THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 303
The Visible and the Invisible Church
20.11. The Visible and the Invisible Church
The controversy concerning Free Will and Grace also affected the idea of the Church and sacraments. Until the rise of Pelagianism a very wide scope was allowed here to Free Will. The Grace conveyed by the sacraments, which were not to be had outside the Church, was considered to be conditioned by the faith and life of the recipient. It was tacitly assumed that these factors were within the control of the will. That is to say, Grace preceded Election. This, according to Augustine's mind matured by reflection and controversy, was an inversion of the truth. His theory of Predestination demanded that Election should precede Grace. And thus side by side with his practical belief in an external society in which good and bad, wheat and tares, were growing together, partaking of the means of grace, i.e. the visible church, he conceived the novel idea of a spiritual society of elect, the communion of saints, the invisible church, whose members were known to God alone, whether they were within the fold of the external society or not. Of this body it might be affirmed without a trace of bigotry, extra ecclesiam nulla solus.
The two conceptions are not kept strictly apart, and the characteristics of the invisible church are constantly transferred by Augustine to the visible church. This body, whose growing nucleus is thus supplied by the invisible church, is the civitas Dei on earth. Over against it stands the civitas terrena, the earthly polity. The two states, separate in idea, origin, purpose, and practice, are yet dependent the one on the other, giving and taking influence. The civitas Dei needs the practical support of the civitas terrena in order to be a visible state. The civitas terrena needs the moral support of the civitas Dei in order to be a real state, for a civitas only exists on a basis of love and justice and by participation in the sole source of existence, which is God. The city of God is the only real civitas, gradually absorbing the civitas terrena and borrowing its authority and power in order to carry out the divine purpose.
Magistrate and legislator become the sons and servants of the church, bound to execute the church's objects We have here the germ of the medieval theory of the church as the kingdom of God on earth, but it must be noted that Augustine does not start with the assumption of identity, does not use church and kingdom of God as interchangeable terms, despite the assertion ecclesia iam nunc est regnum, which he is the first of Christian writers to make. Even in this phrase he does not mean that the church is actually the kingdom, but only that it is so potentially. The full and perfect realisation he reserves until the consummation of all things.
From the earliest days of Christianity the words sacrament and mystery were borrowed to denote any sacred secret thing, and especially the means of grace. The number of these was not distinctly specified, for Christians, believing that the Church was the storehouse of unlimited grace, were not careful to count the means. Two however stood out preeminent, Baptism and the Lord's Supper. With regard to the doctrine underlying these two, it may be said that it was in the fourth and fifth centuries essentially what it had been before. No doubt Christian experience and the struggle with paganism and heresy tended to produce explanations, but the main thought was always simply that of life bestowed and life maintained. The early believers had not asked how, but the question could not but arise, and that rather in connexion with the Eucharist than with Baptism.
For the water of Baptism did not invite speculation to the same degree as did the bread and wine, and their relation to the Body and Blood of Christ. Not that Baptism was ever regarded merely as a ceremony of initiation; it was the fear of losing, through post-baptismal sin, the grace conveyed by Baptism that in our period kept many from the font. Other causes such as negligence, reluctance to forgo the world, and various fancies and superstitions, combined to render Baptism, as in Constantine's case, the completion rather than the commencement of Christian life. Such delay was not the intention of the Church, and the necessity of checking slackness, together with the Western doctrine of prevenient grace helping the first step Godward, brought about a strict insistence on the necessity of Baptism and a readiness, in the West at least, to allow the Baptism of heretics, provided the right form of words was used. But both wisdom and generosity were shewn by the refusal to tie down the operation of the Holy Spirit to ritual action, and by the admission of faith, repentance, or martyrdom, as substitutes for formal Baptism when this could not be had. It must not be forgotten however that Augustine, when he found the Donatists proof against persuasion, advocated a resort to violence — coge intrare.
The Eucharist was more obviously mysterious, and at a time when the rite was attended by many who were more conscious of its mysterious experience than of any effect it might have upon life, speculation was active, and teachers laboured to assist inquiry by analogy and illustration which often grew to something more. Thus from Gregory of Nyssa came an impulse which finally developed into the doctrine of transubstantiation.
Not that Gregory means to teach this; the passage in his works containing the germ is not a definition. His style is highly imaginative and the Oratio catechetica is full of similes. One of these is borrowed, but without hesitation, from physiology. Gregory draws a parallel between the change of bread and wine, by digestion, into the human body, and the change of the sacramental elements, by consecration, into Christ's immortal body. Using Aristotelian terms, he says that in each case the constituents are arranged under a fresh form. This is not transubstantiation but transelementation. The image commended itself, and it was repeated and elaborated by other writers until at length the complete identification of the bread and wine with the Body and Blood of Christ became the authoritative doctrine of the Eastern Church.
The Roman doctrine of transubstantiation has points of resemblance with Gregory's illustration, but it is expressed in terms of a different and later philosophy. Gregory teaches a change of form; the schoolmen, a change of both material and form, which they explain by the help of the distinction between substantia and accidentia. The great contribution of the age to the doctrine of the Sacraments is the view that in a real sense they continue the process of the Incarnation.
Human nature first became divine in the person of Christ by union with the divine Word, and subsequently and repeatedly in the person of the individual believer through union with Christ in the Sacraments. This is the teaching of both East and West as represented by Hilary and Gregory of Nyssa. As in Baptism the soul is joined to Christ through faith, so in the Eucharist is the body, being transformed by the Eucharistic food, joined with the Body of the Lord Thus the special purpose of the Incarnation, viz. the deification of man, is being constantly fulfilled.
The language in which this noble conception is expressed, especially in the East, tends to encourage a superstitious reverence for the outward symbols, which the Greek fathers frequently have occasion to correct.
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