Adolf Harnack · 4 of 20

Chapter II. Western Christianity and Western Theologians before Augustine.

The distinctive character of Western Christianity has been frequently referred to in our earlier volumes. We may now, before taking up Augustine and the Church influenced by him, appropriately review and describe the Christianity into which he entered, and on which he conferred an extraordinarily prolonged existence and new vital energies by the peculiar form and training to which he subjected it. It was the Roman Church that transmitted Christianity to the Middle Ages. But it might almost be named the Augustinian-Gregorian with as much justice as that of the Augsburg Confession is called the Lutheran.

If, however, we ascend the history of the Latin Church to as near its origin as we can, we find ourselves confronted by a man in whom the character and the future of this Church were already announced, viz., Tertullian. Tertullian and Augustine are the Fathers of the Latin Church in so eminent a sense that, measured by them, the East possessed no Church Fathers at all. The only one to rival them, Origen, exerted his influence in a more limited sphere. Eminently ecclesiastical as his activity was, his Christianity was not really ecclesiastical, but esoteric. His development and the import of his personal life were almost without significance for the mass; he continued to live in his books and among theologians. But with Tertullian and Augustine it was different. It is true that only a fraction of Tertullian’s teaching was retained, that he was tolerated by posterity only in Cyprian’s reduced version, and that Augustine became more and more a source of uneasiness to, and was secretly opposed by, his Church. Yet both passed into the history of the Western Catholic Church with their personality, with the characteristics of their Christian thought and feeling. The frictions and unresolved dissonances, in which they wore themselves out, were transmitted to the future as well as the concords they sounded, and the problems, which they could not master in their own inner experience, became the themes of world-historical spiritual conflicts. We can exhibit the superiority of Western to Eastern Christianity at many points; we can even state a whole series of causes for this superiority; but one of the most outstanding is the fact that while the East was influenced by a commonplace succession of theologians and monks, the West was moulded by Tertullian and Augustine.

Roman Christianity, still (c. 180) essentially Greek in form, but already with important features of its own, had won the Great African to its service. It had already transmitted to him Latin translations of Biblical books; but on this foundation Tertullian laboured, creating both thought and language, because he was able thoroughly to assimilate the new faith, and to express his whole individuality in it.

In doing so he adopted all the elements which tradition offered him. First, as a Christian Churchman, he took up the old enthusiastic and rigorous, as well as the new anti-heretical, faith. He sought to represent both, and in his sovereign law to verify the strict lex of the ancient disciplina, founded on eschatological hopes, and allied with unrestrained pneumatic dogmatics, and also the strict lex of the new rule of faith, which seemed ancient, because the heretics were undoubtedly innovators. He sought to be a disciple of the prophets and an obedient son of his Episcopal teachers. While he spent his strength in the fruitless attempt to unite them, he left both forces as an inheritance to the Church of the West. If the history of that Church down to the sixteenth century exhibits a conflict between orthodox clerical and enthusiastic, between biblical and pneumatic elements, if monachism here was constantly in danger of running into apocalyptics and enthusiasm, and of forming an opposition to the Episcopal and world-Church, all that is foreshadowed in Tertullian.

A further element, which here comes before us, is the juristic. We know that jurisprudence and legal thought held the chief place in mediæval philosophy, theology, and ethics. Post-apostolic Greek Christians had, indeed, already put Christianity forward as the “law,” and the Roman community may have cultivated this view with peculiar energy; but in and by itself this term is capable of so many meanings as to be almost neutral. Yet through the agency of Tertullian, by his earlier profession a lawyer, all Christian forms received a legal impress. He not only transferred the technical terms of the jurists into the ecclesiastical language of the West, but he also contemplated, from a legal standpoint, all relations of the individual and the Church to the Deity, and vice versâ, all duties and rights, the moral imperative as well as the actions of God and Christ, nay, their mutual relationship. He who was so passionate and fanciful seemed never to be thoroughly satisfied until he had found the scheme of a legal relationship which he could proclaim as an inviolable authority; he never felt secure until he had demonstrated inner compulsions to be external demands, exuberant promises to be stipulated rewards. But with this the scheme of personal rights was applied almost universally. God appears as the mighty partner who watches jealously over his rights. Through Tertullian this tendency passed into the Western Church, which, being Roman, was disposed to favour it; there it operated in the most prejudicial way. If we grant that by it much that was valuable was preserved, and juristic thought did contribute to the understanding of some, not indeed the most precious, Pauline conceptions, yet, on the whole, religious reflection was led into a false channel, the ideas of satisfaction and merit becoming of the highest importance, and the separation of Western from primitive and Eastern Christianity was promoted.

Another element is closely connected with the legal, viz., the syllogistic and dialetical. Tertullian has been extolled as a speculative theologian; but this is wrong. Speculation was not his forte; we perceive this very plainly when we look at his relation to Irenaeus. Notice how much he has borrowed from this predecessor of his, and how carefully he has avoided, in doing so, his most profound speculations! Tertullian was a Sophist in the good and bad sense of the term. He was in his element in Aristotelian and Stoic dialectics; in his syllogisms he is a philosophising advocate. But in this also he was the pioneer of his Church, whose theologians have always reasoned more than they have philosophised. The manner in which he rings the changes on auctoritas and ratio, or combines them, and spins lines of thought out of them; the formal treatment of problems, meant to supply the place of one dealing with the matter, until it ultimately loses sight of aim and object, and falls a prey to the delusion that the certainty of the conclusion guarantees the certainty of the premises—this whole method only too well known from mediæval Scholasticism, had its originator in Tertullian. In the classical period of eastern theology men did not stop at auctoritas and ratio; they sought to reach the inner convincing phases of authority, and understood by ratio the reason determined by the conception of the matter in question. In the West, auctoritas and ratio stood for a very long time side by side without their relations being fixed—see the mediæval theologians from Cassian—and the speculation introduced by Augustine was ultimately once more eliminated, as is proved by the triumph of Nominalism. Stoic, or “Aristotelian” rationalism, united with the recognition of empirical authority under cover of Augustinian religious formulas, remained the characteristic of Roman Catholic dogmatics and morality.

