It was probably in the first or second year following the martyrdom of S. Cecilia that the great Emperor Marcus died. He was followed by his unworthy son, Commodus, who inherited none of his father's noble qualities. Indeed, he has been not unjustly styled a gladiator rather than an emperor. His historian tells us how he publicly engaged in these inglorious combats more than seven hundred times." Yet, strange to say, the general persecution of Christianity, which raged, well-nigh all through the nineteen years of Marcus' reign, although by no means ended, was much less severe and was less general in the evil days of Commodus.
Indeed, Commodus had no fixed policy. With Marcus the existence of the Christians constituted a real danger to the prosperity of the Empire; they were strangers to the spirit of Rome and her gods; not traitors—no one could accuse the Christians of treason to the Emperor and his government—but standing aloof; having no share in the ancient traditions upon which Marcus and those who thought with him believed that the greatness of Rome was founded, and on the maintenance of which, her future grandeur, nay, her very existence as a world-empire, depended. Therefore, the Commodus, in his singular and degraded passion for the Amphitheatre, was a strong contrast to his father Marcus, who loathed these bloody and corrupting spectacles and made various but fruitless efforts to do away with them. But the fashion was too deeply rooted, and not even the all-powerful will of the Emperor could put an end to them.
His son Commodus, however, cared little or nothing for the ancient Roman traditions. So, in his time, the persecution was intermittent; depending a good deal on the temper and views of the powerful Imperial lieutenants who ruled in the name of Rome in the provinces. There was, too, at the headquarters of the Government a powerful influence at work favorable to the religion of Jesus. Many of the courtiers and office-bearers about the court were Christians; and Marcia who, though never bearing the title of Empress, was, to all intents and purposes, the wife of Commodus, and who possessed vast influence with the Emperor, was a firm friend of Christianity; possibly, as some believe, herself a Christian.
All this, especially as time went on, helped the hated and dreaded sect; and so the position of Christians in the reign of this weak and vacillating Emperor gradually became far less precarious than it had been under the rule of Marcus.
In his earlier years, however, before the palace influences, and especially the persuasions of Marcia, had been able to arrest the bitter persecuting spirit which had for so many years prevailed, we hear of these bloody attacks still harassing Christian communities, notably in North Africa.
In that great and wealthy province, the religion of Jesus had evidently grown up, as it had done in Gaul, with marvelous rapidity; striking its roots among the population far and wide. We have absolutely no records which tell us of its first beginnings, no story of the laying of the foundation of the Faith; only at the close of the second century, when Commodus and his immediate successors were reigning, we find a large and flourishing Church established in Carthage and the country districts, a Church already elaborately organized. The first mention we come upon of this North African Church is an account of a persecution to which it was subjected in the first days of the reign of Commodus.
This onslaught took place at Madaura. We have no details; only a few of the martyrs' names are preserved to us, and those not Latin, but evidently belonging to men of the Punic race. Only a few days after—according to later investigations, in the August of the same year, A. D. 180—a cruel persecution brought the Roman colony of Scillium, in North Africa, into some prominence. The more distinguished Christians were brought to Carthage, were there formally charged with professing the proscribed religion, and were condemned and put to death, solely because they persisted in refusing to swear by the genius of the Emperor. The Proconsul Saturninus, following the policy pursued by so many of the more statesmanlike among the higher magistrates of the Empire, endeavored to procure from them something of a recantation; and offered the group of Christian Scillitans a period of delay, thirty days, to consider if they would not make up their minds to preserve their lives by the apparently easy process of swearing by the genius of the Emperor. They were, however, steadfast, and in consequence suffered capital punishment. On being summoned to swear by the genius of the Emperor, Speratus replied, "I do not acknowledge the sovereignty of this world; I serve God, whom no man hath seen, or can see with these eyes."
Before summing up the general state of Christianity at the close of the second century, we would once more return to Asia Minor, and briefly allude to a few striking personalities who considerably influenced the Catholic Church in the latter half of the second century.
