2. The Church in the Roman Empire.
The Chris-
tians would appear in the
empire as a strange small
sect and for a time their recruits were perhaps
chiefly
amongst the lowly, though churches for which the
epistles of
Saint Paul were written can hardly be re-
garded as unimpressive. In the Roman Empire the
believers might be
hated because they were confused
with the Jews or because the Jews incited
the pagans
against them; but in the first two centuries they suffered
from the hostility of the populace rather than the
intolerance of the
emperors. After the fall of Jerusalem
it was in Asia Minor that they came
to appear most
numerous, most lively, and most capable; and for a
long
time this was the most impressive seat of the
Church. In various parts of
the empire the teaching
in the apostolic period itself would tend to vary,
at
least in its emphases, and the tradition came to develop
on
differing lines. Also, as time went on, one great
region (almost as a
matter of temperament) would be
preoccupied chiefly with doctrine while
another con-
centrated on asceticism and
another became interested
in organization.
From the middle of the second century, Helleniza-
tion—which found its climax in Alexandria—had
cap-
tured the mentality of churchmen, who,
instead of
appearing as a mere sect came out into first-class con-
troversy with leading intellectuals. They
had taken
Platonic ideas into their own system, but they set out
to
show where pagan thought had gone wrong, and
claimed that Christianity was
the culmination of Greek
culture, the real heir of ancient philosophy.
While this
was happening, and the Church was settling down to
a
long-term role in the world, there arose in Asia Minor
the Montanism which
in a sense implied a reversion
to the primitive spirit, the exultant early days. It meant
a
wave of “prophesyings,” a reawakening of more
immediate eschatological hopes, a severity in disci-
plinary matters and something like an actual thirst
for
martyrdom. Dealing with these problems was part of
the larger
process by which a sect that had envisaged
an imminent eschatological
climax gradually turned
into a sedentary Church, realizing what it needed
if
it were to exist on a permanent footing. Controversies
in the third
century about penance, about relapses in
time of persecution, about the
validity of baptism by
heretics, and about the rights of bishops, were part
of
the consequences of this transition.
Christians were beginning to develop a larger world
view; scholarship was
accumulating; the interest in
history was rising. Confronted by the
multiplicity of
theological opinions, towards the end of the second
century, Irenaeus had insisted on the steadying influ-
ence of bishops, who were still regarded as the reposi-
tories of the original apostolic
tradition. In spite of the
varieties at a certain level, an impressive
uniformity
and consistency had been made possible by such pro-
cedures as the communication from one
region to
another of the decisions made by local councils of
bishops.
At the same time, the heads of great sees
attempted on occasion to secure
the support of Rome
in a doctrinal controversy, and this was capable
of
being construed later as an appeal to Rome. The
church in Rome,
very much a church of foreign colon-
ists at
first, was for a long time cosmopolitan—
consisting of groups
that had brought their local tradi-
tions and
customs with them. Like Christianity itself,
all new sects, all heresies,
all novel teaching sought
to reach the capital of the empire; and the
bishop of
Rome would have to meet early at a local level the
challenge
that these were later to present to the
Church in general. When Christians
from further east
brought to Rome their different dates for the celebra-
tion of Easter, he was in a position
to be highly aware
of the inconvenience of this anomaly. Perhaps
because
he was inclined to be less speculative than the bishops
of the
Greek-speaking East, and more concerned for
tradition and order, he not
only met problems early
but seems often to have commanded respect by
his
actual decisions. In the remarkable period in which
the universal
Church was developing its organization,
he gains in importance, though all
his claims do not
go unchallenged. To us it might appear that the lead-
ership which he asserted was likely to
become due to
him by reason of his merits. At the same time, it was
still recognized that the authority of a bishopric—or
a local
tradition—depended primarily on the distinc-
tion of its apostolic origin. Rome could claim to
go
back to Peter and Paul.
In the middle of the third century the expansion is
remarkable in Africa and
in Western Europe, as well
as in the lands to the east of the
Mediterranean. Further
east again, the missionary work pushes across
Iraq,
though its effect is to be gravely limited from this point
by a
Persian dynasty that is committed to Zoroastrian-
ism. At a time when the Roman Empire was
coming
under pressure on the frontiers and was moving to-
wards a grim development—while in any case
this
empire held hosts of déracinés, people feeling lost, not
quite at home
in the world—the older paganism was
coming into decline.
Oriental mystery cults attempted
to answer the need for a salvationist
faith with its
mysticisms and forms of sacrament; philosophy outside
the Church was running to religiosity. By the second
half of the third
century the Church had become an
imposing body and a powerful influence in
the empire,
with important government and court officials amongst
its
members. Amongst its assets in the great conflict
of religions were the
possession of a sacred book; the
attachment not to a mythical figure or a
demiurge but
to a Person who had walked in the world and could
be
identified in history; the assistance of an imposing
organization; and the
fact that this religion, besides
producing its martyrs and issuing in an
expressive kind
of devotion, had become intimately connected with the
moral life and works of charity. The Church was be-
ginning perhaps to suffer even from its prosperity, and,
to
some, the rise of heresies seemed to come as a
retribution for this.
Already the controversies had
opened which led to the long conflicts over
the Holy
Trinity and the Person of Christ.
Christianity had profited from the meeting of Jewish
religion, Greek
philosophy, and the Roman Empire—a
conjuncture that seemed to
coincide with the Incarna-
tion. It had
profited from the defects of all three—
Jewish legalism, the
tendencies of Greek philosophy
at this late period, and the frustrations
and distracted-
ness of the Roman world.
It had appeared at an ad-
vanced date in that
long period in which much of the
ability and the yearning of the human race
in Asia,
and now even in Europe—the result of a great
anxiety
about man's destiny—had been directed to the explor-
ing of the possibilities of the
spiritual realm. At a
turning-point in the history of man's religious conscious-
ness, Christianity, moreover, had
moved into a highly
civilized world which had an advanced form of
urban
life—a world which could support it with a certain
refinement of intellect.
Its success was bound to affect the mentality of
men—bound to
alter their way of experiencing life,
their attitude to nature, their
posture under the sun,
and their notions of human destiny. Since
Christians
believed in the Incarnation, they were bound to deny
the
gulf which the pagans had so often presumed to
exist between God and Nature—bound to reject the
view that matter is evil and that salvation must consist
in escape from the
body. They could not believe that
in an eternity of cyclic repetitions
Christ would go
on dying over and over again for sinners; so they were
released from extreme cyclic theories, while the Old
Testament presented
history as moving forward, mov-
ing to an
objective, an unrepeatable and irreversible
thing. The Old Testament
indeed, forced them to look
at history and regard it as important, and it
cannot
have been without significance that in Europe, for
generation
after generation, men could not learn about
their religion without turning
to what was really very
ancient history. Instead of a great emphasis on
Fortune,
Christianity gave currency to the notion that the hand
of
Providence was in everything and (as had already
happened) this might mean
that retrospective reason-
ing could
ultimately make sense of that kind of history-
making which goes on over people's heads, overriding
their
conscious purposes and their predictions. Christi-
anity stressed the sanctity of human life, the impor-
tance of the family, the inadmissibility of sexual
license
and the evil of such things as gladiatorial contests and
the
murder of infants. It regarded suicide as wicked.
It insisted that man's
life had a spiritual dimension,
but it combined a high view of personality
and its
potentialities with an insistence on man's universal sin.
It
must have affected the world—the very conception
of a human
being—when, week in and week out, in
numberless localities, men
were reminded to reflect on
their own sins, on forgiveness, humility,
mercy, and
love.
