death the two persons who had been reconciled by force. It was hoped, and perhaps this was not far from right, that they died together, or at least as the consequence of the same event. The places which were believed to have been sanctified by this bloody drama were early fixed upon, and consecrated by memoriæ. In each case, whatever the people desired came in the end to be true. Tradition makes history, retrospectively, as it ought to have been, and as it never is. Not long ago the portraits of Victor Emmanuel and Pius IX. hung side by side in every frequented place in Italy; and the people desired that these two men, who represented principles whose reconciliation was generally considered necessary to Italy, should be in reality completely united. If, in our time, such views impose themselves on history, it will one day appear, in documents reputed to be serious, that Victor Emmanuel and Pius IX. (probably Garibaldi will be added) met each other secretly, understood and loved each other. During the middle ages, at different times, similar attempts were made to appease the hatreds of the Dominicans and Franciscans; to prove that the founders of these two orders were two brothers living together in the most affectionate intercourse; that at first their rules were the same; and that St. Dominic girded himself with the cord of St. Francis.
Concerning Peter and Paul, the increase of the legend was rich and rapid. Rome and all its environs, above all the way to Ostia, were full of souvenirs which were pretended to be connected with the last days of the two apostles. A crowd of touching circumstances; the flight of Peter; the vision of Jesus bearing his cross, iterum crucifigi; the final adieu of Peter and Paul; the meeting of Peter with his wife; Paul at the Salvian waters; Plautilla sending the handkerchief which bound her hair to bandage the eyes of Paul,—all this presented a beautiful ensemble, to which was only wanting an ingenuous and skilful writer. It was too late; the vein of the first Christian literature was spent; the serenity of the narrator of the Acts was lost; his voice was raised no more in story or in romance. It is impossible to choose between a crowd of equally apocryphal writings: in vain one seeks to shield these recitals with the most venerable names (pseudo-Linus, pseudo-Marcellus); the Roman legend of Peter and Paul remains always in a sporadic state. It was more often recounted by the pious guides than seriously read. It was a local affair: no text concerning it has been consecrated and made authoritative for reading in the churches.
Many among you, ladies and gentlemen, will go to Rome, or will return there. Ah, well! if you preserve any good remembrance of these conferences, go, in memory of me, to the Salvian waters, alle tre fontane, to St. Paul-without-the-Walls. It is one of the most beautiful parts of the Roman Campagna,—deserted, damp, green, and sad. There, in a deep depression in the soil, crowned by those grand horizontal lines, disturbed by no living detail,—there are some clear and cold springs. The fever and mouldiness of the tomb are inhaled there. Some Trappists are there established, conscientiously practising their religious suicide. When you are there, sit down a moment, not too long (one quickly catches the fever there), and, while the Trappists give you to drink the water which gushes from the three bounds which the head of Paul made, think of him who came here to talk of these legends with you, and to whom you have listened with so much courtesy and kind attention.
FOURTH CONFERENCE,
London, April 14, 1880.
ROME,
THE CAPITAL OF CATHOLICISM.
FOURTH CONFERENCE.
ROME, THE CAPITAL OF CATHOLICISM.
Ladies and Gentlemen,—It is plain that the importance of the churches in the primitive Christian community was in proportion to their apostolic nobility. The guaranty of orthodoxy was in the succession of the bishops, by which the great churches were linked to the apostles. A direct line appeared to afford a very strong assurance of conformity of doctrine, and it was jealously maintained. Now, what can be said of a church founded by both Peter and Paul? It is clear that such a church ought to endure in order to have a veritable superiority over others. The chef-d'œuvre of the competency of the Roman Church was the establishment of this superiority. That once assured, the ecclesiastical destiny of Rome was established. When this city should have cast off her secular character, she would have another,—a sacred capacity, corresponding to that of Jerusalem.
She would know how to confiscate to her profit this Christianity which she had so cruelly combated,—so much had humanity suffered, to escape from those whom fate had designed for this great secular task, regere imperio populos!
Under Antonine and Marcus Aurelius, Rome reached its highest grandeur; its rule of the whole world seemed to be undisputed; no cloud could be seen upon its horizon. The emigration from the provinces, above all from the Orient, was augmented rather than lessened. The Greek-speaking population was larger than it had ever been. All who desired a place in the world aspired to come to Rome: nothing was sanctioned until it had received the stamp of this universal exposition of the products of the entire universe.