We have already noticed how pre-eminent among Christian communities this great and important province—or, more accurately, group of provinces—appears to have been in literary, and not only in literary, activity in the latter years of the first and during the first half of the second century. This was natural, as it had been for long years the home of John and of others of the Apostles and first teachers of Christianity, Paul having laid the foundations of the famous churches. There had lived and worked and written John the beloved Apostle, Andrew and Philip of the Twelve, and at least one of the famous disciples of Philip; the "other John," the Presbyter, Aristion, who had known the Lord, Papias and Polycarp. From Asia Minor, once their home, had gone forth into distant Gaul Pothinus, the Martyr-Bishop of Lyons, and the famous scholar, afterwards his successor in the See, Irenaeus. To churches of Asia Minor five of the seven ever-memorable epistles of Ignatius had been written, and a sixth of these letters to Polycarp, one of their bishops. This region, too, as has been accurately remarked, was "the hotbed of heresies and the arena of controversies." After the death of Polycarp, circa A. D. 157, Asia Minor maintains its literary preeminence largely owing to the indefatigable activity of a few great Christian scholars.
Another distinguished writer of this great province, Claudius Apollonaris, Bishop of Hierapolis, was a contemporary of Melito, though a somewhat younger man; he too addressed an apology to the Emperor Marcus. Of his numerous works, only two short extracts remain. A third and once famous Church leader was Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, of whose letter to Victor of Rome on the date of the keeping of the Easter Festival, Eusebius has preserved a solitary but priceless extract. Although there remains to us little more than the shadow of once great names falling on the page of Eusebius, we can form from passing notices some idea of the vigor and activity of the Asia Minor Churches in the last years of the first and all through the second century.
From Asia Minor early in the century, as we have said, Pothinus went forth to the distant and important province of Gaul—perhaps the most important of the outlying "Governments" of Rome. As Pothinus was ninety years old at the time of his martyrdom in A. D. 177, the tradition which suggests that he was sent to Gaul by Polycarp of Smyrna is quite possible. There are, however, many proofs, more trustworthy than the comparatively late tradition connected with Pothinus, which link the Churches of Southern Gaul with the Churches of Asia Minor, and which indisputably tell us that the former were the daughter Churches of the Asian communities of which we have been speaking.
(1) Very close from remote times was the commercial connection between the Western cities of Asia Minor and Southern Gaul. It seems, therefore, natural to assume that the flourishing Christianity of the sea-board cities of proconsular Asia, Smyrna, Ephesus, etc., would follow the usual channels of commerce.
(2) The well-known letter, to which we have referred at some length, giving the graphic picture of the sufferings of the Christians of Lyons and Vienne in the persecution of A. D. 177, was addressed to "the Brethren that are in Asia and Phrygia." This shows the closeness of the ties which connected the Christians in Gaul with the Churches of Asia Minor.
(3) The most prominent Christian in the Gallic Churches after Pothinus, the bishop, was Irenaeus, who succeeded Pothinus as Bishop of Lyons A. D. 178. Now this Irenaeus, we know, passed at least his youth in Asia Minor, when Polycarp was Bishop of Smyrna.
We have already, in our sketch of Polycarp, quoted Irenaeus' touching memories of his master. We may thus regard Irenaeus as a link between Gaul and Asia. His training in Smyrna he never forgot, alluding to it on various occasions in his writings, which have come down to us.
This disciple of the Smyrna Church in his later life became the most illustrious bishop in Christendom. Of his career we possess too few details to give any complete picture. We hear of him in Rome, paying a long official visit to the great Italian see; we can faintly trace his busy active work during a somewhat long tenure of the chief Gallican see of Lyons. A rather late tradition speaks of him as a most successful and unwearied preacher of the Faith, as one who rallied round him in Lyons and the surrounding districts a large and influential Church; dying, as Gregory of Tours tells us, a martyr, somewhere about A. D. 197; but over this martyrdom there hangs a doubt, as there is no mention of it by Tertullian, or later by Eusebius.
That he lived to the end of the second century is, however, certain. The traditions and teaching of the Asia Minor Churches were faithfully preserved and taught in these daughter Churches of Gaul, notably in respect of the date on which the Easter Festival should be kept. Here Irenaeus in opposition to Rome and her bishop, followed the practice of Asia Minor, presumably derived from the teaching of John.
But though details concerning the years spent in Gaul are wanting, as far as later ages are concerned, Irenaeus will ever live in his book, written against those many Oriental heresies, so common in Asia Minor, which had naturally found their way into the connected communities of South Gaul.
