Volume 1, Chapter 4

THE CRISES OF THE THIRD CENTURY

Section 2: THE EASTER CONTROVERSY

Section 3: MONARCHIANS -- SABELLIUS -- ST. HIPPOLYTUS

Section 4: THE PENITENTIAL CONTROVERSY -- ST. CALIXTUS I

Section 5: THE SCHISM OF NOVATIAN

Section 6: ST. CYPRIAN AND ROME

Section 7: THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA -- ORIGEN

Section 8: MITHRAISM

Section 9: THE MANICHEES

Section 10: DENIS OF ALEXANDRIA -- PAUL OF SAMOSATA

The history of the Church in the second century is very largely the history of its first contacts with the Pagan religions of the time. The effect of that meeting is to bring out, ever more clearly, the new religious thing's well defined form. The reaction by which it emerges unchanged -- and alone unchanged -- from that syncretist century of a hundred religious enthusiasms, is spontaneous. The Church does not find it necessary to add either to its traditional faith, or to the already recognised jurisdiction of its rulers, in order to stem the development within its walls of theories alien to its nature. Sedet aeternumque sedebit -- for such crises was it built. They have been no more than the occasion for its essential nature to show itself in function. They leave the Church no different, save, perhaps, for a clearer consciousness of its own nature and powers. The stress of the century which culminates in the Adversus Haereses of St. Irenaeus was due, primarily, to the influence on the Church of forces bred elsewhere. It was an attempt from outside to pull the Church into line with the day's religious fashions. In the century which follows St. Irenaeus the crisis is wholly different. Catholics are its authors; and the struggle is one for mastery between the episcopate and individuals who, by reason of their theological skill or of the sacrifices they have made for the faith, claim for themselves and their opinions a deciding voice -- as of right -- in matters of discipline that involve points of belief.

It is one of the fortunate accidents of the story of the next eighty years (190-270) that these disputes involve the Roman Church, whose history over a continuous period of years is now, for the first time, revealed. As the troubles of the second century are a means to inform us what contemporary Catholics believed about the nature of Catholicism, so those of the third century throw a flood of light for us on the position, already traditional, of the Roman Church within the great whole. They supply a commentary of fact to St. Irenaeus' theory, and we are thereby enabled to see at work that superior authority which he noted as the Roman See's peculiar privilege. There is a dispute concerning the calendar, disputes on the explanations of the mysteries of faith, disputes about changes in discipline, and disputes which raise the fundamental question of the relations of the Roman Church to the rest. We meet the first of the anti-popes, and the first schisms in the Roman Church itself. At the same time, thanks to the genius of Plotinus, a last attempt is made to infuse life into Paganism-an attempt which is, also, bitterly anti-Christian. A last new religious revival from the East threatens yet another delay to the Pagan's realisation that Christianity or nothing is his choice. At Alexandria one of the greatest geniuses of all time essays a vast synthesis of philosophy and Christian learning, and founds a tradition of theology which is to endure for centuries.

THE EASTER CONTROVERSY

The actual date of the death and resurrection of Our Lord formed no part of the Church's traditional faith. From very early on, the different Churches followed each their own judgment in the matter. By the end of the second century the majority of the churches, Rome amongst them, had come to celebrate the Resurrection on the Sunday which followed the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan. The churches of the Roman province of Asia (Asia Proconsularis) celebrated the commemoration of Our Lord's death rather than His resurrection, and they kept it on the 14th of Nisan whether that day fell on a Sunday or not. This difference of observance was felt as a serious inconvenience; and, in 154, the pope of the time -- Anicetus -- made an effort to win over to the Roman, and more general, practice the bishop whose prestige might have brought in the rest of the Asiatics, Polycarp of Smyrna. St. Polycarp, invoking the great name of the apostle St. John as the source of the Asiatic tradition, would not be persuaded, and endeavoured in his turn to win over Anicetus. But Anicetus, too, had his tradition -- the tradition of his predecessors in the Roman See. There the matter rested -- the harmony of charity between the two bishops in no way disturbed.

In 167 this difference of practice again came to the fore. The detail of the event is not known, but the Asiatic bishops are found in that year defending their own tradition, apparently against an attempt to introduce the more general custom. Twenty- four or twenty-five years later, however, the question came up once more, and it speedily developed into a crisis of the first magnitude. It is unfortunate that we know nothing of the immediate reasons for the action of the pope of the time, St. Victor I (189- 198) and very little of the order of the events. What is certain is St. Victor's letter to the Bishop of Ephesus, Polycrates, in which he bids him call together the bishops of the province of Asia and secure their consent to the adoption of the Roman practice in the matter of the celebration of Easter. The pope reminds Polycrates of the apostolic origin of his see, and, presumably, of the authority thence deriving. Polycrates called the bishops together -- from his letter to St. Victor we gather such a reunion was without precedent, and only the fact that it was ordered from Rome could have justified him in the innovation. But the bishops of Asia preferred to keep their own tradition, and in the reply of Polycrates we have a curious testimony to the fact that the theories of church government to which St. Irenaeus gives expression are not any personal invention of his own. For Polycrates bases the refusal on the grounds of apostolic tradition. His practice is that of apostles too, St. Philip buried at Hierapolis and St. John whose tomb is in his own city. He makes the list of distinguished bishops and martyrs since then, and he pleads " the fixed rule of faith" which forbids innovation in the apostolic tradition. No threats, he declares, will terrify him. Greater men than he have settled the principle on which he must act "It is better to obey God than men." (Acts v, 29.)

The issue is simple. Two traditions equally apostolic are in conflict. On what principle shall either prevail? Rome acted. St. Victor, apparently about the same time that he wrote to Polycrates, had written to other bishops also in the same sense. The letters of several councils of bishops in reply to his survive. They all express their agreement with Rome. "No threats will terrify me," the Bishop of Ephesus had written to the pope, referring no doubt, to some mention in the Roman letter of penalties in case of refusal. Now, by letters to all the churches, St. Victor declared Polycrates and his associates cut off and separated from the Church. It is the first recorded occasion of such disciplinary intervention on the part of the Roman Church, and its action has already all those characteristics which mark it ever afterwards. As against the Roman tradition not even apostolic traditions prevail, not even Philip nor John, since Rome is Peter and Paul.

But the matter did not end with the excommunication of the Asiatics. In more than one church it was felt that Rome had used them harshly, and appeals for a more lenient treatment began to flow in to St. Victor. Among those who pleaded was St. Irenaeus himself. He urged that the difference of practice was not of those for which brotherly charity should suffer, and he recalled the previous discussion between St. Polycarp and the pope Anicetus and its happy ending. And he wrote to others beside the Bishop of Rome, rallying opinion to his view of the case. But nowhere is it suggested that the Roman bishop had outstepped his jurisdiction, that the right he was exercising, perhaps somewhat mercilessly, was not really his right. St. Irenaeus was as successful in his mediation as in his theology. The pope withdrew the excommunication, and the churches of Asia continued to celebrate Easter in the tradition of St. Philip and St. John.

MONARCHIANS -- SABELLIUS -- ST. HIPPOLYTUS

Of more serious intrinsic importance than this quarrel of liturgical observance was another controversy which began in the reign of this same pope, St. Victor I, and which raged around the divinity of the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ. The discussions which now began continued at intervals for the first half of the third century. Then, after a peace of fifty years, they revived, and for a good hundred and fifty years more they were the chief feature of the Church's history.

The traditional belief was simple. God is one and there is but one God. Jesus Christ is God, being the incarnate second term of the Divine Trinity, God the Son or Logos. The Logos is nevertheless not the Father. The intelligence of believers, and their piety, continued to meditate and probe these traditional data, always with a hope of better understanding, and with the practical aim of making the tradition seem reasonable to critics from outside. Two questions in the main divided the attention of these theorists, the relation between the human and the divine in Our Lord, and the way in which the divine in Our Lord was divine. This second question had been already discussed by St. Justin. Now it was the turn of the first, and when the theorists, in their efforts to conciliate seemingly contradictory beliefs, stumbled into a denial of the tradition, a school of thinkers arose to set them right who in turn stumbled into errors on the Trinitarian question.

There came to Rome towards the end of the pontificate of Eleutherius (175-189) a wealthy citizen of Byzantium, one Theodotus, by trade a dealer in leather. He had apostatised in a recent persecution, and now sought to hide his shame in the great city. He was less successful, however, than he had hoped; and taxed with his record he retorted that after all, in denying Jesus Christ he had not denied God, for Jesus was but a man, the holiest of men admittedly, upon whom the Christ had descended in the form of a dove when he was baptized in the Jordan by John but, for all that, no more than a man. To support the theory Theodotus produced a catena of texts from Holy Scripture. The pope, St. Victor I, in 190 excommunicated him, but Theodotus remained obdurate. He gathered round him a number of adherents, and soon was the leader of a sect taken from the most erudite circle of the Roman Church. Logicians, mathematicians, scientists, they used the comparative method and along with their Bibles studied Euclid and Galen and Aristotle: The Church tradition occupied a very small place in their critical labours, where indeed grammar and logic extracted from the Scriptures all they craved to know, How long the sect continued as a sect we do not know. But through one of its members of the second I generation, Artemus (fl. 235), its teaching passed to the notorious bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, the friend of that Lucian who was the teacher of Arius and the real father of Arianism. The theories of Theodotus do not seem to have seriously troubled the peace of the Church, at any rate during his own lifetime. With the contemporary theory which bears the cumbrous name of Patripassian Monarchianism it was far otherwise. The thinkers responsible for this theory were moved by the desire to safeguard the two traditional truths of the unity of God and the real divinity of Jesus Christ, and to refute the suggested contradiction between the two. But their theory only achieved its end by identifying Father and Son, thus sacrificing a third truth of the tradition, namely that the Father and Son are really distinct. [17]

The first to bring this theory to Rome was, according to Tertullian, Praxeas in the closing years of the second century. Thence Praxeas had passed into Africa where Tertullian routed him, and, better still, converted him. Another account makes Smyrna the seat of the heresy's first beginnings and Noetus its founder. From Smyrna, after the excommunication there of Noetus, it came to Rome with one of his disciples, Epigonus, somewhere between 198 and 210. The Monarchists speedily became known, and the theory became the exclusive topic of discussion in the Roman Church. Nor was the cause of truth and peace at all assisted by the presence in Rome of a double opposition to Monarchianism. The Roman Church opposed it for the innovation it was; but, at the same time, it met with opposition of a very different character, the reasoned opposition of a philosopher, from the greatest scholar in the Roman Church, the priest Hippolytus. It was the misfortune of the Roman Church that between its officials and Hippolytus there was soon a war as bitter as that between either of them and the Monarchists. Nor did Hippolytus scruple to charge the official opposition with complicity with the heretics. On the other hand Hippolytus and his followers, in their ingenious defence of one truth, came very near to denying others. The task of the historian is not made easier by the fact that our knowledge of these transactions is due, in the very largest measure, to the writings of St. Hippolytus himself, - - written before the saint's reconciliation and martyrdom, when, the first of all the anti-popes, he was himself leading a schism against the lawful Bishop of Rome.

