Sermons & Letters 196

When Manes seemed to himself to have escaped the hatred of the Persians and to have (as we mentioned a little before) hoped for the judgment of Cascar, and had in each matter employed much fraud and deceit, nevertheless, compelled to seek hiding places for the safety and protection of his own life, he withdrew into a remote part, or an obscure village, of the diocese of Cascar; and there, all witnesses of his preceding wickedness and crimes having been removed far off, he resolved to hold a debate concerning the dogmas of religion with a certain presbyter, rector of that parish. Whether alone, or indeed with those virgin disciples (namely, affecting continence outwardly) whom, coming from the fort of Arabion, he had led with him to Cascar, we cannot affirm for certain.

This much becomes known to us from the praised Acts: that he set out at once to a certain Diodorus, called Trypho by Epiphanius, who presided over the parish of the Christians, in order to enter into disputations with him. Cyril calls the place of this parish a most vile village. Photius supports him, writing: 'Thence a fugitive, he occupies a certain obscure village, and there again strives to foster and lay open his impiety.' But he makes no mention at all of Diodorus, or Trypho the presbyter, whom Manes attempted to assail and harass with new disputations.

Although this man excelled beyond others there existing in piety, pure religion, and the other virtues, yet since he was little or not at all versed in the sacred letters, he could easily have been deceived by Manes, who flattered himself that he would bring him over to his own opinion. Yet this opinion deceived the author of the heresies. For the presbyter, scarcely having heard the blasphemies into which the architect of the new dogmas had burst forth, admonished Bishop Archelaus, demanding that instruction and help be given to him. Archelaus at once wrote a lengthy epistle to his presbyter, which Beausobre, as though less worthy of his History, or little suited to his own aims, neither rendered into French nor transferred into his own work.

Yet at the superscription of this epistle, seeking a knot in a bulrush, he presses on; and since he stumbled there upon two things suspect to him—unless (he says) I labor under a delusion—they plainly make clear that it was not written in the age of Archelaus. Of these, the one is that there a single Church is said to have been founded without a bishop, over which a presbyter alone presided. Wherefore I can by no means persuade myself (he subjoins) that, in the course of the third century of the Church, either in the cities or in the suburbs or villages, any Churches were founded over which bishops were not present. But when the Church had not yet sufficiently increased with a multitude of the faithful, the bishops had only deacons, who were subject to themselves;

but there were no bishops, although they were so called and performed all the sacred functions. Yet it was only a long time afterwards that such rural bishops, or chorepiscopi, were stripped of all superior authority, and thereupon compelled to descend to the order of presbyters. Diodorides, therefore, was a fort, or suburb, which then had a bishop, as D. Assemani in the Oriental Library seems to intimate. This former difficulty being premised, which Beausobre judges to be most grave, he at once descends to the other, which renders Archelaus's epistle more suspect.

Supposing therefore (he himself says) that the bishops in the country places and towns had only simple presbyters to preside over the common people, at least it ought to be reckoned as placed beyond all hazard of doubt that these were called by their bishops by the name of 'brothers,' by no means of 'sons,' especially when they directed their writings to them. He feigns that the term 'sons' befits deacons only, since they are properly the ministers of the bishops in performing sacred rites. Wherefore he persuades himself that no example can anywhere be found, in the first three centuries, of bishops who, in giving letters to presbyters, placed the term 'sons' in the superscription. Thus far Beausobre. Does he then wish to compel his readers to believe fables?

These things, although they may seem composed with much studied artifice and be aided by words and sentences, can nevertheless claim for themselves no faith or authority, except among stupid and dull men, wholly ignorant of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and of this ancient order and economy. Nor does it help him to appeal, without any author, to the ecclesiastical history of the first three centuries. For in the first place he ought to have brought forward the distinction which lies between some particular assembly of the faithful gathered under one legitimate pastor, namely a bishop, and that place in which the faithful themselves came together to hold their assemblies.

That is, when on the Lord's days—that is, the days of the Sun—they celebrated the divine mysteries under one president, and in them matters of the Christian religion were treated. But who is ignorant that the name 'Church' was accommodated to both? When therefore it is affirmed concerning the Church taken in the former sense that it could not exist without a bishop, and that each one had its own and single bishop presiding, whom the ancients, as Justin and Tertullian, called the high priest, this must already be understood of the episcopate according to the ancient and new hierarchy of the Church, as ought to be well known to all.

