THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY nY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIBJU UUOLLA, CALIFORNIA RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY AND THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT BY AUGUSTE SABATIER Late Dean of the Protestant Faculty of Theology in the University of Paris TRANSLATED BY LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON NEW YORK McCLURE, PHILLIPS MCMIV CO. Copyright, 1904, ty McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. r\ i ? Published, February, 1904, N * UNIVERSITY LIBRARY SAN DIEGO NOTE IT is with a sense of obeying the will of him who is no more that we publish this work. The task is at once very grateful, because it seems to us like giving a sort of survivorship to his thought, and very sorrow- ful, from the bitterness of our consciousness that he is no longer here to perfect his own work, and to present it himself to the public in the concise and literary form which he would have given to it. On December 2, 1900, my husband joyfully called me to him, saying, " I have put the last period to my book." And while I was congratu- lating him, he added: " Now I shall let it rest during our journey to Egypt and Palestine. It will take me three months to revise it on our return, but I shall not modify its form, for I have said that which I desire to say. If accident befalls me during the journey remember this: my book must come out whatever happens. There it lies," he continued, turning to his desk ; " you will give it to Menegoz and Rob- erty, who will both willingly revise it; but it must appear!" He repeated the words with emphasis, separating each syllable to show that this was his well-considered determination. Although he had long been out of health, he had no idea that his disease would progress so rapidly, and when I spoke to him of rest he would say : " I have work planned out for two hundred years," or else, " I hope to die in my professorial chair." This hope was almost fulfilled, for on the 6th of February my husband gave a lecture, and returned home, literally staggering, to take to his bed. It was an immense disappointment to him to give up the journey to Palestine, for which, on the very evening before, he had been making preparations. He had long dreamed of the journey as the crown of all his toil. v vi NOTE On December 80, 1900, we were alone together in the country. I took an atlas, and while he, shivering over the fire, with closed eyes, described the hoped-for journey, I, wondering, followed on the map the outlines of the Lake of Tiberias, the picturesque features of the country, which he described as if he had seen them. He was listening to the words of Christ, looking upon the places where they had been spoken, describing to me the prospect which Jesus had before his eyes as he spoke. It was a never-to-be-forgotten evening. During the twenty-five years that I had the privilege of sharing his life I never ceased to wonder at the prodigious powers which enabled him to accomplish a truly superhuman task. He worked incessantly and everywhere, undisturbed by noises, conversations, the children's plays, music, bursts of laughter : nothing interrupted or confused his thought. The activity of his brain was so intense that it drew heavily upon his physical strength. Worn out by his labours, he 'gently breathed away his life on April 12, while praying, " Our Father, who art in heaven." It is impossible to give adequate recognition to the zeal of those friends who have kindly revised this volume, with all its references: M. Menegoz, the chosen partner of his theological thought, his brother- in-arms ; MM. J. Emile Roberty, Jean Reville, Adolphe Lods, who had been more or less his pupils, and who, having become his colleagues, were bound to him with unalterable affection. With pious respect they have hardly touched the form of this work, preferring to leave some repeti- tions rather than risk weakening the thought, and not daring to under- take the work of condensation which its author would have performed. When he had written out all his thought he was never weary of cutting down, pruning, seeking for greater clearness and conciseness. Thanks, therefore, to all you, his true and faithful friends. Though the book lacks its last fine touch, at least those who know how such labour is done will see with what a sure hand the master craftsman blocked out his work, how firm was his design and how definite his thought, from the first sketch. FRANKLINE SABATIEB. PREFACE THIS volume forms a sequel to the work which the author published in 1897, under the title, " Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based upon Psychology and History." Two systems of theology still confront one another: the theology of authority and the theology of experience. They are characterised by methods radically opposed in the scientific development of religious ideas and Christian dogmas. To the solution of the question of method the present work is consecrated. At the present hour one method is dying and destined soon to disappear ; the other is taking on ever more vigorous development, and is destined to triumph. The problem here discussed belongs not simply to the order of philos- ophy. It reacts strongly upon the social order. In fact, the relations between civil and religious society, between Church and State, necessarily differ in character according as religion is conceived of as an inner inspiration upspringing in human consciences that have been tilled and sown by the divine Spirit, or as a supernatural institution charged by a higher and external authority with the education, training, and gov- ernment of human spirits. In the first case religion becomes inherent in civil society itself, as it is in the human conscience; it acts beneath the surface, like the hidden sap that awakens the winter-bound tree to the new life of spring, yet neither suppresses nor does violence to its legitimate development. In the second, on the contrary, religion claims external authority as a divine law to which all human laws must yield, as an extra-human truth which the intelligence must receive with docility, as a tutelage, in fact, to which man must submit. Hence inevitably arise those irremediable conflicts, less violent among Protestant nations, TU viii PREFACE because the authority of Protestant dogma is always relative, more pro- found and acute among Catholic peoples, by reason of their moral cus- toms, and their concordats, which latter, it is true, may moderate the violence of these conflicts, but leave untouched the fatal root of all the evil. In France, especially, the religious question underlies all political agitation. The strange alternation of movements of revolt and of reaction, between which the country oscillates, is both consequence and symptom of a fundamental religious problem existing in its political life, ever ill stated and ever wrongly solved. Nevertheless, it is not in the least degree from a political point of view that the question is treated in these pages. Such problems demand to be persistently studied and meditated by themselves and for them- selves alone, without prepossession either of dislike or favour, in the sole interest of truth. This book is in no sense a work of polemics. Whether discussing the Catholic or the Protestant dogma of authority, our inten- tion has not been to refute either, but before all things to give a historic explanation of their formation and their destiny. Every system has its immanent logic which impels it toward its point of perfection, and thus revealing its internal inconsistencies or insufficiencies, impels it no less irresistibly to dissolution and ruin. The history of a dogma is its inevitable criticism. Revealing the laborious method of its formation, it explains its origin ; pointing out the elements which have entered into its composition, it defines its nature; and finally, making manifest the changes which, from epoch to epoch, have taken place in general ideas, the new configuration of the historic soil upon which these construc- tions of the past repose, it lays bare their foundations, and by that very act reveals their transient and contingent character. In this sense Schiller's saying is true : Die Weltgeachichte ist das Weltgericht. In an argument against the systems and method of authority we have not wished to impose upon the reader the necessity of believing us upon our own word. We have supported each important affirmation PREFACE ix by authentic citations. This part of our work is that which has cost us the most labour. This volume is especially offered to students, to those who read not for mere amusement, but for instruction's sake, and who seek in these matters to reach a reasonable, sound, and accurate conviction. Such will here find bibliographical directions which may aid them in their own researches. The list of citations is far from complete; it was necessary to be content with those that are essential. 1 More than ever we are convinced that psychology and history are the two nursing mothers of religious philosophy. Our former volume was simply a work of psychology and history, and nothing else will be found here. PARIS, August 14, 1899. 1 Appendix I. CONTENTS Preface by Madame Sabatier INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM I. The Conflict of Methods XT II. Authority and Autonomy xviii III. Of Authority in Matters of Religion xxviii BOOK I THE ROMAN CATHOLIC DOGMA OF AUTHORITY CHAPTER I DEFINITION OF THE DOGMA I. The Formula of the Dogma 8 II. The Meaning of the Dogma 8 III. The Root of the Dogma and Its Constituent Elements .... 19 CHAPTER II THE CHURCH I. The Catholic Notion of the Church ......... 16 II. The Messianic Kingdom and the Church 21 III. The Greco- Roman Basis of the Catholic Church 27 IV. The Church and Heresies . . 32 CHAPTER III TRADITION I. Historic and Supernatural View . .39 II. The Authority of Tradition in Judaism 42 III. The Earliest Christian Tradition 44 IV. The Baptismal Formula and the Apostolic Symbol 51 V. The Genesis of the Catholic Theory of Tradition 55 VI. Development of the Catholic Theory 61 xi xii CONTENTS CHAPTER IV THE EPISCOPATE I. The Episcopate and Tradition 68 II. History of the First Christian Community of Corinth .... 70 III. Progressive Development of the Episcopate 75 IV. The Priesthood 83 V. Apostolic Succession .90 VI. The Theory of Cyprian Cathedra Petri 98 CHAPTER V THE PAPACY I. The Formative Law of the Catholic Hierarchy 101 II. The Share of Rome in the Origin of the Papacy 105 III. The Legend of St. Peter's Chair 112 IV. First Age of the Papacy Grandeur and Decadence 120 V. The Infallible Pope . .129 VI. The Future of the Papacy 136 BOOK II THE PROTESTANT DOGMA OF AUTHORITY CHAPTER I PRIMITIVE PROTESTANTISM I. The Reformation and Humanism 145 II. Originality of the Reformation Principle 150 III. The Bible and the Reformers 155 IV. The Inward Witness of the Holy Spirit; or, The Subjective Basis of Protestantism 160 CHAPTER II THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE BIBLE I. Origin of the Idea of Inspiration 165 II. Belief in Inspiration in the Christian Church 167 III. The Principle of the Dogma 174 IV. The Construction of the Dogma 175 V. Comparison of the Protestant and Catholic Dogmas of Authority . . 183 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER III THE PROGRESSIVE DISSOLUTION OF THE DOGMA I. The Basis of the Dogma Displaced 188 II. The Progress of Biblical Criticism 191 III. Concessions and Compromises The Triumphs of Rationalism . . . 197 IV. Latent Germs and New Methods 202 CHAPTER IV THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I. Revival and Reaction 212 II. The Final Crisis 218 III. The Last Bulwark of the System of Authority 229 CHAPTER V WHAT IS THE BIBLE? I. The Two Elements of the Answer . . 235 II. The Historic Notion of the Bible 235 III. The Religious Notion of the Bible 240 IV. The Attempt at Synthesis 244 V. Conclusion 250 BOOK III THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT CHAPTER I FROM THE RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY TO THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT Preliminary Dialogue 255 I. Authority and Religion ........... 255 II. Historic Testimony and Criticism 263 III. Why has the Christian Religion Hitherto Taken on Authoritative Forms? 278 CHAPTER II JESUS CHRIST THE FOUNDER OF THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT I. The Teaching of Jesus, Its Form 283 II. Jesus and the Old Testament 288 III. The Person of Jesus Christ, Its Authority 292 IV. The Nature of the Gospel 295 xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER III THE NEW TESTAMENT THE CHARTER OF THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT I. The Fulfilment of the Messianic Promise 301 II. The Paulinian Notion of Inspiration 305 III. The Johannean Doctrine of Inspiration 309 IV. The Idea of the Universal Priesthood 312 V. The Tradition of the Religion of the Spirit 313 CHAPTER IV CONTENT OF THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT I. The Antinomy Resolved . . 319 II. The Gospel of Salvation 323 III. The Gospel of Salvation and the Person of Christ 329 IV. Faith, Belief, and Theology 335 CHAPTER V SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY, ITS MATTER AND METHOD I. The Spirit of Piety and the Scientific Spirit 342 II. Conditions on which Theology May Become Scientific . . . . 345 III. The Degree of Objectivity in Religious and Christian Experience . . 349 IV. Religion and Theology 350 V. The Matter, Function, and Method of Theology ...... 359 CHAPTER VI THE ORGANISATION OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE I. Unity; Its Organising Principle . . 362 II. Analysis of the Christian Consciousness 366 III. The Three Degrees of Religious Evolution 369 IV. Construction of the System 375 INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM I The Conflict of Methods To the thinking man a discord between methods is a graver matter than an opposition between doctrines. The antagonism which has arisen between traditional theology and the kindred group of all other modern disciplines is of this kind. In the former the method of authority still reigns. 1 The latter depend only upon experience. It follows that between the two there can be no bond nor any common standard. It is the property of the method of authority to base all judgment of doctrine upon the exterior marks of its origin and the trustworthiness of those who promulgated it. In religion this method appeals to miracles, which accredit God's messengers to men, and stamp their words or writings with the divine imprint. On the other hand, the modern experimental method puts us in imme- diate contact with reality, and teaches us to judge of a doctrine only according to its intrinsic value, directly manifested to the mind in the degree of its evidence. The two methods are so radically opposed that to accept the latter is at once to mark the former as insufficient and outworn. It sometimes happens that the advocates of the former, to make it the more acceptable, reduce it to the necessary and legitimate use of testimony admitted in matters of history. It is easy to show the con- fusion which must follow. Historical testimony, derived from men who i Appendix II. xv xvi INTRODUCTION are recognised as fallible and limited, is always received subject to cau- tion, and the truth which the historian draws therefrom is simply the result of the comparisons which he institutes between various testimonies, and the verification to which he submits them. Thus the foundation of historic certainty is still evidence verified by rational criticism. Quite otherwise is the method of authority. The testimony upon which the argument is based is the testimony of God. The point of departure is the axiom that it is reasonable and just that human reason should subordinate itself to the divine reason, should indeed be silent and humble before it. All reasoning of this kind avowedly or tacitly implies on the part of the thinking subject a declaration of incompetence, and as a consequence a conscious or unconscious act of abdication. In the Middle Ages the method of authority, lording it over the human mind, dominated in all sciences. A proposition of Aristotle, an utterance of Scripture, a dictum of the Fathers, a decision of a council, settled officially, and for most men quite as fitly, a problem of physics, astronomy, or history as a problem of morals or philosophy. One stands astounded on ascertaining how great was the authority of the ancients in the schools up to the end of the seventeenth century. Yet this infantile method was vanquished on the day when Galileo and Bacon opposed to it in the realm of physics the method of observation and experiment, and when Descartes, in philosophy, subjecting all tradi- tional ideas to a provisional doubt, resolved to accept as true only those which appeared to him to be evidently such. It was an intellectual revolution of incalculable importance, which put an end to the long minority of the human mind by asserting its autonomy. To say that the mind is autonomous is not to hold that it is not sub- ject to law; it is to say that it finds the supreme norm of its ideas and acts not outside of itself, but within itself, in its very constitution. It is to say that the consent of the mind to itself is the prime condition and foundation of all certitude. This principle explains the character, the independence, and the marvellous expansion of modern culture during INTRODUCTION xvii the past three hundred years. If theology persists in subjecting itself to an ancient method from which all other disciplines have freed them- selves, it will not only find itself in sterile isolation, but it will expose itself to the irrefutable denials and unchallengeable judgments of a reason always more and more independent and certain of itself. Without doubt, if religion could remain in the realm of pure senti- ment, it would be beyond the jurisdiction of science; but religion ex- presses and realises itself in doctrines and institutions which cannot be exempted from criticism. These doctrines, which bear upon their face the indelible date of their birth, implicate as to the constitution of the universe, the history of the early ages of humanity, the origin and nature of the writings in the canonical Scriptures, certain notions bor- rowed from the philosophy and general science of a bygone period of human history. To force them upon the philosophy and science of to-day and to-morrow is not merely to commit an anachronism; it is to enter upon a desperate conflict in which the authority of the past is defeated in advance. This is why traditional theology appears to be always in distress; one by one she abandons her ancient positions, having been unable to find security or a basis of defence in any of them. Let astronomy tell the story of the heavens, or geology that of the earth ; let Egypt, India, or Assyria reveal its past; let historical criticism study the texts and monuments of antiquity ; let Darwin and his successors relate the evolu- tion of creatures and the history of life upon our globe, and some sec- tion of the sacred walls is inevitably undermined, and the entire edifice of ancient beliefs seems shaken to its foundations. It may perhaps be said : Granted that with the method of authority theology cannot maintain its dignity as a true science ; is it yet certain that it can survive without this method? Thus, in the eyes of the majority, the problem of authority becomes a question of life or death for theology, and even for religion. To fore- stall a hasty conclusion, let us first of all point out to troubled minds xviii INTRODUCTION that a change of method does not necessarily entail the destruction of a science. The latter can disappear only if the object of its study vanishes. Now the religious phenomenon is the permanent object of theology. So long as the religious phenomenon of Christianity is repeated, so long it will continue to be necessary to study it, to deter- mine its conditions, its nature, cause, and significance. The experi- mental method destroyed the astrology and physics of ancient days, but it created a new physics and a new astronomy. Why should not the same method, adopted by theology, have the same fecundating and rejuvenating effect? And if this transformation is not logically impossible, why should it not be justified in the eyes of the Christian conscience as well as in those of history and philosophy? To this ques- tion the studies collected in this volume are meant to reply; and for this radical revolution it is their purpose to prepare. II 'Authority and Autonomy THE conflict of methods ends in the antinomy between the authority of tradition and the autonomy of the mind. These are two historic and social puissances, which, though often opposed one to another, are none the less allied and correlative. In the moral progress of humanity, and in the acquisition of learning, it may be said that they play equal and equally necessary parts. It is important, then, before going farther, to take account of their relations. These relations at once lead back to those of the individual with his species. Authority is the right of the species over the individual, autonomy is the right of the individual with regard to the species. In metaphysics there is no problem more important than that of the relation of the particular to the general, of the individual being to the universal being. The question, at bottom, is to know whether the spirit shall be subordinated to the creature or the creature to the INTRODUCTION spirit ; whether in the phenomenon of consciousness, which is necessarily individual, we are to see an accident without meaning or the manifesta- tion of the true being. In the former case all individuality, mere ephemeral efflorescence, is engulfed in a materialistic pantheism; it has just the degree of reality, and the destiny, of the wave that ceaselessly swells and falls back upon the face of the rayless ocean. In the other case, individualisation, that is, the persistent production of more dis- tinctly marked individualities, ever more stable and more clearly con- scient, becomes the very law of universal evolution. Consciousness ap- pears as the final cause, and hence as the profound reason of things, and where it takes on a moral character it is crowned in the eyes of the whole universe with an inviolable and sacred majesty. Yet this is only half the truth. While tending to individuality the world tends neither to anarchy nor to disorder. Individuality does not exhaust the phenomenon of consciousness. In every consciousness there is a new principle of unification, the germ of an order grander and more beautiful than the material order which is maintained by physical laws. Side by side with individual energies, which doubtless cause divi- sion and separation, is there not in the intelligence itself an element of generalising reason, and in the heart a principle of sympathy, a law of fraternal love, bringing individual wills into concord and unity? Solidarity, which in nature is a ruthless fact, becomes in the realm of the spirit a moral ideal, a holy obligation. Should it not be the task of humanity as it emerges from nature, and rises into the life of the spirit, to realise and to make apparent above the physical universe that moral universe which reproduces all its riches, and all its harmony in a higher plane, and with an ineffable glory? For it is a fact that the moral consciousness does not appear at the beginning of evolution, nor does it at any moment burst suddenly into being all luminous and perfect. It emerges slowly and laboriously from the night of nature. It cannot establish itself without subordinating physical laws to its own laws, hence contradictions and repeated con- xx INTRODUCTION flicts. Thus there is always a double relation between nature and the spirit; nature remains for the moral consciousness a necessary support which it has no right to despise, and at the same time an obstacle which it ought to overcome, and a limit which it must overpass. In a positive sense, nature prepares for the advent of the spirit ; this is its reason for being. In a negative sense, the spirit can triumph only in raising itself above nature. Let us here descend from metaphysics to history. In the light of these principles the relations between the species and the individual will be easily defined. Every individual life is from the beginning determined by the col- lective life from which it emanates. Man is not born adult or inde- pendent. Little by little he differentiates himself from the species, as the child emerges from the matrix in which it was formed. If none should live for himself, it is because none exists by himself. I belong to my race, to my family, by my organism. The fact of my birth has determined in advance the conditions of my life and the outlines of my destiny ; it has made me a white man and not a negro, a European, a Frenchman of the nineteenth century, instead of a savage and a barbarian. Upon my nurture depend not only my health and my race instincts, but also my intellectual faculties and my moral inclina- tions; from society, in the bosom of which I grow up, I receive my education and all my ancestral heritage. In fact, my being is like a body immersed in an encompassing and penetrating fluid. Heredity, which imposes upon me the irresistible bias of ancestral life ; political order, which shuts me up in its decrees ; custom, which in time becomes second nature; historic tradition and testimony of my fellows, which extend my life in time and space and enlarge my per- sonal experience to embrace the total experience of humanity who shall show the limits of the empire which species exercises over the formation of the individual, and over the course of his destinies? All these influences are concentrated and made active by relations which they are continually creating and developing. Authority of the INTRODUCTION xxi family, authority of the school, authority of the tribe, of the city and the Church; these are conservative and educating potencies, without which the progress of civilisation and moral culture were not even con- ceivable. Authority, then, has its roots in the organic conditions of the life of the species, and its end in the formation of the individual. This essentially pedagogical mission at once justifies and limits it. Like every good teacher, authority should labour to render itself useless. What does the man become under this tutelage? From his parents and masters the child receives his language, his ideas, his manner of life, his very ways of thinking and feeling. At the outset his trust is entire, his faculty of testing and of criticism almost null. But soon, by the very process of education, his reason awakes and grows stronger. From thenceforth he carries within himself an inward judge who sum- mons to his tribunal, and judges by his own law, the things which sur- round him, and those which are taught him. He will know for himself the world in the midst of which he lives ; he tests by his own experience the statements of his teachers. The latter may no longer rely upon the prestige of their authority; they are obliged to give him proofs and reasons; they must persuade him if they would gain him, and if in his turn he expresses an opinion, it is no longer upon the faith of others, but as the result of an inward ordeal to which he has submitted it. Thus the method of direct intuition and experiment succeed the method of authority, not by the way of arbitrary evolution, but progressively, and as the necessary effect of the development of the conscience and the reason. And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction, and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognised truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established. A like evolution toward autonomy has gone forward in the history of humanity. Only it has been slower and more stormy. Emerging xxii INTRODUCTION from the state of nature, humanity tends to the state of reason, but it has not yet arrived there. The heavy chains of primitive animality still weigh it down, and it is only by throwing off those that are out- ward, transforming and spiritualising those that are within, that it can rise to liberty and light, and establish itself at last in the moral security of the autonomous conscience. Authority which is purely exterior is neither reasonable nor disinterested. It ought to be a guide, but it grows blind ; tutelage becomes tyranny. The past is continually strug- gling for self-perpetuation against the future which is sure to dawn. Hence those conflicts, crises, revolutions, martyrdoms, which make the path of the human race a road to Calvary. The son of man is perpetu- ally climbing it, bearing his cross. And yet the goal is there, and this goal is the enfranchisement of the spirit. History is a moral pedagogy, whose vitality lies in this per- petual struggle between the autonomy of the conscience and social authority. Of this struggle are born all the problems which civilised peoples to-day have to face. In the political order it is the conflict between the governing class and the governed. The authority of the former has long been main- tained by virtue of the might of victorious strength, or the sovereignty of divine authority. The awakened reason asks authority for its credentials, and the latter may present only such as are reasonable. In one way or another it must show that it acts only for the greatest good of the governed, and exists only by virtue of their consent. To recon- cile the autonomy of the citizen with the necessities of the social order: this is the political problem. The same conflict exists in the economic order between capital, which, being accumulated wealth, is also the authority of the past, and labour, which represents the present effort of living energy. Labour will no longer be the slave of capital; it also aspires to autonomy. To con- ciliate the autonomy of labour with the necessities of the industrial order: this is the economic problem. INTRODUCTION xxiii In the bosom of the family the same cause produces the same results. What is it that has so notably weakened the ancient authority of the father over his children and domestics, and of the