Content:

The aim of this book is to illustrate, from the writings of those authors on whom tradition has bestowed the name of Fathers of the Church, the process of development in Christian thought, life, and worship during the period which culminated in the acceptance of the Christian faith by the Emperor Constantine, and, what that acceptance made possible, the first oecumenical formulation of doctrine at the Council of Nicaea, which begins the era of conciliar definitions. It is a period in which the Church is seen defending and explaining its teaching and practice against misrepresentation by the pagans; striving to safeguard its tradition from distortion by those within the society, or who claimed to be within it; coming to terms (for good or, it may be, for bad) with its environment in the world; working out the implications of the Apostolic faith and devotion, and translating the faith into the language of Hellenistic thought; and consolidating its organization and its forms of worship.

The title of Apostolic Fathers is by custom applied to certain writers of the age generally known as ‘sub-apostolic’ who were thought of as the immediate successors and disciples of the Apostles. They are represented here by St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch.

The letter from the Church at Rome to the Church of the Corinthians which tradition ascribes to a certain Clement is in itself anonymous, but there is no reason to doubt the ascription. Who that Clement was is a question to which three considerable answers have been given. There is, first, that Clement who was a fellow labourer of St. Paul, one of his ‘fellow workers whose names are in the book of life’.¹ Origen and Eusebius saw in him the author of the letter; a possible but unlikely conjecture. Then there is Titus Flavius Clemens, cousin of the Emperor Domitian and consul with the Emperor in A.D.95, who at the close of his consulship was arrested, together with his wife Domitilla, on the charge of ‘atheism’ and ‘Jewish practices’. He was put to death; his wife was banished. Now Domitilla was probably a Christian; the cemetery at Rome which bears her name may well have been her gift to the Church: and many scholars have assumed that the consul also was a believer (Streeter suggested² that he might be the ‘most excellent Theophilus’ of the Lucan preface), and that he wrote the letter to the Corinthians. But it seems certain that our author was not a Roman by race; and it is more than doubtful if the consul could have been a professed Christian. The third suggestion is that the writer was a freedman of the household of Clemens and Domitilla; and this seems most plausible: but the further suggestion that he was a Jew by race has the flimsy basis of a reference in chapter 4 to Jacob as ‘our father’; it is contradicted by the whole tone of the epistle.

The official list of popes gives the succession Peter, Linus, Cletus (or Anacletus), Clement. We may suppose our Clement to have been in some sense a bishop; and the traditional dates of Pope Clement, 90-100, would cohere with the internal evidence of the letter. For the Neronian persecution is apparently referred to as an event of the past; but the Church has suffered further disasters. We need not doubt that this points to the troubles of Christians under Domitian; and the situation presupposed in the sections concerning the ministry — the Apostles have passed away, as have also some of their successors — is that of a generation after Nero’s principate.A.D.94 is a likely date.

The letter was occasioned by news reaching Rome of faction within the Church at Corinth, leading to the deposition of certain blameless presbyters; evidently the Corinthian Christians had not changed much since the time when St. Paul had been moved by reports of schisms to write I Corinthians. The Roman Church now intervenes because of Christian concern over this distressing situation, not because it claims authority over other churches. Since Corinth was a Romanized city after its refounding as a colony in 44 B.C. the Roman believers may well have had a particular concern about the fortunes of the Church in that place.

For us the importance of the epistle lies in the picture it presents of the Roman Church at the end of the first century. A comparison of Clement with the other Apostolic Fathers reveals a wide variety of types of thought and ways of life in the early Church; the curious exegetics of Barnabas, the theological crudities of Hermas, the fervid sacerdotalism of Ignatius; and it is a comparison which may serve to show the emergence of the characteristic Roman Christianity. Here we find no ecstasies, no miraculous ‘gifts of the Spirit’, no demonology, no preoccupation with an imminent ‘Second Coming’. The Church has settled down in the world, and is going about its task ‘soberly, discreetly and advisedly’; Christians pray for their secular rulers, and for a spirit of submission to authority, even in time of persecution. For his theology the writer accepts the monotheism common to Judaism and Stoicism (he employs both scriptural and Hellenic phraseology); to which he adds, without any feeling of tension, the Christology of Paul and Hebrews; he has little to say of the Holy Spirit. One would assume that he had small interest in theological speculation; rather he is concerned with the organization of the Christian community, its ministry, and its liturgy: and what he says about the ministry is of great interest to us, though notoriously uncertain of interpretation. Above all, Clement is a moralist. The Christianity he portrays is a moral movement, firmly set in a clear consciousness of knowing the living God, and living a redeemed life in Christ. Compared with other religions, it was the religion of inwardness and the Spirit, and at the same time a brotherhood, as comprehensive as human life and as deep as human need….If we compare what the Roman church has here written with what we know of town and community life, the societies, schools, etc., of that time, the tremendous difference strikes us at once, and we remember the words of the Apostle Paul to the Philippians: ‘ye are children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom ye are seen as lights of the world’.¹

Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, was condemned to death in his own city, and taken to Rome, expecting to be thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre. Apart from what we can discover from his letters, we know nothing of him. We infer from the fate which he anticipated that he was not a Roman citizen, for citizens were exempt from such indignity; we gather from his letters that he was converted in adult life. The date of his death is unknown; Eusebius gives 108, while John Malalas (c. 600) assigns it to 115, on the occasion of Trajan’s visit to Antioch. It is not a fact beyond all doubt that Ignatius actually suffered martyrdom; for by the fourth century his bones were assumed to have been buried in his episcopal city; and if this tradition is true he could scarcely have been torn to pieces by the beasts at Rome.

On the long journey from Syria Ignatius was taken, closely guarded, through districts of Asia Minor where there were many churches. At Laodicea there was a choice of roads; the southern route leading through Tralles, Magnesia, and Ephesus, while the route chosen reached Smyrna by way of Philadelphia and Sardis. It appears that messages were sent from Laodicea to the Christian communities on the southern road, who had been expecting to greet the hero on his way to martyrdom, and they sent delegates to Smyrna to meet him there and convey their sympathy and admiration. At Smyrna there was a pause in the journey, while the party awaited a ship, and Ignatius had time to write letters of thanks and exhortation to the brethren at Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles. At the same time he took the opportunity to write to the church at Rome, warning the brethren of his impending arrival and imploring them not to try to win for him the mistaken kindness of a reprieve. From Smyrna the guards took him by sea to Troas, where another pause enabled Ignatius to write to the churches of Philadelphia and Smyrna; and to send a personal letter to Polycarp, Smyrna’s bishop. These were letters of thanks for the kindness they had shown him.

The chief themes of the letters are: warnings against the Docetic heresy (which denied the reality of Christ’s human nature, and therefore of his sufferings); and, more insistent, the exhortation to unity, with the emphasis on the authority of the bishop, and, under him, of the clergy.

Ignatius affirms the true corporeity of the Redeemer, and the reality of his human sufferings; with equal clarity he maintains his true divinity. ‘He was truly born, truly ate and drank; was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate; he was truly crucified and he truly died.’¹ ‘Son of Mary, and Son of God, first passible, then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord.’² He is the Logos who reveals the Father; he bestows immortality through his death and resurrection, though Ignatius does not attempt to explain how this is effected; the Spirit is the charisma of Christ; and Christianity is Christ in us. Of his theology Dr. Sanday says:

The theme of unity and submission to ecclesiastical authority, represented primarily by the bishop, appears in letter after letter. Unity is the very condition of Christianity: without the bishop there is no Church; without the bishop there can be no baptism, no agape, no Eucharist: the bishop presides at common worship; if presbyters officiate, they do so as his delegates. There is no word of any charisma of the Spirit; no mention of prophecy, nor of any other ‘gifts’. There is one authority, and one primary ministry, the ‘monarchical episcopate’. Those who regard this ‘prelacy’ as an unfortunate development, as the intrusion of a rigid sacerdotalism into the Christian brotherhood, naturally tend to find in Ignatius’ reiterations the signs of something like a neurotic obsession with episcopacy, or at least of an hysterical anxiety to enforce a novel conception of the ministry which he, perhaps egotistically, feels to be all-important: and they can point to his positive craving for martyrdom as evidence of a sort of spiritual exhibitionism. On the other side it is urged that a time of persecution is not the suitable occasion for introducing experiments, but rather for rallying round the old loyalties; that Ignatius seems to have been a leader loved and trusted in Asia Minor as well as in Syria; that he was calling on the faithful to close their ranks in the face of danger from persecution and from erroneous teaching.

There is no denying a certain shrillness in the voice of Ignatius; a tone very different from the level steadiness of Clement. ‘Ignatius is a mystic with heart red-hot and nerves strained to the breaking-point.’¹ Battifol says of him: ‘His letters, written in an abrupt and nervous style, over-loaded with metaphors, incoherent, popular, and lacking every Hellenic grace, are yet endowed with such pathetic faith, and such passionate joy in martyrdom with such an overwhelming love of Christ, that they are one of the finest expressions of the Christianity of the second century.’²

In 1875 Bryennios, Metropolitan of Serrae, who later became Patriarch of Nicomedia, was working in Constantinople in the library of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem when he found a manuscript dated 1056 which contained copies of the Epistles of Clement, Barnabas, and Ignatius, and a document purporting to set out the Teaching of the Apostles, which has become generally known as the Didache, from the first word of its Greek title. This document was published in 1883, and caused no small stir; for it seemed likely to turn upside-down the received ideas of the early history of the ministry. On the face of it the treatise was of a very early date, before itinerant prophets had been displaced by a settled permanent ministry; when episcopacy was not yet the universal form of church government, and ‘bishop’ was synonymous with ‘presbyter’; when the agape was still conjoined with the Eucharist; when liturgy and theology were still in an early stage. Most scholars inclined to a date in the first century, some arguing for as early as 60, or at any rate not later than 100.³ Lightfoot placed it at the very beginning of the second century, at latest. But others soon began to express doubts about its genuineness. It was admittedly ‘pseudepigraphical’ in claiming to be the ‘teaching of the Apostles’; and the sceptics went beyond the supposition that it represented the practice of the early Church — or of a particular early church — in the first or second century, regarded by that community as based on the Apostolic instructions; they held it to be a deliberate piece of archaeologizing, a later generation constructing a fancy picture of life in the primitive Church. Dr. Charles Bigg¹ attributed it to the fourth century, regarding it as a Montanist pamphlet, put out during Julian’s persecution. The place accorded to prophets in the document has led many² to give to it a Montanist provenance, though few seem to have followed Bigg in bringing it down so late. Dr. Armitage Robinson thought it an artificial production of the latter part of the second century, believing that the ‘Two Ways’, which forms its first part, is based on Barnabas. Others suppose that it genuinely represents conditions in some remote backwater of the Church, which may either have preserved features of primitive church life, or have slipped into eccentricities. It would probably be safe to say that there is now a general tendency to regard the treatise as an archaizing work, of the later second century. Certainly there has been little acceptance of Streeter’s suggestion, that it reflects the conditions of the early church at Antioch, one of the great centres of Christianity.

