2
Pax Romana
Although the Roman Empire eventually attempted to exterminate the Church, the early Christians believed that God made use of all things for His own purposes and had given the Empire itself a providential role in the spread of the faith. As St. Paul explained, Jesus was sent “when the time had fully come” (Gal 4:4), when the necessary conditions had been met. The Empire formed a geographical and cultural unity, and the Pax Romana (Roman peace) allowed relatively safe and easy travel all over the Mediterranean, thereby facilitating missionary efforts. By preaching and making use of synagogues in cities and large towns, evangelizers were able to reach the largest number of people.
One of the paradoxes of the early Church was the fact that the capital city of her great persecutor became the center of her life, with the martyrdom of Peter and Paul at Rome—a reenactment of the martyrdom of the Lord Himself—serving as the foundation stone of the Church’s lasting victory.
Gnosticism
But as persecution from without intensified in the late second century, the Church found herself threatened internally by something even more dangerous, because it seduced even sincere believers. Although Christianity’s greatest appeal was its promise of eternal life, it now found it necessary to emphasize its incarnational character, proclaiming the goodness of creation and the reality of time in the face of a strong force that found the world so repugnant that it yearned for release.
Dualism
Gnosticism is the name given to a variety of movements, most of them pagan but some ostensibly Jewish or Christian. At stake was the most fundamental of all the teachings of the Judaeo-Christian faith—that one God created the universe and rules over it. Gnosticism, by contrast, was fundamentally dualist, positing two equal gods ruling two wholly separate realms of the universe—spiritual and material, light and dark, good and evil.
It promised redemption not from sin but from Fate—from history itself—teaching that men, composed of souls and bodies that are ultimately incompatible, are trapped between the two realms because of some primordial catastrophe. Salvation consists in freeing the soul from the prison of the body, achieved through the acquisition of secret knowledge (gnosis).
True Gnosis
Gnosticism was Christianity’s greatest threat because the Church claimed to possess the true gnosis—the Gospel—which Gnosticism sought to transform for its own purposes, offering what was to many people a credible explanation of the mystery of how evil could exist in a universe governed by an all-good God and a radical solution to the widespread sense of the meaninglessness of life.
Gnostic Gospels
Gnosticism required the rejection of the Old Testament, since the allgood God could not have created the material universe, which is the realm of a second, perhaps lesser, divinity. Gnostics also reinterpreted Jesus Himself, whom they could not accept as a real man who once lived on earth. Thus they tended to approach the New Testament in a wholly “spiritual” way, as composed mainly of allegories of the soul in its relationship to God. Their denial of history, including the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life (He could not really have died), allowed them to “transcend” particular beliefs and to soar into the realm of the mystical imagination.
Various early books written under Gnostic auspices—the “gospels” of Judas, Thomas, and Philip as well as stories about Mary Magdalen—differed substantially from the four Gospels and sometimes contradicted them. All were written much later than the New Testament.
Flesh and Spirit
Morally, Gnosticism was paradoxical. It urged the rejection of the flesh in order to enter the realm of the spirit and therefore placed no positive value on marriage. But the renunciation of sexual relations was thought to be possible only for an elite, leaving the masses to live lives of unredeemed sensuality.
Irenaeus
Gnosticism was refuted chiefly by St. Irenaeus (d. ca. 195), bishop of Lyon in Gaul (France), in his Treatise on Heresies, one of the earliest Western theological works of any kind. Against the secret knowledge promised by the Gnostics, Irenaeus emphasized that the truths of Christianity are accessible to all. Christ is the true saving gnosis, and the events recounted in the Gospel really happened. Irenaeus stressed the limits not only of human reason but of divine revelation as well—God reveals only His dealings with man, not His own inner divine reality, which Gnosticism claimed to penetrate. The goodness of creation was affirmed by Irenaeus, including the goodness of the human body.
Marcionites
The Gnostic Marcionites were especially emphatic in their denial that the Creator of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament, and they consequently rejected the entire Old Testament, as well as those parts of the New Testament that stressed Jesus’ continuity with Judaism. Irenaeus was the first theologian to speak of the New Testament as “Scripture” in the same sense as the Old.
Creation
Against the elaborate Gnostic cosmology, St. Clement of Alexandria (d. ca. 217) asserted that God created the universe from nothing, a doctrine that became a basic Christian teaching. It both affirmed God’s absolute power—“all things were made through him” (Jn 1:3)—and maintained an absolute distinction between God and the universe: He did not create the universe out of Himself, hence the universe is not divine.
The Soul
The belief that the soul preexists its incarnation in the body was widespread in the ancient world; and, as employed by the Gnostics and others, it effectively denied human sinfulness, evil is not the result of human action but of the misfortune of the soul’s entrapment in an alien environment. From Paul, Irenaeus developed a contrasting theory of redemption—Adam was created free but fell into Satan’s clutches, a bondage inherited by all his descendants until righteousness was restored by Christ, who shed His blood to ransom men from the devil.