When Epigonus arrived in Rome to set up his school of Theology, mindful of the condemnation at Smyrna and perhaps knowing of the fate that had befallen Praxeas at the hands of Tertullian, he tempered his zeal with caution. It was his good fortune that the pope St. Zephyrinus (199-217) was an administrator rather than a scholar, and as Epigonus and his chief lieutenant, the more famous Sabellius, showed their belief in the reality of Our Lord's divinity in an instructed attack on the recently condemned Theodotus, they speedily gained a name for orthodoxy and the favour of the pope. But if Zephyrinus, lacking both taste for this theorising and skill in its practice, saw no more in the new party than welcome allies against the Adoptionists, this was by no means the case with Hippolytus. The writings of this great man have most of them perished, but enough remains to show that in him the Roman Church possessed a scholar of an erudition like to that of Origen. With the erudition, there went, alas, an uncomfortable impatience of ignorance in high places, and a genius for rough and bitter language that recall his other contemporary, Tertullian. In the events of the next few years both the learning and the caustic wit of St. Hippolytus were to have every opportunity. He now attacked Sabellius as he had attacked Theodotus; and when the pope refused to endorse the letter of his attacks, refused to make his own the learned theories by which Hippolytus was routing the new heresy, Hippolytus turned to attack the pope. Zephyrinus, however, stood firm. He refused to enter the dangerous ground of the rival philosophical explanations of the tradition, and contented himself with a steady re-affirmation of what had always been believed "I only know one God Who suffered and died, Jesus Christ and beyond Him no other. It is not the Father Who died but the Son."

In 217, while the three-cornered controversy was still raging, Zephyrinus died. He had ruled for nearly twenty years, but during all that time there had been a "power behind the throne", a greater man than himself, on whom, wisely enough, he relied. This was his deacon Calixtus. Calixtus had had an unusually exciting life. Years before, as a slave, he had managed his master's bank. He was unlucky enough to lose his master large sums of money, some of it in bad debts where the debtors were Jews. His efforts to recover from them led to a riot and, the Jews denouncing him as a Christian, he was sent to penal servitude in the mines of Sardinia. About the year 190 he was set free and returned to Italy. The accession of Zephyrinus found him at Antium, a pensioner of the Roman Church. The new pope brought him back to Rome and ordained him deacon, one of that council of seven who saw to the management of the Roman Church's temporal business. Calixtus was a man of affairs, a practical administrator, and in the influence of Calixtus over his master, Hippolytus saw the reason for the pope's reluctance to condemn Sabellius and the rest in terms of his theory. Hippolytus was, then, already personally hostile to Calixtus when Zephyrinus died. When Calixtus was elected to succeed him, the learned and choleric Hippolytus seceded, accusing Calixtus of Monarchianism, and of holding that the distinction of terms in the Trinity is incompatible with the divine unity.

Hippolytus had a numerous following. They gathered round him and he set up his sect as the true Church in opposition to the " Monarchist " Calixtus. Meanwhile Calixtus had acted. He condemned Sabellius and excommunicated him as an innovator in the traditional belief, but he did not, in so doing, make his own the subtle reasoning by which Hippolytus exposed the heresy and explained the compatibility of the related truths.

That reasoning is indeed subtle, and to distinguish it from the heresy which makes the Logos a second inferior God calls for a philosophical mind and much good will. Nevertheless, although he did not adopt the ideas of Hippolytus, neither did St. Calixtus condemn them.

The schism of Hippolytus -- he was never thrust out of the Church but left it himself -- continued long after the death of St. Calixtus (222) and of his successor Urban I. In the persecution of Maximin, which was directed mainly against the rulers of the Church, Hippolytus, a confessor now in the mines of Sardinia, found himself the fellow-sufferer of the lawful pope Pontianus (235). There, under what circumstances no record remains, he was reconciled to the power he had so long denied, and the Church honours him among her martyred saints.

THE PENITENTIAL CONTROVERSY -- ST. CALIXTUS I

The question of Patripassian Monarchianism, or to give it its shorter name Modalism, [18] was not the only controversy in which the pope, St. Calixtus I, was involved. In that controversy he had had for his adversary the subtle, scholarly, and irascible Hippolytus. In the next, which raged round changes in the Church's penitential discipline, his action roused all the bitterness of Tertullian as well. Few men have been called upon to face two such adversaries in a short four years.

Tertullian, at the moment when he composed his bitter attack on St. Calixtus I, was nearing the end of his long and eventful career. He was born at Carthage apparently about the year 160. His father was a centurion, and Tertullian was born and bred a Pagan. It was, however, the Law and not the Army which attracted Tertullian, and it is the Roman lawyer who speaks through all his varied writing. He was converted to Christianity, became a priest of the Church of Carthage, and from 197 he is, for a good quarter of a century, the central figure of literary activity in the Latin Church. Tertullian is always the Roman, sober, practical, contemptuous of philosophy and abstraction. He is, too, always the lawyer, with the lawyer's failing of over-refinement, of quibbling even, in his destructive criticism and in his advocacy. But never was any lawyer less hindered by the dry formalities of his knowledge. For Tertullian's learned advocacy is fired by one of the most passionate of temperaments. Thence results an apologetic of unexampled vigour and violence. Tertullian is master of all the controversial talents, "the most prolific, the most personal of all these Latins", with a gift of apt and biting phrase that sets him side by side with Tacitus himself. Of no man has it ever been truer that the style is the man; and in the works of this convert genius lie the foundations of the theological language of the Latin Church.

Christianity, for Tertullian, is not the crown of all philosophical history, it is not a light to make clear riddles hitherto obscure, but a fact to be proved and a law to be explained and obeyed. Into that explanation he put all the native rigour of his own harsh temperament, all the inflexibility of the civil law in which he was a master. From the chance that it was Tertullian who was the pioneer of the Latin theological language, it gained that tradition of clear cut definition, and the beginnings of that store of terms incapable of any but the one interpretation, which, from the beginning, saved the Western Church centuries of domestic controversy and disputation.

Tertullian's temperament proved, in practice, too much for his logic; and in Montanism his strongly individualistic nature found a home more congenial than the religion of the Church. The Montanist Tertullian spent the last half of his life in reviling the Church as bitterly as he had previously reviled, on its behalf, Pagans and heretics alike. He had been a Catholic perhaps fifteen or sixteen years when Montanism began to seduce his splendid intelligence. Ten years later, when the decree of St. Calixtus roused him to write the De Pudicitia, he was a fully- fledged member of the sect, and so great was his influence upon it that, in subsequent years, it was as Tertullianists that the Montanists were known in Africa.

But it was as a Catholic that he wrote the greatest of all his works the De Praescriptione Hereticorum -- a statement of the old argument which rules heresy out of court unheard, self-condemned, because self-confessed as an innovation. It is St. Irenaeus' argument from tradition, but cast this time in legal form, and gaining enormously in power from Tertullian's superb exposition. Other works poured from his versatile mind, his supple mastery of the old Latin tongue bending it to new uses. Instructions for catechumens, apologies addressed to Pagans, ascetical exhortations for the faithful, and everywhere controversy, panegyrics of virginity and of that patience in which, rather touchingly, he notes himself so sadly lacking "Miserrimus ego semper aeger caloribus impatientiae." Perhaps Tertullian's greatest service to the progress of theological science is his exposition of the mysteries in the Divine Trinity. The attempts of all his predecessors in this field, from St. Justin downwards, are easily surpassed; as Tertullian surpasses, too, all later writers until Nicea. More convincingly, and more clearly, than any of them does he argue the eternal divinity of the Logos, His origin from the substance of the Father, His unity of nature with the Father, and His real distinctness from the Father. More clearly than any writer, Greek or Latin, before St. Athanasius, he explains the necessity of belief in the divinity of the Holy Ghost. But it is his exposition of the mutual relations between the Divine Three, and its unembarrassed understanding that there is no conflict between the truths of Their unity and of the Trinity, that is Tertullian's chief glory as a theologian. All his ease of careful analysis finds scope in the distinction he draws between a division of the Divine Substance and its organisation. The resulting terms of that organisation he recognises as spiritual substances, divine in nature; and, first of all writers, he gives them the name persons. "Unity of Substance, Trinity of Persons" the classic formula in which the traditional faith finds reasoned expression is of Tertullian's very minting. A hundred years before the event he thus anticipates Nicea, and by his immense influence wherever the Latin tongue prevails, he saves the West from years of subtle controversy and disunion. [19]

That a power to forgive sins, and to reconcile the sinner to God, was left to the Church by its Founder was undoubtedly part of the Tradition from the very beginning. " Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them," He had said, "Whose sins you shall retain they are retained," and "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in Heaven, whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed also in Heaven." In St. Paul's letters to the Corinthians we have at least one record of the Apostle's use of his powers. A generation later we can, however, note a tendency to require that the Church be an assembly of saints, from which all who sin after their baptism should be rigorously expelled; a tendency to demand absolute sinlessness as a normal condition of membership. Baptism could not be repeated. Therefore let the baptized be warned. Should they again fall into sin, the Church had no second baptism to raise them a second time. To this ideal the evidence of everyday offered a contradiction of fact. There were Christians who sinned and sinned gravely, and who yet did not fall from their faith in Christ. Did their sins really matter? Gnostic theories that matter and spirit were independent the one of the other, so that sin, deriving from matter, could not affect spirit, would deny to post-baptismal sin any importance at all. The more prevalent opinion in the Church judged it with the utmost severity. Such literature, of the generations immediately following that of the Apostles, as has survived is filled with evidence of this fact. The tendency is to abolish the distinction between precept and counsel, and to impose both alike, as of obligation, on all Christians. In nothing was the new rigorism more rigorous than in what related to sex. Not only, for such extremists, is virginity preferable to marriage, but marriage itself is considered a bar to sanctity. "There is no resurrection except for such as keep their virginity" one pseudo-Pauline maxim declares. True Christianity implies perpetual virginity. Baptism is equivalent to a vow of chastity. Those who uphold these opinions are the Encratites -- never a sect as such, though more than one of the greatest of them ultimately fell away from the Church, but a group whose ideas were for long a feature of public opinion to be constantly reckoned with. Their views on the Church's policy in the matter of forgiving post-baptismal sin were, naturally, extremely rigid.