There is more general agreement in supposing a Syrian provenance. It is the first example of the ‘Church Orders’; and they, except for the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, are probably all either Syrian or Egyptian; the two which are in part derived from the Didache (the Didascalia and the Apostolic Constitutions) are almost certainly Syrian; and internal evidence favours Syria rather than Egypt as the land of origin.³

The importance of Apostles and Prophets in the Church as pictured in the document seemed, when it was first published, to support the theory of a ‘charismatic ministry’ in the early Church, a ministry called directly by God through the bestowal of special spiritual gifts, or charismata. On the basis of the Didache, together with the lists of ‘gifts’ in 1 Cor.xii.28 ff. and Eph. iv. 11 ff. Harnack evolved his theory of the early ministry. He held that in the first century there were two ministries: that of preaching, which was universal and ‘charismatic’; and that of administration, the ordained ministry of bishops (a title convertible with ‘presbyters’) and deacons, exercising a local authority. The ‘universal’ ministry was, he held, by far the more important in the early days; and in the Didache we see a state of transition; the local ministry is beginning to take over the authority of the ‘charismatic’. But there is really no warrant for all this, either in Scripture or in this document, whatever view is taken of its date or of its representative character. The lists in the epistles are not enumerations of ministers but of ‘gifts’, several of which might be displayed by the same man; there is no suggestion in the New Testament of a ministerial authority derived from the gift of prophecy, nor of any distinction between ‘charismatic’ and ordained ministries; in fact, ordination is spoken of as conveying a charisma (2 Tim. i. 6). And the Didache does not show a threefold ministry of apostles, prophets, teachers, but describes itinerant prophets who teach, and who may be called apostles.

As for the passages about the Eucharist in the Didache; it seems improbable that chapter xiv is a mere duplication of the instructions in chapters ix and x. It is much more likely that the earlier passage refers to the agape, the latter to the Eucharist proper.

The Epistle to Diognetus is by custom ranked among the Apostolic Fathers; but it has more affinity with the Apologists, those writers whose concern it was to explain and defend Christianity before the pagan world. The main concern of the Church in earliest days had been the winning of converts and the guidance of the infant Christian communities; defensively, the Christian leader’s first task had been to repel Jewish attacks. But by the turn of the century Christianity was becoming a considerable element in many cities of the Roman Empire; its rapid growth began to arouse distrust and perplexity, and to provoke repressive measures. Thus arose the need for apologetic; to show the reasonableness of the new faith, and, if possible, to state it in terms comprehensible and acceptable to the educated man of the Roman world; to claim toleration for Christians as people of blameless lives, willing to be exemplary citizens because of their faith, not in spite of it, if only they might be excused the customary religious observances of the pagan empire.

The chief aim of this epistle is to demonstrate the attractiveness of the Christian way of life. Its theology is vague, and the apologetic of the early chapters, with its commonplace attack on Jewish and pagan worship, is unimpressive. But the elegance of its style and the sincere nobility of much of its thought, particularly in the setting forth of the redemption, cannot be denied. Lightfoot called it ‘the noblest of early Christian writings’, and it has won high praise from most of those who studied it; and yet it was unknown to Eusebius; it is not noticed by any ancient or medieval writers; and the sole authority for the text is a late medieval manuscript which was destroyed by fire in Strassburg during the Franco-Prussian war. This neglect is puzzling; perhaps its anonymity lost it a place among the Apostolic Fathers, while other Apologists had put up a more trenchant and systematic defence; and its theological imprecision did not commend it to a later age as an authority on doctrine.

Its authorship admits a wide — sometimes a wild — conjecture. Clement, Apollos, Justin, Quadratus, Marcion, ‘Aristides’ have all been suggested on quite inadequate grounds. Connolly argued with some plausibility for Hippolytus, who has been called the residuary legatee of the unclaimed literature of the second century. It has even been conjectured that it might be a fifteenth-century essay in the manner of Justin. The earliest date suggested is the reign of Trajan; the latest (discounting theories of forgery) the beginning of the fourth century. There seems to be now a general inclination towards the middle of the second century; and the tone of the letter, with its merely inchoate theology, the absence of any doctrine of the Spirit, and the lack of any traces of institutionalism, supports an early date. Nothing is known of its place of origin; nor of the identity of Diognetus, who may well be a literary fiction; for the document is an ‘epistle’ rather than a true letter, an apologetic treatise in epistolary form.

The most famous of the Apologists proper is utterly lacking in the elegance and charm of the writer to Diognetus. Justin was born of gentile parents towards the end of the first century in Flavia Neapolis (the ancient Sichem, now called Nablus) in Samaria. In his Dialogue with Trypho he tells of his early passion for philosophy; how he betook himself to a Stoic teacher (who showed no interest in theology); then to a Peripatetic (who displayed too lively a concern for his fees); thence to a Pythagorean (but he demanded a too intensive course of preliminary study). Dissatisfied with these tutors, Justin put himself under a Platonist and found his doctrines more congenial. Then, in mature life, he was converted to Christianity, apparently at Ephesus, and rejoiced at finding the goal of his long search. But he still thought of himself as a philosopher, and when, soon after his conversion, he removed to Rome and set up as a teacher he still wore, says Eusebius, the distinctive cloak which was the accepted academical dress of the professor of philosophy; a garb which would accord well with the claim of his Apology that Christianity is the fulfillment of the philosophic quest; Christ did not come to destroy the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa. Tradition holds that in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, about A.D.165, Justin met the death which earned him the title afterwards affixed as a kind of surname.

He seems to have been a prolific writer, and his reputation has attracted many spurious attributions; but only two books have come down to us which are certainly his; the Apology addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius and his adopted sons, with its supplement (the so-called ‘Second Apology’), and the Dialogue with Trypho. The dialogue, ostensibly a report of an argument with a Jew whom Justin met at Ephesus soon after his conversion, is of interest in the evidence it provides for contemporary Jewish Christianity, and in the Procrustean methods by which Justin forces the Old Testament to supply prefigurations of the New. But for us Justin is more important as an apologist whose chief aim is to obtain justice for Christians by defending them against pagan calumny. Though more doctrinal than the other Apologists, he is not really a theologian; rather he is a philosopher — of a somewhat superficial kind — and a moralist, for whom Christianity is rational truth and a noble way of life. He is one of the first to strive to reconcile Christianity and Hellenic thought, by asserting that while the Church has the complete truth there are truths of philosophy as well, which, because they are true, must be due to the working of the same Logos who revealed all truth in his incarnate life, who is both the creative Word and (as the Stoics also taught) the Divine Reason. Hence arises Justin’s one original contribution to Christian thought, the conception of the ‘Spermatic Logos’. Before the coming of Christ men had been enabled to attain to bits and pieces of the truth through the possession of ‘seeds’ of the Divine Reason; at Christ’s coming the whole Logos took shape and was made man. It is this liberal attitude to pagan thought which is Justin’s chief importance, not any contribution to technical theology. He shows us an educated man of the second century, seeking to commend the faith to others of like interest and the same background of culture. He is no profound thinker, and no stylist; his works are rambling and diffuse; woolly as well in texture of language as of thought.

So far we have met with Apostolic Fathers and Apologists. The next two writers bear the title of Catholic Fathers, bestowed in virtue of their position as defenders of the faith of the main tradition of the Church against Gnostic heresy, some account of which must now be given.

‘Gnostic’ is a term used to cover a wide range of notions, and there is no general agreement about the precise limits of its denotation; it refers in fact to a type of thought rather than to a specific heresy. The word is derived from the Greek for knowledge (gnosis); and it is characteristic of the Gnostic that he lays claim to the possession of esoteric truth about God and his relation to the world of matter, and to men in their material bodies. Such a relation is a problem for the type of outlook from which Gnosticism emerges, for that outlook is fundamentally dualistic, making a clean break between spirit and matter, between God and the world. Harnack saw in Gnosticism the ‘acute Hellenisation of Christianity’, but it seems to be more oriental than Greek; and it is pre-Christian in origin, coming into conflict with the Faith when this amorphous Eastern syncretism tries to take Christianity into its system and to expound the teaching of Christ in terms of oriental theosophy. To the Gnostic the Christianity of the gospels was milk for the spiritual nursery; the mature man needed a diet more intellectually satisfying, a diet which Gnosticism offered to supply. It was clearly impossible that Absolute Spirit should have direct contact with matter, either in creation or in revelation; still more incredible was the notion that God could become man. The world could only have indirect relation to God by means of a chain of beings, of graduated spirituality. Hence in Samaria Simon Magus, we are told, taught that from the One there issued Thought, and from Thought came various ranks of Angels, and by them the world was made: at Antioch, at the beginning of the second century, Saturninus ascribed creation to seven Angels, of which Jehovah was one: while the lunatic fringe of Syrian Gnosticism was represented by the Ophites, who revered the Serpent of Genesis iii as being man’s helper against the inferior creator-god, the Demiurge: and the Cainites took their name from the character whom they held to be the first hero in Scripture, for they went to the extreme of exegetical topsy-turvydom, assuming that all biblical judgements, like dreams, ‘go by contraries’, and applying this canon of popular oneirocriticism throughout the Scriptures. In Alexandria Basilides interposed 365 heavens between the Supreme Being and the material world, and taught that the disorder of the world was healed when Nous descended from the Supreme upon the son of Mary, and this deified man was taken up to heaven without suffering, while Simon of Cyrene died on the cross. Carpocrates held that the world’s disorder was the fault of the Angels of creation, who spoilt the divine plan by their officious introduction of law (especially the law of property) and morality (especially sexual morality); so that a return to anarchy and communism would set men free from the infinite succession of birth and rebirth and the bondage of matter. But the greatest of the Gnostics was Valentinus, an Egyptian who taught in Rome in the middle of the second century. His cosmological fantasy presents a dizzy scheme of ‘Aeons’, ultimately derived from the Supreme Being, and composing the ‘Pleroma’, the fullness of the Divinity — apparently a poetical symbolism of the attributes of the Supreme. These Aeons are arranged in pairs, male and female, each pair producing a subordinate pair, until Will and Wisdom gave birth to the abortion Achamoth, who is the source of confusion, which is restored to order by two pairs of Aeons, Christ and Spirit, Definition and Cross. Finally, Jesus comes into being as the last of the Aeons, and Achamoth produces three types of men; the Carnal (the pagans, who are irredeemable), the Psychic (ordinary Christians who are capable of restoration), and the Pneumatic (the spiritual Valentinians, who need no redemption).

