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Hippolytus
Here we see that Hippolytus had no idea of the sense some put upon the convenire of his master Irenæus.[1122] It was not “necessary” for them to conform their doctrines to that of the Bishop of Rome, evidently; nor to “the Church of Rome” as represented by him. To the church which presided over a province, indeed, recourse was to be had by all belonging to that province; but it is our author’s grateful testimony, that to the council of comprovincials, and not to any one bishop therein, Rome owed its own adhesion to orthodoxy at this crisis.
All this illustrates the position of Tertullian, who never thinks of ascribing to Rome any other jurisdiction than that belonging to other provinces. As seats of testimony, the apostolic sees, indeed, are all to be honoured. “In Greece, go to Corinth; in Asia Minor, to Ephesus; if you are adjacent to Italy, you have Rome; whence also (an apostolic) authority is at hand for us in Africa.” Such is his view of “contemporaneous affairs.”
“Well might he weep,” says Tayler Lewis, “as Lucian represents him, over his overflowing universe of perishing phenomena, where nothing stood;…nothing was fixed, but, as in a mixture, all things were confounded.” He was “the weeping philosopher.”
Here let me add Henry Nelson Coleridge’s remarks on the Greek seed-plot of those philosophies which were begotten of the Egyptian mysteries, and which our author regards as, in turn, engendering “all heresies,” when once their leaders felt, like Simon Magus, a power in the Gospel of which they were jealous, and of which they wished to make use without submitting to its yoke. “Bishop Warburton,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge, “discovered, perhaps, more ingenuity than sound judgment in his views of the nature of the Greek mysteries; entertaining a general opinion that their ultimate object was to teach the initiated a pure theism, and to inculcate the certainty and the importance of a future state of rewards and punishments. I am led by the arguments of Villoison and Ste. Croix to doubt the accuracy of this.” In short, he supposes a “pure pantheism,” or Spinosism, the substance of their teaching.[1123]
This and the foregoing chapter offer us a most overwhelming testimony to the independence of councils. In the late “Council of Sacristans” at the Vatican, where truth perished, Pius IX. refused to all the bishops of what he accounted “the Catholic universe” what the seven suburbicarian bishops were able to enforce as a right, in the primitive age, against two successive Bishops of Rome, who were patrons of heresy. These heretical prelates persisted; but the Province remained in communion with the other apostolic provinces, while rejecting all communion with them. All this will help us in studying Cyprian’s treatise On Unity, and it justifies his own conduct.
The simple primitive cathedra,[1124] of which we may learn something from the statue of Hippolytus, was, no doubt, “a throne” in the eyes of an ambitious man. Callistus is here charged, by one who knew him and his history, with obtaining this position by knavish words and practices. The question may well arise, in our Christian love for antiquity, How could such things be, even in the age of martyrdoms? Let us recollect, that under the good Bishop Pius, when his brother wrote the Hermas, the peril of wealth and love of money began to be imminent at Rome. Tertullian testifies to the lax discipline of that see when he was there. Minucius Felix lets us into the impressions made by the Roman Christians upon surrounding heathen: they were a set of conies burrowing in the earth; a “light-shunning people,” lurking in the catacombs. And yet, while this fact shows plainly that good men were not ambitious to come forth from these places of exile and suffering, and expose themselves needlessly to death, it leads us to comprehend how ambitious men, studiosi novarum rerum, could remain above ground, conforming very little to the discipline of Christ, making friends with the world, and yet using their nominal religion on the principle that “gain is godliness.” There were some wealthy Christians; there were others, like Marcia in the palace, sufficiently awakened to perceive their own wickedness, and anxious to do favours to the persecuted flock, by way, perhaps, of compounding for sins not renounced. And when we come to the Epistles of Cyprian,[1125] we shall see what opportunities were given to desperate men to make themselves a sort of brokers to the Christian community; for selfish ends helping them in times of peril, and rendering themselves, to the less conscientious, a medium for keeping on good terms with the magistrates. Such a character was Callistus, one of “the grievous wolves” foreseen by St. Paul when he exhorted his brethren night and day, with tears, to beware of them. How he made himself Bishop of Rome, the holy Hippolytus sufficiently explains.
It has been sufficiently demonstrated by the learned Döllinger, than whom a more competent and qualified witness could not be named, that the late pontiff, Pius IX., was in this respect, as a bishop, very much like Callistus. Moreover, his chief adviser and prime minister, Antonelli, was notoriously Callistus over again; standing towards him in the same relations which Callistus bore to Zephyrinus. Yet, by the bull Ineffabilis, that pontiff has retrospectively clothed the definitions of Zephyrinus and Callistus with infallibility; thus making himself also a partaker in their heresies, and exposing himself to the anathemas with which the Catholic councils overwhelmed his predecessor Honorius and others. That at such a crisis the testimony of Hippolytus should come to light, and supply a reductio ad absurdum to the late papal definitions, may well excite such a recognition of divine providence as Dr. Bunsen repeatedly suggests.
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