Some Christians saw the idea of the natural immortality of the soul as a pagan error, but St. Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) eventually formulated the accepted orthodox teaching: the soul is immortal by nature but God also brings about the resurrection of the body, a uniquely Christian belief that affirms the goodness of the flesh.
The World of Spirits
Belief in magic was almost universal in the ancient world, and all ancient religions believed in the existence of a whole panoply of supernatural beings with power in the world—some gods, some angels, some demons. Gnosticism accounted for evil by teaching that demons rule the material universe. Demons had to be fought against continually and could be vanquished only through divine power.
Belief in magic was shared by Christians, who usually treated it not as fraudulent or delusory but as a genuine and dangerous manifestation of evil power, not denying the existence of supernatural beings but understanding them in new ways. But it required some period of meditation to understand how precisely they fit into the divine economy (in some early Christian writings Jesus was Himself called an angel). Eventually, based on Scripture, the Church developed a complex theology of both angels and fallen angels—devils—who are completely under God’s power but whom He allows to have power over the affairs of men.
The Victory of Orthodoxy
Gnosticism did not fade away as a result of the work of Irenaeus and others; the battle went on for several centuries. But the Church’s eventual victory had a profound effect not only on her own life but on the entire Western world and the Christian Near East. Had it been victorious, Gnosticism might have penetrated the culture of the Roman Empire in such a way as to create a new world religion of deep pessimism and rejection of the world. Western culture would have lost that sense of the importance of human activity in history that distinguished it from the fatalism that at times affected much of the East.
The Locus of Truth
Canon of Scripture
The later principle of sola scriptura (“the Bible alone”) could not have resolved the Gnostic issues, because the authority of the Church had first to determine which books were divinely inspired and what they meant. By excluding certain books as unsuitable to be read in the liturgy, the Church in effect declared the Gnostics’ own writings to be apocryphal (“hidden”) and unreliable.
Creeds
Paul denounced false teachings of a somewhat practical kind, such as the necessity of circumcision. The Gnostic threat, however, now led the Church to require assent to formal doctrines as set forth in creeds, one of the first instances of a pattern that would recur over and over again in the history of the Church: doctrines becoming fully conscious, and formally stated, only after being called into question.
Hierarchy
Gnosticism was vanquished in large part because of the Church’s hierarchical nature, her ability to define the meaning of the faith in ways that were binding on the faithful, in contrast to movements, like Gnosticism itself, that were held together primarily by some theory of inspiration and were only loosely organized. One of the Church’s legacies from the Romans was precisely her sense of order and discipline, including her sense of law. The problem of organization was particularly crucial after the generation of the Apostles had passed away
After the New Testament itself, one of the earliest Christian records is The Shepherd, a dialogue in which a confused Christian named Hermas receives enlightenment from angels, one of whom is called “the Shepherd”. The book describes the tripartite clerical division of bishop, priest, and deacon.
Pope St. Clement I wrote a letter of rebuke to the Christians of Corinth in Greece, wherein for the first time he spoke of the laity (“people of God”) and exhorted them to obey their clergy, a defense of hierarchy (“rule by priests”) that he based on the order of Israel, now transferred to the Church. For years afterward, Clement’s letter was publicly read at Corinth as the voice of authority.
A few years later, St. Ignatius (d. ca. 107), bishop of Antioch, was arrested and sent to Rome for trial, presumably because, like Paul, he was a Roman citizen. Along the way, he sent letters ahead to seven local churches through which he expected to pass, letters that are the earliest account, after the New Testament itself and The Shepherd, of the structure of the early Church. To all his hearers, he stressed the crucial importance of both the Eucharist and the office of bishop, around whom the faithful must gather and without whom there could be no legitimate Church.
Marks of the Church
Eventually, the true Church came to be identified by four signs—being one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Her unity could be discerned by empirical evidence and her apostolic character by historical evidence, but her holiness transcended her human face and referred to her inner reality as the Body of Christ.
Catholicity
Ignatius called the Church “catholic”—universal—in the sense both of the whole Church, transcending local communities, and the universality of her truth, omitting nothing. For Ignatius, who was said to have known St. John the Evangelist personally and who was familiar with Paul’s Letters, not only Scripture but Tradition (“handing on”) was an important witness to truth.
Apostolic Succession and Tradition
Irenaeus particularly stressed “apostolic succession” as the ultimate guarantor of truth, meaning primarily the transmission of authentic apostolic teachings from generation to generation through a line of bishops. Divine revelation was believed to have ended with the last Apostle (St. John, in the late first century), so that the most damaging charge that could be leveled at a theologian was that he introduced novelty. All Christians, of whatever theological school, constantly appealed to the authority of both Scripture and the previous interpreters of Scripture, requiring that every seemingly new idea be found, at least implicitly, in truths already believed.
