Edward Bouverie Pusey · 3 of 21

Main Body · Part 3

through the mystical communion those who believe in Him, He makes us incorporate with Himself and with one another. For who should separate and remove from a natural oneness with one another, those who through the One Holy Body are bound up into oneness with Christ? For if we all ‘ partake of the One Bread,’ we are all made ‘one Body.’ For Christ cannot be divided. Wherefore the Church is called also ‘the body of Christ,’ and we too ‘are members in particular,’ according to the mind of Paul. For we all, being united by One Christ through the Holy Body, in that we have received in our own bodies Him the One and Indivisible, owe our members more to him than to ourselves.— But that, by partaking of the Holy Flesh, we obtain that union with Christ which is in a manner bodily, Paul will testify, speaking of’ the mystery of godliness which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, but is now revealed unto His holy Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should he co-heirs, and concorporate and co-partakers of His promise in Christ.’ But if we are all incorporate with one another in Christ, and not only with one another, hut with Himself, in that He is in us through His own Flesh, how are we not all clearly one both with each other and with Christ? For Christ is the Bond of oneness, being, in One, God and Man.

“But as to the Oneness in Spirit, we all, having feoeived One and the same Holy Spirit, are in a manner mingled with each other and with God. For although to us, being many, Christ giveth the Father’s and His own spirit to dwell in each of us, yet is He One and Indivisible, holding together in oneness through Himself the spirits which, in their several existences, are severed from oneness, and making all to appear as one in Himself. For as the power of the Holy Flesh maketh those concorporate, in whom It is, in like way, I deem, the One Indivisible Spirit of God, dwelling in all, bringeth all together to the spiritual unity. For since One Spirit dwelteth in us, God the One Father of all will be in us, through the Son, holding in oneness, both to one another and to Himself, whatsoever partaketh of the Spirit.”

S. Hilary is even at pains to show, against the Arians, that the unity spoken of is not an unity of will but an unity of nature; and so he overthrows the more their sophism that the Unity of the Father and the Son was an unity of will only. “I ask those who thrust upon us an unity of will between the Father and the Son, whether Christ is at this day in us by truth of nature, or by harmony of will? For if the Word is truly made Flesh, and we truly receive the Word, being Flesh, in the Food of the Lord, how must He no t be thought to abide by nature in us, Who, being born Man, took the nature of our flesh inseparably to Himself, and under the Sacrament of the Flesh to be communicated to us, blended the nature of His Flesh with the Divine Nature?”

And as to the other Sacrament, S. Hilary says, “The Apostle teacheth, from the nature of Sacraments, that this is the unity of the faithful. ‘As many as have been baptized unto Christ, have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor

free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ But that in so great variety of nations, conditions, sexes, they are one, is this from consent of the will or from the unity of the Sacrament, in that they both have one Baptism and all have put on one Christ? What has concord of minds to do here, seeing they are thereby one, that, by the nature of One Baptism, they are clothed with one Christ? “

The first then and very chiefest character of Unity is not any thing which comes forth from us; it is infused into us by God. But this it is man’s part to receive, and he receives it by faith. “There is One Body and One Spirit;” “One Body,” as held together by the “One” Holy “Spirit;” “One Body,” of all which are and have been and shall be, all too who before Christ’s Coming believed in Him and pleased Him. “For to this end,” says S. Chrysostom, “was the Spirit given, that He might unite those who are separated by race and by different manners; for old and young, rich and poor, child, youth, and man, male and female, and every soul become, in a manner, one, and more entirely so than if there were one body.”

S. Paul also, following our Lord, places the origin of unity in God. God maketh us one body, by giving to us One Spirit, ingrafting us into One Christ through One Baptism, regenerating us to “one hope of our calling,” freely giving to us, son-ship, heaven, infusing into us One Faith; for “faith,” he says, “is the gift of God.”

But from this also S. Hilary argues, that our union is an union of nature, not of will. “They who were of one heart and of one soul, I ask, were they one through the Faith of God? Yes; through faith was the heart and soul of all one. And the faith was it one or more? One certainly, since the Apostle himself sets forth ‘One Faith’ as ‘One Lord,’ and ‘One Baptism,’ and ‘One Hope,’ and ‘One God.’ If then through faith, i. e. by the nature of one faith, all were one, why is there not an unity by nature in those who are one by the nature of One Faith?”