But because the Churches, thus regarded in the former manner, for the most part—then especially—were not confined within narrow bounds, but extended themselves over far-reaching spaces, comprehending sometimes several cities, suburbs, villages, forts, countrysides, and other things of the sort, neither one place for performing the mysteries could suffice for all the faithful of this Church, nor one priest; and therefore within the same diocese, which they called a Church, several sacred assemblies had to be held, especially on the Lord's days, over which priests had to preside, both by teaching the people and by performing the sacred synaxis or collect.

Lest, however, in writing these things I should seem to men of impaired faith to be fabricating that ecclesiastical discipline was of this kind in the course of the second century of the Church, it is already made known from Tertullian and Justin Martyr. For the latter, in his Apology published for the Christians and offered to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, made open mention of these sacred assemblies celebrated on the Lord's day, even in the towns and countrysides inhabited by the Christian people; describing likewise each detail—both what was performed by those set over them, and what the people joyfully acclaimed, and what, finally, was recited by the ecclesiastical readers from the commentaries of the apostles and prophets.

And all these things, after the president's address, by which the people were instructed and exhorted to the imitation of such beautiful things, the prayers of the whole assembly followed; and then they distributed to each one present the consecrated bread and the consecrated wine mixed with water. To the absent, moreover, they were accustomed to send it by the deacons. From which participation in the sacred gifts they were by no means deprived who, hindered by sickness, captivity, chains, or any other cause, could not on the Sun's day be present at the sacred assembly with the thronging people. Just as those arriving from abroad were received in hospitality. For it was the office of these same presidents to help them, since the president was also the curator of all the needy.

Therefore from the words of Justin, which we subjoin at the end, we must reason thus against Beausobre's trifles: In the course of the already second century of the Church, and while the persecutions both of the Jews and of the heathen were still raging, the Christian people had so increased that not only in the more notable cities, as Eusebius says, but in the towns and countrysides, on the Lord's day all the faithful held an assembly in common, in which the presidents or presiders of the Churches performed the divine service.

Wherefore, if a single bishop presided over each single Church, as we have ascertained from the canonical Epistle of John, and as we understand from the successions of bishops described by Hegesippus and Tertullian, it was utterly impossible for him, on the same day, to run from place to place, to traverse the whole diocese, and, awaiting the throng and multitude of the people, to hold and complete those assemblies of which we now speak. Nor, moreover, will it be permitted to think that the Christian people of each single diocese, when the Lord's day recurred, could, all other cares set aside, have flowed together from any part whatsoever of the diocese to the episcopal sees.

For in the first place Justin asserts that sacred assemblies were held in the towns and in the countryside. Then, moreover, the distance of the places would have forbidden women, children, and old men to undertake the longer journeys; and finally they could easily have been seized by the imperial ministers, if in bands, at appointed hours, in some determined place, they had had to gather before their own and single bishop. For that the bishops were then always sought out and seized unto death by the emperors' ministers, is more than sufficiently established both from the martyrdom of Ignatius, Polycarp, Peter, and Dionysius, and from the glorious end of the Roman bishops who, down to Justin's times, merited to ascend the throne of Peter.

If, then, over those assemblies held in towns and country places on the Lord's days, some presiding officer and prefect who might perform the sacred rite commonly held the leadership, then that fabrication of Beausobre at once falls to the ground: namely, that in the first three earlier centuries the terms 'bishops' and 'presbyters' were used to signify one and the same person, authority, and power. For this is the old refrain that, after Aerius, Blondel, Salmasius, and the other masters of the Puritan school sang over again.