The centre of a future catholic orthodoxy was evidently there. The well-developed germ of the Papacy existed under Antonine. The Church of Rome showed itself more and more indifferent to those crude Gnostic speculations which occupied some minds filled with the intellectual activity of the Greeks, but tainted with the reveries of the Orient. The organization of Christian society was the principal labor at Rome. This extraordinary city applied to this object the energetic moral strength and the practical genius which she has employed in the most diverse causes. Careless of speculation, decidedly hostile to dogmatic innovations, she presided there,—a mistress already trained by all the changes which had been brought about in discipline and in the hierarchy.
I.
From the year 120 to 130 the Episcopate was elaborated in the Christian Church, and the creation of the Episcopate was eminently a Roman work. All ecclesiæ imply a little hierarchy,—a bureau as it is called to-day,—a president, some assessors, and a small staff of men in its service. Democratic associations are careful that these functions shall be limited as far as possible as to power and duration; but from this arises that precarious something which has prevented any democratic association from outlasting the circumstances which have created it. The Jewish synagogues have had more continuity, although the synagogical body has never come to be a clergy. This is the result of the subordinate place which Judaism has held during several centuries: the pressure from without has counteracted the effects of internal divisions. If the Christian Church had been left with the same absence of directorship, it would doubtless have missed its destiny.
If its ecclesiastical powers had continued to be regarded as emanating from the Church itself, it would have lost all its hieratic and theocratic character. It was written, on the contrary, that a clergy should monopolize the Christian Church, and substitute themselves for it. Acting as its spokesman, presenting itself as having the sole power of attorney in every thing, this clergy will be its strength, and at the same time its gnawing worm,—the principal cause of its future falls.
I repeat, that history has no example of a more complete transformation than that which occurred in the government of the Christian Church about the time of Hadrian and Antonine. What happened in the Christian Church will happen in any association in which the subordinates could resign in favor of the bureau, and that again in favor of the president; so that afterwards the subordinates and the seniors would have no deliberative voice nor influence, nor any control in the management of the funds, and the president would be able to say, "I alone, I, am the association." The presbyteri (seniors) or episcopi (superintending officers) became very soon the only representatives of the Church; and almost immediately another still more important revolution took place. Among the presbyteri or episcopi, there had been one, who, through the habit of occupying the principal seat, absorbed the power of the others, and became pre-eminently the episcopos or the presbyteros. The form of worship contributed powerfully to the establishment of this unity. The eucharistic act could only be celebrated by one person, and gave to the celebrant an extreme importance. That episcopos, with a surprising rapidity, became the head of the presbytery, and, consequently, the entire Church. His cathedra was placed apart, and, having the form of an arm-chair, became the seat of honor, the symbol of primacy. From this time, each church has but one chief presbyteros, who is thus called to the exclusion of the other episcopi. Beside this bishop, there were deacons, widows, and a council of presbyteri: but the great step has been taken; the bishop is the sole successor of the prophets, his associates have disappeared. Apostolic authority, reputed as transmitted by the laying-on of hands, suppressed the authority of the community. The bishops of the various churches soon placed themselves in communication with the others, and formed of the Universal Church a sort of oligarchy, which held assemblies, censured its members, decided questions of faith, and was in itself a true sovereign power. On one side, the shepherds; on the other, the flock. Primitive equality no longer existed: in fact, it had endured but a single day. The Church, however, was only an instrument in the hands of those who guided her; and these held their power, not from the community, but from the spiritual inheritance of a transmission claiming to date back to the apostles in a continuous line. It is evident that the representative system will never be in any degree whatever the law of the Christian Church.