But it is of man to retain the faith which he has received. They have not the same Lord, who do not believe the same truth as to Him. The heretics of old who did not believe that the Son was Consubstantial, Co-Eternal, and Co-Equal with the Father, or that, when Incarnate, He had a human soul, or true flesh truly taken of the Virgin Mary, or that the Blessed Virgin bare Him Who was God, or who held that God dwelt only in the Man Christ Jesus, or contrariwise, that the Manhood was absorbed into God, or that our Lord had no human will—these and whatsoever else there was of ancient heresy on the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, believed not the same Lord; as neither did the Pelagians believe in what He wrought for us, and the Donatists denied the existence of that mystical body, whereof He was the Head.

The Faith, S. Paul says, is one, one unchangeable faith, admitting neither of enlargement nor diminution, so that either what the Apostles believed and taught the whole Church as faith, should cease to be faith, or that any thing should become faith

which they, full of the Holy Ghost, knew not and taught not as the faith. But since the faith is one, one whole, then whosoever parteth with, or altereth any portion of the one faith, in fact changes the whole, so that it is not the same faith, whence the stress in the Anthanasian Creed on “keeping the faith whole and undefiled.”

This unity, derived from Our Blessed Lord as Head of the Church, is imparted primarily through the Sacraments. S. Paul says, that “all, baptized into Christ, have put on Christ,” and, having put him on, are one in Christ. And of the Holy Eucharist, “We, being many, are one bread and one body: for we all are partakers of that one Bread.” By Baptism we are ingrafted into the mystical body of Christ; by partaking of His Body, we continue to be members of His Body. But as Christ Himself worketh all things in all, He baptizeth invisibly, He consecrateth, He strengtheneth those who stand, He restoreth those who fall; yet to signify to us that He doeth it, He useth the outward ministry of men, appointed in succession, from the day when He breathed on the Apostles and said, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” Such an organization, as essential to the transmission of grace from Christ our Head, seems to lie in the words of S. Paul, “holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together,” “according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, increaseth with the increase of God.” The “joints and bands” are, in the image of the body, naturally those ministers by which the whole body is held together in one, and through which spiritual nourishment is ministered to the growth of the whole. Certainly, the Apostolic ministry was to continue to the end of the world. “Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers,” or those in their stead, He set in the Church, “for the edifying of the Body of Christ, till we all come, in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

Thus, then, we have from Holy Scripture, as means and conditions of the unity of the Church, One All-Perfect Author, the “One God and Father of all;” one end to which all tends, the “one hope of our calling;” “One Head,” the Head of the Church, our “One Lord;” “One Spirit,” giving life to every living member; the same Sacraments, “One Baptism,” and “One Bread,” by which we are all ingrafted into or maintained in the One Body of our One Head; one Apostolic descent of the Bishops and Pastors of the flock, coming down from One; “One” common “Faith,” that which was given once for all, with the anathema that we hold no doctrine at variance with it, although an Angel from Heaven were to preach it. Of the se we are receivers only.

These if any wilfully reject, they reject Christ. They sever themselves, not only from the Body of Christ, but directly from the Head, loosing the band which binds them

unto Him. These while Christian bodies retain, they are, so long, like the river which “went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted and became into four heads.” They come from the Fountain of blessedness; they flow down to the Ocean of the Eternal Love of God; they water the parched land; the y cool and refresh the weary and the thirsty in the places which God has appointed for them with the one stream coming down from Him. They are one in their One Original, from which they continually and unchangeably derive their being. They adore God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with the same new song of the Gospel; they confess Him in the same words of Apostolic Faith; they offer to Him the same incense of praise, and the same Holy Offering whereof Malachi foretold, “from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same,” pleading on earth to the Eternal Father that One Sacrifice, as presented in Heaven; they receive the same “Bread which came down from Heaven to give life to the world.” Unknown in face, in place separate, different in language, opposed, alas! in some things to one another, still before the Throne of God they are One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church; each several portion praying for itself and for the rest, united in the prayers and oblation which it offers for all, by the One Bread and the One Spirit which dwelleth in all. “In which mystery” (the Holy Eucharist), says S. Cyprian, “our people are shown to be united, so that, as many grains collected and ground and mingled together make one bread, so in Christ, Who is the Heavenly Bread, we may know that there is one Body wherewith our whole number is conjoined and united.”

