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‘The whole church is here listening’: Tracing the sensus fidelium in public discourse in the early church
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2022
Abstract
This essay forms the basis for the case that contemporary application of the concept of the sensus fidelium as a vehicle for transmitting accurate doctrine relies primarily on shifts in power structures in the first several centuries of the church. By investigating two documents depicting public theological dialogues in the presence of both clergy and laity, Origen's Dialogue with Heraclides from the third century and the Dialogue of Heraclian from the fourth century, I argue that the intersection of a widening gap between lay and clergy with a shrinking importance in public theological debate served actually to relocate the sensus fidelium from the efforts of powerful clergy into the lived churchly practices of the laity.
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References
2 Ibid., citing Augustine, De predestination sanctorum 14.27 (PL 44, 980).
3 Athanasius, De decritis nicaenae synodi 4.4 (Opitz 2). See Lim, Richard, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. 109Google Scholar.
4 See, in this context, the now several-decades-old debate between Lonergan scholars and Lindbeck scholars on the process of establishing canon and doctrine. See Moulaison, Jane Barter, ‘Missteps on The Way to Nicea: A Critical Reading of Lonergan's Theory of the Development of Nicene Doctrine', Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 38/1 (2009). pp. 51–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, 25th anniversary edn (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Lonergan, Bernard, The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, trans. O'Donovan, Conan (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1976)Google Scholar; Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975)Google Scholar.
5 Lim, Public Disputation, p. 25.
6 As summarised by Goldhill, Simon, ‘Introduction: Why Don't Christians Do Dialogue?’, in Goldhill, Simon (ed.), The End of Dialogue in Antiquity (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), p. 7Google Scholar. Some, like König, push back that dialogue does not really disappear; it is the lack of the symposium as a form of writing that makes the dialogue genre as a whole feel emptier; see Jason König, ‘Sympotic Dialogue in the First to Fifth Centuries CE', in Goldhill, End of Dialogue, pp. 85–113.
7 Richard Lim, ‘Christians, Dialogues, and Patterns of Sociability in Late Antiquity’, in Goldhill, End of Dialogue, p. 167. This is not to mention the influence in the West of Augustine's supposed reticence for the form. See e.g. Gillian Clark, ‘Can we Talk? Augustine and the Possibility of Dialogue’, in Goldhill, End of Dialogue, p. 134, who concludes that ‘the reason why Augustine doesn't do dialogue is not that he is a Christian, but that he is a Christian bishop; not that his authoritative text removes the possibility of debate (it has yet to do so), but that his social and educational role needs careful handling. His forensic mode of argument is frankly embarrassing to a present-day moderate, but he was certain that his opponents were wrong in ways that damaged human souls, and he set out to defeat them in ways that would carry conviction to an audience who expected the forensic mode. He might even have argued, as he did about the Donatists, that he was demonstrating tough love of neighbour. He could also have argued that personal dialogue with the Scriptures, which are disconcerting in their language and in their modes of address to God, and public exegesis of those Scriptures in dialogue with a mixed community of Christians, was much more challenging than dialogue among people who, like ourselves, shared a classical education and could enjoy it in comfortable privacy.’
8 Paul Smith, ‘Auctoritas and Potestas in the Apostolic Constitutions’ (Ph.D., University of St Michael's College, 2018).
9 Faivre, Alexandre, The Emergence of the Laity in the Early Church, trans. Smith, David (New York: Paulist Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
10 Daly, Robert J., Origen: Treatise on the Passover and Dialogue with Heraclides (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), pp. 1–2Google Scholar.
11 Jean Scherer (ed.), Entretien d'Origène avec Héraclide et le évèques ses collègues sur la Père, le Fils, et l’âme (Cairo: Publications de la Société Fouad I de Papyrologie, 1949); SC 67 (Paris: Cerf, 1960).
12 Which might be at the request of Origen, or just the work of the scribe; cf. Capelle, Bernard, ‘L'Entretien d'Origène avec Héraclide’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 2/2 (1951), pp. 145–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Lim, Public Disputation, p. 18.