‘We are dealing in the last resort with the products of human fancy, a fanciful world "moulded to the heart’s desire", in which the religious imagination was not tied down to historical facts preserved in an authoritative book. In these days I venture to think that we are not sufficiently grateful to the orthodox Catholic theologians who clung so doggedly to the literal truth of the Scriptures’. This is the verdict of Dr.Burkitt,¹ although he took the favourable view of Valentinus that he was a Christian seeking to interpret the Faith in terms acceptable to Hellenistic culture.

The refutation of such vertiginous fancies, the overthrow of ‘the baseless fabric of this vision’, and the affirmation of the apostolic tradition and the scriptural revelation was the purpose of the great work of Irenaeus. Little is known of his life. He was born in Asia Minor about 130, and as a youth he saw and heard Polycarp of Smyrna. Later he came to Gaul, and in 177 as a presbyter of Lyons he took to Pope Eleutherus the letter of the confessors of the Gallican churches — which he may have written. In the same year he succeeded Pothinus as Bishop of Lyons. Tradition attributes his death (some say by martyrdom) to the first years of the next century.

The work generally known as Adversus Haereses really bears the title The Refutation of False Gnosis; and the first two books give a detailed exposure of Gnostic fantasies; books iii and iv expound Christian teaching; the fifth and last book treats of the resurrection and the consummation of history — including an account of the millenarian hope which Irenaeus shared with Papias and Justin, and others who took the Apocalypse as their map of the future. Irenaeus is chiefly concerned to establish the ‘Apostolic Tradition’, the Church’s ‘Rule of Faith’, against the Gnostic claim to the possession of a secret tradition. And he insists that this Rule is guaranteed as being the teaching of the great sees, whose succession can be traced back to the founding Apostles. Against the claim to an unwritten esoteric doctrine he opposes the authority of Scripture: the New Testament is now for the first time quoted as Scripture; and the gospel canon is closed, for does not nature itself teach us that there must be four gospels, and no more than four? Thus against the novelties of Gnosticism he opposes the traditional Faith, the established succession of bishops, and the guaranteed revelation in the gospels. ‘Although the expression The Catholic Church, which came into vogue towards the end of the second century, does not occur in the writings of Irenaeus, the thing itself is constantly before him, that is, the conception of the one true Church spread over the earth, and bound together by the one true faith, in contrast to the manifold and variegated and apostate forms of heresy.’¹

Irenaeus may justly be called the first biblical theologian; for him the Bible is not a collection of proof-texts as it is for the Apologists, but a continuous record of God’s self-disclosure and his dealings with man, reaching its culmination in the person and work of Christ. His Christology is not systematically expounded; Irenaeus was not a systematic thinker. But the chief points are clear: Christ is the Logos, the complete revelation of the Father’s love; in opposition to the Gnostic notion of emanation Irenaeus affirms the eternal co-existence of the Logos with the Father, thus developing the teaching of the prologue of the Fourth Gospel. But he employs Pauline as well as Johannine ideas; Christ is the second Adam who restores mankind to the position lost by the Fall, or rather he enables man to fulfil the potentialities possessed by Adam at his creation; for man was not created perfect and immortal, but capable of perfection and immortality. This redemptive work, by which Christ ‘joins the end to the beginning’, that is, restores man to God, is one of the meanings of the famous doctrine of ‘recapitulation’. The word is Pauline — or deutero-Pauline — from Ephesians i. 10. But on the whole, though Irenaeus makes use of Pauline phrases and images, his doctrine of redemption is ‘Eastern’ or ‘incarnationist’. He speaks of Christ’s victory over Satan, of ransom, of sacrifice, but these conceptions do not seem to be brought into relation with one another, or with the dominant theme of salvation through Christ’s incarnation and our incorporation in him. This, at least, is how it appears to most commentators. But Bishop Aulen, in his important book Christus Victor, finds in Irenaeus a consistent statement of the ‘classical’ theory of the Atonement, doing justice to every aspect of the work of Christ regarded as an act of God, and free from the forensic notions of the later ‘Western’ view.

Irenaeus followed the example of the Apologists in seeking to expound Christian teaching in terms acceptable to Greek thought; thus contributing to what Harnack termed ‘the dilution of Christianity by Hellenism’, but what others have seen as the legitimate and indeed necessary development of the Johannine teaching on the Logos who enlightens every man. The other great ‘Anti-Gnostic Father’ was a man of very different temper and outlook. Tertullian was born at Carthage about the middle of the second century, the son of a pagan centurion. He was educated for the law, and was a well-established pleader when in 193 he was converted to Christianity by witnessing the courage of Christians facing torture and death for the Faith. It is not certain if he was ever ordained; and in 203 he left the Great Church to join the Montanists, a sect of enthusiasts who asserted that the new era of the Paraclete had begun with them and was being manifested in the gift of the ‘New Prophecy’, bringing a new revelation to interpret and extend the Gospel, if not to supersede it, and to impose a more rigorous moral standard. Starting in Phrygia, this movement spread to Africa, where Tertullian found it congenial to his fiery spirit and his austere morality.

Tertullian was uncompromising by nature; and he would resist to the uttermost any attempt to contaminate the faith by association with pagan thought. Was not philosophy the parent of Gnostic error? ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What harmony can there be between the Academy and the Church?’¹ Tertullian is at one with Irenaeus in insisting that the Church’s teaching is based on Scripture interpreted by the Church according to the tradition delivered by the Apostles to the churches and preserved by the succession of bishops. Against the Gnostics Tertullian emphasizes the humanity of Christ and the reality of his sufferings with the vehement paradox which is characteristic of him. His most famous passage is generally misquoted: ‘The Son of God died; it must needs be believed because it is absurd. He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible.’¹ One erratic thinker whose views were refuted at length by Tertullian has usually been classed with the Gnostics, and he was so classed by Irenaeus. But although, like the Gnostics, he was a dualist, his dualism is so different from theirs and has so different an origin, that this traditional classification introduces confusion. This teacher was Marcion, who came from Pontus to Rome in 140 and won a reputation as a theologian. Unlike the Gnostics, his interests were not in cosmology, but in ethics and the exegesis of Scripture. He carried the Pauline contrast between the Law and the Gospel to the point of denying any compatibility between the Old and the New Testaments, and went on to postulate two Gods: the God of the Old Testament, a God of justice who is the Creator, the Demiurge (and here he is akin to the Gnostics), is inferior to the supreme God of the New Testament who is the God of love. Jesus, as the agent of the good God, came to destroy the work of the Demiurge. Marcion also joins company with the Gnostics in denying the reality of Christ’s humanity, and in supposing that man’s aim should be to free himself from enslavement to matter by ascetic discipline. Naturally he rejected the whole of the Old Testament and made a selection of his own from the New Testament Scriptures consisting of the greater Epistles of Paul and an edited version of Luke’s Gospel. Tertullian devoted five books to the refutation of this type of teaching. But it was more easy to demonstrate the absurdity of Marcion’s doctrine than to solve in detail the problems raised by many passages in the Old Testament. Indeed, until literary and historical criticism led to the conception of a progressive revelation there was no real solution but only an escape by the liberal use of allegory.

Another type of erroneous teaching combated was that of the ‘Monarchians’, who professed to be the champions of monotheism in a pagan world: one school upholding the unity of God by declaring Christ to be a man on whom the power of the Spirit descended, who are therefore called Dynamic Monarchians; while another school, the Modalist Monarchians, saw in Christ and the Spirit merely temporary modes of God’s manifestation. These latter were represented at Rome by Praxeas and Noetus, and against Praxeas Tertullian wrote a treatise in which he laid down the lines of the later Trinitarian doctrine by the use of the terms ‘substance’ and ‘person’ to express distinction in the unity of the Godhead. This is not to assert that Tertullian anticipates Nicene orthodoxy; for him the Son ‘comes into being’, ‘there was a time when the Son did not exist’. He does not attain to the conception of the eternal coexistence which we find in Irenaeus.

In his Apology, written in 197, soon after his conversion, Tertullian writes as a lawyer, pleading that the persecution of Christians is illegal, and that the laws against Christians are a denial of human rights. Like other Apologists, he rebuts the allegations of unnatural vice levelled against the Christians, but he does it in more detail, with a wealth of irony. He does not shrink from a piece of dubious special pleading in his assertion — which became a commonplace with Christian writers — that only bad emperors had oppressed the Church: he even claims that Marcus Aurelius favoured Christians; a claim which would have seemed curious to Justin, and to Pothinus and his fellow martyrs in Gaul.

Alexandria was the chief intellectual centre of the Hellenistic world; it was also the metropolis of Greek-speaking Jewry and the headquarters of Jewish apologetic. The Septuagint, which was partly apologetic in intention, was produced there, and Philo had there carried on his indefatigable labours with the aim of accommodating Jewish religion to Greek learning. The same kind of activity was pursued there by Christian teachers, and at one extreme it gave rise to Gnostic aberrations; more central was the work of the catechetical school for the instruction of converts, of which the first known head was the Sicilian, Pantaenus. He was succeeded by Clement, whose name has been thought to indicate descent from the Titus Flavius Clemens who has already been mentioned. He was born in the middle of the second century, educated probably at Athens, and succeeded Pantaenus in 190. In 203, on the outbreak of the persecution of Severus, he retired from Alexandria, and apparently never returned: tradition held that he eventually suffered martyrdom, and for long he was venerated as a saint; but he has never received official canonization.

The aim of his writings is to rescue learning from the disrepute into which Gnosticism had brought it, by setting up the ideal of a ‘true Gnosis’, in opposition to Gnosis falsely so-called. He develops the Johannine theme of Justin, that the Logos is the source of all spiritual and intellectual enlightenment; that Greek philosophy, as well as Jewish prophecy, was a preparation for Christ. His teaching is contained in three main works, which correspond to the three stages of initiation into the Christian Mysteries. The Protrepticus (‘Exhortation to the Greeks’) sets out the superiority of the Christian revelation; the Paidagogus (‘Tutor’) represents Christ as instructing the convert in matters of outward conduct as a preliminary to the reception of the true doctrine; and this doctrine is given in the Stromateis (‘Miscellanies’ — literally ‘patch-work’) in which the Christian philosophy is somewhat desultorily expounded. There was also a fourth major work, the Hypotyposes (‘Outlines’), giving commentaries on various parts of Scripture; but of this only fragments have survived.