It was the Episcopate, without the intervention of civil power, with no support from the tribunals, which thus established order above liberty in a society originally founded upon individual inspiration. This is why the Ebionites, who had no Episcopate, had also no idea of Catholicity. At first sight, the work of Jesus was not made to last. Founded upon a belief in the destruction of the world, which, as years rolled on, was proved an error, it seemed that his congregation could only dissolve in anarchy. The prophetic book, the charismes, the speaking of tongues, individual inspiration, were no more than were necessary to bring all again into the proportions of a common chapel. Individual inspiration created, but immediately destroyed what it created. After liberty, law is necessary. The work of Jesus might be considered as saved the day in which it was admitted that the Church has a direct power, a power representing that of Jesus. Since then the Church dominates the individual, drawing him to her bosom through his need. Inspiration passes from the individual to the community. The clergy is the dispenser of all pardons, the intermediary between God and the faithful. Obedience, first to the Church, then to the bishop, becomes the highest duty. Innovation is the sign of error: schism, henceforth, will be for the Christian the worst of crimes.
In a certain regard one may say that this was a decadence, a diminution of that spontaneity which had been eminently creative until now. It was evident that ecclesiastical forms were about to absorb, to stifle, the work of Jesus, that all free manifestations of Christian life would soon be arrested. Under the censure of the Episcopate, the speaking of tongues, prophecy, the creation of legends, the making of new sacred books, would soon become withered powers, the charismes would be reduced to official sacraments. In another sense, however, such a transformation was the essential condition of the strength of humanity. And, moreover, the centralization of powers became necessary when churches were more numerous: intercourse between these little pious societies would be impossible, unless they had representatives appointed to act for them. It is undeniable, moreover, that, without the Episcopate, the churches, re-united for a time by the souvenirs of Jesus, would gradually have been dispersed. The divergences of opinion, the difference in the turn of imagination, and, above all, the rivalries, and the unsatisfied amours-propres, would have operated by their infinite effects of disunion and disintegration. Christianity would have expired at the end of three or four centuries, like Mithraicism and so many other sects which were not allowed to endure. Democracy is sometimes eminently creative; but it is upon the condition that the democracy comes forth from conservative institutions which prevent the revolutionary fever from prolonging itself indefinitely.
Here was the greatest miracle of the new Christianity. It drew order, hierarchy, authority, and obedience from the free subjection of desires: it organized the crowd; it disciplined anarchy. What does this miracle accomplish other than to strike at the pretended derogations to the laws of physical nature? The spirit of Jesus strongly inoculated in his disciples that spirit of sweetness, of abnegation, of forgetfulness of the present; that unique pursuit of interior joys which kills ambition; that strong preference given to childhood; those words repeated without ceasing, as from Jesus, "Whoever is first among you, let him be the servant of all." The influence of the apostles was not less in that direction. The apostles lived and ruled after their death. The idea that the head of the Church held his command under the members of the Church who had elected him never once occurs in the literature of this time. The Church thus escaped through the supernatural origin of its power, that element of decay which exists in delegated authority. A legislative and executive authority may come from the people; but sacraments and dispensations of celestial pardons have nothing in common with universal suffrage. Such privileges come from heaven, or, according to the Christian formula, from Jesus Christ, the source of all pardon and of all good.
The religion of Jesus thus became something solid and consistent. The great danger of Gnosticism, which was to divide Christianity into numberless sects, was exorcised. The word "Catholic Church" resounded everywhere, as the name of that great body which would thenceforth survive the ages unbroken. The character of this catholicity is already seen. The Montanists are regarded as sectarian; the Marcionites are convinced of the falseness of the apostolic doctrine; the different Gnostic schools are more and more driven from the bosom of the general church. Something had arisen which was neither Montanism, nor Marcionism, nor Gnosticism; which was Christianity, not sectarian,—the Christianity of the majority of bishops, resisting sects, and using them all, having, if you will, only negative characters, but preserved by these negative characters from the pietist aberrations, and from dissolving rationalism. Christianity, like all parties who wish to live, disciplines itself, and restrains its own excesses. It unites to mystical exaltation a fund of good sense and moderation which will kill Millenarism, Charisms, Glossolaly, and all the primitive phenomenal spirits. A handful of excited men, like the Montanists, running into martyrdom, discouraging penitence, condemning marriage, are not the Church. The juste milieu triumphs. Radicals of any sort will never be allowed to destroy the work of Jesus. The Church is always of a medium opinion: it belongs to all the world, and is not the privilege of an aristocracy. The pietist aristocracy of the Phrygian sects and the speculative aristocracy of the Gnostics are equally stripped of their pretensions.
