CHAPTER V

ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS

§ 1. The Economic Side

It is important to realize in some detail the operation of the economic factor in particular, and of organization in general, before we try to grasp synthetically the total process of documentary and doctrinal construction. The former is somewhat sedulously ignored in ordinary historiography, by reason of a general unwillingness even among rationalists to seem to connect mercenary motives with religious beginnings; and of the general assumption among religionists that "true" or "early" religion operates in spite of, in defiance or in independence of and not by aid of, economic motives. No one will dispute that the history of the Roman Catholic Church is one of economic as well as doctrinal action and reaction, or that Protestantism from the first was in large measure an economic processus. But it is commonly assumed, at least implicitly, that "primitive" religion, religion "in the making," is not at all an affair of economic motive or reaction.

Those who have at all closely studied primitive religious life know that this is not so. [340] The savage medicine-man is up to his lights as keenly concerned about his economic interest as were the priests of ancient Babylon and Egypt--to take instances that can hardly give modern offence. [341] And to say this is not to say that the "religion" involved is insincere, in the case of the savage or the pagan any more than in that of the modern ecclesiastic or missionary. It is merely to say that religion has always its economic side, and that faith may go with economic self-seeking as easily as with self-sacrifice. I at least am not prepared to say that when the Franciscans in general passed from the state of voluntary poverty to that of corporate wealth they ceased to be sincere believers; or that a bishop is necessarily less pious than a Local Preacher.

I have seen, in Egypt, the life of a Moslem "saint" in the making. He fasted much, certainly never eating more than one meal a day, and he was visibly emaciated and feeble as a result of his abstinences. Over his devout neighbours he had an immense influence. To his religious addresses they listened with rapt reverence; and when once in my presence he gave to a young man a religious charm to cure his sick sister, in the shape of a cigarette paper inscribed with a text from the Koran and rolled up to be swallowed, the youth's face was transfigured with joyous faith, his eyes shining as if he had seen a glorious vision. I have not seen more radiant faith, in or out of "Israel." And the saint, all the same, took unconcealed satisfaction in showing privately the heavy purse of gold he had recently collected from his faithful. To call him insincere would be puerile. I believe him to have been as sincere as Luther or Loyola. He simply happened, like so many Easterns and Westerns, to combine the love of pelf with the love of God.

If I am told there were no such men among the early Jesuists or Christian propagandists, I answer that if there had not been the cult would not have gone very far. Of course the records minimize the economic side. In the gospels we are told that Judas carried "the bag," but never anything of what he got to put in it. But in the Acts, the economic factor obtrudes itself even in myth. A picture is there drawn (ii, 44), for the edification of later Christians, of the first community as having "all things common"--a statement which we have no reason to believe true of any ancient Christian community whatever--unless in the "pre-apostolic" period. [342] The picture never recurs, in the apostolic history or elsewhere. And the purpose of edification is unconsciously turned to the account of revelation. Of the faithful it is represented that they "sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all, according as any man had need." The assertion is reiterated (iv, 34) to the extent of alleging that all who had houses or lands sold all, bringing the proceeds to the apostles for distribution "according as any one had need." Among these having need would certainly be the "apostles."

Soon one of the faithful, Joseph surnamed Barnabas, "a Levite, a man of Cyprus by race," is held up to honour for that "having a field," he "sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet." Then comes the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who, or at least the former, have ever since supplied Christendom with its standing name for the fraudulent liar. The sin of Ananias consisted in his not having given the apostles the whole price of a possession he had voluntarily sold for behoof of the community. There could be no more striking instance of the power of ecclesiastical ethic to paralyse the general moral sense. Ananias in the legend was giving liberally, but not liberally enough to satisfy the apostle, who accordingly denounces him as sinning against the Holy Ghost, [343] and miraculously slays him for his crime. One might have supposed that no Christian reader, remembering that the ultra-righteous apostle, in the previous sacrosanct record, had just before been represented as basely denying his Lord, could fail to be struck with shame and horror by the savage recital. But of such shame and horror I cannot recall one Christian avowal. And we are to remember that the devout recipients of that recital are assumed to have been the ideal Christian converts.