Clement is not an important theologian nor a profound thinker; ‘a warm-hearted rambling man with large but somewhat woolly mind and a poetical enthusiasm showing itself in an eloquence which his Greek readers would recognize to be of the proper literary quality’.¹ But his warmth and liberal vision are endearing, and F.D. Maurice found him ‘that one of the Old Fathers whom we should all have reverenced most as a teacher and loved most as a friend’.² Westcott sees his particular interest as a figure in an age of transition. ‘Doctrine was passing from the stage of oral tradition to written definition. Thought was passing from the immediate circle of the Christian revelation to the whole domain of human experience. Life in its fullness was coming to be apprehended as the object of Christian discipline’.³ We have seen that the Gnostics made play with their claim to an esoteric tradition. Clement claims to be the ‘true Gnostic’ dependent upon an unwritten tradition, entrusted by the Lord to his Apostles and handed down from father to son (not, in Clement, from bishop to bishop). This tradition he identifies with the ‘Ecclesiastical Rule’, his term for what Irenaeus and Tertullian call the ‘Rule of Faith’; which he regards not as an independent source of teaching but as a key to the understanding of the Church’s doctrine; not as co-ordinate with Scripture in authority but as a guide to its exegesis. Dr. Hanson, in his recent study of Clement’s use of this term,¹ shows that it includes at least three elements: private speculations, often of a Gnostic type; doctrinal speculations inherited from Alexandrian teachers, which he believed to be ultimately derived from the Lord; and what the Fathers called the didascalia, the Church’s interpretation of her faith in teaching and preaching.²

Typical of Clement’s Gnosticism is his contrast between faith and knowledge. Faith is for him the foundation of elementary Christian belief on which knowledge is built, the knowledge which in its perfection is the contemplation of God, and the consequent recovery of the divine likeness in man. Every man has the image of God in him, which is to be transformed into the likeness; this image is man’s reason, whose source is the Logos, who therefore is at work as well in Hellenic thought as in Jewish religious intuition. God has spoken ‘at sundry times and in divers manners’ not only ‘through the prophets’ but through the philosophers also. The true Gnostic should unite all the truth which is the gift of the one divine Logos. ‘Towards this great unity of all science and all life Clement himself strove; and by the influence of his writings he has kept alive in others the magnificent promises included in the teachings of St. Paul and St. John, which by their very grandeur are apt to escape apprehension. He affirmed, once for all, upon the threshold of a new age, that Christianity is the heir of all past time, and the interpreter of the future.³

Clement’s work was carried on, and to some extent obscured, by the prodigious labours of his pupil, Origen. Origen was born of Christian parents; he is the first of the Fathers of whom a Christian home and boyhood is recorded. His father was martyred in 203, and Origen himself was only prevented from courting the same fate by the shrewd action of his mother, who hid the clothes of the youthful aspirant to the martyr’s crown, rightly judging that modesty would get the better of zeal. After his father’s death he supported himself and the family by teaching, and enjoyed the patronage of a wealthy lady, while enduring as best he could the companionship of a Gnostic protégée of his patron, apparently a person of eclectic tastes, like some of her sisters of the present age, who find themselves able to combine a professed membership of the Church with an interest in theosophy, or in ‘Christian Science’. But soon Origen, at the age of eighteen, was called to take Clement’s place as head of the catechetical school. He sold his secular library to purchase an exiguous annuity of about a shilling a day, which sufficed, so simple were his wants, to make him independent of fees. He learnt Hebrew in order to study the Old Testament in the original tongue, and started on the labours which resulted in his Hexapla; he made himself familiar with pagan philosophy, and attended the lectures of Ammonius Saccas, the Neoplatonist, under whom Plotinus studied a year later.

The school grew rapidly; but in 215 his successful labours were interrupted by the massacre at Alexandria known as the ‘Fury of Caracalla’, and he withdrew to Caesarea, where he was honoured by the invitation of the Palestinian bishops to expound the Scriptures in Church; an unusual distinction for a layman, which shows the extent of his reputation. His own bishop, Demetrius, took offence at this and recalled him in 216.An important consequence of this return was the conversion of a wealthy heretic named Ambrose, who encouraged him to embark on the work of authorship which made him one of the most prolific writers of antiquity. Ambrose went further; he set up an efficient book-producing organization, with seven shorthand-writers and seven copyists, besides expert calligraphers. Among the first ‘titles’ of this publishing-house were the De Princpiis and the earlier part of the great Commentary on St. Johns Gospel. Origen’s influence increased, till he became ‘the unofficial representative, arbiter, and peacemaker of the Eastern church’. Then, about 230, he fell foul of his bishop by receiving ordination, while on a visit to Greece, at the hands of his old friends, the bishops of Caesarea and Jerusalem. The action was uncanonical; for no bishop was allowed to ordain a man from another’s jurisdiction: besides that, Origen had in early life placed a barrier to his ordination when, in a moment of zeal which he afterwards regretted, he interpreted Matthew xix. 12 with a literalness surprising in one who was to be the chief exemplar of allegorical exegesis. Demetrius had before been piqued by the Caesarean engagements of his subordinate, and now he was not unjustifiably incensed at this breach of ecclesiastical order. Origen was condemned at Alexandria and banished, and later Demetrius obtained his condemnation at Rome, though the East as a whole seems to have ignored these disciplinary measures. From 230 to his death in 254, a death hastened by the torture he endured in the Decian persecution, Origen made Caesarea his home and headquarters. Thither Ambrose transferred his publishing machinery, and thence treatises and commentaries, and, towards the end of his life, volumes of sermons, poured in a never-failing stream.

Origen was, first, a great teacher, and his pupil, Gregory Thaumaturgus, has left an account of his methods and of the power he exercised. ‘No subject was barred, nothing was kept from us. . . . We were allowed to make ourselves familiar with all kinds of doctrine, from Greek and Eastern sources, on spiritual or secular subjects, ranging freely over the whole field of learning’. The master taught, ‘in words which inspired us as well by their humility as by their confidence that, as the eye seeks light, and the body craves food, so our mind is informed by nature with a longing to know the truth of God and the causes of phenomena.’ He kindled in our hearts the love of the divine Logos, the supreme object of love, who by his unspeakable loveliness draws all irresistibly to himself’. The minds of his pupils were so fired that ‘the only object worthy of our pursuit seemed to be philosophy, together with our teacher of philosophy, that divinely-inspired man’, the aim of whose teaching was that the pupil should ‘make himself like God in purity of mind, that he may draw near to God and abide in him.’

It would be impossible here to attempt any account of Origen’s vast theological output, or to estimate his importance in the many fields in which he worked. He has been called the first great scholar of the Church, the first great preacher, the first great devotional writer, the first great commentator, the first great dogmatist. We may glance at his labours in two fields; in biblical studies and exegesis, and in doctrine.

In his work on the Bible Origen shows little of critical acumen, even for his age; he has nothing like the ability displayed in this regard by Dionysius of Alexandria in his discussion of the authorship of the Apocalypse; neither does he evince any interest in the establishment of the true text in places where he quotes variant readings from different manuscripts. The important thing is that he recorded so many variations, and so called the attention of others to problems that he himself was little concerned to solve. One great pioneer work he did achieve. Because of the problems raised by the innumerable discrepancies between the Septuagint version and the received Hebrew text, Origen proposed himself the preparation of a monumental comparative edition of the Bible, setting out in parallel columns the Hebrew text, a transliteration into Greek characters, Aquila’s slavishly literal version, Symmachus’ Greek translation, the Septuagint, and Theodotion’s revision of the LXX: making six columns, and this gives it the title Hexapla (‘sixfold’). So colossal a work (it took a quarter of a century to complete) could hardly expect a wide circulation; and it survives only in fragments. Its importance lies in the novelty of a sound method. Other biblical works of Origen include expositions, in either commentaries or homilies, of almost every book of the Bible. Though they may often exasperate the modern reader by repetition, by diffuseness, by the lack of any sense of proportion and of any historical sense, by fantastic speculations, there are in them so many flashes of penetration, there is so much of nobility of thought, so candid a facing of difficulties, such a determination to interpret the Bible, rather than to use it as a repository of proof-texts’, that ‘it is due to Origen, more than to any other single master, that one of the most extensive branches of Christian literature, that of biblical interpretation, and one of the principal divisions of Christian thought, that of biblical theology, were established for all time in the centre of the activity of the Church.’¹

Origen defined the method of biblical interpretation which had already been employed by Christian writers, and which Clement had briefly touched on. Scripture, says Origen, is like a man, in that it is composed of body, soul, and spirit. The body of scripture is its literal meaning, which is comprehensible to the simple: the soul is the moral meaning, clear to any believer when it is pointed out to him: the spirit is the spiritual or allegorical sense. It must be admitted that Origen says very little about the ‘moral’ meaning; but since his illustration — the Pauline reference of the unmuzzled ox to the right of ministers to support by the people — seems to imply that it consists in the particular application of some general principle illustrated by the text, the moral meaning will in most instances emerge directly from the literal. In any case Origen is mainly concerned with the allegorical method, revealing the hidden spiritual meaning, the device whereby the difficulties and inconsistencies of the scriptures, and even what are, from a Christian standpoint, the immoralities, can be harmonized with the Faith.It is not a method for today; though something very like it appears in the present vogue of typology’. But in earlier ages ‘it made it possible for intelligent Christians to believe the Bible ...and by saving the Bible it gave security to the historical foundation of the Christian faith’. And even today it is the only method by which many of the Psalms can be used intelligently as the vehicles of Christian devotion.

In the De Principiis (On First Principles’) Origen produced the first synthesis of philosophical theology. Previous writers had written on particular topics and chiefly in refutation of various aberrant teachers, or had given a necessarily superficial account of the Church’s tenets for the purposes of apologetic. Clement had attempted something like a general account of the Christian ‘Gnosis’; but it was not in his nature to be systematic. Origen’s work is based on the scriptural revelation and on the deliverances of human reason. On matters which were treated neither by Scripture nor by Christian tradition he feels free to speculate. In many respects his dogmatic system was inadequate or erroneous by the standard of the later judgement of the Church: in particular he seems to stress the distinctions in the Trinity at the expense of the Unity; to subordinate the Son too definitely; and to limit the activity of the Spirit. But he was a pioneer; and Athanasius and the Cappadocians, whose theology was expressed in the great doctrinal formulas, owed far more to him than did Arius and his like, who claimed to be the heirs of Origen in virtue of a few oddments they collected from the store which he left behind.

