naturally to the thought of Atonement through the death of Christ,
and Atonement involves the theory of the Church and its sacraments,
whereby the benefits of the Atonement are secured. On all these topics
our period throws fresh light.
Two of the main aspects under which the earliest Christian writers regarded the Atonement were those of a sacrifice to God and of a ransom from evil. They did not specify to whom the price was paid. The third century had tried to remedy their indefiniteness by the unfortunate addition of the words “to Satan," and the proposition thus enlarged held its own for nearly 1000 years until it was discredited by Anselm.[1] The notion that the arch-enemy had overreached himself, and, while receiving the ransom, found no advantage in it (inasmuch as Christ’s death saved more souls than His life), appealed to the mind of the age, and Gregory of Nyssa’s grotesque image of the devil caught by the hook of the Deity, baited with the Humanity, was taken up and repeated with applause. But not by all. The “harrowing off Hell,” in the form current in the fourth century, describes deliverance of souls by the triumphant Christ without a word of ransom. Gregory of Nazianzus rejects with scorn the notion of ransom paid to Satan or to God; the views of Athanasius and Augustine are entirely free from bad taste and extravagance. They start from the thought of God’s goodness and justice. Goodness required that man should be delivered from the bondage of misery; justice required something more than mere repentance in order to effect that deliverance, nothing less than the offering up of the human nature which contained the sinful principle. This was achieved by Him who assumed human nature and represented man. Thus far Athanasius. Augustine, who is equally insistent on the fact of the sacrifice of Christ, goes deeper than Athanasius into the reason for the particular form that it took and the effects that it wrought. He shares Athanasius’ admiration of the divine goodness exhibited in the long-suffering of God and the voluntary humility of the God-man; he is even more jealous for the divine justice. It was just that Satan who had acquired right over the race should be satisfied in respect of his claims. But Satan took more than his due, slaying the innocent. It was therefore just that he should be forced to relinquish the sinners in behalf of whom the sinless suffered.
The controversy concerning Free Will and Grace also affected the idea of the Church and sacraments. Until the rise of Pelagianism a very wide scope was allowed here to Free Will. The Grace conveyed by the sacraments, which were not to be had outside the Church, was considered
- ↑ The idea of satisfactio per poenam so often ascribed to the Latin fathers is altogether foreign to Roman Law and belongs to the sphere of Germanic institutions. In Roman Law the alternative is solvere satisve facere.