But the Western type of thought possessed, besides this, an element in which it was considerably superior to the Eastern, the psychological view. The importance due to Augustine in this respect has been better perceived in recent years, and we may look for better results as regards the share of Scholasticism in the development of modern psychology. In Augustine himself Stoic rationalism was thrust strongly into the background by his supreme effort to establish the psychology of the moral and immoral, the pious and impious on the basis of actual observation. His greatness as a scientific theologian is found essentially in the psychological element. But that also is first indicated in Tertullian. As a moralist he indeed follows, so far as he is a philosopher, the dogmatism of the Stoa; but Stoic physics could lead into an empirical psychology. In this respect Tertullian’s great writing, “De anima,” is an extremely important achievement. It contains germs of insight and aspirations which developed afterwards; and another Western before Augustine, Arnobius, also did better work in grasping problems psychologically than the great theologians of the East. This side of Western theology undoubtedly continued weak before Augustine, because the eclecticism and moralism to which Cicero had especially given currency held the upper hand through the reading of his works.

Finally, still another element falls to be mentioned which distinguishes the features of Western Christianity from the Eastern, but which it is hard to summarise in one word. Many have spoken of its more practical attitude. But in the East, Christianity received as practical a form as people there required. What is meant is connected with the absence of the speculative tendency in the West. To this is to be attributed the fact that the West did not fix its attention above all on deification, nor, in consequence, on asceticism, but kept real life more distinctly in view; it therefore obtained to a greater extent from the gospel what could rule and correct that life. Thus Western Christianity appears to us from the first more popular and biblical, as well as more ecclesiastical. It may be that this impression is chiefly due to our descent from the Christianity in question, and that we can never therefore convey it to a Greek; but it is undeniable that as the Latin idiom of the Church was from its origin more popular than the Greek, which always retained something hieratic about it, so the West succeeded to a greater extent in giving effect to the words of the gospel. For both of these facts we have to refer again to Tertullian. He had the gift, granted to few Christian writers, of writing attractively, both for theologians and laymen. His style, popular and fresh, must have been extremely effective. On the other hand, he was able, in writings like De patientia, De oratione, De pænitentia, or De idololatria, to express the gospel in a concrete and homely form; and even in many of his learned and polemical works, which are full of paradoxes, antitheses, rhetorical figures, frigid sentences, and wild exaggerations, we do not fail to find the clear and pertinent application of evangelical sayings, astonishing only by its simplicity, and reminding us, where the thought takes a higher flight, not infrequently of Augustine.

The Christianity and theology of Tertullian, whose elements we have here endeavoured to characterise, were above all headed by the primitive Christian hope and morality. In these was comprehended what he felt to be his inmost thought. Both phases recur in a large section of Latin literature of the third and of the first half of the fourth century. There it is hardly possible to find any traces of Antignostic dogmatics; on the contrary, Apocalyptics were developed with extreme vividness, and morality, often Stoic in colouring, received a stringent form. The whole of the abundant literary labours and dogmatic efforts of Hippolytus seem to have been lost on the West from the first and completely.

But Tertullian also was deprived by his Montanism of the full influence which he might have exerted on the Church. The results of his work passed to Cyprian, and, though much abbreviated and modified, were circulated by him. For the period from A.D. 260 down to Ambrose—indeed, properly speaking, to Augustine and Jerome—Cyprian became the Latin Church author par excellence. All known and unknown Latin writers of his time, and after him, had but a limited influence: he, as an edifying and standard author, dictated like a sovereign to the Western Church for the next 120 years. His authority ranked close after that of the Holy Scriptures, and it lasted up to the time of Augustine.

Cyprian had hardly one original theological thought; for even the work “De unitate ecclesiæ” rests on points of view which are partly derived from the earlier Catholic Fathers, and partly borrowed from the Roman Church, to which they were indigenous. In the extremely authoritative work, “De opere et eleemosynis” the Tertullian conceptions of merit and satisfaction are strictly developed, and are made to serve as the basis of penance, almost without reference to the grace of God in Christ. Cyprian’s chief importance is perhaps due to the fact that, influenced by the consequences of the Decian storm he founded, in union with the Roman bishop Cornelius, what was afterwards called the sacrament of penance; in this, indeed, he was the slave rather than the master of circumstances; and in addition, he was yielding to Roman influences which had been working in this direction since Calixtus. He established the rule of the hierarchy in the Church in the spheres of the sacrament, sacrifice, and discipline; he set his seal on Episcopalianism; he planted firmly the conceptions of a legal relation between man and God, of works of penance as means of grace, and of the “satisfactory” expiations of Christ. He also created clerical language with its solemn dignity, cold-blooded anger, and misuse of Biblical words to interpret and criticise contemporary affairs—a metamorphosis of the Tertullian genius for language. Cyprian by no means inherited the interest taken by Tertullian in Antignostic theology. Like all great princes of the Church, he was a theologian only in so far as he was a catechist. He held all the more firmly by the symbol, and knew how to state in few words its undoubted meaning, and to turn it skilfully even against allied movements like that of Novatian.

This had been learnt from Rome, where, since as early as the end of the second century, the “Apostles’” creed had been used with skill and tact against the motley opinions held about doctrine by Eastern immigrants. The Roman Bishops of the third century did not meddle with dogmatic disputes; the only two who tried it, and undoubtedly rendered great services to the Church, Hippolytus and Novatian, could not keep the sympathies of the clergy or the majority. In the West men did not live as Christians upon dogma, but they were obedient to the short law (lex) presented in the Symbol; they impressed the East by the confidence with which, when necessary, they adopted a position in dogmatic questions, following in the doctrine of the Trinity and in Christology an original scheme formed by Tertullian and developed by Novatian; while at the same time they worked at the consolidation of the constitution of the Church, the construction of a practical ecclesiastical moral code, as also the disciplining and training of the community through Divine Service and the rules of penance. The canons of Elvira, which, for the rest, are not lax, but are even distinguished by their stringency, show how strictness and clemency were united, Christendom being marked off from the world, while at the same time a life in the world was rendered possible, and even the grossest sins were still indulged in. The result was a complete ecclesiastical constitution, with an almost military organisation. At its head stood the Roman Bishop, who, in spite of the abstract equality of all Bishops, occupied a unique position, not only as representative, but also as actual defender of the unity of the Church, which, nevertheless, was severely shaken, first by Novatianism, and afterwards by Donatism.