In the midst of the enormous variety of opinions which fill the first Christian age, the Catholic opinion constitutes a sort of standard. It was not necessary to reason with the heretic in order to convince him. It was sufficient to show him that he was not in communion with the Catholic Church, with the grand churches which trace the succession of their bishops to the apostles. Quod semper, quod ubique became the absolute rule of truth. The argument of prescription to which Tertullian gave such eloquent force reviews all the Catholic controversy. To prove to any one that he was an innovator, a disturber, was to prove that he was wrong,—an insufficient rule, since, by a singular irony of fate, the doctor himself who developed this method of refutation in so imperious a manner, Tertullian, died a heretic.
Correspondence between the churches was an early custom. Circular letters from the heads of the great churches, read on Sunday in the re-unions of the faithful, were a sort of continuation of the apostolic literature. The ecclesiastical province, questioning the precedency of the great churches, appeared in germ. The Church, like the synagogue and the mosque, is essentially a citadel. Christianity, like Judaism and Islamism, is a religion of cities. The countryman, the paganus, will be the last resistance which Christianity will encounter. The few rural Christians came to the church of the neighboring city. The Roman municipality thus enclosed the church. Among the cities, the civitas, the grand city, was alone a veritable church, with an episcopos. The small city was in ecclesiastical dependence on the great city. This primacy of the great cities was an important fact. The great city once converted, the small city and the country followed the movement. The diocese was thus the unity of the conglomerate Christians. As for the ecclesiastical province, it corresponded to the Roman province: the divisions of worship of Rome and Augustus were the secret law which ruled all. Those cities which had a flamen, or archiereus, are those which later had an archbishop: the flamen civitatis became the bishop. After the third century, the flamen held the rank in the city which was later that of the bishop in the diocese. Thus it happened that the ecclesiastical geography of a country was very nearly the geography of the same country in the Roman epoch. The picture of the bishops and the archbishops is that of the ancient civitates, according to their line of subordination. The empire was as the mould in which the new religion was formed. The interior framework, the outlines, the hierarchical divisions, were those of the empire. The ancient archives of the Roman administration, and the church-registers of the middle ages, and even those of our own day, are nearly the same thing.
Thus the grand organisms which have become so essential a part of the moral and political life of European nations were all created by those naïve and sincere Christians, whose faith has become inseparable from the moral culture of humanity. The Episcopate under Marcus Aurelius was fully ripe: the Papacy existed in germ. Œcumenical councils were impossible. The Christian Empire alone could authorize great assemblies; but the provincial synod was used in the affairs of the Montanists and of the Passover. The bishop of the capital of the province was allowed to preside without contest.
II.
Rome was the place in which the grand idea of Catholicity was conceived. Rome became each day more and more the capital of Christianity, and replaced Jerusalem as the religious centre of humanity. Its church had a generally recognized precedence over others. All doubtful questions which disturbed the Christian conscience demanded an arbitration, if not a solution, at Rome. This very defective reasoning was used,—that, since Christ had made Cephas the corner-stone of his church, this privilege ought to extend to his successors. By an unequalled stroke, the Church of Rome had succeeded in making itself at the same time the Church of Peter and the Church of Paul, a new mythical duality, replacing that of Romulus and Remus. The Bishop of Rome became the bishop of bishops, the one who admonished others. Rome proclaims its right (a dangerous right) to excommunicate those who do not entirely agree with her. The poor Artemonites (a sort of anticipated Arians) had much to complain of in the injustice of the fate which made them heretics; while, even until Victor, all the Church of Rome thought with them; but they were not heard. From this point, the Church of Rome placed itself above history. The spirit which in 1870 could proclaim the infallibility of the Pope might see itself reflected at the end of the second century by certain clear indications. The writing made at Rome about 180, of which the Roman fragment known as the "Canon de Muratori" makes a part, shows us Rome already regulating the canon of the churches, making the passion of Peter the basis of Catholicity, and repulsing equally Montanism and Gnosticism. Irenæus refutes all heresies by the faith of this church, "the grandest, the most ancient, the most illustrious, which possesses by continuous succession the true tradition of the apostles Peter and Paul; to which, on account of its primacy, all the rest of the Church should have recourse."
