Part 5

If the reasoning of Titus according to Tacitus is correctly reported, the victorious general believed that the destruction of the temple would be the ruin of Christianity as well as that of Judaism. No one was ever more completely deceived. The Romans imagined, that, in tearing up the root, they should eradicate the shoot at the same time; but the shoot was already a shrub that lived its own life. If the temple had survived, Christianity would certainly have been arrested in its development. The surviving temple would have continued to be the centre of all Judaic works. It would always have been regarded as the most holy place of the world: pilgrims would have come there, and would there have brought their tributes. The Church of Jerusalem, grouped around by consecrated parvises, would have continued, by the strength of its primacy, to receive the homage of all the world, to persecute the Christians of the Church of Paul, to exact, that, in order to have the right to call one's self the disciple of Jesus, one should practise the circumcision, and observe the Mosaic code. All effectual propagandism would have been interdicted: letters of obedience signed at Jerusalem would have been exacted from the missionary. A centre of irrefragable authority, a patriarchate composed of a sort of college of cardinals under the presidency of men like James, pure Jews belonging to the family of Jesus, would have been established, and would have constituted an immense danger for the new-born Church. When one sees St. Paul after so many mishaps remaining always attached to the Church of Jerusalem, one understands what difficulties a rupture with these holy personages would have presented. Such a schism would have been considered as an enormity. The separation from Judaism would have been impossible; and this separation was the indispensable condition of the existence of the new religion. The mother was about to kill the child. The temple, on the contrary, once destroyed, the Christians thought no more of it: very soon, indeed, they will consider it a profane place: Jesus will be every thing to them. The Christian Church of Jerusalem was by the same stroke reduced to a secondary importance. It was re-organized around the element which made its force, the _desposyni_, the members of the family of Jesus, the sons of Clopas; but it will reign no more. This centre of hate and exclusion once destroyed, the reconciliation of the opposing parties in the Church of Jesus will become easy. Peter and Paul will be brought into accord, and the terrible duality of the new-born Christianity will cease to be a mortal sore. Lost in the depth of the interior of the Batanæa and the Hauran, the little group which attached itself to James and Clopas becomes the Ebionite sect, and slowly dies.

These relatives of Jesus were pious, tranquil, mild, modest, hard-working men, faithful to the severest precepts of Jesus concerning poverty, but at the same time very exact Jews, considering the title of "Child of Israel" before every other advantage. From the year 70 to about the year 110, they really governed the churches beyond the Jordan, and formed a sort of Christian senate. There is no need to demonstrate the immense danger which these pre-occupations, with genealogies, were to the new-born Christianity. A sort of nobility of Christianity was about to be formed. In the political order the nobility is almost a necessity to the state. Politics having elements of gross struggles which render it more material than ideal, a state is very strong only when a certain number of families has, by tradition and privilege, the duty and interest of guarding its welfare, representing and defending it. But, in the order of the ideal government, birth is nothing: each one is valued in proportion to the truth he shows, and the good he does. The institutions which have a religious, literary, moral end, are lost, when considerations of family, caste, heredity, prevail in them. The nephews and cousins of Jesus would have ruined Christianity, if the churches of Paul had not already been strong enough to act as a counterpoise to this aristocracy, the tendency of which would have been to proclaim itself alone respectable, and to treat all converts as intruders. Some pretensions analogous to those of the Alides in Islam were established. Islamism would certainly have perished under the embarrassment caused by the family of the prophet, if the result of the struggles of the first century of the Hegira had not been to reject, upon second thought, all those who were too near the person of the prophet. The true heirs of a great man are those who continue his work, and not his relatives by blood. Considering the tradition of Jesus as his own possession, the little _coterie_ of the Nazarenes, as they are called, would certainly have stifled it. Happily this narrow circle disappeared in good season: the relatives of Jesus were soon forgotten in the interior of the Hauran. They lost all importance, and left Jesus to his true family, the only one which he has recognized,--those of whom he said, "They hear the word of God, and keep it."

III.

According as the Church of Jerusalem sank, the Church of Rome rose, or, rather, a phenomenon was evidently manifested in the years which followed the victory of Titus. It was that the Church of Rome became more and more the inheritor and the substitute of the Church of Jerusalem. The spirit of the two churches was the same: what was a danger at Jerusalem became an advantage at Rome. The taste for tradition and the hierarchy, and the respect for authority, were in some sort transplanted from the parvises of the temple to the Occident. James, the brother of the Lord, had been a sort of pope at Jerusalem. Rome is about to take up the part of James. We shall have the pope at Rome. Without Titus, we should have had the pope in Jerusalem, but with this great difference, that the pope at Jerusalem would have extinguished Christianity in about one or two hundred years, while the Pope of Rome has made it the religion of the universe.