Ignatius, Irenaeus, and others identified the essential elements that defined Catholicism and would later come to define Eastern Orthodoxy: a divinely established “visible” Church, episcopal authority, apostolic succession, Tradition, and the centrality of the Eucharist. Irenaeus made the terms orthodox (“correct teaching”), catholic (“universal”), apostolic, and traditional virtually synonymous.
Tradition
At Alexandria (Egypt), one of the great intellectual centers of the new faith, St. Clement (d. ca. 217) and Origen (d. ca. 254) spoke of Tradition as being found not only in formal doctrinal statements but also in the liturgy, catechetical writings, and creeds recited at baptism. Divine truth was to be found in the Scripture, but not only there. Numerous beliefs commonly accepted by later Christians came down solely through Tradition—both matters of substantive belief, such as the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, and lesser things, such as Joachim and Anna being the names of Mary’s parents and the Magi being named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. The doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus could not be proved or disproved from the Bible alone, since the Hebrew word for “virgin” (almah) was also the word for “young woman”, whom readers would assume to be a virgin. The reference to Jesus’ “brothers” in the New Testament was also ambiguous, since the Greek word (adelphoi) could mean blood relatives in general.
The Church of Rome
Peter and Paul The Early Fathers
There was a Christian community in Rome, probably made up of converted Jews, even before the arrival of Peter and Paul, and no one in the early centuries disputed the claim that they both lived in Rome and were martyred there. This intimate connection to Peter—the rock upon whom Jesus said He would build His Church—was the basis of the church of Rome’s claim to rank above all other local churches. The latter part of Acts is an account of Paul’s arrest by the Roman authorities and his demand to be taken to Rome for trial, although the account breaks off abruptly.
The Early Fathers
The writings of the early Church Fathers testify to Rome’s unique status. Ignatius, for instance, extolled the church of Rome as especially worthy of respect,1 recalling Peter’s martyrdom at Rome, and from a very early time, the Church venerated the Apostle’s tomb, which, according to a very ancient tradition and the evidence of modern excavations, lies under the great basilica of the Vatican, while Paul was killed and buried on the site of the basilica later named after him “Outside the Walls”.
As a young priest, Irenaeus came to Rome to consult the bishop. He also thought it appropriate to record the names of all the bishops of Rome to his own day, the first three of whom—Sts. Linus (67-76), Cletus (76-91), and Clement (91-100)—are still commemorated in the Roman liturgy immediately following the Apostles themselves.
The Fathers also record how the early Christians relied on the pope to settle disputes. St. Polycarp (d. ca. 155), bishop of Smyrna (Asia Minor), traveled to Rome to discuss the disputed date of Easter with Pope St. Anicetus (ca. 155-166), although the two could not agree. Later Pope St. Victor I (ca. 189-199), after excommunicating several Eastern bishops for observing a day of Easter different from that of the West, acceded to Irenaeus’ entreaty to rescind the sentence. Before they drifted into heterodoxy, the great African theologians Tertullian (d. ca. 220) and Origen (d. ca. 254) also exalted the see of Rome, and during a brief lull in the persecution, the Emperor Aurelian (270-275) referred a Church dispute at Antioch to Pope St. Felix I (269-274).
A Cosmopolitan See
The international character of the see of Rome was reflected in the fact that, while the Roman Church continued to choose her bishops from among her own priests, some of those chosen were of African or Greek origin—priests who had migrated to serve in the capital of their faith.
Over time, the bishop of Rome employed several titles, of which “vicar of Christ” was by far the most important. The term pope was a colloquial name for “father” (pappa), often used for other bishops but in time considered an exclusive, semi-official title of the bishop of Rome.
Divisions
The see of Rome itself did not always rise above the troubled waters of the early centuries. One of the persistent tensions in the early Church was the degree of rigor demanded of Christians. By modern standards, that Church was rigorous indeed, but for people like Tertullian, she was too lax. The priest Hippolytus (d. 235), who took very rigorous positions on moral questions, attacked Pope St. Zephyrinus (199-217) as corrupt. Hippolytus was then himself proclaimed pope by a dissident group, thereby becoming the first “anti-pope”. Eventually, however, he was reconciled with Pope St. Pontian (230-235), and the two were martyred together.
Ecclesiastical Structure
The Worthiness of Her Members
Hippolytus championed the not uncommon idea that the Church was the community of the righteous, in opposition to which Pope St. Calixtus I (217-222) compared her to Noah’s ark, encompassing a representative part of the human race, and he pointed to Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, where the just and the unjust are to be separated only at the final harvest (see Mt 13:24-30).
Hippolytus, despite his rigor, supported the claim that ultimate authority resides in the duly ordained officers of the Church, independent of their personal worthiness, a doctrine that, as it came under periodic attack, became a bedrock of Catholic teaching. Novatian (d. 258), a wealthy man who became an anti-pope in opposition to Pope St. Cornelius (251-253), held that those who compromised the faith could never be reconciled. Novatian was driven out of Rome, but his schism spread to Gaul and Spain.
