6-7. Priesthood versus Order
3. As the deacon thus pressed hard on the heels of the presbyter, so the presbyter in turn put himself into competition with the bishop. Ambrosiaster and Jerome not only deny any parity of deacon and presbyter, but assert in opposition a fundamental parity of order between presbyter and bishop. Both were commentators on St Paul. Exegesis was one of the most fertile forms of that astonishing intellectual efflorescence, which, bursting out at the beginning of the fourth century in the schools of Origen and of Lucian, and in the West fifty years later, produced during several generations a literary harvest unequalled throughout the Christian centuries. And the two Latin presbyters found in the Pastoral Epistles just the historical and scriptural basis for the establishment of the claims of the presbyterate, that the instinct of the times called for. The apostle had distinguished clearly enough between deacons and presbyters or bishops: but he had used — so they rightly saw — the three different terms for the same order of the ministry, and it was an easy deduction that presbyter and bishop must be still essentially one.
So Ambrosiaster on 1 Timothy: "post episcopum tamen diaconatus ordinationem subiecit; quare, nisi quia episcopi et presbyteri una ordinatio est? uterque enim sacerdos est, sed episcopus primus est; ut omnis episcopus presbyter sit, non tamen omnis presbyter episcopus, hie enim episcopus est qui inter presbyteros primus est." And so Jerome on Titus explains that in the apostolic age presbyters and bishops were the same, until as a safeguard against dissensions one was chosen out of the presbyters to be set over the rest: consequently bishops should know "se magis consuetudme quam dispositionis dominicae veritate presbyteris esse maiores, et in commune debere ecclesiam regere."
The exegesis of Ambrosiaster and Jerome was undeniably sound: their historical conclusions were, if the picture given in the earlier pages of this chapter is correct, not so just to the facts as those of another commentator of the time, perhaps the greatest of them all, Theodore of Mopsuestia. No doubt the New Testament bishop was a presbyter but "those who had authority to ordain, the officers we now call bishops, were not limited to a single church but presided over a whole province and were known by the title of apostles. In this way blessed Paul set Timothy over all Asia, and Titus over Crete, and doubtless others separately over other provinces, so that those who are now called bishops but were then called apostles bore then the same relation to the province that they do now to the city and villages for which they are appointed." Timothy and Titus "visited cities, just as bishops to-day visit country parishes."
"Uterque enim sacerdos est." In these words lies perhaps the real inwardness of the movement for equating presbyters with bishops and of its partial success: "Priesthood" was taking the place of "Order."
In the first centuries, to St Ignatius for instance and to St Cyprian, the essential principle was that all things must be done within the Unity of the Church, and of that unity the bishop was the local centre and the guardian. That alone is a true Eucharist, in the language of Ignatius, which is under the authority of the bishop or his representative. No rite or sacrament administered outside this ordered unity had any reality. Baptism or Laying on of hands schismatically conferred, whether without the Church among the sects or without the bishop's sanction by any intruder in his sphere, were simply as though they had not been. Under the dominance of this conception the position of the bishop was unique and unassailable. But, as time went on, the single conception of Order, intense and overmastering as to those early Christians it had been, was found insufficient: other considerations must be taken into account, "lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Breaches were made in the theory first at one point, then at another. Christian charity rebelled against the thought of wholly rejecting what was intended, however imperfectly, to be Christian Baptism: iteration of such Baptism was felt, and nowhere more clearly than at Rome, to be intolerable. As with Baptism, so, though much more gradually and uncertainly, with Holy Orders. The distinction between validity and regularity was hammered out : "quod fieri non debuit, factum valet" was the expression of the newer point of view: Augustine, in his writings against the Donatists, laid down the principles of the revised theology, and later ages have done little more than develop and systematise his work.
It is obvious that in this conception less stress will be set on the circumstances of the sacrament, more on the sacrament itself: less on the jurisdiction of the minister to perform it, more on his inherent capacity: less, in other words, on Order, more on Priesthood. We are not to suppose that earlier thought necessarily differed from later on the question, for instance, to what orders of the ministry was committed the conduct of the characteristic action of Christian worship, or as to its sacrificial nature, or as to the priestly function of the ministrants. But earlier language did certainly differ from later as to the direction in which sacerdotal terminology was most freely employed. In the general idea of primitive times the whole congregation took part in the priestly office : when a particular usage of sacerdos first came in, and for several generations afterwards, it meant the bishop and the bishop only. The prhaseology in this respect of St Cyprian is repeated by a whole chain of writers down to St Ambrose.
No doubt the hierarchical language of the Old Testament was applied to the ministry of the Church long before the fourth century: but it was either transferred in quite general terms from the one hierarchy to the other as a whole, or it was concentrated upon the bishop. Thus in the Didascdia Apostolorum it is the bishops who inherit the Levites' right to material support, the bishops who are addressed as "priests to your people and levites who serve in the house of God, the holy catholic Church," the bishop again who is "the levite and the high priest" (contrast the language of the Didache).
But the detailed comparison of the three orders of the Jewish ministry and the Christian was so obvious that it can only have been the traditional use of "sacerdos" for the bishop that retarded the parallelism. We find "levita" for deacon in the egiprams of Damasus and in the de Officiis of St Ambrose: but the complete triad of "levita, sacerdos, summus sacerdos" for deacon, presbyter, and bishop meets us first in the pages of the ex-Jew Ambrosiaster. And while Ambrose employs the Old Testament associations of the levite to exalt the dignity and calling of the Christian deacon, Ambrosiaster contrasts the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" with the priests, and paraphrases the titles "sacerdos" and "summus sacerdos" as "presbyter" and "primus presbyter." " Summus sacerdos " is freely used of bishops by Jerome, though the title was forbidden even to metropolitans by an African canon.
But in any case the new extension of "sacerdos" to the Christian presbyter was too closely in harmony with existing tendencies not to take root at once. It is common in both St Jerome and St Augustine: Pope Innocent speaks of presbyters as "secundi sacerdotes": and from this time onward bishop and priest tend more and more to be ranked together as joint possessors of a common "sacerdotium."
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