History of the Catholic Church

J. C. Robertson

• Publisher: Endymion Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781531295530
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The beginning of the Christian Church is reckoned from the great day on which the Holy Ghost came down, according as our Lord had promised to His Apostles. At that time, "Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven, " were gathered together at Jerusalem, to keep the Feast of Pentecost (or Feast of Weeks), which was one of the three holy seasons at which God required His people to appear before Him in the place which He had chosen.

ST. AUGUSTINE.

~

A.D. 354-430.

PART I.

THE CHURCH IN THE NORTH of Africa has hardly been mentioned since the time of St. Cyprian. But we must now look towards it again, since in the days of St. Chrysostom it produced a man who was perhaps the greatest of all the old Christian fathers—St. Augustine.

Augustine was born at Thagaste, a city of Numidia, in the year 354. His mother, Monica, was a pious Christian, but his father, Patricius, was a heathen, and a man of no very good character. Monica was resolved to bring up her son in the true faith: she entered him as a catechumen of the Church when a little child, and carefully taught him as much of religious things as a child could learn. But he was not then baptized, because (as has been mentioned already) people were accustomed in those days to put off baptism, out of fear lest they should afterwards fall into sin, and so should lose the blessing of the sacrament. This, as we know, was a mistake, but it was a very common practice nevertheless.

When Augustine was a boy, he was one day suddenly taken ill, so that he seemed likely to die. Remembering what his mother had taught him, he begged that he might be baptized, and preparations were made for the purpose; but all at once he began to grow better, and the baptism was put off for the same reason as before.

As he grew up, he gave but little promise of what he was afterwards to become. Much of his time was spent in idleness; and through idleness he fell into bad company, and was drawn into sins of many kinds. When he was about seventeen, his father died. The good Monica had been much troubled by her husband’s heathenism and misconduct, and had earnestly tried to convert him from his errors. She went about this wisely, not lecturing him or arguing with him in a way that might have set him more against the Gospel, but trying rather to show him the beauty of Christian faith by her own loving, gentle, and dutiful behaviour. And at length her pains were rewarded by seeing him before his death profess himself a believer, and receive Christian baptism.

Monica was left rather badly off at her husband’s death. But a rich neighbour was kind enough to help her in the expense of finishing her son’s education, and the young man himself now began to show something of the great talents which God had been pleased to bestow on him. Unhappily, however, he sank deeper and deeper in vice, and poor Monica was bitterly grieved by his ways. A book which he happened to read led him to feel something of the shamefulness and wretchedness of his courses; but, as it was a heathen book (although written by one of the wisest of the heathens, Cicero), it could not show him by what means he might be able to reach to a higher life. He looked into Scripture, in the hope of finding instruction there; but he was now in that state of mind to which, as St. Paul says (1 Cor. i. 23), the preaching of Christ sounds like “foolishness;” so that he fancied himself to be above learning anything from a book so plain and homely as the Bible then seemed to him, and he set out in search of some other teaching. And a very strange sort of teaching he met with.

About a hundred years before this time, a man named Manes appeared in Persia (A.D. 270), and preached a religion which he pretended to have received from Heaven, but which was really made up by himself, from a mixture of Christian and heathen notions. It was something like the doctrines which had been before taught by the Gnostics, and was as wild nonsense as can well be imagined. He taught that there were two gods—a good god of light, and a bad god of darkness. And he divided his followers into two classes, the lower of which were called hearers, while the higher were called elect. These elect were supposed to be very strict in their lives. They were not to eat flesh at all;—they might not even gather the fruits of the earth, or pluck a herb with their own hands. They were supported and were served by the hearers; and they took a very odd way of showing their gratitude to these; for it is said that when one of the elect ate a piece of bread, he made this speech to it:—"It was not I who reaped or ground or baked thee; may they who did so be reaped and ground and baked in their turn!” And it was believed that the poor “hearers” would after death become corn, and have to go through the mill and the oven, until they should have suffered enough to clear away their offences and make them fit for the blessedness of the elect.