husband over his wife? Whence comes the struggle now going on in all civilised nations between woman and man? It is the same principle of autonomy, which, gathering strength from all that develops the forces of the mind, so disquietingly shocks the deepest foundations of the old world. To reconcile the rights of the moral personality of woman and child with the existence and the unity necessary to a family, this above all others, is the social problem. In the order of religious and philosophic thought, the antagonism is not less acute, nor the crisis less threatening. The dualistic concep- tion of the natural and the supernatural, the antithesis of a world ex- terior to God and a God exterior to the world, acting and reacting upon one another from without, the government of the world by those catastrophes which we call miracles, the supernatural authority which the churches draw from this method to substantiate their claim to im- pose their irrational dogmas upon the faith of the simple, and govern minds as the kings of the earth used to govern bodies, all this old system has succumbed under the irresistible activity of the emancipated philo- sophic reason. Here, again, autonomy in revolt first of all showed the way to irreligion and atheism, just as, in politics, it engenders upris- ings and causes strikes in the industrial order, and the free union in the family order. Violent explosions always make ruins, but ruins are not solutions. To reconcile the autonomy of thought with the indefeasible laws of the moral consciousness, scientific freedom with faith in the God who is spirit: this is the religious and moral problem more profound and urgent than all the others. The relations between authority and autonomy are, then, neither simple nor easy, because autonomy and authority are not fixed quan- tities, but states essentially unstable, and always yet to be. It must be clearly understood that the passage from one system to another has as xxiv INTRODUCTION its ineluctable condition, so far as man is concerned, the passing of the animal life into the life of the spirit. The sovereignty of external authority is weakened only when that of reason and the conscience begin and increase. As the reptile may not hope to soar in upper air before growing wings and becoming a bird, so the man who continues to live a purely animal life may not aspire to a true autonomy. Violent agitations may achieve a change of master, but they cannot bring the man out of slavery. Here the nature of the being deter- mines the conditions of his life. The animal can but serve or dis- appear. This is the vicious circle in which those revolutionaries are turn- ing who dream that by violence they can put an end to a system of authority. If they join forces to oppose a greater material strength to that which the hated authority commands, they may, indeed, triumph over it, but the victorious strength, being merely brute strength, must necessarily create a new rule of authority, which will be as much more burdensome as the strength which founded it was more irresistible. Thus, in the French Revolution, we saw the despotism of absolute mon- archy give place to the tyranny of the Convention, and this, after a few years of anarchy, disappear before the military tyranny of Napoleon. Material forces were opposed to and beaten by forces greater, but of the same nature. Reason is to liberty, and to the har- mony of spirits, that which the law of gravitation is to the movements of matter. Reason can assert no influence over the movements of bodies, weight can do nothing with the organisation of spirits. The sole way of escape from the action of brute force is the consciousness of yielding full obedience to the inward law of reason. Authority is a necessary function of the species, and for very self- preservation it watches over that offspring in whom its life is prolonged. To undertake to suppress it is to misapprehend the physiological and historic conditions of life, whether individual or collective. Itself both pedagogic method and social bond, it may be transformed, it cannot INTRODUCTION xxv disappear. Pure anarchists are unconscious dreamers. The species and the individual, tradition which is the experience of the past, and the experience of to-day which will be the tradition of to-morrow, are data equally positive and inviolable. Their reciprocal play, the actions and reactions which flow from them, are the very warp of history. None may with impunity isolate himself from his race and his social cradle. None may dare, without forfeit, to renounce the benefits or the burdens of the solidarity which unites him with his brothers, his fore- fathers, and his children. We should fall to the level of the brute if each one had to begin for himself the work of the ages. Individuality itself would thus find its ruin, for individuality is the child and heir of the labours of the entire human race, which alone, by preparing its moral and material conditions, have made possible its appearance. Why, then, is the civilised man less a slave to the fetters of nature than the savage? His present autonomy rests upon the authority of tradition, and is its fruit. 1 Humanity does not exist outside of the individual man, or without him ; the individual man does not exist outside of humanity and without it. The individual and society are the object one of the other. Their apparently contradictory rights are, in reality, mutual duties. The moral dignity of a society is measured by what it does to educate and form the personality of its members, the moral dignity of an individual by what he does for his brothers, and for the social body to which he be- longs. The well-being of one necessarily depends on that of the other. Where individuality is weak, without initiative or energy, the social body, whatever its extent in space, is neither strong nor really great. That society which, to maintain itself, oppresses individual souls, and sacrifices their rights and their culture to its own tranquillity, is like a mother who should devour her children. The individual who, by his own selfishness, exploits or destroys the social bond, is the perverse or heedless child who, to warm himself, sets fire to the house of his fathers. Social authority and individual autonomy are not more hostile, and can 1 Appendix III. xxvi INTRODUCTION no more legitimately be opposed to one another, than the final destiny of man from that of humanity. And yet authority is never other than a power of fact. This is to say that it cannot be the philosophic explanation nor the ultimate reason of anything. A provisional and intermediary condition, a method of protecting the good acquired in the past, the explanation of authority lies in that which preceded it, and its justification in that which must follow it. When we accept political, philosophical, moral, or religious decisions, we suppose them, and those who promulgate them always sup- pose them, to be just and reasonable. An authority, whatever its nature, convicted of injustice and unreasonableness, falls under the dominion of the mind of him who submits to it. Whether willingly or unwillingly, authority must own the control of reason. In the historic evolution of humanity it represents a rational condition which maintains it as long as itself endures. When the condition is outworn authority must perforce change, whether it will or not. Formerly the father of the family had the power of life and death over his children and slaves, and could be called to account by no one for the way in which he treated them. Kings and priests had a power no less absolute over their subjects or their flock. Not very long ago the King of France, of his sole will, could throw a citizen into the Bastile; the French father could put his daughter into a convent, and the Church, with the aid of the civil power, could send a heretic to the scaffold. Why is all this impossible to-day? An established authority, however great its antiquity or its power, never carries its justification in itself. It must show itself reasonable to the awakened reason which demands its credentials. By that fact it has been changed. The fact must show itself reasonable, or, in other words, the budding law of reason tends to change itself into fact, by modi- fying the inward state. Authority can maintain itself only by becom- ing more moral ; by placing its supporting point always less apart from man, always more essentially within the man himself. The authority of INTRODUCTION xxvii material force, of custom, tradition, the code, more and more yields place to the inward authority of conscience and the reason, and in the same measure becomes transformed for the subject into a true autonomy. The sphere of rule is not decreased ; much the contrary ; the rule will be so much the better obeyed as it becomes immanent in the conscience and the will of man, and identifies itself with his own moral nature. Theft is a crime which public force represses. My property will be much better guarded if I live among thoroughly honest people than it could be by the intermittent vigilance of the policeman if I lived among thieves. The fear of the court-martial does not always deter the con- scienceless soldier from deserting in the face of the enemy ; but if patriot- ism has possession of me as a sacred duty, this sentiment will be more efficacious to make me a soldier faithful to the flag than all the threats in the world. There is all the difference between legality and morality, between abstaining from evil and virtue. Far from leading to anarchy, the true autonomy, which is and can be no other than the true obedience and inward consecration of the soul to the law of goodness, can alone bring about the highest order and entire harmony. Being essentially progressive, and far removed from the state of perfection, neither authority nor autonomy may be posited as absolute. They act upon one another for mutual strength, and together they aspire toward the same ideal of right and justice. Autonomy, in action, transforms authority by gradually displacing its seat. So much the more does authority contribute to the development of autonomy. From their interaction results the progress of humanity. Thence it follows that every historic authority demands at once re- spect and criticism; respect because, being the expression of a given tradition, custom, social state, it brings us an inheritance by which we have profited and shall continue to profit; criticism, because by elevat- ing our conscience and reason, this very authority no longer represents anything other than a bygone phase of evolution, and its only reason xxviii INTRODUCTION for being must be a new progress. Free inquiry, with regard to author- ity, is not only a right, it is a duty. The new truth discovered by free inquiry is older and more venerable than the most venerable authority. After his years of school and apprenticeship, man is called by the very seriousness of life to revise the opinions of his master, to accept the heritage of the past only for what it is worth, to conduct himself toward the institutions of his country, with a view to making them better sub- serve the common good. This is the progress of human affairs; they never make better advance than when they are freed from the injurious constraint of a superstition which renders authority incapable of prog- ress, or a revolt which destroys it. The new generations which sub- mitted to authority now exercise it in their turn, and if they have truly profited by the experiences of their elders, they will exercise it after a much more reasonable and useful fashion. To conclude: Authority, in its true conception, is, and can be no other than relative. m Of Authority m Matters of Religion THIS theory of the national genesis and social function of authority will easily be granted for the ordinary course of human things in gen- eral. But when the question is of religion, men stop and protest. They postulate for it an authority of another sort and origin, without which, they say, religion cannot be maintained. The divers religious ortho- doxies differ, as to the form or the seat of authority; some put it in the Bible, others in the Church; but they are in accord as to its nature. All of them claim that the authority which they have constituted within themselves is the expression of a divine authority. Supernatural in its institution, it must be infallible in its teaching and its decrees. This dogma becomes the foundation and guaranty of all the others. INTRODUCTION xxix The method of authority asserts itself, and religion, sheltered from every commotion, remains motionless in the midst of universal mobility. Thus the question which is the object of our study is seen to be at least sharply circumscribed and defined. We are not concerned with those natural, historic, and human authorities, which are born of the very force of things, and are modified according to the evolution of the reason and the conscience, whose right of censure they accept or endure. Nothing is more natural, nor more easy to conceive and justify, than that authorities of this order should be organised in religious societies, and particularly in the Christian Church, to exercise the same tutelary and pedagogic function, respond to the same needs, and tend to the same end the spiritual autonomy of believers. Who would deny, from this point of view, the action of the Church and the Bible ? Doubtless we must make reservations here ; nothing that takes place in history is perfect: light and shadow are everywhere mingled and everywhere in conflict. The family itself, sweetest and holiest of institutions, has been found capable of being an instrument of tyranny. But, taken all in all, where shall we find a higher or more universal school of respect and virtue than in the Church, a more effica- cious means of comfort and consolation than the communion of brethren, a safer tutelary shelter for souls still in their minority? And what part played in history is comparable to that of the Church in the history of European civilisation? On the other hand, what can we say of the Bible which would not fall short of the reality? It is the book above all books, light of the conscience, bread of the soul, leaven of all reforms. It is the lamp that hangs from the arched roof of the sanctuary, to give light to those who are seeking God. The destiny of holiness on earth is irrevocably linked with the destiny of the Bible. Christianity can neither realise nor propagate itself without the Church; the Church cannot live without the Bible, that original source and classic norm of the religious life, as it is manifest in the Church itself. These are potencies of fact, of historic authority, and in their INTRODUCTION order come into being in no other way, are no otherwise developed and made active, than are political and pedagogical institutions in the civil order and in general culture. But just as in former times a political school, not satisfied with recognising natural rights, and anxious to defend the monarchical orders, sought to clothe its power with a supernatural and divine right, so the dogmatic of the ancient Fathers wrested the Bible and the Church from history, misapprehended their relative and conditioned character, and erected them into immediately divine authorities and infallible oracles. From that time the Church and the Bible have no longer been simply school teachers, who help the child to discover the truth for himself, and afterward to possess it in himself; they have been the model and matter of truth itself. From methods naturally designed to lead men to faith, they have become the first objects of faith. The first, and often the last article of the credo of more than one Christian, is to believe in the Bible. Strictly speaking, this dispenses with the others, since the others are contained in this, and depend upon it. Thus were formulated and established the fundamental dogmas of the Roman Catholic system and of the old Protestant system ; the super- natural authority of the Church, and the supernatural authority of the Bible, implying, as an inevitable consequence, the infallibility of one or the other. The critical examination of these two dogmas is laid upon us. What method shall we bring to it? Only one is of value to-day that dictated by the scientific spirit. In the order of the moral sciences, it is the historical and critical method, including at once the testimony of psychology and of history. Is there in the course of historic evolu- tion any trace of the supernatural institution of an external, infallible authority, with mission to rule over all religious spirits? How were formed those dogmas which make this divine institution the first article of the Christian faith? These are questions of fact which, before all other things, depend upon history. We shall, therefore, put aside from the outset all abstract or utili- INTRODUCTION xxxi tarian arguments a priori, which encumber the subject, such as these: God, having given to men a supernatural revelation, must have insti- tuted a supernatural authority, as much to preserve it from alteration, as to interpret it without error ; or, The greater part of our knowledge comes from the testimony of others; we live by authority, therefore there must be an infallible authority to teach us religious truth; or again : The benefits of the Church and the effects of the Bible excel all others, therefore the Church or the Bible, or both, must have been in- stituted by a miraculous act of God himself. It needs only to analyse such arguments to perceive that they move in a vicious circle, taking for granted what ought to be demonstrated, or that they are insufficient because of the infinite distance between the premisses and the conclusion. For more cogent reasons we shall pass over the political argument to which the name of Joseph de Maistre has been attached, and which is summed up in his famous book " Of the Pope " : The question is not whether the Pope is infallible, but whether he must be infallible; there is no religion without a church, there is no church without government, there is no government without a sovereign power, which definitely, and without appeal, sets a term to all controversy and debate. This is con- fusing infallibility of right with sovereignty in fact ; it makes religious truth a political fiction. It is an open profession that there is neither law for the conscience nor truth for the reason. Political minds may admire these reasonings, and make use of them; no philosophic spirit will ever bow before them. Against the brutal fact which would over- bear it, the reason lifts up an imprescriptible protest. Furthermore, every dogma has a history; a history which, while explaining it, also judges it: Die Geschichte ist ein Gericht. In the history of any doctrine there is an immanent dialectic which successively throws all its aspects into relief, deduces from them all their conse- quences, exposes all their contradictions, so that to follow the process is to learn how a system, an institution, a dogma, are formed, and to appreciate their value. xxxii INTRODUCTION Such is the method which we shall apply to the problem of authority in religious matters. The first two books of this work will be conse- crated to the history of the Roman Catholic and the Protestant dogmas of authority. In the third, we shall ask whether the very nature of Christianity does not exclude every rule of authority, whether the authoritative forms which until now it has worn were not, in the earlier period of its history, survivals of the antique religions which it believed itself to have abolished and replaced; finally, whether the re- ligion of the Spirit ought not to be, by that very fact, the religion of personal faith and of freedom. 1 1 2 Cor. iii. 6, 17. See Descartes, "Discourse upon Method," 1635; Schleiermacher, "Monologues," 1800, "Der christl. Glaube Einleit.," 3. Ausg., 1835; F. G. Fichte, " Die Bestimmung des Menschen," edit. 1845; Ketteler, Bishop of Mayence, " Freiheit, Autoritat, und Kirche," 3d edit., 1864. BOOK I THE ROMAN CATHOLIC DOGMA OF AUTHORITY BOOK I THE ROMAN CATHOLIC DOGMA OF AUTHORITY CHAPTER ONE DEFINITION OF THE DOGMA THE Roman Catholic dogma of authority took about sixteen centuries for its constitution and definition. The contemporaries of Irenseus and Tertullian saw its birth ; in our own day we have seen its completion at the Vatican Council. In this long labour is condensed and summed up the entire evolution of the Roman Catholic Church. It is open to anyone to discern a divine work in this process of his- tory ; but even then it must be admitted that, in this case, the ways of Providence coincide and make one with the action of historic causes, which have never ceased, during this long period of time, to unfold their natural consequences. Miracle or mystery is in no part of this work, and another Montesquieu would find no more difficulty in explaining the singular history of Papal Rome than the first found in making intel- ligible the no less astonishing greatness and decadence of the Rome of kings, consuls, and Caesars. In default of genius, we believe that the patient and attentive study of events and of texts, considered in their progress and their interrelations, will suffice. I The Formula of the Dogma WHILE in full agreement in professing the general principle of the infallible authority of the Church and its tradition, Roman Catholics before the Council of 1870 were profoundly divided by the question: What is the seat of this principle, and what its organ? 4 THE FORMULA OF THE DOGMA Since the end of the Middle Ages the theologians and jurisconsults of the Church had been divided into three schools. One followed the teaching of the University of Paris in the fifteenth century, and the Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel ; they placed the supreme author- ity in the Council General, and recognised its right to censure the Pope, and even, in case of need, to depose him for cause of scandal or heresy. 1 More moderate and more conciliating, above all things unwilling to expose themselves to the danger of a rupture with the Roman See, or of misapprehending the prerogative of those whom they believed to be the successors of Peter, Gallicans like Bossuet placed authority, not in the Council alone, nor in the Pope alone, but in their definitive and necessary agreement. This collaboration and harmony represented in their eyes the plenary and total union of the Catholic Church, to which alone the promise of infallibility had been made. 2 Finally, the third school, the ultramontane, of which Joseph de Maistre and Louis Veuillot were the most ardent apostles during the first half of the nine- teenth century, placed the Pope above the Council General, anathema- tised the Gallicism of Bossuet, and claimed for the person of the vicar of Christ alone the supernatural privilege of infallibility, the right and power to define the faith and to decide all controversies. Thus three conceptions of the Church and its government confronted one another. According to the first, the Church was an aristocratic re- public (the body of bishops), whose president might be nominated and deposed at need by the Council General, the authentic representative of the whole body. According to the second, the Church was a constitu- tional monarchy, the law of which resulted from the consent and accord of the two arms of power. And, finally, according to the third, it was an absolute monarchy, in which all rights and powers were concentrated in the person of the sovereign and flowed from him. This last doctrine was destined to triumph in the end, because it 1 Appendix IV. * Appendix V. THE FORMULA OF THE DOGMA 6 was imbedded in the logic of the generative principle of Roman Cathol- icism. Doubtless it was entirely unknown in the early centuries of the Church, although Cyprian and Augustine did indeed unwittingly posit its premisses in their theory of the Chair of St. Peter. But it was affirmed with great brilliancy and power in the theocratic programmes of Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Boniface VIII. 1 If it underwent an eclipse in the crisis of the Papacy in the fifteenth century, it was not slow to reassert itself in the sixteenth, finding then in the Company of Jesus an admirable army of defence, which in theory and in fact made it victorious. Thenceforth everything lent it aid, quite as much the impotent attacks of its adversaries as the apologies of its advocates. It was an unequal struggle between the Council and the papacy. One was intermittent, the other was always there. From the time that the power to convoke the Council and interpret its decisions was reposed in the Pope, he became its master. He had only to make effec- tive that right of sovereign arbiter and supreme interpreter of the thought of the Church which the Council of Trent had recognised as his. The Roman curia was prudently careful not to bring forward before its hour the dogmatic question of infallibility. It left fact and habit to create law and dogma, and limited its own action to rigorous con- demnation of those who still held the contrary doctrine, obliging them to recant or keep silent. Thus the world became accustomed to look upon Rome as the fountain of divine authority in the Church. Whoever re- fused to accept its decisions soon found himself cut off from Catholic communion. In 1854 Pius IX made the first trial of his power. He consulted the bishops without calling them together for deliberation, and then, upon his own pontifical authority, added a new dogma, that of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, to the Credo of the Church. Protestations were vigorous, but few and impotent. The time was ripe. He who exercised such a power should possess it by law. It was possible and it had become necessary to give final definition to this sovereign 1 Appendix VI. 6 THE FORMULA OF THE DOGMA authority, and secure its recognition by the entire Church. The proclamation of the dogma in an Ecumenical Council would be the solemn abdication of the rights and powers of Councils into the hands of the papacy. For this purpose the Vatican Council was convoked in 1870, whence was promulgated the dogma of the personal infallibility of the Pope. The infallible authority of the Council infallibly created the in- fallible authority of the Pope, and by that act died. There could not be two infallibilities in the Church. In questions of faith and morals, the Pope has sovereign authority apart from the Council. The Council apart from the Pope would have no authority. Appeal to the Council, so frequent in past centuries, has become an absurdity. To convoke it would be a useless luxury. The decree concerning the infallibility of the Pope was voted on July 18, 1870, with unanimity of all members of the Council present, save two. The other opposing members had preferred to absent them- selves from Rome. The following is the definitive formula: " Conformably to the tradition faithfully followed since the begin- ning of the Christian faith, with the approbation of the holy Council, we teach and define this as divinely revealed dogma: " The Roman Pontiff, when speaking ex cathedra that is, when performing the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians he defines, in virtue of his superior apostolic authority, a point of doctrine touching faith and morals, obligatory for the entire Church the Roman Pontiff, thanks to the divine assistance which was promised to him in the person of the Most Blessed Peter, enjoys that infallible authority with which the divine Redeemer endowed his Church, when the question arises of defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. The definitions of the Roman Pontiff are then unchangeable in themselves, and are not ren- dered such by the consent of the Church. If anyone which God for- bid! is presumptuous enough to contradict our definition, let him be anathema." THE FORMULA OF THE DOGMA 7 Side by side with this decree we may place the parallel decree of the same Council upon the jurisdiction of the Pope: " The Roman Pontiff has not only the office of inspection and direc- tion, but also full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, not only in things which concern faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the Church in the whole universe. Not only does he possess the highest parts of this power, but he has it in all its plenitude. And this his power is ordinary and im- mediate, as much over all the Churches in general, and each Church in particular, as over each Pastor and all the faithful of whatever rite or dignity they may be. If anyone denies it, let him be anathema ! " From the comparison of these two texts emerges with perfect clear- ness the mind of the Vatican Council. The first defines the dogmatic authority of the supreme Doctor of the Church ; the second explains, the absolute sovereignty of the pastor. One cannot doubt the decisions of the one without falling into heresy, nor, without falling into revolt, re- fuse the obedience always due to the other. It will not suffice to adhere to the definitions of the commandments which the Apostolic See has given in the past, one must also be ready to accept everything which it may advise or decide in the future. Thus recently decreed Pius IX and Leo XIII. . . . "In the difficult course of events, Catholic believers, if they will give heed to us as they are bound to do, will see what are the duties of each, as much in the opinions which they ought to hold as in the things which they ought to do. In the matter of thinking, it is necessary for them to embrace and firmly hold all that the Roman Pon- tiffs have transmitted to them, or shall yet transmit, and to make public profession of them as often as circumstances make necessary. Espe- cially and particularly in what is called ' modern liberties,' they must abide by the judgment of the Apostolic See, and each believer is bound to believe thereupon what the Holy See itself thinks." * 'Appendix VII. 8 THE MEANING OF THE DOGMA II The Meaning of the Dogma IT would seem difficult to dispute the meaning or the bearing of a dogma formulated with such juridical precision. Nothing that concerns the life of the Christian or of the Church is foreign to it. This being so, of what use can it be to discuss at length, as has been done, the words ex cathedra, or other conditions of pontifical infallibility? Whether the Pope speaks ex cathedra or not that is, in his capacity as universal Doctor, or universal Pastor is a point never left to the judgment of the individual mind. So soon as a Catholic believer experiences a doubt upon the subject it is his first and sacred duty not to draw from that fact a pretext for non-obedience, but to refer the question to the Roman See itself, which here, as in all other cases, remains sole and sovereign judge. No opposition of any sort can find a legitimate basis in the formula of the dogma. To be sure, upon points indifferent to their authority, the Popes may permit, and in fact they do permit, in Church or school, a certain degree of liberty. But it is not a liberty founded in right, I mean in the dignity of the spirit or of the conscience. It never exists except upon those points and within those limits where it pleases the Roman See to tolerate it. Being no longer able to dispute the absolute character of the dogma, liberal Catholics endeavour to annul it by reducing it to a pure symbol. According to them, the person of the Pope speaking ex cathedra can have only a representative value. The proclamation of his infallibility can have changed nothing in the Church. The pontifical voice would never be anything other than the echo of the voice of Catholic Christian- ity. In the latter essentially resides infallible inspiration. The Pope is the exterior hour hand which marks the time on the dial plate of the Church, which, in reality, is itself moved by more hidden springs, by the profound and mysterious movements which come to life and succeed one another in the general consciousness of the entire body. The Church THE MEANING OF THE DOGMA obeys the Pope only in appearance. It is the Pope who, in reality, obeys the Soul of the Church. Thus is the identification of the Pope and the Church posited at the same time by liberals and ultramontanes. The former use it to annul the Pope, the latter to annul the Church. The truth of the dogma is with the latter. To make it evident to all eyes they have only to recall this clause of the decree : Pontificis romani definitiones ex sese, non autem ex consensu ecclesia; irreformabiles. Whence it appears that the infallibility of the Pope is entirely personal, independent and absolute. This separation of the Pope and the Church, of the head and the body, is indeed the greatest innovation of the Council of the Vatican, and without doubt the most dangerous. By it the Council broke with the ancient tradition and opened a new era in the historic evolution of Catholicism. Let us here establish against all subterfuges the integrity of a dogma which timid consciences can bring themselves neither to reject nor fully to accept. The Pope depends only upon God. From God he imme- diately draws his enlightenment, his graces, and his powers, which with divine authority he afterwards transmits to the bishops and through them to the entire Church. To seek to overthrow the order of this hierarchy, to make the life and faith of the Church depend upon the Holy Spirit by direct means and immediate communication, in such sort that the inspiration of the Pope would be only a derived inspiration, would be to destroy the new dogma, root and branch. The Holy Spirit is not in the Pope because he is first in the Church, an invisible and immanent power; he is in the Church only by the intermediary and the visible presence of the Pope. 1 As grace inheres in the visible matter of the sacrament, so the gift of the Spirit inheres in the person of the Sovereign Pontiff. His per- sonal infallibility, which comes historically as the cornice of the edi- fice, becomes dogmatically its foundation. One is in communion with *Pezzani, "Codex S. Ecclesiae romanse," 1893, Canon 35, p. 96. 