Among the writers of the early Church are three who first won a reputation in the law-courts. Minucius Felix, the Apologist, displays in his Octavius the persuasive arts of the pleader: Tertullian is the vehement advocate, master of epigram and the biting phrase; while Cyprian’s legal training and experience must have helped to develop in him those abilities which made him a great ecclesiastical statesman and administrator. In some of his letters we may find an impetuous advocacy recalling the manner of his fellow-citizen Tertullian whom he called ‘the Master’ (‘Give me the Master’, he would say, when he wished to consult his writings). But in the main his qualities were not so much those of the bar, as of the judicial, or the front, bench. Cyprian was a leading member of the Carthaginian bar before his conversion in 246, a man of wealth and good social position. Two years after his baptism he was elevated to the bishopric, apparently by popular acclaim; a rapid rise which testified to his reputation, but was not calculated to endear him to all his fellow presbyters. Two years after his consecration the persecution of Decius broke out, and Cyprian went into hiding for a year. Then he returned to rule his diocese ably and firmly until his martyrdom during Valerian’s persecution in 258.

His qualities of statesmanship were put to the proof by three problems which arose during his episcopate. First there was the question of the treatment of those who had lapsed under pressure and had offered sacrifice. Many of these claimed re-admission to the Christian society on the strength of certificates signed by ‘confessors’, those who had suffered imprisonment or torture and had faced death for their Faith, or by those who had achieved martyrdom. The notion had grown up that these heroes of the Church were empowered to dispose of their superfluous merit to weaker brethren who might thus gain remission of the consequences of their failure; it was in some sense an anticipation of the late medieval system of indulgences. The authorities thus faced a dilemma; to honour these drafts on the confessors’ spiritual account might seem too facile a condonation of weakness; to refuse them would be a slight on the prerogative of those whom the Church delighted to honour. Cyprian’s position was especially unenviable: his rapid promotion had aroused resentment; his withdrawal during the persecution could be misinterpreted. The cause of the lapsi and the confessors was championed by one Novatus, a presbyter, who took his case to Rome, where he became a stimulant to the schism of Novatian, who had been elected anti-pope. Since Novatian had at first taken a moderate line on the question at issue between Novatus and his bishop, until Novatus, the supporter of laxity in Africa, egged him on to adopt a rigorist position in defiance of Pope Cornelius, it would appear that the real dispute was between bishop and presbyter on the question of authority in the Church. Cyprian’s policy was to ignore the libelli and consider each case on its merits, imposing penance on the lapsi before re-admission, and permanently inhibiting lapsed clergy from the exercise of their ministry. The same decision was taken by a Roman council under Cornelius. In 252, under the threat of renewed persecution, a general amnesty was proclaimed for all those under penance.

In this matter Cyprian had interpreted, if he had not directed, the mind of the leaders of the Church. In the second matter of controversy — the question of the admission of those baptized by heretics — his policy was endorsed neither by Rome nor by the later practice of the whole Church. Cyprian maintained that heretical baptism was invalid, since baptism was an act of the Church, and heretics were, by definition, outside the society; ‘no man can have God as his Father unless he has the Church as his Mother’. Stephen, the new Bishop of Rome, opposed the practice of rebaptism, and excommunicated those who adhered to it. For a time the Eastern and African churches continued their custom, while the West followed Stephen: and in the end the Western view prevailed, and received conciliar sanction at Aries, in 314. Yet, though his policy was abandoned, Cyprian’s behaviour in the dispute has generally been contrasted favourably with Stephen’s conduct. ‘Cyprian did right in a wrong cause (as it hath since been judged), and Stephen did ill in a good cause: as far then as charity is to be preferred before a true opinion, so far is Cyprian’s practice a better precedent for us, and an example of primitive sanctity, than the zeal and indiscretion of Stephen.’¹

Since the position of Novatus and his like was fundamentally, as we have seen, a challenge to episcopal authority, while the baptismal controversy concerned the nature of the Church, Cyprian was impelled to develop his theory of the Church and its ministry: and herein is his chief importance in the history of Christian thought, for this was the first complete statement on this subject, though it may be claimed that most of what Cyprian has to say had already been said or implied by Ignatius and Irenaeus. In his treatise On the Unity of the Church Cyprian discusses the nature of that unity and the place of the bishop in the Christian community. The Church’s unity, he affirms, is derived from the unity of the one God in Trinity; it finds its expression and safeguard in the unity of the episcopal college. For episcopal authority is corporate, being represented in each place by the local bishop, who exercises there the plenitude of the collegiate authority of the whole body; he cannot be overruled, in that place, by the majority of his fellow bishops, although disputed matters are to be submitted to the judgement of the whole college. It seems certain that this doctrine was suggested by the collegiate nature of magistracies under the Roman constitution; it is eminently the product of a lawyer-statesman.

The terminus proposed for these selections is the formula of the Faith promulgated by the Council of Nicaea: but that formula did not win immediate and universal acceptance — it was really the product of a minority accepted under pressure by some of the delegates and received without enthusiasm by many of the ‘neutrals’ — and a bitter struggle was waged for half a century between Arianism of varied shades and the supporters of Nicaea under their champion, Athanasius, from whose writings the points at issue are illustrated. The implications of this Faith and its technical terms were discussed and finally settled by the three great Cappadocian Fathers, Basil and the two Gregorys, who consolidated positions won by Athanasius.

Athanasius was born in Alexandria in about 296, and received a good grounding in secular learning and made himself well versed in the Scriptures. At an early age he attracted the notice of Alexander, the bishop, who made him his companion and secretary, and later ordained him deacon. In 319 Arius, the popular and able rector of a suburban parish, was accused of teaching that Jesus Christ was neither truly God nor truly man; and for this combination of unitarianism and paganism — the doctrine of one God in lonely transcendence together with the worship of one who was less than God — he was condemned and deposed in 321.Yet he persisted in his teaching and was active in propaganda and intrigue, claiming the support of the writings of Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria, and Lucian, the martyr presbyter of Antioch. Certainly there were passages in Origen — where he stresses the subordination of the Son — and in other earlier writers, which, taken by themselves, could be interpreted in an Arian sense; just as there were many passages in Scripture which the Arians delighted to quote as proof-texts of their doctrine.

In 325 Constantine summoned the first Oecumenical Council at Nicaea, a council which, though predominantly Eastern in composition, represented the whole Church and at the suggestion of a Western bishop, Hosius of Cordova, adopted the term homoousion, ‘of the same substance’, to describe the essential unity of the Father and the Son. To the formula of Nicaea all but the extreme Arian wing subscribed. Athanasius attended the council as secretary and adviser of his bishop, and when Alexander died, three years afterwards (or later), his trusted deacon succeeded him, to meet the troubles which the dying bishop had foretold. They were not long in gathering: Eusebius of Nicomedia, the leader of the Arians at the council, had accepted the Nicene formula; but scarcely had the bishops dispersed when he busied himself in the intrigues in which he took such pleasure and displayed so much skill and assiduity. He demanded the recall of Arius, obtained the ear of Constantine, and induced him to press the demand. Athanasius refused; fantastic charges were trumped up against him, and in 335 a council at Tyre decreed his deposition, and the Emperor sent him into honourable exile at Treves, where his eldest son had his court. On the death of the great Emperor two years later Athanasius was restored to his see, which had been left vacant since his departure; but Eusebius was still busy, and he prevailed on Constantius, Emperor of the East, to foist another bishop on Alexandria. For the second time Athanasius went into exile, making his way to Rome, where he was welcomed with every show of respect by Constans, Emperor of the West, who, seeing the danger of schism in the Empire, interceded with his brother and achieved the restoration of Athanasius in 346. Four years later Constans was murdered; Constantius became sole Emperor, and a Western council at Milan was coerced to condemn Athanasius, who spent the next seven years in hiding, sometimes in his episcopal city, but chiefly among the monks in the desert. Yet from his hiding-places the bishop continued to direct his flock; the monks distributed his writings; and it was in this period that he produced his Orations against the Arians, to support the acceptance of the Nicene Faith in Asia Minor.

Constantius died in 361, and Julian succeeded, Athanasius was recalled to his see (the intruded Arian bishop, George of Cappadocia, having been imprisoned and then lynched); and his first concern was to reconcile the ‘conservative’ party, the Origenists’, to the Nicene formula. He achieved this aim at a synod of Alexandria in the next year; but after eight months the Emperor expelled him from Egypt, and he spent over a year on the run. Recalled by Jovian, he was again exiled after two years, in 365.This fourth and last exile was only of four months’ duration; he was brought back in response to popular clamour throughout Egypt, and enjoyed seven years of peace and honour until his death in 373.

The chequered history of Athanasius, with its alternations of honour and exile, bound up as it was with the personalities and predilections of successive Emperors, and beset by intrigue, is paralleled in the procession — a bemused observer might call it a phantasmagoria — of councils and formulas during these fifty years, wherein creed and counter-creed, extreme manifesto and attempted compromise, tumbled after each other in bewildering sequence. The final triumph of the Nicene faith, and its ratification at the Council of Constantinople in 381, is due to Athanasius more than to any other man. With unflagging energy he defended the formula of the homoousion, as expressing this truth, that if Christ is God, then he must be God in the same sense as God the Father is God; divinity is one ‘substance’. To believe in the godhead of the Son in any other sense is to introduce paganism with its ranks of divinities, semi-divinities, demi-semi-divinities. How then can we maintain that the Father is God, the Son God, and the Spirit God, and yet safeguard Christian monotheism? The final working-out of the terminology by the Cappadocians developed the teaching of Athanasius. There is but one substance in the Trinity, one essential ‘stuff’ of godhead. But the revelation in Scripture, and in Christian experience as witnessed in the Church’s worship, shows us three distinct ‘persons’, three hypostases or objective realities, having relations with each other, and, severally yet not independently, with man. Both ‘Monarchianism’, in its modal form of Sabellianism, and ‘Emanationism’, as taught by Arius, would have paganized Christianity: Sabellianism by reducing to a mere apparition the revelation of God in Christ; Arianism by separating the Redeemer from the Creator, by making the Son a creature and thus looking for salvation to one who was less than Almighty God. Athanasius, ‘single-hearted, and sometimes single-handed, had saved the Church from captivity by pagan intellectualism. Indeed he had done more. By his tenacity and vision in preaching one God and Saviour he had preserved from dissolution the unity and integrity of the Christian faith.’¹

Bishop of Rome, end of first century. — EDITION:}. B. Lightfoot in The Apostolic Fathers (ed. J. R. Harmer, 1891).