Here appears a very important person, who seems to have been the head of the Roman Church in the early years of the first century, concerning whom I am happy to find myself in accord with one of your most scholarly and enlightened critics, Mr. Lightfoot. I speak of Clement Romanus. In the penumbra in which he remains, enveloped and almost lost in the luminous dust of a beautiful far-off history, Clement is one of the grand figures of early Christianity: one would say that it was the head of an old effaced fresco of Giotto's, recognizable still from his golden aureola, and some dim features of striking purity and sweetness. One thing is beyond doubt: it is the high rank which he held in the utterly spiritual hierarchy of the church of his time, and the unequalled credit with which he sustained it. His approval made the law. All parties clung to him, and wished to shield themselves under his authority. It is probable that he was one of the most energetic agents of the grand work that was about to be accomplished: I mean the posthumous reconciliation of Peter and Paul, without which union the work of Christ could only have perished. His high personality, aggrandized by tradition, was, after that of Peter, the most holy figure of the primitive Christian Rome.

Already the idea of a certain primacy in the Church of Rome began to show itself. The right of advising the other churches and of settling their differences was accorded to this church. It is believed that like privileges had been allowed to Peter among the disciples. Now a still closer bond was established between Peter and Rome. In the time of Clement, great dissensions divided the Church at Corinth. The Roman Church, being applied to in these troubles, replied by an epistle, which has been preserved to us. The epistle is anonymous; but a very ancient tradition teaches that Clement was the author of it. The Church at Corinth had changed but little since St. Paul. It had the same proud, disputant, feeble spirit. It is evident that the principal opposition to the hierarchy was found in this Greek spirit, always mobile, because it was always full of life, undisciplined (and for my part I like it), not knowing how to form a flock from a crowd. The women and the children were in full revolt. Some superior doctors imagined that they possessed a profound sense in every thing, and mystic secrets analogous to the gift of tongues and the discernment of spirits. Those who were honored with these supernatural gifts scorned the ancients, and aspired to replace them. Corinth had a respectable presbytery, which, however, did not receive the highest mysticism. The advanced pretenders cast it in the shade, and put themselves in its place. Some of the _presbyteri_ were even dismissed. The struggle between the established hierarchy and personal revelations began, and this struggle fills the history of the Church; the privileged soul complaining, that, in spite of the favors with which it is honored, a gross clergy, wanting in spiritual life, dominates it officially. We see that this was the heresy of individual mysticism, maintaining the rights of the spirit against authority, pretending to rise above common mortals and the ordinary clergy by right of its direct intercourse with divinity.

The Roman Church was always the church of order, of subordination, and of rule. Its fundamental principle was that humility and submission were of more value than the most sublime gifts. Its epistle is the first manifestation in the Christian Church of the principle of authority.

A few years since, there was much surprise when a French archbishop, then a senator, said in the Tribune, "My clergy is my regiment." Clement had said this before him. Order and obedience were the supreme laws of the family and the church. "Let us consider the soldiers who serve under our sovereigns. With what order, what punctuality, what submission, they obey their commands: all are not prefects, nor tribunes, nor centurions; but each one in his rank executes the orders of the emperor and of his chiefs. The great cannot exist without the small, nor the small without the great. In every thing there is a mingling of diverse elements, and by this mingling all advances. Let us take, for example, our bodies. The head is nothing without the feet; the feet are nothing without the head. The smallest of our organs are necessary, and serve the whole body: all conspire, and obey the same principle of subordination for the preservation of the whole."

The history of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is the history of a triple abdication; the community of the faithful first placing all its powers in the hands of the ancients, or _presbyteri_; the presbyteral body at length delegating its authority to one person who was the _episcopos_; then the _episcopi_ of the Latin Church recognized as their head one of themselves, who became the pope. This last progress, if we may call it so, was not accomplished until our time. The creation of the episcopate, on the contrary, was the work of the second century. The absorption of the church by the _presbyteri_ was accomplished before the year 100. In the Epistle of Clement Romanus it is not yet with the episcopate, but with the presbytery, that he deals. We find there no trace of a _presbyteros_ superior to the others, and entitled to dethrone them; but the author proclaims positively that the presbytery and the clergy are above the people. The apostles, in establishing churches, chose through the inspiration of the Spirit the "bishops and the deacons of the future believers." The power emanating from the apostles has been transmitted by regular succession. No church has then the right to dethrone its seniors. The privilege of the rich is nothing in the church. Accordingly, those who are favored with mystic gifts, instead of believing themselves above the hierarchy, should be the more submissive. This involves the great problem, "Who exists in the church? Is it the people? Is it the clergy? Is it inspiration?" This problem was already given in the time of St. Paul, who resolved it in the true manner by mutual charity. One epistle trenches upon the question in the sense of pure Catholicism. The apostolic title is every thing: the right of the people is reduced to nothing. We may then safely assert that Catholicism had its origin at Rome, since the Church of Rome laid down its first rules. Prescience pertains to spiritual gifts, to science and distinction: it belongs to the hierarchy, to the powers transmitted through the medium of the canonical ordination, which attaches itself to the apostles by an unbroken chain. The free church as Christ conceived it, and as St. Paul also regarded it, was a Utopia which held nothing for the future. Evangelical liberty had destroyed it; and it was not realized, that, with the hierarchy uniformity and death would come in time.