The Manichæans (as the followers of Manes were called) soon found their way into Africa, where they gained many converts; and, although laws were often made against their heresy by the emperors, it continued to spread secretly; for they used to hide their opinions, when there was any danger, so that persons who were really Manichæans pretended to be Catholic Christians, and there was some of them even among the monks and clergy of the Church.

In the humour in which Augustine now was, this strange sect took his fancy; for the Manichæans pretended to be wiser than any one else, and laughed at all submission to doctrines which had been settled by the Church. So Augustine at twenty became a Manichæan, and for nine years was one of the hearers,—for he never got to be one of the elect, or to know much about their secrets. But before he had been very long in the sect, he began to notice some things which shocked him in the behaviour of the elect, who professed the greatest strictness. In short, he could not but see that their strictness was all a pretence, and that they were really a very worthless set of men. And he found out, too, that, besides bad conduct, there was a great deal very bad and disgusting in the opinions of the Manichæans, which he had not known of at first. After learning all this, he did not know what to turn to, and he seems for a time to have believed nothing at all,—which is a wretched state of mind indeed, and so he found it.

PART II.

Augustine now set up as a teacher at Carthage, the chief city of Africa; but among the students there he found a set of wild young men who called themselves Eversors—a name which meant that they turned everything topsy-turvy; and Augustine was so much troubled by the behaviour of these unruly lads, that he resolved to leave Carthage and go to Rome. Monica, as we may easily suppose, had been much distressed by his wanderings, but she never ceased to pray that he might be brought round again. One day she went to a learned bishop, who was much in the habit of arguing with people who were in error, and begged that he would speak to her son; but the good man understood Augustine’s case, and saw that to talk to him while he was in such a state of mind would only make him more self-wise than he was already. “Let him alone awhile,” he said: “only pray God for him, and he will of himself find out by reading how wrong the Manichæans are, and how impious their doctrine is.” And then he told her that he had himself been brought up as a Manichæan, but that his studies had shown him the error of the sect, and he had left it. Monica was not satisfied with this, and went on begging, even with tears, that the bishop would talk with her son. But he said to her, “Go thy ways, and may God bless thee; for it is not possible that the child of so many tears should perish.” And Monica took his words as if they had been a voice from Heaven, and cherished the hope which they held out to her.

Monica was much against Augustine’s plan of removing to Rome; but he slipped away and went on shipboard while she was praying in a chapel by the seaside, which was called after the name of St. Cyprian. Having got to Rome, he opened a school there, as he had done at Carthage; but he found that the Roman youth, although they were not so rough as those of Carthage, had another very awkward habit—namely, that, after having heard a number of his lectures, they disappeared without paying for them. While he was in distress on this account, the office of a public teacher at Milan was offered to him, and he was very glad to take it. While at Rome, he had a bad illness; but he did not at that time wish or ask for baptism as he had done when sick in his childhood.

The great St. Ambrose was then Bishop of Milan. Augustine had heard so much of his fame, that he went often to hear him, out of curiosity to know whether the bishop were really as fine a preacher as he was said to be; but by degrees, as he listened, he felt a greater and greater interest. He found, from what Ambrose said, that the objections by which the Manichæans had set him against the Gospel were all mistaken; and, when Monica joined him, after he had been some time at Milan, she had the delight of finding that he had given up the Manichæan sect, and was once more a catechumen of the Church.