Bishops
Bishops in the early centuries were elected locally (there were over a hundred in Italy alone in the mid-third century), although the process by which this occurred varied—the Latin word electio did not mean “majority vote” but simply “choice”, no matter how arrived at. Consensus was sought, and in some cases it was achieved through direct inspiration—articulated by one or more inspired members of the flock—that a particular individual was God’s choice, a claim that then had to be ratified by the whole community as the will of the Spirit.
But election alone did not make a man a bishop. Also required was the laying on of hands by other bishops (usually three), part of the process that insured apostolic succession. Thus each local church had to keep an exact record of the spiritual lineage of its bishops.
Minor Orders
By the mid-third century, the Church at Rome had grown to about sixteen thousand people, and seven clerical orders were recognized. There were fifty-two doorkeepers and exorcists, the former being more than mere ceremonial officers, since only the baptized were permitted to be present at the Eucharist, and the latter functioning as custodians of the holy water and oil and allowed to impart minor blessings. There were forty-two acolytes (“messengers”), who sometimes brought Communion to the sick or to prisoners; seven subdeacons; seven deacons; and forty-six priests. There was also an office of lector or reader, sometimes filled by boys, whose purity made them worthy to read aloud some of the biblical texts in the liturgy, although the Gospel had to be proclaimed by a deacon.
Deacons
Because of their experience in governing, deacons were not infrequently elected bishops, although some men remained in that order all their lives. Deacons were attached directly to the bishop as his aides, not permitted to celebrate the Eucharist but allowed to distribute Communion and to baptize. St. Tarcisius (d. ca. 200), who was probably a deacon, was killed by a mob at Rome because, while carrying the Eucharist—perhaps to those in prison—he refused a demand to give it up. The preaching of homilies—sermons that “broke open” the difficult scriptural texts—was considered integral to the Eucharist and was also one of the deacon’s primary tasks.
Deacons were important figures, since their care for the poor involved administering the property of the Church. At Rome, there were fifteen hundred widows and other needy people who were the responsibility of the Church, and during periods of peace she opened churches and cemeteries. From time to time, there were warnings against greedy or dishonest deacons.
The Montanist Heresy
Most early Christians probably believed in the speedy return of Jesus, and the disappointment of that expectation caused a crisis for some, while for others it confirmed the need for hierarchy, because the Church would have to endure for a long time. The development of the hierarchy provoked the heresy of Montanism in the late second century. Named for its leader, it rejected hierarchy as an obstacle to pure inspiration and located authority in prophets and prophetesses, dreams and visions, anticipating the immanent Second Coming of Christ.
Millenarianism
Based on prophecies in the Book of Revelation, some early Christians embraced millenarianism (from the Latin word for “thousand”), according to which Jesus would one day return and rule over the earth for a thousand years. But Christ was also a continuing Real Presence in the Eucharist, and the two beliefs were brought together in the eucharistic acclamation “Christ will come again.”
Liturgy
Liturgy was a pagan term signifying any kind of religious duty, and the rituals of the Church were called mysterioi (“sacred actions”) in Greek and sacramenta in Latin, the latter meaning “an oath”, since Christians took an oath of faithfulness to Christ.
From the beginning, the Eucharist was considered simultaneously a memory of Jesus’ action at the Last Supper, a thanksgiving, and an oblation or offering in which He is Himself the sacrificial victim, the only offering worthy to be made to the Father. St. Justin Martyr (d. 165) described the liturgy of the Eucharist as consisting of prayers, a greeting of peace, the presentation of gifts, thanksgiving, and the reception of Communion. At the Offertory, the faithful brought to the deacon not only the bread and wine to be used in the sacrifice but other fruits of the field as well, as gifts for the poor and as a sign of the goodness of creation. The Lord’s Prayer, with its petition for the forgiveness of sins, was part of the Eucharist from an early date, recited by the people.
The repentant anti-pope Hippolytus left a record of the Eucharist as celebrated at Rome in the early third century. Scriptural readings began the service, following which the bishop and the presbyters spread their hands over the gifts and said prayers, to which the people responded. During a long prayer of thanksgiving, the bishop pronounced the words by which Christ had instituted the Eucharist—“This is my body . . . this is my blood” (Mt 26:26, 28; Mk 14:22, 24; Lk 22:19, 20)—followed by the epiklesis(“invocation”) calling down the Holy Spirit on the gifts.
The Real Presence
From the earliest days, the eucharistic elements were treated as the actual Body of Christ. The material character of the Eucharist—the reality of bread and wine, flesh and blood—was emphasized, with the transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood paralleling the transformation of the individual Christian through divine grace. Like Paul before them, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Justin, and others referred to the Eucharist as “bread” but also proclaimed that in eating it Christians were fed with the very Body of Christ. No one in the early Church treated the eucharistic presence as merely a sign—their concept of symbol was of something that actually made present the thing symbolized.