These men, wresting the words of the Acts and of Paul to a perverse meaning, dared wrongly to contend that the dignity and power of presbyters and bishops were one and the same—not only in the times of the apostles but in the succeeding centuries as well. To refute their trifling nonsense is not the business of this present leisure, especially since, among other most illustrious men who have disputed about this distinction, the most learned Petavius has done so more copiously. But we, that we may still more forcibly rebut Beausobre, have thought it better to appeal to that presbyter John whom Irenaeus mentions in Eusebius; or to Irenaeus himself, who discharged only the office of a presbyter while Pothinus, bishop of Lyons, was still living;

or to Achillas, presbyter of Alexandria, at the time when Theonas and Peter governed that Church. And Origen, who was ordained a presbyter at Caesarea in Palestine by the bishops, against the will of Demetrius. That, moreover, presbyters, as the Church's second century was drawing to a close and its third beginning, had an authority and jurisdiction unequal to that of their bishops in transacting sacred matters, we are told, among others, by Tertullian, who, setting the ministry of these men over against and comparing it with the rights of bishops, says: The high priest, who is the bishop, has the right of conferring baptism; then the presbyters and deacons, yet not without the bishop's authority, for the sake of the Church's honor—by preserving which, peace is preserved.

Tertullian therefore distinguished three ecclesiastical orders, assigning to each its own rights. For he would not have said that presbyters and deacons cannot baptize without the authority of bishops, if the honor and power had been common to both—to the bishop, that is, and to the presbyter. With this the Carthaginian councils and the most ancient laws of the Catholic Church are in full accord, laid down in writing in the Constitutions that circulate under the name of the apostles; and above all that law by which it was provided that presbyters and deacons could accomplish nothing without the bishop's judgment, just as they might not dare, without their own bishop's knowledge, to abandon the parishes assigned to them.

If, therefore, when the ancient discipline and order of the Church are considered, the supreme rights of bishops were one thing, but those of ordinary presbyters another—presbyters who in the discharge of their offices depended wholly upon the bishops—I can by no means understand with what mind, or upon what foundation, Beausobre could have contended that Diodorus (or Trypho), who, as the Church's third century was declining, governed a rural or suburban parish, with Archelaus his own bishop present, did not in the least desist, nor could have desisted, from that debate to which Manes had all too boldly challenged him. Or would it have been lawful for him, in the presence of his own bishop—whose deputy he was in the office of rector or president—to dispute with a heretical and cunning man?

How could he have done this without wrong? Since even in the bishop's presence he ought not to have baptized—that is, dipped—nor to have discharged any other sacred function; for that same Tertullian, just praised, admonishes presbyters, deacons, and the rest of the men of the clerical service not to arrogate to themselves the office of the bishop dedicated to the bishop, chiefly to guard against rivalry, which is the mother of schisms. But that the office of teaching, of disputing about the dogmas of the faith and defining them, whether in the assemblies of councils or in other gatherings, belongs to bishops by virtue of their ordination, is a thing most fully established.

Wherefore, when certain rural and suburban presbyters, in the Church's fourth and fifth centuries, strove to extend the rights of their ordination and, by rash presumptions, unlawfully usurped to themselves episcopal offices, they were deprived and forbidden the sacred ministry both by the Apostolic See and by the bishops of the whole world, as Pope Damasus declared in his letter. Who moreover affirmed that the setting up of such men was exceedingly wicked and impious. For while they themselves contended for the supreme priesthood in episcopal sees, though they were destitute of all authority, their proud and superfluous exaltation was directed to nothing but the abolition of the sacred canons and the disturbance of the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy.

St. Leo the Great, adhering to the rules of his predecessors and of the councils, defined as void and empty whatever such men (the chorepiscopi) performed in the aforesaid ministry of the supreme priesthood. From his own opinion, therefore, Beausobre fabricates, contending that in the first three centuries the authority and power of presbyters and bishops were the same, that the latter were not set over the former, and that in governing the parishes committed to them and in exercising the other ministries concerning the faithful, presbyters ought by no means to have depended upon the nod and authority of bishops.