Christ is with those of humble mind, not with those who exalt themselves over his flock. The sceptre of the majesty of God, that is, our Lord Jesus Christ, did not come with the pride of pretension and arrogance — though he had the power — but in humility of mind, just as the Holy Spirit said of him: ‘Lord, who has believed our report? . . .’ [Isa. liii. I-I2 and Ps. xxi (22) 5-8).1 You see, beloved brothers, what is the pattern given to us; for if the Lord was thus humble in mind, how are we to behave, when we through him have come under the yoke of grace? [First] Epistle to the Corinthians, xvi

[Ps. ι is quoted, ending, ‘The sacrifice of praise will glorify me, and there is the way by which I shall show him the salvation of God'] This is the way, beloved, in which we found our salvation, Jesus Christ, the high priest2 of our offerings, the protector and helper of our weakness. Through him let us gaze fixedly into the heights of heaven.3 Through him we see as in a mirror4 the spotless and excellent face of God: through him the eyes of our hearts were opened: through him our senseless and darkened mind springs up to the light: through him the Ruler willed that we should taste the immortal knowledge . . . [Heb. i. 3, 4, 7, 5, 13]

Ibid, xxxvi

In love the Ruler took us to himself. Because of the love he had towards us, Jesus Christ our Lord gave his blood for us by the will of God, his flesh for our flesh, his life for our lives.

Ibid, xlix

Let us fix our gaze on the blood of Christ and recognize how precious it is to his Father, because it was shed for our salvation and offered the grace of repentance to the whole world. Let us pass in review all the generations and learn that from generation to generation the Lord has given a chance of repentance to those who are willing to turn to him ... [e.g. Noah and Nineveh] [First] Epistle to the Corinthians, vii

The ministers of God's grace [sc. the prophets] have spoken through the Holy Spirit about repentance . . . [quotations from Ezekiel and Isaiah]

[The story ofRahab]. By the scarlet thread they showed prophetically that through the blood of the Lord there shall be redemption for all those who believe and hope in God .. .

Ibid, xii

Since we are the portion of the Holy one let us practise what belongs to holiness. . . . Let us put on concord, being humble in mind, disciplined, keeping ourselves from gossip and slander, being justified by works, not words. . .

Ibid, xxx

They all [sc. the patriarchs] were honoured and glorified, not through themselves or their works or their righteous behaviour, but through God's will. And we also, who have been called in Christ Jesus through his will, are not justified through ourselves or through our own wisdom or understanding or piety, or our actions done in holiness of heart, but through faith, for it is through faith that Almighty God has justified all men that have been from the beginning of time: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Ibid, xxxii

The doctrine of the Spirit is only inchoate. There are these passing references:

A full out-pouring of the Holy Spirit came upon [you] all...

Ibid. ii. 2

Have we not one God and one Christ and one Spirit of Grace shed upon us? Ibid. xJvi. 6

As God lives and the Lord Jesus Christ lives, and the Holy Spirit, the faith and hope of the elect. . .

Ibid. Ivii. 2

The ministers of God's grace [sc. the Ο. Τ. prophets] spoke through the Holy Spirit about repentance . . .

You will give us joy and gladness if you obey what we have written through the Holy Spirit. . .

Ibid. Ixiii. 2

There is no reference to ecstatic manifestation nor to Christian prophets such as we find in Paul's first letter to Corinth. The Holy Spirit inspires godly men under the old and the new dispensations.

Let us therefore, brethren, enthusiastically accept military service, in obedience to his perfect commands. Let us observe those who serve in the army under our military authorities, and note their discipline, their readiness, their obedience in carrying out orders. Not all of them are prefects, or tribunes, or centurions, or commanders of fifty, and so on; but each man in his rank carries out the orders of the emperor or the leaders. ‘The great cannot exist without the small, nor the small without the great’ . . . [based on ι Cor. xii. 12-26]

Ibid, xxvii

Let our whole body be preserved in Christ Jesus, and let each man be subject to his neighbour, as he has had his place assigned by his spiritual gift. Let the strong not neglect the weak; let the weak respect the strong. . . . Let the pure in flesh [sc. the ascetic] refrain from boasting of it, knowing that it is Another who supplies his self-discipline. Let us consider, brethren, of what stuff we are made; out of what tomb and darkness our fashioner and creator brought us into his world, having prepared his benefits before we were born. Having all these things from him we ought in all respects to give him thanks; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Ibid, xxxviii

The Lord has commanded that the offerings and services should be performed with care, and done at the fixed times and seasons, not in a haphazard and irregular fashion. . . . The high priest has been given his own special services, the priests have been assigned their own place, and the Levites have their special ministrations enjoined on them. The layman is bound by the ordinances of the laity.

[First] Epistle to the Corinthians, xl

Let each one of you, my brothers, give thanks2 to God in his own order, with a good conscience, not transgressing the fixed rule of his service, and with solemn reverence. It is not in every place that the various sacrifices... are offered, but in Jerusalem only; and even there not in every place but before the shrine at the altar3 . . .

Ibid, xli

The Apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ: Jesus the Christ was sent from God. Thus Christ is from God, the Apostles from Christ: in both cases the process was orderly, and derived from the will of God. The Apostles received their instructions; they were filled with conviction through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with faith by the word of God; and they went out full of confidence in the Holy Spirit, preaching the gospel that the Kingdom of God was about to come. They preached in country and town, and appointed their first-fruits, after testing them by the Spirit, to be bishops4 and deacons of those who were going to believe. And this was no novelty, for indeed a long time ago the Scripture had mentioned bishops and deacons; for there is somewhere this passage: Ί will set up their bishops [overseers] in righteousness and their deacons [ministers] in faith.'s

(xliii) Is it any wonder if those who in Christ were entrusted by God with such a work appointed the aforesaid persons? Seeing that the blessed Moses also, ‘a faithful servant in all his house,’ noted down in the sacred books all that had been enjoined upon him... . For when jealousy arose about the priesthood and the tribes were disputing which of them should be adorned with that glorious name, he commanded the twelve tribal chiefs to bring rods inscribed with the name of each tribe . . . [The story of Aaron s rod, Num. xvii]. Do you suppose that Moses did not know beforehand what was going to happen? To be sure he knew it. But he acted thus to prevent disorder in Israel, that the name of the true and only Lord might be glorified: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

(xliv) Our Apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife on the question of the bishop's office. Therefore, for this reason, since they had complete foreknowledge, they appointed the aforesaid persons and later made further provision that if they1 should fall asleep, other tested men should succeed to their ministry [λα,τονργία]. Therefore, when men who were appointed by the Apostles, or afterwards by other men of repute, with the approval of the whole church, have done their service blamelessly to the flock of Christ with humility of heart, in a peaceful and gentlemanly way, and have had a good report from all sides for long periods, we consider it unjust to depose them from their ministry. For it will be no trivial sin on our part if we depose from the bishop's office those who have in a blameless and holy manner offered the gifts.4 Happy the presbyters5 who have gone on their way before this, for they obtained a ripe and fruitful departure; since they need not fear that anyone should remove them from their appointed place. For we see that you have displaced certain men of honourable behaviour from a ministry which they had honoured without reproach.

Ibid, xlii-xliv

Let us run towards the goal which from the beginning has been handed down to us, the goal which is peace; and let us fix our gaze on the Father and Creator of the whole universe, and let us cling to his splendid and superlative gifts of peace, and to his benefits. Let us see him in our mind, and contemplate with the eyes of the soul his forbearing will. Let us observe how unmoved by anger he is in relation to his whole creation.

(xx) The heavens roll on under his direction and are subjected to him in peace. Day and night fulfil the course prescribed by him, without hindering each other. The Sun and moon and the chorus of stars revolve within their appointed limits according to his ordinance in peace, without any deviation. The earth brings forth according to his will at the proper seasons, and produces food in abundance for men and beasts and all things that exist upon the earth, without dispute and without altering any of his decrees. The unsearchable depths of the abysses and the inexplicable judgements of the underworld are held in constraint by the same ordinances. The basin of the boundless sea, gathered together, in accordance with his act of creation, ‘into its meeting-places,’ does not transgress the barriers set round it, but does as he commanded it.

The ocean which man cannot pass, and the worlds beyond it, are directed by the same ordinances of the Ruler. Spring and summer, autumn and winter give way to one another in peace. The winds in their different quarters fulfil their service unhindered in their proper season. Perpetual springs, created for enjoyment and health, unfailingly offer their breasts, designed to secure life for men. And the smallest of creatures meet in concord and peace. All those the great Creator and Ruler commanded to be in peace and concord; he benefits all, and especially he benefits us who have taken refuge in his mercies through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be glory and majesty for ever and ever. Amen.

[First] Epistle to the Corinthians, xix-xx

Let us think of the whole host of angels, how they stand by and serve his will. For the Scripture says: ‘Ten thousand times ten thousand were doing service to him, and they cried out, Holy, holy, holy, Lord Sabaoth; the whole creation is full of his glory.’ Then let us, gathered together in awareness of our concord, as with one mouth shout earnestly to him that we may become sharers in his great and glorious promises. For the Scripture says, ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, it has not entered man's heart, how many things God has prepared for those who patiently await him.’

Ibid, xxxiv

This passage clearly has a liturgical reference, eij το αυτό σννα,χθέντϊζ — ‘gathered together,’ is technical for the Christian assembly — synaxis. The Christians of Rome and Corinth join in the Sanctus with ‘the whole company of heaven,’ as they ‘do their service’ (Xeirovpyovaiv — ‘liturgize’).

(Ix) . . . Thou who art righteous in judgement. . . good in the things that are seen and faithful among those who trust in thee, merciful and pitiful; forgive our sins and failings. . . . Grant concord and peace to us and all that dwell on the earth, as thou didst grant to our fathers, when they called upon thee in holiness, with faith and truth, so that we may be saved, being obedient to thy almighty and excellent name, and to our governors and rulers on earth. (Ixi) Thou, Master, hast given them the authority of kingship by thy magnificent and ineffable power, that we, recognizing the glory and honour which thou hast given them, may submit ourselves to them, in no way opposing thy will. Grant them, Lord, health, peace, concord, stability, that they may without stumbling administer the government which thou hast given them. For thou, heavenly Master, King of Ages, givest honour and glory to the sons of men, and authority over things that are on earth. Do thou, Lord, direct their counsel, according to what is good and well-pleasing in thy sight, that, administering in peace and gentleness with godliness the authority thou hast given them, they may obtain thy favour. Ο thou who alone canst do these good things for us, and things far exceeding these, we praise thee through the high-priest and protector of our souls, Jesus Christ, through whom be glory and majesty to thee, both now and for all generations and for ever and ever. Amen.

