6-2. The Early Days of Episcopacy
Most of our documents then of the first century shew us the local churches neither self-sufficient nor self-contained, but dependent for all special ministries upon the visits of the superior officers of the Church. On the other hand most of our documents of the second century — in its earlier years the Ignatian letters, and an ever-increasing bulk of evidence as the century goes on — shew us the local churches complete in themselves, with an officer at the head of each who concentrates in his hands both the powers of the local ministers and those also which had at first been reserved exclusively for the general ministry, but who is himself as strictly limited in the extent of his jurisdiction to a single church as were the humbler presbyter-bishops from whom he derived his name. When we have explained how the supreme powers of the general ministry were made to devolve on an individual who belonged to the local ministry, we have explained the origin of episcopacy. With that problem of explanation we have not here to deal in detail: we have only to recognise the result and its importance, when in and with the bishop the local church sufficed in itself for the extraordinary as well as for the ordinary functions of church government and Christian life.
In those early days of episcopacy, among the diminutive groups of Christian "strangers and sojourners" which were dotted over the pagan world of the second century, we must conceive of a quite special closeness of relation between a bishop and his people. Regularly in all cities — and it was in the provinces where city life was most developed that the Church made quickest progress — a bishop is found at the head of the community of Christians: and his intimacy with his people was in those primitive days unhindered by the interposition of any hierarchy of functionaries or attendants. His flock was small enough for him to carry out to the letter the pastoral metaphor, and to “call his sheep by name.” If the consent of the Christian people had always been, as Clement of Rome tells us, a necessary preliminary to the ordination of Christian ministers, in the case of the appointment of their bishop the people did not consent merely, they elected: not till the fourth century did the clergy begin to acquire first a separate and ultimately a predominant share in the process of choice. Even though the "angel of the church" in the Apocalypse may not have been, in the mind of the seer, at all intended to refer to the bishop, yet this quasi-identification of the community with its representative exactly expresses the ideal of second century writers. "The whole number of you I welcome in God's Name in the person of Onesimus," "in Polybius I beheld the whole multitude of you," writes Ignatius to the Christians of Ephesus and Tralles : "be subject to the bishop and to one another" is his injunction to the Magnesians : the power of Christian worship is in "the prayer of the bishop and the whole church/' So too to Justin Martyr, "the brethren as we are called" and ** the president '* are the essential figures in the portraiture of the Christian society. If it is true that in the first century the apostle-founder and the community as founded by him are the two outstanding elements of Christian organisation, it is no less true that in the second century the twin ideas of bishop and people attain a prominence which throws all subordinate distinctions into the background. Even as late as the middle of the third century we see Cyprian — who is quite misunderstood if he is looked on only as an innovator in the sphere of organisation — maintaining and emphasising at every turn the intimate union, in normal church life, of bishop and laity, while he also recognises the duty of the laity, in abnormal circumstances, to separate from the communion of the bishop who had proved himself unworthy of their choice : " it is the people in the first place which has the power both of electing worthy bishops and of spurning the unworthy." Similar witness for the East is borne in the same century by the Didascalia Apostolorum, where bishop and laity are addressed in turn, and their mutual relations are almost the main theme of the writer.
But this personal relation of the bishop to his flock, which was the ideal of church administrators and thinkers from Ignatius to Cyprian, could only find effective realisation in a relatively small community: the very success of the Christian propaganda, and the consequent increase everywhere of the numbers of the Christian people, made some further development of organisation imperative. Especially during the long peace between Severus and Decius (211-249) did recruits pour in. In the larger towns at least there could be now no question of personal acquaintance between the president of the community and all its members. No doubt it might have been possible to preserve the old intimacy at the cost of unity, and to create a bishop for each congregation. But the sense of civic unity was an asset of which Christians instinctively availed themselves in the service of religion.
If practical convenience sometimes dictated the appointment of bishops in villages, these appointments were only common in districts where, as in Cappadocia, cities were few, and where consequently the extent of the territory of each city was unduly large for supervision by the single bishop of the civitas. Normally, even in days before there was any idea of the formal demarcation of territorial jurisdiction, the civitas with all its dependent lands was the natural sphere of the individual bishop's authority. And within the walls of the city it was never so much as conceivable that the ecclesia should be divided. When the Council of Nicaea was making provision for the reinstatement in clerical rank of Novatianist clergy willing to be reconciled with the Church, the arrangement was subject always to the maintenance of the principle that there should not be two bishops in the city. The very rivalries between different claimants of one episcopal throne serve to bring out the same result — witness the earliest instances of pope and anti-pope of which we have documentary knowledge, those of Cornelius and Novatian in 251, and of Liberius and Felix about 357.
In the latter case Constantius, with a politician's eye to compromise, recommended the joint recognition of both claimants: but the Roman people — Theodoret, to whose History we owe the details, is careful to note that he has recorded the very language used — saluted the reading of the rescript in the circus with the mocking cry that two leaders would do very well for the factions at the games, but that there could be only “one God, one Christ, one bishop.” Exactly the same reason had been given a century earlier in almost the same words, by the Roman confessors when writing to Cyprian, for their abandonment of Novatian and adhesion to Cornelius: “we are not unaware that there is one God, and one Christ the Lord whom we have confessed, one Holy Spirit, and therefore only one true bishop in the communion of the Catholic Church.” Both in East and West, in the largest cities as well as in the smallest, the society of the faithful was conceived of as an indivisible unit ; and its oneness was expressed in the person of its one bishop. The community of Christians in any locality was not like a hive of bees, which, when numbers multiplied inconveniently, could throw off a part of the whole, to be henceforward a complete and independent organism under separate control. The necessity for new organisation had to be met in some way which would preserve at all costs the oneness of the body and its head.
It followed that the work and duties which the individual bishop could no longer perform in person must be shared with, or deputed to, subordinate officials. New offices came into being in the course especially of the third century, and the growth of this clerus or clergy, and its gradual acquisition during the fourth and fifth centuries of the character of a hierarchy nicely ordered in steps and degrees, is a feature of ecclesiastical history of which the importance has not always been adequately realised.
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