De Ecclesia Christi

« The name Ecclesia indeed also has a generic meaning, of an assembly of many, insofar as they are considered as called to some unity; but the specific meaning, and from biblical and ecclesiastical usage the most proper, is religious, so that the Church is the society of those united in the true worship of God; and this meaning is again taken either in universal extension or in some particular restriction. »

So that the diverse meanings in which the designation Ecclesia is used in the divine writings and in the other sacred monuments may not seem somehow to disturb our treatment, which, God favoring, is to be drawn from these same documents, it will not be out of place to set those manifold meanings, as is customary with most authors, before the beginning of the discussion itself in a single view.

I. The name Ecclesia, both by its etymology and by its use among sacred and profane writers, has the generic meaning of a multitude gathered into one by summoning; for ἐκκλησις is evocatio, a calling out, and from this ἐκκλησία, in a concrete sense, are those very persons who have come together into a certain unity by being called. According to this generic notion, therefore, the Church cannot be conceived without there being many, and these rational in nature, and some unity of these many toward a common end. For evocatio, in the proper and not the metaphorical sense, can be made only to rational creatures; and when its term is the Church or the unity of many, that calling itself cannot be rational unless some end to be attained is proposed to this unity of many. But in this generic meaning neither the form of the unity nor the end is determined as to what it is; and thus an assembly is called ecclesia not only when it is religious in form and end, but also when it is profane and political. Acts XIX. 22. 39. 40; indeed even « the ecclesia of the wicked » Ps. XXV. 5. More frequently, in this general sense, the name ecclesia, both in Greek and in Latin, stands for a political or judicial assembly in the Old Testament. Judg. XX. 2; Ecclus. XXI. 20; XXIII. 34; XXXIII. 19; XXXVIII. 37; 1 Macc. III. 13; V. 16; XIV. 19. Sometimes in this sense the Greek ἐκκλησία is rendered in the Latin Vulgate as concio (from concieo), Deut. XVIII. 16; as concilium, Judith VI. 19 (Greek 21), and elsewhere ¹.

II. But by solemn and common usage in the sacred books, Ecclesia signifies an assembly insofar as it is religious in form and end, namely holily bound to God (Lactantius, Divin. institut. IV. 28; Hieronymus in Amos IX. 6) and consecrated; and therefore the Church (and by this name, in this religious and common sense, the Scriptures never designate anything but the true Church) is called the society of those joined to God and to one another through true religion as its essential form, or through true worship. Since, moreover, in the present historical order the true religion neither is nor ever has been other than revealed and supernatural, hence the end and form of the Church, its union with God and in its members, the calling of each to it, and finally its whole institution, is supernatural; and accordingly the Church is understood as a supernatural society.

This proper meaning of the Church in sacred usage undergoes certain modifications as to extension.

1°. The fundamental notion presents itself everywhere: the Church is the very supernatural society of all those joined to God and to one another by true religion, and therefore a society universal in destination, which is formed by revealed religion and ordered to its end. In this principal meaning the plural number of Churches is repugnant, no less than in all the other names designating universality or absolute perfection. I say principal meaning, insofar as the usage of speech, both biblical, especially of the New Testament, and ecclesiastical, so determines this sense of the name Church that it must be held the most proper among the other meanings; and unless the context shows otherwise, Ecclesia simply so called is always understood in this notion ². « I will build my Church; Christ is the head of the Church; he loved the Church and gave himself up for her; To him (God) be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of ages; Through the Church the manifold wisdom of God is made known; The Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth; The great mystery in Christ and in the Church; God has set in the Church first Apostles, second prophets, third teachers; In which the Holy Spirit has placed you as bishops to rule the Church of God, which he acquired with his own blood; » and the like, found everywhere. Matt. XVI.; Eph. I. III. IV. V.; 1 Cor. XII.; Col. I.; 1 Tim. III.; Acts XX.

2°. From texts such as those just cited it is clear why, when the government, the magisterium, and the ministry of the Church are in question, those very persons who have been placed in the Church by Christ for these offices, for the building of his body, have principally been called Church, both by the Savior himself and thence by universal ecclesiastical usage. If your brother sins against you, and if he does not hear you nor the private witnesses you bring with you, « tell it to the (tribunal of the) Church; but if he does not hear the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Amen I say to you (Apostles), whatever you bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven » etc. Matt. XVIII. 17. ³. This meaning of the Church, namely as teaching and governing, is inadequately distinguished from the one explained a little earlier; for the Church is signified not only as a part in a whole, but as an essential part, and in some way a visible form, not so much contained in the whole as rather containing and forming the whole. Whence comes that saying of the holy Fathers, as we shall see in its place: « The Church is in the Bishop. »

