I. THE EARLY CHURCH
1. Judaic Christianity.
The disciples of Jesus, if they
appeared ready to confess their
despondency and even
weakness at the time of the Crucifixion, made a recov-
ery so rapid that it puzzles the
historians. It altered
the course of history; for though, as a result of it, they
did
not exactly announce a new religion to their fellow
countrymen, they
proclaimed an “event” which
brought the older faith
to its culmination, shattering
its traditional framework and calling for a
host of new
interpretations. It would seem that, during the lifetime
of Jesus, they may have followed Him without properly
understanding the
drift of His teaching; and it would
appear to have been the vividness of
their belief in
the Resurrection that transformed the situation for
them, enabling them to feel that now everything could
be fitted into place.
It had in fact convinced them that
Jesus was the fulfilment of the famous
prophecies on
which the Jews had been relying for a long time; and
that, if the truth had been so difficult to recognize,
it had been because
those prophecies—and particularly
the notions of the Messiah and
the divine Kingdom—
had been construed in too mundane a manner.
Once
this basic insight had been reached, a remarkable work
of
intellectual synthesis was quickly achieved, and
there followed an amazing
missionary endeavor, which
required considerable bravery at first and
cannot be
plausibly accounted for by reference to mundane
vested
interests. It is clear to the historian, and it was
amply admitted at the
time, that the dynamic behind
all this was the conviction that the beloved
Leader
has risen from the dead. There was a strong expectation
that He
would quickly return.
It has always been a matter of the greatest difficulty
for
Christianity—and perhaps for any similar form of
faith—to secure by peaceful means and sheer mission-
ary endeavor the wholesale conversion of a people
already dominated by an exclusive form of supernatural
religion. The Holy
Land was in this position, and
though Judaism was in a fluid and
interesting state,
the disciples produced only what appeared to be an
addition to the multitude of sects and parties there—
some of
these latter being impressive on the spiritual
and ethical side, and some
of them so similar in one
way or another that the tracing of influences
among
them is a delicate affair. The Church for a few decades
was
predominantly Judeo-Christian, its members still
attending the Temple and
conforming to the Law, but
meeting also in private houses or the Upper Room
for
instruction, prayer, and the breaking of bread. Until
the war
which led to the destruction of the city in
A.D. 70, it was the group in
Jerusalem (with James,
the brother of Jesus, at its head) which was the
leader.
It seems to have been quickly recognized that con-
verts from paganism were admissible; and pagans were
encountered
in great numbers when the gospel was
carried to the virtually Greek cities,
such as Caesarea,
on the Palestine coast. Communities were soon estab-
lished also in Damascus and the
Hellenistic city of
Antioch, beyond the frontier; and Antioch, where the
term
“Christian” came into use, became the center for
a
wider missionary campaign in the Greco-Roman
world. But also, at this early
stage in the story, Chris-
tian missions
(following previous ones on the part of
the Jews) spread eastwards to
Transjordan and into
Arabia, and they were pushed forwards to the
upper
Euphrates and the Tigris. Here, churches using the
Aramaic
tongue became important during the earliest
centuries. Some difficulty
arose over the question
whether the pagans should be made to conform to
the
Jewish law and this may have created additional diffi-
culty for Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, as
Jewish
nationalism became more intense, more exacting. But
the
extension into the Greco-Roman world, together
with the destruction of
Jerusalem, brought the Chris-
tian faith a
higher degree of autonomy, a further scope
for development; and it opened
to Christianity the
possibility of becoming a world-religion. The
early
need for exposition in the Greek language, the marriage
with
Greek ideas, and the contact with a highly devel-
oped culture were to prove important in this connec-
tion. “Historical
Christianity”—the religion as we have
actually known
it in its concrete development through
the centuries—comes in
some respects as a Greco-
Jewish synthesis,
owing part of its power to the combi-
nation
of two such highly different systems. It would
be interesting to know how
the religion would have
developed if, in its early generative period, it
had
combined with a different culture.
The historian is hampered because the Christians in
their very earliest
period produced so little in writing,
or at least preserved so little.
Their leaders knew what
was needed at the time, however, and the whole
future
question of authority in the Church would seem to have
been
decisively affected by the fact that (for the imme-
diate purpose) so much was realized to depend on the
evidence of
eyewitnesses, and the primacy was natu-
rally
given to these. Perhaps it is for similar reasons
that one glimpses the
importance of certain relatives
of Jesus in the earliest days at Jerusalem;
and, of course,
Saint Paul was accepted as an Apostle because his
particular vision of the risen Christ was regarded as
giving him first hand
knowledge. Once the eyewitnesses
had passed off the scene, it was natural
that a certain
primacy should be conceded to those who had been
closest to them—those to whom they had communi-
cated most; and the objective was the preservation
of
what had originally been delivered at first hand—what
in
the course of time could only appear in a less cogent
form as
“tradition.”