When Constantine granted toleration and privileges to the Church, and enabled the provincial Churches to communicate with all freedom, Rome had already become a Latin city, and the Roman community was thoroughly Latinised; elsewhere also in the West the Greek element, once so powerful, had receded. Undoubtedly, Western Christians had no other idea than that they formed a single Church with the East; they were actually at one with the Eastern tendency represented by Athanasius in the fundamental conceptions of the doctrines of God, Christ, and eternal salvation. But their interests were often divided, and, in fact, there was little mutual understanding, particularly after Cappadocian orthodoxy triumphed in the East. From the middle of the third century the weakening of the central power had once more restored their independence to all the provinces, and had thus set free the principle of nationality; and this would have led to a complete reaction and wholesale particularism had not some energetic rulers, the migrations of the tribes, and the Church set up a barrier, which, indeed, ultimately proved too weak in the East.

It was the great dogmatic controversies which compelled the provincial Churches to look beyond their own borders. But the sympathy of the West for the East—there never developed any vital interest in the opposite direction—was no longer general or natural. It sprang, as a rule, from temporary necessities or ambitious purposes. Yet it became of incalculable importance for Western theology; for their relations with the East, into which the Western Church was brought by the Arian conflict, led Western Christians to observe more closely two great phenomena of the Eastern Church, the scientific theology (of Origen) and monachism.

It may here be at once said that the contact and influence which thus arose did not in the end change the genius and tendency of the Western Church to its depths. In so far as a lasting change was introduced in the fifth century, it is not to be derived from this quarter. But for their suggestiveness, the capital and impulse which were received from the East cannot be highly enough appreciated We need only compare the writings of the Latin theologians who were not influenced by the Greeks, with Hilary, Victorinus Rhetor, Ambrose, Jerome, Rufinus, and the others dependent on them, in order to perceive the enormous difference. The exegetical and speculative science of the Greeks was imported into the West, and, besides monachism and the ideal of a virginity devoted to God, as the practical application of that science.

The West was not disposed to favour either of these, and since it is always hardest to carry through changes in the rules of practical life, the implanting of monachism cost embittered conflicts. But the ideal of virginity, as denoting the love-bond with Christ, very soon established itself among the spiritual leaders of the West. (Even before this, Cyprian says, De hab. virg. 22: and you virgins have no husband, your lord and head is Christ in the similitude and place of a man.) It then won through Ambrose the same significance for the West as it had obtained through Origen’s expositions of the Song of Songs and Methodius in the East. Nay, it was in the West that the ideal was first, so to speak, individualised, and that it created a profusion of forms in which it was allied with or excited the impassioned love of Christ. The theological science of the Greeks could not have domesticated itself, even if the time had been less unfavourable; just then its authority was tottering even in the East, after the Cappadocians seemed to have reconciled faith and knowledge for a brief period. Where one has once been accustomed to regard a complex of thoughts as an inviolable law, a legal order, it is no longer possible to awaken for it for a length of time the inner sympathy which clings to spheres in which the spiritual life finds a home; and if it does succeed in obtaining an assured position, its treatment assumes a different character; there is no freedom in dealing with it. As a matter of fact, the West was always less free in relation to dogma proper than the East in the classic period of Church theology. In the West men reflected about, and now and again against, dogma; but they really thought little in it.

But how great, nevertheless, were the stores rescued to the West from the East by Greek scholars, especially Hilary, Ambrose, and Jerome, at a time when the Greek sun had already ceased to warm the West! In the philosophical, historical, and theological elements transplanted by them, we have also one of Augustine’s roots. He learned the science of exegetical speculation from Ambrose, the disciple of the Cappadocians, and it was only by its help that he was delivered from Manichæism. He made himself familiar with Neoplatonic philosophy, and in this sphere he was apparently assisted by the works of another Greek scholar, Victorinus Rhetor. He acquired an astonishing amount of knowledge of the Egyptian monks, and the impression thus received became of decisive importance for him. These influences must be weighed if we are to understand thoroughly the conditions under which such a phenomenon as that which Augustine offers us was possible. But, on the other hand, Augustine continues the Western line represented by Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrosiaster, Optatus, Pacian, Prudentius, and also by Ambrose. Extremely characteristic is his relation to the Stoic Christian popular philosophy of Western teachers. We shall see that he retained a remnant of it. But his importance in the history of the Church, and of dogma, consisted essentially in the fact that he gave to the West, in place of Stoic Christian popular morality as that was comprised in Pelagianism, a religious and specifically Christian ethic, and that he impressed this so strongly on the Church that its formulas at least maintain their supremacy up to the present day in the whole of Western Christendom. In getting rid, however, of Stoic morals, he also thrust aside its curious complement, the realistic eschatology in which the ancient Latin Christians had given specific expression to their Christian faith.

Ambrose was sovereign among Western Bishops, and at the same time the Greek trained exegete and theologian. In both qualities he acted on Augustine, who looked up to him as Luther did to Staupitz. He comes first to be considered here in the latter respect. His education, his Episcopal chair in Milan, the Arian and Apollinarian conflict into which he had to enter, directed him to Greek theological literature. Philo, Hippolytus, Origen, and Basil were industriously read by him; he made extracts from them, and edited them in Latin. He was united with Basil, not only by similiarity of situation, but above all by agreement in character and attitude. Basil was his real teacher in doctrine, and while the former was met with distrust in Alexandria and Rome, Ambrose highly honoured him, and fully recognised his orthodoxy. The importance of this attitude of the Milanese Bishop for the closing of the Arian controversy, and for the reconciliation of Roman and Alexandrian orthodoxy with that of the Cappadocians, has been described in an earlier volume. It has indeed been recently shown, beyond dispute, that, in spite of his dependence on the Greeks, Ambrose preserved and further developed the Western system in his Christology. Tertullian, Novatian—directly or indirectly—and Hilary influenced him. But on the other hand there is no mistake that he emphasised more strongly than Augustine the fundamental position of the Nicene decision, and that he was confirmed in his doctrine of the Two Substances by the Cappadocians, who had been involuntarily led to something approaching it in their fight against Apollinaris. Further, he treats the Logos in Jesus Christ so much as the subject, the human substance so much as form and matter, that here again Greek influence—as in Hilary, who was similarly dependent on the Greeks—cannot be overlooked; for his own conception of the work of Christ conflicts with this stunted view of his human nature. But the most important influence of the East upon Ambrose does not lie in the special domain of dogmatics. It consists in the reception of the allegorical method of exegesis, and of many separate schemes and doctrines. It is true Ambrose had his own reservations in dealing with Plato and Origen; he did not adopt the consequences of Origen’s theology; he was much too hasty and superficial in the sphere of speculative reflection to appropriate from the Greeks more than fragments. But he, as well as the heavier but more thorough Hilary, raised the West above the “meagreness” of a pedantically literal, and, in its practical application, wholly planless exegesis; and they transmitted to their countrymen a profusion of ideas attached to the text of Holy Scripture. Rufinus and, in his first period, Jerome also completed the work. Manichæism would hardly have been overcome in the West unless it had been confronted by the theosophic exegesis, the “Biblical alchemy” of the Greeks, and the great theme of virginity was praised with new tongues after Western Christians heard of the union of the soul with its bridegroom, Christ, as taught by Origen in his commentary on the Song of Songs. The unity, so far as at all attainable, of ecclesiastical feeling in East and West, was restored in the loftiest regions of theology about A.D. 390. But the fight against Origen, which soon broke out with embittered hatred, had, among other sad consequences, the immediate result that the West refused to learn anything further from the great theologian. The West never attained a strict system in the science of allegorical exegesis.

