6-6. The Aggrandizement of the Diaconate
2. The earlier paragraphs of this chapter have already given us reason to anticipate the developments of the diaconate in the fourth century. We have seen how the intimate relations of the deacons with the bishop as his personal staff caused the business of the churches to pass more and more, as numbers multiplied, through their hands; we have seen also how from their attendance on the bishop, in church as well as outside of it, they gradually acquired what they did not originally possess, a status in Christian worship. It is just on these two lines that their aggrandisement still proceeded. In Rome and in some of the Eastern churches (witness the last canon of the Council of Neocaesarea in Pontus, c. 315), the deacons were limited, on the supposed model of the Acts, to seven, while the presbyterate admitted of indefinite increase, and the mere disproportion in numbers exalted the individual deacon : "diaconos paucitas honorabiles, presbyteros turba contemptibiles facit," says Jerome bitterly. But if complaint and criticism focused itself on the affairs of the church of Rome, where everything was on a larger scale and on a more prominent stage than elsewhere, the indications all suggest that the same thing was in lesser measure happening in other churches.
The legislation of the earliest councils of the fourth century supplies eloquent testimony to the ambition of deacons in general and Roman deacons in particular. The Spanish canons of Elvira, c. 305, shew that a deacon might be in the position of "regens plebem," in charge, no doubt, of a village congregation : he might (exceptionally) baptize, but he might not do what "in many places" the bishops of the Council of Aries, in 314, learnt that he did, namely "offer" the Eucharist. By a special canon of the same Council of Aries, the deacons of the Roman City are directed not to take so much upon themselves, but to defer to the presbyters and to act only with their sanction. Both these canons of Aries are combined and repeated in the 18th canon of Nicaea: but the reference to Rome is omitted, and the presumptions of the diaconate — we must suppose that existing conditions in the Eastern churches are now in view — take the form of administering the Eucharist to presbyters, receiving the Eucharist before bishops, and sitting down among the presbyters in church. Later on in the century we find the Roman deacons wearing the vestment called "dalmatic," which elsewhere was reserved to the bishop : and one of them — probably the Mercury who is mentioned in one of Pope Damasus' epigrams — had asserted the absolute equality of deacons and priests. Ambrosiaster, who may be confidently identified with the Roman ex-Jew Isaac, the supporter of the Anti-pope Ursinus, treats in the hundred and first of his Quaestiones "de iactantia Romanorum levitarum": Jerome, in his epistle ad Evangelum presbyterum, appropriates the arguments of Ambrosiaster and clothes them with his own incomparable style.
The Roman deacons, they tell us, arrogate to themselves the functions of priests in saying grace when asked out to dinner, and in getting responses made to themselves in church instead of to the priests: and this arrogance is made possible because of their influence with the laity and in the administration of ecclesiastical affairs, "adsiduae stationes domesticae et officialitas." But the mind of the Church is clear : "si auctoritas quaeritur, Orbis maior est Urbe": even at Rome presbyters sit, while deacons stand, and if at Rome deacons do not carry the altar and its furniture or pour water over the hands of the priest — as they do in every other church — that is only because at Rome there is a "multitude of clerks" to undertake these offices in their place.
We do not know that these indignant remonstrances of Ambrosiaster and Jerome had any practical results: we do know that in the second half of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century three deacons, Felix, Ursinus, and Eulalius, made vain attempts upon the papal throne — the successful rivals of the two latter were priests, Damasus and Boniface — while by the middle of the fifth century, as illustrated in the persons of St Leo and his successor Hilarius, the archdeacon almost naturally became pope.
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