The attempt to secure uniformity in the Church
would seem to go back to the
jealousy with which the
Judeo-Christian leaders in Jerusalem regarded the
“Hellenizers”—some of these latter
being Jews who
had been affected by Hellenization or pagans who
(before becoming Christian) had been converts to
Judaism. When the
“Hellenizers” carried the gospel
to pagans in the
Greek coastal cities of Palestine or
in Syria, it would appear that the
Church at Jerusalem
would send a “Hebrew” to check on
the result of their
work. But, in spite of the care that was taken,
there
were aberrations even amongst the Christians in
Palestine; and
in Samaria, which had already been
heterodox in its Judaism, an irregular
form of Christi-
anity slid away and became
the origin of Gnosticism—
this after A.D. 70, when the failure
of Jahweh to grant
victory in an apocalyptic war helped to produce a
movement partly directed against the Old Testament
deity. Henceforward, the
rise of Christianity was par-
alleled by the
multiplication of Gnostic sects which,
in spite of their fantastic
character, proved imposing.
Now, more than ever, it was necessary to
safeguard
the original doctrines of the Church.
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.
3. The Christianized Empire.
After the failure of
a great persecution and a tyrannical development
of
the empire, the Emperor Constantine granted to the
Church in A.D.
313 full freedom of worship and the
restitution of confiscated goods.
Henceforward, he in-
creased his favors to the
Christians, and the Church
began to move into a privileged position. It
could be
argued that his interests as an emperor would recom-
mend an alliance with an institution that
carried
power; but there are signs that he was a sincere be-
liever, though pagan in his manner of
believing—too
sure that the Christian God was the one who
was
victorious in battle and helped him to outwit his ene-
mies. All this came as the climax of the Christian
interpretation of history that had been developing—
with the
Hebrews regarded as the fathers of civili-
zation, their language the original one, the language
of God;
Christianity being the return to the original
religion of mankind, the one
from which the Jews had
lapsed (only to be partially rescued by Moses)
while
the Greeks had declined still more—the Church being
the heir of the wisdom of both Jews and Greeks, how-
ever, and the Incarnation coinciding neatly with the
establishment of the Roman Empire, the era of peace.
It seemed
that, at this culminating moment, when the
empire itself was becoming
Christian, churchmen were
willing to attribute to a Christian emperor the
kind
of divinity that they had refused to concede to his
predecessors.
Henceforward it became almost consistently true
that all who wished to gain
imperial favor or to hold
office or to make their way in society would have
every
motive for joining the Church; and the conversion of
the Roman
Empire—hitherto a matter of persuasion
and not without its
risks—was to be continued by the
strong arm of the state. This
was almost bound to
introduce corruptions in the Church itself, and to
in-
crease the danger of a formal
Christianity, mixed with
paganism and thinking in pagan
terms—the danger also
of official compromises with paganism. It
was perhaps
natural, but it was unfortunate, that when there were
parties in the Church, one or more of these (not merely
the orthodox, but
sometimes the heretical) should ap-
peal to the
emperor, even when he was not inclined
to intervene. This had its special
dangers, for in A.D.
325 Constantine himself, having called the first ecu-
menical council at Nicaea, put himself
behind the
decree of that Council, condemning the Arian heresy,
but
within less than three years was induced to change
his mind.
Stranger still, men so convinced that they spoke for
the right
religion—and so sure that government and
power should be at the
service of God—were soon
advocates of persecution; and the
process in this case
was so understandable that nobody today can feel
sure
that, living in the same period and sharing the same
assumptions
about religion, he would have decided
differently. Some who were slow in
their conversion
to the practice appear to have been brought over when
the victims of persecution declared later in life that
they were now glad
that they had been coerced.
Already, in the reign of Constantine, there arose
issues which were to
trouble the Church for a long
time. One of them was the Donatist schism,
which
arose out of the later persecutions and was directed
against
bishops who had consented to the handing over
of sacred books to the
magistrates. It led to the erection
of a counter-church in
Africa—bishop confronting
antibishop—with violence,
persecution, atrocities,
self-immolation, and streaks of the revolutionary
and
the apocalyptic. An extravagant, though serious and
understandable, religious issue received tremendous
leverage from social
discontent and possibly a sort of
nationalism, and from hostility to the
Roman establish-
ment. The trouble lasted
for a century, almost until
the barbarians overran the province.
Shortly before 325, Arius, who wished to guard the
sovereignty of God the
Father, and may not have been
far enough from paganism to reject all ideas of subor-
dination in the deity, produced a
doctrine which, while
asserting the divinity of the Son, secured a clear
reduc-
tion of status for Him. The
controversy tore the Church
apart until A.D. 381, and it is perhaps not too
much
to say that for a longer period than this a great deal
of the
ecclesiastical conflict lay between men who
wished to assert both the
complete divinity and the
complete humanity of Christ, but could not agree
on
the formula that would ensure the one without deplet-
ing the other. The formula adopted at Nicaea,
homoousion (consubstantial with the Father) had al-
ready been rejected in a part of the eastern Church
that had
reacted against a heresy of an opposite tend-
ency. It was uncongenial to some because in any case
it could not
claim to be scriptural. Various shades of
the Arian and Nicene formulas
were attempted by one
party and another, who suggested “like the
Father”
and “of like substance with the
Father,” though there
emerged one group that diverged further
than Arius
and declared that there was no likeness at all. The
emperors provided a complicating factor—now hesi-
tating, now changing their minds, now plumping for
a
form of Arianism. The West remained firm in its
support of the Nicene
formula, but subtle differences
arose when technical terms had been
translated into
Latin, and the West was later than the East in con-
fronting the earlier heresy that had
constituted the
opposite danger. At a moment when a great work of
reconciliation was being achieved, there emerged an
emperor who was a
Westerner and a pious man, and
he clinched the matter by an edict in 380,
and a second
ecumenical council, that of Constantinople, 381, which
confirmed Nicaea.