14 Daly, Origen, pp. 20–1.
15 Scherer (ed.), Entretien, pp. 50–58; cf. Daly, Origen, pp. 22–3. Lim points out that Pamphilius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Caesarea had actually worked together on a volume of these dialogues; hence their storage at the library of Caesarea; Lim, Public Disputation, pp. 17–18.
16 Daly, Origen, pp. 20–1.
17 Ibid., p. 23; see Capelle, Bernard, ‘Origène et l'oblation à faire au Père par le Fils, d'après le papyrus de Toura’, Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 47 (1952), pp. 163–71Google Scholar.
18 Origen, Dial. 4.30–2.
19 Daly, Origen, p. 25.
20 Ibid.
21 Origen, Dial. 1.15.
22 Daly, Origen, p. 90, n. 49.
23 Ibid. Cf. Henri Crouzel, Origène et la ‘connaissance mystique’ (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961); Crouzel, Origen: The Life and Thought of the First Great Theologian, trans. A. S. Worrall (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 61–84; Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen, trans. Anne Englund Nash and Juvenal Merriell (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2007); Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, trans. Robert J. Daly (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), pp. xi–xviii.
24 Origen, Dial. 4.17–21; 5.4–7 (SC 67, 62–6); Daly, Origen, pp. 60–1.
25 Daly, Origen, p. 105, n. 4. By which he means not illegible or unreadable, but inscrutable; also ibid., p. 26.
26 See, as a thorough example from the fourth century, Hilary of Poitiers, Liber II ad Constantium 6: ‘Faith is asked for, as if no faith existed. A faith is written down, as if it were not in the heart. We who have been reborn by faith are now instructed as to the faith, as if that rebirth, were without faith. We are instructed in Christ after baptism, as if there could be any baptism without Christ's faith. We correct it, as if it were pardonable to sin against the Holy Ghost [cf. Matt 12:32]. The chief and lasting cause of irreligion, however, is that though we bring forward the apostolic faith seven times over we refuse ourselves to confess the gospel faith, as we publicly defend our impieties meanwhile with newfangled chatter, deluding the ears of the simple with bombast and deceptive words, as we avoid believing about the Lord Jesus Christ what he taught us to believe, as we surreptitiously unite under the specious name of peace, claim to reject novelties whilst rebelling again against God with new terms, and use the text of the scriptures to invent things that are not in the scriptures.’ Trans. Lionel R. Wickham, Hilary of Poitiers: Conflicts of Conscience and Law in the Fourth-Century Church (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 107.
27 Origen, Dial. 8.18–10.15; 27.9–28.17 (SC 67, 72–6, 106–8); Daly, Origen, pp. 64–5, 78.
28 Origen, Dial. 10.14–15 (SC 67, 76); Daly, Origen, p. 65.
29 Origen, Dial. 12.15–15.27 (SC 67, 82–8); Daly, Origen, pp. 67–9.
30 Origen, Dial. 12.15–13.18 (SC 67, 82); Daly, Origen, p. 67.
31 Faivre, Emergence of the Laity in the Early Church, p. 60.
32 Origen, Dial. 15.19–22 (SC 67, 86); Daly, Origen, p. 69.
33 Richard P. Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 74–5. Eusebius hits the nail on the head with his introductory comment in his letter to the church at Caesarea regarding the Nicene Creed that ‘rumours usually travel faster than accurate information’. Eusebius, Ep. Caes. 1 (Opitz Urkunde 22, 3.42.3–43.2). In Hilary's case, he laments the way news on Eastern deliberations is typically stuck in the East, but that the news he least wants to travel quickly – namely, the ‘blasphemous’ creed from Sirmium 357 – tended to be fast-tracked to the West without Hilary getting a chance to look over it. He rejoices that ‘the impious and infidel creed which was sent straightway to you from Sirmium was not only not accepted by you [the western bishops to whom he sent the De Synodis], but condemned as soon as reported and notified’. Hilary of Poitiers, De Synodis 2, in Hilary of Poitiers, John of Damascus, vol. 9 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Ser., ed. W. Sanday (Peabody, MA: Hendrikson, 1999 [1899]), p. 144.