At the end of the Eucharist, some of the consecrated hosts (a name for a sacrificial victim) were reserved for the sick, but some could also be given to the congregation, who took them to their homes and consumed them each day, before taking any other food or drink. Eucharistic elements that were left over might also be consumed by the clergy, buried, or even burned but were never simply discarded or eaten casually. At Rome, the unity of the Church was maintained in part by the bishop’s offering the Eucharist in the morning, then sending deacons or others to bring the consecrated elements to people throughout the city, a gift that was also sometimes sent as a gesture of love and unity to the Church in other cities.
Sacrifice
The early theologians proclaimed the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, particularly its efficacy when offered on behalf of the dead. Since Jesus Himself is the new Temple, the Church transformed the sacrificial worship of the Jews, with Jesus as the unbloody sacrifice who replaces the holocaust of animals, a sacrifice that is properly celebrated with solemn ceremonies, requiring meticulous attention to ritual practices.
For a long time, the Eucharist was celebrated only on Sunday, but by the later third century, it was being celebrated daily in Carthage (North Africa), a practice that gradually spread in the West but not in the East.
Daily Prayers
Even before the Divine Office was established as a public rite, prayers were enjoined to be said at the third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day, corresponding to the hours when Jesus hung on the Cross. Hippolytus urged washing the hands, breathing into them, and making the sign of the cross before praying.
Church Buildings
For a time, Christianity was distinguished from paganism partly by the fact that it did not require that worship be performed only at specially consecrated sites. The early Christians usually met in private homes, although occasionally a house was turned into a permanent place of worship, the oldest known such structure, at Dura-Europos (Syria), dating from the second century. But in time, church buildings came to be treated as sacred. By 300, at the height of persecution, there were forty churches at Rome, even though it was still permissible to worship wherever the faithful gathered. Ecclesia (“gathering”), the Greek equivalent of church, meant both the assembly of the faithful and the building where the assembly met.
Images
Some early Christians inherited the Jewish opposition to images, but in time the Church embraced them, recognizing beauty as a reflection of the Creator, art in the service of God being the natural corollary of the Incarnation. (The church at Dura-Europos had biblical scenes painted on its walls.) Christian images were not merely means of instruction but themselves possessed a sacred character worthy of veneration.
On tombs and elsewhere, Christians placed the symbol of the cross; the Greek letters chi and ro (the beginning of the word Christ); and the Greek letters iota, eta, sigma (IHS—the first letters of Jesus’ name). Other symbols included the anchor for hope, because it saved those in peril of the sea; the ship as the bark of Peter that would bring Christians safely into the harbor of the Kingdom; the Good Shepherd; the sacrificial lamb; and the fish, whose Greek letters iota, kappa, theta, upsilon, sigma—ikthus—were a kind of code for “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior”.
From Revelation came the symbols of the four Evangelists: the man for Matthew, who elaborated the human genealogy of Jesus; the ox for Luke, who began with Zechariah’s sacrifice in the Temple; the lion for Mark, who began with John the Baptist in the wilderness; and the soaring eagle for John, whose writings elevated readers to the Eternal Word.
Before they developed their own styles, Christians used familiar Greek imagery, so that the earliest images of Jesus were of a beardless young man—the Good Shepherd—based on representations of the god Apollo and thus immediately recognizable as divine.
Theology
The Scriptures were universally accepted as divinely inspired, although there was some uncertainty as to the exact nature of that inspiration. Some people held that the Evangelists had been put into a kind of trance and that the Holy Spirit simply dictated through them, but this idea was eventually rejected in favor of the belief that the Spirit merely guided the authors and preserved them from error.
Levels of Exegesis
Theology (“the study of God”) consisted primarily in the close reading of Scripture and the attempt to unlock its inner meaning. The literal truth was always affirmed, but it was considered less significant than other levels of meaning: typological, in which Old Testament events prefigure the coming of Christ; allegorical, in which biblical events are understood as referring to spiritual realities, such as the relation of the soul to God; and anagogical, which points toward the future.
Catechesis
The liturgy itself served as the chief means of educating the faithful, through lengthy readings from Scripture and even lengthier sermons (from the Latin sermo, meaning “word”, in the sense of an authoritative verbal pronouncement).
Admission to the Church was by no means easy, in part because of a fear of spies who might betray the community to the authorities. The baptismal sponsor was originally a member of the Church who could vouch for the trustworthiness of the candidate orcatechumen (one to be “instructed”). The catechumenate was ordinarily a three-year period of instruction and probation, with emphasis on Scripture and the ethical teachings of Christianity, in order to judge whether the candidates were worthy of baptism.
The Liturgy of the Catechumens was an adaptation of the worship of the synagogue, in which the earliest Christians continued to participate. The catechumens left before the reading of the Gospel, because they were not yet ready to hear the fullness of the Word. After their departure from the liturgy, they gathered to receive instruction that would prepare them to be baptized. The Lord’s Prayer was said shortly before Communion, because it was not thought suitable that the catechumens should learn it until they had been properly instructed.
