6-11. The Processes of Church Federation
(B) So far we have been dealing only with the internal development of the individual Christian community. But there is an external as well as an internal development to trace; the separate communities were always in intimate touch with one another, and the common feeling of the mass of them formed an authority which, from the beginning, the law of Christian brotherhood made supreme. " If one member suffer, all the members suffer," "we have no such custom, neither the churches of God: " the principles are laid down in our earliest Christian documents, and the organisation of the Catholic Church was an attempt to work them out in practice. No doubt the result only imperfectly embodied the idea, and in the process of translation into concrete form the means came sometimes to appear of more value than the end.
The history of the second century shews how naturally the formal processes of federation grew out of what was at first the spontaneous response to the calls of membership of the great Society, the natural effort to express the reality of Christian union and fellowship. The Roman community, under the leadership of St Clement, writes a letter of expostulation when the traditions of stability and order are threatened by the dissensions between the Corinthian community and its presbyters, St Ignatius addresses separate epistles to the churches of several cities in Asia Minor, on or near his road to Rome, exhorting them to hold fast to the traditional teaching and world- wide organisation of the Christian Society. The church of Smyrna announces to the church of Philomelium the martyrdom of its bishop Poylcarp: the churches of Lyons and Vienne send to their brethren in Asia and Phrygia an account of the great persecution of 177, and the confessors from the same cities intervene with Pope Eleutherus in favour of a sympathetic treatment of the Montanist movement. Correspondence was reinforced by personal intercourse: Polycarp journeyed to Rome to discuss the Easter difficulty with Pope Anicetus; Hegesippus, Melito and Abercius travelled widely among different churches; Clement of Alexandria had sat at the feet of half-a-dozen teachers. Never was the impulse to unity, the desire to test the doctrine of one church or of one teacher by its agreement with the doctrine of the rest, stronger than in the days when formal methods of arriving at the general sense of the scattered communities had not as yet been hammered out. The Christian statesmen of the age of the councils were only attempting to provide a more scientific means of attaining an end which was vividly before the minds of their predecessors in the sub-apostolic generations.
The crucial step in the direction of organised action was taken when the bishops of neighbouring communities began to meet together for mutual counsel. Such owosoi or concilia were no doubt, in the first instance, called for specific purposes and at irregular times. Tertullian alludes to decisions of church councils unfavourable to the canonicity of the Shepherd of Hermas, and makes special mention on another occasion of councils in Greece: "ilia certis in locis concilia ex universis ecclesiis, per quae et altiora quaeque in commune tractantur, et ipsa repraesentatio totius nominis christiani magna veneratione celebratur." The earliest notice of separate councils held simultaneously to discuss a pressing problem of the day is also the earliest indication of the sort of area from which any one of such councils would naturally be drawn; for when, about 196, tension became acute in regard to the attitude of the bishops of proconsular Asia, who refused to come into line with the Paschal observances of other churches, councils were held, as we learn from Eusebius, of the bishops in Palestine and in Pontus and in Gaul and in Osrhoene. During the course of the third century these local or provincial councils became more and more a regular and essential feature of church life and government. But there was as yet very little that was stereotyped about the system. It was Cyprian beyond all others who succeeded, during his brief ten years of episcopate, 248-258, in forging a very practical weapon for the needs of the time out of the conciliar movement: and of Cyprian's councils some represented (proconsular) Africa alone, some Africa and Numidia, some Africa, Numidia, and Mauretania combined; the meetings were more or less annual, but the extent of the area from which the bishops were summoned depended apparently upon the gravity of the business to be dealt with.
Again, if the civil province was in ordinary cases the natural model to follow, there was no necessary dependence upon its boundary lines, where these were artificial or arbitrary. For reasons of State the senatorial province of proconsular Africa and the imperial province of Numidia were so arranged that the more civilised districts and the seaboard belonged to the one, the more backward interior to the other: but the Numidia of ecclesiastical organisation was the ethnic Numidia, the country of the Numidians, not the Numidia of political geography. Perhaps it was just for this reason, because ethnic and ecclesiastical Numidia was shared between two civil provinces, that in assemblies of the Numidian bishops the president was not, as elsewhere, the bishop of the capital or of the province, but the bishop senior by consecration.
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