The sacred histories of the Old Testament were also transformed into spiritual narratives for the West by Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, and Rufinus. In this transformation Western Christians obtained a multitude of separate mystical Neoplatonic conceptions, though they failed to obtain any insight into the system as a whole. Another Western, the rhetorician Victorinus, that “aged man, most learned and skilled in the liberal sciences, who had read and weighed so many works of the philosophers; the instructor of so many noble Senators, who also, as a monument of his excellent discharge of his office, had deserved and obtained a statue in the Roman Forum,” had initiated his fellow-countrymen into Neoplatonism by translations and original works. That happened before he became a Christian. Having gone over to Christianity at an advanced age, and become a prolific ecclesiastical writer, he by no means abandoned Neoplatonism. If I am not mistaken, Augustine made him his model in the crucial period of his life, and although he understood enough Greek to read Neoplatonic writings, yet it was substantially by Victorinus that he was initiated into them. Above all, he here learned how to unite Neoplatonic speculation with the Christianity of the Church, and to oppose Manichæism from this as his starting-point. We do not require to describe in detail what the above combination and polemic meant to him. When Neoplatonism became a decisive element in Augustine’s religious and philosophical mode of thought, it did so also for the whole of the West. The religious philosophy of the Greeks was incorporated in the spiritual assets of the West, along with its ascetic and monachist impulses. But, unless all signs deceive, Augustine received from Victorinus the impulse which led him to assimilate Paul’s type of religious thought; for it appears from the works of the aged rhetorician that he had appropriated Paul’s characteristic ideas, and Augustine demonstrably devoted a patient study to the Pauline epistles from the moment when he became more thoroughly acquainted with Neoplatonism. Victorinus wrote very obscurely, and his works found but a slender circulation. But this is not the only case in history where the whole importance of an able writer was merged in the service he rendered to a greater successor. A great, epoch-making man is like a stream: the smaller brooks, which have had their origin perhaps further off in the country, lose themselves in it, having fed it, but without changing the course of its current. Not only Victorinus, but ultimately also Ambrose himself, Optatus, Cyprian, and Tertullian were lost to view in Augustine; but they made him the proud stream in whose waters the banks are mirrored, on whose bosom the ships sail, and which fertilises and passes through a whole region of the world. For not only the work of those Greek Latins, but also the line of representatives of genuine Western theology and ecclesiasticism ended in Augustine.

Augustine studied, above all, very thoroughly, and made himself familiar with Cyprian’s work. Cyprian was to him the “saintly,” the Church Father, κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν, and his view of heresy and the unity of the Church was dependent on Cyprian. But standing as a Bishop, unassailed, on the foundation which Cyprian had created, Augustine did not find it necessary to state Episcopalianism so uncompromisingly as the former, and being occupied with putting an end to a schism which was different from the Novatian, he learned to take a different view of the nature of schisms from the Bishop whom he venerated as a hero. Cursory remarks show, besides, that Augustine had made himself familiar with the literature of the Novatian controversy, and had learned from it for his notion of the Church. Some works quoted by him we no longer possess—e.g., that of Reticius against the Novatians. What has been preserved to us of this literature, proves that the Western Church was continually impelled, by its opposition to the Novatians in the course of the fourth century, to reflect on the nature of the Church.

But even when he entered into the Donatist controversy, Augustine did so as a man of the second or indeed of the third generation, and he therefore enjoyed the great advantage of having at his disposal a fund of conceptions and ideas already collected. In this sphere Optatus had especially wrought before him.

This is not the place to describe the rise of Donatism; for the dispute did not originate in a dogmatic controversy. It arose in the first place out of Cæcilian’s action against the exaggerated veneration of martyrs, which disturbed the order and endangered the existence of the Church. Some of the clergy who did not desire a strong episcopal power seem to have made common cause with the discontented and refractory enthusiasts, to whom Cæcilian had been obnoxious even when Deacon. In any case, a point of principle did not immediately emerge in the controversy. But it was soon introduced, and indeed there is no doubt that Cyprian was played off against himself. The Donatist party, which was at the same time, it appears, the African national party, found support both in Cyprian’s conception that the Bishop was only a Bishop if he possessed a certain Christian and moral quality, and in his defence of heretical baptism. The opposition, also carrying out ideas taught by Cyprian, gave such prominence to the official character of the episcopate, and the objective efficacy of the sacrament, that the personal quality of the official or dispenser became indifferent. It may be that those martyrs and relic-worshipping enthusiasts in Carthage were inclined from the first to the conception once held by Cyprian against Calixtus and his successors, and that they thus required a standard of active, personal holiness for bishops, which could no longer be sustained in the great Church and during the devastating storms of the last persecution. But this cannot be proved. On the other hand, it is indisputable that, after the Synod of Arles, the controversy had reached a point where it must be regarded as the last link in the chain of the great phenomena (Encratites Montanists, adherents of Hippolytus and Novatians) in which Christendom strove against the secularisation that was imposed upon it by the removal of the attribute of holiness, and with it of the truth of the Church, from persons to institutions—the office and mysteries; this change being due to the fact that otherwise men would have had to despair of the Christian character of the Church as Catholic. The Donatists denied the validity of any ordination conferred by a traditor, and therefore also of sacraments administered by a bishop who had been consecrated by a traditor. As a last remnant of a much more earnest conception, a minimum of personal worthiness was required of the clergy alone, and received into the notion of the Church itself: it was no longer Christian if this minimum was wanting, if the clergy—nothing being now said of the laity—were not free from every idolatrous stain. Compared with the measure of agreement which prevailed between Catholics and Donatists, the separate thesis of the latter looks like a caprice, and certainly much obstinacy, personal discontent, and insubordination lurked behind it. But we may not overlook the question of principle any more here than in the case of Novatianism. The legend of the Sybilline Books is constantly repeating itself in the history of spiritual conflicts. The remnant saved from the flames stands at as high a price as the whole collection. And what a price the Church has paid in order to escape the exhortations of separatists! The Novatian crisis—after the Decian persecution—drew from it the sacrament of penance, and thereby gave the impulse in general to substitute a system of sacraments for the sacrament that blotted out sin. (The formal establishment of the new sacrament had, indeed, still to be waited for for a long time.) The Donatist crisis—after the Diocletian persecution—taught the Church to value ordination as imparting an inalienable title (character indelebilis) and to form a stringent view of the “objectivity” of the sacraments; or, to use a plainer expression, to regard the Church primarily as an institution whose holiness and truth were inalienable, however melancholy the state of its members.