The Encratite view of things was not, however, the only view to find expression in the second century. There was another school of thought which kept nearer to the spirit of the Gospel. Its chief exponent, in the literature of the time which has come down to us, is the brother of the pope, St. Pius I (140-154), a priest of the Roman Church, Hermas by name. His book-the Shepherd -- is a popular work, practical not speculative, and its aim is to bring home to the ordinary man the truth that there is always pardon for the sinner who repents -- pardon at any rate once. Nor is there any mention of sins so great that they are beyond pardon. The sinner repents and God receives him back. Between the terms of the process a series of actions intervenes. The sinner, turning once more to God, re-enters the Church by acts of penance. But, for Hermas, once and once only is there for the sinner this way of forgiveness. The Encratite current runs too strongly for even Hermas to disregard it. None the less he is a witness, in a question where sources are so scarce as hardly to exist at all, that, in the Roman Church, Encratite theories were viewed with disfavour.

The rigorist reactions from the everyday immorality of Pagan life might carry away the enthusiastic Christian to assail even the lawful use of what he saw so generally abused. Hermas is a witness that not all were carried away, though all perhaps felt the strength of the tide at its full; and that the Roman Church continued to teach that to repentance sin is forgiven.

Between the Shepherd of Hermas and the decree of Calixtus I which roused all Tertullian's cantankerousness, there is a period of some seventy years. How the discipline had developed in that time, in some places, can be learnt from a book of Tertullian's written to instruct candidates for Baptism, the De Penitentia. With regard to sins committed after Baptism he teaches the same doctrine as Hermas, but without the hesitation which appears in the Shepherd. There still remains one more opportunity of pardon, and it is given through an external ritual which Tertullian names -- the Exomologesis. This is a laborious, public, penitential act, which the repentant sinner voluntarily performs in atonement for his sin. The sin is declared to the bishop, he fixes the nature and the duration of the penance to be performed, and on its completion receives back the sinner into full communion. Tertullian himself describes these penitents, clad in a special dress, living under a rigorous regime of abstinence and fast, ashes on their heads, their bodies uncared for, who kneel at the door of the church beseeching the prayers of the faithful as they pass in to the services.

The Exomologesis lasted a longer or shorter time according to the sin. Of itself it was merely an offering to God in satisfaction for the wrong done. But since the Church associated herself with the penitent who undertook the penance at the bidding of the bishop, the discipline acquired a new value. The intervention of the Church made it "efficacious" for, Tertullian explains, the Church is Christ and His mediation is infallible in its effect. Two last points of Tertullian's description are to be noticed. Pardon is granted through the Exomologesis once only. The sinner who relapses must, thereafter, negotiate his own pardon with the mercy of God. Nor is the Exomologesis available for every kind of sin. Three sins, notably, are excluded -- idolatry, murder, and fornication. The Church does not teach that these sins are unforgivable. Merely she will not take it on herself to forgive those who commit them. They may be admitted to the ranks of the penitent, there to remain for the rest of their life. Their penance will avail them much in the sight of God, but the Church does not formally receive them back into her communion.

It was this reservation in the discipline of the Exomologesis that Calixtus I now decided to alter. This particular reservation has no warrant in Scripture, nor does Hermas make any mention of it. In all probability it was an ecclesiastical regulation of the late second century, a special provision provoked, it may be, by some special circumstances of contemporary Pagan morality. Whatever its origin, the restriction added to the severity of the existing discipline which, Tertullian is our witness, was already beginning to defeat its own ends. For very few indeed were they who were prepared to submit to it. Whence a practice of deferring Baptism, and a crop of secret sinners. Those who knelt in sackcloth among the penitents were not, apparently, the only ones guilty of sin. More than one of those at whose knees the penitents besought prayers might fittingly, in his turn, have prostrated himself in the dust.

The system was ceasing to fulfil its purpose, and Calixtus I prepared to modify it. He announced that, henceforward, sin in sexual matters would also be forgiven through the discipline of the Exomologesis. No longer would such sinners be permanently cut off from the Sacraments, but, their penance duly performed, they too would regain their place among the faithful. Whereupon Tertullian, and Hippolytus, attacked the pope bitterly and maliciously.

It is important to notice the grounds Calixtus cites as authority for his action. They are quite simply Our Lord's words to his predecessor Peter " Upon this rock I will build My Church, to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven." Calixtus explicitly claims to be the present heir of Peter's prerogative, and on this basis he acts.

THE SCHISM OF NOVATIAN

The edict of Calixtus I marks an important stage in the development of the Church's discipline of penance as we know it. Thirty years later one of his successors, St. Cornelius, developing the reform, brought within the system the sin of apostasy. The action of Calixtus had led to controversy; that of Cornelius provoked a schism.

The persecution of the Emperor Decius, which had just ceased, had been altogether novel in its systematic organisation, thanks to which hardly any Christians escaped the test, save the tiny minority who had means to fly the country. The result was an unprecedented crop of more or less nominal apostasies, and the anomalous situation arose that in many places the majority of the faithful, guilty of a sin the Church refused to pardon, were out of the Church. It had long been the custom -- St. Calixtus allows for its action in his decree -- that although the Church did not reconcile such apostates through the Exomologesis, she accepted them as reconciled at the intercession of their more steadfast brethren, who in bonds awaited the martyr's death. This custom, owing to the crowds of repentant apostates who now besieged the prisons where the confessors were detained, suddenly threatened to break down the reservation once and for all. If these thousands were to be re-admitted at the prayer of the confessors, how could re-admission be refused any longer to those who sought it by the harder road of the Exomologesis? A further complication arose from the fact that not all these confessors were as docile to authority as they were constant in faith. What authority had allowed as a privilege, some of the confessors now began to claim as a right, and their petitions to the bishops for the reinstatement of the apostates took on more and more the appearance of commands. Communicet ille cum suis is a text which St. Cyprian's indignation has preserved. Not only the penitential discipline of the time was shaken, but there were the beginnings of a threat to episcopal authority also. As the bishops in the second century had had to defend the tradition of authority against the usurpation of learning and of private revelation, so now they faced a new menace which would subordinate their authority to the prestige of individual confessors and martyrs.

It was in Africa that the new troubles began, in the Church of Carthage whose bishop at the moment (250) was St. Cyprian. He protested against the threatened subversion of traditional practice. Such sinners were not admitted to receive the Eucharist until, having performed the appointed penance through the Exomologesis, the bishop and his clergy solemnly laid hands on them. Wherefore he forbids his priests to admit apostates to Communion on the simple presentation of the recommendation of a confessor or a martyr, that is to say, without penance done, without the Exomologesis and without the imposition of hands. The act of the martyr is an act of intercession with the bishop -- an influential intercession no doubt, but no more than that. This intercessory procedure St. Cyprian proceeds to regulate. There must be no more of the collective notes. The martyr must specify by name the person for whom the indulgence is sought, and the person must be someone really known to him. These petitions the bishop will examine publicly, once peace is restored, and thereupon give his decision in each individual case. An exception is made for the apostate in danger of death whom a martyr has recommended and who cannot await the bishop's decision. Him any priest or deacon may reconcile, receiving the acknowledgement of his sin and imposing hands upon him.

These regulations brought to the surface the latent arrogance of the innovators. One martyr sent to St. Cyprian a notification for the reconciliation of all apostates wherever found. Priests were not wanting to support this new revolt, and soon, in one town after another, riots broke out as the crowds of apostates, armed with their letters from the confessors, besieged the churches demanding re-admission from the local clergy. St. Cyprian reminded the rebels that it is the bishop who rules in the Church, and that episcopal rule is the Church's foundation. Also he wrote to Rome an account of his troubles, explaining his point of view and asking for the Roman Church's support.

The Roman reply was encouraging. It explained that the mode of procedure at Rome was substantially that adopted by St. Cyprian, and it endorsed his contention that the bishop alone had jurisdiction in these matters of discipline.

So far, at Rome, no trouble had arisen from any undue interference of the confessors. In its place another question was beginning to arouse discussion. This was the fundamental question, not of how the apostates should be reconciled, but of whether they should be reconciled at all. Calixtus I thirty years before had inaugurated the practice of receiving repentant adulterers through the Exomologesis. Was it now time to extend the same favour to repentant apostates too?

The Roman Church, at the moment of St. Cyprian's letter, was without a head, for the pope, St. Fabian, had been arrested and put to death in the January of 250, and the vigilance of the authorities had, so far, prevented the election of a successor. The reply to St. Cyprian had, then, been the letter of the clergy who governed the see during the vacancy. It was actually written by the priest Novatian -- at that moment the outstanding personality of Christian Rome. In many ways he recalls St. Hippolytus, though he was cast in a smaller mould than that great man. His surviving writings recall Tertullian in their doctrine and in their manner of exposition. In the history of the development of the philosophical explanation of Revelation Novatian has an important place, and his influence on later thinkers was considerable. He is said to have been harsh in disposition, and is accused of vanity. His elevation to the priesthood had not been universally popular, and the criticism continued now while he held the important position of instructor to the catechumens. In the reply to St. Cyprian Novatian had shown signs of a spirit more rigorous than that implied by the system he described, of a fear that, in absolving the apostate, the Roman Church was losing something of its prestige and strength.

This rigorist spirit was soon to have its opportunity. The persecution ended. The bishops came back to their sees. In Africa a council of bishops adopted St. Cyprian's provisional arrangement as henceforward the permanent law of the Church in the mater. At Rome, after a vacancy of fourteen months, St. Fabian was given a successor, the pope Cornelius (March 5, 251), Novatian had been a candidate, and among his helpers in what we might perhaps call his campaign, were two of St. Cyprian's clergy, excommunicated by him for their share in the revolt of the apostates, and come to Rome to intrigue against him. Novatian was apparently to be the next pope. They joined themselves to him and they shared his disappointment. For Novatian was bitterly disappointed, and with a following among the clergy, the laity and the imprisoned confessors, he now organised a Church of his own and found three bishops to consecrate him. The new sect needed a principle by which to justify its existence. It found it in the question of the treatment of the apostates. Paradoxically, the man whom the envoys of the unreconciled and rebellious apostates of Africa had supported, now declared himself the patron of rigorism. The one point on which Novatian now condemned the Church of Cornelius and of Cyprian was that it offered pardon to the repentant apostates. Novatian not only would refuse them pardon, but, developing his first severity, he denied there was any possibility of their being pardoned at all, no matter what their sorrow, no matter how severe the reparation they made.

The new pope, Cornelius, in the autumn of 251, summoned a council of bishops at Rome -- sixty of them. The teaching of Novatian was condemned and, with his supporters, he was expelled from the Church. The policy of St. Cyprian, which the bishops of Africa had already endorsed, was now adopted by the Roman Council too, and thereafter by all the churches of the world.

