Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

Origen, in replying to the attacks of a very subtle and able Platonic philosopher of the second century, appeals again and again to the divine power shown forth in the conversion of so many, and among them of those who had previously been the slaves of sin. Heathen philosophy could boast of two converts, Phædo and Polemo; on which he says, “We assert that the whole habitable world contains evidence of the works of Jesus, in the existence of those churches of God which have been founded through Him by those who have been converted from the practice of innumerable sins. And the name of Jesus can still remove distractions from the minds of men, and expel demons, and also take away diseases, and produce a marvellous meekness of spirit and complete change of character, and a humanity, and goodness, and gentleness in those individuals who do not feign themselves to be Christians for the sake of subsistence or the supply of any mortal wants, but who have honestly accepted the doctrine concerning God and Christ and the judgment to come.”

Celsus, unable to resist the miracles which Jesus is recorded to have performed, had on several occasions spoken of them slanderously as works of sorcery, to which Origen had severally replied. But he also pointed out how far greater a divine power is manifested in healing the maladies of the soul than in raising the daughter of Jairus, or the son of the widow of Nain, or Lazarus four days dead; for indeed these miracles were the symbols of the greater things which our Lord promised to do by His Apostles. “I would say that, agreeably to the promise of Jesus, His disciples performed even greater works than these miracles of Jesus, which were perceptible only to the senses. For the eyes of those who are blind in soul are ever opened, and the ears of those who were deaf to virtuous words listen readily to the doctrine of God and of the blessed life with Him; and many too who were lame in the feet of the ‘inner man,’ as Scripture calls it, having now been healed by the word, do not simply leap, but leap as the hart, which is an animal hostile to serpents, and stronger than all the poison of vipers. And these lame who have been healed received from Jesus power to trample with those feet in which they were formerly lame upon the serpents and scorpions of wickedness, and generally upon all the power of the enemy; and though they tread upon it, they sustain no injury, for they also have become stronger than the poison of all evil and of demons.”

On this point he dwells further. The Jew introduced by Celsus argued that our Lord was a man. Origen replied: “I do not know whether a man who had the courage to spread throughout the entire world His doctrine of religious worship and teaching could accomplish what He wished without the divine assistance, and could rise superior to all who withstood the progress of His doctrine – kings and rulers, and the Roman Senate and governors in all places, and the common people. And how could the nature of a man possessed of no inherent excellence convert so vast a multitude? For it would not be wonderful if it were only the wise who were so converted; but it is the most irrational of men and those devoted to their passions, and who, by reason of their irrationality, change with the greater difficulty so as to adopt a more temperate course of life. And yet it is because Christ was the power of God and the wisdom of the Father that He accomplished and still accomplishes such results, although neither the Jews nor Greeks who disbelieved His word will so admit. And, therefore, we shall not cease to believe in God, according to the precepts of Jesus Christ, and to seek to convert those who are blind on the subject of religion, although it is they who are truly blind themselves that charge us with blindness; and they, whether Jews or Greeks, who lead astray those that follow them, accuse us of seducing men – a good seduction, truly, that they may become temperate instead of dissolute, or at least may make advances to temperance; may become just instead of unjust, or at least may tend to become so; prudent instead of foolish, or be on the way to become such; and instead of cowardice, meanness, and timidity, may exhibit the virtues of fortitude and courage, especially displayed in the struggles undergone for the sake of their religion towards God, the Creator of all things.”

The wonder of the formation of the Christian community itself was never absent from the mind of those who were eye-witnesses of the heathendom in the bosom of which it arose. The place now occupied in the minds of men by the sins of professing Christians was then occupied by the sins of heathens in the midst of whom Christians formed so striking a contrast. Origen refers to the moral miracle as supported and in part explained by the material miracle, which, like every writer of those centuries, he presupposed and dwelt upon as a fact which was manifest before the eyes of every one – a fact which might be ascribed to sorcery, but could not be denied.

“I think,” he says, “the wonders wrought by Jesus are a proof of the Holy Spirit’s having then appeared in the form of a dove; and I shall refer not only to His miracles, but, as is proper, to those also of the Apostles of Jesus. For they could not without the help of miracles and wonders have prevailed on those who heard their new doctrines and new teachings to abandon their national usages and to accept their instructions at the danger to themselves even of death.” And elsewhere: “Christians, who have in so wonderful a manner formed themselves into a community, appear at first to have been more induced by miracles than by exhortations to forsake the institutions of their fathers and to adopt others which were quite strange to them. And, indeed, if we were to reason from what is probable as to the first formation of the Christian society, we should say that it is incredible that the Apostles of Jesus Christ, who were unlettered men of humble life, could have been emboldened to preach Christian truth to men by anything else than the power which was conferred upon them, and the grace which accompanied their words and rendered them effective; and those who heard them would not have renounced the old established usages of their fathers, and been induced to adopt notions so different from those in which they had been brought up, unless they had been moved by some extraordinary power and by the force of miraculous events.”200