In this thought Catholicism was first complete. By it is explained its later history down to the present day, in so far as it is not a history of piety, but of the Church, the Hierarchy, sacramental magic, and implicit faith (fides implicita). But only in the West did the thought come to be deliberately and definitely expressed. It also made its way in the East, because it was inevitable; but it did so, as it were, unconsciously. This was no advantage; for the very fact that this conception of the Church was definitely thought out in the West, led over and over again to the quest for safeguards, or a form which could be reconciled with living faith, and the requirements of a holy life. Even Augustine, who stated it definitely and fully, aimed at reconciling the Christian conscience with it. But he was not the first to declare it; he rather received it from tradition. The first representative of the new conception known to us, and Augustine also knew him, was Optatus.

The work of Optatus, “De schismate Donatistarum,” was written in the interests of peace, and therefore in as friendly and conciliatory a tone as possible. This did not, indeed, prevent violent attacks in detail, and especially extremely insulting allegorical interpretations of texts from Scripture. But the author every now and then recalls the fact that his opponents are after all Christian brethren (IV., I., 2), who have disdainfully seceded from the Church, and only decline to recognise what is gladly offered them, Church fellowship. At the very beginning of his book, which, for the rest, is badly arranged, because it is a reply point by point to a writing by the Donatist, Parmenian, Optatus (I., 10 sq.)—differing from Cyprian—indicates the distinction in principle between heretics and schismatics, and he adheres firmly to the distinction—already drawn by Irenæus—to the end of his statement. Heretics are “deserters from or falsifiers of the Symbol” (I., 10, 12; II., 8), and accordingly are not Christians; the Donatists are seditious Christians. Since the definition holds (I., 11) that “a simple and true understanding in the law (scil. the two testaments), the unique and most true sacrament, and unity of minds constitute the Catholic (scil. Church),” the Donatists only want the last point to be genuinely Catholic Christians. The heretics have “various and false baptisms,” no legitimate office of the keys, no true divine service; “but these things cannot be denied to you schismatics, although you be not in the Catholic Church, because you have received along with us true and common sacraments” (I., 12). He says afterwards (III., 9): “You and we have a common ground in the Church (ecclesiastica una conversatio), and if the minds of men contend, the sacraments do not.” Finally, we also can say: “We equally believe, and have been stamped with one seal, nor did we receive a different baptism from you; nor a different ordination. We read equally the Divine Testament; we pray to one God. Among you and us the prayer of our Lord is the same, but a rent having been made, with the parts hanging on this side and on that, it was necessary that it should be joined.” And (III., 10) he remarks very spiritually, founding on a passage in Ezechiel: “You build not a protecting house, like the Catholic Church, but only a wall; the partition supports no corner-stone; it has a needless door, nor does it guard what is enclosed; it is swept by the rain, destroyed by tempests, and is unable to keep out the robber. It is a house wall, but not a home. And your part is a quasi ecclesia, but not Catholic.” V., 1: “That is for both which is common to you and us: therefore it belongs also to you, because you proceed from us;” that is the famous principle which is still valid in the present day in the Catholic Church. “Finally, both you and we have one ecclesiastical language, common lessons, the same faith, the very sacraments of the faith, the same mysteries.” Undoubtedly Optatus also held ultimately that those things possessed by the schismatics were in the end fruitless, because their offence was especially aggravated. They merely constituted a “quasi ecclesia.” For the first mark of the one, true, and holy Church was not the holiness of the persons composing it; but exclusively the possession of the sacraments. II., 1: “It is the one Church whose sanctity is derived from the sacraments, and not estimated from the pride of persons. This cannot apply to all heretics and schismatics; it remains that it is (found) in one place.” The second mark consists in territorial Catholicity according to the promise: “I will give the heathen for an inheritance, and the ends of the world for a possession.” II., 1: “To whom, then, does the name of Catholic belong, since it is called Catholic because it is reasonable and diffused everywhere?”

