The Ekklesia

The Ekklesia had a body of writing which it preserved for the instruction of its members and the continuity of its doctrine; but it took a long time before these documents were sifted and before a certain proportion of them, a small portion of the whole, were affirmed to have special value as Scripture, that is, inspired and therefore authoritative. There were for instance in the way of records or pretended records of Our Lord’s life and teaching certainly more than fifty such documents, for we have fragments of at least that number.
Only four were admitted to the Canon, that, is the “regular” or “official” collection. In the same way letters were written by the missionaries of the Early Church, but in the same way only a certain number, under the name of “Epistles,” were admitted to the Canon, and one record of early Apostolic action, the Acts of the Apostles; one apocalyptical work, which we know as the Apocalypse.
This being the sequence whereby the Canon of what we call today the New Testament was gradually formed (by selection over a long space of time), it is exceedingly bad history to pretend that this collection of documents was the authority for the Faith. The authority for the Faith was the tradition of the Apostles; the living agreement of the faithful, especially as represented by their heads in the Apostolic succession. the Bishops.
Apart from this fundamental institution of the hierarchy, the sacred caste which alone had spiritual authority over the Church, there were four other elements which strengthened the new society and helped it to grow. There was the function of intercommunication by travel and by correspondence, along the Imperial roads. All these Churches kept in touch and maintained a common doctrine alive. Councils of Bishops were held (at least, after the Emperors had accepted the Catholic Church and it had become the official religion). They would be summoned to represent the Church throughout the whole world, whence they derived their title, “ecumenical.”
The first of these, under the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, was summoned at Nicea near Constantinople because Constantinople had become the capital of the Empire. It met to discuss and define the full doctrine of Our Lord’s Divinity, and to reject the heretical theses connected with it.
The function of getting into communication by travel and by letter supported and was called into being by the supreme principle of Unity; The idea that the Church was one, its doctrine one, its authority one, stood out vividly in the minds of all its members. From the beginning, dissent was not tolerated; unity was of the essence of the thing, and in connection with this there was present at first more vaguely, later with greater definition, the conception of primacy.
One of Our Lord’s Apostles, Peter, was the head of the Apostolic College; his See had a special, if at first less defined, position in Christendom; and Rome, where Peter was last settled, where he and Paul were martyred, became the permanent seat of this primacy as it developed.
The third activity which made for the growing strength of the Church was the use of what we now call Creeds (from the Latin word,”Credo,” “I believe”).
They were called in the East where Greek was spoken “symbols,” from the Greek “symbolae,” which means things put together. They were originally called in the Latin-speaking West, “Confessiones.” They arose in order to make sure a new candidate for admission to the Ekklesia was not tainted with heresy.
He or she was required before admission to recite truths which had been defined in order that such definition might combat false ideas.
These brief recitals did not pretend to cover the Faith; they were not a summary of all, nor even of the principal, belief; for instance, the great creed of the 4th century made no mention of the most important and fundamental mystery of the new society, the Eucharist and the Real presence of Christ therein. Of that doctrine there was ample evidence, going back to the beginning, but as it was not questioned its definition had never entered into these rebutting affirmations which the candidate was required to make.
The forth function making for unity and strength and permanence and growth was, of course that very Eucharist just mentioned. Bread and wine were consecrated after a method, and with words handed down traditionally as those of Our Lord Himself at the Last Supper. The mystic ceremony was performed by the celebrant hierarch, or hierarchs; on its performance the bread and wine over which the mystical formulae had been uttered were belived to be no longer bread and wine but the Body and Blood of Christ Himself.
As St. Justin himself wrote, at a time which was to the Crucifixion as our time is to the Declaration of Independence, and writing as on a matter accepted and long established, writing moreover for the instruction of readers who were not Christian, the bread was no longer “common bread” but “the flesh of Christ.”
All this gives us the external method and machinery whereby the Faith was established and spread with such astonishing success throughout a vast society which had begun by knowing it ill, had proceeded to hate it, and had at last accepted it for a universal religion.
But what was the internal force? How were men convinced?
Why did they join this society in spite of the terrible risks communion with it involved?
Often it meant ruin of fortune and thrusting out from the society of one’s fellows and sometimes torture and death. What drove men to it?
The answer is that the Church was a person which men came to trust as they come to trust it today. A man became a Christian because he found that the Church affirmed things which he recognized to be true in experience and holy in character. It was loved, witnessed to and defended to the death by those who thus felt it to be, when in contact with it, divine, and the only fixed and certain authority of their experience. As for doctrine, they took it from this society of which they had thus become enamored upon such firm grounds. It was not the society which proceeded from the doctrine, but the doctrine that came from the society.
To understand this point, which is fundamental to all comprehension of the Church’s triumph over and penetration throughout the old Roman world, we must also understand the character of the violent resistance which it excited.
As that resistance is too often presented, it seems incomprehensible, because it is represented wrongly. People would not have been thrown to wild beasts, tortured to death, condemned to imprisonment with hard labor in the mines, simply because they preached a general spirit of kindliness, or worshipped a particular ideal Character. Nothing could have been more tolerant to opinion than the old Graeco-Roman Empire.
It is not true that the Empire persecuted the Church because it was a secret society. Mystery societies of various sorts flourished among the citizens; why then did angry instinct for killing this particular one arise?
In some degree, no doubt, for that reason we find hundreds of years before suggested by a Greek philosopher filled with vision. He wrote, that if humanity should come across a perfectly good man, his fellowmen would tear him to pieces. Holiness is a reproach.
