by Will Durant
The doughtiest fighter for Christianity in this period was Quintus Septimius Tertullianus of Carthage. Born there about 160, the son of a Roman centurion, he studied rhetoric in the same school that trained Apuleius; then for years he practiced law at Rome. Midway in life he was converted to Christianity, married a Christian, renounced all pagan pleasures, and (says Jerome) was ordained a priest. All the arts and tricks that he had learned from rhetoric and law were now put at the service of Christian apologetics, enhanced by a convert’s ardor. Greek Christianity was theological, metaphysical, mystical; Tertullian made Latin Christianity ethical, juristic, practical. He had the vigor and virulence of Cicero, the satirical scurrility of Juvenal, and sometimes he could rival Tacitus in concentrating acid in a phrase. Irenaeus had written in Greek; with Minucius and Tertullian Christian literature in the West became Latin, and Latin literature became Christian.
In the year 197, while Roman magistrates in Carthage were trying Christians on charges of disloyalty, Tertullian addressed to an imaginary court the most eloquent of his works—the Apologeticus. He assured the Romans that Christians “are always praying for all emperors, for . . . a safe dynasty, brave armies, a faithful Senate, and a quiet world.”54 He extolled the grandeur of monotheism, and found premonitions of it in pre-Christian writers. O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae! he cried in a happy phrase—“Behold the witness of the soul, by its very nature Christian!”55 A year later, passing with strange celerity from persuasive defense to ferocious attack, he issued De Spectaculis, a scornful description of the Roman theaters as citadels of obscenity, and of the amphitheaters as the acme of man’s inhumanity to man. And he concluded with a bitter threat:
Other spectacles will come—that last eternal Day of Judgment . . . when all this old world and its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle will be on that day! How I shall marvel, laugh, rejoice, and exult, seeing so many kings—supposedly received into heaven—groaning in the depths of darkness!—and the magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus melting in fiercer flames than they ever kindled . . . against the Christians!—sages and philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together! . . . and tragic actors now more than ever vocal in their own tragedy, and players lither of limb by far in the fire, and charioteers burning red on the wheel of flame! 56
Such unhealthy intensity of imagination does not make for orthodoxy. As Tertullian aged, the same energy that in his youth had courted pleasure now turned into a fierce denunciation of every consolation but those of faith and hope. He addressed woman in the coarsest terms as “the gate by which the demon enters,” and told her that “it is on your account that Jesus Christ died.”57 Once he loved philosophy, and had written works like De Anima, applying Stoic metaphysics to Christianity; now he renounced all reasoning independent of revelation, and rejoiced in the incredibility of his creed. “God’s son died: it is believable precisely because it is absurd [ineptum]. He was buried and rose again: it is certain because it is impossible.”58 Sinking into a morose puritanism, Tertullian in his fifty-eighth year rejected the orthodox Church as too sullied with worldly ways, and embraced Montanism as a more outright application of the teachings of Christ. He condemned all Christians who became soldiers, artists, or state officials; all parents who did not veil their daughters; all bishops who restored repentant sinners to communion; finally he called the pope pastor moechorum—“shepherd of adulterers.”59
Despite him the Church prospered in Africa. Able and devoted bishops like Cyprian made the diocese of Carthage almost as rich and influential as Rome’s. In Egypt the growth of the Church was slower, and its early stages are lost to history; suddenly, late in the second century, we hear of a “Catechetical School” in Alexandria, which wedded Christianity to Greek philosophy, and produced two major fathers of the Church. Both Clement and Origen were well versed in pagan literature, and loved it after their own fashion; if their spirit had prevailed there would have been a less destructive break between classical culture and Christianity.
