6-4. The Church’s Cursus Honorum
But this development of the diaconate is only part of a much larger movement. In the greater churches at least an elaborate differentiation of functions and functionaries was in course of process during the third century. Under the pressure of circumstances, and the accumulation of new duties which the increasing size and importance of the Christian communities thrust upon the bishop, much which he had hitherto done for himself, and which long remained his in theory, came in practice to be done for him by the higher clergy. As they moved up to take his place, they in turn left duties to be provided for: as they drew more and more to the spiritual side of their work, they left the more secular duties to new officials in their place. Evidence for Carthage and Rome in the middle of the third century shews us that, besides the principal orders of bishop, presbyters, and deacons, a large community would now complete its clerics by two additional pairs of officers, subdeacon and acolyte, exorcist and reader, making seven altogether.
The church of Carthage, we learn from the Cyprianic correspondence, had exorcists and readers, apparently at the bottom of the clergy (ep. xxiii. "praesente de clero et exorcista et lectore [the words are no doubt ironical] Lucianus scripsit") ; and it had also hypodiaconi and acoliti, who served as the bearers of letters or gifts from the bishop to his correspondents. Subdeacons and acolytes were now in fact what deacons had earlier been, the personal and secretarial staff of the bishop, while exorcists and readers were the subordinate members of the liturgical ranks. The combination of all these various officers into a single definitely graduated hierarchy was the work of the fourth century: but it is at least adumbrated in the enumeration of the Roman derus addressed by Pope Cornelius, Cyprian's contemporary, to Fabius of Antioch in 251. Besides the bishop, there were at Rome forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes; of exorcists and readers, together with doorkeepers, there were fifty-two; of widows and afflicted over fifteen hundred: and all this "great multitude" was "necessary in the church."
Promotion from one rank of the ministry to another was of course no new thing. In particular the rise from the diaconate to the presbyterate, from the more secular to the more spiritual office, was always recognised as a legitimate reward for good service. "They that have served well as deacons," wrote St Paul, "purchase for themselves an honourable step"; though the Apostolic Church Order interpretation raises a question whether the place of a presbyter or that of a bishop is meant. But it was a serious and far-reaching development when, in the fourth century, the idea grew up that the Christian clergy consisted of a hierarchy of grades, through each of which it was necessary to pass in order to reach the higher offices. The Council of Nicaea had contented itself with the reasonable prohibition (canon 2) of the ordination of neophytes as bishops or presbyters. The Council of Sardica in 343 prescribes for the episcopate a "prolixum tempus" of promotions through the "munus" of reader, the "officium" of deacon, and the "ministerium" of presbyter.
But it was in the church of Rome that the conception of the cursus honorum — borrowed, we may suppose, consciously or unconsciously from the civil magistracies of the Roman State — took deepest root. Probably the oldest known case of particular clerical offices held in succession by the same individual is the record, in an inscription of Pope Damasus, of either his own or his father's career — there are variant readings "pater" and " puer," but even the son's career must have begun early in the fourth century — "exceptor, lector, levita, sacerdos." Ambrosiaster, a Roman and younger contemporary of Damasus, expresses clearly the conception of grades of order in which the greater includes the less, so that not only are presbyters ordained out of deacons and not vice versa, but a presbyter has in himself all the powers of the inferior ranks of the hierarchy: "maior enim ordo intra se et apud se habet et minorem, presbyter enim et diaconi agit officium et exorcistae et lectoris."
The earliest of the dated disciplinary decretals that has come down to us, the letter of Pope Siricius to Himerius of Tarragona in 385 (its prescriptions are repeated with less precision in that of Zosimus to Hesychius of Saiona in 418), emphasizes the stages and intervals of a normal ecclesiastical career. A child devoted early to the clerical life is made a reader at once, then acolyte and subdeacon up to thirty, deacon for five years, and presbyter for ten, so that forty-five is the minimum age for a bishop: even those who take orders in later life must spend two years among the readers or exorcists, and five as acolyte and subdeacon. But the requirements of Siricius and Zosimus are moderate when brought into comparison with the pseudo-papal documents which came crowding into being at the beginning of the sixth century: of the apocryphal councils fathered on Pope Sylvester the one gives a cursus of 52 years, the other of 55, before the episcopate.
Two considerations indeed must be borne in mind which qualify the apparent rigour of the fourth and fifth century cursus. In the first place we have already traced the beginning of the depreciation of the readership. In days when liturgical formulae were still unwritten, the reader's office was the only one that was mechanical: what it had necessarily implied was a modicum of education, and all who had passed through the office had at least learned to read. Thus it came about, from the fourth century onwards, that the readers were the boys who were receiving training and education in the schools of the Church: according to the canons, for instance, of the Council of Hippo in 393 readers on attaining the age of puberty made choice between marriage and permanent readership on the one hand, celibacy and rise through the various grades of clerical office on the other. And the second thing to be remembered is that all these prescriptions of canons or decretals represented a theoretical standard rather than a practice regularly carried out.
Canon Law in the fourth century could still be put aside, by bishop or people, when need arose, without scruple. Minor orders might be omitted. St Hilary of Poitiers wanted to ordain Martin a deacon straight off, and only made him an exorcist instead because he reckoned that Martin's humility would not allow him to refuse so low an office. Augustine and Jerome were ordained presbyters direct. Even the salutary Nicene rules about neophytes were on emergency violated: Ambrose of Milan and Nectarius of Constantinople were both elected as laymen (the former indeed as a catechumen), and were rushed through the preliminary grades without appreciable delay; St Ambrose passed from baptism to the episcopate in the course of a week.
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