But is then the whole unity of the Church from God and to God alone, so that it involves duties to God only, and none from man to man? Of the early Christians, the Holy Ghost bears witness that they were at first “of one heart and of one soul.” The intensest conception of human affection, which the range of heathen poetry could imagine as having been once realized, that they were “twain in body, one in soul,” was brought into being by the Day of Pentecost, not in two, but in thousands. For there was, what no imagination could conceive, not one soul in all, but One Holy Spirit, dwelling indivisibly in each, One and the Same filling each soul, the very same in each, binding them together by the virtue of the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity, melting all into a perfect oneness of will by the fire of love which God is. Well might the heathen say then, “God is among them of a truth.” For the glory which Christ gave them was greater than that of miracles; it was the greatest of all miracles, when souls purified, by His indwelling, from passion and envy and all unlove, presented no longer let or hindrance to His all-pervading warmth, but through the love of Christ were one, He says, “as We are One,” Whose Oneness is indivisible.

The Divine gift of Unity requires, as a corresponding duty, mutual love, as the exercise of that “love of God which is shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Ghost which is given to us.” This has been called “subjective” unity, or “unison of wills,” and of this, intercommunion is the natural expression. But is all unity forfeited, where the

unity of intercommunion is suspended? No one, in the face of Church-history, can or does maintain that all interruptions of intercommunion destroy unity. For Church-history records too many such interruptions, which (although never probably without fault on the one side or on both) yet did not exclude either side from the body of Christ. Unlove began its work even in the Apostles’ times. At Corinth, already, our Lord’s words, “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another,” were in a degree eclipsed. Divisions began within the single Church. In the next century, was that first wider rent in the Christian body, when the Bishop of Rome, against the remonstrance of many Bishops, renounced the communion of the Asiatic Churches, because they followed, as to the keeping of Easter, a tradition different from that of Rome and of the other Churches. “The East,” says S. Epiphanius, “differing from the West, they received not from each other tokens of peace.” The strife ceased not until the Council of Nice. Again, in the next century, was the temporary severance between Borne and both Asiatic and African Churches, through the Bishop of Rome, of whom one, now counted a saint, said,“While thinking that all may be excommunicated by him, he excommunicated himself alone from all.” This was allayed seemingly by a subsequent peace-loving Bishop of Rome, but the question on which they disagreed was settled by the large Council of Aries, not by the Bishop of Rome.

Lucifer, once an exile from the faith, and ready to suffer death for it, created a schism between Catholics. Paulinus, whom he hastily consecrated against S. Meletius’ was recognized at Alexandria and Rome; S. Meletius, remained in the communion of the Easterns. S. Basil toiled in vain to heal the schism, and blamed the Westerns for their “pride, haughtiness, precipitancy.” S. Meletius, out of communion with Rome, presided (as it were, marked out by God) at the Second General Council. On his death, the fathers of the Council, with the people of Antioch, filled up his place, maintaining the rights of the Eastern Church, and after fifty-six years the schism was healed, a successor in the line of S. Meletius bringing back all into one flock. S. Meletius, when departed, was owned to be a saint by those who, in his lifetime, owned him not as a bishop. Lucifer, who created the schism, himself closed a life of labour for the faith by forming a small schismatic body in Sardinia; yet, for his faith’s sake, is called by S. Jerome, who wrote against his sect, “the blessed Lucifer.”

“What, when in the troubles as to S. Chrysostom, saints were on opposite sides, and, in the cessation of intercourse between Home and Alexandria, the African Bishops had to exhort the Bishop of Home, that “each Church should keep towards the other the

peace which the Lord commanded?”

The Fifth General Council, overruled by God to good, yet assembled by a heretical emperor, at the instigation of a heretic, was (in part through the vacillation, the alternate assent and dissent, of Vigilius) the occasion of a schism which rent the West, Africa, Upper Italy from east to west, and even Ireland, nor was the schism wholly healed for 150 years.

Our own heathen ancestors, in our S. Augustine’s time, were in great measure converted by those who were not in communion with Rome, yet God blessed the zeal of both for His Glory.