Baptism
Baptism was conferred at Easter, when the new Christians participated in the death and Resurrection of Jesus, freeing them from sin and death and incorporating them into the life of Christ. Candidates for baptism were anointed with oil, a traditional Jewish rite. Given the extremely demanding preparation that catechumens had to undergo, most baptisms were of adults. There is evidence, however, of entire households being baptized, including children, and in the third century, Origen said this was an apostolic tradition, even though some theologians opposed it.
Confirmation
Also during the third century, the rite of calling down the Holy Spirit on the baptized emerged as the separate rite of confirmation in the West, while in the East it remained part of the baptismal ceremony itself.
Penance
At first, there was little emphasis on the Church’s power to reconcile sinners, since baptism itself took away sin and the primary emphasis was therefore on the faithful preservation of baptismal grace.
Celsus (d. ca. 200), who wrote the most sustained pagan polemic against Christianity, accused the Christians of promoting moral laxity through easy forgiveness, an issue that also troubled some Christians. In time, grave sins had to be confessed publicly, followed by a lengthy period of official penance during which the penitent could not participate in the Eucharist and his gifts and those of notorious sinners were refused.
Throughout the early centuries, there was debate over whether certain sins—murder, adultery, and apostasy—could be forgiven at all in this life, and some Christians denied that soldiers, civil servants, or teachers could even be baptized (the last because they instructed students in the pagan myths). But this was not the prevailing belief. Despite the Church’s orientation toward peace, Christians did serve in the army, where the chief moral evil was thought to be the requirement of offering incense to the god-emperor, the refusal of which caused the soldier saints George, Alban, and Maximus to be martyred during the late third century.
Origen, whose father was a martyr, was an extreme ascetic, considered to be excessively rigorous in his moral teachings—according to legend he castrated himself because of Jesus’ admonition “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out” (Mt 5:29; see Mt 18:9). But paradoxically, he came to be regarded as a heretic in part because he believed that the eventual restoration of the fallen universe implied the possibility of universal salvation—even Satan might eventually repent.
Deadly Sins
Eight basic sins were commonly recognized, forerunners of the classic list of the seven “deadly sins” that kill grace in the soul—gluttony, luxury (love of pleasure), love of money (covetousness, envy), sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride. Sadness was perhaps akin to the modern phenomenon of depression and was considered sinful because it involved an element of despair, while acedia was a jaded world-weariness or boredom. Vainglory and pride were distinguished in that the former was mere egotistical boasting or desire for praise and recognition, while the latter was the far more serious sin of following one’s own will rather than the will of God.
Church and Empire
The Church Grows
The Church was growing rapidly, even constituting a majority in some districts in the Near East and by 300 perhaps counting as many as forty thousand in Rome. Although she may have appealed primarily to the poor and outcast, there were also aristocratic converts, including some in the imperial household itself, possibly even the wife and daughter of the persecuting emperor Diocletian (284-305).
Pagan Hostility
The Jews, prior to their rebellion of 70, were treated by the Romans in a special way because they were so tenacious in their religious fidelity—not required to do anything that violated their faith, even to the point that Roman officials observed the prohibition against Gentiles entering the sacred precincts of the Temple. Christians were treated more harshly than Jews, especially after the destruction of the Temple and as the distinction between the old and new religions became apparent. (Jews sometimes encouraged and supported the persecution of Christians.)
Some pagan hostility to Christianity was mere popular gossip, stimulated by the fact that Christians were of necessity secretive, so that only garbled snatches of their beliefs were generally known. Thus they were accused of practicing secret vices, including cannibalism, presumably because of the Eucharist, although most educated Romans probably did not believe such stories.
The Conflict of Values
But in a sense persecution was almost inevitable. The Empire underwent a long crisis that was military and financial in nature but also moral—a loss of patriotism that made citizens unwilling to assume their traditional duties, a prosperity that rendered them indolent and hedonistic, and a series of despotic rulers who made citizenship meaningless. In the Greco-Roman world, citizenship—full participation in the life of society—was considered the highest duty.
Even though Christians obeyed the law, their otherworldliness was thought to hasten the decline. They formed their own society within the Empire, obedient to the state in a passive way (they prayed even for evil emperors) but detached from it. Jesus authorized the payment of taxes, and Christians pointed out that not only were criminals virtually unknown among them, but they also cared for their own poor rather than letting them become public charges.
The Christian teaching that sexual activity is permissible only within marriage, for the sake of procreation, was an implicit condemnation of the rampant hedonism of Roman life, something that Caesar Augustus (29 B.C.—A.D. 14) also tried unsuccessfully to curb. But Christianity went directly against law and custom in its complete prohibition of abortion, a prohibition found in the Didache (“teaching”), one of the earliest Christian writings. Not only did the Romans practice abortion, every father had the right to decide whether or not a newborn child should be allowed to live. The Church also departed from Roman law in certain other ways, as in allowing marriage between a free woman and a slave.