When the reader shall have pondered with himself what has hitherto been said, I do not at all fear that he can and will judge as weaker still those things which Beausobre objected in the last place, meaning to prove that the letter of Archelaus to Diodorus, of which we are now treating, is spurious. For if in the first three centuries bishops were not accustomed to call their fellow presbyters, or the suburban ones, by the name of 'sons,' but rather, dealing with them more honorably, in their letters styled them 'brothers,' then the divine authority of the Epistles of Peter and Paul would at once totter and fall away, since we find these marks and characteristics in them. And indeed the apostle Peter calls Mark the bishop his son, writing in his first Epistle:

'The Church that is gathered together in Babylon saluteth you, and so doth Mark my son.' This form of speech St. Paul likewise employed everywhere, whether when he wrote in the first to Timothy: 'To Timothy, my beloved son in the faith'; and again, addressing the same man, he adds: 'This charge I commit to thee, son Timothy.' Or when he begins the second epistle to the same with these words: 'Paul an apostle, etc., to Timothy, my dearest son'; or finally—to pass over very many other examples of this kind—when he charged Titus to appoint presbyters throughout the cities of Crete, as he himself had directed. For indeed in this Epistle that Titus was called son by Paul, those words betray: 'To Titus, my beloved son according to the common faith.' What then?

One or the other would follow from Beausobre's invented opinion: either that the aforesaid Epistles of the apostles Peter and Paul bear the marks and characteristics of forgery—a thing utterly unheard of until now; or at least that those divine writers, in composing their familiar letters, used a certain license quite foreign to those courteous observances that would more strictly have been maintained between fellow bishops and fellow presbyters. This latter cannot be affirmed without the brand of the greatest audacity. For those apostles, writing at the dictation of the divine Spirit, employed those formulas which better suited the persons and the arguments about which they had proposed to speak.

And therefore it came about that those whom in one place they called sons, in another place they called brothers—as Paul, held in captivity, writing to Philemon, named Timothy a brother, an appellation which he is wont everywhere to bestow on all who are regenerated in Christ by baptism. But when he wished to have regard to the position of the persons whom he himself had either begotten to Christ and the faith by his preaching, or to the sacrament of order which he had conferred upon them, he reasonably called those converted, baptized, and initiated into orders by himself 'sons'—as is evident enough concerning Timothy, Titus, Onesimus, and others, from the aforesaid Epistles.

Since, therefore, those arguments of Beausobre are rather witty and fabulous, there is no reason why we should reject as fictitious the letter of Archelaus to his presbyter Diodorus, or Trypho. 6. But come now, having for a little while restrained Beausobre's trifling nonsense, let us return to the order of our history. And, relying on the testimony of Epiphanius, we judge—nay rather, we hold as certain—that Archelaus did not set out at once for Diodoris, a village of his diocese, and, without any delay of time, anxiously inquire after the wolf fleeing from Caschara. But the matter is described more clearly by Cyril, who says:

that at first, while Archelaus was unaware that Manes had betaken himself to that village, the presbyter who was in charge of the parish, having met with him once and again, instituted a disputation concerning the dogmas of religion. And although that presbyter, whom Epiphanius calls Trypho, was destitute of eloquence and of the faculty and abundance of speaking, yet he nevertheless overcame Manes. For in him was fulfilled that divine promise made to the apostles: 'Take no thought how or what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.'

Manes, bearing this exceedingly ill, as if to wipe away the mark of his disgrace, wished to attack Trypho (or Diodorus) again with new disputations—by contending, namely, that the two Testaments of the sacred Scriptures do not in the least cohere with one another, and by seeking to prove their very great repugnance chiefly from the evangelical witnesses. But this pure and unmixed fiction of the cunning and sacrilegious man aimed chiefly at this mark: that, the authority of the Old Testament being overthrown, he might conjecture that it had drawn its origin from a certain evil and eternal principle.

But the presbyter Diodorus, desiring to break the audacity of so great a scoundrel, determined to signify the whole matter by letter, as we have said, to Archelaus his bishop. And what those letters contained we are taught both from Epiphanius and from Archelaus. For Epiphanius asserts that Diodorus used only these words, which he transcribes, namely: 'A certain man has come here, who after the manner of a most hostile wolf sets about to destroy the sheepfold. But I beseech thee to write to me how I ought to conduct myself against him, and by what reasonings to resist his pernicious doctrine. But if thou thyself shalt deign to come, thou wilt free the fold and flock of Christ from all anxiety.'

But Archelaus, meeting the wishes and letters of Diodorus, makes plain in his answering letter that these things had not been indicated to him by his presbyter merely in general terms. For among other matters he insists chiefly upon this, that he may demonstrate that harmony and consonance of both Testaments; adducing for this cause various similitudes, which he studiously borrowed from the use, condition, and substance of natural things. Of which sort are those examples, or those drawn from a single garment, which seems to be woven with a covering and a warp. This alone (he adds), which we see as purple in the garment, is the New Testament; into the fabric of the Old, the glory of the Lord Jesus. Or that other example taken from a mirror.