[First] Epistle to the Corinthians, lix-lxi

Let that passage of Scripture1 be far from applying to us, where it says: ‘Wretched are the double-minded who doubt in their soul, and say, We have heard these things also in our fathers’ time, and look, we have grown old and none of them has happened to us. Silly fools, compare yourselves to a tree. Take a vine: first it drops its leaves; then a shoot comes, then a leaf, then a flower, after that the sour fruit, then the fully ripe grapes.’ You see that in a short time the fruit of the tree reaches maturity. In truth his will shall be fulfilled quickly and suddenly. The Scripture bears witness, when it says: ‘He shall come quickly and not linger, and the Lord will come suddenly to his temple, even the Holy One whom you expect.’

Ibid, xxiii

Since all things are seen and heard, let us fear him and abandon hideous desires for evil deeds, that we may be sheltered by his mercy from the coming judgements.3 For where can any of us escape from his mighty hand? What world will receive anyone who deserts from his service? For the Writing4 says in one place: ‘Where shall I go’ &c. . . . [Ps. cxxxix. 7 f.] Whither shall anyone go away, or where shall anyone run away from him who embraces the whole universe?

Ibid. xxviii

Let us observe, beloved, how the Ruler is continually displaying the resurrection that will be, of which he made the first fruits when he raised the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Let us look, beloved, at the resurrection which happens regularly. Day and night show us a resurrection; the night goes to sleep, the day rises: the day departs, night comes on. Let us take the crops. How does the sowing happen, and in what way? ‘The sower went out’ and cast each of his seeds into the ground. These fall dry and bare on to the ground and decay. Then from the decay the mightiness of the Ruler's providence raises them up, and many grow from the one and bear fruit.

Ibid, xxiv

Let us look at the marvellous sign which takes place in the East, in the district of Arabia. There is a bird called the phoenix. It is the only one of its kind, and it lives for five hundred years. And when it reaches the time of its dissolution, the time for it to die, it makes for itself a coffin of incense and myrrh and other spices, which when the time is up it enters and dies. But with the decay of its flesh a worm is produced, which is nourished from the moisture of the dead creature and grows wings. Then, when it has grown into a fine specimen, it takes up the coffin in which are the bones of its progenitor and flies with them from Arabia to Egypt, to the city called Heh'opolis. And in the day-time, in view of all, it flies to the altar of the Sun and lays them on it, and then sets off back again. The priests then examine the records, and find that it has come after an interval of exactly five hundred years, (xxvi) Do we then think it a great marvel if the Creator of the universe is to effect the resurrection of those who served him in holiness with the confidence of a good faith, seeing that he shows us the magnificence of his promise even by a bird? . . .

Ibid, xxv-xxvi

The legend of the Phoenix is related in Herodotus ii. 73 and Tacitus, Annals, vi. 28.

How blessed and marvellous are the gifts of God, beloved. Life in immortality,1 splendour in righteousness, truth in boldness, faith in confidence, discipline in holiness: all these are in our understanding. What, then, are the things prepared for those endure? The Creator and Father of the Ages,2 the all-holy one himself knows their number and beauty1 . . .

Ibid, xxxv

Let us be humble-minded, my brothers, and get rid of all conceit and vanity and foolishness and anger, and let us do as Scripture bids us; for the Holy Scripture says, ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, neither let the strong boast in his strength, nor the rich in his riches, but if a man boasts let him boast in the Lord, to seek him out and to do judgement and righteousness.’ Especially remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, which he spoke teaching kindness and forbearance.2 This is what he said: ‘Show mercy, that you may receive mercy; forgive, that you may be forgiven; as you treat others, so you will be treated; as you give, so will it be given to you; as you judge, so will you be judged; as you show kindness, so will kindness be shown to you. Measure for measure, you shall receive what you bestow.’

With this commandment and these instructions let us keep ourselves firm to proceed in obedience to his holy words, in humility of mind. For the Holy Word says: ‘Upon whom shall I look, except upon the man who is meek and quiet and trembles at my oracles.’

[First] Epistle to the Corinthians, xiii

Let us come to an end of those ancient examples [of jealous persecution], and come to the athletes of most recent times; let us take the noble examples of our generation. Through envy and jealousy the greatest and most righteous ‘pillars’ were persecuted and engaged in the contest unto death. Let us have the good Apostles before our eyes. Peter through wicked jealousy endured not one or two hardships but many, and after having thus borne witness went on to the place of glory which was his due. On account of envy and strife Paul gave an example of the prize of endurance: seven times imprisoned, driven into exile, stoned; he preached in the East and the West, and won noble renown for his faith. He taught righteousness to the whole world and went to the western limit of the earth.1 He bore witness before the rulers, and then passed out of the world and went on to the holy place, having proved himself the greatest pattern of endurance.

(vi) With these men of holy life was assembled a great host of the elect,2 who suffered on account of envy, with many indignities and tortures, and have provided for us a most noble example.

Ibid, v-vi

Bishop of Antioch. Martyred (?) c. 115. — EDITION: J. B. Lightfbot in The Apostolic Fathers (ed. J. R. Banner, 1891).

I hope that, if I am worthy, I may find continual satisfaction in you. Now it is right that you should in every way glorify Jesus Christ who glorified us; that being perfectly united in obedient submission to the bishop and the presbytery, you may be sanctified in all respects, (iii)... I exhort you to be in harmony with the thought of God; for Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the Father's thought, and in the same way the bishops who are established in the farthest parts of the earth share in the thought of Jesus Christ, (iv) Hence it is right for you to be in harmony with the thought of God. And so you are. For your reverend presbytery, which is worthy of God, is tuned to the bishop, as strings to a lyre: and thus in your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung. . . .

(v) For if I in a short time had such intercourse with your bishop, intercourse not in the fashion of this world but in the Spirit, how much more do I congratulate you who are closely attached to him as the church is attached to Jesus Christ and as Jesus Christ to the Father, that all may be harmonious unity. Let no one be deceived. A man who is not within the sanctuary is deprived of the bread of God. For if the prayer of One or two’ l has such power, how much more that of the bishop and all the church. Therefore a man who does not come to the assembly is arrogant, and has separated himself; for the Scripture says, ‘God resists the proud.’ Let us then be very careful not to resist the bishop, that through our submission to the bishop we may belong to God.

(vi) And in proportion as a man sees his bishop keeping silence, let him stand in greater awe of him. For when anyone is sent by the master of the house as his steward,3 we ought to receive him as him who sent him. Clearly then we should regard the bishop as the Lord himself. . .

To the Ephesians, ii-vi

Avoid heretics like wild beasts; for they are mad dogs, biting secretly. You must be on your guard against them; their bite is not easily cured. There is only one physician [who can cope with it], a physician who is at once fleshly and spiritual, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true life in death, born of Mary and of God, first passible then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Ibid, vii

Therefore be eager for more frequent gatherings for thanksgiving [eucharist] to God and for his glory. For when you meet frequently the forces of Satan are annulled and his destructive power is cancelled in the concord of your faith. There is nothing better than peace, in which all hostility is abolished, whether it conies from the powers of heaven or the powers of earth.

Ibid, xiii

My spirit1 is abased in self-surrender because of the cross, which is an offence to the unbelievers, but to us salvation and eternal life. ‘Where is the clever man?’ ‘Where is the expert debater?’ Where is the boasting of the so-called sensible people? For our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived by Mary according to God's plan,3 of the seed of David but also of the Holy Ghost; he was born and was baptized, that by his Passion he might cleanse water.

Ibid, xviii

The virginity of Mary and her child-bearing was hidden from the prince of this world; so likewise was the death of the Lord — three mysteries that are to be proclaimed with a shout, which were effected in the quiet of God. How then were they revealed to the ages? A star shone in heaven, brighter than all other stars; its light was unspeakable, and its strangeness caused amazement; and all the other stars, with the sun and moon, became a chorus for that star, which outshone them all; and all were troubled to know whence came this strange appearance, so unlike them. From that time onward all magicl was abolished and every spell; the ignorance of wickedness vanished, the ancient kingdom was destroyed; for God was displayed in human form to bring ‘newness of eternal life.’ Then what had been completed in the purpose of God began to be enacted: hence the whole universe was stirred, because the destruction of death was being undertaken.

(xx) If Jesus Christ should deem me worthy, through your prayers, and if it should be his will, I intend3 to write you a second pamphlet in which I shall proceed to expound the divine plan4 of which I have begun to treat, with reference to the new man, Jesus Christ, which consists in faith towards him and love towards him, in his passion and resurrection; especially if the Lord should make some revelation to me. Meet together in common — every single one of you — in grace, in one faith and one Jesus Christ (who was of David's line in his human nature, son of man and son of God) that you may obey the bishop and presbytery with undistracted mind; breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality, our antidote to ensure that we shall not die but live in Jesus Christ for ever. To the Ephesians, xix-xx

I advise you, be eager to act always in godly concord; with the bishop presiding as the counterpart of God, the presbyters as the counterpart of the council of the apostles, and the deacons (most dear to me) who have been entrusted with a service [diaconate] under Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before all ages and appeared at the end of time. Therefore do all of you attain conformity with God, and reverence each other; and let none take up a merely natural attitude towards his neighbour, but love each other continually in Jesus Christ. Let there be nothing among you which will have power to divide you, but be united with the bishop and with those who preside, for an example and instruction in incorruptibility.

(vii) Thus, as the Lord did nothing without the Father6 (being united with him), either by himself or by means of his Apostles, so you must do nothing without the bishop and the presbyters. And do not try to think that anything is praiseworthy which you do on your own account: but unite in one prayer, one supplication, one mind, one hope; with love and blameless joy. For this is Jesus Christ, and there is nothing better than he. Let all therefore hasten as to one shrine, that is, God, as to one sanctuary, Jesus Christ, who came forth from the one Father, was always with one Father, and has returned to the one Father.

To the Magnesians, vi-vii

Do not be led astray by strange doctrines and ancient unprofitable myths.1 For if we are still living according to Judaism to this day, then we are admitting that we have not received grace.2 For the divinely inspired prophets lived in expectation of Jesus Christ: and therefore they were persecuted, being inspired by his grace so that unbelievers might be convinced that there is one God who has displayed himself through Jesus Christ his Son, who is his Word that proceeds from silence, who in all respects was pleasing to him who sent him.