Optatus did not succeed in clearly describing the first mark in its negative and exclusive meaning; we could indeed easily charge him with contradicting himself on this point. The second was all the more important in his eyes, since the Donatists had only taken hold in Africa and, by means of a few emigrants, in Rome. In both signs he prepared the way for Augustine’s doctrine of the Church and the sacraments, in which Optatus’ thought was, of course, spiritualised. Optatus has himself shown, in the case of Baptism (V., 1-8), what he meant by the “sanctity of the sacraments.” In Baptism there were three essentials: the acting Holy Trinity (“confertur a trinitate”), the believer (“fides credentis”), and the administrator. These three were not, however, equally important; the two first rather belonged alone to the dogmatic notion of Baptism (“for I see that two are necessary, and one as if necessary [quasi necessariam]”), for the baptisers are not “lords” (domini), but “agents or ministers of baptism” (operarii vel ministri baptismi). (Ambrosiaster calls them advocates who plead, but have nothing to say at the end when sentence is passed.) They are only ministering and changing organs, and therefore contribute nothing to the notion and effect of Baptism; for “it is the part of God to cleanse by the sacrament.” But if the sacrament is independent of him who, by chance, dispenses it, because the rite presupposes only the ever the same Trinity and the ever the same faith, then it cannot be altered in its nature by the dispenser (V. 4: “the sacraments are holy in themselves, not through men: sacramenta per se esse sancta, non per homines”). That is the famous principle of the objectivity of the sacraments which became so fundamental for the development of the dogmatics of the Western Church, although it never could be carried out in all its purity in the Roman Church, because in that case it would have destroyed the prerogatives of the Clergy. It is to be noticed, however, that Optatus made the holiness of the sacraments to be effective only for the faith of the believer (fides credentis), and he is perfectly consistent in this respect, holding faith to be all important, to the complete exclusion of virtues. Here again he prepared the way for the future theology of the West by emphasising the sovereignty of faith. It is all the more shocking to find that even Optatus uses the whole reflection to enable him to depreciate claims on the life of the members of the Church. We see clearly that the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments grew out of the desire to show that the Church was holy and therefore true, in spite of the irreligion of the Christians belonging to it. But in aiming at this, men lit, curiously, upon a trace of evangelical religion. Since it was impossible to point to active holiness, faith and its importance were called to mind. A great crisis, a perplexity, in which, seeing the actual condition of matters, the Catholic Church found itself involved with its doctrine of Baptism, virtue, and salvation, turned its attention to the promise of God and faith. Thus the most beneficent and momentous transformation experienced by Western Christianity before Luther was forced upon it by circumstances. But it would never have made its way if it had not been changed by the spiritual experiences of a Catholic Christian, Augustine, from an extorted theory into a joyful and confident confession.

Parmenian gave Optatus occasion to enumerate certain “endowments” (dotes) of the Church, i.e., the essential parts of its possession. Parmenian had numbered six, Optatus gives five: (1) cathedra (the [Episcopal] chair); (2) angelus; (3) spiritus; (4) fons; (5) sigillum (the symbol). The enumeration is so awkward that one can only regret that it is adapted to the formula of an opponent. But we learn, at least, in this way that Cyprian’s ideal of the unity of the Episcopate, as represented in Peter’s chair, had been received and fostered unsuspiciously in Africa. “Peter alone received the keys” (I., 10, 12). “You cannot deny your knowledge that on Peter, in the city of Rome, was first conferred the Episcopal chair, in which he sat, the head of all the Apostles, whence he was also called Cephas, in which one chair unity might be observed by all, lest the rest of the Apostles should severally defend one, each for himself, in order that he might now be a schismatic and sinner, who should appoint a second as against the one unique chair” (II., 2). The connection with Peter’s chair was of decisive importance, not only for Optatus, but also for his opponent (II., 4), who had appealed to the fact that Donatists had also possessed a Bishop in Rome. Optatus, besides, discusses the second point, the angelus, who is the legitimate Bishop of the local community, the chair (cathedra) guaranteeing the œcumenical unity, and he emphasises the connection of the African Catholic Churches with the Oriental, and especially the seven-fold ecclesia of Asia (Rev. II., 3), almost as strongly as that with the Roman Church (II., 6; VI., 3). His disquisitions on spiritus, fons, and sigillum, are devoid of any special interest (II., 7-9). On the other hand, it is important to notice that he expressly subordinates the consideration of the endowments (dotes) of the Church, to the verification of “its sacred members and internal organs” (sancta membra ac viscera ecclesia), about which Parmenian had said nothing. These consisted in the sacraments and the names of the Trinity “in which meet the faith and profession of believers” (cui concurrit fides credentium et professio). Thus he returns to his natural and significant line of thought.

If Ambrosiaster and Optatus prepared the way for Augustine’s doctrines of the sacraments, faith, and the Church, Ambrose did so for those of sin, grace, and faith. We have endeavoured above to estimate his importance to Augustine as a disciple of the Greeks; we have now to regard him as a Western. But we have first of all to consider not the theologian, but the Bishop. It was the royal priest who first opened Augustine’s eyes to the authority and majesty of the Church. Only a Roman Bishop—even if he did not sit in the Roman chair—could teach him this, and perhaps the great work, De civitate Dei, would never have been written had it not been for the way in which this majesty had been impressed on Augustine by Ambrose; for great historical conceptions arise either from the fascinating impression made by great personalities or from political energy; and Augustine never possessed the latter. It was, on the contrary, in Ambrose, the priestly Chancellor of the State, that the imperial power (imperium) of the Catholic Church dawned upon him, and his experiences of the confusion and weakness of the civil power at the beginning of the fifth century completed the impression. Along with this Ambrose’s sermons fall to be considered. If, on one side, they were wholly dependent on Greek models, yet they show, on the other hand, in their practical tone, the spirit of the West. Augustine’s demand that the preacher should “teach, sway, and move” (docere, flectere, movere) is as if drawn from those sermons. in spite of the asceticism and virginity which he also mainly preached, he constantly discussed all the concrete affairs of the time and the moral wants of the community. Thus Ambrose represents the intimate union of the ascetic ideal with energetic insistence on positive morality, a union which the Western mediæval Church never lost, however much practical life was subordinated to the contemplative.

Three different types of thought are interwoven in Ambrose’s doctrine of sin and grace. First, he was dependent on the Greek conception that regarded evil as not-being, but at the same time as necessary. Secondly, he shows that he was strongly influenced by the popular morality of Ciceronian Stoicism, which was widespread among cultured Western Christians, and which had, by its combination with monastic morality, brought about, in Pelagianism, the crisis so decisive for the dogmatics of the West. Thirdly and finally, he carried very much further that view taken by Tertullian of the radical nature of evil and the guiltiness of sin which was made his fundamental principle by Augustine. Evil was radical, and yet its root was not found in the sensuous, but in “pride of mind” (superbia animi); it sprang from freedom, and was yet a power propagating itself in mankind. The Greeks had looked on the universal state of sinfulness as a more or less accidental product of circumstances; Ambrose regarded it as the decisive fact, made it the starting-point of his thought, and referred it more definitely than any previous teacher—Ambrosiaster excepted—to Adam’s Fall. Passages occur in his works which in this respect do not fall a whit behind the famous statements of Augustine.