It was also persecuted perhaps because its claims and affirmations upon itself were novel. It said, as nothing else had yet said, “I am the voice of God. You must accept what I say as truth. My code of morals is the path to eternal beatitude, and neglect or denial of them is the path to eternal despair.” That was challenge to all human custom, a sort of challenge not easily to be borne.
Allied to this was the hard, the angular quality of the new thing, with its strict definitions, is Hierarchy, its highly disciplined organization, standing thus as an alien body in the midst of a society that was dissolving. It was an alien thing, and, as it were, indigestible; or rather it was something which had to be accepted altogether or crushed altogether, if there were to be any peace.
But there was a last political reason, and a strong one, for the resistance. As this highly organized definite, enthusiastic body spread, it became more and more a state within a State; it was a society with its own authorities, its own discipline and spirit in the midst of that Imperial World which was inspired by a political desire for peace and unity.
The government of the Empire reacted inevitably and violently against the presence of such an opponent and challenger. It has been noted by many that the Emperors best at government were often the worst persecutors.
This resistance to the spread of the Faith, this compulsion laid upon the Catholic body to fight for its life, was a chief element in its final triumph. Permanent work is done in hard material, “Greek sculpture is not fashioned in butter,” as a just critic said of a minor poet’s verses. The best carving is done in the closest grained wood, and against the grain.
This great united state, which included the whole of the known civilized world. The Graeco-Roman Empire, fell at first gradually then more rapidly into a material decline.
(p. 25-36) From The Foundation of Christendom by H. Belloc,
Meanwhile the Church was growing. The framework of the Empire stood; its laws, all its life moved on without a break.
There was no “fall of the Roman Empire”- the phrase is rhetorical and false; but there was a profound change proceeding in the texture of Society. The half-civilized tribes on the fringes of the Empire filtered in more and more into Graeco-Roman society acquired more power and introduced elements of disorder; the ruling class changed and largely lost its culture.
On the material side of life all seemed to be sinking slowly, even while on the spiritual side there was rising to triumph the mighty force of the Catholic Church.
Now since the rise of the one spiritual thing and the fall of the other material thing were coincident, may not they be related as cause and effect?
This is the capital question which we have to deal with on approaching the decline of the Roman Empire in material things. The Empire declined and The Church expanded.
The dates are sufficient proof in this natter. The old pagan civilization was in active decay long before the new small and struggling obscure group of Catholic congregations began to have any appreciable effect. The golden age of literature was passed; letters had become sterile, architecture coarsened, long before the Ekklesia was felt to be a menacing force to the natural Paganism of the Old World.
Already old age, corruption, greed, the preponderance of slaves and “Freed-men” side by side with the growth of vast fortunes overshadowing society and throwing it ourt of balance, had already been at work when the Catholic Church was still so insignificant that it is hardly mentioned by the mass of contemporary writers.
There are one or two allusions here and there which have reference to this body, but no more. Only when the Empire was already almost broken down, in the third century, does the Church begin to make strong appeal; and even then its members were as yet but a small minority, even in the East. They were a still smaller minority in the West.
Nor were Christians found in any of the principal palaces of authority; nor possessing power through wealth, still less through office. Tertullian had said at the beginning of the grave social crisis that all might be well if the Caesars could be Christian—but took it for granted that the Caesars could not be Christian.
It is more than a coincidence that the triumph of the Catholic Church came at last coincidently with the restoration of order. The reestablishment of Imperial administration, arms and general obedience in the later part of the third century, with the growing appeal of the Catholic lucidity and discipline, is not fortuitous.
The fact that when one man at last became the monarch of the world, Constantine, he also recognized and promoted what was to be the world-religion is not by accident; the two things were the fruit of one spirit running through Society. The Graeco-Roman world not only needed inspiration and vision which had died within it but needed also unity, and the principle of certitude without which unity cannot be.
I repeat that central phrase, for it is fundamental to the whole story; so far from the Church causing the decline of Society under which the old Empire slipped into the Dark Ages, the Church saved all that could be saved
The old Roman State, be it remembered, was based on the Army; the Army was its cement, and , one might say, its principle of being. p.,38 -43
Lastly, let it be remembered that though we must for the purposes of right history admit the continual material decline going on through those first five centuries during which the Empire turned from Pagan to Christian, the new religion brought with it invaluable compensations for evils which it had not caused, but at the advance of which it had been present.
The Catholic Church brought to the old ruined, dying, despairing Graeco-Roman world the quality of vision. It brought a motive for living and thence there came to it, sustaining all that could be sustained of that grievously weakened world, saner and more stable social arrangements.
The Catholic Church, having become the religion of the Graeco-Roman society, did among other things two capital things for the settlement of Europe on its political side, and for arresting the descent into chaos. It humanized slavery and it strengthened permanent marriage. Very slowly through the centuries, those  two influences were to produce the stable civilization of the Middle Ages, wherein the slave was no longer a slave but a peasant; and everywhere the family was the well-rooted and established unit of Society.
To sum up then, by the end of that great period, the first five centuries, extending from the Incarnation to the conversion of Clovis and the establishment of Catholic Gaul, the end of the five centuries during which all our ancestry turned from Paganism to Catholicism and during which the Empire was baptized, were centuries in which we suffered great damage: disorder, barbarism threatening our race, the fall of the arts, of great verse and of high unified administration, the worsening of roads, much loss of the knowledge inherited from the past (Greek, for instance, was dying out in the West, and legend was more and more intermixed with real history). But Europe at that time was spiritually consolidated so that it proved able to meet and overcome the strain to which it was about to be subjected.
That strain would have come anyhow, the violent attack under which Europe nearly broke down, “The Siege of Christendom,” was inevitable. But we survived it. Had it not been for the conversion of the world, we should have gone under.