Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 1 1911.djvu/205

Rh upon Catholic writers of the next generations. Jerome, writing amid Syrian surroundings, would eagerly accept the there current presentation of the Alexandrine tradition, though his knowledge of the later facts caused him to throw back the dates from the known to the unknown, from Athanasius and Alexander to Dionysius and Heraclas. Of course there is no smoke without fire; and presumably the Alexandrine presbyterate, in the generations immediately preceding the Council of Nicaea, must have possessed some unusual powers in the appointment of their patriarch. But it seems as likely that these were the powers which elsewhere belonged to the people as that they were the powers which elsewhere belonged to the bishops.

The explanation here offered would no doubt have to be disallowed, if it were true, as has sometimes been alleged, that Arianism all the world over stood for the rights of presbyters, while the cause of Athanasius was bound up with the aggrandisement of the episcopate. But the connexion was purely adventitious at Alexandria, or at any rate local, and the conditions did not reproduce themselves elsewhere. There is no reason at all to suppose any general alliance between presbyters and Arianism, or between the episcopate and orthodoxy: on the contrary, all the evidence goes to shew that in Syria and Asia Minor, and perhaps elsewhere, the bishops were less Catholic than their flocks. At Antioch, for instance, where Arian bishops were dominant during half a century, orthodox zeal was kept alive by the exertions of Flavian and Diodorus, originally as laymen, afterwards as priests. In so far as the doctrinal issue affected the development of organisation at all, it must on the whole, both because of the general confusion of discipline and also because of the ill repute which the tergiversations of so many bishops earned for their order, have enhanced the tendency towards the emancipation of presbyters from episcopal control.

Whatever special conditions may have affected the course of development at Rome or Alexandria, it may be taken as generally true that, by the end of the fourth century the Christian presbyter's right to celebrate the Eucharist was coming to be regarded as inherent in his sacerdotium rather than as devolved upon him by the bishop. With this right went also the right to be served by deacons as ministri or impérat, and ultimately the right to preach. While the 18th canon of Nicaea still regards the deacons as "ministers "of the bishop only, later in the fourth century the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions speaks of rys tpòs duporépovs diakovías, "their service to both bishops and priests," and Ambrosiaster is aghast at the audacity of trying to put presbyters and their servants on a par, "presbyteris ministros ipsorum pares facere." The right to preach had never been formally associated with any order of the Christian ministry: Ambrosiaster was certainly interpreting the documents on his own account, rather than recording tradition, when he asserts (in Eph. iv. 11, 12) "omnibus inter initia concessum est et