The Novatian schism, a conflict of personal ambition to some extent, had been much more the product of a conflict between the rigorism of the Christian pharisees and the more merciful tendency of constitutional authority. Something of that rigorist spirit was to be found in every Church, and hence Novatian, beaten at Rome, and disavowed in a series of echoing condemnations throughout the Church, was yet able to organise a strong minority. The Novatian Church had its hierarchy, its sacraments, its churches, its cemeteries. Its existence was legally recognised by Constantine (326) and not until a century later did it lose its last church in Rome. In the East and in Africa it survived even longer, still divided from the Catholic Church by the one belief that to absolve from crimes such as apostasy was beyond the power of the Church, and as late as the beginning of the seventh century it was still a useful occupation for an Alexandrian theologian to write a lengthy treatise Against the Novatians.

ST. CYPRIAN AND ROME

St. Cyprian, whose co-operation with Rome in the affair of the repentant apostates has been recounted, was at that time, only recently consecrated (248), and his consecration as bishop had followed closely on his conversion. He came apparently of a family socially distinguished, and his own education was of the best. A scholarly distinction and the courtesy of the great gentleman are apparent in all his writings, and in all that we know of his eventful career as Bishop of Carthage. St. Cyprian was of that class of men who are born to rule. The habit of decision, the instinct for responsibility, the courage to lead, all this was St. Cyprian's by nature.

He had hardly been consecrated when the persecution of Decius came to wreck the peace of the Church, and with the persecution the crisis of the confessors and the repentant apostates. He had thought it his duty not to expose himself to arrest, and it was from a secret hiding place that he ruled his flock, encouraging those whom the persecution tried and, to the best of his powers, restraining the excesses of the innovators. With the peace there came the end of the long vacancy in the Roman See, the election of Cornelius, and the schism of Novatian. Towards that schism some of St. Cyprian's own disloyal clergy had worked, and it was but fitting that he should himself be prominent in the work for peace. He checked the schemes of Novatian's envoys at Carthage, and he wrote a memorable appeal to the confessors at Rome who sided with the anti-pope. But his great contribution to the restoration of unity was his treatise On the Unity of the Church published at this moment. The subject of this important work is better indicated by an older title it sometimes bore, De Simplicitate Praelatorum, i.e. on there being but one bishop in each church-for the Church with whose unity St. Cyprian is concerned, in this work, is not the Catholic Church as a whole, but the local church, and more precisely the local church of Rome.

It has been well said of St. Cyprian that "He was a practical man without any philosophy or theology." He repeats the tradition; he borrows very largely from Tertullian; he writes a highly cultivated Latin; but there is nowhere evidence that he possessed any power of seeing general principles in the learning he had, nor of deducing thence, in his day to day application of it, further general truths. The one subject which he ventures to explore is this question of the Church and its nature. He explores it simply because exploration of it is forced on him by controversies he cannot escape. And it is in the spirit of a practical controversialist, eager to find arguments and confirmation of his policy, that he explores it. The pitfalls to which such a character is exposed, in such a work, are very easy to imagine. St. Cyprian was to experience them in very full measure.

In the De Unitate Ecclesiae he pleads for unity in each local church, and, well in the tradition, he finds the only hope of such unity in the obedience of all to the local bishop. Our Lord founded the first Church on one individual, Peter, as a pattern for all time. In each church there should be but one bishop as there was but one Peter. Schism is the sin of sins. To leave the bishop is to leave the Church, and to leave the Church is to leave Christ. Outside the Church there are no sacraments nor any bishops. St. Cyprian's theory, and the arguments by which he supports it, serve his restricted purpose admirably. But beyond the local church there is the whole body, of which the local church is but a part. It is possible, in arguing for the authority of the local bishop, to leave less room than will be needed if the theory is ever to be completed and take in the unity of the Church Universal. It was St. Cyprian's misfortune that he based his pleas for unity on arguments only true in part. The next five years were to make this painfully, almost tragically, clear. St. Cyprian was next to find himself in disagreement with Rome.

The first trouble was with that pope, Cornelius, to assist whom the De Unitate Ecclesiae had been written. The priest Felicissimus whom St. Cyprian had excommunicated for his share in the disturbances of the repentant apostates, and who, gone to Rome to appeal, had then become the ally of Novatian, now put in his appeal to Cornelius. St. Cyprian's complaint is that the pope should even listen to so discredited an intriguer. An incidental phrase of his letter witnesses to the important fact that he shared the belief, so far uncontroverted, that in the Church Universal the local Church of Rome had a special place. For St. Cyprian it is ecclesia principalis (a phrase which recalls immediately the potentior principalitas of St. Irenaeus) and the " source from which the unity arises."

Pope Cornelius died in 253. His successor was Stephen I, and with the new pope St. Cyprian had a series of disagreements.

In 254 the bishops of Merida and Leon in Spain were deposed, why we do not know. The affair had apparently caused a certain commotion, for their successors thought it well to seek support in a general confirmation of their rights. So it was that they appealed for recognition to Africa and, at their Autumn meeting, the African bishops confirmed the Spanish sentences and the new elections. But the deposed bishops appealed to Rome, and Rome re- established them ! Of the rights and wrongs of the affair it is not possible to judge, for the documents have long ago perished. We can, however, note the affair as a cause of discord between St. Cyprian and Rome at the very beginning of St. Stephen's pontificate, and we can also note, m connection with it, the appearance of some disturbing new theories in St. Cyprian's theology of Church government. One such theory is that it is for the people to depose bishops who are sinners. They are the judges. Another equally mischievous novelty is the idea that only men of innocent life should be made bishops, because bishops who sin lose the Holy Spirit and all power of order; their prayers are not heard; God no longer ratifies what they do; their sacrifices contaminate those for whom they are offered.

The next stage in St. Cyprian's development is the affair of the bishop of Arles, Marcian. He was a rigorist of the Novatian type and he refused to give his people the benefit of the new milder discipline in the matter of apostasy. Thereupon he was denounced to Rome, and at Carthage too, as a bishop who had cut himself off from the unity of the Church. It was a suitable occasion for the application of St. Cyprian's theory of deposition. He did not, however, make use of it. Nor did he leave the matter to the bishops of the accused prelate's own province. Instead he wrote to Rome, a most urgent letter. The pope, he urged, should write authoritatively to the bishops of Gaul. It is his duty to maintain the established discipline, the decision of Cornelius. He must depose Marcian and appoint another in his place. And would the pope be good enough to say whom he had appointed as Marcian's successor so that the bishops would know with whom, in future, they must communicate as Bishop of Arles.

St. Cyprian, in his indignation, has forgotten his own theory of the year before. He contradicts it. He is appealing, once more, in the traditional manner to the potentior principalitas of the ecclesia principalis. A year later and, in conflict with Rome on a question of policy, he once more involves himself in novelties and contradiction.

The subject of the new dispute was the question whether, when persons already baptized by heretics or schismatics were received into the Church, they should be re-baptized. A layman of note raised the question -- a very practical one no doubt in the time of religious revival which followed the Decian persecution-and St. Cyprian replied in an elaborate letter. The baptism administered by heretics cannot be of value, he teaches, because the Holy Spirit does not operate outside the one only Church. Later in the year (255) the question was raised at the African bishops' meeting, and the same decision was given in a joint letter to the bishops of Numidia. Despite the authority that inspired the letter the discussion continued. An opposition party revealed itself, quoting against St. Cyprian and his council an older practice. To settle the matter finally a joint meeting of all the bishops of Africa and Numidia was held in the Lent of 256, and the declaration of 255 re-affirmed. St. Cyprian wrote to Rome the news of the council's decision.

Now at Rome, as at Alexandria, the teaching had always been that the baptism of heretics was valid, as it had been the teaching in Africa until about thirty years before St. Cyprian's time. There is reason to believe that the Africans knew the Roman tradition, and it is possible that during the interval between the two African Councils (Autumn 255 and Spring of 256) Rome had declared its mind. St. Cyprian, in that case, would be repeating the procedure of acting independently of Rome, as in the matter of the Spanish bishops, and his letter after the Council of 256 be, not merely an announcement of African policy, but a reply to Pope Stephen's definite declaration that if the rite be duly administered the person of the minister does not affect its validity.

Be that as it may, two facts are certain. First of all, when the African envoys arrived in Rome they found themselves treated as heretics. They were refused communion, refused even hospitality, and the pope refused them a hearing. Cyprian was regarded as the false prophet of a false Christ. The second fact is St. Cyprian's letter. For all his recognition of the ecclesia principalis, he writes as though, in this matter, he considered all bishops were equals; as though the administration of baptism was a detail of the local church's domestic life -- and if the detail differed from church to church, that was the business of the local church and of the local church alone. To God alone is the local bishop responsible. This is hardly in keeping with the theory of 254 that bishops are to be judged by the people who elected them and, if bad, deposed. St. Cyprian is once again weaving a theory to justify his policy, and weaving it from one day to the next. Another contradiction of his own theory is the declaration, in the letter to Rome, that this question of the validity of baptism is one on which Catholic bishops can differ. In 255 he had explained to Marcian that it is an article of faith!

The letter to Rome is, in its tone, an appeal to an ally. For answer the pope notifies the Bishop of Carthage of the Law and the Tradition and, without any diplomacy, simply bids him observe it. " If therefore anyone shall come to you from any heresy whatsoever, let there be no innovation contrary to what has been handed down, namely that hands be imposed upon them in [sign of] penance." The reply is in the curt legal tone of a power too conscious of its own authority and of the obedience due to it, and too accustomed to receive obedience, to feel any need of argument. To the decision the pope simply added the reference-the already traditional reference -- to the first of his predecessors in the Roman See, and to the authority thence deriving to himself. In all this there is nothing new. The one element of novelty, so far, is in St. Cyprian's theories. His action on receipt of the Roman decree adds yet another. He took fire at what he called the pope's "haughtiness, self-contradictions, wandering from the point at issue, his clumsiness and lack of foresight," and at the next meeting of the African bishops (September 1, 256) a joint reply was sent to the pope. " None of us," said St. Cyprian in his opening speech and alluding to the pope, "poses as bishop of bishops. . . each bishop has the right to think for himself and as he is not accountable to any other, so is no bishop accountable to him." The Council unanimously supported St. Cyprian.

Rome proceeded to make known its decision to all the churches. It was no longer a question merely of the correction of the Bishop of Carthage. Rome was hinting at the possible excommunication of dissidents. St. Cyprian began to look round for allies. He found a most devoted one in the Bishop of Cesarea in Cappadocia, Firmilian. Firmilian replied in a letter filled with so violent an invective against the pope that the pious pens of the copyists not infrequently refuse to transcribe it. The unity and the peace of the Church, "unity of faith, unity of truth" are assured facts. They stand in no need of any protection from a supreme judge of controversies. Almost, in the midst of this philippic, Firmilian denies the possibility of differences. The pope is worse than all the heretics, for he deliberately darkens the minds of the repentant heretics who seek light from him. As for the pope's reminder that he is the successor of Peter and therefore the final judge of the tradition, that, for Firmilian, is the crowning mark of St. Stephen's folly and pride.