One material cause contributed much to that pre-eminence which most of the churches recognized in the Church of Rome. This Church was extremely rich: its goods, skilfully administered, served to succor and propagate other churches. The heretics condemned to the mines received a subsidy from it: the common treasury was in a certain sense at Rome. The Sunday collection, practised continually in the Roman Church, was probably already established. A marvellous spirit of tradition animated this little community, in which Judæa, Greece, and Latium seemed to have confounded their very different gifts, in view of a prodigious future. While the Jewish Monotheism furnished the immovable base of the new formation, while Greece continued through Gnosticism its work of free speculation, Rome attached itself with an astonishing readiness to the work of the government. All its authorities and artifices served well for that. Politics recoils not before fraud. Now, politics had already taken up its home in the most secret councils of the Church of Rome. Some veins of apocryphal literature, constantly refilled, sometimes under the name of the apostles, sometimes under that of apostolic personages, such as Clement and Hermas, were received with confidence to the limits of the Christian world on account of the guaranty of Rome.
This precedence of the Church of Rome continued to increase up to the third century. The bishops of Rome showed a rare competency, evading theological questions, but always in the first rank in matters of organization and administration. The tradition of the Roman Church passes for the most ancient of all. Pope Cornelius took the lead in the matter of substitution. This was particularly seen in the dismissal of the bishops of Italy, and the appointment of their successors. Rome was also the central authority of the churches of Africa.
This authority was already excessive, and showed itself above all in the affair of the Passover. This question was much more important than it appears to us. In the early times all Christians continued to make the Jewish Passover their principal feast. They celebrated this feast on the same day as the Jews,—on the 14th of Nisan, upon whatever day of the week it happened to fall. Persuaded, according to the account of all the old gospels, that Jesus, the evening before his death, had eaten the Passover with his disciples, they regarded such a solemnity as a commemoration of the last supper, rather than as a memorial of the resurrection. As Christianity became more and more separated from Judaism, such a manner of regarding it was very much questioned. At first a new tradition was promulgated,—that Jesus, being about to die, had not eaten the Passover, but had died the very day of the Jewish feast, thus constituting himself the Pascal Lamb. Moreover, this purely Jewish feast wounded the Christian conscience, especially in the churches of Paul. The great feast of the Christians, the resurrection of Jesus, occurred in any case the Sunday after the Jewish Passover. According to this idea, the feast was celebrated the Sunday which followed the Friday after the 14th of Nisan.
In Rome this custom prevailed, at least since the pontificates of Xystus and Telesphorus (about 120). In Asia there were great divisions. The conservatives, like Polycarp, Meliton, and all the ancient school, believed that the old Jewish custom conformed to the first Gospels and to the usage of the apostles John and Philip. This was the object of the voyage to Rome which Polycarp undertook about the year 154, under the Pope Anicetus. The interview between Polycarp and Anicetus was very cordial. The discussion of certain points appears to have been sharp, but they understood each other. Polycarp was not able to persuade Anicetus to renounce a practice which had been that of the bishops of Rome before his time. Anicetus, on the other hand, hesitated when Polycarp told him that he governed himself according to the rule of John and the other apostles, with whom he had lived on a familiar footing. The two religious leaders remained in full communion with each other; and Anicetus showed Polycarp an almost unprecedented honor. In fact he desired that Polycarp, in the Assembly of the Faithful at Rome, should pronounce, in his stead and in his presence, the words of the eucharistic consecration. These ardent men were full of too lofty a sentiment to rest the unity of their souls upon the uniformity of rites and exterior observances.