But important as this phase was, in which thought was no longer directed primarily to sin’s results, or to the single sinful act, but to the sinful state which no virtue could remove, yet it is just in this alone that we can perceive the advance made by Ambrose. As regards religion, none is to be found in his works; for his doctrine of the traducian character and tenacity of sin was in no way connected with the heightened consciousness of God and salvation. Ambrose did not submit evil to be decided upon in the light of religion. Therefore he merely groped his way round the guilty character of sin, without hitting upon it; he could once more emphasise the weakness of the flesh as an essential factor; and he could maintain the proposition that man was of himself capable of willing the good. For this reason, finally, his doctrine of sin is to us an irreconcilable mass of contradictions. But we must, nevertheless, estimate very highly the advance made by Ambrose in contemplating the radical sinful condition. It was undoubtedly important for Augustine. And to this is to be added that he was able to speak in a very vivid way of faith, conceiving it to be a living communion with God or Christ. The religious individualism which shines clearly in Augustine already does so faintly in Ambrose: “Let Christ enter thy soul, let Jesus dwell in your minds. . . . What advantage is it to me, conscious of such great sins, if the Lord do come, unless He comes into my soul, returns into my mind, unless Christ lives in me?” And while in many passages he distinctly describes the merit gained by works, and love as means of redemption, yet in some of his reflections, on the other hand, he rises as strongly to the lofty thought that God alone rouses in us the disposition for what is good, and that we can only depend on the grace of God in Christ. St. Paul’s Epistles occupied the foreground in Ambrose’s thought, and from them he learned that faith as confidence in God is a power by itself, and does not simply fall into the realm of pious belief. However much he adds that is alien, however often he conceives faith to be an act of obedience to an external authority, he can speak of it in different terms from his predecessors. Faith is to him the fundamental fact of the Christian life, not merely as belief in authority (“faith goes before reason,” fides prævenit rationem), but as faith which lays hold of redemption through Christ, and justifies because it is the foundation of perfect works, and because grace and faith are alone valid before God. “And that benefits me because we are not justified from the works of the law. I have no reason, therefore, to glory in my works, I have nothing to boast of; and therefore I will glory in Christ. I will not boast because I am just, but because I am redeemed. I will glory, not because I am without sins, but because my sins have been remitted. I will not glory because I have done good service, or because anyone has benefited me, but because the blood of Christ was shed for me.” That is Augustinianism before Augustine, nay, it is more than Augustinianism.

In the dogmatic work of Western theologians of the fourth century, the genius of Western Christianity, which found its most vigorous expression in Cyprian’s De opere et eleemosynis, fell away to some extent. But it only receded, remaining still the prevailing spirit. The more vital notion of God, the strong feeling of responsibility to God as judge, the consciousness of God as moral power, neither restricted nor dissolved by any speculation on nature—all that constituted the superiority of Western to Eastern Christianity is seen in its worst form under the deteriorating influence of the legal doctrine of retribution, and the pseudo-moral one of merit. In view of this, the inrush of Neoplatonic mysticism was highly important; for it created a counterpoise to a conception which threatened to dissolve religion into a series of legal transactions. But the weightiest counterpoise consisted in the doctrine of faith and grace as proclaimed by Augustine. However, it will be shown that Augustine taught his new conception in such a form that it did not shatter the prevailing system, but could rather be admitted into it; perhaps the greatest triumph ever achieved in the history of religion by a morality of calculations over religion.

The conception of religion as a legal relationship, which was concerned with the categories lex (law) delictum (fault) satisfactio, pœna (punishment) meritum, præmium, etc., was not destroyed by Augustine. Grace was rather inserted in a legal and objective form into the relationship, yet in such a way that it remained possible for the individual to construe the whole relationship from the point of view of grace.

We have attempted, in the above discussion, to exhibit the different lines existing in the West which meet in Augustine. Let us, in conclusion, emphasise further the following points.

1. Along with Holy Scripture, the Symbol, the Apostolic “law” (lex), was placed in the West on an unapproachable height. This law was framed in opposition to Marcionitism, Sabellianism, Arianism, and Apollinarianism, without essential variations, and without any process of reasoning, as a confession of faith in the unity of God in three persons, as also in the unity of Christ in two substances. The Western Church, therefore, apparently possessed a lofty certitude in dealing with Trinitarian and Christological problems. But with this certitude was contrasted the fact, of which we have many instances, that under cover of the official confession many more Christological heresies circulated, and were maintained in the West than in the Churches of the East, and that in particular the Christological formula, where it was not wholly unknown, was, for the laity and for many of the clergy, simply a noumenon. This fact is further confirmed when we observe that Western theologians, as long as they were not directly involved in Eastern controversies, did not turn their attention to the principles contained in the above “law,” but to quite different questions. Augustine was not the first to write “expositions of the Symbol,” in which questions, wholly different from what his text would lead us to expect, were discussed. On the contrary, Western theologians from Cyprian show that they lived in a complex of ideas and questions which had little to do with the problems treated by Antignostics and Alexandrians, or with dogma.

2. In connection with the development of penance on the basis of works and merits (in the sense of satisfactions), and in harmony with the legal spirit characteristic of Western theological speculation, Christ’s expiatory work came now to the front. It was not so much the Incarnation—that was the antecedent condition—as the death of Christ, which was regarded as the salient point (punctum saliens); and it was already treated from all conceivable points of view as a sacrificial death, atonement, ransom, and vicarious consummation of the crucifixion. At the same time, Ambrose discussed its relationship (reconciliatio, redemptio, satisfactio, immolatio, meritum) to sin as guilt (reatus). In such circumstances the accent fell on the human nature of Christ; the offerer and offering was the mediator as man, who received his value through the divine nature, though quite as much so by his acceptance on the part of the Deity. Thus the West had a Christological system of its own, which, while the formula of the two natures formed its starting-point, was pursued in a new direction: the mediator was looked on as the man whose voluntary achievement possessed an infinite value in virtue of the special dispensation of God. (Optat I., 10: “the world [was] reconciled to God by means of the flesh of Christ”: mundus reconciliatus deo per carnem Christi.) From this we can understand how Augustine, in not a few of his arguments, opposed, if in a veiled fashion, the doctrine of the divine nature of Christ, discussing the merits of the historical Christ as if that nature did not exist, but everything was given to Christ of grace. The same reason further explains why afterwards modified Adoptianism was constantly re-emerging in the West, it being from the stand-point of the consistent Greek Christology the worst of heresies because it dislocated the whole structure of the latter, and threw its purpose into confusion. Finally, the same fact also explains why, in later times, Western Christians, particularly such as had acquired the mystical monachist observance of intercourse with Christ, the chaste bridegroom, substantially reduced the Christological conception to “Ecce homo.” The vividness and thrilling power which this figure possessed for them, raising them above sorrow and suffering, cannot deceive us as to the fact that the Church Christology was no longer anything to them but a formula. But while the ancient Western form had become the basis of a view which left fancy and disposition to fix the significance of Christ’s Person, that must not be described as a necessary deduction from it. That form—in which Christ was the object of the Father’s grace, carried out what the Father entrusted him with, and by Him was exalted—rather corresponded to the clearest passages of the New Testament, and was the only protection against the superstitious conceptions of the Greeks which emptied the Gospel of all meaning. Of decisive value, however, are not the various mediæval attempts to appraise Christ’s work, but rather the whole tendency to understand Christianity as the religion of atonement; for in this tendency is expressed characteristically the fear of God as judge, which, in the East, disappeared behind mystic speculations.