When Origenes Adamantius was seventeen (202) his father was arrested as a Christian, and condemned to death. The boy wished to join him in prison and martyrdom; his mother, failing to deter him by other means, hid all his clothes. Origen sent his father letters of encouragement: “Take heed,” he bade him, “not to change your mind on our account.”60 The father was beheaded, and the youth was left to care for the mother and six young children. Inspired to greater piety by the many martyrdoms he saw, he adopted the ascetic life. He fasted much, slept little and on bare ground, wore no shoes, and subjected himself to cold and nakedness; finally, in rigorous interpretation of Matthew XIX, 12, he emasculated himself.IV In 203 he succeeded Clement as head of the Catechetical School. Though he was only eighteen, his learning and eloquence drew many students, pagan as well as Christian, and his fame spread throughout the Christian world.
Some ancients reckoned his “books” at 6000; many, of course, were brief brochures; even so Jerome asked, “Which of us can read all that he has written?”62 In love with the Bible, which through boyhood memorizing had become part of his mind, Origen spent twenty years, and employed a corps of stenographers and copyists, collating in parallel columns the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, a Greek transliteration of that text, and Greek translations of it by the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.V By comparing these diverse renderings, and using his knowledge of Hebrew, Origen offered to the Church a corrected Septuagint. Insatiate, he added commentaries, sometimes of great length, on every book in the Bible. In Peri archon, “First Principles,” he achieved the first orderly and philosophical exposition of Christian doctrine. In a “Miscellany” (Stromateis) he undertook to demonstrate all Christian dogmas from the writings of the pagan philosophers. To lighten his task he availed himself of that allegorical method by which pagan philosophers had made Homer accord with reason, and Philo had reconciled Judaism with Greek philosophy. The literal meaning of Scripture, argued Origen, overlay two deeper layers of meaning—the moral and the spiritual—to which only the esoteric and educated few could penetrate. He questioned the truth of Genesis as literally understood: he explained away as symbols the unpleasant aspects of Yahveh’s dealings with Israel; and he dismissed as legends such stories as that of Satan taking Jesus up to a high mountain and offering him the kingdoms of the world.63 Sometimes, he suggested, scriptural narratives were invented in order to convey some spiritual truth.64 “What man of sense,” he asked,
will suppose that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun or moon or stars? Who is so foolish as to believe that God, like a husbandman, planted a garden in Eden, and placed in it a tree of life ... so that one who tasted of the fruit obtained life? 65
As Origen proceeds it becomes apparent that he is a Stoic, a Neo-Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a Gnostic, who is nonetheless resolved to be a Christian. It would have been too much to ask of a man that he should abandon the faith for which he had edited a thousand volumes and flung away his manhood. Like Plotinus he had studied under Ammonius Saccas, and sometimes it is hard to distinguish his philosophy from theirs. God, in Origen, is not Yahveh, he is the First Principle of all things. Christ is not the human figure described in the New Testament, he is the Logos or Reason who organizes the world; as such he was created by God the Father, and is subordinate to him.66 In Origen, as in Plotinus, the soul passes through a succession of stages and embodiments before entering the body; and after death it will pass through a like succession before arriving at God. Even the purest souls will suffer for a while in Purgatory; but in the end all souls will be saved. After the “final conflagration” there will be another world with its long history, and then another, and another. . . . Each will improve on the preceding, and the whole vast sequence will slowly work out the design of God.67
We cannot wonder that Demetrius, Bishop of Alexandria, looked with some doubt upon the brilliant philosopher
who adorned his diocese and corresponded with emperors. He refused to ordain Origen to the priesthood, on the ground that emasculation disqualified him. But while Origen was traveling in the Near East two Palestinian bishops ordained him. Demetrius protested that this infringed his rights; he convened a synod of his clergy; it annulled Origen’s ordination, and banished him from Alexandria. Origen removed to Caesarea, and continued his work as a teacher. There he wrote his famous defense of Christianity Contra Celsum (248). With magnanimous spirit he admitted the force of Celsus’ arguments; but he replied that for every difficulty and improbability in Christian doctrine there were worse incredibilities in paganism. He concluded not that both were absurd, but that the Christian faith offered a nobler way of life than could possibly come from a dying and idolatrous creed.
