The Holy Catholic Church and Christian Culture-by H Belloc
The Holy Catholic Church and Christian Culture
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.
We must begin by laying down as a historical fact not to be removed by affection one way or the other, that the conversion of the Roman Empire was a conversion to what was called by all our ancestry and what is still called by those with any historical sense The Catholic Church.
The Empire was not ‘converted’ to what modern men mean when they used the word ‘Christianity’.
The phrase is continually used and as continually corrupts the historical judgement of those who use it and those who hear it.
In the ears of modern youth, especially in societies which have lost the Catholic Culture, the word ‘Christianity’ means vaguely, “That which is common in various sects, opinions and moods inherited in diluted form from the Reformation”.
In England (and USA) today, for instance ‘Christianity’ means a general feeling of kindliness, particularly to animals.
To some more precise in mind it may mean an appreciation of and even an attempt at copying, a Character which seems to them portrayed in the four Gospels (four out of the certainly more than fifty, which four they happened to inherited from the Catholic Church, although they do not know it).
To a much smaller number, with greater powers of definition and better historical instruction, the word ‘Christianity’ may have even so precise a meaning as ‘the acceptance of the doctrine that an historical Figure appeared in Palestine about two thousand years ago, and was in some way the Incarnation of God and that the main precepts, at least, of an original society calling itself after His name should be our guide for moral conduct.
But all these uses of the word ‘Christianity’ from the vaguest to the most precise, do not apply the tremendous business with which we are here concerned.
The society of the ancient world was not changed from its antique attitude to that which it finally adopted in the 4th century (and continued thenceforward to spread throughout Europe) by any mod or opinion; it was transformed by adherence to the doctrine and discipline as well as the spirit and character of a certain institution; and that institution is historically known; it is a Personality which can be tested by certain indisputable attributes, practices and definitions.
It claimed and claims Divine authority to teach, to include in its membership by specific form of initiation those who approached it and were found worthy; to exclude those who would not accept that unity and supremacy.
It performed throughout the society of the Empire and even beyond its boundaries a certain liturgical act of sacrifice, the Eucharist, it affirmed its foundation by a Divine figure who was also a man, and a manifestation of God.
It further affirmed that its officers held their authority through appointment originally by this Founder, who gathered a small group for that purpose, it affirmed that from the members of this small original group, in unbroken succession, descended the spiritual powers which could be claimed by officers and by them alone, in particular manner, over the whole body of Christians, and in general fashion over the world at large.
In order to understand this very great thing which captured and transformed the old pagan world, we must grasp its nature.
We must be able to answer the question, “what was it that spread so rapidly and so triumphantly throughout the Graeco-Roman world?’
Secondly, we must appreciate the “method’ by which this revolution was accomplished; lastly in order to understand both the nature and the method of the ‘thing’ we must discover why it met with so ‘intense a resistance’, for that resistance explains both its character and its ways of propagation and it was victory over that resistance which established the Catholic Faith and practice so firmly over our race for so many centuries and generations.
First then, as to the nature of the conquest. The great change did not come because ‘it met a need’; it did indeed meet needs that were universal. It filled up that aching void in the soul which was the prime malady of the dying ancient society; also it relieved and dissipated despair, the capital burden imposed by that void.
Yet the meeting of the need was not the essential character of the new ‘thing’; it was not the driving power behind the great change; it was only a result incidental thereof.
It was not merely in order to assuage such needs of the spirit that men turned towards the Catholic Church: had that been so, we should have been able to trace the steps whereby from vague gropings and half-satisfied longings there should have crystallized this and that myth, this and that fulfillment of desire by imagination, until the system should have come into being long after the inception of the first influences.
That such a gradual process did take place is commonly affirmed by those who have not a sufficient acquaintance, even on the largest lines with the ‘thing’ historically but in fact nothing of the kind took place. You discover not a vague frame of mind, but a definite society from the first; no criticism of documents or of tradition can prevent any other conclusion.
A man appeared, gathered together a certain company and taught.
And not only so soon as that company begins to act, but at the root of all memory with regard to its action, you have the specific claim of Divine revelation in the Teacher, of His Human and Divine nature; of His resurrection from the dead; of His establishing a central rite of Sacrifice, which was called the Eucharist (the Act of Gratitude); the claim to authority; the Apostolic organization of the tradition; the presence of a hierarchy and all the rest.
The Catholic Church visible was not an influence that spread; it was a ‘Thing’. It was a fixed Corporation, a Club, if you will; it was an organization with a form and members, a defined outline, and a discipline. Disputes arose within it, certain of its members would overemphasize this or that among the doctrines for which it stood and so warp the proportion of the whole.