Soon the twelve are made to explain (vi, 2-4) to the growing "multitude of the disciples" that "it is not fit that we should forsake the word of God, and serve tables. Look ye out ... seven men of good report, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. But we will continue stedfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the word." From the date of that writing the apostle and his successors could claim to be worthy of their hire, though they had long to squabble for it. In the early Jesuist additions to the Teaching we see how the issue was raised. At first (xi) there is a succession of wandering apostles or "prophets." Every apostle is to be received "as the Lord; but he shall not remain [except for?] one day; if however there be need, then the next [day]; but if he remain three days, he is a false prophet. But when the apostle departeth, let him take nothing except bread enough till he lodge [again]; but if he ask money, he is a false prophet." That is the first stage, probably quite Judaic.

The next section (xii) still adheres broadly to the same view. Every entrant must work for his living. "If he will not act according to this, he is a Christmonger (christemporos)." Evidently there were already Christmongers. But in chapter xiii the primitive stage has been passed, and there is systematic enactment of economic provision for the installed prophet or teacher as such:--

But every true prophet who will settle among you is worthy of his food. Likewise a true teacher, he also is worthy, like the workman, of his food. Every first-fruit, then, of the produce of wine-press and threshing-floor, of oxen and of sheep, thou shalt take and give to the prophets; for they are your high-priests. But if ye have no prophet, give [it] to the poor. If thou makest a baking of bread, take the first [of it] and give according to the commandment. In like manner when thou openest a jar of wine or oil, take the first [of it] and give to the prophets; and of money and clothing and every possession, take the first, as may seem right to thee, and give according to the commandment.

This economic development, too, may have been Jewish, as it was heathen. [344] It is certainly also Christian. The "prophets" are represented in the Acts (xi, 27) as at work already in the days of Claudius; and they were an established class at the time of the writing of First Corinthians (xii, 28), standing next to "apostles" and above "teachers." That passage is obviously post-Pauline, if we are to think of Paul as spending only a few years in his eastern propaganda. But the prophets are ostensibly numerous in the earliest days of the church, [345] and seem to have subsisted alongside of "apostles" at the outset. All along they must have found some subsistence: in time they are "established." The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth sections of the Teaching, which are our best evidence of the progression, show a gradual triumph of the economic factor, registering itself in the additions. The fifteenth section divides in two parts, an economic and an ethical, the economic coming first:--

Now elect for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men meek and not avaricious, and upright and proved; for they too render you the service of the prophets and the teachers. Therefore neglect them not; for they are the ones who are honoured of you, together with the prophets and teachers.

It was for a community thus supporting various classes of teachers and preachers, first poorly and primitively, later in an organized fashion, that the gospels were built up and the epistles composed.

§ 2. Organization

Organization, which in our days has become "a word to conjure with," is no new factor in human life. It is the secret of survival for communities and institutions; and the survival of Christism in its competition with other cults must be traced mainly to the early process of adaptation. That, however, takes place in terms of three concurrent factors: (1) the appeal made by the cult which is the ground of association; (2) the practice of the community as regards the relations of members; (3) the administration, as regards propaganda, expansion and co-ordination of groups. And it is through primary adaptations in respect of the first and second, with a constant stimulus from the third, that the Christian Church can be seen to have succeeded in the struggle for existence. That is to say, it is in the element in which conscious organization is most prominent as distinct from usage or tradition that the determining influence chiefly lies.

The writer who in England was the first to take a comparatively scientific view of church organization from the ecclesiastical side, the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, puts in the forefront of his survey "the preliminary assumption that, as matter of historical research, the facts of ecclesiastical history do not differ in kind from the facts of civil history." [346] For those who see in the religion itself a processus of natural social history, this assumption is a matter of course; but the ecclesiastical recognition of the fact is an important step; and the churchman's analysis of the process is doubly serviceable in that he keeps the study avowedly separate from that of the evolution of doctrine. What he could not have supplied on scientific lines without falling into heresy, the rationalist can supply for himself.

As our historian recognizes, the Christian movement in the Eastern Empire had from the outset a strong basis in the democratic spirit which it derived alike from Jewish and from Hellenistic example. In the day of universal autocracy, social life lay more and more in the principles of voluntary association; and the first Christian churches were but instances of an impulse seen in operation on all sides. In the Jewish environment, the synagogue; in the Hellenistic the ecclesia or private association, were everywhere in evidence. Greek religious associations--thiasoi, eranoi, orgeones--were but types of the prevailing impetus to find in voluntary organized groups a substitute for the democratic life of the past. [347] Whereas the older associations for the promotion of special worships were limited to male free citizens, the new admitted foreigners, slaves, and women. Besides religious associations there were a multitude of others which had the double aspect of clubs and friendly societies; trade guilds existed "among almost every kind of workmen in almost every town in the empire:" [348] and burial clubs, dining clubs, financial societies, and friendly societies met other social needs.

