What strikes the student of ethics is the steady supplanting of the ethical interest by the dogmatic and organization points of view, and the steady separation of the clergy into a caste in which the celibate requirements play a most prominent and unfortunate part.

The development of the ecclesiastical mind and temper is plainly marked, and the unfortunate relations between the empire and the church, however great may have been the benefits, were constantly tending to make the ethics into a corpus juris, and to harden the whole treatment of ethics into a rather bloodless casuistry, with all the attendant unethical consequences.

The conciliar utterances are not engaged in stemming the tide of pagan intrusion which steadily flows into the stream of the ecclesiastical development.

It is one of the vivid illustrations of the uselessness of external infallible authority that not even the reverence for the letter of Scripture could stop the crassest idolatry and most vulgar witchcraft being foisted on the church in the name of Jesus and his disciples. In point of fact the doctrinal and ethical development was quite as dependent upon heathen philosophy as upon the New Testament for the form and method of its growth, and with the philosophy entered the pagan superstitions from which the philosophy had never wholly freed itself.1 For the learned even these things were dangerous (Augustine and his doctrine of demons), for the ignorant they were fatal. It resulted in the maintenance under other names of popular pagan superstitions without number.

We have seen how the mystery cult and the sacrament soon coalesced, and in the rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper, as by open doors, there entered the whole cycle of pagan magic conceptions, utterly undermining in the vulgar mind the ethical values of the simple symbolism. It was, no doubt, through this door that the cult of the dead (Egypt) also made its easy way. No doctrine came with greater force to a perishing social organ1 Plato and the symbolic explanations of the myths.

ization than Paul's proclamation of the resurrection-life. It was identified almost at once with purification by baptism, so that the baptized were "buried with Christ" and rose to a new life.

1

Soon also the sacrament of the Lord's Supper with its mystic interpretation (Johannine Logos theology) was the partaking of the divine life and the entrance from death into life. The saint and martyr were soon accorded special honor as having completed the work begun in sacramental mystery, and their relics were soon "reverenced," and by the vulgar soon worshipped. It is quite vain to emphasize this distinction as important. No really intelligent pagan ever thought the statue made by hands really divine, but regarded it as a "help to devotion." The struggle over the worship of pictures was, however, in vain. The iconoclasts were wellnigh as superstitious as the picture-worshippers. Their arguments are based upon the essential wrong of any attempt at the portrayal of Christ because it implicitly denies his divinity, and the mother of God was not to be painted because painting was a heathenish art.3

Indeed the iconoclastic agitation came from without. Perhaps the Mahometan movement, with its military pictureless fanaticism, was the moving factor in the mind of the iconoclastic emperors and army.

Whether Vigilantius really represented an intelligent rejection of saint-worship and icon-superstition we do not know. We have only the intemperate and scurrilous abuse of Jerome as the source of our information. Canon Gilly's interesting book' leaves us still guessing and very much in the dark. One thing is certain, the council of Nicæa (787) settled the question for both East and West, and settled it wrongly. For however the educated may guard against the puerile materialism represented in the image-cult, all historical experience has shown that the ignorant cannot be guarded against it, and that it debases worship swiftly and surely.

1 προσκυνεῖν.

"Conciliabulum, Constantinople," 754.

2 λατρεῖν. ♦“Vigilantius and His Times," 1844.

As a matter of fact it simply opened the door to the worship of the heathen gods, which had probably never really ceased under other names. Mary becomes the Queen of Heaven, and the saints and apostles take the places of favorite demi-gods and pagan heroes. Their relics are worshipped, and a canon orders all churches to be supplied with them.1

In fact a crude Gnosticism prevailed, in which access to the highest divinity was only to be obtained by the intervention of intermediate demi-gods. Mary became toward the close of this period the influential intermediary between God and man, so that Nestorius protests against making her a goddess. She becomes the Bride of the Holy Spirit, the Mother of God (Athanasius), and to this day is the centre of a superstitious cycle of legends borrowed from pagan antiquity.