But no innovator, even during the first enthusiasm when so many debates surrounded so intellectually vigorous a ‘thing’, would ever pretend that there was not one body to be preserved. He might claim to be the true continuator of that body, and protest (when he was excluded from it for dissent); but never did any of those at the origin propose that discord upon essentials could be permanent.
This new and strict corporation had a name, a name associated in the minds of its contemporaries with the idea of a secret society possessed of mysteries; it called itself the EKKLESIA.
Now it is all-important to grasp this further fact, that the new Ekklesia with its mysteries, its initiation ceremonies (instruction in doctrine, solemn affirmation thereof, called “confession”, what we call a creed, and Baptism) was not one of many religions which happened to prove the winner in a sort of race. That is an error which one finds in many of the textbooks and which has almost passed into popular acceptance. Any number of our general outlines of history and the rest talk of the Early Church in this fashion.
They say, for instance, that the earlier mysteries such as the mysteries of Eleusis, the latter mysteries of Mithras, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis, etc. were of this sort and what they call “Christianity” (for they usually avoid the word “Catholic Church”) was but one of many.
This is not true, and the test that it is not true is simple and should be conclusive. The Catholic Church alone and from its origins proclaimed the Divinity of a real historical man and the objective truth of the doctrines which it affirmed. It proclaimed from the beginning the Resurrection of that real historic man from the dead; and the popular nickname “Christian” (which became, like so many nicknames, the general term) arose from that fact.
All the other popular worships with their mysteries and initiations and the rest of it were admittedly ‘myths’. They did not say, “this happened”; what they said was, “This is a parable, a symbol to explain to you the nature and the possible fate of the human soul and its relation to the Divine.
Not one of them said, “I was founded by a real man whom other men met and knew, who lived in a particular place and time, one to whom there a ‘ a cloud of witnesses’”; not one of them said that they held revealed truth and that their officials held a Divine commission to explain that truth throughout the world.
In all this there was a violent contrast between the Catholic Church and the whole of the pagan world around; neither the intellectuals following Greek traditions nor the Roman Empire with its administrative sense of unity persecuted the other associations.
It was not the doctrine of the Resurrection, still less the doctrine of Immortality which was found repulsive; it was the affirmation that the criminal who had been put to death in a known place and time at Jerusalem, under the Emperor Tiberius, condemned to scourging and ignominious capital punishment of Crucifixion, whereto no Roman citizen was liable, was Divine, spoke with Divine authority, founded a Divine Society, rose from the dead, and could promise to his faithful followers eternal beatitude. This was what shocked the intellectuals, but this also was what gave stuff and substance to that new society and so led, as we shall see in a moment to persecution.
Now, as to its method of expansion, how did it propagate itself?
What was the machinery which proved so successful that in less than four long lifetimes the whole of that hostile society was officially Catholic, and that within another two long lifetimes the whole of the population, West and East, of the known world between the Channel, the Rhine, the Danube and the desert followed its creed and accepted its doctrines?
It worked by the method which we have come to call “Cells,” a word rendered familiar today through the universal Communist agitation. If, as some think, that Communist movement is the final assault upon Catholic tradition and the Faith, if it be, as many think, the modern anti-Christ, the parallel is indeed striking. All over the Graeco-Roman Empire there were founded rapidly a number of these small organizations, first connected with and later separated from local Jewish synagogues; fixed in the greater towns, but later scattered like seed also in the provincial centers, and then by missionary effort throughout the countrysides.
We know this was the method, through ample documentary evidence; we have also a vast mass of tradition, largely legendary, of course, after such length of time, but containing its nucleus of truth, which tells us how in this place and in that these “Cells” were founded and established. Each was called individually a Church, just as the general organization was known as the Church as a whole. They were governed by a Hierarchy. At the head of one church would be one presiding officer, the Episkopos, a word of which we have made the English word “Bishop.”
He was nominated sometimes, apparently by the local clergy, sometimes by the acclamation of the community; but he held his title not from these, but from the Apostolical succession. This and that ancient local Church boasted that it had been founded by an Apostle, and soon in drawing up lists of Bishops the chain was traced to that Apostle who had first begun it by the laying on of hands.
Those thus ordained would lay on hands in their turn, and so the hierarchy or body of the clergy was formed. After some indeterminate time not the Bishop alone (who was the full priest), but subordinates bearing the titles of “elders,” in the Greek “presbuteros,” could function at the Holy Mysteries, having been ordained in their turn by the Bishops. These consecrated the elements of the Eucharist, and from them would commonly be drawn the Episcopate. Such was the original form of the Church.