10 THE MEANING OF THE DOGMA the Church only as he remains in communion with the Pope. If by any possibility the entire body of the Church, that is to say, the totality of bishops, priests, and people, should separate themselves from the Pope and reject his definitions and his decrees, it would not be that the Pope was in error, but that the Church herself had departed from the truth. Furthermore, the Roman canonists, with invincible logic, have deduced all the practical consequences which flow from the formula of the dogma. No issue is left open to those who would escape them. The following, with and under authority of the Pope, is taught in the course of canon law in the Roman University: " To the Roman pontiff are due from all Catholics honour and obedi- ence, even when which God forbid the Pope is a bad man." It is an error to assert that the power of the Pope may be limited by the canons of ecclesiastical law, by the customs or institutions of the Church; the Pope is above the canon law. As to natural or divine law, doubtless the Pope cannot be freed from it, but he remains its supreme and infallible interpreter, so that, as a matter of fact, one can never be in the right in setting them up against him. Equally it would be idle or even ridiculous to oppose to him the Holy Scriptures or Catholic tradition, since he alone holds the key to both, that is, their authentic and legitimate interpretation. 2 The Roman Pontiff has full authority over all Councils, even Ecu- menical. When he makes a Concordat with the head of a potential State, this Concordat is not the least in the world synallagmatic and equal in its two parts. The prince is bound to conform himself to it, because it is his Christian duty to obey the Holy See. But the Pope, in accepting the Concordat, makes a purely gracious concession, always revocable 1 76., Can. 29. * lb., Can. S3. The Pope has the right, if be please, to designate his successor (Can. 48). THE MEANING OF THE DOGMA 11 whenever such a concession may turn to the detriment of the Church, or when it simply ceases to be of any utility to the Church. 1 Even in the matter of opinions which concern neither dogma nor morals, it is of strict obligation to receive and to profess, the case occur- ring, all past, present, and future instructions and directions of the sovereign Pontiffs. And it is not enough to yield them external obedi- ence in silence and respect. The only worthy and religious obedience is inward, the obedience of the heart. 2 So soon as faith becomes nothing other than submission to an external authority, theology is necessarily reduced to be the mere redaction of a code of canon law. Is a discussion raised in the Church, the con- testing powers soon cease to argue, and seek to evoke a decision of the Roman court, which shall crush the adversary and put an end to the dispute. Religious truth is then not a matter of knowledge or* of reason, but of politics and diplomacy. In the Roman system it becomes thenceforth impossible to find the slightest basis for a constitutional opposition to the sovereignty of the Pope. The government of the Pope, being the government of God, is necessarily absolute. Theocracy is the foundation of the dogma of the Vatican. 3 If the utterance of the Pope is the source of truth, of law, of the salvation of individuals and of peoples, if his prescriptions ought to be law by the mere fact that they come bearing his seal, it is evident that no human sentiment, no demonstration of fact, no cry of conscience, no claim of humanity or of patriotism would have a feather's weight against the least important decretal. The dogma of the infallibility of the Pope is something entirely different from a theological theory. The deified papacy is an actual government, with its organs, its functionaries, its court, its magistrates. '/&., Can. 34 and Commentary. */&., Can. 29, p. 81; Pius IX, Constitutio Quanta cura, 1864. */&., Can. 40, 49. 12 THE ROOT OF THE DOGMA At the same time, the Roman curia is raised above the political order and the supernatural and divine order, to serve as the organ of the most limitless power which the world has ever known. It is very remarkable that the same year which saw the spiritual power of the Popes raised to its climax saw the end of their temporal power. In fact, since the sixteenth century a continual movement toward emancipation had been enfranchising the politics, science, edu- cation, and civil life of modern states from the effective tutelage of the Church. In the temporal order the claims of the Roman theocracy have become almost inoffensive, thanks to the material impotence of the Pope. None the less do they persist as a moral and metaphysical authority whose sphere of action is of immense range. In this quality they are open to discussion, and discussion is precisely their gravest danger. They can neither refuse nor maintain it. An authority which discusses ceases to be absolute, since by the mere fact of discussing and advancing arguments it recognises the supremacy of the tribunal of reason. Such is the contradiction to which the Vatican dogma has reduced Catholic theology. It cannot undertake to prove the dogma without by that very act destroying it. in The Root of the Dogma and Its Constituent Elements CONSIDERED by itself, the dogma of the infallibility of a single man, to whom all others are obliged in conscience to submit the direction of their religious thought and the conduct of their moral life, remains incom- prehensible and intolerable, a defiance of common sense. But the Roman Catholic dogma is very easily accounted for from the historic point of view, if it be studied in its profound connection with the earlier evolu- tion of the Church. It is its logical conclusion and fulfilment. The new dogma has its roots in the Catholic conception of the Church kTHE ROOT OF THE DOGMA 13 elf. It grows therefrom as the plant grows from the seed sown in e ground. The infallibility of the Pope is simply the last expression and perfected form of the infallibility of the Church. What would an abstract infallibility be, which had not an organ infallible like itself, by which to exercise itself and rule in the world of facts? The infallibility of the Pope is derived in law and in fact from the infallibility of the Church. In law, the thesis is clear; one syllogism suffices to establish it. If the Council is infallible the Pope is infallible too, for the Council has so declared him. If the Pope is not infallible, neither is the Ecumenical Council, and in this case the authority of the Council is destroyed and the entire system of Catholic authority falls to pieces. Thus it becomes clear how the new dogma, impossible as it seemed to be, so easily triumphed over its opponents. The opposition encoun- tered at the Vatican and in the Church was vain, because it was without principle or basis. Nothing was left for the Gallicans and liberal Catholics but arguments of procedure. They attacked vices of form in the convocations or in the deliberations and notes of the Council, feeble weapons which fell from their trembling hands so soon as the Council itself had declared its proceedings regular. Then those opposing were reduced to the alternative of unconditional submission or persistent hold- ing to their individual opinion, the principle of Protestantism and of all heresy. It is to-day logically impossible to believe in the infallibility of the Church without believing in that of its head, for the first has no other real expression except the second. Facts speak more loudly than the law, and history more cogently than logic. From having been, in the apostolic times, a pure democracy, the Church became a great federation governed by its bishops; it was an aristocratic system. Later the primacy of the Bishop of Rome made of it a monarchy, at first tempered by Councils, then more and more cen- tralised, omnipotent, and finally absolute. The same political necessity U THE ROOT OF THE DOGMA which had raised the second-century bishop above the Council of Elders, and made him the symbol and representative of the unity of the local church, elevated the Bishop of Rome above the other bishops and made him the personification and head of the entire Catholic body. The person of the Supreme Pontiff should therefore not be considered as in itself an ordinary and empirical individuality; he is essentially repre- sentative and symbolic, like the person of the priest at the altar or in the confessional, like the substance apparent in the sacrament. In him a mystery takes place at the moment when he seats himself upon the Chair of Peter. He is the concentration of the whole Church, as the Church in its turn, in its entire hierarchy and extent, is merely the development in time and space of that which is first of all in the very person of her chief. The Pope is the sun of which bishops and priests are the rays to carry the light and life to the very extremities of the body of the Church. From thenceforth the bishops could not test the prerogative of the papacy without destroying their own by the same stroke. Thus the dogma of the personal infallibility of the Pope is im- planted by all its rootlets in the more general dogma of the infallibility of the Church. It is its necessary and final form. Without doubt, this form annuls and supplants all preceding forms of authority, bishops or Councils, and in this sense it is true that it operated a great change and even a revolution in the Church. But this revolution came about in the same manner as those preceding, and succeeded by virtue of the same logic and for the same reasons. The principle remains the same under the changing variety of its manifestations, and the principle resides in this, that the infallibility of the Church can be apparent and active only by quitting the abstract sphere and becoming, so to speak, incarnate in a visible organ, priest, Council or Pope. 1 1 Vide Scherer, " Etudes sur la litt. contemporaine," v. pp. 341-361, " la Papautt, 1'Eglise et la soci6t6 moderne"; Thomassin, " Ancienne et nouvelle discipline de 1'Eglise," 1678-79, and "Dissertations sur les conciles"; Bossuet, "Sermon sur 1'unite de 1'Eglise et la declaration de 1682"; P. Gratry, "Lettres sur le Pape Hono- THE ROOT OF THE DOGMA 16 The notion of the Church, in its turn, resolves into two elements. It is constituted of a doctrinal element, that is, the tradition which guards the supernatural deposit of divine truth, and which must at the same time justify the rights which the Church arrogates to herself and the absolute submission to her mysteries and precepts which she demands from everyone. The other element, the organ of action and administra- tion in the Church, is the Episcopate, without which doctrinal tradition would remain uncertain and vacillating, like every human tradition. Constituted in its essence by the theory of the apostolic succession, the Episcopate is a living chain across the centuries, parallel to that of the doctrinal tradition, an unbroken link of the Church of the present to its supernatural origins, that is, to the apostles, to Christ, and to God. Church, tradition, supernatural priesthood, episcopate, papacy, such, in the order of their historical genealogy, are the constituent ele- ments of the Catholic dogma of authority. It is possible to under- stand the latter clearly, and judge it with all impartiality, only by tracing back its long genesis. We shall see the divers factors of which it is the fruit successively developing in history from their most distant origins to their latest consequences, beginning with that very notion of the Church which is earliest in date and which has engendered all the others. rius," 1870; Lord Acton, "History of the Vatican Councils," 1871; A. Harnack, " Dogmengeschichte," 1890, iii. p. 565-653; Joseph de Maistre, "Du pape" ; " Acta ct Decreta Concilii Vatican!," 1891 (Collectio Lacensis viL). CHAPTER TWO THE CHURCH I The Catholic Notion of the Church THE idea of the Church is not only the keystone of the Roman Catholic system, it is Roman Catholicism itself; in it the entire system is con- densed and summed up. The property of the Catholic conception is to present religion itself as a supernatural institution ; a sacerdotal and hierarchical institution ; that is, a visible and permanent corporation, charged by God himself to teach men what they ought to believe and do, and to save them. The Church is the ark of the new covenant which Jesus Christ, the new Noah, built with his own hands, and confided to an elect crew to rescue the lost and wanderers of earth and carry them safely to the shores of eternity. 1 In this dogma of the Church, the real and the ideal, the human and the divine, are not only reconciled, but identified and made inseparable. The Church is the historic and visible incarnation of saving truth, and of the redemptive work of God. To speak of an invisible church be- comes a futility ; it is to say that the incarnation has not taken place. The most profound and authoritative Catholic theologians of to-day love to insist upon the likeness and parallel between the incarnation of divinity in the person of the Christ and the incarnation of religion itself in the body of the Church. The second is represented as the con- sequence of the first, which thus perpetuates itself through the cen- turies. The divine Word had need of a visible organ and a human 1 Tertullian. 16 THE CATHOLIC NOTION OF THE CHURCH 17 medium in order to communicate himself to men. Like the Christ, the visible Church is therefore conceived and organised by the Holy Spirit in the bosom of humanity. It is still the Word made flesh; it is the very Son of God continuing, after his resurrection, to appear among men in a human form which perpetually renews and rejuvenates itself. Like the person of Christ, the Church is at once human and divine. In the Church the two notions communicate and interpenetrate in the unity of a supernatural life and activity. The divine element is the soul of the Church, which vivifies and leaves its imprint upon the entire body, that is, the human mass which by itself is inert and passive. From this point of view nothing is more logical or becomes more natural than the dogma of the infallibility of the Church, or the current axiom that outside the Church there is no salvation. If the Church is nothing other than the institution of salvation, created by God to res- cue men from death and damnation, they being all necessarily con- demned by original sin, it is very clear that outside of her none can be saved. And on the other hand, if the Church is divine truth incar- nate, how can she err ? To accuse the Church of error is to accuse God himself of mistake or deception; it is to say that the truth is not the truth. 1 There are two definitions of the Catholic Church, one general and one restricted. In the general sense, the Church is the visible society of all who pro- fess its faith and partake in its sacraments, in the obedience due to its legitimate pastors and to the Roman Catholic Pontiff. But considered in its inward essence and in the restricted sense of the word, the Church is, above all things, the sacerdotal and hierarchical order divinely estab- lished, the direct heir of the rights and privileges of the apostles. Was it not, indeed, the apostles to whom the promises were made, upon whom powers were conferred, to whom the mission of teaching men and making 1 J. A. Moehler, " Symbolik oder Darstellung der Dogm.," chapter on the Church; Perrone, " Theol. dogm. Trait des lieux theolog." 18 THE CATHOLIC NOTION OF THE CHURCH them holy was confided, as is the proper task and end of the Church? There are, then, actually two Churches in the Church ; the one teaching and governing, the other taught and governed; one active, the other passive. It is the essential distinction between cleric and layman. 1 There is this difference between the Catholic and the Protestant con- ceptions of the Church, that according to the latter inward virtues, such as the sincerity of faith and the reality of conversion, are required in order to become members of the true Church of Christ, while Catholic theologians simply require external marks, like the profession of the true faith and participation in the sacraments, which are of a nature to be apprehended by the senses. The reason for this is simple: if inward virtues are required, they being invisible and always uncertain, it is impossible to know who are the true members of the Church, nor, consequently, where is the true Church. We necessarily reach the dis- tinction made by heretics between the visible Church, which may be false and faithless, and the true Church, which would be invisible. As it is above all things important that there should be neither doubt nor uncertainty as to the place in which, and the persons in whom, the true Church resides, it is of the highest necessity to require, for their recog- nition, nothing invisible or occult, and consequently nothing purely spiritual and moral. " The Church," says Bellarmin, " is an organised social body as visible and palpable as the Roman people, the Republic of Venice, or the Kingdom of France." It is a true state, to which one belongs, as to any other, by an external and legal tie. The Church, like every political state, includes two sorts of mem- bers, the good and the evil, docile subjects and those rebellious or im- pious. 2 Here, as elsewhere, it belongs to the heads and possessors of legitimate authority to preserve the good and to subdue the evil by exhortations, laws, and chastisements. As political states are recruited by birth, so the Church is recruited l Perrone, ib. * Roman Catechism,!. 10, 6. THE CATHOLIC NOTION OF THE CHURCH 19 by baptism. The act of baptism is the external proof that one legiti- mately belongs to it. A baptised person may be unbelieving or rebel- lious ; he remains none the less the subject of the Church, and the Church has always the right to claim him. This theory rests upon the initial fact of a supernatural institution. The Church is not the effect of the psychological and social law which decrees that every religion, since it contains an eminent social principle, shall create a religious society by its own expansion. No, the Church is a creation of God. How, without a miracle, should the first realisa- tion of the Christian idea have been adequate to this principle? Founded upon an eternal decree, the Church instituted by Christ is to all its mem- bers pre-existent. It is a metaphysical entity descended from heaven in historic time, prepared for and prefigured in the Old Covenant, reigning sovereign in the New. Such is the doctrine of Cyprian, Augustine, Bossuet, and Leo XIII. But the modern historian never presupposes a miracle. However imposing may be the destinies of the Church, or its still more lofty claims, its birth, its development, its triumphs, and its reverses are none the less a series of phenomena, interlinked and conditioned by the cir- cumstances of time and place, like all other historic phenomena. If miracle is found neither in the circumstances nor the progress of this history, in which have met and mingled all the social forces of two thou- sand years, why should it have occurred in its beginning? Why should not the fortunes of the Rome of the Popes be naturally explicable by a concurrence of causes more numerous indeed, but not less discernible, than the fortunes of the Rome of the consuls and Caesars ? All the great empires, all the great societies of former days, were equally attributed to divine origin. Historical criticism has always been able to trace, through the golden haze of legend, the ordinary course of human societies, everywhere marked by inevitable struggles and sorrows. The fables woven around the cradle of the papacy are of no greater historic value for being of another order than those which 20 THE CATHOLIC NOTION OF THE CHURCH surrounded that of Romulus with a divine nimbus. We can mark the date of their appearance in history. They go no farther back than the third century. It was only after the Church had constituted herself an infallible oracle and an organised political power, that anyone dreamed of justify- ing in theory that which had triumphed in fact. From one end of the history of the Catholic Church to the other we can note this circum- stance. Dogma never consecrates anything that has not already passed into practice for a century or two. The Episcopal power had long prevailed in the whole Church before Cyprian made it the dogmatic theory. The Immaculate Conception of Mary, the personal infallibility of the Pope, had already been long triumphant when Pius IX made dogmas of these beliefs. Let us then establish the true relations: it is not the dogmatic and supernatural theory of the Church which makes its strength, it is the strength and victory of the Church which leads to the theory. Therefore, the strength and the victory came from else- where and should be otherwise explained. Having now been studied for nearly a century by the most impar- tial and rigorous historic method, the problem of the historic origin of the Roman Catholic Church and the theory which consecrates its claims has been illuminated by the brightest possible light. Deeply rooted in the Hebraic religion, germinating in the earliest Christian communities, developed and gradually prepared by a great variety of conflicts and a continuous succession of efforts, the Catholic notion of the Church first appears distinct and ready to be established in triumph only in the time of Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, and especially of Cyprian. Passing from the second century to the third, the sensation is as if one passed from one world to another. A revolution has taken place. Behind the Catholic form of Christianity there are more ancient forms not difficult to discern, which remain like the landmarks of a road once followed, and until our own days almost forgotten. THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH 21 II The Messianic Kingdom and the Church THE original germ of the Catholic Church is the Messianic idea of the ** Kingdom of God " or " of Heaven." It claims to be this very king- dom, the object of the hopes and prayers of the prophets and seers of Israel. And yet how different are the two conceptions ! The Kingdom of Heaven, as its name indicates, was to come from heaven at the end of time. Men were expecting, at no long delay, the supreme catas- trophe which should introduce the judgment of God, reward each man according to his works, put an end to the reign of the powers of evil, and inaugurate that of righteousness and peace. 1 This is what John the Baptist proclaimed in his energetic and familiar figures of speech : " The axe is laid unto the root of the trees, therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." 2 Jesus intended nothing else when, taking up the same theme, he said : " The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand ; repent ye and believe the gospel." 3 What relation is there between this apocalyptic and transcendent conception and the idea of a religious society politically organised, living in history side by side with terrestrial powers, having like them its chiefs, its laws, interests, diplomacy ; treating with them or battling against them to maintain and extend its hard-won privileges and con- quests? How, and by what succession of changes in facts and ideas, did the Jewish Messianic idea become the Catholic conception of the Church in the third century? These are the precise terms of the prob- lem which the origins of Christianity set before the historian and the thinker. 1 Daniel vii. 13, 14, and all Jewish and Christian apocalyptic. 'Matt, iii. 10. 'Mark i. 15. [The French translation is more vigorous: "Repent, for the measure of the time is full! The Kingdom of God is at the door; receive the good news in faith. Trans.] 22 THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH When we attribute to Jesus this Catholic conception of the Church, or simply the intention of founding something analagous to it, we fall into the most artless of anachronisms. Not only he did not will this Church ; he could not even have foreseen it, for the good reason that he thought himself to have come in the last days of the world, and all this historic development of Christianity was outside of his Messianic horizon. Since the appearance of the book of Daniel all pious souls in Israel had believed themselves to be living in the last period of history. The preaching of the Baptist had vivified this belief throughout all Palestine. Jesus assuredly shared it. The Kingdom of Heaven, for whose advent he undertook to prepare, because he expected it shortly to appear, was not a Church organised and established on earth, but the great revolution predicted by the prophets and described in the apocalypses, the striking manifestation of the righteousness and faithfulness of God. No doubt he knew neither the day nor the hour of this event, and, unlike the makers of apocalypses, he attempted no illusory calculations ; but neither did he doubt that the catastrophe of the drama in which he was engaged was imminent. " The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," he said ; " its era has already risen in the hearts of men. This generation shall not pass away until the divine trump shall have sounded." * This being the case, what interest could he have in organising a social institution for a long future? The apostles whom he commissioned were neither priests nor eccle- siastical functionaries ; they were simple messengers, bearers of the good tidings of the Kingdom. They were not to have finished visiting the cities of Israel before the Son of Man should appear. 2 In the mean- time, Jesus simply sought to group around himself the elect of God, obscure, scattered, and poor, to await with them the signal which the Father would give. Therefore he never had the idea of any other social bond than their attachment to his person, any other organisation 1 Appendix VIII. *Matt. x. 23. THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH 23 ;han their mutual good will, any other hierarchy than the reversed hierarchy of the greatest humility and the most self -forgetful love, most devoted to the welfare of others. 