Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 1 1911.djvu/224

178 2. Canon Law, even more dearly than the Creed, owed its development to the work of councils.

The conception of a Church Law, ius ecclenasticum, ius canonicum, was not matured till the fourth century, and then largely as a result of the new position of the Church in relation to the State, and in conscious or unconscious imitation of the Civil Law. Down to the dose of the era of persecutions the discipline of the Church was administered under consensual jurisdiction without any written code other than the Scriptures, in general subordination to the unwritten Kaviav or rcgtda, the ‘‘rule of truth,” “the ecclesiastical tradition.” Primitive books like the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apostolic Church Order give us a naive picture of the unfettered action of the bishop as judge with his presbyters as assessors. But as time went on the questions to be dealt with grew more and more complex; it became no longer possible to keep the world at arm’s length, and the relations of Christians with the heathen society round them required an increasingly delicate adjustment ; the simplicity of the rigorist discipline, by which in the second century all sins of idolatry, murder, fraud, and unchastity were visited with lifelong exclusion from communion, yielded at one point after another to the demands of Christian charity and to the need of distinctions between case and case. The problem became pressing when the persecution of Decius suddenly broke up the long peace, and multitudes of professing Christians were tempted or driven to a momentary apostasy. The Novatianist minority seceded rather than hold out to these unwilling idolaters the hope of any readmission to the sacraments : the Church was forced to face the situation, and it was obviously undesirable that individual bishops should adjudicate upon similar circumstances in wholly different ways. It .was here that St Cyprian struck out his successful line: his first councils were called to deal with the dis- organisation which the persecution left behind it, and the bishops at least of Africa were induced to agree upon a common policy worked out on a uniform scale of treatment.

There is, however, nothing to shew that at Cyprian’s councils any canons were committed to writing, to serve as a permanent standard of church discipline. That crucial step was only taken fifty years later, as the persecution initiated by Diocletian relaxed and the bishops of various localities could meet to take common counsel for the repair of moral and material damage. During the decade 305-315 the bishops of Spain met at Elvira, the bishops of Asia Minor at Ancyra and at Neocaesarea, the Western bishops generally at Arles; and the codes of these four councils are the earliest material preserved in later Canon Law.

The decisions of such councils had. however no currency, in the first instance, outside their own localities, and even the Council of Arles was a concilium plenarium only of the West; but the feeling was already gaining