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.
We must begin by laying down as a historical fact not to be removed by affection one way or the other, that the conversion of the Roman Empire was a conversion to what was called by all our ancestry and what is still called by those with any historical sense The Catholic Church.
The Empire was not ‘converted’ to what modern men mean when they used the word ‘Christianity’.
The phrase is continually used and as continually corrupts the historical judgement of those who use it and those who hear it.
In the ears of modern youth, especially in societies which have lost the Catholic Culture, the word ‘Christianity’ means vaguely, “That which is common in various sects, opinions and moods inherited in diluted form from the Reformation”.
In England (and USA) today, for instance ‘Christianity’ means a general feeling of kindliness, particularly to animals.
To some more precise in mind it may mean an appreciation of and even an attempt at copying, a Character which seems to them portrayed in the four Gospels (four out of the certainly more than fifty, which four they happened to inherited from the Catholic Church, although they do not know it).
To a much smaller number, with greater powers of definition and better historical instruction, the word ‘Christianity’ may have even so precise a meaning as ‘the acceptance of the doctrine that an historical Figure appeared in Palestine about two thousand years ago, and was in some way the Incarnation of God and that the main precepts, at least, of an original society calling itself after His name should be our guide for moral conduct.
But all these uses of the word ‘Christianity’ from the vaguest to the most precise, do not apply the tremendous business with which we are here concerned.
The society of the ancient world was not changed from its antique attitude to that which it finally adopted in the 4th century (and continued thenceforward to spread throughout Europe) by any mod or opinion; it was transformed by adherence to the doctrine and discipline as well as the spirit and character of a certain institution; and that institution is historically known; it is a Personality which can be tested by certain indisputable attributes, practices and definitions.
It claimed and claims Divine authority to teach, to include in its membership by specific form of initiation those who approached it and were found worthy; to exclude those who would not accept that unity and supremacy.
It performed throughout the society of the Empire and even beyond its boundaries a certain liturgical act of sacrifice, the Eucharist, it affirmed its foundation by a Divine figure who was also a man, and a manifestation of God.
It further affirmed that its officers held their authority through appointment originally by this Founder, who gathered a small group for that purpose, it affirmed that from the members of this small original group, in unbroken succession, descended the spiritual powers which could be claimed by officers and by them alone, in particular manner, over the whole body of Christians, and in general fashion over the world at large.
In order to understand this very great thing which captured and transformed the old pagan world, we must grasp its nature.
We must be able to answer the question, “what was it that spread so rapidly and so triumphantly throughout the Graeco-Roman world?’
Secondly, we must appreciate the “method’ by which this revolution was accomplished; lastly in order to understand both the nature and the method of the ‘thing’ we must discover why it met with so ‘intense a resistance’, for that resistance explains both its character and its ways of propagation and it was victory over that resistance which established the Catholic Faith and practice so firmly over our race for so many centuries and generations.
First then, as to the nature of the conquest. The great change did not come because ‘it met a need’; it did indeed meet needs that were universal. It filled up that aching void in the soul which was the prime malady of the dying ancient society; also it relieved and dissipated despair, the capital burden imposed by that void.
Yet the meeting of the need was not the essential character of the new ‘thing’; it was not the driving power behind the great change; it was only a result incidental thereof.
It was not merely in order to assuage such needs of the spirit that men turned towards the Catholic Church: had that been so, we should have been able to trace the steps whereby from vague gropings and half-satisfied longings there should have crystallized this and that myth, this and that fulfillment of desire by imagination, until the system should have come into being long after the inception of the first influences.
That such a gradual process did take place is commonly affirmed by those who have not a sufficient acquaintance, even on the largest lines with the ‘thing’ historically but in fact nothing of the kind took place. You discover not a vague frame of mind, but a definite society from the first; no criticism of documents or of tradition can prevent any other conclusion.
A man appeared, gathered together a certain company and taught.
And not only so soon as that company begins to act, but at the root of all memory with regard to its action, you have the specific claim of Divine revelation in the Teacher, of His Human and Divine nature; of His resurrection from the dead; of His establishing a central rite of Sacrifice, which was called the Eucharist (the Act of Gratitude); the claim to authority; the Apostolic organization of the tradition; the presence of a hierarchy and all the rest.
The Catholic Church visible was not an influence that spread; it was a ‘Thing’. It was a fixed Corporation, a Club, if you will; it was an organization with a form and members, a defined outline, and a discipline. Disputes arose within it, certain of its members would overemphasize this or that among the doctrines for which it stood and so warp the proportion of the whole.