1 Assuredly his work had the future for its own, and was bound to conquer the world, because he laid its groundwork in the deep and im- mutable foundation of the human conscience. The words of life which, under this temporary Messianic form, he implanted in souls could not but fructify in history in every possible way. But the perspective of centuries to come was closed to him. He walked by faith in the love and righteousness of the Father, and not by sight, and none may say that his faith was deceived. None the less does it remain a fact that no one would have been more astonished and scandalised than he, had he been able to foresee all that men bearing his name, and making use of his authority, were to present to the world as his work or his thought. 2 In the direction of the future the horizon was still less open to the gaze of the apostles and the first generation of Christians. Per- suaded that the Messiah had come, they could not imagine that the world would last long. Without a single exception they awaited from day to day the triumphant return of their Master upon the clouds of heaven. The whole Apocalypse of St. John is built upon this hope. Paul was no exception. Almost to the close of his career he believed that he should see before death this glorious revolution and the resur- rection of the dead. Such an absorbing vision filled the believers with ardent enthusiasm, detached them from the earth, took away all anxiety for the future. They lived in a fever of exaltation. The necessities of common life, like its laws, seemed to them abolished. 3 The picture of the first Christian community of Corinth which we find in the letters of Paul, not less than that of the Christians of Jerusa- lem in the Acts of the Apostles, give an exact idea of this first period of individual inspiration and free expression. The elect lived in the age as not belonging to it. They considered themselves as strangers Matt, xxiii. 8-12; Mark, x. 42-45. Appendix IX. "Appendix X. 24 THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH and travellers, who pass along without thinking of any enduring estab- lishment. The individual gifts (charisms) apportioned by the Spirit to divers members of the community met all needs. The Spirit, acting in each believer, thus determined vocations, and portioned out to one and another, according to the faculties or the zeal of each, ministries and offices which appear to have been provisional. 1 But with the passage of time things were certain to change. These embryos of organisms, spontaneously opening to the light in divers forms, could not but determine and assert themselves. The charism of the Spirit was destined soon to become a permanent ecclesiastical func- tion. Above or side by side with the apostles, prophets, and teachers who held their vocation directly from God alone, and who were essentially itinerants, each community naturally drew from its own body its settled ministers, elders, bishops, and deacons charged with the general interests of the community, with the maintenance of discipline and the distribu- tion of alms. Thus came into being and grew up side by side with the free and nomad apostolate a settled ecclesiastical functionality, which was destined little by little to replace and absorb it. The progress of this absorption marks the progress of the Catholic conception of the Church, and this became perfected when, in virtue of the theory of apostolic succession, divine inspiration and ecclesiastical jurisdiction were held to be absolutely coincident. 2 The first Christian communities, composed at first of members equal among themselves and distinguished solely by varieties in the gifts of the Spirit, became in time organised bodies, veritable churches, which at first developed and took on different physiognomies according to the diversities of their geographical and social surroundings. In Palestine and beyond the Jordan the Christian community was modelled upon the Jewish synagogue, and apparently bore the same Aramaean name. In 1 1 Cor. xii., xiv.; Rom. xii. 3-9. J This evolution, which appears as accomplished* in the epistles called "Pastoral" and in the Epistles of Ignatius, was not yet universal in the time of the " Teaching of the Apostles." See " Teaching of the Apostles," xii., xiii., xiv., xv. THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH 25 the Occident it appears to have reproduced the form of pagan colleges or associations, so numerous in Greek cities at that epoch. In all this there is neither divine institution nor miracle of any sort, but simply the play and effect of general laws which rule social phe- nomena of this order. It may all be luminously explained in each region of the empire by the action of natural causes which come under the historian's observation. Yet the evolution of every organism is governed by a directing idea, which is as its perfect latent soul. This idea is no more wanting here than elsewhere. It appears in the very earliest beginning. The Christian communities scattered through the empire entertained frequent relations with one another; they received the visits and teach- ings of the same gospel messengers, or date back to the same apostles. All the communities founded by Paul, for example, had very close family ties. They were the children of the same father. It is therefore nat- ural that they should have had from the beginning a very vivid con- sciousness of their spiritual unity, and that above the particular and local churches should have appeared, precisely as in the letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles, the idea of The Church of God or of Christ, one and universal. The principle of unity was found in this, that Chris- tians who are united to Christ live by the same moral life, and are con- scious of being in the same religious relation to God, and animated by the same spirit and the same hope of the eternal life upon which they are to enter. The Apostle Paul therefore conceives of the Church of the saints and the elect as an organ of the Christ, his very body, in which the Christ, who is its head, manifests all the virtues of his spirit and sheds forth the plenitude of his divine riches. Unity, inward har- mony, the communion of saints ; here already is distinctly set forth the essential character of the Church of Christ. But this unity, in which all natural and social diversities or oppositions are effaced, is not con- ceived as an exterior and visible unity ; it is not founded upon unity of government, upon rites or even upon dogmas; it is entirely moral, and 26 THE MESSIANIC KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH is born of the communion of the Spirit; it is practically realised and maintained by mutual love. Again, the Church is represented as the pure and holy bride of the Messiah ; she awaits her spouse, and prepares herself to go forth to meet him when he shall descend from heaven upon the clouds, to inaugurate the reign of God. This Paulinian notion of the Church of Christ, like all the Apostle's theology, is essentially idealist and transcendent. Amidst the sorrows and struggles of the present age, it is the grouping of the holy and elect; it is the forming of the true people Israel, heir of the ancient promises, who are to appear and hold themselves in prayer and watchfulness during the short interval of time which separates the present from the approaching hour when their King shall come. 1 None the less we must recognise here the great idea which was to preside over the evolution of the Christian communities and lead through them to the constitution of the Catholic Church. Every religious and moral idea tends to translate itself to those outside, and to realise itself, in facts. The ideal unity of the Church would tend to become a visible reality by unity of government, worship, and discipline. Just as indi- vidual believers felt the imperious desire of grouping themselves, and uniting with one another, so the various sections of Apostolic Chris- tianity, very diverse in origin, local churches dispersed throughout the empire, desired to draw near one another, to affirm their solidarity by an even closer federation and subordination which constantly became more clearly defined. 2 Two necessary conditions were still lacking. It was essential first that apostolic Christianity should find a fixed centre around which indi- vidual churches might be grouped. Next it was necessary that they should come to the point of developing from within themselves a dog- matic rule and a principle of authority which would permit this centre to subdue all heresies and oppositions. In the very beginning of the century the future centre of the Catholic Church became apparent, and episcopal authority was constituted. 1 Appendix XI. * Appendix XII. GILECO-ROMAN BASIS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH 27 III The Grceco-Roman Basis of the Catholic Church IN the very beginning two events occurred to determine the course of the history of Christianity : the great success of the Paulinian missions in the territories of the empire, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation in the year 70. By this event the centre of gravity of infant Christianity was forever displaced. From the Orient it passed to the Occident, and from Jerusalem to Rome. The primitive Judaeo- Christian group declined, the pagano-Christian ever more and more gained the ascendant. The first representatives of these two groups were Paul of Tarsus and James, the brother of Jesus. Far from being superior to them in authority, Peter appears relatively effaced between these two champions of contrary tendencies, which at that time were rival forces in the churches. James was not an apostle; he was something better, he was the brother of Christ, and succeeded him by a sort of hereditary right, founded on kinship in blood and Davidic descent. Until his death he was the true lieutenant, the first vicar of the Messiah, to whom Peter and the others were subordinated. If Palestinian Christianity had lived and extended itself toward the Orient, it would have formed and trans- mitted, coming from this source, a sort of Christian caliphate of another nature from that which was later established in Rome. 1 James, surnamed the Rampart of his people, represented the past Jewish particularism, ritual piety. Paul represented the moral prin- ciple of the gospel of Jesus, the religion of inward faith and of liberty. The future could not long remain uncertain. The tragic events of the year 70, which gave a fatal blow to the dreams of Jewish Messianism, put Paul in the right and consecrated the results of his work. The struggle had been intense. The letters of Paul to the Christians of Galatia, Corinth, and Rome were its fruit and remain its monument. 'Appendix XIII. 28 GR^CO-ROMAN BASIS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH When Paul returned from his distant journeys he had much difficulty in winning from Jerusalem the acceptance of these new children whicli were not her issue, and whose growing numbers gave the Christian Jews more fear and embarrassment than pleasure. The partisans of James had only one anxiety, to maintain the national privileges of the older brothers, the People Israel according to the flesh; while the Apostle to the Gentiles, overthrowing all literal arguments, proved the invincible incredulity of the mass of Jewish people, and hailed in these new Gentile communities the Israel according to the spirit, and the true inheritors of the promises made to Abraham. 1 Paul was stigmatised as a false apostle, an apostate, an enemy of Christ, a propagator of iniquity. His reply to his adversaries was in no gentle tone. Reading with enlight- ened eyes his letter to the Galatians and the second to the Corinthians, especially his visit to the apostles, pillars of Jerusalem, and his quarrel with Peter at Antioch, it is easy to see what anachronisms they commit, and with what fictions they lull themselves, who represent these first Christian communities as organised in the form of the Catholic Church, under the official rule of St. Peter. 2 None the less does this crisis mark the first step along a new way. A venturesome pilot had cut the cables which still held the vessel to the native shore, and had turned its prow to the open waters of Greek and Roman civilisation. It has been observed that Paul appears to have proceeded method- ically to the conquest of the empire; he had gone over it, province by province, in such manner that the political divisions virtually became ecclesiastical circumscriptions: Syria, Cilicia, Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, Achaia, Italy, Gaul, Spain. The new Christianity was flowing into the imperial organism as into a mould, whose ideal of unity and hierarchi- cal forms would survive in the Church, even when the political shell should have fallen to pieces under the hammer of the barbarians. 'Acts xxi. 18ff.; Gal. iii., iv., especially the allegory of Sarai and Hagar, 1. Cor. x. 1-10; Rom. iv., etc. 1 Appendix XIV. GILECO-ROMAN BASIS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH 29 At the close of the great apostle's life, and on the eve of the catas- trophe of the Jewish war, the equilibrium between the Jewish and pagan elements in Christianity had been definitely destroyed. The Jewish people, having continued in unbelief, seemed condemned by a decree of divine justice. Taking refuge beyond the Jordan, the fragments of the first Jewish Christian communities vegetated, with no contact with the mass of Christianity, and remaining unprogressive while all around them was in process of modification, they were to end by appearing as a heretic sect under their old name of Nazarenes. As a matter of fact, faithful to the spirit and tradition of James and other members of the family of Jesus, they alone represented primitive orthodoxy. But thus go the things of the world. Orthodoxy is always the doctrine officially consecrated by success. Recruited especially in that world of proselytes which gravitated to the synagogues, the Gentile-Christian body, which was called the " great Church," followed a middle path between the theology of Paul, which they were incapable of comprehending, and the pretensions and rites of the Judaisers, which they could not tolerate. Thus was formed a sort of elementary and neutral doctrine, half Greek rational wisdom and half Israelitish tradition. Such was the theology of the writers of the transi- tion period, who succeeded the apostles and are called the Apostolic Fathers. It was the substructure of Catholic orthodoxy. In the eyes of Jesus, of Paul and the other apostles, the Old Testa- ment had the absolute character of a divine revelation. It was also the first and for a long time the only written authority. But while it was venerated by them as much as by the Jews, it was necessarily coming to be otherwise interpreted. How make the partition between that which was conformable to the gospel and that which was contrary to it, between the ceremonial part actually abolished and the persistent moral part! The allegorical exegesis taught by Philo and already practised by Paul came to the aid of the liberty of faith. Of the Old Testament they retained these three things: faith in one God, creator of heaven and 30 GR^ECO-ROMAN BASIS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH earth, the moral law of the Decalogue, and the Messianic prophecies by which they proved that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. The rest was interpreted symbolically, as figures of the new priesthood, which, under cover of this venerable authority, was already being installed in the churches of the second century. 1 Jerusalem being destroyed, this Graeco-Roman Christianity sought a new centre around which to group itself ; it had not long to hesitate. The great churches of Antioch, Ephesus, and Alexandria found a sort of equilibrium, and exercised authority only over the communities of their several regions. One city alone was lifted above all the others and enjoyed universal importance. Rome was always the eternal and the sacred city. Twice she was to inherit the succession of the world. The capital of the empire was marked in advance to become the capital of Christianity. There was no miracle in this; it was a fact of the social order, which so well answered to the historic conditions of the time that the real miracle would have been if it had turned out otherwise. In the formation of the Catholic Church the action of the Roman genius was decisive. It first manifested itself toward the close of the first century; and from this moment it never ceased to be potent. In the new function it was faithful to its old spirit. It left to others the charge and the glory of being active in philosophic science or by the ardour of faith. Alexandria might be more learned, Ephesus more mys- tical. Its lot was administration, the maintenance of the rule, the incli- nation for, and the spirit of, government. In the name of the practical interest of unity and good order it intervened everywhere between the spontaneity of liberty and individual inspiration. It gave no orders as yet, simply fraternal counsels, but the counsels naturally had all the weight which could be given by the prestige of Rome, the strength and the wealth of its community, and the double legend of St. Peter's chair and his martyrdom. All this is shown in the letter which the Church of Rome addressed to that of Corinth in the last period of Domitian's reign. The letter Appendix XV. GR^ECO-ROMAN BASIS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH 31 is collective and anonymous. At the time there was still no more a single bishop at Rome than at Corinth. The Roman community says nothing in the name of an official primacy or supremacy which it does not possess, but speaks in the name of the fraternal solidarity which permitted no one of the churches of the time to remain indifferent to the troubles and sorrows of the others, especially when they solicited help or counsel. But it is none the less true that the Roman genius makes itself seen, even in this first tentative. A part of the Corinthian Church, the younger and the more volatile, had uprisen against the " elders," who had long been in charge, and had even deposed some of them. Rome, without hesitation, took sides against the revolutionists and in favour of the representatives of established authority, for the tradition of ecclesiastical power, for the subordination of the simple believer to the heads who are the true priests of God, Levites, and sacrificers of the new covenant. The unity necessary to realise in the Church is that of the empire, and more practically that which by the hierarchy and lay discipline reigns in the Roman army, the political and military ideal from which Rome thenceforth never departed. 1 The Old Testament offered examples and figures which easily became rules. The Levitical ceremonial, abolished in the substance of its rites, had sacred forms which persisted in the imagination as divine types upon which Christian worship ought to be modelled. Christians continued to conceive of their worship as a sacrifice, their prayers and the Eucharist as offerings, and the communion table as an altar. 2 Thus was born unto Christianity the idea of a new priesthood instituted by God himself, to instruct, sanctify, and save mankind. The oversight of so high a mission called for an equal power. Little by little arose the image of a new theocracy, destined to replace the Mosaic theocracy, and to be Element of Rome, 1. Cor. 40, where for the first time appears the word "laic," as opposed to " priest," 44 : 37 n. */&., 36, 40; 42; Epist. to Heb. x., xvii., 10, etc. 32 THE CHURCH AND HERESIES extended over the whole earth. This germ of theocracy is thus found from its very origin inherent in the very idea of the Church. It was to go on developing, and end by subordinating all the rest to itself. About this time appeared for the first time the name Catholic Church, which was destined to so great a fortune. It was not yet a general expression, designating " the great church," the whole community of believers, in opposition to the sects, heresies, particular schools which were multiplying on all sides. 1 To make a strongly organised society out of this ill-defined mass, two elements were still necessary; a single, strong rule of faith, given and everywhere accepted as the expression of the apostolic tradition, and an episcopal government, sufficiently well established and sufficiently powerful to reduce the whole to unity and obedience. The double crisis of Gnosticism and Montanism which broke forth between 130 and 150 A. D., and lasted nearly a century, furnished both. IV The Church and Heresies HISTORY goes on without repeating itself. There are many essential differences between the intestine conflicts which agitated the Church in the times of James and Paul, and those which, a century later, were stirred up by the Gnostic doctors and the prophets of Montanism. Nevertheless, the latter are the successors and logical development of the former. The curious antithesis formed by Gnosticism and Montanism represents in like fashion the Scylla and Charybdis between which the great Church must find a middle passage in order to become the Catholic Church. Gnosticism has taken on many forms, engendered many sects and systems ; nevertheless, it is easy to discover the fundamental essence and inspiration of them all. It was the speculative mind of Greece, warped by the influence of Alexandria and Asia Minor, struggling to discover Ignatius, "Ad Smyrn.," 8; "Martyr. Polycarpi," epigraph of the letter from Smyrna. THE CHURCH AND HERESIES 33 high truths behind the letter of ancient or popular myths, to trans- form faith into gnosis or knowledge, and positive religions into esoteric philosophy. The Gnostic doctors are the first theologian-philosophers of Christianity. They claimed to have the key of the mysteries of being, of life and of death. Their mysterious theosophy volatilised the very substance of ancient beliefs; it changed the narratives of the Bible or of the Gospels into symbols of metaphysical ideas, and the fact of redemption into a sort of cosmological drama, designed to explain and represent the origin and the end of evil, which are the origin and the end of being itself, the flux and reflux of things. The Gnostics called themselves and doubtless believed themselves Christians, but they were another sort of Christians than the multitude. They gave Jesus a notable place among the divine aeons which they found under the figure of the popular divinities; they even gave to him a decisive part, the part of Saviour, in the liberation of the spirit held captive in the hands of matter, then to be restored to the divine pleroma. Christianity thus remained the supreme religion, but its value was no longer unique and exceptional; it had lost its moral originality, it entered into a vaster system as one part of it, as the final link in a chain of earlier revela- tions, as the symbolic expression of a higher and more comprehensive metaphysic; in short, it vanished in a general philosophy of cosmic evolution. In like fashion the old Lutheran orthodoxy was lost in the unanticipated exegesis and subtile dialectic of the Hegelian system. If to this effort of Graeco-Alexandrine speculation to resolve the historic substance of the Christian faith, we add the rites of initiation, the theurgic practices, the ceremonies and plastic representations by which all these gradually assimilated Christian ceremonial to the mys- teries and the ceremonial of paganism, it is impossible to misapprehend the direction of the movement. It was the revenge of the Greek mind upon the apostolic preaching; it was the Hellenisation of Christianity and its absorption into the general philosophy of the time. Such was the peril on the left hand of the still plastic Christianity 34 THE CHURCH AND HERESIES of the second century. On the right hand an opposite peril was not less threatening. What was the feverish agitation which disturbed first the churches of Asia Minor, extending with astonishing rapidity to Rome, to Gaul, to Africa, everywhere setting the most fervent members of the communities in opposition to the administrators who governed then? On one side we find prophets, martyrs, free preachers; on the other bishops, elders, church councils. The Montanism which first ap- peared on the volcanic soil of Phrygia was to the colourless Christianity of the second century the revival of the " prophetic spirit " of the first days, with its miraculous gifts, its moral austerity, and feverish expec- tation of the Messianic return of Christ in the clouds, and the destruc- tion of the world in a final conflagration. Montanus inaugurated the last age of the world, the age of the Paraclete. Second-century Christianity had not explicitly disowned the hopes or the apocalyptic speculations of the age preceding. But it no longer expected a near and violent catastrophe to resolve the difficulties against which it had daily to struggle. The Church was no longer " the com- pany of the saints," it no longer considered itself a stranger and pil- grim here below. It had taken domicile and settled down upon the earth among all the other pioneers of the time. Such a change could not take place without requiring a certain accommodation to pervading customs and to the necessities of the time. In the act of expansion the body of the Church had become chilled. Its moral temperature had fallen several degrees. The piety of the greater number had become worldly, and tolerant to excess, morals had become relaxed. Then arose new prophets in the old spirit to denounce this tendency to worldliness in the Church of God. The outburst of Montanism about the year 140 or 150 was what in our days are those Anglo-Saxon revivals which, out- side of the clergy and the official framework, from time to time arouse traditional Protestantism, too ready to slumber amid the comforts of the present world. In the disordered transports of Phrygian prophet- ism we find the last paroxysms of the ancient fever of Jewish Messianism. THE CHURCH AND HERESIES 36 The Montanists claimed that in them the gifts of the Spirit had revived; they predicted the near return of the Christ, and the last judg- ment; they consequently proposed to maintain, by a discipline to the last degree rigorous, a clean-cut separation and irreconcilable conflict between the " family of the saints " and a corrupt world condemned to imminent destruction. They represented the most living party in the Church, and this explains how, by nature volatile, the most pious Chris- tians of the West, the martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, Tertullian of Car- thage, should have shown themselves so favourable to a movement of revival and reformation which was to bring back the golden age of Christianity. But the times had changed indeed. Already Christian ideas and customs had taken another course. The tentative of Montanus and his disciples was an anachronism. From the point of view of the Messianic hopes, it was the galvanisation of beliefs practically dead, and from the point of view of moral discipline, it was the resurrection of an ideal which must meet an invincible resistance in the stubborn and mingled mass of second-century Christianity. When two great opposing forces meet, the resultant is motion in a middle direction. It was the same with the Christianity of the second century, hesitating and drawn in contrary directions by this conflict be- tween Gnosticism and Montanism. If one was a return to the Greek spirit, the other was a revival of the Jewish spirit. The Christian body, with those who directed it, could neither absolutely repudiate both, since its life was drawn from their double substance, nor obey exclusively the impulse of one of the two. To live at all, it was forced to receive, and mingle in its own bosom, such elements as were capable of mingling and amalgamating, while rejecting such as seemed to be excessive and an- tagonistic. It is difficult, but necessary, to picture to one's self the intellectual and moral spectacle offered by Christianity between the years 150 and 180, under the reigns of Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius. The most 36 THE CHURCH AND HERESIES diverse currents of thought and devotion came in contact and mingled in all possible ways. In the great polemics of the age the forms of the age to follow were decided. In the vat into which the whole vintage had been gathered a fermentation, an intense ebullition, was going on, the rapid decomposition of the old elements and the slow recomposition of a new system; it was the crucible whence emerged the Catholic theory of the Church. This theory so little came down ready-made from heaven by a supernatural road, that the battle of which it was the issue remained long uncertain. It is clear that this form of Christianity was the only one even possible in the face of dangerous heresies. Many different solutions were concurrently sketched out, according to locality, to respond to the conservative instinct of the Christian conscience. Alexandria, for example, triumphed over heresy by a learned exegesis of the sacred texts, and upon this exegesis constituted a form of Chris- tianity which is not without analogy with Protestantism. What does the school of Pantaenus, of Clement, and of Origen more closely resemble than a little Protestant university? The Churches of Asia Minor built up their tradition on another basis. They relied upon their customs, upon the sayings of the Elders and the Apostle John, to resist as well the objurgations of Rome as the assaults of the Gnostics and the diatribes of the Montanists. It was a sort of Anglicanism, or better perhaps, of Gallicism before the Council of Trent. At Antioch and in Syria the letters of Ignatius offer a mystical theory of the Episco- pate which is essentially Oriental, and radically different from the Roman theory, which was destined to triumph. But in this crisis, the outcome of which was to be a radical trans- formation of primitive Christianity, in this work of general salvation, it was Rome which, by its political importance as by its genius for government, was destined to take the direction, and impose upon the others the necessary solution. Alexandria was half Gnostic, and yielded to heresy while trying to refute it by a method of her own. Asia Minor, Gaul, Carthage, were in secret sympathy with Montanism. Rome clearly THE CHURCH AND HERESIES 37 saw the double peril ; it faced both sides at once, defined the vacillating orthodoxy, and at the outset proposed practical solutions most apt to make it everywhere triumphant. The Catholic theory of the Church was a Roman work. Without the least concern about philosophical logic or learned exe- gesis, treating religious questions like political matters, solely intent upon maintaining the visible unity of the body of the Church and eliminating from it all elements of dissidence and anarchy, she invented, or rather applied, in the religious and moral order, the juridic author- ity of prescription so well developed by Tertullian. Instead of encouraging discussion with heretics, Rome suppressed it ; providing for believers a way to oppose to all objections a declinatory, a sort of previous question, which did more than refute heresy, which executed it before it had opened its mouth. 