Christ the King
However, the Church came into her most serious and inevitable conflict with the state over the cult of emperor-worship, a practice that expanded over time and by the later third century was regarded by the Roman authorities as the necessary basis of imperial unity. Increasingly, the emperor was exalted as “Son of God”, a title Christians considered appropriate only to Jesus.
To the degree that the Romans understood the Christian movement, they were alarmed by the implications of the exchange between Pilate and Jesus (“So you are a king?”; “You say that I am king” [Jn 18:37; see Lk 23:3]) and the unintended affirmation of the mocking inscription that Pilate placed above Jesus’ head on the Cross: “INRI” (Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum—“Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews”).
In no way did the Christians seek to establish a worldly kingdom, but in affirming that they were citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven (“Here we have no lasting city” [Heb 13:14]), and that ultimately they had no king but Jesus, they were withholding their ultimate loyalty from the Empire. In a number of ways, the Church proposed herself as a kind of substitute for the Empire. The word evangelion had been used for the emperors’ public boasts of their achievements but was now appropriated for the Gospels, which were thereby proclaimed to be much better news than anything that emperors could announce.
From the Roman standpoint, the demands made on Christians were quite minimal—a little incense offered to the gods of the state. Christianity would have been readily accepted if Jesus had been regarded as simply one god among many, as the emperor Philip the Arab (244-249) was rumored to do in his private chapel. But to the Christians this was a violation of the First Commandment, in some ways the worst possible sin. As both Jews and Christians made clear, monotheism was “intolerant” by its very nature—in the Gloria, which was an ancient hymn, the repetition “you alone” was an explicit denial of all other pretended deities.
Civil Religion
The official religion of the Empire was still a civic religion in which the welfare of the state depended on the good will of the gods and failure to give them due honor might bring divine wrath. Military defeats, epidemics, and other misfortunes were thus sometimes blamed on the Christians’ disrespect for the old gods, and, ironically, they were considered atheists because of that disrespect.
Martyrdom
Martyr is a Greek word for “witness”, applied to those whose deaths were the ultimate witness to the truth they espoused. After the martyrs came the confessors—those who professed their faith openly but did not actually suffer death. Suffering and martyrdom became the highest Christian ideal, an integral part of Christian life from the beginning. To Ignatius, the Eucharist was intimately connected to martyrdom, planting in the believer the seeds of Christ’s presence, which martyrdom brought to fulfillment, and in his letters to the seven churches, he forbade them to make any effort to spare him his fate, of which there is no direct record.
Martyrdom was another point of division between heretics and orthodox believers, in that many of the Gnostics rejected it and even ridiculed it, because of the significance it gave to the death of the body.
Local churches preserved detailed accounts of their martyrs in their liturgies, as the church at Rome did by invoking the early popes and the third-century martyrs Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, Lawrence, Cosmas and Damien, and others.
Martyrdom was even venerated to the point where some Christians had to be warned not to seek it, since the achievement of that ultimate crown was entirely a matter of God’s will. When a group of Christians presented themselves to a Roman magistrate and demanded punishment, he remarked dryly that there were cliffs and rivers available to those who wished to commit suicide.
Martyrdom was inflicted in a variety of ways. Stephen was stoned to death, which was the Jewish penalty for blasphemy. Under Nero (54-68), Christians were coated with tar and set on fire in the amphitheatre to light the night games, and over the next two centuries, numerous Christians were sent into the arena to be torn apart by wild beasts, as Ignatius anticipated would happen to him.
Paul, as a Roman citizen, was honorably beheaded, while Peter was dishonorably crucified (upside down, according to tradition, because he did not consider himself worthy to die as his Lord had died). Some martyrs were mutilated, sent to the mines, and worked to death; others were buried alive, burned en masse, or strapped into iron chairs that were slowly heated until they roasted to death.
St. Perpetua was a North African woman put to death, along with her slave Felicity, around 200. Her unbelieving father begged her to recant for the sake of her infant son, but she insisted that she had a higher duty to God and lamented that her father, alone of her family, would not rejoice in her death. St. Lawrence (d. 258) was a Roman deacon who, when ordered to turn over the treasure of the Church to the authorities, showed them the poor instead and said, “This is our treasure.” He reportedly joked, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side”, as he was slowly roasted on a gridiron.
Those who did not die a martyr’s death sought burial near those who had. Altars were erected over martyrs’ tombs, and the Eucharist was sometimes celebrated in cemeteries or in underground catacombs, although those were not the regular sites of worship and were not ordinarily used as hiding places. Christians adapted the pagan custom of the refrigerium (“refreshment” or “coolness”), a ritual meal at the graves of the martyrs, not merely to commemorate the dead but to participate in the communion of saints—living and dead joined together in Christ. The custom of venerating relics began with the preservation of the bloody robes of the martyrs, which were treated with great reverence.