This book, a lengthy treatise divided into five books "Against Heresies," is a great and important work. In many respects it is the weightiest writing of the early Church which has been preserved to us. The first two books contain a minute description and a criticism of various notable heretical sects, both Gnostic and Ebionite, the remaining three are an exposition of the doctrines of Christianity as they were taught in the latter half of the second century in all the Catholic Churches. From this writing we derive many side-lights upon early Christian belief and practice, notably a clear statement of the position which thoughtful Christians occupied in the Roman Empire; and of the duties and allegiance which they owed to the Imperial Government according to the teaching of responsible leaders like Irenaeus; whom we may fairly regard as the depository of the teaching of Polycarp and of those great theologians and writers who flourished in the second century in the Eastern centers of Christianity in Asia Minor. In Irenaeus' book we have also a clear statement of the attitude of the Catholic Church, circa A. D. 190-180, towards the Canonical writings of the New Testament.
Here it may be safely said that the authority which was then attributed by the Christian communities of Asia and Gaul to the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of Paul, several of the Catholic Epistles, and the Apocalypse, falls in no respect short of the authority attributed to these books in the fourth or in the nineteenth century. Irenaeus places them on the same platform as he places the Canonical books of the Old Testament, citing them as Holy Scripture in the same way, and attributing them to the respective authors whose names they bear.
When Irenaeus wrote, in the last quarter of the second century, these books of the New Testament were evidently universally used and looked upon as absolutely authoritative in the Catholic Church; and this, we should bear in mind, was the recorded practice of the Church within a hundred years of the death of John, and must have been so for at least thirty or forty years before; for Irenaeus clearly learned his belief from Polycarp, who was himself a disciple of John. The general reception of the books of the New Testament Canon was evidently coincident with the days when men lived who had talked with the Apostles of the Lord.
On the subject of the obedience of Christians to the Imperial authority, he bases his teaching on the words of Paul, who is singularly clear in his injunction of the duty of Christians to submit themselves to all lawful constituted authority; Irenaeus even quotes our Lord as one who paid tribute to the Roman officials in the Holy Law. Irenaeus was a Millenarian, but so, in fact, were most of the Christian writers of the second century. In very early days Millenarism, or Chiliasm, was inseparably associated with the Gospel itself. It is found in Justin, in Irenaeus, in Tertullian; but although Irenaeus considered the Roman Empire as a temporary arrangement of Providence which would presently give place to the earthly reign of Christ and His own, he never for one instant allowed this "hope," or rather expectation, to interfere with his teaching of the inevitable duty of unswerving loyalty to the existing powers. He even dwelt upon the blessings of the Roman power, as giving peace to the world.
The germs of the Creed of the Catholic Church can be traced unmistakably in earlier writers, notably, as we have observed, in the recently-discovered "Apology of Aristides," addressed to the Emperor Hadrian well-nigh half a century before the writing of Irenaeus. But it is in this great work of the Bishop of Lyons that we find the earliest formulated creed, which may be said to have formed the basis of the Nicene Creed, put out after the "Peace of the Church" was formally established by Constantine in the first quarter of the fourth century.
The full title of Irenaeus' master-work is "The Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely so Called." It is more commonly known and quoted by the shorter title, "Against Heresies." Its five books were composed and put out separately, no doubt, as the busy active life of the great bishop allowed him leisure. The composition was probably spread over a number of years. The third book was certainly published before A. D. 190. The original Greek has not as yet (A. D. 1901) been found, and the work, as we now have it, exists only in a somewhat barbarous Latin version—made evidently in very early times, since Tertullian early in the third century quotes it. The first book only, in the original Greek form, is mostly preserved in the writings of Hippolytus (early third century) and in Eusebius. Of the other writings of this famous scholar bishop, we only possess the titles, and a few precious extracts, notably the one from the Epistle to Florinus (above quoted in our sketch of Polycarp), for which we are indebted to Eusebius.
We have completed, in our chronicle of the early years of Christianity, the last quarter of the second century. We have been unable, as we stated in our earlier pages, to present any formal history of the laying of the foundation stories of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth; our authentic materials have been too scattered and disjointed. There are a few letters, some even of considerable length, written by persons of high authority in the Church; a few apologies or defenses of the new religion, a few absolutely reliable stories of sufferings and death endured for the Faith's sake, a few rare mentions of Christianity by Pagan writers, an imperial rescript or two bearing on the relations of Christianity and the Empire, a certain number of inscriptions and religious emblems in the ancient cemeteries of the Christians, a few later redactions of the "Acts" and "Passions" of martyrs, from which, with the aid of recent archaeological discoveries in the cemeteries or catacombs of Rome, we have disentangled some trustworthy information.