But no innovator, even during the first enthusiasm when so many debates surrounded so intellectually vigorous a ‘thing’, would ever pretend that there was not one body to be preserved. He might claim to be the true continuator of that body, and protest (when he was excluded from it for dissent); but never did any of those at the origin propose that discord upon essentials could be permanent.
This new and strict corporation had a name, a name associated in the minds of its contemporaries with the idea of a secret society possessed of mysteries; it called itself the EKKLESIA.
Now it is all-important to grasp this further fact, that the new Ekklesia with its mysteries, its initiation ceremonies (instruction in doctrine, solemn affirmation thereof, called “confession”, what we call a creed, and Baptism) was not one of many religions which happened to prove the winner in a sort of race. That is an error which one finds in many of the textbooks and which has almost passed into popular acceptance. Any number of our general outlines of history and the rest talk of the Early Church in this fashion.
They say, for instance, that the earlier mysteries such as the mysteries of Eleusis, the latter mysteries of Mithras, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis, etc. were of this sort and what they call “Christianity” (for they usually avoid the word “Catholic Church”) was but one of many.
This is not true, and the test that it is not true is simple and should be conclusive. The Catholic Church alone and from its origins proclaimed the Divinity of a real historical man and the objective truth of the doctrines which it affirmed. It proclaimed from the beginning the Resurrection of that real historic man from the dead; and the popular nickname “Christian” (which became, like so many nicknames, the general term) arose from that fact.
All the other popular worships with their mysteries and initiations and the rest of it were admittedly ‘myths’. They did not say, “this happened”; what they said was, “This is a parable, a symbol to explain to you the nature and the possible fate of the human soul and its relation to the Divine.
Not one of them said, “I was founded by a real man whom other men met and knew, who lived in a particular place and time, one to whom there a ‘ a cloud of witnesses’”; not one of them said that they held revealed truth and that their officials held a Divine commission to explain that truth throughout the world.
In all this there was a violent contrast between the Catholic Church and the whole of the pagan world around; neither the intellectuals following Greek traditions nor the Roman Empire with its administrative sense of unity persecuted the other associations.
It was not the doctrine of the Resurrection, still less the doctrine of Immortality which was found repulsive; it was the affirmation that the criminal who had been put to death in a known place and time at Jerusalem, under the Emperor Tiberius, condemned to scourging and ignominious capital punishment of Crucifixion, whereto no Roman citizen was liable, was Divine, spoke with Divine authority, founded a Divine Society, rose from the dead, and could promise to his faithful followers eternal beatitude. This was what shocked the intellectuals, but this also was what gave stuff and substance to that new society and so led, as we shall see in a moment to persecution.
Now, as to its method of expansion, how did it propagate itself?
What was the machinery which proved so successful that in less than four long lifetimes the whole of that hostile society was officially Catholic, and that within another two long lifetimes the whole of the population, West and East, of the known world between the Channel, the Rhine, the Danube and the desert followed its creed and accepted its doctrines?
It worked by the method which we have come to call “Cells,” a word rendered familiar today through the universal Communist agitation. If, as some think, that Communist movement is the final assault upon Catholic tradition and the Faith, if it be, as many think, the modern anti-Christ, the parallel is indeed striking. All over the Graeco-Roman Empire there were founded rapidly a number of these small organizations, first connected with and later separated from local Jewish synagogues; fixed in the greater towns, but later scattered like seed also in the provincial centers, and then by missionary effort throughout the countrysides.
We know this was the method, through ample documentary evidence; we have also a vast mass of tradition, largely legendary, of course, after such length of time, but containing its nucleus of truth, which tells us how in this place and in that these “Cells” were founded and established. Each was called individually a Church, just as the general organization was known as the Church as a whole. They were governed by a Hierarchy. At the head of one church would be one presiding officer, the Episkopos, a word of which we have made the English word “Bishop.”
He was nominated sometimes, apparently by the local clergy, sometimes by the acclamation of the community; but he held his title not from these, but from the Apostolical succession. This and that ancient local Church boasted that it had been founded by an Apostle, and soon in drawing up lists of Bishops the chain was traced to that Apostle who had first begun it by the laying on of hands.
Those thus ordained would lay on hands in their turn, and so the hierarchy or body of the clergy was formed. After some indeterminate time not the Bishop alone (who was the full priest), but subordinates bearing the titles of “elders,” in the Greek “presbuteros,” could function at the Holy Mysteries, having been ordained in their turn by the Bishops. These consecrated the elements of the Eucharist, and from them would commonly be drawn the Episcopate. Such was the original form of the Church.
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