6-3. The Four Orders of Christian Offices
Of such a hierarchy the germs had no doubt existed from the beginning; and indeed presbyters and deacons were, as we have seen, older component parts of the local communities than were the bishops themselves. In the Ignatian theory bishop, presbyters, and deacons are the three universal elements of organisation, "without which nothing can be called a church". And the distinction between the two subordinate orders, in their original scope and intention, was just the distinction between the two sides of clerical office which in the bishop were in some sort combined, the spiritual and the administrative: presbyters were the associates of the bishop in his spiritual character, deacons in his administrative functions.
Our earliest documents define the work of presbyters by no language more commonly than by that which expresses the "pastoral" relation of a shepherd to his flock: "the flock in which the Holy Ghost hath set you as overseers to shepherd the Church of God," "the presbyters I exhort . . . shepherd the flock of God among you . . . not as lords of the ground but as examples of the flock, until the Great Shepherd shall appear." But in proportion as the local organisation became episcopal, the pastoral idea concentrated itself upon the bishop. To Ignatius the distinctive function of the presbyters is rather that of a council, gathered round the bishop as the apostles were gathered round Christ — an idea not unconnected perhaps with the position of the presbyters in the Christian assembly; for there is no reason to doubt that primitive tradition underlies the arrangement of the early Christian basilicas, where the bishop's chair stood in the centre of the apse behind the altar, and the consessus presbyterorum extended right and left in a semicircle, as represented in the Apocalypse. So too in the Didascalia Apostolorum (Syriac and Latin) the one definite function allotted to presbyters is that of "consilium et curia ecclesiae."
Besides pastoral duties, however, the Pauline epistles bring presbyters into definite relation also with the work of teaching. If "teachers " were originally one grade of the general ministry, they would naturally have settled down in the communities earlier than the itinerant apostles or prophets: "pastors and teachers" are already closely connected in the epistle to the Ephesians: and the first epistle to Timothy shews us that "speaking and teaching." It is probable enough that the second-century bishop shared this, as all other functions of the presbyterate: St Polycarp is described by his flock as an "apostolic and prophetic teacher": but, as differentiation progressed, teaching was one of the duties less easily retained in the bishop's hands, and our third-century authorities are full of references to the class known in Latin as presbyteri doctores.
If presbyters were thus the bishop's counsellors and advisers where counsel was needed, his colleagues in the rites of Christian worship, his assistants and representatives in pastoral and teaching duties, the prototypes of the diaconate are to be found in the Seven of the Acts, who were appointed to disburden the apostles of the work of poor relief and charity and to set them free for their more spiritual duties of "prayer and ministering of the Word." Quite similarly in the "servants" of the local church, the bishop found ready to hand a personal staff of clerks and secretaries. The Christian Church in one not unimportant aspect was a gigantic friendly society: and the deacons were the relieving officers who, under the direction of the "overseer," sought out the local members of the society in their homes, and dispensed to those who were in permanent or temporary need the contributions of their more fortunate brethren. From their district-visiting the deacons would derive an intimate knowledge of the circumstances and characters of individual Christians, and of the way in which each was living up to his profession: by a very natural development it became part of their recognised duties, as we learn from the Didascalia, to report to the bishop cases calling for the exercise of the penitential discipline of the Church. Throughout all the early centuries the closeness of their personal relation with the bishop remains: but what had been spread over the whole diaconate tends to be concentrated on an individual, when the office of archdeacon — oculus episcopi, according to a favourite metaphor — begins to emerge: the earliest instances of the actual title are c. 370-380, in Optatus of Caecilian of Carthage and in the Gesta inter Liberium et Felicem of Felix of Rome.
Originally, as it would seem, deacons were not ministers of worship at all: the earliest subordinate office in the liturgy was that of reader. By the end of the second century the first of the minor orders had obviously an established place in church usage. While Ignatius names only bishop, presbyters, and deacons, Tertullian, contrasting the stable orders of Catholics with the unsettled arrangements of heretics, speaks of bishop, presbyter, deacon, and reader: "alius hodie episcopus, eras alius; hodie diaconus qui eras lector; hodie presbyter qui eras laicus." And in remote churches or backwardly organised provinces the same four orders were the minimum recognised long after Tertullian, as in the so-called Apostolic Church Order (third century, perhaps for Egypt) and in the canons of the Council of Sardica (343, for the Balkan peninsula: the canon is proposed by the Spaniard Hosius of Cordova).
But the process of transformation by which the diaconate became more and more a spiritual office began early, and one of its results was to degrade the readership by ousting it from its proper functions. It was as attendants on the bishop that the deacons, we may well suppose, were deputed from the first to take the Eucharist, over which the bishop had offered the prayers and thanksgivings of the Church, to the absent sick. In Rome, when Justin wrote, soon after 150, they were already distributing the consecrated "bread and wine and water" in the Christian assembly. Not very much later the reading of the Gospel began to be assigned to them: Cyprian is the last writer to connect the Gospel still with the reader; by the end of the third century it was a constant function of the deacon, and the reader had sunk proportionately in rank and dignity.
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