Almost every society, however, had its tutelary divinity, "in the same way as at the present day similar associations on the continent of Europe"--as in England before the Reformation--"invoke the name of a patron saint; and their meetings were sometimes called by a name which was afterwards consecrated to Christian uses--that of a 'sacred synod.'" [349] In many of them "religion was, beyond this, the basis and bond of union.... Then, as now, many men had two religions, that which they professed and that which they believed; for the former there were temples and State officials and public sacrifices; for the latter there were associations; and in these associations, as is shown from extant inscriptions, divinities whom the State ignored had their priests, their chapels, and their ritual." [350]

The Christists, then, when they began to form groups, were doing what a swarm of other movements did. Their ecclesiæ were called by a pagan name, as were the Jewish synagogues. Two things it behoved them to do if they were collectively to gain ground and outlive or out-top the rest: they must multiply in membership, and they must co-ordinate their groups; and both things they did on lines of common action. Membership was from the first promoted by the simplest of all methods, systematic almsgiving to poor adherents; a practice long before initiated by the Jewish synagogues and to this day fixed among them. Given the basis of free association, the inculcated duty of almsgiving, the eastern belief in its saving virtue, [351] and the special Christian belief in the speedy end of the world, the problem of membership was early solved. The poor, helped one day, would themselves help the next, as is their human way in all ages; and in an age of general poverty, the result of an autocratic fiscal system in the Empire as afterwards in the Turkish Empire which in the East took its place, such mutual sympathy constituted a broad social basis of corporate existence.

For our ecclesiastical historian, the poverty is the main determinant on the side of early organization. With a note of profound pessimism, which alternates strangely with passages of professional eulogy of the Church, he notes that pauperism and philanthropy were going hand in hand already throughout the Empire before the advent of Christianity, rich men and municipalities proclaiming an "almost Christian sentiment" on the subject. "The instinct of benevolence was fairly roused. And yet to the mass of men life was hardly worth living. It tended to become a despair." [352] And he claims that the Christian practice of almsgiving--which he knows to have been warmly inculcated among the Jews, as it has always been in Eastern countries--was one of the conservative forces that "arrested decay. They have prevented the disintegration, and possibly the disintegration by a vast and ruinous convulsion, of the social fabric. Of those forces the primitive bishops and deacons were the channels and the ministers.... They bridged over the widening interval between class and class. They lessened to the individual soul the weight of that awful sadness of which, then as now, to the mass of men, life was the synonym and the sum." [353]

The generalization as to the widening of the interval between classes is hardly borne out by the evidence; and the pessimism of the last sentence partly defeats the argument, by putting the life of the early Christian period on the same general level with that of to-day and of all the time between. The true summary would be that in that age the springs of social life were lamed by the suppression of all national existence; that the rule of Rome tended to general impoverishment in respect of a vicious system of taxation; and that the subject peoples, deprived of the old impulses to collective energy, at once turned more and more to private association and became ready to believe in a coming "end of the world" which in some way was to mean a new life. And as the Church's doctrine was pre-eminently one of salvation in that new life, it behoved it in every way to resort to propaganda while maintaining the eleemosynary system which gave it a broad basis of membership. Thus the organization which controlled the simple financial system must also have regard to the spread of doctrine. And for the means of spreading doctrine, again, as we have already noted, the cue was obviously given by Judaism, which stood out from all religious systems in the Roman world as a religion of Sacred Books. Sacred Books of its own the Jesuist movement must have if it was to hold its own against the prestige of the Jewish Bible. The production of Sacred Books, then, was a task which devolved upon the organizers of the Christian ecclesiæ throughout the Eastern Empire, equally with the task of co-ordination, of which, in fact, it was a main part. A common religious literature was the basis of Jewish cohesion. Only by means of a common religious literature could Christism cohere.