Persecution
Persecution was not consistent. The first wave came under Nero in the year 67, when Peter and Paul were among those put to death at Rome, probably because the hated emperor needed scapegoats to blame for the great fire that destroyed a good part of the city and that rumor accused him of having started. Domitian (81-96), whom even pagans counted among the wicked, initiated a persecution that inspired the image of the “Great Beast” in Revelation—the Whore of Babylon that symbolized for Christians an empire that had become the sworn enemy of Christ.
Trajan (98-117), one of the five “good emperors” of the era, laid down a common-sense policy: provincial administrators were not to seek Christians out nor pay attention to irresponsible accusations but were to act only on credible charges, examine the accused, and persuade them to recant their beliefs.
Some Christians hoped for sympathy from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180), but he despised them for not fully supporting the Empire and ordered a persecution that was particularly severe in Gaul (modern France). Paradoxically, his debauched and sadistic son Commodus (186-192) proved to be more tolerant. Alexander Severus (222-235) was somewhat friendly to the Christians, but his successor Maximin (235-236) was cruel. Decius (249-251) initiated the first general persecution.
Diocletian
By far the greatest persecution began in 303 under Diocletian, almost at the end of his reign, nothing less than an attempt to exterminate the Church altogether, a campaign that probably did not stem from personal hatred of Christianity but from his effort to rekindle the old religious loyalties. He was reported to have turned against the Christians after learning that several of them had made the sign of the cross during an official pagan ritual, thereby causing it to fail.
The Seed of Christians
Thousands were martyred under Diocletian, and, besides official persecution, Christians were also often assaulted by hostile mobs. But the persecutors found themselves up against a unique phenomenon: a people who were not intimidated by torture and death but actually seemed to grow stronger, thereby giving rise to the famous boast, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians”, a claim that could have both a supernatural explanation—divine grace is poured out on a faithful people—and a more natural one—many pagans were inspired by the courage and joyful fidelity of the martyrs and therefore began to take their claims seriously.
Apostasy
But Christians were not uniformly brave. Some public officials were simply following orders and suggested to the accused how they might evade punishment through a fairly minimal conformity that fell short of outright denial of the faith, such as refraining from formal Christian worship or turning the sacred books over to the authorities for inspection, in order to look for evidence of vice or treason.
This provoked a major crisis in the Church, because some priests acceded to this demand, considering it a less serious offense than actually conforming to the state religion. Many Christians apostatized completely, and among the clergy there were numerous instances of various kinds of surrender. According to legend, Pope St. Marcellinus (296-304) first made accommodations to Diocletian, then repented and was martyred.
The church at Carthage especially exalted martyrdom, and its rigor gave rise to deep and lasting divisions within the North African church. Tertullian, its greatest luminary, taught that apostates—those who abandoned the faith in time of persecution—could not be readmitted even if repentant. He ended by joining the Montanists, who condemned what they considered the laxness of Church discipline, which they blamed for the disappearance of the charisms.
But St. Cyprian (d. 258), bishop of Carthage and one of the most important Western theologians, went into hiding during a persecution, continuing to govern his flock through a kind of secret network, an action that he justified on the grounds that, like Paul at Ephesus, his continued activity was needed for the good of the Church, affirming that even heretics and apostates could be reconciled if they were repentant.
Rigorism
Some Christians held that those to whom God gave the charism of suffering possessed ultimate authority, but Cyprian upheld the office of the bishop. His own seeming evasion of martyrdom caused him to lose some authority, and he reminded his flock that, holy as the martyrs and confessors were, they did not replace the apostolic hierarchy. (Cyprian was eventually beheaded.)
Schism occurred in Egypt under a bishop named Meletius (d. ca. 324) and elsewhere in North Africa under a bishop named Donatus (d. ca. 355), both of whom held that those who lapsed under persecution could never be received back into the Church. Both schisms endured for centuries.
While generally less rigorous than Carthage, the church at Rome also split over the issue, with Pope Cornelius taking a more lenient view and being opposed by the anti-pope Novatian. Pope St. Stephen I (254-257) quarreled with Cyprian over the question, with Cyprian denying that baptism could be validly administered by someone in schism. In his dispute with Cyprian, Stephen became the first pope known to have cited the text “Thou art Peter” to establish his authority, but Cyprian did not bend. However, after his death, the Donatists proved so divisive that the church at Carthage adopted the Roman position on baptism.
Diocletian’s reign marked the last successful effort to maintain the Empire intact. Realistically, he divided the imperial power, setting up a “tetrarchy” of four men, each of whom had responsibility for part of the Empire. When he retired in 305—the first emperor in well over a century who did not die a violent death—civil war inevitably broke out among those appointed to share authority. The ultimate victor was a general named Constantine, who would soon effect the most far-reaching religious revolution in the history of the world.