IV.

Clement had probably not seen either Peter or Paul. His great practical sense showed him that the salvation of the Christian Church demanded the reconciliation of the two founders. Did he influence the author of the Acts which represent to us this reconciliation as accomplished, and with whom he seems to have had some intercourse, or did these two pious souls spontaneously fall into accord on account of the bias which he had given to Christian opinion? We are ignorant for want of proofs. One thing is sure, the reconciliation of Peter and Paul was a Roman work. Rome had two churches,--one coming from Peter, the other from Paul. Those numerous converts who came to Jesus--some through the school of Peter, and some through that of Paul--were tempted to exclaim, "What! Are there, then, two Christs?" It was necessary to be able to reply, "No: Peter and Paul understand each other perfectly: the Christianity of one is the Christianity of the other." Perhaps (this is an ingenious hypothesis of M. Strauss) a light cloud was introduced for this purpose into the evangelical legend of the miraculous fishing. According to the recital of Luke, the nets of Peter would not contain the multitudes of fish which could easily have been taken; Peter was obliged to make a sign to his co-workers to come to his aid. A second bark (Paul and his friends) was filled as the first, and the fishing of the kingdom of God was superabundant.

The life of the apostles begins to become obscure. All those who have seen them have disappeared: most of them left no writings. One had entire liberty to embroider on this virgin canvas still. Friends and enemies profited by the unknown to set up arguments in support of their theses, and to satisfy their hates. Towards the year 130, that is to say about sixty-six years after the death of the apostles, a vast Ebionite legend was produced at Rome, and designated by the title of the preaching, or the travels, of Peter. The missions of the chief of the apostles were recounted there, principally those along the coast of Ph[oe]nicia; the conversions which he had made; above all, his struggles against the great anti-Christ, Simon the Magician, who was at this epoch the spectre of the Christian conscience. But frequently under this abhorred name another person was concealed: it was the false apostle Paul, the enemy of the law, the veritable destroyer of the Church. The true Church was that at Jerusalem, presided over by James, the brother of the Lord. No apostolate was of any value, if it could not show letters emanating from this central college. Paul had none: therefore he was an intruder. He was the "man enemy," who came behind to sow the tares in the steps of the true sower. With what fury Peter gave the denial to his impostures, to his false allegations of personal revelations, his ascension to the third heaven, his, pretension of knowing about Jesus some things which the hearers of the gospel had not understood, the exaggerated manner in which he and his disciples interpreted the divinity of Jesus!

These strange ideas of half ignorant sectaries would have been without consequences outside of Rome; but every thing which related to Peter assumed importance in the capital of the world. In spite of its heresies, "The Preachings of Peter" had much interest for the orthodox. The primacy of Peter was there proclaimed. St. Paul was thus injured; but a few retouches extenuated what was shocking in these attacks. Several attempts were made to diminish the peculiarities of the new book, and adapt it to the Catholics. This mode of re-modelling books to suit the sect to which one belonged was the order of the day. Little by little the force of things was understood: all sensible men saw that there was safety for the work of Jesus only in the perfect reconciliation of the two heads of the Christian doctrine. Paul had, even in the sixth century, some bitter enemies: he had always some enthusiastic followers like Marcion. Outside of these obstinate men of the right and left, there was a union of the moderate masses, who, before their Christianism in one of the schools, fully recognized the right of the other to be called Christian. James, the partisan of absolute Judaism, was sacrificed, although he had been the true chief of the circumcision. Peter, who was much less objectionable to the disciples of Paul, was preferred before him. James retained no devoted partisans outside of the Judæan-Christians.

It is difficult to say who gained the most in this reconciliation. The concessions came principally from the side of Paul: all Paul's disciples received the others without difficulty, while those of Peter repulsed the followers of Paul. But concessions usually come from the strong. In truth, each day confirmed Paul's victory.