In 250 the Decian persecution reached Caesarea. Origen, now sixty-five, was arrested, stretched on the rack, loaded with chains and an iron collar, and kept in prison for many days. But death caught up with Decius first, and Origen was released. He lived only three years more; torture had fatally injured a body already weakened by unremitting asceticism. He died as poor as when he had begun to teach, and the most famous Christian of his time. As his heresies ceased to be the secret of a few scholars, the Church found it necessary to disown him; Pope Anastasius condemned his “blasphemous opinions” in 400, and in 553 the Council of Constantinople pronounced him anathema. Nevertheless, nearly every later Christian savant for centuries learned from him, and depended upon his work; and his defense of Christianity impressed pagan thinkers as no “apology” had done before him. With him Christianity ceased to be only a comforting faith; it became a full-fledged philosophy, buttressed with Scripture but proudly resting on reason.
V. THE ORGANIZATION OF AUTHORITY
The Church might be excused for condemning Origen: his principle of allegorical interpretation not only made it possible to prove anything, but at one blow it did away with the narratives of Scripture and the earthly life of Christ; and it restored individual judgment precisely while proposing to defend the faith. Faced with the hostility of a powerful government, the Church felt the need of unity; it could not safely allow itself to be divided into a hundred feeble parts by every wind of intellect, by disloyal heretics, ecstatic prophets, or brilliant sons. Celsus himself had sarcastically observed that Christians were “split up into ever so many factions, each individual desiring to have his own party.”68 About 187 Irenaeus listed twenty varieties of Christianity; about 384 Epiphanius counted eighty. At every point foreign ideas were creeping into Christian belief, and Christian believers were deserting to novel sects. The Church felt that its experimental youth was ending, its maturity was near; it must now define its terms and proclaim the conditions of its membership. Three difficult steps were necessary: the formation of a scriptural canon, the determination of doctrine, and the organization of authority.
The literature of Christianity in the second century abounded in gospels, epistles, apocalypses, and “acts.” Christians differed widely in accepting or rejecting these as authoritative expressions of the Christian creed. The Western churches accepted the Book of Revelation, the Eastern churches generally rejected it; these accepted the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Epistles of James, the Western churches discarded them. Clement of Alexandria quotes as sacred scripture a late first-century treatise, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Marcion’s publication of a New Testament forced the hand of the Church. We do not know when the books of our present New Testament were determined as canonical—i.e., as authentic and inspired; we can only say that a Latin fragment discovered by Muratori in 1740, named after him, and generally assigned to ca. 180, assumes that the canon had by that time been fixed.
Ecclesiastical councils or synods met with increasing frequency in the second century. In the third they were limited to bishops; and by the close of that century they were recognized as the final arbiters of “Catholic”—i.e., universal—Christian belief. Orthodoxy survived heresy because it satisfied the need for a definite creed that could moderate dispute and quiet doubt, and because it was supported by the power of the Church.