If the Church had become more worldly and more
contentious, its power to
inspire renunciation and the
life of the spirit was reasserted in the
development of
monasteries. There had been analogies to this in other
parts of the globe, but Christianity had had from the
first an ideal of
chastity and poverty, and the sufferings
of the martyrs had kept its
self-denying aspects alive.
The Egyptian anchorites are anterior to the
victory
of the Church in the empire, and, when they appear,
they have
strange features, particularly their obsession
with the battle against the
vast multiplicity of
demons—a battle which could only be won by
the
repudiation of the world, a tremendous disciplining of
the body,
and a conquest of all ordinary emotions. It
was a battle not to be won by
the man who lived as
a citizen in society; and, though
prayers—sometimes
repeated in what seems to be an incredibly
mechanical
manner—contributed to the objective, the
movement
was one which needed the greatest care by the Church.
Nor is
it clear how much of its deeper Christian char-
acter may not have been contributed retrospectively
by the influential literature that it provoked. We are
told,
however, that Saint Anthony, when he went to
a solitary life in the desert
in A.D. 271, was moved by
the injunction: “Sell all that thou
hast and give to the
poor and follow me.” The Egyptian desert
offered a
remarkable opportunity, and great numbers followed
his
example. Something that almost seems like a com-
petition in asceticism may have developed here and
there—and warnings against spiritual pride in this
connection
appear early in Egypt—but out of his very
loneliness the hermit
was to contribute something of
rare quality to the inner life of the
Church.
The anchorites came to rudimentary forms of
grouping for certain purposes,
but it was Saint
Pachomius who, in about A.D. 320 or 323, brought to
the problem an essentially organizing mind and estab-
lished the community principle. He prescribed rules
for a whole order of monasteries; and, now not only
renunciation but also
obedience was important, while,
besides vigils, readings from the Bible,
prayer, and
contemplation, there was greater emphasis on manual
labor.
The hermit was to have a significant history in
Palestine and Syria, but
Saint Basil the Great, from
about A.D. 357, produced a community ideal
which
superseded this and became current throughout the
Greek world.
Before the middle of the century the
news had reached the West and very
soon ascetic
groups were being founded there, though it was not
until
something like two hundred years later that Saint
Benedict established his
famous Rule that became the
guide for Westerners. The whole movement, the
liter-
ature that arose from it, and the
spiritual teaching it
produced had a great effect on the Church in
general;
and in the fourth century important people, including
a
surprising number of the leading intellects, associated
themselves with it,
at least during part of their lives.
In its ultimate extension, it was to
have by-products
of an unpredictable kind—especially its
contributions
to cultural and even economic life. It may have been
in
one sense a protest against the growing worldliness
of the fourth-century
Church, or an attempt to find
a new pattern of renunciation, in some cases
perhaps
even an escape from civic obligations. But it became,
from the
religious point of view, an eminently creative
thing.
It is a whole Christian version of civilization that
comes to the front in
the fourth century. Biblical
scholarship has advanced and become a
technical affair.
Eusebius not only reconstructs the story of the
Church
but has an interpretation of world history. The ancient
culture
receives a Christian shape, and the transmuta-
tion sometimes shows originality. The greatest intel-
lects of the time, and some of the most imposing Chris-
tian figures of any age are the Fathers
of the Church
who cluster in the latter half of the century—almost
all of them highborn, enjoying the best education of
the time, and trained
in the monastic movement, yet
emerging also as great men of the
world—Saint Basil,
Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine,
and
many more. In a period of influential bishops, particu-
larly Saint Ambrose in Milan, the reign of
Theodosius
I (379-95) saw paganism forbidden, heretics pursued
by the
government, Catholic orthodoxy the official
religion of the whole empire,
and the spiritual author-
ity boldly asserting
its right against the temporal. The
piety of the lower sections of society
made itself evi-
dent in the further development
of the cult of martyrs
and the veneration for relics, as well as in the
eagerness
for pilgrimages.
Early in the fifth century, Saint Augustine had to
meet an important
accusation from the paganism that
still asserted itself, particularly in
some of the aristoc-
racy. Barbarian raiders
had even reached the city of
Rome. The tragedy that was falling upon the
West was
being ascribed to the desertion of the pagan deities.
Augustine answered the charge in his City of God.