More miserable was that great breach, prepared perhaps for centuries, and which has lasted until now, between the East and “West. Miserable in its origin and its issue. A quarrel begun by two Christian Patriarchs about authority over a province newly recovered to the Christian Faith, strengthened subsequently by offensive answers to an offensive writing, and anathema answered by anathema; involving a people which was acknowledged to be orthodox; embittered, in later times, by the mixture of this world’s politics, the capture of Constantinople under the banner of the Cross, amid excesses from which even the Saracens abstained; the establishment of Latin Emperors of Constantinople and multiplication of Latin Patriarchs and Bishops, sometimes scandalous in their lives, oppressive to the Greeks, whom they ejected, banished, or at times destroyed. “The Latins,” says Fleuri, “defeated the very end they had in view. The conquest of Constantinople drew after it the loss of the Holy Land, and made the schism of the Greeks irremediable.” The conditions of reconciliation were, absolute submission to an authority which had grown up since the separation. They were to purchase help against heathen or Mohammedan invaders by the surrender of the Patriarchal system which they had from the times of General Councils, which had the sanction of the Universal Church, and was bound up with all their memories of all the victories of the Faith over heresy. Or lands were offered to princes to whom they did not belong, on the condition that they would renounce obedience where it was due, and transfer it where it was not due. If we may judge of the sentiments of the Greeks from one of their able and moderate writers, Elias Meniates, Bishop of Zerniza, towards the end of the 17th century, says, “I hold the dispute about the supreme power of the Pope to be the principal cause of our divisions. This is the wall of division between the two Churches. The chief controversy I hold to be about the sovereignty of the Pope. For this is at this time the great wall of separation which divides the two Churches. If all Christians were agreed on

this chief point, viz., how the Church was to be governed, whether by aristocratical rule as we think, or monarchical as the Latins think, there would be very little trouble in agreeing about the rest.” And can we think that the whole guilt of this miserable rent has fallen upon one side only, that, when both East and “West confess the same Mysteries of the Faith, the East is no part of the Church of Christ, because it does not subject itself to the West under which God did not place it? Moses and Aaron pleaded with God, “Shall one man sin, and wilt Thou be wroth with all the congregation?”And are we to assume, whatever were the original wrong tempers of two Greek Patriarchs, that their sin either then involved the innocent, or now lives on so fatally, after so many centuries, when terms are imposed so different from those in the first quarrel? And that, when the great Russian Empire, converted to the faith by the preaching of Monks and Missionary Bishops since the separation of the East and West, is a witness to the Greek Church, that she is a true member of the One Church! “Rome cannot show, since she has been divided from the East, a conversion on so large a scale, so complete, so permanent.” And now too, the Russian Church has been and is, through Apostolic Bishops, winning tens of thousands beyond the bounds of the Russian Empire to the faith of Christ.

In the great schism of the Western Church, in which the Churches of the West were for forty years nearly equally divided, each party was by the other regarded as schismatic, yet we cannot doubt that each belonged to the true Church of Christ.

“After domination in temporals and spirituals was multiplied in the Church,” says Gerson, “men began intrusions and schisms in the Roman Church, for the sake of which dominations and powers, there were continually hatreds and rancours between the Supreme Pontiffs, the Roman Emperors, and temporal Lords.”

There is then no ground to assume that suspensions of inter-communion (sad and mournful as they are) in themselves hinder either “body from being a portion of the Body of Christ. The Donatists were not merely separated from the Catholic Church throughout the world, but denied its existence, and claimed to be the whole Church. The body was formed on a heresy, rejected by the English Church. Probably real schism is always united with heresy, whether as springing from it or degenerating into it. There may be schismatic acts, which have not the deadliness of the sin of schism, as there may be degrees of unlove in an individual, which do not cast the Spirit of God out of his soul. We believe the Church to be universal, although there are large tracts of the world which it has not reached, or from which it has been driven out; we believe the Church to be holy,

notwithstanding that the evil is more on the surface than the good; we believe the prophecy to have been fulfilled, “neither shall men learn war anymore,” although peace has been in these last days the exception among Christians; we believe our Lord’s words that love is the test of His disciples, and that thereby shall they be known among men, although unlove and jealousy and self-interest and anger are far more visible. Well then may we believe that the several Churches, owning the same Lord, united to Him by the same Sacraments, confessing the same Faith, however their prayers may be hindered, are still one in His sight, Whom all desire to receive; Whom all confess; Whose Passion all plead before the Father; in Whom alone all alike hope. And so as to ourselves, our divines maintained (under appeal to a free general Council of the whole East and West, while there was yet hope, and God’s Arm is not shortened, that He should not yet turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers), that we have done nothing to forfeit the Communion of the rest of Christendom.