This power of miracles, as inherited by the disciples from their Lord, is thus recorded by Irenæus:201—

“They who are truly His disciples, having received the grace from Him, effect it in His name for the good of others in proportion as each individual has received the gift from Him. Some with true and permanent effect expel demons, so that in many cases the very persons who have been delivered from the evil spirits believe and are in the Church. Some have foreknowledge of future events, visions, and prophetic utterances. Others heal sick people by the imposition of their hands and make them whole. Dead, too, have been raised to life, and have remained with us many years. What shall I say? It is impossible to express the number of the graces which the Church throughout the whole world, having received them from God, effects every day for the good of the nations in the name of Jesus Christ who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And in this she neither seduces any nor works for filthy lucre; for what she has freely received she freely imparts.”

In the time of Irenæus, Clement, Tertullian, and Origen, the proof from the rapid growth of the Church in spite of the world’s opposition was by no means complete. Moreover, the greatest and most general persecutions, those of Decius, Gallus, Valerian, and Diocletian, came after this. Probably the struggle between the Church and the Empire was not understood in all its bearings before the time of Decius. But we possess two treatises of Athanasius, composed in his youth, about the year 320. They are extremely beautiful both in style and matter; and in parts of them Athanasius contemplates the whole preceding history of the Church and the effects of her preaching the cross of Christ. I take as a specimen what he says about certain miraculous effects worked by the name and the cross of Christ, for the truth of which he appeals to universal experience.202

“When did men begin to desert the worship of idols except from the time that the true God, the Word of God, appeared among men? When did the oracles which were everywhere among the Greeks cease and come to nought, save from the time that the Saviour manifested Himself upon earth? When did the gods and heroes of the poets begin to be condemned as mere mortal men, save from the time that the Lord set up His trophy against death, and preserved incorruptible the body which He had taken by raising it from the dead? And when was the deceit and madness of demons despised, save when the Word, the power of God, the Lord of all, and of these among all, in His condescension for the weakness of men, appeared upon the earth? When did the art and the schools of magic begin to be trodden underfoot, save upon the manifestation of the Word among men? In a word, when did the wisdom of the Greeks become foolish, save when the true Wisdom of God showed Himself on the earth? For of old the whole world and every spot in it was filled with the false worship of idols, and men held that there were no gods but idols. But now through all the world men desert the superstition of idols and fly to Christ, and worship Him as God, through whom they recognise the Father whom they knew not. And observe this wonder. The religions were different and numberless; each place had its own idol, and he that was invoked as god there could not pass to the next spot to persuade his neighbours to worship him, but could only just maintain his own worship; for no one worshipped his neighbour’s god, but kept to his own idol, thinking that he was the lord of all; whereas the one and same Christ is worshipped everywhere by all; and what the impotence of idols could not do to persuade its neighbours, this Christ has done, persuading not only those near, but simply the whole world to worship one and the same Lord, and through Him God His Father.

“Of old, also, everything was full of the deceit of oracles, and those in Delphi, and Dodona, and Bœotia, and Libya, and Egypt, and the Kabiri, and the Pythia, were admired in men’s imagination; but from the time that Christ is preached everywhere, this their madness also is stopped, and no one any longer acts the prophet. And of old the demons deceived men with spectres, taking possession of fountains and rivers, of wood and stones, and so astonishing the foolish with deceits. All these sights have vanished since the Divine Epiphany of the Word; for a man using only the sign of the cross scatters all their tricks. Of old men deemed those whom the poets called Zeus, and Kronos, and Apollo, and the heroes, to be gods, and were drawn into error by worshipping them; but now that the Saviour has appeared among men, these have been reduced to the nakedness of mortal men, while Christ has been recognised as alone true God, God the Word of God. What shall I say of the magic which had so much vogue among them? Before the Word was spread among us, it prevailed and worked among Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Indians, and astonished the beholders; but it was convicted and utterly brought to nought by the presence of the truth and the appearance of the Word. But as to the Grecian wisdom and the big words of the philosophers, I think it needs no word from us when the strange sight is before the eyes of all, that all the volumes written by the Greek wise men were not able to persuade even a few neighbours of immortality and virtuous life; while Christ, only by a few cheap words in the mouth of men who had no wisdom of the tongue, has persuaded numerous assemblies of men throughout the whole world to despise death and to have immortal longings, to pass by time and see eternity, earth’s glory to esteem as dust and ashes, and grasp instead of it a crown in heaven.