Rome waited, her relations with the churches of Asia Minor as strained as her relations with Africa. Then, before any action had been taken, on August 2, 257, the pope St. Stephen died. Whether the new pope, Sixtus II, was of a gentler disposition, or whether he thought it wiser not to press the matter to a decision at a moment when the persecution was reviving, the question was left alone. Sixtus and St. Cyprian were friends and the Roman Church in the next year came to the help of Firmilian, whose diocese had suffered much in the Persian invasion. The controversy of the three sees had speedily travelled beyond its first issue of the worth of heretical baptism. It had raised the question of the relation between the pope and the episcopate, a thorny question which was to cause trouble again and again in the ensuing centuries, and which was not to be finally solved until the Council of 1870. Little wonder that its appearance in the days of St. Cyprian provoked such a turmoil. Of more importance to Church History than the evidence which that turmoil affords as to the real humanity of the great saints, is its witness to the Roman See's habit of ruling; and to the fact that, upon all the questions which the ever-widening discussion involved, it is that decisive Roman interpretation of the tradition, which had occasioned the turmoil, that secures universal acceptance and is taken as the Church's belief. "For with this Church every other Church throughout the world must bring itself to agree."

St. Cyprian, it is not hard to understand why, has been the chosen patron of those in our own times whose ideal is a Catholicism without the Roman Primacy. But so to esteem him is to do him serious injustice. 'The theological impasse into which, at the end of his career, his untheological mentality led him must be judged in the light of his whole life, the mood which found expression when storms provoked his gallant soul be set side by side with those calmer hours when, free from the necessity to justify a policy, "he recognised in the Roman See an altogether special importance because it is the See of that Apostle upon whom Christ conferred the primacy of apostolic authority."

Eleven months after the pope whom he had opposed, St. Cyprian, too, laid down his life in testimony of his faith, September 14, 258. The Acta which relate his trial and martyrdom are well known as among the most moving of all that marvellous literature: his arrest and trial, and exile, his recall and re-arrest, the second trial, its sentence of death and the serene confident beauty of his death. Galerius Maximus proconsul Cypriano episcopo dixit: Tu es Thascius Cyprianus? Cyprianus episcopus respondit: Ego sum. . . . Iusserunt te sacratissimi imperatores caerimoniari. Cyprianus episcopus dixit: Non facio. Galerius Maximus ait: Consule tibi. Cyprianus episcopus respondit: Fac quod tibi praeceptum est: in re tam iusta nulla est consultatio. Then the proconsul most reluctantly, vix et aegre, lectured him as is the custom for judges with the man they must condemn. Et his dictis decretum ex tabella recitavit: Thascium Cyprianum gladio animadverti placet. Cyprianus episcopus dixit: Deo Gratias. He was led to the place of execution. He set off his outer garment, bade his servants give the executioner his alms, five and twenty pieces of gold. He bound himself his eyes, and his deacons bound his hands. "Ita beatus Cyprianus passus est. . . the eighteenth day before the Kalends of October, under the Emperors Valerian and Gallienus but in the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom honour and glory for ever and ever Amen."

The Roman Church, embodying the memory of her greatest names in the very heart of her active life, has written them into the consecration prayer of the Mass, and along with the names of these ancient popes, that of the great Bishop of Carthage who, on earth, sometimes opposed them.

THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA -- ORIGEN

Alexandria, in the third century, was still the intellectual capital of the Roman world. Thanks to its great library and the marvellous scientific organisation of the Museum, the city never failed to draw to itself leading thinkers of every kind of learning. It had been the centre of the learned Judaeo-Hellenic speculation associated ever after with the name of Philo; from Alexandria, too, had come many of the leading Gnostics -- Valentine certainly, and Cerdon who was responsible for the Gnostic element in the theology of Marcion. It was in Alexandria, too, that the effort of philosophy to replace the Hellenistic religions as interpreter of the riddle of life now reached its full perfection. The thinkers who now built from it a kind of Hellenistic theology and mysticism were three, Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), Plotinus (d. 270) and Porphyry (d. 304).

Their system is Neo-Platonism properly so called. Ammonius Saccas, an Alexandrian labourer, is known chiefly by the work of Plotinus, his pupil, for, if he himself wrote at all, his works have all perished. Plotinus, also an Egyptian by birth, left Alexandria for Rome after the death of his master. There he lectured and taught for the next twenty years -- the elite of the world capital filling his rooms, the Emperor Gallienus among his audience-but not until the last few years of his life did he commit his ideas to writing. As Plotinus developed Ammonius Saccas, so Porphyry, his own confidential pupil, arranged and systematised the teaching of Plotinus. But Plotinus is the real founder of the new faith and its principal saint. That faith was not, of course, anything so simple as the mere revival of a cult of Plato's philosophy. The spirit of syncretism, powerful for three centuries and more everywhere, except in the domain of the Church's tradition, showed itself very apparently in Neo-Platonism. Plato's ideas found a place in it, but so, too, did those of the Stoic Zeno, of Pythagoras, of Aristotle, and of Philo. Finally there was the influence of the Gnostic movement, with all its strange amalgam of oriental ideas and Gnostically interpreted Christian traditions. Out of these elements the genius of the Neo-Platonists, during the third century, devised their system.

These Neo-Platonists were, however, very far from desiring any reconciliation of philosophy with the religion of the Church. On the contrary the movement was markedly hostile to the Church; Porphyry, amongst his other works, writing classical antiquity's masterpiece of anti-Christian polemic -- a great work in fifteen books of which, however, only a few pages have survived. Anti- Catholic might be a truer description than anti-Christian, for Porphyry shows great reverence for the memory and character of Our Lord; and his attack, on the lines of the familiar modern historical criticism of the gospels, is directed rather against what he considered the influence of St. Paul. Porphyry lived to see the last of the persecutions in full swing; and it was the Neo-Platonist movement which, in more than one important instance, lent the illiterate and uncouth Galerius, who was that persecution's real author, a logical excuse for his hate and something of a system in his pursuit of it.

Neo-Platonism, in itself a vaguely rational justification of religious sentiment, with a worked out scheme relating the fundamental problems of the nature of God, the creation of man and man's destiny, and offering to man the chance of recovery, of a gradual ascent by increase of knowledge to the actual vision of God Himself, could scarcely ever have progressed beyond the elite of a small philosophical school But, by an ingenious exegesis of the mythologies, this religious idealism was combined with the old classical Paganism, all of whose rites and practices found in the new system an allegorical interpretation to sanction them. This sagacious combination met with much success. It helped once more to its feet the religion so often condemned to die since the days of Euripides; and whatever hold these ancient beliefs maintained for the next three centuries on the allegiance of the intelligent, can be set to the credit of the system which had at last given them a philosophical setting, something even of a body of doctrine, and which was offering to their devotees a way to heaven even in this life of earth. Of the movement's influence on the Church much must be said, but in dealing with a later period of the Church's history. The harm it did the Church of the third and fourth centuries was that, as an attractive willo'-the-wisp, it distracted from their real goal those who anxiously sought for truth, and that it armed the fiercest of the Church's persecutors. But in a later age, through the genius of St. Augustine, and through the writer who passed, for centuries, as Denis the Areopagite, more than one idea that derived through Plotinus entered into the service of Catholic theology and Catholic mysticism.

Of the first introduction of the Church into Egypt we know nothing. The legend of the foundation of the see of Alexandria by St. Mark was, apparently, unknown even to Alexandrians before the fourth century; and except for the names of the handful -of Alexandrian Gnostics, all that we know of the Egyptian Churches before the end of the second century is a list of bishops of Alexandria that goes back to A.D. 61. It is only in the last twenty years of the second century that the darkness lifts, and it lifts to reveal to us the existence at Alexandria of a flourishing school of Christian culture under the guidance of Pantenus.

The writings of this doctor of the Alexandrian Church have perished. That he was a convert from Stoicism, and that before setting up at Alexandria he had shared in the evangelisation of "the Indians," and that among his pupils were Alexander, later bishop in Cappadocia, and Titus Flavius Clemens who succeeded him in the direction of the school, is the sum of our information regarding him. For these scanty data it is to that successor that we are indebted. Titus Flavius Clemens -- Clement of Alexandria -- unlike the master to whom he owed so much and whom he so greatly venerated, is very well known to us, is in fact one of the best known, as he is one of the most lovable personages of the Church's early history. His work at Alexandria, and the work of the genius who was first his pupil there and then his successor-Origen, was to exercise an influence far beyond the local church that bore them to the faith. It was to be a leading influence in Western theology until the time of St. Augustine, and to give to the theology of the Eastern Church an orientation and a spirit which it has perhaps never lost. Also this Alexandrian theology, like its two great teachers, was to be a sign of contradiction among Catholics for all time -- contradiction always sufficiently lively to be a barrier to any official recognition of the sanctity of the two pioneers of the Church's systematic theology. Neither Clement of Alexandria nor Origen, for all their heroic life, are invoked as saints or enrolled among the Doctors of the Church.

Clement was born in Athens, probably about 150, a Pagan. We are ignorant of what brought him to the faith, but he has himself listed the different influences which, after his conversion, perfected the formation of his Christian culture. He names a Greek of Ionia, another of Greater Greece, a Syrian, an Egyptian, an Assyrian and a Palestinian convert from Judaism. Then he met Pantenus, and with him found his vocation in the explanation to educated Catholics of the religion they professed. To the lecture rooms of the school in Alexandria came a varied and distinguished audience, of men and women alike, drawn from the leisured and educated classes of the Church. Clement, now a priest of the Alexandrian Church, set their Faith before them scientifically. Like himself, they were, the most of them, converts from Paganism. He showed them, with all his own rich knowledge of Paganism, the world they had gained in comparison with what they had given up. At every turn he cites the treasures of that ancient culture, in which they had been bred. Its poets, its philosophers, its orators -- he knows them all, and in his instructions the appropriate citation from them is always to hand. Like St. Justin he is optimistic in his view of the Pagan culture and the pre-Christian philosophies. Both have in them a vast amount of good; both rightly used can greatly assist the instructed Christian; the religion revealed to the Church is, yet once again, the crown of truth naturally known.