vi. b. But Dr. Manning says, that we have denied the “visible head” of the Church,

i. e. we do not, any more than the Eastern Church, own the monarchy of the Bishop of Rome. In the time of Henry VIII. the English Church submitted to the abolition of appeals to Rome; and what it then submitted to, it has since concurred in. But, if any thing is clear in Christian antiquity, it is that such appeals are not of Divine right. Africa was converted from Italy. Yet England is not at this moment more independent of any authority of the Bishop of Rome, than Africa was in the time of S. Augustine. There are only three conceivable ways in which the Bishop of one Church could interfere in the internal regulations of another. They are, the Confirmation of its ^Bishops, or of its Canons or Ecclesiastical laws, or the reviewing of the judicial sentences of its Bishops. These would control its legislative or its judicial functions in detail, or the selection of those in whom the legislative and judicial functions are vested. Of these three, it is confessed by Roman Catholic writers too, that the confirmation of Bishops lay with the Primate, as in other countries with the Metropolitan, and that the Pallium was never sent to Africa. The African Canons stood on their own authority, as did those of all other Churches; the Greek, the Spanish, the Gallican, the British. The case of Apiarius evinces on both sides an entire unconsciousness of any inherent right in the see of Rome to receive appeals. The Bishops of Rome rested their right, not upon any inherent claim, but upon a Canon of the Council of Sardica, which they, by mistake, thought to be a Canon of the Council of Nice. The African Bishops, and among them S. Augustine, declared their willingness to obey any Nicene Canon, but stated that they had no such Canon as that alleged by the Bishop of Rome, in their collection of Nicene Canons which they received through him. The words of S. Augustine are still preserved. “We profess that we will observe this rule too [as to the appeals of priests or deacons], saving a more diligent inquiry as to the Council of Nice.” On this the question was put to the Synod, and the whole Council said, “All things which were enacted in the Council of Nice, we all

approve.” S. Augustine also signed the synodal letter to Boniface from the 217 Bishops present from all Africa, in which they deprecated any “haughtiness” [typhus] on the part of the Bishop of Rome, and professed that they “will comply with what has been alleged on his part about the appeals of Bishops to the Bishop of the Roman Church, and about terminating the causes of clerks by the Bishops of their Provinces, until ascertaining, whether there was such a Canon of Nice, since they had none such in any Greek or Latin copy of the Canons.” They sent accordingly to the East and received copies of the Canons from S. Cyril of Alexandria, and Atticus, Bishop of Constantinople. After these had been sent to Boniface, another Council from all Africa was held, in which Bishop Faustinus urged that the unhappy Apiarius, having been received to communion by Celestine, should be received by the Church of Africa also. A three days’ hearing of Apiarius was ended by his own confession of all the horrible scandals of which he had been accused. Whereupon the Bishops of the African Council wrote thus to Celestine:“We earnestly beg that henceforth you will not readily admit to your hearing those who come from hence, nor be willing to receive to communion those excommunicated by us, because you will readily see that this is ruled by the Council of Nice. For although it may seem as if provision were there made as to the inferior clergy or laymen, how much more would it have this observed as to Bishops, that, being suspended from communion in their own province, they should not seem to be restored to communion by your Holiness hastily or over-hurriedly or unduly. Let your Holiness repel also, as beseems you, the shameless applications of presbyters and clergy below them, because by no statute of the fathers has this been derogated from the African Church, and the Nicene Canons have most plainly committed both the inferior Clergy and the Bishops themselves to their Metropolitans. For most prudently and justly have they provided, that all matters should be terminated in the places where they arose; nor will the grace of the Holy Spirit be wanting to each province, whereby the Bishops of Christ may both prudently see and constantly maintain equity; especially, since it is allowed to each, if he is dissatisfied with the judgment of those who took cognizance of his case, to appeal to the Council of his Province or of all Africa. Unless any one think that our God can inspire with justice a single individual, and refuse it to innumerable Bishops assembled in Council. Or how should the judgment beyond seas itself stand, seeing that persons needed as witnesses cannot be brought there, for infirmity of sex or age or many other hindrances. For that any should be sent, as it were from the side of your Holiness, we find ordained by no synod of the fathers. For as to that which you sent by our fellow-Bishop Faustinus, as if from the Nicene Council, we could find nothing of the sort in more accurate copies, which we have received from the holy Cyril, our fellow-Bishop of the Alexandrian Church, and the venerable Atticus, Bishop of Constantinople, taken from the original, which we transmitted to Bishop Boniface of venerable memory. Moreover, whoever may ask yon, do not send any of your Clergy to execute your orders; allow it not; lest we

should seem to bring the fumes of secular pride into the Church of Christ, which holds out to those who desire to see God, the light of simplicity and the clear day of humility. For, now that the unhappy Apiarius has for his shocking wickednesses been removed from the Church of Christ, we are sure that through the probity and moderation of your Holiness, Africa, without violating brotherly charity, will not have further to endure our brother Faustinus.”