THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 092

The Hierarchy of Bishops

6-13. The Hierarchy of Bishops

Here then we must pause for a moment to take into account the second main element in the history of the federation of the Christian churches. Every federation has to face this primary problem — the reconciliation of the equal rights of all participating bodies with the proportional rights of each according to their greater or less importance. The difficulty which modern constitutions have tried to solve by the expedient of a dual organisation, the one part of it giving to all constituent units an equal representation, the other part of it a proportionate representation according to population (or whatever other criterion of value may be selected), was a difficulty which lay also before the early Church. The unit of the Christian federation was the community, whose growth and development is described in the first half of this chapter; and that description has shewn us that the necessary and only conceivable representative of the individual community was its bishop. But some communities were small and insignificant and unknown in history, others were larger in numbers, or more potent in influence, or more venerable in traditions : were the bishops of these diverse communities all to enjoy equal weight?

Such a question was no doubt not consciously put until the scientific and reflective period of Christian thought began, nor before the complex process of federation was approaching completeness: that is to say, not before the end of the fourth century. But in so far as it was put, it could receive but one answer. In the theory of Christian writers from St Irenaeus and St Cyprian onwards, all bishops were equal, for they were all appointed to the same order and invested with the same powers, whether the sphere in which they exercised them were great or small; and this theory was given its sharpest expression in Jerome's assertion (in the same 146th letter) that the bishop of Gubbio had the same dignity as the bishop of Rome, seeing that both were equally successors of the Apostles, "ubicumque fuerit episcopus, sive Romae sive Eugubii, sive Constantinopoli sive Rhegii sive Alexandriae sive Tanis, eiusdem meriti eiusdem est sacerdotii . . . omnes apostolorum successores sunt."

But in fact, and side by side with the fullest recognition of this theoretical equality, the bishops of the greater or more important churches were recognised, as the rules of the federation were gradually crystallised, to hold positions of privilege, so that the ministry of the Church came to consist not only of a hierarchy within each local community, at the head of which stood the bishop, but of a further hierarchy among the bishops themselves, at the head of which, in some sense, stood the bishop of Rome. The first steps towards such a hierarchy were on the one hand the traditional influence and privileges which had grown up unnoticed round the greater sees, and on the other hand the position acquired by metropolitans in the working out of the provincial system.

The canons of the same councils which first provide for regular meetings of the bishops of each province, reveal also the rapid aggrandisement of the bishop of the metropolis, who presided over them. If at Nicaea the "commonwealth of bishops," is the authority according to one canon, by another the "ratification of the proceedings " belongs to the metropolitan. The canons of Antioch, sixteen years later, lay it down that the completeness of a synod consists in the presence of the metropolitan, and, while he is not to act without the rest, they in turn must recognise that the care of the province is committed to him and must be content to take no step of any sort outside their own diocese apart from him. Traditional sanction is already claimed for these prerogatives of the metropolitan they are "according to the ancient and still governing canon of the fathers."

Things were not so far advanced in this direction, it is true, in the West. At any point in the first five centuries the Latin Church lagged far behind the pitch of development attained by its Greek contemporaries. Christianity had had a century's start in the East, and at the conversion of Constantine it is probable that if the proportion of Christians in the whole population was a half, or nearly a half, among Greek-speaking peoples, it was not more than a fifth, in many parts not more than a tenth, in the West. The Latin canons of Sardica in 343 shew how little was as yet known of metropolitans. Although many of the enactments deal with questions of jurisdiction and judicature, the bishop of the metropolis is mentioned only once, and then in general terms, "coepiscopum nostrum qui in maxima civitate, id est metropoli, consistit." The name "metropolitan" is as foreign to these canons as to the earliest versions of the Nicene canons, where we meet with just the same paraphrases, "qui in metropoli sit constitutus," "qui in ampliori civitate provinciae videtur esse constitutus, id est in metropoli."

With this backwardness of development among the Latins went also a much smaller degree of subservience to the State: and it resulted from these two causes combined that their church organisation in the fourth and fifth centuries reflected the civil polity much less closely than was the case in the East. The "province" of the Nicene or Antiochene canons is the civil province, its metropolitan is the bishop of the civil metropolis, and it is assumed that every civil province formed also a separate ecclesiastical unit. It followed logically that the division of a civil province involved division of the ecclesiastical province as well. When the Arian emperor Valens, about 372, divided Cappadocia into Prima and Secunda, it was with the particular object of annoying the metropolitan of Caesarea, St Basil, and of diminishing the extent of his jurisdiction by raising Anthimus of Tyana to metropolitan rank; and though Basil resisted, Anthimus succeeded in the end in establishing his claim. Before the end of the fourth century not only every province but every group of provinces formed an ecclesiastical as well as a civil unit: the provinces of the Roman Empire had by subdivision become so numerous that Diocletian had grouped them into some dozen dioeceses with an exarch at the head of each, and the Council of Constantinople in 381 forbids the bishops of one dioecese or exarchate to interfere with the affairs of "the churches beyond their borders, "

So wholly modelled upon civil lines was the ecclesiastical organisation throughout the East, that in the middle of the fifth century the canons of Chalcedon assume an absolute correspondence of the one with the other. Every place which by imperial edict might be raised to the rank of a city, gained ipso facto the right to a bishop (canon 17). Every division for ecclesiastical purposes of a province which remained for civil purposes undivided was null and void — even if backed up by an imperial edict — the "real" metropolis being alone entitled to a metropolitan (canon 12). Civil and public lines must be followed in the arrangement of ecclesiastical boundaries.

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