Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/339

 were regarded by the ancient teachers of the church as unworthy of the name of the church, and were called heretical, a rabble of apostates, evil-thinking, harmful, and so forth.’” (p. 217.)

The church, the one upon which the whole teaching is based, is the hierarchy. The Theology before that expounded about the one church, the kingdom of grace, the body of Christ, the church of the living and the dead and the angels; then of all those who believed in Christ; then by degrees it added to this first definition another concept; then at last the hierarchy is substituted for that church. The Theology knows very well that according to its conception the church is nothing but the hierarchy, and sometimes it says so, as in the Introduction to the Dogmatic Theology, as in the expressions of the Eastern Patriarchs, as always in the expressions of the Catholic Church; but the Theology has at the same time to confirm its definition that the church is an assembly of all the believers, and so it does not like to say directly that the church is the hierarchy. The Theology knows that the essence of the matter is the infallibility and sacredness of the hierarchy, and so it has to prove first that the hierarchy was established by Christ, and that the Theology is an exposition of the dogmas as confirmed by that same hierarchy. All that is necessary is to prove that the hereditary hierarchy was established by Christ, and that we are the inheritors of this hierarchy, and then, no matter how you may understand it, the church, the essence of the church, as the keeper of truth, will be nothing but hierarchs. For that reason the Theology uses all its efforts to prove the impossible, namely, that Christ established the hierarchy, and a hereditary one at that, and that our hierarchy is the legitimate heir, and such and such a hierarchy, not ours, is illegitimate.

172. The flock and the divinely established hierarchy with their mutual relations. “I. It is not difficult to