No literature, indeed, could avert schism. Schism and strife are among the first notes sounded in the epistles; and a religion which aimed at dogmatic teaching, as against the purely liturgical practice of the old pagan cults, was bound to multiply them. Judaism itself was divided into antagonistic groups of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes, to say nothing of the Zealots, the Essenes, and other diverging groups. But sects do not destroy a religion any more than parties destroy a State; and the way of success for Christism was a way which, while it involved a multiplication of schism so long as the voluntary basis remained, made a growing aggregate which was at least a unity as having a special creed, distinct from all competing with it.

Thus the Christian movement was doubly a copy and competitor of Judaism, upon whose books it primarily founded. As the dispersed Jewish synagogues were co-ordinated from Jerusalem by the High Priest, and later from Tiberias by the Patriarch, by means of Twelve Apostles and possibly by a subordinate grade of seventy-two collectors who brought in the contributions of the faithful scattered among the Gentiles, so the Jesuists, beginning with an organization centred in Jerusalem and likewise aiming at the collection of funds for which almsgiving in Jerusalem was the appealing pretext, were bound after the fall of the Temple to aim at a centralization or centralizations of their own. A literature became more and more necessary if the new faith was to extend. That was the way at once to glorify the new Hero-God and to multiply his devotees. And it would seem to have been from the starting-point of the Jewish Teaching of the Twelve Apostles that the new departure on one line was made.

To say who, or what class in the new organization, began the evolution, seems impossible in the present state of our knowledge. The point at which the Christist organization in course of time most noticeably diverges from the Jewish model is in the creation and aggrandisement of the episcopos, the bishop, a title and a function borrowed from the pagan societies. These had officials called epimeletai (superintendents) and episcopoi, whose function it was to receive funds and dispense alms. [354] The early Christists adopted the latter title, and constituted for each group a single official so named, who as president of the assembly received the offerings of donors and was personally responsible for their distribution. This is not the place to trace the effects of the institution in the general development of the churches. It must suffice to note that while in their presbyters these preserved the democratic element which they had derived from Judaism and which gave them their social foundation, their creation of a supreme administrator, whose interest it was always to increase the influence of his church by increasing his own, gave them a special source of strength in comparison with the Judaic system. [355]

For the dispersed Jews, held by a racial tie, association was a matter of course. Marked off by religion if not by aspect from Gentiles everywhere, they were a community within the Gentile community. For the first Jesuists, association was not thus a matter of course all round. For the slaves, seeking friendship, and the poor, seeking help, it may have been; but the more prosperous were for that very reason less spontaneously attracted. The fundamental tie was the so-called "Eucharist," which at first, in varying forms, was probably only an annual rite: the agapae or love feasts were common to the multitude of pagan associations. Accordingly many adherents tended to "forsake the assembling of themselves together," [356] and it was plainly the function of the bishop to act upon these. Not only the Epistle to the Hebrews and that of Jude but those of Barnabas and Ignatius, and The Shepherd of Hermas, anxiously or sternly urge the duty of regular meeting. Addresses by bishops and "prophets" would be natural means of promoting the end.

Who then produced the literature? Once more, there is no evidence. If any of the Epistles might at first sight seem "genuine," they are those ascribed to James and Jude, essentially Judaic or Judaistic documents, especially the former, in which (ii, 1) the cumbrous formula "the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory" exhibits a Christian interpolation. It is essentially in the spirit of the Teaching, a counsel of right living, calling for works in opposition to the new doctrine that faith is the one thing needful, and sounding the Ebionitic note (v, 1): "Go to now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you." But save for the interpolation and the naming of Jesus Christ in the sentence of preamble, there is no specific Jesuist or Christist teaching whatever. If this document was current among the Jesuists, it was borrowed from a Jewish author who had at most one special item of belief in common with them, that of "the coming [or presence] of the Lord" (v. 7, 8); and here there is no certainty that "the Lord" meant for the writer the Christ.

Once more, then, we turn for our first clue to the Judaic Teaching, which on its face exhibits the gradual accretion of Jesuist elements, beginning with an Ebionitic mention of the "Servant" Jesus, and proceeding step by step from a stage in which wandering "apostles" or "prophets" must subsist from hand to mouth and from day to day, to one in which settled prophets are supported by first fruits, and yet a further one in which bishops and deacons appear to administer while prophets and teachers continue to teach. And as the "prophets" constitute a class which in the third century has disappeared from the church, as if its work were done; and as they bear the name given to the chief producers of the sacred literature of Judaism, it would seem to be the natural surmise that they were the primary producers of special literature for the early Christian churches.