Augustine had still to fight his way through many difficulties. He had learnt that the best and highest wisdom of the heathens could not satisfy his mind and heart; and he now turned again to St. Paul’s epistles, and found that Scripture was something very different from what he had supposed it to be in the pride of his youth. He was filled with grief and shame on account of the vileness of his past life; and these feelings were made still stronger by the accounts which a friend gave him of the strict and self-denying ways of Antony and other monks. One day, as he lay in the garden of his lodging, with his mind tossed to and fro by anxious thoughts, so that he even wept in his distress, he heard a voice, like that of a child, singing over and over “Take up and read! take up and read!” At first he fancied that the voice came from some child at play; but he could not think of any childish game in which such words were used. And then he remembered how St. Antony had been struck by the words of the Gospel which he heard in church; and it seemed to him that the voice, wherever it might come from, was a call of the same kind to himself. So he eagerly seized the book of St. Paul’s Epistles, which was lying by him, and, as he opened it, the first words on which his eyes fell were these,—"Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. xiii. 13, 14). And, as he read, the words all at once sank deeply into his heart, and from that moment he felt himself another man. As soon as he could do so without being particularly noticed, he gave up his office of professor and went into the country, where he spent some months in the company of his mother and other friends; and at the following Easter (A.D. 387), he was baptized by St. Ambrose. The good Monica had now seen the desire of her heart fulfilled; and she soon after died in peace, as she was on her way back to Africa, in company with her son.

Augustine, after her death, spent some time at Rome, where he wrote a book against the Manichæans, and then, returning to his native place Thagaste, he gave himself up for three years to devotion and study. In those days, it was not uncommon that persons who were thought likely to be useful to the Church should be seized on and ordained, whether they liked it or not; and if they were expected to make very strong objections, their mouths were even stopped by force. Now Augustine’s fame grew so great, that he was afraid lest something of this kind should be done to him; and he did not venture to let himself be seen in any town where the bishopric was vacant, lest he should be obliged to become bishop against his will. He thought, however, that he was safe in accepting an invitation to Hippo, because it was provided with a bishop named Valerius. But, as he was one day listening to the bishop’s sermon, Valerius began to say that his church was in want of another presbyter; whereupon the people laid hold of Augustine, and presented him to the bishop, who ordained him without heeding his objections (A.D. 391). And four years later (A.D. 395), he was consecrated a bishop, to assist Valerius, who died soon after.

Augustine was bishop of Hippo for five-and-thirty years, and, although there were many other sees of greater importance in Africa, his uncommon talents, and his high character, made him the foremost man of the African church. He was a zealous and exemplary bishop, and he wrote a great number of valuable books of many kinds. But the most interesting of them all is one which may be read in English, and is of no great length—namely, the “Confessions,” in which he gives an account of the wanderings through which he had been brought into the way of truth and peace, and humbly gives thanks to God, whose gracious providence had guarded and guided him.

PART III.

Augustine had a great many disputes with heretics and others who separated from the Church, or tried to corrupt its doctrine. But only two of his controversies need be mentioned here. One of these was with the Donatists, and the other was with the Pelagians.

The sect of the Donatists had arisen soon after the end of the last heathen persecution, and was now nearly a hundred years old. We have seen that St. Cyprian had a great deal of trouble with people who fancied that, if a man were put to death, or underwent any other considerable suffering, for the name of Christ, he deserved to be held in great honour, and his wishes were to be attended to by other Christians, whatever his character and motives might have been. The same spirit which led to this mistake continued in Africa after St. Cyprian’s time; and thus, when the persecution began there under Diocletian and Maximian (A.D. 303), great numbers rushed into danger, in the hope of being put to death, and of so obtaining at once the blessedness and the glory of martyrdom. Many of these people were weary of their lives, or in some other respect were not of such characters that they could be reckoned as true Christian martyrs. The wise fathers of the Church always disapproved of such foolhardy doings, and would not allow people, who acted in a way so unlike our Lord and His apostle St. Paul, to be considered as martyrs; and Mensurius, who was the bishop of Carthage, stedfastly set his face against all such things.

