The Church – Hierarchy or Democracy?
A lecture given to the Hull & District Theological Society on 11 October 2006
by Fr Anthony Storey
Summary by David and Fiona Bagchi
This subject has occupied me for most of my life. My subject is not the faith of the Church but its structure. And by ‘the Church’ I mean the Western Church in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular.
Structure is important because without it, teaching (no matter how great it is) will become lost. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto would have been lost without the Communist Party. The original spirit of the work was falsified by the party, but the party also preserved it. The same applies to the Church, which is why the Church has constantly to be reformed. I want to say only one or two things about society in general, not to enunciate a political theory about what society should be. You will have your own views on the matter. Generally, I suspect, you are rather in favour of everything being equal. It will become clear from the rather biased lecture which way this lecturer leans!
The Old Testament
We see the importance of such structural concerns in the Old Testament. Originally, Moses was the leader of the children of Israel, but there was no structure. He was succeeded by the Judges. When Israel asks for a king, God is reluctant because kings are not part of his plan, and through Samuel he warns of the dreadful exactions a king will make of them. A parallel process takes place in Roman society. At first, the idea of consuls and other leading citizens working in turns for the res publica, the common good, with no-one in overall charge, was egalitarian. Then the emperors take over, and although ‘SPQR’ (‘property of the senate and people of Rome’) is stamped on everything it has become a fiction. (A similar fiction operates in British politics. In theory, we elect the Queen’s Prime Minister; in practice, he becomes PM only when Parliament accepts him.)
Plato and Aristotle
The influence of these two fifth-century BC Greek philosophers on the Church and society of the West is difficult to over-estimate. The ideal society for Plato would include a recognition that we are all equal. But in practice one always has an aristocracy (democracy did not last in Athens much more than a generation), and since that is the case it is better that this aristocracy should consist of the wisest in society rather than the strongest, as he sets out in his Republic. Aristotle would say harmony is better than unison. Unison is boring, and harmony requires a dominant and a recessive, and this explains Aristotle’s preference for an unequal ordering of society in his work, The Politics. Both these works are seminal for the development of Western society and are well worth reading, and the two positions they represent provide the theme for this lecture.
The New Testament
The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) emphasize the kingship of the all-powerful Christ and the importance of following him. John’s gospel, by contrast, derives from a later date and is egalitarian, almost Platonic, in tone. Here Jesus treats his disciples as friends, not as followers, and Judas’s crime is breach of friendship, not treachery. The charge to Peter in John’s gospel is not the authoritarian ‘Upon this rock I will build my Church’ but ‘If you love me, feed my sheep’. Jesus in John’s Gospel is a fulfilment of Moses the leader, not of David the king.
The Church presented in the Acts of the Apostles is Platonic (although I am not saying that Plato has any influence in the Church at this early stage): all are equal and required to share, and those who do not are punished (Ananias and Sapphira, Acts 5). It reflects the view of the priesthood found elsewhere in the NT – the Church has only one priesthood and all share in it. However, there is a need for some order and it is clear that a system of overseers and elders is already developing.
The Church in late antiquity and the early middle ages
The NT provides a model for the Christian Church until the Emperor Constantine embraces Christianity. One of his first acts on seizing Rome is to build the Lateran basilica, and this signals the beginning of a vast programme of church building. Buildings are suddenly important to the Church, and within a very short time, the Christian Church is being modelled on temple worship. The structure of the Church now follows the structure of the empire, with dioceses, parishes etc. reflecting civic territorial divisions. It is not really a religious model.
In 410 Rome fell to Alaric. Pagans immediately blamed Christians for being pacifists and sapping Rome’s will to fight. It is against this background that Augustine in Africa wrote a very important political work The City of God. It is an enormously long book and I am not going to go into it, but it is immensely important, seminal for the Western Church. Augustine was a Neoplatonist who insisted that all Christians are equal by virtue of their baptism (you do not hear that again in the Roman Church until Vatican II), and that if they all lived up to their baptism the Church could wither away. (We hear this later with Marx – if you all lived up to your equality, the state could wither away) There needs to be authority because of sin, but behind Augustine’s system is a presumption in favour of freedom and the notion of the Church as being an equal community of people.
As late as 450 Pope Leo the Great was talking about liberty. He believed that although the Church is ordered in various ranks, baptism makes kings of all who are anointed in Christ. Any Christian who has the gifts of rational and free understanding shares in the priestly office. The oil of consecration that is poured over the higher orders also falls on the lower orders. So 450 years after Christ, this view of a universal priesthood still existed – and was being presented by a pope. It was to be re-asserted at Vatican II.
Not long after Alaric, the Benedictine Order was founded. It was a community of brothers, under an abbot (‘father’). Christopher Dawson in his book The Foundation of Europe argued that it was the monks of Northumbria and Ireland who saved Europe during the time of the barbarian invasion, although many were killed. Similarly during the Muslim invasion, when Islamic forces pushed up as far as Poitiers and the rest of Christendom was is disarray, it was Northumbrian and Irish Christianity that saved Europe at this time.