The problem of organization lay in determining the center of that power. After the weakening of the mother church at Jerusalem, the individual congregations, unless established or protected by other communities, appear to have exercised an independent authority. The church of Rome, however, claimed to have been founded by Peter, and quoted Jesus as saying: “Thou art Peter” (Heb. Cephas, Gk. Petros), “and upon this rock” (Heb. Cephas, Gk. petra) “I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”69 The passage has been challenged as an interpolation, and as a pun to which only Shakespeare would stoop; but the likelihood remains that Peter, if he did not establish the Christian colony in Rome, preached to it, and appointed its bishop.70 Irenaeus (187) wrote that Peter “committed to the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate”; Tertullian (200) confirmed this tradition; and Cyprian (252), bishop of Rome’s great rival, Carthage, urged all Christians to accept the primacy of the Roman see.71
The earliest occupants of “Peter’s throne” left no mark upon history. The third, Pope VI Clement, stands out as the author of an extant letter written about 96 to the church of Corinth, appealing to its members to maintain harmony and order;72 here, only a generation after Peter’s death, the bishop of Rome speaks with authority to the Christians of a distant congregation. The other bishops, while acknowledging the “primacy” Of the Roman bishop as the lineal successor of Peter, repeatedly challenged his power to overrule their own decisions. The Eastern churches celebrated Easter on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, whatever day of the week this might be; the Western churches postponed the feast to the following Sunday. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, visiting Rome about 156, tried and failed to persuade Anicetus, Bishop of Rome, to have the Eastern date observed in the West; and on his return he rejected the Pope’s suggestion that the Eastern churches should accept the Western date. Pope Victor (190) rephrased Anicetus’ request as a command; the bishops of Palestine obeyed, those of Asia Minor refused. Victor sent out letters to the Christian congregations, excommunicating the recalcitrant churches; many bishops, even in the West, protested against so severe a measure, and apparently Victor did not insist.
His successor Zephyrinus (202-18) was “a simple and unlettered man.”73 To aid him in administering the spreading episcopate of Rome, Zephyrinus raised to the archdeaconate a man whose intelligence was less questioned than his morals. Callistus, said his enemies, had begun his career as a slave, had become a banker, had embezzled the funds deposited with him, had been sentenced to hard labor, had been released, had started a riot in a synagogue, had been condemned to the mines of Sardinia, had escaped by having his name surreptitiously inserted into a list of pardoned prisoners, and had then lived for ten years at Antium in painful peace. When Zephyrinus placed him in charge of the papal cemetery he transferred it to the Via Appia, in the catacomb that bears his name. When Zephyrinus died, and Callistus was chosen pope, Hippolytus and some other priests denounced him as unfit, and set up a rival church and papacy (218). Doctrinal differences accentuated the schism: Callistus believed in readmitting to the Church those who, after baptism, had committed a mortal sin (adultery, murder, apostasy), and who professed their penitence. Hippolytus considered such lenience ruinous, and wrote a Refutation of All Heresies, with special attention to this one. Callistus excommunicated him, gave the Church a competent administration, and vigorously asserted the supreme authority of the Roman see over all Christendom.
The schism of Hippolytus ended in 235; but under Pope Cornelius (251-53) his heresy was revived by two priests—Novatus at Carthage and Novatian at Rome—who set up schismatic churches dedicated to the unrelenting exclusion of postbaptismal si
nners. The Council of Carthage under Cyprian, and the Council of Rome under Cornelius, excommunicated both groups. Cyprian’s appeal for Cornelius’ support strengthened the papacy; but when Pope Stephen I (254-57) ruled that converts from heretical sects need not be rebaptized, Cyprian led a synod of African bishops in rejecting the decree. Stephen, like another Cato, excommunicated them in an ecclesiastical Punic War; his providentially early death allowed the quarrel to lapse, and averted the secession of the powerful African Church.
Despite overreachings and setbacks, the Roman see increased its power with almost every decade. Its wealth and ecumenical charities exalted its prestige; it was consulted by the Christian world on every issue of gravity; it took the initiative in repudiating and combating heresies, and in defining the canon of the Scriptures. It was deficient in scholars, and could not boast a Tertullian, an Origen, or a Cyprian; it gave its attention to organization rather than to theory; it built and governed and let others write and talk. Cyprian rebelled; but it was he who, in his De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate, acclaimed the see or seat of Peter (cathedra Petri) as the center and summit of Christendom, and proclaimed to the world those principles of solidarity, unanimity, and persistency which have been the essence and mainstay of the Catholic Church.74 By the middle of the third century the position and resources of the papacy were so strong that Decius vowed he would rather have a rival emperor at Rome than a pope.75 The capital of the Empire naturally became the capital of the Church.