One of the ways by which the persecutors hoped to put down the Gospel, was to get hold of all the copies of the Scriptures, and to burn them; and they required the clergy to deliver them up. But most of the officers who had to execute the orders of the emperors did not know a Bible from any other book; and it is said that, when some of them came to Mensurius, and asked him to deliver up his books, he gave them a quantity of books written by heretics, which he had collected (perhaps with the intention of burning them himself), and that all the while he had put the Scriptures safely out of the way, until the tyranny of the heathens should be overpast. When the persecution was at an end, some of the party whom he had offended by setting himself against their wrong notions as to martyrdom, brought up this matter against the bishop. They said that his account of it was false; that the books which he had given up were not what he said, but that he had really given up the Scriptures; and that, even if his story were true, he had done wrong in using such deceit. They gave the name of traditors, (or, as we should say, traitors,) to those who confessed that they had been frightened into giving up the Scriptures; and they were for showing no mercy to any traditor, however much he might repent of his weakness.

This severe party, then, tried to get up an opposition to Mensurius. They found, however, that they could make nothing of it. But when he died, and when Cæcilian, who had been his archdeacon and his righthand man, was chosen bishop in his stead, these people made a great outcry, and set up another bishop of their own against him. All sorts of people who had taken offence at Cæcilian or Mensurius thought this a fine opportunity for having their revenge; and thus a strong party was formed. It was greatly helped by the wealth of a lady named Lucilla, whom Cæcilian had reproved for the superstitious habit of kissing a bone, which she supposed to have belonged to some martyr, before communicating at the Lord’s table. The first bishop of the party was one Majorinus, who had been a servant of some sort to Lucilla; and, when Majorinus was dead, they set up a second bishop, named Donatus, after whom they were called Donatists. This Donatus was a clever and a learned man, and lived very strictly; but he was exceedingly proud and ill-tempered, and used very violent language against all who differed from him; an...

Table of contents

• THE AGE OF THE APOSTLES.
• ST. IGNATIUS.
• ST. JUSTIN, MARTYR.
• ST. POLYCARP.
• THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE.
• TERTULLIAN—PERPETUA AND HER COMPANIONS.
• ORIGEN.
• ST. CYPRIAN.
• FROM GALLIENUS TO THE END OF THE LAST PERSECUTION.
• CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.
• THE COUNCIL OF NICÆA.
• ST. ATHANASIUS.
• THE MONKS.
• ST. BASIL AND ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUM. COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE.
• ST. AMBROSE.
• THE TEMPLE OF SERAPIS.
• CHURCH GOVERNMENT.
• CHRISTIAN WORSHIP.
• ARCADIUS AND HONORIUS.
• ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM.
• ST. AUGUSTINE.
• COUNCILS OF EPHESUS AND CHALCEDON.
• FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
• CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS—CHRISTIANITY IN BRITAIN.
• SCOTLAND AND IRELAND.
• CLOVIS.
• JUSTINIAN.
• NESTORIANS AND MONOPHYSITES.
• ST. BENEDICT.
• END OF THE SIXTH CENTURY.
• ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.
• MAHOMETANISM—IMAGE-WORSHIP.
• THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND.
• ST. BONIFACE.
• PIPIN AND CHARLES THE GREAT.
• DECAY OF CHARLES THE GREAT’S EMPIRE.
• STATE OF THE PAPACY.
• MISSIONS OF THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES.
• POPE GREGORY THE SEVENTH.
• THE FIRST CRUSADE.
• NEW ORDERS OF MONKS.—MILITARY ORDERS.
• ST. BERNARD.
• ADRIAN IV.—ALEXANDER III.—BECKET.—THE THIRD CRUSADE.
• INNOCENT THE THIRD.
• FREDERICK II.—ST. LEWIS OF FRANCE.
• PETER OF MURRONE.
• BONIFACE VIII.
• THE POPES AT AVIGNON.—THE RUIN OF THE TEMPLARS.
• THE POPES AT AVIGNON (continued).
• RELIGIOUS SECTS AND PARTIES.
• JOHN WYCLIF.
• THE POPES RETURN TO ROME.
• THE GREAT SCHISM.
• JOHN HUSS.
• THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE.
• THE HUSSITES.
• COUNCILS OF BASEL AND FLORENCE.
• NICOLAS V. AND PIUS II.
• JEROME SAVONAROLA.
• JULIUS II. AND LEO X.
• MISSIONS.—THE INQUISITION.