The Historians' History of the World 08

Thus the Roman church was but one of the confederation of Greek religious republics, founded by Christianity. As of apostolic origin, still more as the church of the capital of the world, it was, of course, of paramount dignity and importance. It is difficult to exaggerate the height at which Rome, before the foundation of Constantinople, stood above the other cities of the earth; the centre of commerce, the centre of affairs, the centre of empire. The Christians, like the rest of mankind, were constantly ebbing and flowing out of Rome and into Rome. The church of the capital could not but assume something of the dignity of the capital; it was constantly receiving, as it were, the homage of all the foreign Christians, who, from interest, business, ambition, curiosity, either visited or took up their residence in the Eternal City.

But if Rome, or the church of Rome, was thus the centre of the more peaceful influences of Christianity, and of the hopes and fears of the Christian world, it was no less inevitably the chosen battle-field of her civil wars; and Christianity has ever more faithfully recorded her dissensions than her conquests. In Rome every feud which distracted the infant community reached its height; nowhere do the judaising tenets seem to have been more obstinate, or to have held so long and stubborn a conflict with more full and genuine Christianity. In Rome every heresy, almost every heresiarch, found welcome reception. All new opinions, all attempts to harmonise Christianity with the tenets of the Greek philosophers, with the oriental religions, the cosmogonies, the theophanies, and mysteries of the East, were boldly agitated, either by the authors of the gnostic systems or by their disciples. Valentinus the Alexandrian was himself in Rome, so also was Marcion of Sinope. The Phrygian Montanus, with his prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, if not present, had their sect, a powerful sect, in Rome and in Africa. In Rome their convert, for a time at least, was the pope; in Africa, Tertullian. Somewhat later, the precursors of the great Trinitarian controversy came from all quarters. Praxeas, an Asiatic; Theodotus, a Byzantine; Artemon, an Asiatic; Noetus, a Smyrniote, at least his disciples the deacon Epigenes and Cleomenes, taught at Rome. Sabellius, from Ptolemais in Cyrene, appeared in person; his opinions took their full development in Rome. Not only do all these controversies betray the inexhaustible fertility of the Greek or eastern imagination, not only were they all drawn from Greek or oriental doctrines, but they must have been still agitated, discussed, ramified into their parts and divisions, through the versatile and subtile Greek. They were all strangers and foreigners; not one of all these systems originated in Rome, in Italy, or in Africa. On all these opinions the bishop of Rome was almost compelled to sit in judgment; he must receive or reject, authorise or condemn; he was a proselyte, whom it would be the ambition of all to gain.

Thus, down to the conversion of Constantine, the biography of the Roman bishops, and the history of the Roman episcopate, are one; the acts and peculiar character of the pontiffs, the influence and fortunes of the see, excepting in the doubtful and occasional gleams of light which have brought out Victor, Zephyrinus, Calixtus, Cornelius, Stephen, into more distinct personality, are involved in a dim and vague twilight. On the establishment of Christianity, as the religion if not of the empire, of the emperor, the bishop of Rome rises at once to the rank of a great accredited functionary; the bishops gradually, though still slowly, assume the life of individual character. The bishop is the first Christian in the first city of the world, and that city is legally Christian. The supreme pontificate of heathenism might still linger from ancient usage among the numerous titles of the emperor; but so long as Constantine was in Rome, the bishop of Rome, the head of the emperor’s religion, became in public estimation the equal, in authority and influence immeasurably the superior, to all of sacerdotal rank. The schisms and factions of Christianity now become affairs of state. As long as Rome is the imperial residence, an appeal to the emperor is an appeal to the bishop of Rome. It was the slow and imperceptible accumulation of wealth, the unmarked ascent to power and sovereignty, which enabled the papacy to endure for centuries.

[312-395 A.D.]