1 This method was a con- fession of apostolic faith, a popular and universal symbol, which, be- coming a law of the Church, excluded from its midst, without dispute, all those who refused to repeat it. It was the " Rule of Faith." The Church of Rome easily obtained it by adding a few clear and well-defined propositions to the formula of baptism recited by the neophytes in primitive times. This is how, against Gnostic dualism, she maintained the identity of the supreme God, creator of the world; and against Docetism, the reality of the body of Jesus, and of his sufferings and death. These are the origins of the symbol called, " Of the Apostles," the first and venerable monument of Catholic orthodoxy. It saw the light in its earliest form in the church of Rome, between the years 150 and 160, and as it offered a means of defence extremely easy and sure, it passed rapidly from the Roman church to the other churches. The victory over Montanism was slower and more difficult, but it also had still more decisive practical consequences. In the end the 1 Tertullian, the entire treatise " De Praescriptione Haereticorum," especially chap. 20, 21. Thus is the question of truth decided for the Church. It is not by research into intellectual or moral proof, always uncertain, but by an exterior and legal criterion which makes all discussion useless. 38 THE CHURCH AND HERESIES bishops got the better of the prophets, and bent to their own disciplinary authority and oversight all inspirations and miraculous gifts, however striking they might appear to be. This was the capital point. From that time the bishops appeared as the highest organs of the Holy Spirit, whose action was directed into clearly defined channels, and confined within the hierarchy. The ecclesiastical order and the religious order became so closely identified that it would never again be possible to set one against the other, or to attempt to reform the Church in the name of the Spirit, since the Church judges, without appeal, of the truth or the properties of the Spirit. By the same act, the conceptions of the Catholic Church, and of the Kingdom of God, which in the beginning were a whole heaven apart, were blended and identified. 1 The apocalyptic hope lost its object. The reign of God was to come in the triumphs and progressive conquests of the Church over the world. Thenceforth the attributes of the one passed over to the other. The visible body of the Church clothed itself in the ideal perfections of the kingdom of God; holiness, unity, catholicity, infallibility, eternity. That which in the faith of Jesus and the apostles was transcendent, became a visible and historic society. The ideal and the real were confused. God wills to rule the world through the Church, and the Church reigns through its hierarchy. In his Church, and by his ministers, God gives his oracles, distributes his graces, rewards, absolves, or punishes. Outside the Church is no salvation, because apart from her Christianity is a pure abstraction, less than nothing. For this Church there could be no question of weakness or erring, since beyond the promises of indefectibility, which were made to it by its founder, it is nothing other than the Word of God made flesh, the very truth itself rendered visible and permanent on earth in a historic institution. 2 Thus at last, but not before the third century, we meet the Catholic dogma of the Church. It comes forth from the womb of history by a 1 See the conception of theCity of God in " Augustine." * Appendix XVI. HISTORIC AND SUPERNATURAL VIEW 39 long and painful birth process, and is to be naturally explained, like every other historic phenomenon, by the inner logic of ideas and things, the circumstances of the time, the genius or the ambition of men. Rome had laid its first foundation by promulgating the Rule of Faith against heresy ; she completed the edifice by her theory of Apostolic Succession, which became the foundation of the authority of the bishops. These two new theories constitute the very essence of the Catholic conception of the Church. It remains to examine both more closely. 1 CHAPTER THREE TRADITION Historic and Supernatural View IN a general sense, tradition is the bond of the generations of the human race, which by this succession form an organic sequence, transmitting to the last comers the heritage of those who preceded them. It is the light of time, the woof of history, the permanent consciousness of humanity. Every society engenders traditions which become the treasure house of its memories and customs, its spiritual acquisitions, its laws, all the fruit of its life. From this private treasury it continually draws lessons and examples, inspirations and virtues, an experience and a practical sagacity which nothing else can supply. This is the condition of all progress, and the law of life. That which is without a past has no future. If we compare tradition to a stream flowing down the ages, it is Appendix XVII. 40 HISTORIC AND SUPERNATURAL VIEW clear that that happens to it which happens to all rivers; as it travels farther from its source its increasing waters become imbued with the washings of the various earth strata through which they pass. To drop the figure, it is a historic law that every tradition not fixed in writing changes in process of development; the more distant it is from the events, so much the more their image and memory becomes altered and transformed, and the final form of the tradition differs from the original character which was its starting point, unless a vigilant and severe criticism has unceasingly sifted it, to free it from intermingling legends and superstitions, and maintain it in primitive purity. The duty of criticism is thus as imprescriptible as the rights of tradition. Without the first, the second would remain fruitless, or rather, would become an invincible obstacle to progress. It would be. the enslavement of progress. It would be the subjection of the present and the future to the past, the stagnation and ultimate decay of the human mind. In the Renascence the alliance of stimulating criticism with con- serving tradition wrought victory in the sciences, in philosophy, politics, and art, and since that time it has shown itself admirably fruit- ful. Men have understood that the heritage of the ages, however precious, cannot reasonably be accepted except with reserves. Tradi- tion hands down everything, good and bad, error and truth, excellent habits and barbarous customs, generous sentiments and detestable insti- tutions. We thus understand Pascal's saying : " Humanity is a man who is to live forever, and learn without ceasing." From this point of view the moderns are the ancients, since they have a longer experience behind them. The ancients, on the contrary, are the younger, they are the children, because they came in the early ages of the world. How should the judgment of ripe age be subordinated to the first reasonings of youth? This rational view of tradition is not the Catholic view; it is dis- tinguished from it by one essential characteristic. In the Church tradi- tion belongs to the supernatural order. The truth transmitted and the HISTORIC AND SUPERNATURAL VIEW 41 act of transmission are alike clothed with divine character. The tradi- tion of the Church becomes the sovereign rule of truth, and by that fact is raised above criticism and discussion. The tradition of the Church is often opposed to Holy Scripture, especially since the controversies evoked by Protestantism. From the historic point of view, this opposition is absolutely without justification, since the Scriptures are simply the earliest form of the tradition, fixed in books, and thus shielded from alteration and neglect. If the question is What was primitive Christianity ? it is evident that the apostolic writ- ings are the best source of information at the historian's disposal, since they are the most ancient and the most faithful testimony which we pos- sess. What might be told of the life of Christ after the close of the second century, outside of these written events, is almost worthless. But from the dogmatic point of view the question is reversed, at least in Catholicism. The Church has definitely decided what must be held as sacred scriptures, and what must be looked upon as apocrypha. The traditional faith of the Church alone gives legitimate interpreta- tion of the sacred texts. The supreme judge of controversy is therefore not Scripture, but tradition. The first is subordinate to the second. There is in the Church a latent tradition of truth, of which the biblical writings are merely a first emanation, and from which they cannot be separated without losing all guaranty and value. The Council of Trent placed in the same rank, as issuing from the same source of inspiration, apostolic Scriptures and tradition, beliefs and customs received by oral transmission from the apostles to our time ; and that none may, as do the Protestants, set these authorities over against one another, and criticise tradition in the name of the Bible, it pronounced anathema those who warp the Scriptures according to their own sense, and in the last resort it gave the Church alone the right to judge of the texts, and the inter- pretation to be put upon them. 1 The Church is not merely assisted by the Holy Spirit in guarding the ancient writing; it is equally her mission to explain, complete, and 1 Appendix XVHL 42 THE AUTHORITY OF TRADITION IN JUDAISM enrich this primitive deposit in the progressive measure which new times may require. Tradition is never exhausted and never fixed. It is an ever creative inspiration. As the permanent incarnation of the Word of God, the Church pronounces this Word sovereign whenever it speaks by the mouth of those who have the right to speak in her name. Formerly she had bishops and councils for her organs. To-day she is concentrated in the papacy. But it is still tradition which gives authority to the Pope, as formerly to the Councils. In tradition infallibility properly resides. How was so extraordinary a theory formed? At what precise date did it appear? What causes produced it and made it victorious? Through what forms and what stages did it pass, from Irenaeus and Tertullian, who laid its first foundations, to the point jof perfection and concentration to which it has attained in our day ? As many chapters as questions, but history to-day throws full light upon them all, leaving no smallest place for miracle or mystery. II The Authority of Tradition m Judaism ALL religious traditions, at least those of antiquity, appear invested with a sacred character. They were incarnated in priests, who, in the name of the Divinity itself, taught other men the rites and dogmas ac- cording to which it would be adored. Thence the anxious scruples and fastidious care which were given to the recitation of formulas and the performance of acts of worship. A tradition of this nature taking form in the Christian Church of the early centuries, while the habits of ancient cults weighed heavy upon it, is not, therefore, a unique nor even an ex- ceptional phenomenon. It may be found repeated all along the history of religions, following a very clear psychological and social law. Nothing is more in the nature of things, and it would have been truly a miracle had it been otherwise. THE AUTHORITY OF TRADITION IN JUDAISM 43 A striking parallel, not to cite others, offers itself in the history of Judaism. The Mosaic law, built up and definitively put into form in the time of Ezra, appeared, notwithstanding its minute prescriptions, in- capable of sufficing for itself. Almost immediately an oral tradition, to accompany and protect the sacred text, was drawn from the teaching of the rabbins, as Catholic tradition was later born of that of the bishops and Fathers of the Church. The Pharisees became the jealous guardians of this rabbinic tradition, and to give it the more cogent authority it was dated back to Moses, precisely as the bishop and councils traced the traditions of which they were the repositories to Christ and the apostles. Little by little the legend became accredited, that after having given the written law on descending from Mount Sinai, Moses farther trans- mitted orally to the elders many precepts and commentaries ; they in turn bequeathed them to the prophets, and from the prophets they came down without interruption to the men of the Great Synagogue. Thus the Scribes, as Jesus said, were truly, according to their tradition, sitting in Moses' seat, as the bishops later in that of Christ. From that time it became as sinful to contradict this tradition as to violate the law itself. In Pharisaism, as later in Catholicism, the Scriptures came under subjection to oral tradition, for the reason that the master of the interpretation is always the true master of the text. Here again, as in the history of Catholicism, the authority of tradi- tion rendered all reform impossible. All truly inspired souls, all re- formers and prophets, fell and were broken against this sacred barrier. This was the fate of John the Baptist, it was the fate of Christ him- self. Between him and the Pharisees began at the very outset a contest concerning the authority of " the tradition of the elders." One needs only to read the Sermon on the Mount, and the discussions about the Sabbath, fasting, unclean food. Jesus accused them of making void the law of God himself by the commandments of men, and of binding weak consciences with heavy chains. They in return could not forgive him 44 THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TRADITION the freedom of his inspiration, the boldness of his conduct, and his dis- courses, which tended to nothing less than the downfall of the entire edifice of Jewish piety. It was the eternal struggle, soon to be repeated in the very Church of Christ, between traditional formalism and the inspirations of conscience. Is it impossible to establish a more direct line of descent between Pharisaic tradition and the origin of the Catholic idea? The first Christians, coming out from Judaism, had been brought up on the prin- ciples of Pharisaism. What is there surprising in their retaining its mental habits, and especially that respect for tradition which was still all- powerful in the Semitic East? What did James, the brother of the Lord, and the apostles in Jerusalem, but maintain, against Paul and his dis- quieting inspiration, the scrupulous care of the " oral tradition " con- cerning the words and example of Christ? Why were they called the " pillars " of the Messianic Church, if not because they were the up- holders of its tradition? Does not the entire second Christian century, whether in the person of those who were already called " the Catholics," or of the Ebionites, or of the Gnostics, make common appeal to the tradition of the elders, as to a decisive authority? The Church had in- herited and was keeping alive the habits of the synagogue. 1 m The Earliest Christian Tradition WE must not form our ideas of early Christianity from its organisation and its dogmatic in the time of Constantine, still less from those of modern times. Between the first age and those which followed there is all the difference between matter in a state of fusion and matter grown cold and solid. '"Horn.," Clement, letter of Peter to James, first lines; " Recognitiones," I. 21, **; II. 45, x. 4,9. See, also, Acts xv., xxi. 20 ff.; Gal. ii. 1-15. It will be remembered that Basilides and Valentinian also took advantage of a special apostolic tradition. THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TRADITION 46 Unity of association arose spontaneously from unity of hearts and the common possession of an ardent hope. The profession of faith of the first Christians was short : " Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah," and their watchword shorter still : Maranatha, '" The Lord is at hand." With- out exception they all lived in the belief, at that time so widespread, that the last days of the existing order were at hand ; and this belief , doing away with the idea of a long future, at the same time dispensed them from all care and trouble with a view to founding a permanent establish- ment here below. 1 It is impossible to imagine a greater delusion than that of the Roman Catholic Church, when it seeks to discover its own image in this primitive society. We are here in the age of apocalyptic Messianism, of free inspiration, of the miraculous gifts of the Spirit. 2 Jesus wrote nothing nor caused anything to be written. He never dreamed of giving a second volume to the Bible of the Jews, still less of creating another sacerdotal order and new ceremonies. He left neither dogmas nor rules other than the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount, or the teachings of his parables and the promise of his return. He desired to have only apostles, that is, " messengers," to preach every- where that the time was fulfilled and the Kingdom of Heaven was about to appear. That a new religion resulted from the preaching of this gospel was because, under the Messianic form, which it at first took on, there was the contagious sentiment of an entirely new relation, a filial relation to God, of a new revelation of God in the heart of man, as a divine leaven, an all-powerful grace, which should regenerate and fecun- date the entire life of humanity. Thus the Master confided his gospel to the free and living preaching of his disciples and the assistance of the Spirit. 1 Matt. iii. 2; Mark i. 15, ix. 1., and paral. Matt. xriv. 33, 34; Acts ii.17; 1 Cor. vii. 29; Gal. i. 4; 2 Tim. iii. 1 Pet i. 5; Jas. v. 3, 8, 9; Rev. i. 1, xxii. 20; Heb. x. 25, 37; 1 Jno. ii. 18, " Teaching of the Apostles," cxvi. ' See the description of the inner life of the first Christian community, 1 Cor. xiL, xiii. 46 THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TRADITION But as they were repeated these discourses took on permanent forms. Thus spontaneously sprang into life the first Christian tradition, like all historic traditions: it was formed naturally from the stories of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, which the apostles must have told in order to show by them the fulfilment of the prophecies, and persuade all men that this was indeed the Messiah of the people. 1 In Christian circles the tradition grew daily richer by what each had learned and re- lated of the " deeds and words " of the Master, as in the second century said Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, so curious and avid for these words of the ancient witnesses. Thus, at the end of twenty or thirty years, we find the gospel message and the substance of Christian preaching com- monly designated by the terms " tradition," " pattern of teaching," the " good deposit " which must be treasured up and guarded with care. 2 The mirage and illusion began when people began to imagine that this initial tradition was the deliberate and premeditated work of an official authority, and that the apostles, in college assembled, enclosed it in rules and formulas. This was entirely to misapprehend the true office of the apostles, and the character of that age, in which all Chris- tians, baptised with spirit and fire, enjoyed the sacred and fruitful gift of inspiration. Without any doubt, on their own testimony, the Twelve began to lay the foundations of this tradition, which for this reason may be called " apostolic," but they were not alone in this work. All those who knew or believed that they knew something about Christ, all those who had received or believed that they had received some heavenly revelation, brought their gift to the common treasury. Little by little it all began to be epitomised and organised, yet without taking on a single and permanent form. Born of memory and faith the tree grew naturally, 'Acts, ii. 22-36, viii. 26-35, x. 34-43; 1 Cor. xv. 1-3. The Gospel was currently called a "Word," the "Word of God," the "Received Word," vap&doffu, TVXOS SiSaxv, wapaSifmj. Luke i. 2; 1 Cor. x. 23, xi. 2, xv. 1-3; 2 Tim. i. 14; Rom. vi, 17; 2 Thess. ii. 15, etc. THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TRADITION 47 and day by day adorned itself with new flowers, or even with new branches. 1 To become convinced of this absence of all fundamental or official decision, to grasp the movement and life of this first tradition, its pro- gressive enrichment and incessant variability, it will suffice to follow it in its two constituent parts, the acts and teachings, that is, the biog- raphy of Jesus, and the interpretation which was put upon it. In both parts there is a common stock, a harmony of essential data and large outlines. But as we advance, what a variety of concurrent forms! What inconsistencies! What polemics and conflicts! The " sayings of the Lord " became, side by side with the Old Testa- ment, the ultimate norm to which to refer for resolution all questions that might arise in the life of the earliest communities; they were therefore carefully gathered up, repeated, and memorised. 2 It appears highly probable that the first Gospel writings were collections of these " sayings " or logia, which the second Christian generation must espe- cially have felt the need of collecting and putting in definite form. 3 In any case it is certain that such were still cited from memory at the be- ginning of the second century. 4 Half a century after the death of Jesus the tradition of the events of his life, while already firm in its large outlines, was far from being identical in all regions where Christianity prevailed. Here it was very rich, and there very meagre. Thus is explained the great variety in the first written narratives, with which Luke was not satisfied, and which he 'The latest of these branches, one of the most beautiful and fruitful, is repre- sented by the Fourth Gospel. *1 Thess. iv. 15, v. 2; 1 Cor. viL 10, 12, ix. 14; Rom. xii, 14, 20, etc. It is now generally admitted that the Apostle Matthew composed an Aramaean collection of this kind. In any case, Luke and the author of the First Gospel had such collections at their disposal. Luke i. 1-4; Prologue, and the testimony of Papias in Eusebius, H. E. III. 39. 4 This is the case with Clement of Rome, with Papias, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who, though they were acquainted with this or that written gospel, preferred to draw from oral tradition. As much may be said of the authors of the " Teaching of the Apostles." 48 THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TRADITION undertook to correct, complete, and harmonise in a new account. 1 These were private and entirely occasional works, which naturally reflected the environment in which they were produced. Papias, following a still more ancient witness, tells us that Mark, the interpreter of Peter, put into writing the acts and sayings of Jesus, according to his memory of the preaching of that apostle; but as the teaching of the latter was determined by the occasion, Mark could not draw from it a connected and complete whole, and he deserves no blame, since he simply undertook to relate, without falsehood or alteration, the things which he had thus learned. 2 Luke, with other resources, did no otherwise. This is how, in the New Testament canon, we have not a single Gospel, as would have been the case had the apostles ordered the preparation of one, but four narratives sufficiently different for us to be incapable at the present day of reconciling their data and resolving their inconsistencies. Where do we find the official authority of the apostles intervening to direct this work of writing which was to have such importance for the destinies of the Christian religion? It was with the early Christian literature as with all popular literature, echoes of a free and living tradition ; it was born of the circumstances and the needs of each day. 3 Until about the year 130, the time of Poly carp and Papias, the divers Gospel writings were still encompassed by the oral tradition from which they had issued, and by which they continued to be nourished. But by the time of Justin Martyr they had finally absorbed all the substance of tradition, and had taken its place in Christian confidence. One thing is worthy of remark: all that it has been possible to glean outside of our four Gospels about the life of Jesus in the subsequent tradition of the Church is of very little, not to say of no, value. It is not that tradition was sterile, on the contrary it was prodigiously fecund, as the Apocry- phal Gospels bear witness, but it brought forth only legends. 1 See the prologue of Luke's Gospel, i. 1-4. 'Euseb. H. E. III. 39. Testimony of John the Elder, preserved by PapiM. 'This ii even more true of the apostolic letters than of the Gospels. THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TRADITION 49 Christian tradition is therefore not of divine institution. It was born and developed from beginning to end after the manner of all historic traditions, which grow richer as they grow older, but bring with them so much the less warrant in proportion as they travel farther from the time and place of their origin. Catholic theology was right in maintaining against the old Prot- estant theology that Scripture is born of tradition ; but it was wrong in concluding therefrom that the later tradition may have as much weight as the writings of the New Testament, or more ; since the latter represent a more ancient, and by so much more faithful, tradition. The truth is that all tradition calls for historic criticism and its methods of verifica- tion. There is no other way of discerning how much it is worth. If such is the variability of tradition as to the events of the life of Jesus, how much greater must it be as to the forms of his preaching and teaching ! In that age of general inspiration, diversities of gifts and of environment must have been more acutely felt in this field than else- where. Thus we see, even in the apostolic generation, the appearance of very different types of doctrine and preaching. When the Apostle Paul said " my gospel," opposing it to that of his adversaries, he had a very vivid conception of all that was specific, new, and original, in his doctrine. He was not unaware, as his letter to the Christians of Galatia shows, that his doctrine and mission were an occasion of scandal, and a cause of violent polemic and hatred to the Pharisaeo-Christians of Jerusalem. James, the Lord's brother, did not preach after that fashion. Though they and Paul alike confessed Jesus " the Messiah of glory," they hardly agreed as to the meaning of his death, the nature of his person, or in their notions of faith and redemption. In what con- cerned the law of Moses and the national customs of Israel, the differ- ence in their attitude and utterances reached open conflict, the latter declaring them definitively abrogated, the former preserving them. 1 'Testimony of Paul in Gal. i., ii.; testimony as to James in Gal. ii. 1, 2; Acts xv. 1, 2, IS ff, xxi. 18 ff ; see all the second part of the 2d Epistle to the Corinthians, and 60 THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN TRADITION Between these extremes, how many intermediate types formed the transition and filled the wide space! It suffices to recall the names of Apollos, Peter, Philip, John, who represent very distinct tendencies. 1 And are not these varieties found in the New Testament, where we find by turns writings so different in method and thought as the Epistle to the Romans and that of James, the Gospels of Mark and of John, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse? That there was unity of religious faith, of the first inspiration, we admit, indeed, but what a wealth and what a diversity of theologies ! Does it not clearly appear that no rule, no official credo yet existed, and that no exterior authority had risen to cramp or stifle the spontaneity of individual inspiration? A curious little book recently discovered, which dates from the first third of the second century, but represents a condition of things still more ancient, brings a yet more significant testimony. " The Teach- ings of the Lord according to the Twelve Apostles " contains, brought together in a few pages, the Catechism, the Liturgy, and the ecclesi- astical discipline which regulated the teaching, the worship, and the inner life of the communities of Palestine or of Syria under the reign of Trajan, at latest. The gospel is here summed up under the figure of two roads, one of which leads to life and the other to death, with a few maxims borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount. There are only two rites : Baptism and the Eucharist, and the prayers which accom- pany them, though of a fine mysticism, seem entirely to ignore the teach- ings of Paul. Finally, the edification of the communities is still in great part effected by itinerant prophets and evangelists, in presence of whom is felt the necessity of recommending that the former should be placed in care of deacons and bishops regularly elected and settled. Com- paring this venerable document with the " Apostolic Constitutions " of Phil, i. 15-18, iii. 2, etc. Hegesippus in Eusebius upon the Pharisaeo-Christians, bitter enemies of Paul. To measure the consequences and the notoriety of these early contentions one must read the Clementine Homilies. 