Each Gentile convert weighted the balance on his side. Outside of Syria, the Judæan-Christians were swallowed up by the wave of new converts. The churches of Paul prospered: they had good judgment, solidity of mind, and some pecuniary resources which the others had not. The Ebionite churches, on the contrary, grew poorer each day. The money of the churches of Paul was spent in the support of some glorious poor men, who were unable to earn any thing, but who possessed the traditional life of the primitive spirit. The elevated piety and severe manners of these last were admired by the Christian communities of Pagan origin, who imitated and assimilated themselves to these customs. It soon happened that no distinction was manifest: the sweet and conciliatory spirit of St. Luke and Clement Romanus prevailed. The compact of peace was sealed. It was agreed that Peter had converted the first-fruits of the Gentiles, that he had first absolved them from the yoke of the law. It was admitted that Peter and Paul had been the two heads, the founders of the Church of Rome; Peter and Paul became the halves of an inseparable couple,--two luminaries, like the sun and moon. What one taught, the other taught also. They had always been in accord: they had opposed the same enemies, had been victims of Simon the Magician. At Rome they lived like brothers; the Church of Rome was their common work. The supremacy of this church was established for ages.

Thus, from the reconciliation of these parties, the settlement of these primitive struggles, there came forth a grand unity,--the Catholic Church, the Church of Peter and of Paul, a stranger to the rivalries which had marked the first century.

It was, above all, the death of the two apostles which pre-occupied the parties, and gave an opportunity for the most diverse combinations. The tissue of tradition grew in this respect, by an instinctive travail, almost as imperious as that which had presided at the construction of the legend of Jesus. The end of the life of Peter and of Paul was commanded _à priori_. It was maintained that Christ had predicted the martyrdom of Peter, as he had announced the death of the sons of Zebedee. The need was felt of associating in death the two persons who had been reconciled by force. It was hoped, and perhaps this was not far from right, that they died together, or at least as the consequence of the same event. The places which were believed to have been sanctified by this bloody drama were early fixed upon, and consecrated by _memoriæ_. In each case, whatever the people desired came in the end to be true. Tradition makes history, retrospectively, as it ought to have been, and as it never is. Not long ago the portraits of Victor Emmanuel and Pius IX. hung side by side in every frequented place in Italy; and the people desired that these two men, who represented principles whose reconciliation was generally considered necessary to Italy, should be in reality completely united. If, in our time, such views impose themselves on history, it will one day appear, in documents reputed to be serious, that Victor Emmanuel and Pius IX. (probably Garibaldi will be added) met each other secretly, understood and loved each other. During the middle ages, at different times, similar attempts were made to appease the hatreds of the Dominicans and Franciscans; to prove that the founders of these two orders were two brothers living together in the most affectionate intercourse; that at first their rules were the same; and that St. Dominic girded himself with the cord of St. Francis.

Concerning Peter and Paul, the increase of the legend was rich and rapid. Rome and all its environs, above all the way to Ostia, were full of souvenirs which were pretended to be connected with the last days of the two apostles. A crowd of touching circumstances; the flight of Peter; the vision of Jesus bearing his cross, _iterum crucifigi_; the final adieu of Peter and Paul; the meeting of Peter with his wife; Paul at the Salvian waters; Plautilla sending the handkerchief which bound her hair to bandage the eyes of Paul,--all this presented a beautiful ensemble, to which was only wanting an ingenuous and skilful writer. It was too late; the vein of the first Christian literature was spent; the serenity of the narrator of the Acts was lost; his voice was raised no more in story or in romance. It is impossible to choose between a crowd of equally apocryphal writings: in vain one seeks to shield these recitals with the most venerable names (pseudo-Linus, pseudo-Marcellus); the Roman legend of Peter and Paul remains always in a sporadic state. It was more often recounted by the pious guides than seriously read. It was a local affair: no text concerning it has been consecrated and made authoritative for reading in the churches.

* * * * *

Many among you, ladies and gentlemen, will go to Rome, or will return there. Ah, well! if you preserve any good remembrance of these conferences, go, in memory of me, to the Salvian waters, _alle tre fontane_, to St. Paul-without-the-Walls. It is one of the most beautiful parts of the Roman Campagna,--deserted, damp, green, and sad. There, in a deep depression in the soil, crowned by those grand horizontal lines, disturbed by no living detail,--there are some clear and cold springs. The fever and mouldiness of the tomb are inhaled there. Some Trappists are there established, conscientiously practising their religious suicide. When you are there, sit down a moment, not too long (one quickly catches the fever there), and, while the Trappists give you to drink the water which gushes from the three bounds which the head of Paul made, think of him who came here to talk of these legends with you, and to whom you have listened with so much courtesy and kind attention.

FOURTH CONFERENCE,

London, April 14, 1880.

ROME, THE CAPITAL OF CATHOLICISM.

FOURTH CONFERENCE.

ROME, THE CAPITAL OF CATHOLICISM.