This cultured critique of Paganism, none the less effective for its sympathy with the Pagan's craving for certitude and security, is only one part of Clement's mission. He shows himself -- this man driven by his nature to teach -- equally enthusiastic, equally cultured, equally painstaking in his elaborate instructions on the life the Christian should lead. Not a single occupation of the day, not one of the phases of that sophisticated civilisation escapes him. His audience is made up of that immense majority of human beings who are tied to the life of the city by a hundred obligations. They cannot, if they would, leave the world for the desert. Clement proposes to teach them how to remain in the world and yet be perfect Christians. It is a little the mission of St. Francis d Sales fourteen hundred years later, in a civilisation so very different, and where yet human nature is so very much the same, and tried in the same way. And it is in the same spirit of cultured optimism that Clement too, priest here as well as philosopher, directs his hearers.

Finally Clement is a theologian, using his trained mind to develop the data of the traditional belief. As a theologian he knows, and respects, and makes much of "the fixed rule of the tradition." He proclaims himself as heir of the ancients from whom he learnt the Faith in the days before he met Pantenus, and is careful to note that what they taught was valuable because they had received it from the Apostles, from Peter and Paul, John and James. Peter is "the chosen one, the elect, the first of the disciples for whom alone the Saviour paid the tribute money," and so attached is Clement to Peter's prestige that he will not have it that it was Peter the Apostle whom St. Paul "resisted to his face" at Antioch. That unfortunate was another Peter. one of the seventy-two disciples ! It is from the Apostles, again, that bishops derive the authority by which they rule. Of all doctrines the Church's doctrine is to be preferred, because it is traditional. It is the role of Philosophy to prepare the mind to receive this doctrine, and it is on the basis of this doctrine that Clement proposes to build what is, for him, the crown of the Christian's achievement, the perfect knowledge (Gnosis) to which only the perfect Christian attains.

This superstructure, or rather Clement's view of its nature, goes beyond what the Church had ever taught. It is Clement's personal (and erroneous) contribution to the theology of man's knowledge of God. But, even for Clement, it depends for whatever truth it can claim to possess on the previous acceptance of the Church's traditional teaching. The point is important, for Clement, so often claimed as a "liberal protestant," born seventeen hundred years before his time, is a Catholic as his very mistakes clearly prove. He shares the common Alexandrian fault of an over-fondness for allegorising the meaning of Sacred Scripture, and, more seriously still, in his eagerness to discover the traditional teaching in his beloved philosophers (the Trinity, for example, in Plato) he runs the risk of deforming it. Again, though his division of practising Christians into two classes, those who live by faith and those raised to knowledge, might accord with the traditional distinction between life according to precept and life according to counsel, Clement's introduction of the Platonic idea that the possession of knowledge adds, of itself, to moral perfection opens the way to all manner of error. In the same spirit of optimism he introduces into his moral teaching a canonisation of what it is hard to distinguish from the Stoic virtue of indifference (apatheia).

Clement guided the school at Alexandria for more than twenty years. In the persecution of 202 he made his way to Cappadocia where his friend Alexander was now bishop, and when Alexander was imprisoned administered the see for him. The last record of him is a letter from Alexander, written in 215, which speaks of him as dead. That letter is addressed to Clement's one time pupil, Origen, now himself in turn director of the theological school. To have formed Origen is perhaps Clement's chief title to fame.

Origen, born 185, was Christian from his birth, the child of parents who lived only for their faith. Unlike Clement in this, he was unlike him, too, in race; for Origen, to all appearance, was of the native Egyptian stock. He was still a student when his father was martyred (202). The sentence entailed the confiscation of the family property, and the youth began his career as a teacher to help t- keep his mother and her numerous family. When Clement fled to Caesarea, Origen took his place as director of the theological school. The heroism to which Origen was so movingly to exhort his contemporaries, was, from his childhood, the daily affair of his life. It was about this time, too, that in an heroic misunderstanding of the Gospel text, Origen submitted to the famous mutilation which was later to form the technical justification for his dismissal from the school. Like Clement, and like St. Justin before him, Origen was not content with what chances of achieving wisdom he found at home. He travelled much. Greece, Palestine, Arabia, Antioch, Nicomedia, Rome -- he had seen them all and was familiar with what each had to offer the scholar. To defend the faith against its critics he must know what the critics themselves believed, and so he spent years in the schools of the leading philosophers, and notably of Ammonius Saccas. His zeal for the study of the Bible drove him to the original texts and to learn Hebrew. He became known as the most learned of all the Christians, and it was to him that the learning-loving mother of the Emperor Alexander Severus applied for instruction as to the Church's teaching.

He was ordained priest in Palestine by a bishop other than his own, and upon his return home was solemnly deposed by the Bishop of Alexandria, and deprived of his position in the school. He betook himself to the friendly bishop who had ordained him, and thenceforward Caesarea, in Palestine, was his headquarters until in 235, driven by the persecution of Maximin, he made his way to Cappadocia. In the persecution of Decius he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured. Four years later -- 254 -- he died at Tyre. He had been for forty years the wonder of the Christian world, the oracle universally consulted on points of doctrine and of practice. His knowledge, his logic, his eloquence knew no equal, and his amazing genius was set in a life of ascetic detachment and humility.

His erudition, and his industry, were indeed immense, and its output reckoned at six thousand volumes -- an enormous total even when the slender possibilities of the "book" as the ancients knew it are borne in mind. More important even than the erudition and the industry was the systematic fashion of its exposition. The learning of Clement -- so far as it found expression in writing -- lacks all order. It resembles only too faithfully the meadow to which he himself compared it -- where all things grow and, if sought, are ultimately found. St. Justin, Tertullian, St. Hippolytus had each of them, for the purpose of his own particular controversy, used secular learning to explain and defend the tradition. But beyond the defence of special points there was as yet no Catholic Theology. The only syntheses which claimed to set out a rational orderly exposition of religious truth, from the first movements of the Divine Life ad extra down to the last destiny of created things, were the Gnostic systems. It is Origen's chief title to fame that, first of all Christian scholars, he set himself to construct a vast synthesis in which the many sided truths of the traditional faith should be displayed in all their related harmony. Much of that work has perished. Enough remains to make very clear the reason of the admiring veneration with which his contemporaries regarded him.

In Scripture, besides a great mass of commentaries which covered every book of the Bible, he published that stupendous instrument of textual scholarship, the Hexapla. Here were set out, in six parallel columns, four Greek versions and two Hebrew versions of the Old Testament in an endeavour to ascertain the value of the Septuagint text. Then, as an apologist, he wrote the eight books Against Celsus, the most perfect apologetic work of the primitive Church, in answer to the mightiest attack on Christianity that Paganism ever produced. His theological reputation depends chiefly, however, on his Summa, the Book of Principles (Peri Archon). Here, for the first time, a Christian writer, with no preoccupation with controversy to influence the order of his work or his style, endeavours to explain systematically the whole body of the tradition. That the technical language of theological science was as yet too undeveloped -- to say nothing of the notion of Theology as a science -- to make success possible, does not detract from the glory of the pioneer. Faults, and serious faults, were in the circumstances inevitable; and the product of Origen's mighty erudition was, in the centuries that followed his death, to be more than once the occasion of controversies that aroused the whole Church. Nor are Catholic scholars at one, even to-day, in their opinion of Origen's orthodoxy on many points. But of the genius which places him near to St. Augustine himself, of the encyclopaedic learning, of Origen's real holiness of life and of his constancy in the presence of persecution, there has never been any question. In his own lifetime, for all the misunderstanding between himself and the Bishop of Alexandria, there was never any condemnation of his theories. He died venerated by all the Catholicism of his time. But almost from the moment of his death discussion began and presently from one quarter and another condemnations began to shower upon his work -- though never were any made of the man himself.

The gibe of Celsus -- and of contemporary Paganism generally-that the Church has no message for any but the illiterate, Origen turns against its authors. The truth of the faith is capable of scientific proof in the Greek manner, and the Christian gladly makes use of other knowledge to explain and prove his Christianity. "The disciples of the philosophers say that Geometry Music, Grammar, Rhetoric, Astronomy are the born companions of Philosophy. We say the same thing of Philosophy itself with regard to Christianity." Nowhere in all this early Christian literature is there a keener realisation of the beauty and the value of the Pagan culture, nowhere a greater confidence in its role of pedagogue to bring the Pagan mind to Christ. Not that, for Origen, the religion of the Church is merely a matter of philosophy, of principle and conclusion. It is for him as for his predecessors a thing revealed, "the model made over to the Churches," and the true prophets of Christ are they who teach the word "as the Church." The test by which he would have his hearers distinguish the true exposition of Christ's teaching from the false is the ancient one -- " Make use of the Church's preaching handed down by the Apostles through the order of succession, which still to this day remains in the churches. That alone is to be believed as true, which, in every way, accords with the tradition of the Church and the Apostles."

To this tradition all else, even that pursuit of a deeper knowledge which Origen, following Clement, acclaims as a Christian's noblest virtue, is subject. To the primacy of the Church's traditional teaching, even the Hellenic culture must yield. There is no place in the Church for contrary philosophies, and to attempt to introduce them is criminal. Hoc fecit infelix Valentinus, et Basilides, hoc fecit et Marcion haereticus. The schools where these men expound their personal interpretations are no better than brothels. Haeretici aedificant lupanar in omni via, ut puta magister de officina Valentini, magister de coetu Basilidis, magister de tabernaculo Marcionis. The Church has its rulers the bishops. Not all of them, he notes, are models. "At times we surpass in pride the wicked princes of the heathens. A little more of it and we, too, shall have our bodyguard like the King. Terror walks in our wake. We live apart, inaccessible to all -- and especially to the poor. To those who petition us we are haughtier than any tyrant, than even the most cruel of kings. Such is the state of things in many a famous church, especially in the churches of our greatest cities." Origen knows then what a bad bishop can be. He is not thereby confused as to the place of the bishop in the Church. The bishop is sovereign over clergy and laity alike. As he has the power to offer sacrifice, so he has the power to rule and to expel unworthy members for the safety of the whole body. Finally the bishop is the teacher. Origen makes much of the possession of knowledge as itself a virtue, and the perfect Christian is the instructed Christian, the Christian who "knows", Origen's " gnostic." Logically he makes much, also, of the Church's learned men, doctores ecclesiae, of whom he is proud to be one. But the final word, yet once again, is not with individual learning but with authority. In doctrine, as in morals, the bishops are the judge of what is in conformity with the tradition.

The Church's teaching is, then, the starting point of Origen's exposition. He notes that while some truths are taught as certain others are to some extent matters for discussion. The traditional teaching of the Church is completed by the study of Sacred Scripture and of Philosophy. Origen is perhaps the most scriptural of all theologians. It is to Scripture he goes for the solution of all his problems; and Scripture for him had three meanings the literal; the moral -- that is, the meaning useful for the spiritual welfare of the soul; and finally the " spiritual " -- that is, the allegory which contains a doctrine about the relation of God to His universe. Origen by no means ignores or discounts the literal sense, but it is the allegory of the moral and spiritual interpretations which most attract this great Alexandrian, as it had attracted Alexandrian Judaism centuries before him.