But there is no definite or consecutive history. What materials we possess we have made use of, and we have been able, from these scattered and disjointed pieces, the authenticity of which is undoubted, to frame a story of the painful, anxious growth of a community which has since influenced the whole story of the world, which after more than eighteen centuries of existence is growing still in numbers, power, and influence, which will never stop in its solemn, onward march until all the kingdoms of the world have become the Kingdom of Christ and of God.
As the second century closed, the first stage of the great onward march had been reached. From the beginning of the third century onwards, the vast numbers of the Christians, their elaborate organization, the position and commanding ability of certain of their members, prevented them from any longer doing their work and living their lives in that comparative silence, secrecy, and obscurity which in many respects had hitherto been of such service to them.
At the end of the second century Christianity had become a power in the Roman world. In its early homes it even seemed that Christians were to be found in vast numbers—in such districts, for instance, as pro-consular Asia, round Ephesus and the neighboring cities, and in Phrygia and in Cappadocia. In Alexandria an important school for the teaching of Christianity flourished; in Italy and Greece there were many converts. In Italy at that time as many as sixty bishops were administering sees large and small. The Church of the capital of the Roman world was a powerful and influential community numbering its many thousands. In South Gaul we have already spoken of an important and flourishing Church in Lyons and the neighborhood. We have seen, too, that in the wealthy and populous province of pro-consular Africa, a Church highly organized and very numerous existed, with its center at Carthage. In the first years of the third century we read of a Church Synod with some seventy bishops gathering-round the Bishop of Carthage. Here, too, at this period flourished one of the most famous of the early Christian writers, Tertullian, many of whose brilliant and picturesque writings have come down to us. From these we gather vast stores of information concerning the Church communities, their joys and sorrows, their dangers and persecutions, their temptations and encouragements. One or two well-known passages on the numbers and position of Christians from this great writer deserve quotation. They are beyond question colored with the exaggeration of the orator and rhetorician; but that they are in the main true, and contain no fancy picture of the state of Christianity circa A. D. 198-201, may be fairly assumed; for his burning words receive support from similar assertions gleaned from the relics of other Christian writers. These all tell the same story.
In the course of his long "Apology," perhaps the best known of his extant writings, we come upon the following passage, which dwells on the numbers and widespread influence of the followers of Jesus:
"If we (Christians) desired to play the part of open enemies, would there be any deficiency in strength, whether of numbers or resources? We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you—cities, houses, fortresses, market places, the very camp, . . . palace, senate, forum: we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods. . . . Without arms, and raising no banner of revolt, but simply in enmity with you, we could carry on the contest with you by an ill-willed separation only. For if such multitudes of men were to break away from you, and betake themselves to some remote part of the world, why the very loss of so many citizens would cover the Empire with shame; nay, in the very forsaking, vengeance would be inflicted . . . you would be horror-struck at the solitude in which you would find yourselves amid such a prevailing silence, and that silence as of a dead world. You would have to seek for subjects to govern, you would have more enemies than citizens remaining."
Again, in another treatise, the same Tertullian, speaking of the state of things at the end of the second century, thus writes: "Day after day, indeed, you groan over the increasing number of Christians; your perpetual lament is that the State is crowded out (by us), that Christians are in your fields, in your camps, ... in your houses; you mourn over it as a misfortune that both sexes, that every age, that all souls, are passing over from you to us."
And this strange and marvelous growth of the new religion was not confined to the countries occupying the center of the Roman world, where the new teaching had taken firm root from the first days of the preaching of the Lord and His Apostles—countries such as Syria and Asia Minor, Italy and Greece; but it had made a firm lodgment, as we have seen, in great and populous outlying provinces, such as in North Africa and in Southern Gaul—and even in lands more remote than these, for we hear of Christianity in distant Britain; while Irenaeus, writing in the last quarter of the second century, appeals, as witnesses against the novelties of the Gnostic heretics, to the traditions of the Churches even of Spain and Germany.