But this we have by no means been wont to cast away, when the very true image of things is shown to us. Or he brings another example from boys led to their teachers by a pedagogue, who, when they are brought to a riper age, ought not to dishonor the pedagogue himself, although they no longer need his protection. And finally, he proves by the example of an infant that both Testaments are to be retained and venerated—an infant who, already nourished with milk and advancing to stronger food, cannot, without grave wrong, cast away and shrink from the breasts of his nurse; but rather venerates and cherishes them, and confesses himself to be a debtor for their benefit. 7. These things, therefore, and others of this kind, in his very lengthy letter, which Epiphanius calls a book,

Archelaus suggested to Diodorus his presbyter, in order to make plain (as we have said) the ever-admirable and sincere harmony and highest concord of both Testaments. But we by no means think that the whole aim of Archelaus lay in asserting this concord of the Testaments; rather, from the reasons adduced, the holy bishop wished to show something deeper: namely, that human nature, already imperiled amid so many and so great vices and wrapped about with the darker shadows of ignorance, was not to be recalled all at once to the clear knowledge of truth, and had to be loosed from the snares of eternal death by which it was bound. But it was needful that those very men who,

straying after the manner of wild beasts, never thought about divine things, should be taught by the diverse degrees of the heavenly and eternal wisdom. First, namely, through the figures and shadows of natural things, which they might suck out like milk from the Mosaic law; and finally through grace and the clear contemplation of divine things, which, as in the form of more solid food, the New Testament set before them—the very Son of the eternal Father. If, then, Diodorus had been willing to use these most weighty reasons at Archelaus's suggestion, he could easily have confounded and crushed Manes; and the very dogmas of the Catholic faith, and the authority of the divine Old Testament—which was chiefly brought into peril—would beyond doubt have been proved.

The presbyter Diodorus, therefore, relying on the writings of Archelaus, though he was awaiting the coming of his bishop, is compelled by the audacity of Manes to enter into disputation once more. For Manes, coming forth into the midst of the village at earliest dawn, began again his disputation with Diodorus. First Manes objected his dogmas to Diodorus. But he met all his questions, and, according to the wisdom which he had received from God, more gently harassed his impostor. But when at last he began to hesitate somewhat within himself, suddenly Archelaus (says Epiphanius), unexpectedly, was seen, who, like a most keen father of the household and most zealous for his own, boldly rushed in, raging against the robber. But what did Manes then?

Like a cunning and shifty man, with feigned flattery he turned to Archelaus, meaning to entreat him that it might be granted him to dispute with the presbyter only, asserting moreover that it exceedingly ill became a bishop to contend about those matters of religion with a man inferior to himself. But the people who were present, having found out the wickedness of Manes, so inveighed against him that they even sought to overwhelm him with stones. Which peril indeed he would by no means have escaped, had he not, taking flight now for the third time, fled away again to the Castle of Arabio, whither he had first betaken himself. 8. Beausobre, however, has related this new disputation of Archelaus with Manes in his History otherwise than we have described.

He, that he might now attain the end he had set before himself, seeks out and gathers arguments from every quarter, not only to reject those Acts as spurious, but even to declaim and rave against them as the sources of many heresies. When we have detected that the cunning and malignant genius of this un-Catholic man dared to break forth into various accusations and insinuations, utterly injurious to the bishop Archelaus and to the whole assembly of Catholics, then, lest he should seem to the flatterers of false criticism to be wise in lofty things, our love for the truth by no means suffers us to pass these things over in silence;

therefore it shall be our undertaking to vindicate from all calumny and deceitful accusation the opinions of Archelaus and the arguments of that new disputation, which Beausobre has cast into various snares, so as to contend back and forth that, when the Church's third century was already running its course, the true tradition of the Catholic and Apostolic Church concerning the chief dogmas of our faith had been corrupted, weakened, and utterly ruined. That is, that we may to the utmost of our power reprove a man of the greatest audacity, perpetually playing at trifles and fabrications.