Later, unhappily, Rome took the stand of insisting upon its right. About the year 196 the question was more exciting than ever. The churches of Asia persisted in their old usage. Rome, always enthusiastic for unity, wished to coerce them. Upon the invitation of Pope Victor, convocations of bishops were held: a vast correspondence was exchanged. But the bishops of Asia, strong in the tradition of two apostles and of so many illustrious men, would not submit. The old Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, wrote in their name a very sharp letter to Victor and to the Church of Rome. The incredible design which Victor conceived on account of the acrimony of this letter proves that the Papacy was already born, and well born. He pretended to excommunicate, to separate from the Universal Church, the most illustrious province, because it had not bent its traditions before the Roman discipline. He published a decree by virtue of which Asia was placed under the ban of the Christian community. But the other bishops opposed this violent measure, and recalled Victor to charity. St. Irenæus, in particular, who, through the necessity of the country in which he lived, had accepted for himself and his churches in Gaul the Occidental custom, could not support the thought that the mother-churches of Asia, to which he felt himself bound in the depths of his soul, should be separated from the body of the Universal Church. He energetically persuaded Victor from the excommunication of the churches which held to the traditions of their fathers, and recalled to him the examples of his more tolerant predecessors. This act of rare good sense prevented the schism of the Orient and the Occident from occurring in the second century. Irenæus wrote to the bishops on all sides, and the question remained open to the churches of Asia.
In one sense, the process which brought about the debate was of more importance than the debate itself. By reason of this difference, the Church was brought to a clearer idea of its organization. And first it was evident that the laity were no longer any thing. The bishops alone handled questions, and promulgated their opinions. The bishops collected together in provincial synods, over which the bishop of the capital of the province presided (the archbishop of the future), or, at times, the oldest bishop. The synodal assembly came out with a letter, which was sent to other churches. This was then like an attempt at federative organization,—an attempt to resolve questions by means of provincial assemblies, presided over by bishops agreeing among themselves. Later, questions concerning the presiding over synods and the hierarchy of the Church sought solution in the documents of this great debate. Among all the churches, that of Rome appeared to have a particular initiative right. But that initiative was far from being synonymous with infallibility; for Eusebius declares that he read the letters in which the bishops severely blamed the conduct of Victor.
III.
Authority, gentlemen, loves authority. The authoritaires, as we say to-day, in the most diverse ranks, extend the hand to each other. Men as conservative as the leaders of the Church of Rome must be strongly tempted to favor public force, the effect of which is often for good, as they must admit. This tendency had been manifest since the first days of Christianity. Jesus had laid down the rule. The image of the money was for him the supreme criterion of its lawfulness, beyond which there was nothing to seek. In the height of the reign of Nero, St. Paul wrote, "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God." Some years later, Peter, or the person who wrote in his name the Epistle known as the First of Peter, expresses himself in an identical manner. Clement was an equally devoted subject of the Roman Empire.
In fine, one of the traits of St. Luke (according to my idea there was a bond between St. Luke and the spirit of the church at Rome) is his respect of the imperial authority, and the precautions which he took not to injure it. The author of the Acts evaded every thing which would present the Romans as the enemies of Christ. On the contrary, he seeks to show, that, under many circumstances, they defended St. Paul and the Christians against the Jews. Never a disparaging word against the civil magistrates. Luke loved to show how the Roman functionaries were favorable to the new religion, sometimes even embracing it; and how Roman justice was equitable, and superior to the passions of the local powers. He insists upon the advantages which Paul owed to his title of Roman citizen. If he ends his recital with the arrival of Paul at Rome, it is perhaps in order not to recount the monstrosities of Nero.
Without doubt, there were in other parts of the empire devoted Christians who sympathized entirely with the anger of the Jews, and dreamed only of the destruction of the idolatrous city which they identified with Babylon. Such were the authors of apocalypses and sibylline writings. But the faithful of the great churches were of quite a different way of thinking. In 70, the Church of Jerusalem, with a sentiment more Christian than patriotic, left the revolutionary city, and sought peace beyond the Jordan. In the revolt of Barkokébas, the division was still more pronounced. Not a single Christian was willing to take part in this attempt of blind despair. St. Justin in his Apologies never combats the principle of empire. He desired that the empire should examine the Christian doctrine, approve and countersign it in some way, and condemn those who calumniated it. The most learned doctor of the time of Marcus Aurelius, Meliton, Bishop of Sardis, made still more decided advances, and undertook to show that there is always in Christianity something to recommend it to a true Roman. In his Treaty upon Truth, preserved in Syriac, Meliton expresses himself in the same way as a bishop of the fourth century, explaining to one Theodosius that his first duty is to establish by his authority the triumph of truth (without telling us, alas! by what sign one recognizes truth). Let the empire become Christian, and the persecuted of to-day would find that the interference of the state in the domain of conscience is perfectly legitimate.