(ix) Now if those who were accustomed to the ancient practices [sc. of Judaism] attained to a new hope, abandoning the keeping of sabbaths and making the Lord's day the centre of their lives, the day on which our life also rose through him and through his death, which some men deny — that mystery by which we attained belief, and therefore we endure, that we may prove to be disciples of Jesus Christ our only teacher — if this is so, how shall we be able to live apart from him? For even the prophets were his disciples through the Spirit and expected him as their teacher. And therefore when he came, whom they rightly awaited, he raised them from the dead.

Ibid, viii-ix

Be eager to be firmly established in the precepts of the Lord and of the Apostles, ‘that you may be prospered in all that you do’ in flesh and spirit, in faith and love, in the Son and Father and Spirit, in the beginning and the end, with your right reverend bishop and the worthily-woven chaplet6 of your presbytery, and with the godly deacons. Be submissive to the bishop and to one another, as Jesus Christ was to the Father, and the Apostles to Christ and the Father, that there may be a union both of flesh and spirit.

To the Magnesians, xiii

When you are submissive to the bishop as to Jesus Christ, it is clear to me that you are not living as ordinary men but according to Jesus Christ, who died for us that you might escape death through faith in his death. It is therefore necessary that you should do nothing without the bishop; and that is your practice. Submit yourselves also to the presbytery, as to the Apostles of Jesus Christ, our hope: for if we live in him we shall be found in him. And those who are deacons of the mysteries of Jesus Christ must please all men in all ways. For they are not deacons [ministers] of food and drink, but servants of the church of God; therefore they must guard against reproach as they guard against fire.

(iii) Likewise let all men respect the deacons as they reverence Jesus Christ, just as they must respect the bishop as the counterpart of the Father, and the presbyters as the council of God and the college of Apostles; without those no church is recognized. To the Trallians, ii-iii

Be on your guard against such men [sc. Docetic heretics]. And this will be your case if you are not self-assertive and if you are inseparable from Jesus Christ and from the bishop and the institutions of the Apostles. He who is within the sanctuary is pure: he who is outside is not pure; that is, he who acts independently of bishop and presbytery and deacons. Such a man is not pure in his conscience.

Ibid, vii

Turn a deaf ear to any speaker who avoids mention of Jesus Christ who was of David's line, born of Mary, who was truly born, ate and drank; was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, truly crucified and died while those in heaven, on earth, and under the earth beheld it; who also was truly raised from the dead, the Father having raised him, who in like manner will raise us also who believe in him — his Father, I say, will raise us in Christ Jesus, apart from whom we have not true life.

Ibid, ix

To the church . . . which has the chief seat in the place of the district of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honour, worthy of congratulation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in purity, having the chief place, in love, keeping Christ's law, bearing the Father's name: I salute that church in the name of Jesus Christ, the Father's Son. To those who in flesh and spirit are at one with his every command, filled with the grace of God without distraction, and strained clear from every extraneous pollution, abundant greetings of unalloyed joy in Jesus Christ our God.

To the Romans, opening

I am afraid that your affection for me may do me harm; for it is easy for you to do what you will, but hard for me to attain to God, unless you are kind to me [sc. by not intervening on my behalf].

(ii) I would have you please God and not man, as, to be sure, you are doing. For I shall never have such another opportunity as this to attain to God; while you, if you keep silent, will win the credit of the noblest possible achievement. For if you are silent and leave me to my doom, then am I a word of God; but if you set your hearts on my physical existence, I shall again be a mere cry. This is the only favour I ask; that I may be poured as a libation while an altar is still ready; so that you may form a choir and sing to the Father, in Jesus Christ, because God has deigned to allow the bishop from Syria to appear in the West, having summoned him from the East. It is glorious to have my sunset from the world but towards God, that I may have my sunrise to him.

(iii) You never grudged anyone; you instructed others. For myself, I only wish that the lessons you give should hold good. Only pray that I may have courage, inwardly and outwardly . . .

Ibid, ii-iii

I die for Christ of my own choice, unless you hinder me. I beseech you not to show ‘inopportune kindness’ to me. Let me be given to the wild beasts, for by their means I can attain to God. I am God's wheat, and I am being ground by the teeth of the beasts so that I may appear as pure bread.1 Rather coax the beasts, that they may become my tomb, and leave no part of my body behind, that I may not be a nuisance to anyone when I have fallen asleep. Then shall I be truly a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world shall not even see my body. Entreat the Lord for me that through these instruments I may appear as a sacrifice to God. I do not lay injunctions on you, as Peter and Paul did. They were Apostles; I am a convict. They were free; I am a slave, up till now: but if I suffer, then am I a freedman of Jesus Christ, and shall rise free in him. Now I am learning in my bonds to abandon all desire.

(v) From Syria to Rome I am ‘fighting with wild beasts,’ by land and sea, by night and by day, being bound among ten leopards, I mean the squad of soldiers, who become worse in return for their gratuities. But through the wrongs they do me I become more of a disciple, ‘yet I am not justified on this account.’ I hope I may have profit of the wild beasts that have been got ready for me: and I pray that they may prove expeditious with me: and I will coax them to eat me up expedi-tiously, and not refuse to touch me through cowardice, as they have done in some cases. Why, if they refuse though I am willing, I will force them to it. I ask your indulgence; I know what is for my good; now I am beginning to be a disciple: may nothing, of things visible and invisible, grudge my attaining to Jesus Christ. Let all come, fire and cross and conflicts with beasts, hacking, cutting, wrenching of bones, chopping of limbs, the crushing of my body, cruel chastisements of the devil laid upon me. Only let me attain to Jesus Christ.

(vi) . . . My birth pangs are at hand. Bear with me, my brothers. Do not hinder me from living: do not wish for my death. Do not make the world a present of one who wishes to be God's. Do not coax him with material things. Allow me to receive the pure light; when I arrive there I shall be a real man. Permit me to be an imitator of the Passion of my God . . .

(vii) I write to you while alive, yet longing for death; my desire4 has been crucified and there is not in me any sensuous fire, but living water bounding up in me,5 and saying inside me, ‘Come to the Father.’ I have no pleasure in food which is destined for corruption,6 nor in the delights of this life. I desire the bread of God, which is the flesh of Christ who was of the seed of David; and for drink I desire his blood which is incorruptible love.

To the Romans, iv-vii

All who belong to God and Jesus Christ are with the bishop; and all who repent [sc. of schism] and come into the unity of the Church will also belong to God, that they may be living according to Jesus Christ. Make no mistake, my brothers. If anyone follows a man who causes a schism he ‘does not inherit the kingdom of God.’ And any man who goes in for strange doctrine dissociates himself from the Passion.

To the Philadelphians, iii

Take great care to keep one Eucharist.2 For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup to unite us by his blood;3 one sanctuary, as there is one bishop, together with the presbytery and the deacons, my fellow-servants. Thus all your acts may be done accordingly to God's will.

Ibid, iv

I have my refuge in the gospel4 as in the flesh of Jesus, and in the Apostles4 as the presbytery of the Church. Yes, and we loved the prophets because their preaching looked forward to the Gospel. . .

When I was among you I cried out (I spoke with a loud voice, with God's voice): ‘ Give heed to the bishop and the presbytery and the deacons.’ There were some who suspected that I said this on previous information about the division caused by certain persons. But he in whom I am bound is witness that I was not informed by human agency. It was the Spirit that preached, saying, ‘Never act without the bishop. Keep your body as the temple of God. Love union; shun divisions. Be imitators of Jesus Christ, as he was of his Father.'

To the Philadelphianst vii

I hear certain persons [sc. Judaizers] saying, ‘Unless I find it in archives1 I will not believe it in the Gospel.’ And when I replied, ‘It is in the Scriptures,’ they answered, ‘That remains to be proved.’ But as for me, Jesus Christ is the archives, the inviolable archives are his cross, death and resurrection, and faith through him.

Ibid, viii

I perceived that you are settled in unshakable faith, nailed, as it were, to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, in flesh and spirit, and with firm foundations in love in the blood of Christ, with full conviction with respect to our Lord that he is genuinely of David's line according to the flesh, son of God according to the divine will and power, really born of a virgin and baptized by John that ‘all righteousness might be fulfilled’ by him, really nailed up in the flesh for us in the time of Pontius Pilate and the tetrarchy of Herod — from this fruit of the tree, that is from his God-blessed passion, we are derived — that he might ‘raise up a standard’ for all ages through his resurrection, for his saints and faithful people, whether among Jews or Gentiles, in one body of his Church, (ii) For he suffered all this on our account, that we might be saved. And he really suffered, as he really raised himself. Some unbelievers say that he suffered in appearance only. Not so — they themselves are mere apparitions. Their fate will be like their opinions, for they are unsubstantial and phantom-like.

To the Smyrnaeans, i-ii

For I know and believe that even after his resurrection he was in a physical body; and when he came to Peter and his companions he said, ‘Take hold and feel me, and see that I am not a bodiless phantom.’ And immediately they touched him and believed, when they had had contact with his flesh and blood. Therefore also they despised death and proved superior to death. And after his resurrection he ate and drank with them as being in a physical body, though in spirit he was united with the Father.

(iv) If these acts of our Lord were mere appearance, then so are my bonds. Why then have I exposed myself to death, fire, sword, wild beast? Ah, but ‘near the sword near God,’ in the presence of wild beasts, in the presence of God. Only let it be in the name of Jesus Christ so as to share his Passion. I endure all things, since he gives me the power who is perfect man.2 Ibid, iii-iv

They [sc. the Docetists] have no concern for love, none for the widow, the orphan, the afflicted, the prisoner, the hungry, the thirsty. They stay away from Eucharist and prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ3 which suffered for our sins, which the Father raised up by his goodness.

Ibid, vi

Shun divisions, as the beginning of evils. All of you follow the bishop, as Jesus Christ followed the Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles; respect the deacons as the ordinance of God. Let no one do anything that pertains to the church apart from the bishop. Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is under the bishop or one whom he has delegated. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; just as wherever Christ Jesus may be, there is the catholic4 Church. It is not permitted to baptize or hold a love-feast5 independently of the bishop. But whatever he approves, that is also well-pleasing to God; that all your acts may be sure and valid.

Ibid, viii

Later, the Eucharist was separated from it, as appears from Pliny (Ep. x. 96), contemporary with Ignatius. Cf. Didache, quoted on the next page.

First or second century. — EDITION: J. B. Lightfoot in The Apostolic Fathers (ed. J. R. Harmer, 1891).

The first six chapters expound the ‘Two Ways,’ of life, and of death.

Baptize thus: having first recited all these things, baptize ‘in the nam