He is not so enthusiastic as Clement, his master, in the employment of Philosophy as an auxiliary, despite his enthusiasm for Philosophy. He does not so much use philosophical data to explain Christian doctrine, to accredit it with the Pagan world, but rather, in his theological exposition, he thinks like a philosopher. The philosopher, the enthusiast for Greek learning, is revealed in the spirit of his work rather than in the presence there of any definite philosophical teaching. For all the time Origen spent in the schools of Ammonius Saccas, he cannot be claimed as a neo-Platonist. God is one, incomprehensible, impassible; and in this unity there are the three hypostases Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The second term of this Trinity, the Son or Logos, is God, yet distinct from the Father, begotten from all eternity. "There never was a time when the Son was not," he said, refuting Arius a century before that heretical Alexandrian appeared; and the Son is of the [same] substance as the Father -- the Nicene teaching and even, perhaps, the Nicene formula homoousion.

So far, on these fundamental points, Origen is undoubtedly orthodox; but the faulty terminology of some of his obiter dicta led later to the suspicion that, in the matter of the relation of the Son to the Father, he taught a subordinationist theory. Like the Apologists who preceded him, he relates the generation of the Logos to the creation, and, a very serious error, he teaches a theory of eternal creation -- there never was a time, according to Origen, when there were no creatures, God's omnipotence being eternal. Here Origen's speculation leads him to the theories for which, in the centuries ahead, he was to be most savagely attacked. For the subject of this eternal creation is the world of spirits, created equal in gifts and powers and endowed with free will. From the varying degrees in which, at the moment of trial, they were faithful to the Creator there have resulted all the subsequent inequalities of the Universe, moral and physical. Of the original spirits some became angels, the hierarchy of heavenly powers; others, the sun, moon and stars; others, the souls of men; and yet others, the demons. No term has been set to this evolution, and according to their conduct it is in the power of all spirits to regain the height from which they have fallen, and, in another world which will come into being upon the consummation of this present world, to work out their new destinies. The spirits who, in greater or less degree, fell in the hour of trial are provided with bodies of one kind or another -- even the angels have a body of a " subtle " kind -- and in that union of body and soul they expiate their sin and work out their salvation. But not through their own efforts alone are they saved. They are assisted by the intervention of the Logos, Who to that end, finally Himself became incarnate, uniting Himself first to a human soul and thereby to a human body.

Jesus Christ, the Logos became man; He is then really man and really God. The redeeming death of Jesus Christ was universal in its effect, profiting not only men, but all reasonable beings wheresoever found. That this treasury may be his, however, man must co-operate with God Who offers it to him. God's help is essential, a sine qua non, but even this is powerless unless by act and will man co-operates. One form of God's help is the gift of Faith. Another is the higher gift of knowledge (gnosis). "It is much better to be convinced of our teaching by reason and knowledge than by simple faith," and Origen -- though not so enthusiastically as Clement divides the faithful into two classes according to this principle. The Christian who is " gnostic" has greater obligations. He should live austerely, practising continency, preserving virginity and living apart from the world.

After death there is the life to come, and, for most men, a certain purification in quodam eruditionis loco, through a baptism of fire. The less a man has to expiate the less will he suffer. Heaven is the full revelation of the mysteries of God and union with Christ. The old apocalyptic notion of an actual material kingdom of Christ on earth where with His saints he will reign for a thousand years Origen rejects, as he rejects the theories of the transmigration of souls. The wicked will be punished by fire -- a special kind of fire for each individual, bred of his own individual wickedness. Will this punishment last eternally. Here Origen hesitates, and except for some of the fallen angels, teaches that in the end all God's intelligent creation will be reconciled to Him. Not all will enjoy the same degree of happiness, but all will be happy in some degree.

The premises on which the vast system is based are excellent. But along with all the vast learning, and the deep thought, that produces the system, there is an amazing amount of rash conjecture and of unproved assertion. Origen is indeed "like some great river in flood, which in its very abundance, brings down together the rich fertilising mud and the sand whence comes sterility." And in this great synthesis there is one thing lacking. Nowhere does Origen, ex professo, discuss the nature of the Church itself. For good or for ill, however, he was to dominate all theological development until St. Augustine, and in the East until long after. Even his opponents were obliged, in their fight agains this influence, to use his learning and to copy his methods. St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Gregory Nazianzen, the champions of Catholicism in the doctrinal controversies of the next century, are all his pupils; for if there descended from him to the theology of the Greek-speaking Church a looseness and a vagueness from which the West was preserved, that same Church more than once found in Origen the best of defences against the speculations of heresy.

MITHRAISM

Before we come to the final discussions which bring this century of controversy and crisis to an end, something must be said of yet another ancient religion from the East which, by now, was racing for the primacy of popularity. This was the cult of Mithra.

Mithra, originally, in the religion of ancient Persia is the god of Light. In the religion of the Avesta he is a god of the second rank, the judge of the dead, the god who keeps men to their promises, the god of Honour then, and especially of military honour. He sees all things and the Sun is his eye. With the fourth century B.C. the cult spread to Chaldea, and Chaldean astrological theologies influenced it, working out an identity between Mithra and the Sun God. About the same time Alexander's conquest of Persia brought Mithraism into relation with the Greek mythology, and thence derived a more aesthetic interpretation of the rites and the myth. Finally the later Roman conquest of the East opened to the cult the whole of the West, and from the end of the first century (A.D.) Mithraism was a settled religion in the West and rapidly developing. Merchants and oriental slaves took it to all the ports of the western world, but the chief agent of its spread was undoubtedly the army, and with the legionaries it soon travelled to the very frontiers. As a religion it has its foundation in the great eastern theory of the dual origin of all reality. To fight the evil principle, beings are created intermediary between God and man. Mithra is one of these heroes and gradually, as the theories develop, he comes to eclipse all the other heroes, and even the transcendent divinity, as the God of Light and the protector of mankind.

The culminating point of the Mithra legend is his victorious conflict with the bull, and from the slain bull flows all life and all usefulness. Finally Mithra ascends to Heaven in a fiery chariot driven by the Sun. He will, however, return once more. There will be a second slaying of the bull, whence will come immortality for the faithful, and then a general conflagration will destroy the wicked, the demons, and the principle of evil, Ahriman himself.

The cult was organised in circles of restricted membership which divided and sub-divided as their members increased. It had an elaborate liturgy in which ablutions, an anointing with honey, fasts, and a ritual banquet of bread and water played their part. The initiation was through seven degrees, animals were sacrificed, and the candidate was received through a baptism of blood which poured from the bull slain above him. The meetings took place in caves, and crypts built to resemble caves, decorated with pictures of Mithra slaying the bull. The weekly holy day, naturally, was Sunday and, equally naturally, the Equinoxes were regarded as a sacred season, and the date of Mithra's birth, placed at the winter solstice -- December 25.

That the cult was immensely popular with the army there is no doubt, nor of its influence in the third century. But that it ever threatened the future victory of Christianity is a matter infinitely less certain. It has, however, been the subject of much loose thinking, as has been also the question of the analogies between Mithraism and the religion of the Church. Fr. Martindale [20] summarises the position very fairly, setting side by side M. Salomon Reinach's neatly phrased thesis and the no less skilfully worded examination of Pere Lagrange. "M. Salomon Reinach thus sums it up: ' Mithra is the mediator between God and man; he secures salvation to mankind by a sacrifice; the cult includes baptism, communion, fasts; his disciples call themselves brothers; in the Mithraist clergy there are men and women vowed to celibacy; there is a moral code which is of obligation and which is identical with that of Christianity.' We have here a series of scornful affirmations to which Pere Lagrange can oppose another series of flat denials. 'The fasts and the brotherhood we can admit -- and they are found in every religion that ever was. Everything else is incorrect. Mithra is called "mediator" once-in Plutarch, and he is mediator between the God of Goodness and the God of Evil. We have no knowledge of any direct relation between the sacrifice of the bull and salvation. Nor is Mithra ever sacrificed, as was Jesus. The Mithraist baptism is a simple ablution in no way different from any other; the communion is nothing more than an offering of bread and water, nor can anyone say it was even intended to represent Mithra; women, usually, had no part in the mysteries of Mithra and could not, therefore, have been there dedicated to celibacy. . . as to men, in that respect, we know nothing except for a single text of Tertullian. . . a text which has been misinterpreted. Every moral code sets out to be obligatory, more or less, and if that of Mithra was identical with the Christian code why did Julian the Apostate-himself a devotee of Mithra -- recommend the Christian code as a model to Pagans?' "

THE MANICHEES

It was in this third century, critical in so many ways for Christianity, that a new religion began to be preached which, although proscribed everywhere from its very first appearance, did not cease to trouble the peace of the world for another thousand years. This was that famous Manicheeism which Christians and Mohammedans, Pagan emperors of Rome and Chinese mandarins, all in their turn repressed with all possible severity. It was a cult that very soon disappeared from sight indeed, but it persisted as the strongest religious undergrowth of all time; and it would be a bold assertion to say that we have yet heard the last of it. There are few features of the general history of the Church better known than its persistent struggle against the Manichees -- the Bougres, Cathari, Albigenses of the Middle Ages -- and yet it is only within the last twelve years that we have had any truly reliable information about the origins of the sect and about its founder. [21]

Mani, a Persian by birth, set himself to found a new religion which should contain all the religious wisdom hitherto known. In this conscious and ambitious syncretist, that long drawn out business comes to its final perfection. Mani is the contemporary of those imperial patrons of syncretism, Heliogabalus and Alexander Severus, and in the years during which they enthroned the Syrian influences at Rome, Mani, from the other side of Syria, made the long pilgrimage still further to the East, in his search for yet more religious wisdom, to India and to the Buddhists.

For Mani, there had been, in the career he had chosen, three great practitioners already, Our Lord, Zoroaster, and Buddha, three interpreters of a single wisdom. They had only preached: Mani would also write, and so secure for "my religion" a world empire such as no religion had so far known. The time was indeed to come when it would, for a time, win over the great intelligence of St. Augustine in Africa, and gain a real hold as far to the east as China. And the main arm of its propaganda would be the book, and its illustrations.

There is something of Montanism in the new religion, for Mani declares himself to be one body and spirit with the Paraclete, the spirit sent by Jesus Christ. At the same time it embodies a mythological doctrine about the origin of the universe which is akin to that of such Gnostics of the previous century as Basilidie's and Valentine. And Mani owes much to Marcion also.

In this new amalgam, the existence of two first principles of all things -- the good and the bad -- is all important, for around the unending struggle of the good god and the bad god everything else turns. This the key to the whole system, as it is the key to Mani's explanation of the universe.