'See what Paul says in the first three chapters of his first letter to the Corin- thians, and especially 1 Cor. iii. 10-15. BAPTISMAL FORMULA AND APOSTOLIC SYMBOL 61 the fourth century, it is easy to measure the progress made by the Church. Nevertheless, it is a first landmark set up, a first attempt to give legal and official form to apostolic tradition, and it brings back a past in the act of disappearing and preparing the way for a new future. The road is open. Henceforth ecclesiastical authority will take pre- cedence of inspiration. The principle of future legislation is laid down. It is the doctrine, the tradition of the apostles. True, the tradition was still rudimentary and floating. We shall see how, by the polemics of the second century, it reached definiteness and precision. IV The Baptismal Formula and the Apostolic Symbol IT was inevitable that the dogmatic crystallisation of this still fluid tradition should take place, as by degrees it did take place, around the point of least resistance in the new cult. That point was baptism, with the profession of faith which from the beginning had been associated with it. Not that we have not here, as elsewhere, an evolution of ideas and forms. But the development is in a straight line, and can be followed with something like certainty. Baptism was in the beginning a literal bath, an entire immersion. By the close of the first century a triple aspersion of water upon the head might suffice at need. 1 Originally it included the idea of the purification of the soul by repentance and the forgiveness of sins. To this idea was added, in the second century, that of a sacrament of initiation and illumination analogous to those of the pagan mysteries. 2 Finally, as we shall see, innovations were made '"Teaching of the Apostles," vii: 'E& 5t dn6repa n^ ?xfl*( runn i n g water or warm water) tK\eov cb rijv KaXV rpls vSup eh 6vo(ia. irarpbt icai vlov xa.1 aylov irveAfuiTOS. 1 With regard to the relation between the Christian sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, and the pagan mysteries, see the work of Gustav Anrich, " Grosskirche, Gnosticismus, und Mysterienwesen," 1894. Justin Martyr calls baptism 0(rr/xof, a word which appears to have been borrowed from the language of the mysteries, 1 " Apol.," 65. See, however, Heb. x. 22-32; Epb. L 17-19. 62 BAPTISMAL FORMULA AND APOSTOLIC SYMBOL in the invocation pronounced over the head of the persons baptised. Change is everywhere, fixity nowhere. Was the institution of baptism the act of Jesus himself? In the present condition of the text it is impossible to prove it. The command of Matthew xxviii. 19, which seems to attribute it to him, is not only posthumous, but even appears late in the tradition of the Apostolic Church. No other Gospel contains it. 1 If Jesus had left so formal a commandment to his apostles, could Paul have written to the Corinthians that Christ had sent him, not to baptise, but to preach the Gospel, and could he have thanked God that he had baptised with his own hands only three or four persons in Corinth? Would he not rather have had reason to reproach himself for having failed in an express command of Christ? Baptism with water dates back to John the Baptist. Jesus con- sidered this rite, which was preparatory to the Messianic kingdom, as willed by God, 2 but anterior to the new covenant and foreign to it. The disciples at first practised it in the same spirit as the Forerunner, hav- ing in view, as he had, the approaching advent of the triumphant Mes- siah. The Messiah's baptism was to be of a different nature. It was the " baptism with the Spirit and with fire," which in John's discourses was distinctly opposed to the baptism with water. 8 It is the only baptism with which Paul is concerned. In the beginning the two were very clearly distinguished, as may be seen in the book of the " Acts of the Apostles," where the effusion of the Spirit sometimes precedes and some- times follows the baptism with water, with no necessary connection between them. 4 But as by degrees the Church and the Kingdom of Heaven became identified, entrance into the latter came to be confounded with entrance into the former; the bath of purification in view of the Kingdom became confused with the effusion of the Spirit, the warrant 1 Appendix XIX. "Matt, iii, 11, and paral.; Acts L 5. 'Mark xi. 30, and paral. 4 Appendix XX. BAPTISMAL FORMULA AND APOSTOLIC SYMBOL 53 and principle of eternal life, and the sign took the place of the thing signified. By this swift descent, second-century Christianity very soon reached the superstitious idea of the opus operatum. 1 From the accordant testimony of Paul's letters and the Acts of the Apostles, it appears evident that, originally, baptism was admin- istered simply " in the name of Christ." 2 The new convert who received it in this form confessed his faith in the Messiahship of Jesus. And as the Christ whom above all Paul preached was the Christ who died and rose again, this apostle saw in baptism a representation in action of the intimate union of the believer with Christ in his death and resur- rection, so that the baptised person seemed to be buried with Christ and to rise with him to the life of the Spirit. Later, especially in the pagan world, this elementary form appeared to be no longer sufficient. Catechumens of pagan origin needed to be converted to the true and living God, the Father of Jesus Christ, and to be initiated into the regenerating virtues of the Holy Spirit, as well as into the redemption wrought by the Son of God, the Saviour of all men. In the churches founded by Paul, such was the threefold object of the instruction given to catechumens, and such the faith which they professed at their bap- tism, summed up in the formula which has become traditional: Into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. By degrees the terms of this formula were developed until finally it became the well-known symbol called " Of the Apostles." But this was a work of time and effort. Toward the middle of the second century we find a rule of faith which the converts doubtless recited on the occasion of their baptism and admission to the Church. It was thus worded: / believe in God, Father Almighty, and Christ Jesus his Son, our Lord, born of the Holy Spirit and of Mary, virgin, Crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, on the third day rose from the dead, Ascended into heaven, Sitteth on the right hand of the Father, From whence he 1 Appendix XXI. 2 Appendix XXII. 54 BAPTISMAL FORMULA AND APOSTOLIC SYMBOL cometh to judge quick and dead. And in Holy Spirit, Holy Church, Remission of sins, Resurrection of the flesh. 1 It is not yet precisely the Apostolic Symbol; several articles are incomplete, and others are wanting. But it is the first form of that symbol, and it very evidently owes its structure to the threefold baptismal formula. To each of its terms, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, have been added explanations and more complete determinations, to clarify the faith of catechumens. What were the causes of this development? They may be traced back to two: on one hand the progress of catechetical instruction, the necessity of giving to converts from paganism a more detailed and posi- tive knowledge of what was considered the essence of the Christian faith ; on the other, and especially, carefulness to avoid Gnostic heresies and build up a protecting barrier between such and the universal Church. It is not by an unimportant coincidence that this rule of faith was put in force precisely in those years between 135 and 150, when Valentinian and Marcion were agitating this great Church with their preaching, and Justin Martyr was opposing them with the most violent polemics. In this same period, as we shall show in the following chapter, the monarchical Episcopate appeared at Rome, with Pius I. Everything there tends to show that in the last years of the age of Hadrian and Antoninus the Pious, the community in Rome was passing through a profound crisis, whence emerged clearly defined doctrine, concentrated ecclesiastical authority, and established discipline. 2 That which, with singular energy and order, was going on in Rome, was also taking place in all the great churches of the time. It was everywhere necessary to instruct the simple, to provide them with a criterion of the true faith which should be easy to remember, and to erect a barrier against the confusion and absolutism of Gnostic specula- tion or the speculations of Montanism. Everywhere, therefore, rules of faith were being roughly blocked out, which, being naturally built upon 1 Appendix XXIII. s Appendix XXIV. GENESIS OF CATHOLIC THEORY OF TRADITION 55 the threefold baptismal formula, strongly resembled one another without coinciding in details. Traces of more or less developed professions of faith may be found in the later writings of the New Testament, especially in the Epistles called Pastoral, and in the writings of Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Ignatius, Hernias, Justin Martyr. 1 Sometimes they are shorter, sometimes more explicit. One article is strongly supported because its existence had been threatened; another is passed by in silence because it has in no sense been a subject of dispute. In short, down to about the year 150, the symbol recited by catechumens varied* according to time and place; it was in process of elaboration and development. In the end it attained its most clearly defined form in Rome, and from thence it was carried into the East, and especially into the West. It took pos- session of the Churches of Africa and of Gaul, where Tertullian and Irenseus found it strongly intrenched under the name and with the authority of " Doctrine of the Apostles," and " Rule of the Truth." Genesis of the Catholic Theory of Tradition THE notion of tradition implies three terms: a point of departure, a point of arrival, and the link that connects them. In the Catholic theory the point of departure is God himself; the point of arrival the Church militant; the connecting link, the apostles and the legitimate line of their successors. The intermediate link is therefore the essential term. On one side the apostles take hold on Christ and so on God; on the other they make part of the Church and represent it. It is by their means that revelation, given from heaven and coming to men, remains divine to the very end, without perversion or corruption. Apos- tolicity must therefore be the inevitable and essential mark of Catholic 1 1 Tim. ii. 5, iii. 16, and especially vi. 12, 13; 2 Tim. i. 14, ii. 2; Titus i. 9; Clem. Rom., 1 Cor. 58; Ignatius, " Epist. ad Trail.," 9; " Ad Smyrn," 1; " Ad Eph.," 7; " Ad Magn.," 11; Polycarp, " Ad Philipp.," 2; Justin Martyr," 1 Ap.," 61; "Dial.," 30. 66 GENESIS OF CATHOLIC THEORY OF TRADITION tradition. Here we touch the very corner stone of the infallibility of the Church. This dogmatic theory of tradition presents itself for the first time defined and settled in the form of an infallible and sovereign law, in the writings of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hyppolitus. These writers were led to formulate it by their polemic against Gnosticism and other heresies of their time. With perfect candour they explain its genesis. They forged this weapon on the field of battle, to insure a victory that had been long uncertain. What subjects were in dispute in those theological frays of the second century, whose turmoils and confusion give an idea of chaos? The question was of the true doctrine, and how it could be recognised. To consent to discussion with teachers of heresy was dangerous on many considerations. In the first place, there was no hope of either refuting or convincing them. In the domain of science or exegesis, Catholic bishops, with all their admirable virtues, were weak before a Valentinian or a Marcion. Besides, this would be to descend to the shifting sand of individual and subjective opinion, with its endlessly renewed philo- sophical processes. Should they appeal to the apostolic writings, the canon of which the Church had but then completed? But here they would encounter that criticism which the adversaries so freely exercised upon both the text and the origin of these writings. Or indeed, like Marcion, they had a different collection, or the texts were not the same, or finally, the interpretation of them differed indefinitely, thanks to the allegorical method then everywhere in use, which permitted either party, in all good conscience, to make the Scriptures speak in his own favour. It was as difficult to come to an agreement upon the meaning of the text as upon the truth of the doctrine, since, in all the camps, it was in fact the latter which determined the former. Therefore Tertullian could not admit of an appeal to the Scriptures, in a discussion with heretics. The dispute was, indeed, over the Scriptures themselves, and this GENESIS OF CATHOLIC THEORY OF TRADITION C7 being the case, it could only be decided by a superior authority. Thus at this juncture the authority of tradition was practically made superior to that of the Bible, for it was tradition which had decided as to the contents of the sacred canon, had chosen between the books, those which were to be admitted to it and those which must be excluded from it, and tradition still gave the rule for rightly using and rightly under- standing them. 1 If the tradition of the Church was to be final arbiter of controversy, it must needs take on definite form and find a popular mode of expres- sion. We have already seen that about the same period it attained to both in the baptismal profession of faith. 2 Such is " the sovereign law," ** the canon of truth." Irenaeus and Tertullian thus reason about it: The mark of the truth of a doctrine is its legitimacy. Legitimacy shows itself in antiquity. Heresies are false because they are new. Rising up to disturb the churches and attacking established tradition, they prove by the very lateness of their appearance that the tradition existed before them. The warrant of the true faith is found in all the apostolic churches, Rome, Ephesus, Corinth, Antioch; in the uninterrupted succession of their bishops, the first of whom were instituted by the apostles themselves, and received from them the authentic faith which it was their duty to preach. To hold fast to this tradition without wavering is the necessary line of conduct, the rule which all must follow. The sole verity which we must believe is that which in no respect differs from it. Outside of tradition there is only uncertainty and confusion. 3 Polemics were thus grandly simplified and put within the reach of 1 Irenaeus, " Adv. Her.," iii. 2; Tertullian, " De Pres. Hasr.," 17. *When the advocates of Church tradition undertake to explain what they under- stand by this word, they simply recite the symbol or rule of faith at the time in force, which they consider as transmitted by the Apostles to their successors, and handed down to themselves by the uninterrupted series of bishops. Irenanis, I. 10, 1, III. 4, 2; Tertullian, " De Praescrip. Haer.," IS, 20f.; "Adv. Prax.," 9. 'Tertullian, the entire treatise " De Praescriptione"; Origen, " D Brineip.," I. Praef., f and 4; Hippolytus, " Pbilosophoumena." 68 GENESIS OF CATHOLIC THEORY OF TRADITION the most humble believer. There was no longer any need of discussing the intrinsic proofs of truth; it bore an infallible external mark its legal description given by the bishops themselves. By the same act the Church, which had been a party to the suit, was made judge of last appeal. She no longer had to plead at the bar, but only to pronounce sentence. She no longer disputed with heretics, she condemned them. By this juristic expedient, which Ter- tullian so well defined and named prescription, heretics were already barred out. They came too late. The mere fact that they were outside of the tradition of the Church sufficed to prove them outside of the truth. From Tertullian to Bossuet the argument never varied ; it may thus be summed up : " New idea : certain sign of revolt and error." What a distance had been travelled from Papias.to Tertullian, and how had the very idea of tradition been metamorphosed! Papias, too, had made appeal to " the living and enduring word," and preferred it to the single books, born of the occasion, which circulated in his time. But what he thus sought was a historic method of increasing his knowl- edge. He did not appeal to the juridical decision of authority, based upon the regular order of episcopal succession since the apostles, he interrogated the old men who had seen Peter or John or Andrew or Philip or any other of the first disciples of the Lord, and could repeat their discourses. Fifty years later, the point of view and method of procedure of Tertullian and the Church were entirely different. The Church had left the field of history, and intrenched itself in that of dogma. Tradition was no longer testimony to be gathered, it was an official rule of faith, which the bishops first promulgated and then applied as apostolic. 1 To raise a new historic tradition to the rank of supernatural tradi- tion and divine, permanent inspiration in the Church itself, one must either forget history or do violence to it. The Catholic theory rests upon three premisses which are not only undemonstrable, but fictitious : 1. That the apostles drew up and left to their successors an unchange- 1 Appendix XXV, GENESIS OF CATHOLIC THEORY OF TRADITION 69 able formulary of Christian faith. 2. That succeeding generations added nothing, subtracted nothing, changed nothing, as to the customs and ideas which they inherited* 3. That bishops are the successors of the apostles and heirs of their gifts and privileges. These three affirmations are wholly illusory, and a single reading of the original texts is enough to dissipate them irrecoverably. But at the end of the second century historic criticism did not exist. Men lived in the supernatural, and the stream of the marvellous flowed full. In such a time dogma becomes a prolific mother of legends. The reflection of the idea then dominant transforms the vision of the past. History is altered wherever it shows itself contrary to the dogma ; where silence would do it harm it is made to speak. It is common enough to see chil- dren who have attained years of strength fostering and caring for the aged father to whom they owe life. Thus, in the course of the cen- turies, the pious legends of tradition came forward to legitimise and defend the dogma of which they were born. These legends, which, we must remember, were the product and com- plement of the Catholic theory of tradition, came into being at three points, and from generation to generation developed along three parallel lines, with ever greater definiteness and wealth of embellishment. 1. The first were the episcopal lists, which, from about the year 180, began to be formed in all the great churches to establish the line of apostolic succession in material and tangible form. To this end tradi- tional memories were drawn upon, and names were borrowed from the apostolic writings. Starting with Eleutherus, who died in 188, we may go back by names sufficiently authentic as far as Sixtus or Alexander, about the year 130; but back of this the lists of the early Popes or bishops of Rome have absolutely no value. The reason is simple. There was no episcopate in Rome, in any proper sense of the word, before the reign of Hadrian, as we shall presently see. There was need of these official lists in the polemic against the Gnos- tic doctors and Montanist prophets; and it is a matter of experience 60 GENESIS OF CATHOLIC THEORY OF TRADITION that documents of which any authority finds a practical need are always produced. 1 2. The twelve Jewish apostles of Jesus appear to have restricted their teaching to their own people. Paul gives them no part in the evangelisation of the pagan world. It is one of the paradoxes of his- tory that they should have become from the close of the second century the traditional patrons and authorities of the great churches in whose foundation they had almost no part, while Paul and his fellow-labourers, Titus, Sosthenes, Aquila, Apollos, those daring pioneers of the new religion, are forgotten, or relegated to the second rank and to obscurity. Paul is despoiled by John in Ephesus and Asia, as in Antioch and Rome by Peter, whose humble and docile satellite he becomes. This historic paradox is explained by the legends which came into being at the epoch at which we have now arrived. They show us the Twelve assembled at Jerusalem, dividing among themselves the map of the world, and then setting forth, each to conquer, with the strong aid of miracle and at last of martyrdom, the province which to him had been assigned. From the forensic standpoint of the theory of tradition, it was necessary that the episcopal order should everywhere find the name of an apostle to which to fasten its initial link. 3. Finally, to all these legends must be added, as tending to the same end, those which grew up around the Symbol of the Apostles. In the beginning the title apostolic, applied to a traditional rule of faith, was doubtless intended only to declare the essential conformity of this faith to that preached by the apostles. But soon the people began to understand it in a stricter and more literal sense. About the middle of the third century it was said and believed in Rome that the symbol had been brought to the capital of the empire by Peter himself, and consequently that it dated back to the very foundation of the Church. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, confirmed this pious legend, which Rufinus a little later embellished. Before separating, says this writer, the apostles, with a view to defining^ the faith which they were about to * Appendix XXVL DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY 61 preach throughout the universe, conjointly put into form the terms of the symbol, which each one then carried with him. But a legend is like a plant, continually putting out new branches and flowers. Isidore of Seville knows much more about this one than his predecessors. He tells how the apostles met in conclave in Jerusalem. Each one of them, moved by the Holy Spirit, rising in turn, uttered, in the silence of the others, an article of the Credo. This is why the Creed has twelve articles. It became possible even to set over against each of the articles the name of the apostle who proclaimed it. The Roman Catechism at last adopted and consecrated the whole legend. 1 What more striking example could be cited of the birth, evolution, and triumph of a religious tradition ! VI Development of the Catholic Theory AT the very time when the principle of the sovereign authority of tradi- tion was being so brilliantly posited over against heresy, a collection of the writings which had come down from the apostolic age was being formed in the Church, under the impulse of the same circumstances, and in view of the same necessities, and was canonised as the body of the ** Books of the New Testament." Held as supernaturally inspired, these books, which passed as being either by the apostles or their immediate disciples, could not be invested with less prestige and credit than the unwritten tradition. Therefore they at once found a place beside it in common veneration. The two authorities were on an equal footing, and thus far held one another in equilibrium. 2 It even happened very often that those who sacrificed Scripture to tradition, in face of the Gnostic doctors made appeal to it against ecclesiastical authority, or the customs of a too obliging tra- dition. It was Tertullian himself who uttered this word, trenchant 'Catech. Rom. See, especially, Nicholas, "La Symbole des Apotres," 1867. 1 Appendix XXVII. 62 DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY as a sword edge, " Christ said : I am the Truth ; he said not, I am the custom ! " 1 Such an utterance offered a fecund and necessary principle of criti- cism for a tradition which was destined to become ever more densely incrusted with superstitions in succeeding centuries. But it came too late, and even those who repeated it broke its force by their own contradic- tions and inconsistencies. It was impossible that two opposing author- ities, constantly at war, should long maintain an equal footing. With the progress that the priestly hierarchy and ecclesiastical centralisa- tion were making, it was easy to foresee which would have the victory and put the other in subordination. What more convenient way of justi- fying it all than to say with Pope Leo the Great, " All that has been received in the custom and devotion of the Church should be considered as derived from tradition and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit." The descent was too slippery to be climbed again when once the bottom was reached. He who from many points of view may be called a biblical Doctor, Augustine, did not hesitate to write by way of silencing the arguments of heretics : " I should not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Church did not so determine me." This is not quite the same as the more outspoken avowal of a modern ultramontane, but it prophesies and prepares for it : " But for the authority of the Pope I should not put the Bible above the Koran." To rescue the Church from the exclusive influence of Augustine and his ideas, and to bring it back to the middle path, was apparently the reason why Vincent of Lerins made himself the theorist of Catholic tradition, and put forth the famous treatise which has become the classic authority on the subject. His definition of the principle is well known: " That which has been everywhere, always, and by everyone believed, 1 Appendix XXVIII. 'Sermo 77, " De Jejunio Pentecost.," 2. For the express and definitive subor- dination of the Scriptures, Vincent of Lerins, " Commonitorium," 2. "Contra Epist. Fundamenti," 5. 4 K. Hase, " Handb. d. protest. Polemik," 5th ed., p. 81, 1891. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY 63 that is truly and properly Catholic." Tradition, to be authoritative, has, therefore, three marks or criterions by which it may be recognised: universality, antiquity, and the consent of all. On this basis doctrinal truth was finished and perfect in the Church from the beginning, and remains the same through all time and space. From this point of view, we may ask, Can there still be any question of the development of the Christian spirit in the Church? The author replies: The Church guards the deposit of faith which has been confided to her ; she changes nothing in it, adds nothing to it, subtracts nothing from it ; but applies herself to express in new language the ancient verities (non nova, sed nove), to confirm that which had been clearly defined, to define more clearly that which may have remained obscure. There will be progress in the form, but no change in the matter. 1 This fine definition has only one fault, that of remaining abstract and formal. Where are we to find this ancient and universal doctrine? What articles of faith, what rites, are marked with the triple seal here named? Which are the documents and authentic organs of this im- mutable and yet progressive tradition? The Middle Ages are at one in finding them in the " Acts " of the Councils, the " Decrees " of the Fathers, and the general practice of the Church. 2 But among the Coun- cils, which are ecumenical and which are not? Are all opinions of the Fathers authoritative? And if not, how distinguish those which must be received from those which must be rejected? Finally, among the practices of the Church, is there no distinction between the obligatory and the optional ? 8 Truly, this body of Catholic tradition, fluid and fleeting, is of Protean vagueness. But why should this surprise us? By its nature tradition is alive and fruitful, it is always indefinite, because it is never exhausted. Checked and fixed, it becomes as a bond or a fet- ter; left fluid, mobile, uncertain, it lends itself admirably to the ex- 1 Commonitorium pro cathol. Ecclesiae antiquitate et universalitate profanas omnium haereticorum novitates, 3 (al 4). Of. Augustine, " De Baptism.," iv. 24. 2 Appendix XXIX. Appendix XXX. *4 DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY igericics of ecclesiastical government, which alone has the right to in- terpret and apply it. This is why the Church of Rome has always obstinately defended it. The infallibility of tradition is the omnipotence of the hierarchy. 1 The theory of Vincent of Lerins was accepted until the seventeenth century. Bossuet gave it new life and developed it with his usual elo- quence in his polemic against the Protestants : " Catholic truth, coming from God, had from the first his perfection. The faith simply speaks, the Holy Spirit sheds abroad pure enlightenment, and the truth which he teaches has always a uniform language. Any variation in the ex- position of the faith is a mark of falsity and inconsistency." The entire History of Variations rests upon this foundation. Heresy itself is always a novelty, however old it may be ; it is continually making innova- tions, and changes its doctrine every day. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, immutably attached to its decrees once promulgated, show- ing not the slightest variation since the origin of Christianity, manifests herself as a church built upon the rock, always secure in herself, or rather in the promises which she has received, firm in her principles, and guided by a spirit which never contradicts itself. 