king, Louis the Pious, to whom the gift was the more precious because he believed that the author, the disciple of Paul, was no other than the legendary first bishop of Paris, the martyr apostle of France. In the next generation, at the instance of Charles the Bald, Dionysius was translated from Greek into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena. It is evident from Eriugena's earlier works that he was acquainted with the Greek Fathers, and much influenced by the teachings of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and the doctrines of Dionysius and Maximus Confessor fitted very well in his mind with the Platonising bent he had contracted from them as well as from Augustine, and in some part perhaps more directly from later Greek philosophy.

The esteem in which the works of Dionysius were held in subsequent times is shown by the fact that between Eriugena (ca. 850) and the Renaissance (Ficino, 1492), four other translations were made. Of their influence on theology, not alone among the Greeks-especially in John of Damascus -but in the West, it must suffice here to say that Hugh of St. Victor, Grosseteste, and Albertus Magnus wrote commentaries on them, and that Thomas Aquinas quotes them so often that a bare index of references to passages in Dionysius fills many columns.

CHAPTER VIII

CHRISTIANITY

INSTITUTIONS. WORSHIP

Suppression of Paganism-Uniformity and Schism-Bishops, Metropolitans, and Patriarchs-Primacy of Rome-Liturgies-The Mass-Baptism-Confirmation-Church Festivals and FastsDoctrine of the Church in Cyprian-Heretical Baptism-Augustine's Doctrine of the Sacraments-Saints and Martyrs-The Virgin-Angels-Images and Pictures in Churches-The Iconoclastic Struggle-Purgatory-The Church at the End of the Ancient Age.

THE abrogation of the laws against Christianity and the favour Constantine and his successors showed to the church led to a great increase in the numbers of Christians and a corresponding decline of the old religions. Soon the Christian emperors enacted laws against them. Constantius (d. 361) ordered all the temples to be closed, and prohibited sacrifice upon pain of death. It does not appear, however, that any serious effort was made to enforce this law where public opinion did not support it; in the great centres like Rome and Alexandria it was a dead letter. Julian (361363) did not have to reopen the temples; they had never been closed. The legislation of the emperors who followed Julian went no further than to forbid bloody sacrifices. But in 392 Theodosius prohibited all acts of heathen worship, in the temples, on the highways, or on private grounds, under severe penalties. The offering of sacrifice was explicitly put under the head of high treason (majestas), precisely as the Christians' refusal to sacrifice had been treated under the heathen emperors; but the pagans did not display the same zeal for martyrdom. The temples were in some cases converted to municipal uses, others were preserved as architectural monuments. In places where the people held

tenaciously to the religion of their fathers, as, for example, at Gaza, the government sometimes winked at the continuance of heathen worship-for tangible reasons. The zeal of the bishops outran the execution of the law by the officials. In 391 Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, with his army of monks, after riots in which much blood was shed, destroyed the great temple of Serapis. Chrysostom sent out from Antioch raiding-parties of fanatical ascetics, "burning with divine zeal," to demolish the temples in the Lebanon region; Porphyry of Gaza, armed with a special rescript of the emperor Arcadius procured by an imposture worthy of a comedy, razed the famous temple of Marnas. In the West the suppression of paganism was slower and less complete; Christians were relatively less numerous, the hand of the government was less firm, and the Teutonic invasions gave it more urgent occupation.

The Christian emperors were minded to have but one kind of religion in their dominions; they legislated not only against pagans and Manichæans, but against Christian heretics and schismatics of every name. Constantine, as we have seen, ordered that their churches should be turned over to the Catholics and their corporate property confiscated; their meetings for worship, even in private houses, were prohibited. During the controversies in the Catholic church over the nature and person of Christ, first Arius and his followers were exiled, then Athanasius and the uncompromising Nicæans; now it was Nestorius, then Eutyches, and again the Origenists and the Orientals. The heathen emperors had persecuted Christians because they would not conform to the religion of the state in the externals of worship, but left it free to every man to think what he pleased; the Christian emperors demanded conformity of thought, or at least of profession-subscription one day to Nicæa, the next to Rimini; first to Ephesus, then to Chalcedon, as one faction or another inspired the autocrat's theology. The church paid dear for the privilege of being a state church.

The efforts to secure uniformity by more exact definition of dogma, and the use of all the machinery of church and state to force the true faith for the time being, as prescribed in canons of councils and the decrees of emperors, upon dissidents, resulted in new and formidable schisms. The older secessions-Novatians, Donatists, Meletians-had arisen over questions of church order and discipline; those sects were puritan protests against the laxity of the great church. The schisms of the fourth and fifth centuries were doctrinal; they were parties which refused to accept dogmas enunciated by particular councils or to change their faith when the doctrinal weather-cock veered around in Constantinople.

All the conditions of the growth of the church had tended to the concentration of responsibility and authority in the person of the bishops, for which, before the middle of the third century, Cyprian found a jure divino theory. To this authority the councils called by the emperors to legislate for the whole church in doctrine and discipline added not a little; the bishops thus assembled were the church, their decision was its collective voice. All bishops were in theory equal; each had in his own sphere the same powers and prerogatives; in synods and councils each cast a single vote. In Egypt only, in conformity with its political administration, the bishop of Alexandria exercised an authority over the other bishops comparable to that which elsewhere the bishop had over his presbyters; he was an ecclesiastical autocrat-his enemies sometimes called him the Pharaoh. The bishops of the great sees such as Alexandria and Antioch exerted a wide influence beyond their diocesan boundaries. Antioch was the leading church not only in Syria but in Cilicia and far into Asia Minor. Ephesus was held in honour by reason of its part in the early history of Christianity, but had declined in actual importance. Before Constantine there was no provincial organisation and no recognised metropolitan authority, though a gravitation in the latter direction is apparent.

In the canons of the Council of Nicæa, however, the grouping of the bishops by provinces and the primacy of the bishop of the chief city of the province, the seat of the civil administration, are assumed, the organisation of the church in the East being thus assimilated to the provincial organisation of the empire as remodelled by Diocletian. The council of 381 went a step farther, in giving to the bishops of Constantinople, Ephesus, and Cæsarea in Cappadocia, with those of Antioch and Alexandria,' an authority superior to that of other metropolitans and of provincial councils. Among these, again, it assigned to the bishop of Constantinople a rank second only to the bishop of Rome, that is, in effect, the precedence over the whole episcopate of the Eastern church. Ephesus and Cæsarea soon lost their independent rank to Constantinople, while Jerusalem was erected into a patriarchate with the provinces of Palestine under it. Thus, from the middle of the fifth century there were in the East four patriarchates, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. But for the Moslem conquests, which wrested Syria and Egypt from the empire, it is not improbable that the centralising tendencies of the Byzantine empire after Justinian and the weakening of the other patriarchates by the Monophysite schism would have given Constantinople a position in the Eastern church corresponding to that of Rome in the West.

The church of Rome was always the great church of Western Christendom. As the sole church of apostolic foundation, the scene of the labours both of Paul and of Peter, to whom Christ had given the primacy among the Apostles, it was pre-eminently the custodian of apostolic tradition. Its situation also lent it prestige; the church of the capital was naturally looked up to as the capital church of Christendom. The removal of the seat of government did not diminish this prestige, while it left the bishops of Rome all the greater freedom and power. In the inter

1 Corresponding to the "dioceses" of Justinian's administrative system.