On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo IX anointed Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor and an imperial form of Church was re-established, which lasted until the First World War. The Papacy showed itself to be a key player in the restoration of social order, and Augustine remains the main inspiration for this model. As society settled down, a feudal and chivalric model developed in which power flows down from the king. In Ireland, missionaries always reported to the king and in Germany were the ‘proprietary’ churches that belonged directly to the king. The scene was set for a big row between the Church and the king that in England led to the death of Becket.
The high middle ages
In the thirteenth century Aquinas (influenced by Aristotle’s Politics, brought to the West by Arabs) develops a strong, legal, model for the Church. God is seen as supreme legislature, with the Pontifex Maximus as his executive. This strong structure remained dominant in the Catholic Church until, suddenly, there was a new voice – that of Francis of Assisi. He proclaimed that everyone is equal and that none should be ordained. (He had in the end to take orders, or else he would not have been allowed to preach. But all his followers remained ‘minor brothers’.) Pressure upon the papacy to put a stop to this dangerous movement came from the Italian city state, but Francis’s vision inspired others, such as Dominic and Joachim of Fiore.
One can imagine Aristotle turning in his grave at this egalitarian development. But in the end he would have felt partially vindicated: the movement was a victim of its own success. Its numbers soon exceed 5000 and there needed to be an order, which was imposed by the Church. The emergence of such radical movements was, ironically, one reason why the popes became so powerful: controversies that bishops could not settled for themselves were referred to Rome.
The Reformation and modern periods
As the papacy developed there developed also the feeling, common to any government, that too much power is vested in the headquarters, and it is in the headquarters that the Church gradually becomes corrupt.
The Reformation began with Luther simply saying that we are all equal by virtue of our common priesthood. He accepted that for practical reasons someone has to be in charge, but that this was a difference of function only, not of status. When the German peasants took up his ideas to turn against all authority, Luther re-asserted the importance of order and located it in the king: non-conformity is forbidden.
The Church of England is an Erastian church of this sort, with authority vested in the king, and all his subjects required to take communion in the CofE on Easter Sunday. There is much to be said for such a model.
In response to the Reformation, the Catholic Church called the Council of Trent. This saw the adoption of Aristotle as the most important philosophical and political influence on the Church until Vatican II.
The Enlightenment and Liberalism
Looking back over the Middle Ages and Reformation period, one can see that there is a lot to be said for having a balance of power between Church and state. When the Church was so powerful that there was nothing to oppose it, it became corrupt. But, equally, the absolutist states of the early-modern period also became corrupted. The excesses of the court of the Sun King in France produced a reaction in favour of equality. Rousseau’s ‘man is born free and everywhere in chains’ became a call to arms of the French Revolution. The king is executed, but what results is simply another form of dictatorship. For some reason, Plato’s ideal of egalitarian democracy never seems to work.
The 19th cent. ushered in a period of revolutions and of challenges to the Church, especially to the Papal States in Italy. Marx brought out Communist Manifesto. It is an earth-shattering document that everyone should read. It states that it is property which makes people hate their neighbour – get rid of property, and you have no need of the state. (This is what Augustine said about the Church – Christians who live up to their baptism have no need of any external order.) In response, the Catholic Church brought out The Syllabus of Errors (1862), which condemned not only communism but also democracy and individual conscience. Together with Vatican I and the dogma of papal infallibility, it represented a re-assertion of authoritarianism in the Church. Pope Pius IX’s successor, Leo XIII, approved moderate, ‘Christian’ democracy.
In the twentieth century, and especially with the Russian Revolution and the subsequent dictatorship of Stalin in which he murdered 7 million Russians, the Catholic Church felt its opposition to Marxism justified. The communist, atheist state was seen as the great enemy of Christendom, and Hitler and Mussolini were welcomed as an anti-Communist bulwark.
At the end of the Second World War, Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson produced the universal declaration on human rights. At first the Catholic Church could not accept it, Spain rejected it because it permitted religious freedom to Baptists, as did Sweden because it would not admit Jesuits. Only in the 1960s did the Church accept it, at the time of Vatican II.
Vatican II was the first really Platonic council, stating that the Church is the people of God, that all are equal, and that all sacraments are signs of that priesthood which is shared between us all. Since then, the Church has retreated from those views. I remember a debate held in the University in which I defended Catholicism and Professor Henry (who had been brought up in a Jesuit school) was defending Communism. I had thought I had won the debate, but at the end Henry came up to me and said, ‘Storey, leopards don’t change their spots.’ He was right!
There should always be craving for equality but there needs to be order. The Church needs a Pope just as a university needs a Chancellor; but at the same time one is no better than anyone else simply because you are the pope or the chancellor. We are all equal and all children of God. And there is only one thing necessary, which is to love.
(Summary by DVNB based on notes by FACB)