“These are not mere words of ours, but appeal to the test of experience for their reality. Let any one who will go and see the proof of virtue in Christian virgins and the youths who cultivate purity, and the assurance of immortality in the vast multitude of martyrs. He that will try the truth of what we have said, let him upon the appearance of demons, the deceit of oracles, and magic wonders, use the sign of the cross which they mock at, with the mere name of Christ, and he will see how the demons fly, the oracles stop, the whole array of magic and trickery disappears. Who, then, and how great is this Christ who has by His mere name and presence cast His shade over and annihilated all these things everywhere, who prevails over all alone, and has filled the whole world with His teaching? Let the Greeks who mock and blush not say. Is He a man? how then has one man been too much for the power of all their gods, and convicted them by His own power of being nothing? Do they call Him a magician? but how can all magic be destroyed by a magician, and not rather be confirmed? For if He prevailed over some magicians, or was superior to one only, He might well be deemed by them to have surpassed the others by greater art; but if His cross carried off the victory over all magic absolutely, and the very name of the thing, it is plain that the Saviour is not a magician, since the demons invoked by other magicians fly from Him as their Lord. If He only drove away some demons, He might be thought to have power over the inferior by the chief of the demons, as the Jews mocking said of Him. But if all the fury of the demons is displaced and scattered by naming Him, it is plain they are wrong, and that our Lord and Saviour Christ is not, as they think, some demoniacal power. If, then, the Saviour is neither simple man, nor magician, nor a demon, but by His own Godhead has annulled and frustrated all the imagination of poets, the display of demons, and the wisdom of Greeks, it must be plain and confessed by all that He is truly the Son of God, the Word, and Wisdom, and Power of the Father. Hence His works are not human, but above man’s range, and are recognised to be the works of God in truth by their manifest effects, and by the comparison of them with the works of man.”

Athanasius speaks in these words for the whole period preceding him. The apologists of the early Church before him203 lay the most stress in proving her divine character upon five things – the predictions of the Old Testament, the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles, the miraculous power continuing on in Christians, the rapid propagation of the Church, and the steadfast endurance of confessors under persecution. Our Lord Himself laid the greatest weight upon the proof arising from prophecy, and from the works of power, themselves announced in prophecy, which He did, “the works of the Christ.” His answer to the disciples of John the Baptist included both. In fact, He came among a people possessing a divinely appointed priesthood and office of teaching, which He expressly acknowledged when He said, “The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in the chair of Moses; all things, therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do.” But He did not in any way attach Himself to this authority, much less submit to it in His office of teaching. If we reflect on the fact that He did not submit Himself to the authority which He acknowledged to be divine, yet claimed supreme authority, it is obvious that without miracles He could claim no authority as the Christ. And He said so most plainly Himself when He summed up, as it were, the whole bearing of His ministry towards the Jewish authorities in the words, “If I had not done among them such works as no man ever did, they should not have sin; but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father.”

Thus, as in His own life, so likewise in the life of His people, miracles and prophecy were of necessity the double external witness to His mission, as martyrdom, including under it every degree of confessorship, was the great internal witness.

And every ancient Christian writer alleges the existence and the exercise of miraculous power in the Church. But there is also another fact; not only all Christians, but Jews and heathens of every class, the bitterest opponents of the Christian faith, agreed in one point, namely, that superhuman204 power was at work in the world, and in the whole life of man, by which works exceeding man’s ability, and often transgressing the laws of nature, were wrought. They were eye-witnesses of these works. About a great number of them, so far at least as the fact was concerned, they could not be deceived, though they might be deceived as to the nature of the cause.

Without martyrdom and also without miracles the conversion which took place between the Day of Pentecost and the Edict of Toleration in 313 was not even conceivable. Let us consider the bond which connects the two together.

The Christian faith itself rests upon two miracles. The first is the assumption of human nature by the Divine Word, the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity, in the womb of the Virgin Mary. This act of the divine condescension is so transcendent in all its bearings as not merely to surpass the order of nature, but to be, as it were, the parent of miraculous power in all that supernatural order which it creates and maintains. It is the fontal source of grace to man, of his first creation in grace, the first Adam himself being the image of the Second who was to be, and for whose sake the whole creation was made. Take away from the Christian faith that “Gospel of Mary” which St. Luke has recorded in the mission of the Angel Gabriel to her, and that faith is not only altered, but it ceases to be. Everything which the Christian believes and hopes depends, in fact, upon that miracle of miracles, the union of the divine nature with the human in the Person of Jesus Christ. Therefore all His children are born of a miracle, nurtured upon a miracle, live and hope and suffer and die in faith of a miracle, so great, so peculiar, so inconceivable beforehand, that all other miracles are but its progeny.