34 Vaggione, Eunomius, p. 74.
35 Further: ‘These were, indeed, scenes fit for the tragic stage, over which tears might have been shed. For it was not, as in bygone days, when the church was attacked by strangers and by enemies, but now natives of the same country, who dwelt under one roof, and sat down at one table, fought against each other not with spears, but with their tongues. And what was still more sad, they who thus took up arms against one another were members of one another, and belonged to one body.’ Theodoret, Historia Ecclesiastica 1.6.9–10 (GCS 19, 29–30; NPNF 2 3:5.6).
36 Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.2 (PL 67.188B; GCS 93, 14–22). Cf. Ramsay MacMullen, ‘The Preacher's Audience (AD 350–400)’, Journal of Theological Studies ns 40/2 (1989), p. 508.
37 Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.1 (GCS 101, 11–21).
38 The first major critical edition was compiled by Carl Paul Caspari, Kirchenhistorische anectoda, vol. 1, Latinische Schrifte (Oslo: Christiania: Malling, 1883), pp. 133–47; see also PLS 1.345A–350D. References will be made to page numbers in Caspari; English translations provided by Richard Vaggione in an unpublished manuscript.
39 Simonetti argues that there is little evidence to suggest that this account even remotely accurately depicts whatever dispute may have or have not happened; Manlio Simonetti, ‘Osservazioni sull’ “Altercatio Heracliani cum Germinio”’, Vigiliae Christianae 21 (1967), p. 44.
40 Caspari, Kirchenhistorische anectoda, p. 134.
41 Cf. Vaggione, Eunomius, p. 334, for how this was worked out in the practice of baptism by both Nicenes and non-Nicenes. Cf. Hilary, De Synodis 86–92.
42 Caspari, Kirchenhistorische anectoda, pp. 134–5.
43 Cf. Lim, Public Disputation, p. 137.
44 Caspari, Kirchenhistorische anectoda, p. 136.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., p. 137.
47 Ibid., pp. 145–7.
48 Simonetti, ‘Osservazioni’, p. 41.
49 Hilary complained about this very thing: that exile was crueler than martyrdom ‘since it gave him the pains of martyrdom without their glory’. Vaggione, Eunomius, p. 360; cf. Hilary, Const. 4.1–22. While it is possible that Germinius was simply employing a rhetorical strategy to cool down the mob, I believe it more likely that he intends to publicly shame Heraclian.
50 Simonetti, ‘Osservazioni’, p. 42. Simonetti also points to Heraclian's final statement of faith to Germinius as being a bit too close to one from Tertullian's Apologeticum (see p. 43, esp. n. 15).
51 Lim, Public Disputation, p. 20.
52 Ibid., p. 26.
53 Athanasius, Petitiones Arianorum (PG 26: 820); Lim, Public Disputation, p. 27.
54 Cf. Lim, Public Disputation, pp. 28–9, cf. p. 10, where Lim also draws attention to how the squabbles between Christian groups appeared to outsiders: ‘The public perception of widespread disputing, along with Christian rioting that at times turned murderous, rendered the myth of Christian solidarity meaningless.’
55 Lim, Public Disputation, p. 30.
56 Faivre, Emergence of the Laity in the Early Church, pp. 62–3.
57 Elena Giannakopoulou, ‘A Canonical Approach to Holy Canon 89 of St. Basil the Great’, in Nicu Dumitrașcu (ed.), The Ecumenical Legacy of the Cappadocians (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 118.
58 Lim, ‘Christians, Dialogues, and Patterns’, p. 167.
59 Richard Miles, ‘“Let's (Not) Talk about it”: Augustine and the Control of Epistolary Dialogue’, in Goldhill, End of Dialogue, p. 147.
60 MacMullen, ‘Preacher's Audience’, p. 509; see esp. nn. 15–16.
61 Thanks are owed to feedback from attendees of the New Horizons in Early Christian Studies conference, at which a version of this article was originally presented, as well as Nate Wall and Joel Chopp at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, for offering helpful comments.