The ascetic ideal was pitched high -- so high, indeed, that the sect was divided into the Perfect, bound to practice what it was the unforgiveable sin to fail in even once, and the Hearers, who accepted the ideal indeed but, fearful of their ability to live up to it, put off their reception until the last hour of life. The seeming simplicity with which the theory of a dual first principle solved the torturing riddle of the existence of evil, the stiff ascetic ideals, and the spectacle of the life of the Perfect, fascinated thousands, in Mani's time and for centuries afterwards. For these devotees the moral horrors, and such repugnant practices as the ritual slow suicide, were altogether obscured. Nothing availed, in the end, but to destroy the Manichees, as so much noxious human vermin -- so, everywhere, said those to whom it fell to undertake the work of destruction. Mani was not only a cool headed prophet, but an organiser of genius. The new religion was strongly built, and the prophet's first coadjutors were well chosen. Mani's violent end -- he was crucified by the Persian king Bahram in 272 -- did not appreciably halt the progress of his sect. It gradually drew to itself the remains of the Marcionite church, and established itself in the lands between Persia and China. It was the last phase of organised Gnosticism, and the most successful of all.

DENIS OF ALEXANDRIA -- PAUL OF SAMOSATA

The century which follows the Adversus Haereses of St. Irenaeus ends, as it begins, with a Trinitarian controversy and an intervention of the Roman Church. Curiously enough it is a controversy that concerns the very points which had then engaged the attention of the pope St. Victor I. It reveals to us yet another sympathetic figure of the Alexandrian school of theology- St. Denis, Bishop of Alexandria -- and a Bishop of Antioch whose life bears out to the letter Origen's anticipatory warnings on the temptations which beset prelates in the empire's greatest cities- Paul of Samosata.

Denis of Alexandria was Origen's own pupil. After a period as head of the Catechetical School he was elected bishop in 247, and he ruled the Church of the great metropolis for as long as seventeen years. It was an eventful episcopate. To begin with, there was the persecution of Decius in which the bishop was arrested. From the trial which awaited him he was, to his embarrassment, rescued by some of his flock and forcibly hurried into safety. The persecution over, he had to face the problem of the reconciliation of the repentant apostates. His solution of the question was that adopted at Rome, and he took the Roman side again when, three or four years later, St. Cyprian raised the question of the validity of heretical baptism. In the persecution which crowned St. Cyprian's life with martyrdom, Denis was again arrested, tried and exiled. How he escaped death it is hard to understand. He returned to Alexandria when the persecution ended, to find the city given over to a civil war in which it was almost destroyed. To add to the troubles the plague came to devastate the surviving population.

The years of St. Denis' episcopate were then hardly the most suitable for the exercise of the talents which had given him his place in the succession to Origen. But interest in religion was inseparable from the intellectual life of the time; the elaboration of new theories and their passionate discussion, endemic. The occasion which would call forth all the bishop's talents was bound to come.

It presented itself in a revival of the Monarchist theories of Sabellius, of which the five cities of Cyrenaica were the scene. Once more, in their zealous attempts to defend the truth that there is only one God, Christian thinkers were sacrificing the other truth that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are realities really distinct. For these neo-Sabellians the Trinity was a mere matter of names; God is one and according as He is successively Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, He is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The controversy reached Alexandria in an appeal to the bishop from the contending parties. There could be little doubt where so faithful a disciple of Origen would range himself, and St. Denis wrote strongly to Cyrenaica defending the reality of the Trinity. He also wrote to the pope, Sixtus II. It was, however, the misfortune of the Bishop of Alexandria that he did not content himself with a repetition of the tradition in face of the new theory, but criticised that theory in the light of his own, Origenist theology. This, for whatever anti-Origenists there were at Alexandria, was an opportunity not to be neglected. They denounced the bishop to Rome. The pope -- it was no longer Sixtus II but a successor, also named Denis -- had the matter formally examined. He objected to several details of the Bishop of Alexandria's refutation of the Sabellians -- his use of the word "creature" to describe God the Son, for example, and his reluctance to use the word homoousios (consubstantial) to describe the relation of the Son to the Father; and he objected also that his defence of the reality of the distinction between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost by a theory of three distinct hypostases was so expressed that it might be taken as a theory that there were three Gods.

This was communicated to St. Denis in a private letter which invited him to explain the difficulties. With that letter there went a new public condemnation of the Sabellian theories, and also, no names being mentioned, of whoever taught that the Son was a creature, or that the three of the Divine Trinity were separate hypostases. St. Denis gave his explanations -- four books of a "Refutation and Explanations" -- and satisfied Rome of the perfect orthodoxy of his thought. Once more, in a vital controversy involving the traditional faith, Rome has declined to philosophise. There are in presence the innovators and the Catholic who uses against them the weapon of theological theory. Rome stands by the tradition, condemns the innovation by reference to the tradition, and as dispassionately criticises -- again by reference to the tradition -- the theory which the Catholic has constructed to defend the tradition. The procedure is already traditional, and it throws a great of deal light on the practical working of the potentior principalitas of the Roman Church.

The date of this correspondence between Denis of Alexandria and Denis of Rome is somewhere about 262. About the same time the Bishop of Alexandria was drawn into a second controversy which brought him into relation with the greatest centre of Christianity in the East -- Antioch. The Bishop of Antioch at the moment was Paul, a native of Samosata. The moment was one of political debacle throughout the East. The disasters of the Persian War were a recent memory, with the defeat and the shameful captivity of the Emperor himself. The flood of the Persian invasion had barely subsided, and Antioch was under the rule of one of the border States to which Rome's weakness promised a new opportunity of expansion, the Kingdom of Palmyra and its queen Zenobia. With the new ruler, Paul of Samosata was on the very best of terms, and he contrived to combine a high position in the State Treasury with his leadership of the Church of Antioch. Cultured, worldly, profligate even, this aspect of his career fills more space in the contemporary record than the more important, but less alluring, theme of his heresies. Nevertheless, it was his heresies which finally provoked the intervention of neighbouring bishops and his deposition.

The heresies offered in sum, nothing very new. They were little more than a re-edition of the theories of Theodotus and of Artemas.

Jesus Christ was not divine in the same way that the Father was divine, for the Logos dwelt in Jesus Christ simply as in a temple. Moreover, the Divine Logos was simply an attribute or faculty of God and not a divine Person. Jesus Christ could only be said to be divine in so far as the Divinity had adopted Him. The opposition to Paul's novelties showed itself immediately, and between 263 and 268 at least three councils were held at Antioch to judge its bishop's orthodoxy. To these St. Denis was invited, but old age stood in the way of his personal intervention. The long thousand miles journey was more than he dared attempt. It was another pupil of Origen upon whom fell the role of defender of the tradition -- Firmilian, Bishop of Cesarea in Cappadocia, the ally, ten years before, of St. Cyprian.

But Paul of Samosata was too subtle an adversary for the orthodox. Time and again he eluded the prosecution, and not until 268 was the case so handled that he was forced into an open declaration of his dissent. The hero of this was one of his priests, Malchion, the head of the school at Antioch, and its scene a council in which seventy or eighty bishops took part. Paul was deposed, Domnus elected in his place and letters sent to Alexandria and to Rome, communicating the decisions. But Paul was not at the end of his resources and, strong in the support of Zenobia, he held out for four years more, refusing to surrender either church or palace. The deadlock only ended with the new Emperor Aurelian's victory over Zenobia (272). Antioch was once more a Roman city and the suit for Paul's dispossession came before the emperor. He decided that the Bishop of Antioch was the man whom thebishops of Italy and Rome acknowledged to be such. Paul was therefore ejected.

One interesting point about this last controversy of the third century is that while the champions of orthodoxy were all onetime pupils of Origen, the heresiarch, too, made use of the master's terminology to defend himself and to baffle the prosecution. His use of one term in particular drew down upon it the censure of the bishops. This was the term homoousios. Rome, seeing in it the Greek equivalent of Tertullian's consubstantialis, by now the consecrated term in the West to describe how both Father and Son were divine, had, a few years before, overriden Denis of Alexandria's objections to its use. Denis, a Greek, with a philosopher's experience of the subtle possibilities of his native language, had then feared that homoousios might be taken to mean "identical in person" and therefore seem Sabellian. Now, in 268, Paul of Samosata had been able to exploit in the interests of his theory yet a third interpretation of the term. The Council of Antioch had thereupon condemned it. Sixty years afterwards and more that condemnation was to bear unlooked for fruit. For when the Council of Nicea used the word homoousios to defend the traditional faith against Arianism, the heretics retorted with the charge that the Catholics were the real heretics, alleging in proof the objections of Denis of Alexandria, while the old condemnation of the term, now become the touchstone of orthodoxy, was an embarrassment for many of the Catholics. There is, however, a more intimate connection still between this crisis of 263-268, of which unfortunately we know so little, and the Council of Nicea. With Paul of Samosata there disappeared from the clergy of Antioch one of his leading allies, the priest Lucian. The name should be noted for Lucian was the teacher of Arius and the real father of Arianism.

With Aurelian's decision regarding the property of the Church of Antioch there begins a period of thirty years, of whose history we know nothing. Save for the general description -- a few sentences -- of Catholic life at this time in the great history of Eusebius, nothing has survived beyond names and dates in the lists of the bishops of the principal sees. When in 303 the veil lifts, it is to reveal all the horrors of the persecution of Diocletian, the Empire's last assault on the religion of the Church. That assault is the prelude to the Empire's conversion. With that conversion the setting of the Church's life is so different that we can speak of the period which follows as a new age. The formative period is now at an end. It is the history of an undeniable world force which lies before us.

Endnotes

17: Since they professed to uphold at all costs the oneness of the divinity, " the monarchy " as they never tire of calling it, and since they taught, in logical conclusion from their theory, that it was the Father whom Mary conceived and who died for us, the appropriateness of their many-sounding name is evident. [back]

18: Modalism because for those who refused to acknowledge the real distinction between the Father and the Son, Father and Son were simply modes of the Divine Being. [back]

19: Tertullian was, however, considerably less successful in his theories about the divine generation of the Logos and in his argument to prove the consubstantiality of the Logos with the Father. [back]

20: Christus, pp. 532-4 [back]

21: cf. P. ALFARIC Les Ecritures Manicheenes 2 vols. Paris 1918. F. C. BIRKITT The Religion of the Manichees. Cambridge 1925. C. SCHMIDT Neue Originalquellen des Manichaismus aus Aegypten. Stuttgart 1933. J. LEBRETON Gnosticism Marcionism Manichaeism in Studies in Comparative Religions (edit. E. C. Messenger, London 1934) is a good popular account written by a specialist. [back]