hesitate to resign to their rivals. Yet there is convenience and no small significance in connecting the term with a certain characteristic and un-Protestant type of the Christian religion. Catholicism is not dogma only, but dogma plus law plus sacrament. From very early days Christianity was hailed as the “new law”; and the suppression of the rigorist sects, by definitely giving law supremacy over enthusiasm, aggrandized it, but at the same time aggrandized the sacraments. The Western Christian must needs hold that the Eastern development was incomplete. It laid these things side by side; it did not work them into a unity. The latter task was accomplished with no little power by the Western Church in the period of its independent development.[1] The Greek and the Roman Catholic Churches stand united against Protestantism in the general theory of law and of sacraments; but a Protestant can hardly doubt that, if Catholicism is to be accepted, a Catholic organization, and doctrine are better furnished by the Western Church than by the arrested development of its rival.
The theory of asceticism had also to be more fully worked out and better harmonized with Church authority. The priesthood had successive rivals to face. First in the period of “enthusiasm,” the prophets; then the martyrs and confessors; finally the ascetics. The last, in regulated forms, are a permanent feature of Catholicism; and the rivalries of these “regular” Ascetic element. clergy with their " secular" or parochial brethren continue to make history to-day. That the ascetic life is intrinsically higher, that not every one is called to it, that the call is imperious when it comes, and that asceticism must be developed under Church control—all this may be common to East and West. But, in the utilization of the monks as the best of the Church's forces, the Western Church far surpasses the East, where meditation rather than practical activity is the monastic ideal. In the West, “enthusiasm,” in the transformation under which it survives, is not merely bridled but harnessed and set to work.
The new developments of the West could not grow directly out of Eastern or even out of early Western conditions. They grow out of the influence of Ambrose of Milan, but far more of Augustine of Hippo; and behind the latter to no small degree there is the greater influence of St Paul. Intellectual developments do not go straight Augustine’s influence.onward; there are sharp and sudden reactions. Pelagianism, the rival and contradiction of Augustinianism, represents a mode of thought which appeared early in Christianity and which could count upon sympathizers both in East and in West. But, when the Christian world was faced with the clear-cut questions, Was this, then, how it conceived man's relation to God? and Did it mean this by merit? Augustine without much difficulty secured the answer " No." In the East (Council of Ephesus, 431) he was helped by the entanglement of Pelagianism with Nestorianism, just as in the West the ruin of Nestorian prospects was occasioned partly by dislike for the better known system of Pelagianism. In Augustine's own case, reaction against Pelagianism was not needed in order to make his position clear. He may have left a vulnerable frontier in his earlier dealings with the same thorny problem of free will. Certainly his polemic as a Christian against the Manichaeism of his youth constitutes a curious preface to his vehement rejection of Pelagian libertarianism. Once again, a narrow track of orthodoxy midway between the obvious landmarks! But Augustine had a deeply religious nature, and passed through deep personal experiences; these things above all gave him his power. He was also genius and scholar and churchman, transmitting uncriticized the dogmas of Athanasianism and the philosophy of ancient Greece, according to his understanding of them. Without forgetting that Augustine was partly a symptom and only in part a cause—without committing ourselves to the one-sidedness of the great-man method of construing history—we must do justice to his supreme greatness. If earlier times lived upon fragments of Origen, the generations of the West since Augustine have largely lived upon fragments of his thought and experience. On the other hand, not even the authority of. Paul and of Augustine has been able to keep alive the belief in unconditional predestination. If in the West Athanasianism is a datum, but unexamined, and not valued for its own sake, Augustinianism is a bold interpretation of, the essential piety of the West, but an interpretation which not even piety can long endure—morally burdensome if religiously impressive. The clock is wound up at the great crises of history, but proceeds to run down, and does so even more rapidly in Protestantism than in Catholicism. It may be held by hostile critics that the whole thing is a delusion. More sympathetic judgments will divine unquenchable vitality in a faith whose very paradoxes rise up in new power again and again. Augustine's (erroneous) interpretation of the Millennium (Rev. xx.), as a parable of the Church's historic triumph, stands for the final eradication of primitive “enthusiasm” in the great Church, though of course millenarianism has had many revivals in special circles.
Even if the Augustinian stream is the main current of Western piety, there are feeders and also side-currents. Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great are known as the four Latin Fathers. Jerome is very great as a scholar, and Pope Gregory as an administrator. As a writer, too, Gregory modifies Augustinian beliefs into forms which make them more available for Church teaching—a Ethical rationalism and mysticism. process very characteristic of Western Catholicism and carried still further in later centuries (notably by Peter Lombard). Perhaps two side-currents of piety should be named. There is an ethical rationalism which can never be wholly suppressed in the Christian Church by the Pauline or Augustinian soteriology. One thinks one sees traces of it, though held down by other influences, in the whole of medieval theology, and notably in Abelard. It disengages itself in the 17th century as Socinianism and in the 18th as Rationalism or Deism. Secondly there is a strong side-current in the mystical tradition, which we may perhaps treat as the modified form under which the philosophical theology of the Greek Church maintained its life in the medieval West. If so, Mysticism includes in itself a prophecy of modern Christian Platonism or idealism, with its cry of “Back to Alexandria.”
A Western echo of the Christological controversies of the East is found in the Adoptianism of Spain 785–818). These Adoptianists do not hold that Christ the person is adopted (He is God by birth), but his human nature may be.[2] There might be need of this, indeed, if the Adoptianists' theory of redemption were to stand, according to which Christ had taken to Himself a sinful human nature, and had washed it clean. This extreme assertion of duality as against Christological unity was naturally marked as heretical.
Great advance is made in organizing Catholic theology by the fuller theory of sacraments. The East had a tentative hesitating doctrine of transubstantiation;[3] the West defines it with absolute precision (cf. Paschasius Radbertus against Ratramnus; the fourth Lateran Council, 1215). But if the medieval Church and modern Catholics regard the Eucharist as the principal sacrament, Protestants can hardly keep from assigning the supreme place, in the medieval system, to the sacrament of penance. If early " enthusiasm " conceived the Christian as almost entirely free from acts of sin, and if Protestant Paulinism conceives the child of God as justified by faith once for all, the full Catholic theory, representing one development of Augustinianism, views the Christian as an invalid, perpetually dependent on the good offices of the Church. The number of sacraments is fixed at seven,[4] first by Peter Lombard, and the essence of the three sacraments which do not allow of repetition—baptism, confirmation, orders—is defined as a “character”[5] imprinted on the soul and never capable of being lost. We must mark the advance in formal completeness. Theology is now not merely the dogma of the Divine nature or of Christ's person; it is also a dogmatic
- ↑ Loofs declares that the very conception of a means of grace is medieval.
- ↑ The term Adoptianism arose at this time. Modern theologians carry it back to much earlier views.
- ↑ Until indeed, in modern times, Greek theology accepted the Western term and definition.
- ↑ This, too, has been adopted in modern Greek theology.
- ↑ Augustine already has this conception (Loofs). A hostile critic might say that the conception affirms the absolute worth of sacraments while absolutely declining to say what they accomplish.