2

This period is constantly haunted by fears of Judaism. One of the canons of Laodicea forbids Christians to Judaize by "resting on the Sabbath day. They must work on that day, rather seeking to honor the Lord's day, and if they can by resting on that day." But in spite of this fear, through Judaism also came pouring in a flood of superstitions and ritual formalities. The Judaism of Christ's time had become dreadfully corrupt. Angel and devil worship, probably of Babylonian-Persian origin, had left many traces upon it.

Even the canonical Scriptures, though so generally representing the purifying processes introduced by propheticism in the eighth and seventh centuries, nevertheless contained many memories of the more primitive paganism out of which Judaism had so slowly emerged. Upon these remnants of heathenism the attention of the church was all too often fixed. It was a great gain in many respects that the Old Testament had received full canonical authority together with the New Testament writings. But at the same time it involved serious losses. The knowledge

1 II Nice, Canon VII: "And if any bishop shall henceforth proceed to consecrate a church without holy relics, he shall be degraded as a transgressor against churchly traditions." Cf. also Canon XVII of the Sixth Synod of Carthage. (Hefele, II, Edinburgh, 1876, p. 426.) * Canon XXIX.

of its pages was utterly uncritical and unhistorical. It involved the reintroduction of false conceptions of sacrifice and of outworn conceptions of physical purification from which Jesus sought to free us, and they still hold their place in even some Protestant circles.1

The Gnostic Judaism of a Philo, with the artificial interpretation characteristic of the school played havoc with the Scripture reading of the early fathers, and made the Old and New Testaments ready sources for the defence of any particular superstition that served the momentary purpose of the ecclesiastical imperialism."

At this stage the Eastern church hardened into the religious organization which it has remained almost up to the present. The struggle with Rome engendered the undying hate that kept the two communions apart, because subjection to the Vatican was the only condition of union. True, the final break was long postponed, and yet the break with Leo IX (1054) and the final rupture in 1204 were but the seals on what was really accomplished in the struggle over Photius (858).'

For the student of the unrolling of a Christian morality the pages of the history of the Eastern church have an unending interest, but for the history of a development of ethics as a theory of conduct the book is closed with the canons of the second Nicæan council.

'Instructive is Ambrose "de Officiis Ministrorum," lib. I, c. 50, to which reference was made on p. 205.

* "Jerome contra Jovinianum," lib. II, cap. 15.

'Cf. Müller, Karl: "Kirchengeschichte," vol. I (1892), pp. 369–372. 'Cf. Bonwetsch, G. N.: "Griechisch-orthodoxes Christentum und Kirche in Mittelalter und Neuzeit," in P. Hinneberg's series; "Die Kultur der Gegenwart," teil I, Abteil. 4 (1905), pp. 161-182, and Kattenbusch, F.: "Orientalische Kirche," in Herzog-Hauck's "Realencyklopädie," XIV (1904), pp. 436–467.

CHAPTER V

THE MILITANT PAPACY AND ITS ETHICS

I. The Separation of the East from the West; The Intellectual Elements and the Cult; The Political Ambition-II. Relations of Church and State in the Two Wings of Christianity; Gregory I; Bede-III. The Missionary Movement and the Monastery; Augustine; Bonifacius; Alcuin-IV. The Actual Working Ethics of the Roman Church; The Slave Question; Woman; Land Question; Dignity of Labor; Law.

I. THE SEPARATION OF THE EAST FROM THE WEST

Early in the history of organized Christianity, even before the days of Leo I (440-461), the distinct difference in spirit between the Eastern and the Western churches became evident. For some time the African church formed a connecting link between the two, but as the centres of activity moved northward, and as Islam advanced, she ceased to influence the destiny of either branch.

In the East the metaphysical and the dogmatic interests had been supreme. But the crushing weight of Byzantianism transformed the life of the Eastern church. The old excuse of Constantine for the establishment of Christianity was the unity of the empire. From that fatal day the Eastern church became, and remains to a large degree, the mere tool of autocracy, with ignorance as its chief weapon.

The cult then took the place of any intellectual interest. Hence the struggle in the Eastern church over the icons was characteristic as a turning-point in her history, and from the triumph of those who substituted cult for thought the Eastern church almost ceases to interest the student of theoretical ethics. This triumph was due to the monks, whose fierce insistence upon the legitimacy of the worship of images carried the day. The