2 A great change was coming upon the world and the Church. The progress of historic investigation, and the interior evolution of Catholi- cism itself, were to leave this claim of immutability without defence, and compel the theory of tradition to pass through a final transformation. The moderns have acquired the historic sense, and this truly new faculty of understanding and reconstructing the past has given them a new vision. Nothing endures without being transformed. Life is only a process of rejecting ancient things and assimilating things that are new. How could anyone maintain that the Church has lasted eighteen 'Tfie utterance of Pius IX will be remembered: "La traditione sono to." He proved it by promulgating, in 1854, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. * " Histoire des Variations des Egl. prot.," preface and conclusion. See, also, " Premier avertissement aux Prot.," " Exposition de la doctrine catholique," 2d ed., 1679; "Conference avec M. Claude." DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY 65 centuries without varying? Where in Christian antiquity were the dogmas which the men of our own generation have seen brought to life, that of the immaculate conception of Mary, or that of the infallibility of the Pope? Or even purgatory and the theory of indulgences, the seven sacraments, the reservation of the eucharistic cup from the Christian people, auricular confession, obligatory celibacy, the priesthood, and the Mass itself in its present form? Is there in the dogmatic of the Church, in its liturgy, its constitution, a single formula, a single rite, a single institution whose origin cannot be told and the date of its birth noted? And have we not heard, in our own days, that Bossuet himself, if he had not repented, would have died a heretic? There were two factors in the theory of Vincent of Lerins, and the Church had received two graces to enable her to accomplish her mission as the guardian and protector of the truth : the grace of fidelity in con- serving the primitive faith, the grace of inspiration and discernment to complete this faith, as time might demand, and make it always and everywhere victorious over error. The animating spirit of the Church is not only receptive, it is also productive and revelatory. The second element of the theory, which Bossuet left in the shade, has to come to the front. It justifies all the variations of history, and the grace of inspiration absolves the Church from the reproach of inconstancy and infidelity. The surprising thing is not that this transformation has taken place, since it was inevitable, but that its starting point and historic cause come from an idea of Protestant theology. In the beginning of the last century, Schleiermacher singularly fathomed and verified the very idea of tradition by spiritualising it. He represented it as the interior soul, the very conscience of every religious society, a sort of characteristic genius, a collective spirit, which, while remaining faithful to its inner nature, manifested itself in ever new creations, presided over the development of the society, maintaining its moral identity, and assuring to generations to come the spiritual 66 DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY heritage of generations gone by. It was a new philosophy, born of the contemplation of the movement of history. 1 Immediately the most eminent Catholic theologians made it their own. Moehler 2 in Germany, Newman 3 in England, and many learned men, almost everywhere, developed a new theory of tradition, which pre- vails at the present day. Like a family or a nation, the Church has its own characteristic genius, which lives and is active in her. This genius is the Spirit of the prophets and the apostles, it is the very Spirit of God, which Christ promised to those who believe in him. Eternally creative power, light ever new, brilliantly shining in the darkness, this Spirit re- news the ancient things, and brings forth from them things that are new ; he opens the closed book of the Scriptures and reveals its profound significance. Thanks to him, the divine revelation is not a dry parch- ment in the archives of an ever receding past, it becomes real, present, unlimited. In a word, Catholic tradition is Christ himself reincarnate from generation to generation in the historic Church, which is his body, and carrying on through all the ages a perpetual ministry of mediation and revelation. 4 The old line of argument of theologians like Bossuet, Vincent of Lerins, Tertullian, is reversed. The pyramid rests upon its apex. That which was the conclusion of the theory has become its premiss. The Church is infallible because it has the deposit of truth, and it possesses the truth because it is infallible. The circle is closed. An interesting observation should be made here: taken all in all, the new theory is the most dangerous of concessions to modern ideas, and a complete apotheosis of the hierarchy. Upon no other point has Roman Catholic theology an appearance of greater liberality, of closer reconciliation with idealistic philosophy; 1 Schleiermacher, " Der christl. Glaube Einleitung," 1821. Of. Marheineke, "Das System d. Katholicismus " ; Hegel, " Philosophic der Geschichte," complete works, vol. 9. 2 "Die Einheit der Kirche," 2d edit.; " Symbolik oder Darstellung d. dogmat. Ge- gensaetze der Kathol. u. Protest.," vol. 9. * " Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine," 1848. *Perrone, "Pradect. Theol.," ii. p. 24 ff., viii. p. 30. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY 67 as a matter of fact, on no other does she more faithfully obey the inner logic of the Catholic principle, nor better serve the hopes and plans now realised by the Roman curia. The philosophic concession is evident; it lies in the assimilation of the life and genius of the Church with the life and genius of common- place people. The dogma of tradition is entirely transformed. It is no longer a determined and fixed group of supernatural verities, once for all revealed. The Church not only guards the doctrine, she produces it. Dogma is born and developed in history, and, this being the case, it can be stated and explained like any philosophical production, lit- erary or moral. That which had appeared to be fixed and solid has become mobile, its ice has liquefied, and the stream has begun to flow. But the danger is perceived. From the absolute, doctrine has fallen into the relative. There is, then, only one way to save its infallible character, the Church itself must be deified that all its works and productions may be divine. Therefore its entire history has been canonised, it has been supernaturalised in its every movement. But just here appears the radical inconsistency of the system. To deify history is to deny it in its essence and reality. To say that men have followed in one another's footsteps laboriously seek- ing for truth, and have continually discovered it without the possibility of ever having erred, is the same thing as to say that men are struggling to do well and attain to virtue without the possibility of ever falling into sin. Infallibility, like perfect holiness, makes history useless. And, since Catholic theologians compare the Church with the divine-human person of Christ, we would say that they are falling into the error of the so-called Monophysites, who, losing the human nature of the Saviour in his divine nature, leave him only a vain appearance of humanity. In the same way Catholic evolutionists keep only a vain appearance of evo- lution. The supernatural dogma destroys the sincerity of history. Let us follow to the end. In the strictest sense, the Church is simply the sacerdotal hierarchy. In this hierarchy reside the soul of the 68 THE EPISCOPATE AND TRADITION Church, its infallible tradition, its divine inspiration. And as the Christian laity formerly abdicated in favour of the hierarchy, so has the episcopate in its turn abdicated in favour of the papacy. The Church with all its supernatural graces, its privileges, and its infallibility, is summed up and concentrated in the person of the supreme Pontiff. This person, the true incarnation of the Christ, is infallible, like the Christ whose place he holds. The Pope, like the Church, is not only the guardian and interpreter of tradition, he may at any moment create it by his inspired utterance and infallible decisions ; he is the living tradi- tion. But, this being so, it is possible to say that there is no longer any tradition. Thus completing itself, the Catholic dogma of tradi- tion denies its own existence. Thenceforth tradition is all in the present ; no one can make appeal to it against the Pope; it has, indeed, no longer any historic content ; it is only a label, under which there is and must ever be nothing other than the permanent inspiration and infalli- bility of the Roman Pontiff. 1 CHAPTER FOUR THE EPISCOPATE I The Episcopate and Tradition IN the Catholic system tradition is to the episcopate what the body is to the soul. Their union constitutes the living organism of the Church. Without the episcopate tradition would remain a purely idealistic conception, something analogous to the Hegelian notion of the spirit realising itself and being evolved in history ; it would not be a force nor a rule of government. Without tradition the episcopate would be merely a political caste whose reason for being had been lost, and whose power it would be impossible to justify. These two elements 1 Appendix XXXI. THE EPISCOPATE AND TRADITION 69 are all the more closely allied because each, being without integral strength, draws from the other such strength as it actually exercises. Tradition is only another name for the well-known theory of apostolic succession, whence the Church deduces the divine right of bishops to teach truth and govern souls. It is therefore natural that tradition and episcopacy, forming an organic whole, and each powerless without the other, coming into being at the same time and from the same his- toric causes, should have developed along parallel lines, gaming strength each by the other, till their common ascendency became complete. A twofold illustration of the supernatural principle underlies the process ; a divine act of institution at the beginning, leading in course of time to the theory that the entire institution was divine. Boldly sketched out in the writings of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen, the Catholic theory of the Episcopate was completed by Cyprian (248-258). But the history of Catholicism presents this singular law, that dogmatic theory always lags two or three centuries behind the prac- tical reality. A certain condition is produced by the action of general and natural causes ; thence, the condition being established, dogma comes in to supernaturalise and consecrate it in a formula assumed to be primi- tive and divine. The papacy had in fact exercised supreme magistracy in matters of faith, and ultimate jurisdiction in the discipline and gov- ernment of the Church, for some two centuries before the Vatican Coun- cil sanctioned its authority by the dogma of the personal infallibility of the Pope, and made the Bishop of Rome in some sort the unique and universal bishop. So was it with the episcopate. We can trace it from its coming into existence in the reign of Trajan, as it laboriously estab- lishes itself as a fact in one after another of the great churches; the theory that it had been supernaturally instituted, which Cyprian devel- oped and the Church adopted, came a hundred and fifty years later. Setting aside, then, all dogmatic prepossession, it is meet that we should go to history and to history alone to ask for the origin of the episcopate ; its reply will be all the more clear because the natural evolu- 70 FIRST CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF CORINTH tion by which Christianity passed from its primitive form to its Catholic form is more visible and striking here than anywhere else. History of the First Christian Community of Corinth THIS evolution will appear in fuller light if, instead of drawing a general picture, all the details of which cannot be equally clear, we take the his- tory of a particular church as the object of our observation and study. The Church of Corinth affords such an object. Three documents of undoubted authenticity and ascertained date permit us to follow its inner life for more than a century. 1 The two letters of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthian Christians, with the eighteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, open up to us the first beginnings of this great Church. The letters followed by five or six years Paul's first preaching in Achaia. What a vivid and stirring picture they give of the first community, its customs and its temperament ! What spontaneity of impulse among all its members ! What fraternal equality, what liberty, what superabundance of spiritual gifts and enthusiastic manifestations, which as yet no official organisa- tion modified or reduced to order, no legal authority dominated or ruled. 2 While insisting upon his apostolic authority, Paul neither understood nor exercised it as any other than a moral authority, wholly of persua- sion. He speaks as a father to his children, as an experienced guide to new beginners ; always recognising and insisting upon the autonomy of the community itself, as inwardly ruled by the Spirit of God, which it, like himself, had received. 3 Where do we find the divinely instituted I These three documents, which cover the period at almost equal intervals, are the two Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, which date from the years 56 and 58 of our era; the letter of Clement of Rome, written in the name of the Church of Rome to that of Corinth about the year 96; the testimony of Hegesippus, and the memoirs of Bishop Dionysius, preserved by Eusebius, H. E., IV. 22, 1, IV. 23, 9. I 1 Cor. i. 10-12, x-xiv. 8 1 Cor. iv. 14, 19, v. 1-6, ifl. 21-23, 2 Cor. i. 24. FIRST CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF CORINTH 71 bishop? Where is the legal and official authority? The directing power resides nowhere else than in the assembly of believers, who decide everything in last resort, after longer or shorter deliberation, precisely as in the little Greek republics, where all citizens having the right to vote assembled in the Agora to judge the accused and regulate public affairs. Here, as there, sentence is taken by the majority of suffrages. 1 In short, we are facing a true Christian democracy, with all the charac- teristics and all the faults inherent in this form of government. The bond which formed and maintained the unity of the association was still simply of the mystical and moral order. 2 Christians were " sanctified," " men set apart " (ayiot), forming a single body, because they had a common faith, a reciprocal love, and a common hope. Frater- nal exhortation, or, in extreme cases, sequestration from the assembly of the " saints " and abandonment to Satan, were the sole means of dis- cipline. Without the slightest doubt, here as in every social body, various functions were developed spontaneously to respond to the needs of the common life. The Spirit of God himself provided therefor, according to the apostle, by the diversity of gifts and vocations which were shed abroad in the Church. These gifts, which were considered to be supernatural, manifested themselves spontaneously on all occasions, from the vocations of apostles, prophets, teachers, administrators, down to gifts of healing the sick, of discerning the spirits, and of speaking in unknown tongues. 8 Naturally, at this period we find no trace of a division of Christians into clergy and laity. All formed the elect people, and conversely, this people was collectively a people of priests and prophets. There were no passive members. The most humble had their share of activity and 1 1 Cor. iv. 3-5, whence ft appears that the Corinthian Christians arrogated to themselves even the right to Judge of the apostolate of Paul himself, v. 4, 13, vi. 1-5, 2 Cor ii. 6. 2 The Christians together formed the body of Christ, because the spirit of Christ lived in each of them, and became to them as a common soul. 1 Cor. xii. 12 flf. Cf. Gal. iii. 27-29. 1 Cor. xii. 4-11, 28-30. Cf. Rom. xii. 5-8. 72 FIRST CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF CORINTH were by no means least necessary. The zeal of all was extreme; they needed curb and discipline rather than stimulus. 1 What can be clearer in our sources than this free administration of the community by itself, in the absence of all directing power super- imposed upon it by supernatural delegations? Paul spares it neither reproach nor counsel, but only to rouse it to action, not to substitute his authority for its own. It exercises full rights of jurisdiction upon its own responsibility, it sits in supreme tribunal, chooses its delegates and representatives, organises collections, and regulates acts of worship. The services and functions of the common life were at first freely per- formed by the spontaneous devotion of certain brethren whose gifts, circumstances, and character pointed them out in advance for the work. But it is certain that these very functions were never exercised except with the consent and under the control of all. Here, as in nature, it is correct to say that the need normally created the organ. At the end of his first letter Paul mentions the household of Stephanas, who were the first-fruits of his mission in Achaia, and whose members had ordained themselves for the service of the community. Did he feel any need of conferring upon them any other ordination than this inward ordination of the Holy Spirit? 2 He simply exhorts the other Christians to show themselves deferential and submissive to them. So in the Epistle to the Romans he notes a zealous Christian, Phabe, who had performed the same functions for the early believers at Cenchreae as the family of Stephanas at Corinth, and he places her in the same rank of voluntary servant and patron of the community. 3 It is needless to say that by degrees, as the little Christian church lost its family character, and by expansion took on that of a great urban or regional association, these functions became more stable and regular. *1 Cor. xiv. Paul was obliged to recall to modesty and silence the women who were also endowed with inspiration, 1 Cor. xi. 5-16, xiv. 34. He left to the church itself the charge of regulating these matters, 1 Cor. xi. 13-16. * 1 Cc* xvi. 15 ff. Note the expression, tratav iavrotot. "Rom. xvi. 1, 9, FIRST CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF CORINTH 73 Provision was made for them by election by the general assembly of brethren. 1 Such was the germ whence naturally grew the orders of deacons, of elders, of episcopoi or overseers, which appear to have been constituted at Corinth, as everywhere else, a few years later. There is no more mystery or miracle or sacramental element in this spontaneous organisation than in those at that time found in every large city, whether in the synagogues of the Jews of the Dispersion or in the pagan associations, where we find the same interior ministrations designated by the same names. 2 Let us pass over forty years. The letter which the church of Rome addresses to its sister church of Corinth by the pen of Clement, one of its elders, toward the end of the reign of Domitian, shows the latter church again passing through an important crisis. A part of the com- munity, the younger and less docile part, had put itself in rebellion against the " elders and heads " established and recognised by the Church, and had even effected the deposition of some of these in tumul- tuous assemblies. 3 Neither in Rome nor in Corinth was there yet a bishop in the Catholic sense of the word. In his letter Clement does not dispute the right of the Corinthian Christians to depose their elders and heads. Simply, the right should be exercised only for grave and legitimate reasons, which were wanting in these circumstances, so that the revolution attempted by some appeared like the effect of jealousy, the spirit of disorder and turbulence, rather than 'a work of justice and piety. This is why the church of Rome blames the agitators, invites them to repentance, and to submit themselves to the elders who have been duly invested with their charge, or, if they cannot do this, to leave the country that the Corinthian community may again enter into order and peace. 4 But such crises, even when happily quieted, cannot but leave conse- *2 Cor. viii. 19, Acts vi. 5, xiv. 23; " Teaching of the Apostles," 15. 'Appendix XXXII. Clement of Rome, 1 Cor. 1 and 44. Appendix XXXIII. 74 FIRST CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF CORINTH quences behind them. The authority which they do not destroy is neces- sarily strengthened by the process. This was the case with the eccle- siastical authority in Corinth. The agitations and discords of the early days, of the time of Paul himself, had resulted in constituting a stronger and more legal body of presbyters, who for more than thirty years had assured the uniform progress and prosperity of the Church. 1 The crisis of the year 96 brought this Church into position for another step in the direction of greater concentration of the directing authority. Just as this authority had passed from the bod} 7 of believers into the hands of a Senate, or council of Elders, so it was to pass from their hands into those of the most influential man among them, their natural head, who would thus become the sole bishop, the centre and personification of the entire community, the official guardian of the traditional faith, and the depository of the authority of all. The history of ecclesiastical evolu- tion during the first two centuries is that of a double abdication; the assembly of believers first remit their powers to their elect men, the presbyteroi; and in its turn the body of presbyteroi or episcopoi for at first both were one becomes epitomised in a single personage, its rep- resentative, who becomes the episcopos by pre-eminence, the Catholic bishop, until such time as this episcopate in its turn shall abdicate into the hands of the bishop of Rome, who will thus become the universal bishop, the personification and compendium of all Christendom. To use the political language of Montesquieu, it is the passage from a state of pure democracy, first to the state of republican oligarchy, and thence to the monarchical state. This evolution had been completed at Corinth when Hegesippus, on his way to Rome, spent some time there between the years 135 and 150. He found there a true bishop, by name Primus, under whose undisputed authority the Church so long convulsed was living in' the most irre- proachable orthodoxy and profound peace. A little later Dionysius of Corinth, whose influence extended far, affords a fine type of the Catholic 1 Clement of Rome, 1 Cor. 1 and passim. PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EPISCOPATE 75 bishop of the second century, taking a place beside Polycarp at Smyrna and Soter at Rome. 1 in Progressive Development of the Episcopate THAT which had been taking place in Corinth had been taking place in almost all Christian communities in the great cities. The same history, with variations, was being repeated everywhere. An institution like that episcopacy which dominated the second century of the Church is not formed by a single act nor in one day. There was here neither special decree of institution nor act of private will. In the general movement by which the organisation of the early churches led up to the Catholic episcopate and the hierarchy, we must see the workings of a social law, and the action of historic causes, as independent of the divine arbiter, that is to say, of miracle, as of human premeditation. The little Christian communities which were rapidly being formed almost everywhere were the work of itinerant preachers. The apostles were nothing else. Their name simply means missionary. It is an error to think that the name was reserved solely to the Twelve, or that they formed a closed college with an exclusive delegation to govern Chris- tendom and regulate its faith. The number of apostles of Christ (aTTooroAoi TOV Xptorov) was in fact considerable. It was the title which those took, who, for one reason or another, whether as the consequence of some word of Jesus heard while he was in the flesh, or later as the result of a vision and a command of the Spirit, went forth spon- taneously to publish his gospel and found new churches. But to have received this vocation, whether sooner or later, created in Paul's eyes no essential distinction. The chief personage, the true head of the church of Jerusalem ard of the Jewish churches, was James, who was not one of the Twelve ; and the greatest of the apostles to the Gentiles was Paul of 'Eusebius, H. E. IV. 22, 1; 33, 9. 76 PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EPISCOPATE Tarsus, who had only been called to the apostolate by Jesus after His resurrection. 1 The notion and the representation of a directoral college composed of the Twelve alone, to whom Christ had transmitted his authority to the exclusion of all others, together with special grace for its exercise, are late and legendary. The first link of the golden chain forged by Catholicism to attach its hierarchy to the apostles is a myth. In the beginning we find two great classes of labourers occupied with the work of God ; one was the men of the word, apostles, prophets, teach- ers, the other was the " elders," the overseers or episcopoi, and the deacons. Between them is just this difference, that the former are in the service of the Church at large, and even of the world which must be con- verted, and in the last analysis were responsible only to the Spirit who in- spired and guided them, while the latter, on the contrary, are the min- isters, the elected servants, of a particular community, and are held responsible by it for their charge. Thence it follows that in the apostolic age freedom of teaching was absolute; it belonged to all members of the Church in their very char- acter as Christians, for all had received the Spirit. A conflict between these free itinerant preachers and the settled official leaders of the churches was inevitable. The authority of the latter must often have suffered from the inspirations of the former. Nevertheless, this liberty was long preserved. No doubt it was the persistent cause of the troubles in Corinth, which the letter of Clement was intended to repress. Hermas, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Origen, are witnesses, down to the third century, of this ancient freedom, of which the laity was finally entirely despoiled, for the benefit of an official clergy invested with a monopoly of things divine. It was in the necessity of things that the ecclesiastical authority should lay its hand upon the office and prerogative of teaching. A verse in the Pastoral Epistles marks the movement of transition : " Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially those Appendix XXXIV. PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EPISCOPATE 77 that labour in the word and in teaching." l Nothing contributed more practically to the establishment of the episcopate. The prerogatives of the office increased with the distinction of him who exercised it. In the end the entire activity of the community was concentrated in him. Confided to the care of a single official person, doctrine was more easily guarded against innovations, and unity of teaching was more surely maintained. The " Teaching of the Apostles " preserves a curious testimony of the reaction almost universally felt at the close of the first century, against itinerant prophets and preachers, and individual in- spiration. 2 We must go back for a moment to note this capital fact; not only do we not find in the beginning any formal institution of episcopacy, or of any hierarchy whatsoever, but the names episcopos and presbyteros are equivalent, and designate the same persons; one word being defined by Greek usage, after the analogy of the pagan brotherhoods, the other by Hebraic usage, after the analogy of the synagogues. Whence it appears that we have to do indifferently with several bishops, or over- seers, or several elders, or directors, in the same community. Both are " pastors," shepherds leading the flock of Christ, who remains the " chief Shepherd of souls." This identity of office appears not only in the epistles of Paul, but also in the Acts of the Apostles, the First Epistle of Peter, the letter of Clement, the Shepherd of Hennas, the Teaching of the Apostles, and elsewhere. The testimony of the early Church is universal, and admits of not a single exception. 3 Long after, in a period when all relations had under- gone a change, St. Jerome preserved the following testimony, summing it up in these terms : " The presbyter is the same as the bishop, and be- l Tim. v. 17. [The author's French translation shows his meaning more clearly. " The presbyter or episcopus who can join the gift of teaching to the duty of adminis- tration and direction has double merit, and is worthy of double honour." The Greek is, 01 KdXws irpoeo-TWTei irptorfMrepoi 5iT\5jj Ti/tijt ifut^ffSuffav, pdXurra ol KOTtwrret if \6yip nal Stfa.ffKa\lq,. Trans.] ' Appendix XXXV. 1 Appendix XXXVI. 78 PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EPISCOPATE fore parties had been raised up in religion by the provocations of Satan, the churches were governed by the Senate of the presbyters. But as each one sought to appropriate to himself those whom he had baptised, in- stead of leaving them to Christ, it was appointed that one of the pres- byters, elected by his colleagues, should be set over all the others, and have chief supervision over the general well-being of the community. And this is not my private opinion, it is that of Scripture. If you doubt that bishop and presbyter are the same, that the first word is one of function, and the second one of age, read the epistle of the Apostle to the Philippians. Without doubt it is the duty of the presbyters to bear in mind that by the discipline of the Church they are subordinated to him who has been given them as their head, but it is fitting that the bishops, on their side, do not forget that if they are set over the pres- byters, it is the result of tradition, and not by the fact of a particular institution of the Lord." This judgment of the most learned of the Fathers of the Western Church found a place in the decree of Pope Gratian, and reappears in many ecclesiastical authors down to the seventh century. 