3. An acute observer perceives that the soteriological question—How does man get rid, and remain rid, of his sins and attain eternal life?—had already, in the fourth century, actively engaged the earnest attention of thinkers in the Western Church, and, indeed, in such a way that, as distinguished from the East, the religious and moral sides of the problem are no longer found separate. But the question was not clearly put before the Pelagian conflict, since the controversies with Heraclius and Jovinian were not followed by a lasting movement. Opinions were still jumbled together in a motley fashion, sometimes in one and the same writer. If I see aright, five different conceptions can be distinguished for the period about 400 A.D. First we have the Manichæan which insinuated its way in the darkness, but was widely extended, even among the clergy; according to it evil was a real physical power, and was overcome in the individual by goodness, equally a physical force which was attached to natural potencies and Christ. Secondly, we have the Neoplatonic and Alexandrian view which taught that evil was not-being, that which had not yet become, the necessary foil of the good, the shadow of the light, the transitoriness cleaving to the “many” in opposition to the “one.” It held that redemption was the return to the one, the existent, to God; that it was identification with God in love; Christ was the strength and crutches for such a return; for “energies and crutches come from one hand.” Thirdly, there was the rationalistic Stoic conception; this held that virtue was the supreme good; sin was the separate evil act springing from free will; redemption was the concentration of the will and its energetic direction to the good. Here again the historical and Christological were really nothing but crutches. All these three conceptions lay the greatest stress on asceticism. Fourthly, there was the sacramental view, which may be characterised partly as morally lax, partly as “evangelical”; we find it, e.g., in Heraclius on the one hand, and in Jovinian on the other. According to it he who was baptised possessing genuine faith obtained the guarantee of felicity; sin could not harm him; no impeachment of sin (reatus peccati) could touch him. It is proved that really lax and “evangelical” views met: a man could always rely as a Christian on the grace of God; sin did not separate him from God, if he stood firm in the faith. Nay, from the second century, really from Paul, there existed in the Gentile Church movements which deliberately defended reliance on faith alone (the “sola fide”) and “the most assured salvation through grace granted in baptism” (salus per gratiam in baptismo donatam certissima.) A fifth conception was closely related to, yet different from, the last. We can call it briefly the doctrine of grace and merit. We have pointed out strong traces of it in Victorinus, Optatus, and Ambrose. According to it, evil as the inherent sin of Adam was only to be eradicated by divine grace in Christ; this grace produced faith to which, however, redemption was only granted when it had advanced and become the habitual love from which those good works spring that establish merit in the sight of God. Evil is godlessness and the vice that springs from it; goodness is the energy of grace and the good works that flow from it. Here, accordingly, nature and grace, unbelief and faith, selfishness and love of God are the antitheses, and the work of the historical Christ stands in the centre. Nevertheless, this view did not exclude asceticism, but required it, since only that faith was genuine and justified men which evinced itself in sanctification, i.e., in world-renouncing love. Thus a middle path was here sought between Jovinian on the one side and Manichæan and Priscillian asceticism on the other.

These different conceptions met and were inextricably mingled. The future of Christianity was necessarily to be decided by the victory of one or other of them.

4. In the West, interest in the question of the relation of grace and means of grace to the Church was awakened by the Novatian, heretical baptism, and Donatist controversy. This interest was, however, still further strengthened by the fact that the Church detached itself more forcibly from the State than in the East. The fall of the West Roman Empire, opposition to the remains of a still powerful heathen party in Rome, and finally dislike to the new Arian German forms of government all contributed to this.

One perhaps expects to find here by way of conclusion a characterisation of the different national Churches of the West; but little can be said from the standpoint of the history of dogma. The distinctive character of the North African Church was strongly marked. A darkness broods over the Churches of Spain, Gaul, and Britain, in which the only clear spot is the conflict of the priests with the monachism that was establishing itself. The conflict with Priscillianism in Spain, the attacks on Martin of Tours in Gaul, and, on the other hand, Vigilantius, come in here. It is not unimportant to notice that Southern Gaul was distinguished by its culture and taste for aesthetics and rhetoric about A.D. 360 (see Julian’s testimony) and A.D. 400 (see Sulp. Severus, Chron. init.). Rome only became a Christian city in the fifth century, but even in the time of Liberius and Damasus the Roman Bishop was the foremost Roman. What was wrested by Damasus, that unsaintly but sagacious man, from the State and the East, was never again abandoned by his energetic successors; they also tried vigorous intervention in the affairs of the provincial Churches. Holding faithfully to its confession, the Roman Church was, not only from its position, but also by its nature, the connecting link between East and West, between the monachist leanings of the former, and the tendency to ecclesiastical politics and sacramentarianism of the latter. It also united South and North in the West. Rome, again, from the time of Liberius pursued and explained that religious policy towards paganism, “by which the Catholic Church gained the means not only of winning but of satisfying the masses of the people who were, and, in spite of the confession, remained heathen” (Usener, Relig. Unters., I., p. 293): “it rendered heathenism harmless by giving its blessing to it, i.e., to all that belonged to the pagan cultus.” But that magnanimous way of opposing paganism, which has been rightly adduced, and which Usener (op. cit.) has begun to exhibit to us so learnedly and instructively, concealed within it the greatest dangers. In such circumstances it was of supreme value both for the contemporary and future fortunes of the Church that, just when the process of ethnicising was in full swing, Augustine, equally at home in North Africa, Rome, and Milan, appeared and reminded the Church what Christian faith was.