But, secondly, the very existence of this first miracle was guaranteed and made known by another – the resurrection of Jesus Christ in that very Body bearing the marks of the nails and the wound of the spear in which He was crucified. It was faith in this resurrection which sent forth a College of twelve unlettered men to convert the world, and by that faith they converted it, so far at least that the diadem of its emperors was surmounted by the cross of Christ. They and their successors who went forth in the same faith were misused, calumniated, persecuted, tormented to death in every shape and fashion, until Constantine saw the token in the sky and placed it on his banner.

What, then, we have said as to the Incarnation we may also say as to the Resurrection of Christ; take it away, and the Christian people have no longer a foundation on which to rest. They would simply cease to be.

They are, therefore, doubly the children of miracle.

They were thus from the beginning – and they could not but be – instinct with the sense of miracle.

But these two miracles were no less the ground of martyrdom and of all that life, consisting in the endurance and even choice of suffering, hardship, privation of every kind, of which martyrdom is the seal and crown. The connection between miracle and martyrdom seems to be this: The Incarnation of our Lord is the very reason of miraculous power being exhibited in the world, just as His assumption of human nature is itself the miracle of miracles. The purpose of all miracle is to bring home to the creature a special action of the Creator as Governor of the world, but the head and crown as well as the starting-point of such special action is, in our actual world, the miracle of the Incarnation.

Again, the original need of miraculous action springs from the moral darkness superinduced by the Fall, which the Incarnation repairs. The angelic world, while under probation, or any world of rational creatures unfallen, needs no miracles. And all miracles anterior to Christ are part of a chain of events leading on to Him, just as all martyrs before Christ have their reason of existence in Him alone. The occasion of martyrdom is the enmity between the seed of the serpent and the Seed of the Woman, and miracle is from beginning to end the hand of God showing itself in the contest. “All the just,” says St. Augustine,205 “who have been from the beginning of the world have Christ for their Head. For they believed in the future coming of that One whom we believe to have come, and they were healed by faith in the same One by faith in whom we are healed, that He might be head of the whole city Jerusalem.” And the most inspired of Christian poets, when he beheld the great rose of Paradise flowering with the saints of all times, divided them by their preceding or following the coming of Christ:

“Da questa parte, onde ’l fiore è maturoDi tutte le sue foglie, sono assisiQuei che credettero in Cristo venturoDall’ altra parte, onde sono intercisiDi vôto i semicircoli, si stannoQuei ch’ a Cristo venuto ebber li visi.”

– Paradiso, c. 32, 22.

In like manner the Apostle commences his illustration of the life of faith by the martyrdom of Abel, “who being dead yet speaketh.” Thus the one life pleasing to God from the beginning to the end is identical in its substance, and shows the oneness of the divine plan, commencing its execution in the very family of the first man. There the just loses his life for his justice’ sake, and Abel becomes the type of Christ and of all who follow the Divine Master. So St. John the Baptist, marking the transition from the old covenant to the new, the precursor of our Lord, with the triple aureole of virginity, doctorship, and martyrdom, gives up his life to maintain the sanctity of marriage.

Further, the Passion of our Lord is the source of martyrdom; and union with Him, especially in the act of His Passion, is the cause of all the effects which martyrdom produces. As He said, in reference to His coming Passion, of Himself, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remaineth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit;” so Tertullian said of His people, “The blood of Christians is seed.” In martyrdom lies the perpetuation of faith in Christ. He stands in the midst of the ages, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, working backwards and forwards. The shedding of Abel’s blood, the first blood shed, and the blood of the brother shed by the brother, points to the shedding of Christ’s blood; and so in the interval between Abel and Christ the blood of all the just ones is shed for the hope of Christ. As all martyrdom preceding Him was for the hope of Him, so all following is in remembrance and participation of Him.

There is a strong parallel between miracle and martyrdom as to their principle, their witness, their power, and their perpetuity.

1. First, as to principle. The conception of miracle springs at once from the doctrine of God the Creator, Orderer, and Maintainer of the universe, united with the doctrine of the Fall of man and the ignorance thence superinduced, and requiring to be dissipated by an objective confirmation of the truth. This confirmation is produced when He suspends that order of nature which He has impressed on things. “The divine power can at any time, without prejudice to His providence, do something beyond the order impressed on natural things by God. This is the very thing which He sometimes does to manifest His power. For in no manner can it be better shown that all nature is subject to the divine will than by this, that sometimes He does something beyond the order of nature; for by this it is made to appear that the order of things proceeded from God, not by a necessity of His nature, but by His free-will.”206

On the other hand, the conception of miracles is incompatible with the notion of a power evolving itself by a strict necessity in the universe. This involves at the same time the rejection of the notion of sin as a violation of the eternal law. For the evolution itself is the only law admitted, and is incapable of sin, which arises from the misuse of the liberty of the will. A world evolved by eternal necessity denies any liberty to the will. In this the Positivist and Materialist of the present day only take the position which the Stoic took of old. All the three deny miracle, because they deny creation.