1 Once the Galilean idyll had come to a close with the death of Jesus at Jerusalem, the Christian religion, if we overlook the little peasant communities beyond the Jordan, presents itself in history as a religion of large cities ; it gets its foothold in populous towns, in the provincial capitals of the empire, and thence radiates into all the surrounding country. Its first centres were Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, Smyrna, Philippi, Corinth, Alexandria, Rome, and later, Carthage, Aries, Vienne, Lyons. In these great centres the focus, the place where religious serv- ices and the agapes were held, was at first a private house, like that of Stephanas or Chloe or Titus Justus in Corinth, of Aquila and Priscilla at Ephesus, of Philemon at Colosse, of Jason at Thessalonica, of Lydia at Philippi, etc. 2 These little family churches were very numerous in the same city. This is certain so far as Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome are 1 Appendix XXXVII. "Appendix XXXVIII. PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EPISCOPATE 79 concerned. The power of mystic union emanating from the gospel caused these ecclesiolce to consider themselves not merely as sisters, but as mem- bers of a single larger community, which also needed a larger representa- tion and more general direction. To the central council, common to all, it is probable that each of the little groups sent a delegate to sit as presbyter; but it may be understood that each central council would give itself one or more episcopal, charged to watch over the general interests and needs of the entire community, and that these episcopal, or this episcopos, becoming the head of the whole body, would enjoy a real pre- eminence, and a greater authority in it. Here is yet another cause of the formation of the episcopate. Before long the sentiment of a special dignity was attached to the title of bishop. Those who directed rival communities in the neighbourhood would claim it in their turn, and thus arose the choreplscopol, or village bishops, who, necessarily subordinate to him of the metropolis, constituted for the latter what was called the " diocese." All this system necessarily followed the Roman adminis- trative divisions. As for the Corinthian community, so for the other great churches, we might fix, with a fair degree of certainty, the evolutionary period, which by degrees raised one of these presbyteroi to the place and rank of sole and sovereign bishop. At Rome, for example, the process was not more rapid than at Corinth itself. At the close of the first century there was still no bishop there, in the new, specific sense of the word. It ap- pears from the letter of Clement that the church of Rome, like that of Corinth, had several directors at its head, and was governed by a more or less numerous presbyterate. Thirty years later the " Shepherd " of Hermas shows the same condition, except that he also bears witness, not without severe blame, to disputes which here, as in Corinth, have arisen over the episcopal office, to divisions and competitions breaking out among the presbyteroi, who sought the first place in the assembly of be- lievers. 1 The first who figures as bishop of Rome appears to have been 1 Hermas, " Shepherd," Vis. II. 4, 3. 80 PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EPISCOPATE Pius, or more correctly, after him Anicetus, the contemporary and friend of Poly carp, about the year 150. Those who are cited before these men were merely " elders," several of whom no doubt sat together in the coun- cils of the church.^ At Philippi the constitution of the monarchical episcopate was not less slow to form. The letter which Paul wrote to this church in the year 63 or 64 proves that at that time it was governed by deacons and episcopal in the plural. In the year 120 or 121 the system had not yet been changed. The letter of Polycarp bears testimony to this in a man- ner which admits of no doubt. By reason of the reputation or personal authority of some eminent leader, who was at first only a presbyter, several churches passed from the presbyterial to the monarchic episcopal system without shock, and almost without being aware of a change. Thus it was with the church of Smyrna, under the long leadership of Polycarp, who, born about the year 70, was already at its head in the reign of Trajan, and governed it until the year 154 or 155. Thus, no doubt, it was in the church of Antioch with Ignatius, in that of Hierapolis with Papias, and that of Sardis with Meliton. The presbyterial council had everywhere a presi- dent, to whom was given the pre-eminent title of episcopos. In all the churches, therefore, the germ existed whence the Catholic episcopate should more or less rapidly grow, according as circumstances were more or less favourable. Nowhere was there occasion to import it from with- out or make it out of whole cloth. Nevertheless, this concentration of all power in a single hand, this exaltation of a single personage above all the others, did not take place without awakening protest. Revolutions, however happily conducted, bring on storms. The local resistance encountered by the one under consideration left its traces in the books of the New Testament, which date from the epoch of Trajan, that is, from the last years of the first century, or the 1 Appendix XXXIX. PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EPISCOPATE 81 early years of the second. There are, first, the writings which issued from the " Johannean " school of Ephesus. In the third letter of John we find an unnamed presbyter, doubtless John the Presbyter of Ephesus, denouncing to Gaius the unruly conduct of a certain Diotrephes, who desired to have the first place, and exercise the sole authority in the com- munity, and who, to the end, does not hesitate go to extremes, even to driving from the church those who, by their fidelity to the old customs, are an obstacle to his ambition. 1 About the same time the saying which it is claimed that Christ ad- dressed to Peter, " Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church," made its first appearance with the last redaction of the Gospel of Matthew; the name of Peter became the patron and warrant of the episcopal constitution of the Church. This being the case, it is im- possible not to see a protest against this tendency in the premeditated subordination in which the author of the Fourth Gospel places Peter with regard to the " disciple whom Jesus loved." Peter is neither the sole nor the surest interpreter of the Master's thought. He had need to approach it by way of the disciple who reclined in the Lord's bosom, and it even seems that while Peter went to martyrdom, the Lord had willed that John should survive and give the last directions to the churches. All this means nothing if it does not signify that official authority is less valuable than love as a tie to Christ, and for communion with him. From the beginning the ecclesiastical hierarchy met its eternal enemy in mystic piety, inwardly confident, zealous to find God in liberty, and without intermediary. 2 Not less significant, and with the same meaning, are the exhortations which the First Epistle of Peter, whatever its authority and date, ad- dresses to the presbyteroi. There is no question of any bishop ; but allu- sion is made, with vigorous reprobation, to those who bring no devotion to their functions, or who exercise them with an eye to discreditable bene- 1 Appendix XL. 'Appendix XLI. 82 THE PRIESTHOOD fits, or with the ambition to rule, imagining themselves the masters of other classes of the community. 1 Finally, we hear the same complaint from Hernias, vehemently de- nouncing the dissensions and wranglings for the highest rank, which are disturbing the council of presbyters in Rome, and exhorting them to repent and keep the peace by purity of sentiment, humility, and charity.' 2 But, on the whole, these voices, however numerous, were isolated, and could effect nothing to stem the current which was carrying the Christian body along. They were trying to maintain a passing order which no human power could keep from passing. In proportion as Christianity grew inwardly cold, it felt the necessity of strengthening its external unity by a more closely knit organisation. The discipline, authority, and unified government of the bishop must henceforth make good the ever growing deficit in faith, hope, and love. Future heresies were destined to hasten the movement and render it irresistible. IV The Priesthood EPISCOPACY is something more than a monarchical government. It is a sacerdotal government; the priestly idea completes the idea of the episcopate. In the third and fourth centuries Christianity, like the older re- ligions, presents a priestly caste with identical functions and titles. The epithets sacerdos, pontifex, passed from the heads of Jewish or pagan priests to those of the Christian priesthood. Sacrifice became the essence of the new cult, as it had been of those of former times. There was only one difference, the ancient sacrifices were figurative and vain, while the sacrifice of the Mass was the sole true and efficacious sacrifice. But the sacerdotal notion is the same. 1 1 Pet. v. 1-5, especially the words Karaicvpitforret rdv K\fipuv. The K'/.IKI are the divers orders of members comprising the community. * Hennas, " Shep.," Vis. iii. 9, 7-10, and " Simil.," viii. 7, 4. THE PRIESTHOOD 83 Henceforth the priest is endowed with a sacred character, a divine privilege raises him above the rest of men. In his dread hand he holds the mercies and the wrath of God, he gives or refuses the expiation that seems necessary, and holds in his hand the keys of heaven and hell. As in the old religions, so in the religious system of Catholicism, to enter into relations with God the people must accept the mediation of the priest, and thus, for all that concerns the religious life, they remain in absolute dependence upon him. The Catholic Church made admirable use of the rites of worship and sacerdotal forms of the past, in organis- ing her worship and constituting her hierarchy. Nowhere is the survival of ancient elements in new institutions more apparent. It is very cer- tain that the idea of a new priesthood, a superior caste, among Chris- tian people, is absolutely foreign to the thought of Jesus and to the gospel preached by the apostles. Its later triumph must be explained like many analogous historic phenomena, by the natural, and no doubt inevitable, reprisals of vanquished religions from those who overcame them only by, in many respects, perpetuating them. If the new principle of the gospel was to be realised in a popular religious society, or even if it was to make itself understood and enter the consciousness of the old world, it could not remain purely spiritual ; it was doomed, if I dare say so, to flow in the religious moulds of the past. This historic realisation of the Christian principle within the framework of pre-existing habits and notions, or, properly speaking, the delimitation of Catholicism, was the work of the first three centuries. 1 This evolution is summed up in the history of two words : priest and clergy. Our word priest comes from the Greek word presbyter, to which originally all sacerdotal idea was foreign. It was precisely translated in Latin by senior, elder, delegated to the Senate to administer the affairs of the community. He was designated by election for services rendered, or to be rendered, precisely as were the sediles by the electors of the 1 See the author's " Esquisse d'une Philosophic de la Religion," p. 233 ff. [English translation* " Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion."] 84 THE PRIESTHOOD municipality, or as were the rulers of the synagogues by their fellow- worshippers. Not more in one case than another, did anyone suppose that this choice withdrew the elect from their natural position. The word presbyter has no other meaning until the middle of the second cenvtury. But it was inevitable that when the Eucharist was invested with the appearance and significance of a sacrifice, the presbyter should take on the form and functions of a sacerdos. This sacerdotal idea is so deeply embedded in the word priest, as entirely to overlay and put out of sight its original significance. Priesthood and sacerdos have become synonymous. Thus the history of words sometimes tells us that of ideas. 1 The word clergy has had a precisely parallel destiny. In Greek kleros has the most general meaning, from that of a die for gaming and fortune-telling, to that of function, ministry, and rank or social class. 2 In one of his letters Ignatius still applies it to the whole assembly of Christians. 3 But in reality there were several classes or confraternities in each community. There was the kleros of ordinary members, that of widows and of matrons, that of confessors of the faith, that of deacons, elders, and bishops. 4 The invasion and preponderance of the sacerdotal idea disturbed the equilibrium of these various classes, and entirely changed the relations between those who were clothed with it and the community. They over- shadowed or subordinated to themselves all the others, as steps of the hierarchic scale, of which they held the top. The order of seniores and episcopoi became the pre-eminent ecclesiastical order, the sovereign sacerdotal caste, the clergy. 5 A priesthood involves the idea of sacrifice. Once introduced into the system, the idea of sacrifice was therefore the pivot of the revolution which we have just described. The same movement which conducted Christian worship to the Catholic Mass also led the primitive presbytery to the sacerdotal episcopacy. 1 Appendix XLII. s Appendix XLIII. '"Ad Ephes.," xi. 4 Appendix XLI V. Appendix XLV. THE PRIESTHOOD 86 The worship required by Christ, and defined in his gospel, was worship in spirit and in truth, that is to say, prayer from the heart, trust in the Father's love, the moral consecration of soul and life. He thus did away with victims and priests, temples and altars. More than once Jesus showed his disdain of Levitical rites and sacrifices. He cleansed the temple of the merchants who encumbered it, and ended by prophesying its approaching destruction. 1 With the Messianic era, in any case, sacrifices were to cease. 2 How then could the Christian worship have be- come in the course of two centuries essentially a sacrifice, and its offici- ating minister a priest? It began, in the first place, through metaphor. To explain and justify so radical a change the preachers of the new religion were forced to make use of the old forms of religious speech. They said that the sacrifice truly pleasing to God was the giving up of sin ; that the offering which he claimed was the gift of the heart, grateful prayer, love of one's neighbor, purity of life. Thus Paul, the most spiritualistic of the apostles, wrote to the Roman Christians, " Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. This is your reasonable service," that is, it is the only worship which comes within the logic of your faith. 3 The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews goes a step farther, with his resources of allegorical exegesis and his Alexandrian typology ; he discovers in the new covenant the permanent reality of worship, of which the old had been only the temporary shadow, high priest and victim, temple, altar and expiatory blood. 4 This method was not without danger. The foundation of the new worship was doubtless new, but the old forms were maintained. The conception of worship remained funda- mentally the same. When the spirit of the Master should breathe less warmly, when the body of Christians should grow cold, as in the second 'John iv. 23, 24; Matt. vi. 1-18, ix. 13; Mark vii. 10-12, xii. 33; John ii. 13-19; Matt. xxiv. 2, xxvi. 61; Acts vi. 14, vii. 42-50; Rom. xii. 1, \OJIK)I \arpela. 1 Rev. xxi. 22: xal va&v ofa tlSov ivafa-Q. Rom. xii. 1; Eph. v. 2; Phil. ii. 17, iv. 18; Heb. iii., x.; Rev. v. 9. vi. 9, viii. 3, etc. 4 Heb. v.-x. Cf. Clement of Rome, 1 Cor. 40, 41, and passim. 86 THE PRIESTHOOD century they did, then they would surely be drawn by the force of pagan habits into the old ways of the past. On one side ecclesiastical interest, conspiring with the formal and superstitious piety of Christians by birth and name only, would tend to change the apostolic metaphors into positive realities, and the Church would labor to make real in its constitu- tion and liturgy that Levitical type of worship which the Old Testament presented to it as instituted by God himself. All this already appears in the history of the Eucharistic Supper, which, by a process easy to follow, became the Roman Catholic sacrifice of the Mass. In the earliest time it had been a religious feast, a fraternal banquet, analogous to the family meal celebrated by the Jews on certain days, with prayers of blessing over the bread broken and distributed, and the common cup, circulated from hand to hand. 1 To partake of the same food was to make one body of those who were fed by it. Jesus, like the pious Jews of his time, had the habit of observing feasts of this kind with his disciples, and of beginning with a prayer of thanksgiving said over the bread and the wine. It was from this prayer that the rite was named Eucharist. 2 It was entirely natural that the last supper of which he partook with his disciples should take on greater solemnity, and that the Saviour, just as under the influence of the vision of approaching death he had applied Mary's perfume to the embalming of his body, should in this case have shown in the broken bread and poured wine, the image of his broken body and shed blood. 3 But it does not appear that in the primitive church of Jerusalem, or later in the other communities, the idea of the death of Christ was always attached to the celebration of this family meal. No liturgy was adopted for it. Prophets and apostles improvised the prayers and exhortations which accompanied the 1 Treatise Berachoth in Babylonian Talmud, Schwab's edit., p. 410 ff., and the Jewish Ritual. Vide Lightfoot, " Horae Hebraicae." *Mark vi. 41 and paral. viii. 7, xiv. 23; 1 Cor. x. 16, ef\oyf>\oylas. Appendix XL VI. THE PRIESTHOOD 87 distribution of the bread and wine, the symbol of the spiritual food with which God nourished the souls of his elect. 1 In Paul's churches, on the contrary, the Lord's Supper was from the beginning the epitome or the symbol of the gospel of the cross, that is, of the death of Christ, who offered himself as an expiatory victim for the salvation of men. The " Lord's Supper " was meant to keep alive liie memory of the sacrifice. The Eucharist was distinguished from the primitive agape, it preserved this special significance, and finally became the central feature of the worship. The elements of the bread and wine were thus brought into close relations with the flesh and blood of Christ. He who should unworthily eat of this bread and drink of this cup would be responsible for the body and blood of the Lord. Without any doubt the Eucharist is here still a mere memorial and symbol, but it is a symbol already full of mystery. 2 These two conceptions of the Communion gradually drew together, mingled, and were both developed to the idea of a veritable sacrifice. The first promptly reached the idea of a sacrifice of oblation, an offering made to God by the first-fruits of those vital aliments on which the body of the community subsists ; the second finally reached the idea of an expiatory sacrifice for sin. In both cases the first idea of the Eucharist is reversed. It is no longer God who gives, it is the community which offers, that it may after- ward obtain. Already in the epistle of Clement of Rome the elements of the Supper are represented as an oblation resembling the oblations of the Old Testament, brought and laid upon God's altar. 3 It is the free offer- ing which Jehovah has already demanded by the mouth of the prophet Malachi, an offering of joy and gratitude for the fruits of the earth, for the spiritual bread and all the benefits of God, including those which are included for sinners in the death of Jesus Christ. 4 1 Appendix XL VII. * 1 Cor. x. 18-21, xi. 17-29. Clement of Rome, 1 Cor. 36, 1; 40, 1, 2; 41, 2; Ignatius, "Ad Eph."; Justin Martyr, " Dial, ad Tryph.," 117. Appendix XLVIII. 88 THE PRIESTHOOD But the more the bread and wine came to be understood as the very body of the incarnate Word, the more also was the idea of a simple obla- tion of gratitude bound to fade and yield place to the idea of an ex- piatory sacrifice, and the act of the priest in the Eucharist appear like the repetition of the sacrifice accomplished by Christ upon the cross. The nature and effects of the sacrifice were identical in both cases. That is to say that the act performed at the altar had the same virtue as the death of Jesus. In other words, every day, in the Host consecrated and offered according to the official rite, Christ himself is sacrificed again. The sign has become the thing signified, and the commemoration of the sacrifice on Calvary is its perpetual repetition. Thenceforth, also, the virtue of the sacrifice was conceived more and more as magical in its effects, and extended in its efficacy. It was not limited to those who partook of it, but to all those present or absent, living or dead, whom the priest included in his prayer. 1 With the sacrifice of the Mass the Catholic priesthood was constituted upon the model of former priesthoods. It had the same monopoly of dread and mysterious power, whether of rendering the Deity propitious, or of unchaining his wrath. The consecrating words had the same magical effect as the formulas of ancient rituals, and the same power (in case of need) to do violence to the divine will. The priest was more than a man, more than an angel. 2 The necessary mediator between earth and heaven, he controls the authority of God himself. He closes, and no man opens ; he opens, and no man closes. He saves and damns without appeal. This is what is called the power of the Keys. The separation between people and priest was accomplished. The beautiful gospel figure of the shepherd and the flock, literally received and interpreted, had been used to support this sacerdotal monopoly. It will be remembered how Lainez, the general of the Jesuits, commented upon it in a celebrated discourse before the Council of Trent : " Sheep are 1 In the time of Cyprian the evolution was an accomplished fact, and all its conse- quences were unfolding themselves. Cyprian, Epist. 63. 'Cat Rom., P. II. 7, 2. THE PRIESTHOOD 89 animals destitute of reason, and in consequence they can have no part in the government of the Church." There are, therefore, two Churches, one which includes the mass of Christian people, the other, the Church in the strict sense, is the hierarchy. To the latter pertains the office of governing and teaching; to the former that of obeying and receiving instruction. 2 Catholic architecture has expressed this division of the body of Christ by separating the choir from the rest of the church by a railing and steps. The choir is the priest's church, the rest is the church of the worshippers. Thus in ancient temples a veil or wall kept the profane multitude from the sanctuary of the god, which the priest alone had the right to enter, and there officiate. A beautiful legend, inspired by the primitive Christian spirit, teaches that at the very hour when Jesus expired upon the cross the veil of the temple in Jerusalem was rent by an invisible hand, and the Most Holy Place, until then reserved for the High Priest alone, appeared open, and thenceforth accessible to all, 3 a figure of the holy equality acquired by Jesus for all his disciples. Nothing was farther from the mind of Jesus than to constitute a new sacerdotal order. Upon no point has his thought been more flagrantly traversed than on this, by those who call themselves his heirs. He will have no master among his own, who are all brethren. He promises to all, equally, the gift of the Holy Spirit. And in the primitive church it was the gift of the Spirit alone which made a true Christian. Peter recognised the advent of the Messianic era by the fact that the Spirit, until then reserved for certain persons, priests and prophets, was then poured out upon all flesh universally. 4 It was for this reason that every believer might speak the word of God in the assemblies. 5 The apostle Peter writes to the Christians of Asia, without 1 Sarpi, " Hist. Cone. Trident," VII. p. 1063. " Cat. Rom.," L. 10, 23. Matt, xxvii. 51. 4 Matt xxiii. 6-10, iii. 11 ; Mark xiii. 11 ; Luke xi. 13; Acts ii. 33, vi. 3, viii. 15, xv. 8; Rom. viu. 9, 23; 1 Cor. U. 10-16; 2 Cor. xiii. 13, etc. 5 1 Cor. xiv. 90 APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION exception : " Ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood." This is the hymn that rings through all the Apocalypse of John : " Christ has made us kings and priests unto God his Father." 1 The idea of the universal priesthood of Christians was long held in the Church, concurrently with that of the priests, which in the end abolished it. Yet Justin Martyr, Irenseus, Tertullian still bear witness to the original authority of this idea and to its persistence. 2 " Universal priesthood " is a metaphorical expression borrowed from the past to express something essentially new, so true it is that new ideas, to be comprehended, must appear in an old dress. But this Christian metaphor none the less distinctly opposes the monopoly and privilege of an organised priestly caste. Peter founded the universal priesthood of Christians upon this, that they offer " spiritual sacrifices, which alone are well pleasing to God by Jesus Christ." Evidently he recognised no others, he esteemed that the Eucharist also was, or ought to be, a spiritual sacrifice, which each Christian has the right to offer to God by Jesus Christ. If this is the case, all the reasons at once vanish which might be given by the priest for raising himself above the community of whom he is simply the servant. Apostolic Succession CALLED into being by solicitude for unity and authority in the Church, constituted by the notion of the priesthood, the episcopate was com- pleted by the theory of Apostolic Succession. But the theory followed, not preceded, the establishment of the episcopate. It is always thus with political institutions. They must have existed in fact before anyone could dream of justifying them in law. The Capets already held the crown of France when their lawyers and theologians devised the theory of divine >1 Pet. ii. 4, 5; Rev. v. 10. 4 Justin Martyr, "Dial. adv. Tryph.," 116; Irenaeus, IV. 8, 3; Tertullian, "De Exhort. Cast." APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 91 right in order to settle it upon their heads and those of their descendants. Apostolic succession is the theory of the divine and supernatural legit- imacy of the power of the bishops. This theory, which appears at the close of the second century, was the work of the juristic genius of Rome. How could the episcopal authority, already universally established, be raised above attacks from without and discussions from within ? Neither the idea of a mere historic tradi- tion, ever subject to criticism and reason, nor that of a governmental authority emanating from the community itself, and deriving all its rights from the consent of the Christian people, could suffice to maintain order, prevent schisms, and banish heresy. The power of the govern- ment, and of those who exercised it, must be put above and outside of the judgment of the Church itself, and for that there was only one solution: to show that it was a question of supernatural power, not derived from the will of the Church, but received from heaven by official transmission, legal, uninterrupted, from God to Christ, from Christ to the apostles, from the apostles to the bishops and their successors. A prince who is destined to reign enters the dynasty by birth. En- trance into the episcopal dynasty is by ordination. This legal transmission of a power of divine origin is in both cases a monstrous historic fiction, but in both cases also, it is not the fiction that establishes the power, it is the power already established that gives rise to and accounts for the fiction. The dogma of apostolical succession did not make the bishops, the bishops made the dogma. Thus all returns into the natural order of things, and the mystery is explained. Authentic history mentions no example of a bishop consecrated by an apostle, and to whom an apostle might have transmitted by this institu- tion either the totality, or a part of his powers. For this there are two equally decisive reasons : the first is that an interval of more than half a century separates the disappearance of the apostles from the appearance of the first bishop, in the Catholic sense. The second is that in the prin- ciple itself bishops or deacons could not have been the continuators of 92 APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION the apostle's office, since the two orders are essentially different. The apostle held his mission from God } and was devoted to the work of gen- eral evangelisation ; he could not become the settled director of a partic- ular parish; no apostle was ever a deacon or a bishop. On the other hand, the bishops, elders, and deacons belonged to a local church, whose responsible functionaries they were, and upon this church they could not be imposed without its consent. This being the case, the precise mode of their nomination was of small importance. No doubt the apostle or founder of a church never lost his interest in it. In some cases he per- haps took the initiative and designated those who were most worthy of choice, and these were confirmed by the assembly; in others it was the assembly which first elected its elders or deacons, whom an apostle after- ward installed; or in still others it was the most capable and zealous Christians, like the household of Stephanas at Corinth, who gave them- selves to the work, of their own initiative took charge of the worship and common business of the church, and were confirmed in this function by the grateful approbation of the community. But in the last analysis the fountain of power and the final authority remained in the full assembly of believers. 1 If it had been otherwise, if the bishops had been chosen by the apostles, and that according to an official and invariable rite, it would be incomprehensible that this office of the episcopate should have been the cause of so many cabals and dissensions in the churches, especially in the early days. 2 On the other hand, nothing is more natural if democracy was at first the rule of primitive Christianity, as everything demonstrates that it was. The apostles dead, and the original difference between the functions of apostle and bishop once forgotten, it is easy to perceive that men 1 Clement of Rome, 1 Cor. 54, 2. Of. 44, 3,