3°. The Church simply so called, and thus universal, consists by the divine institution itself of many assemblies as members and parts, each of which reflects the image and participates in the nature of the whole, as the property of the parts of an organic whole requires. Thus most often Church is predicated with an express restriction to the notion of a part: « the Church which is at Jerusalem, at Antioch, at Corinth, in Cenchreae, of the Thessalonians, in Babylon » (Rome). Also « the domestic Church » (of Priscilla and Aquila), « the Church which is in the house (of Nympha), the Church which is in your house (of Philemon). » Whence in the plural they are often called « Churches of God, Churches of the saints, Churches of the Gentiles, Churches in Judea, Churches of Asia, Galatia, Macedonia, » and so on. These are everywhere found in the Acts, in the apostolic letters, and in the Apocalypse. « It has been answered by the Catholics that many Churches are also found named in the Scriptures, and the seven to which John writes, which, many though they are, are nevertheless understood to be members of that single one » — Augustine, Collat. III cum Donat. c. 10. « Behold, there are Churches in the Church... but all these are members of one Church, spread through the whole world » — Id., de unit. Eccles. c. 11. See also Chrysostom in 1 Cor. hom. I n. 1. Long ago Cyprian, comparing the seven Churches to which Paul wrote letters and the seven mentioned in the Apocalypse with the mother and the seven sons (2 Macc.), celebrated the many Churches as one family, which is the one Church built by Christ upon Peter. « With the seven children is plainly joined the mother, origin and root, who afterwards bore the seven Churches, herself first and one, founded upon Peter by the voice of the Lord » — Cyprian, de exhort. martyr. ad Fortunat., ed. Baluz., p. 270; L. de Testim. Script. ad Guarin., p. 201.

Sometimes the name Ecclesia signifies not so much the society of the faithful considered in itself as the assembly actually gathered for religious worship. « When you come together into the Church (a little later, when you come together into one place, ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό), to speak, to be silent in the Church » 1 Cor. XI.; XIV. This sense occurs more frequently in the Old Testament: 3 Kings VIII. 14. 22. 25; 1 Chron. XXIX. 20; 2 Chron. VII. 8; Ps. XLVII. 27; Joel II. 16, and elsewhere.

4°. Between the Church universal simply so called and the significance of the parts and, as it were, the members of that one Church, of which we have spoken, there lies in some way an intermediate meaning, by which in the Old Testament the religious society of the people of Israel is called the Church, the Church of the Lord, the Church of Israel (Num. XIX. 20; XX. 4; Deut. XXIII. 1. 2. 3. 8; 2 Esdras XIII. 1; Lam. I. 10; Acts VII. 38). For the Church so considered comprises the divinely instituted society of the peculiar people of God, not however simply the whole people of God. For even before the peculiar covenant made with Abraham, confirmed and amplified at Sinai, there were sons of God justified through faith from Adam onward (Gen. VI. 2; Rom. IV. 10. 11; Heb. XI.); nor was the universal promise made by God to Adam for the whole human race (Gen. III. 15) abolished or restricted by that peculiar covenant, but was preserved more specially, propagated, and more distinctly explained in one chosen people. This peculiar Church of the people of Israel therefore constituted the principal part of the whole Church of God, already promised in the first parents for all posterity; and it was, as it were, the salt of the earth and the light of the world for all nations, among whom God, by his antecedent will, willed the universal Church of the people of God, already instituted in Paradise immediately after the fall. Wherefore God willed that the Gentiles, of whom he commanded, be excluded not from this universal Church or from the people of God simply, but from that peculiar Church of Israel: « not even after the tenth generation shall they enter the Church of the Lord forever; » or two generations of others, of whom he said: « in the third generation they shall enter into the Church of the Lord » Deut. XXIII. 3. 8.

Not rarely, especially in the Psalms, the peculiar Church of Israel is to be understood in the immediate sense, but in a fuller and typical sense the universal Church in the perfection of the New Testament. Thus without doubt in the typical Psalms: XXI (XXII) 23. 26 (cf. Heb. II. 12); XXXIV (XXXV) 18 (cf. 19 with John XV. 25); XXXIX (XL) 10 (cf. 7–9 with Heb. X. 5); LXXXVIII (LXXXIX) 6 (cf. 5, 26–30 with Heb. I. 5).

Here I shall note in passing what Augustine, and after him the theologians, dispute about the name synagogue. What in the Old Testament is called the Church of Israel is in the Greek and Latin versions often also called synagogue: Exod. XVI. 3 (in the Greek, where the Latin has multitudo); XXXIV. 31; Num. IV. 34; XXXI. 31; John IX. 22; Acts XIII. 43, and elsewhere; or also jointly, « in the midst of the Church and the synagogue » ⁴ Prov. V. 14. Hence it has been asked: a) whether anything differs between the meaning of these names; b) whether the Church of the New Testament can also be called synagogue; c) whether in the Scriptures it is ever so called. Augustine, and after him most theologians, observe for the first question that these two names differ in this: Ecclesia, that is, calling-out or evocatio, can be said only of rational creatures, while synagoga, that is, gathering or driving together, can be said properly not only of these but also of irrational things. In the Septuagint: συναγωγὴ ὕδατος (Is. XIX. 6); συναγωγὴ λίθων (Job VIII. 17). Hence to the second question they reply that the name synagogue could indeed be fitted to the Church of the New Testament, just as the faithful are also called the sheep of Christ; but the grace of the calling is better signified by the expressed name Church. To the third question they deny that the Church of the New Testament is anywhere in the Scriptures called by the name synagogue. « Although synagogue is properly said of the Jews, and Church of the Christians, because congregation is more usually understood of flocks, but convocation more of men; nevertheless we find that the former too is called Church, and perhaps it is more fitting for us to say: save us, Lord our God, and gather us from the nations... Nor ought we to disdain, but rather to give ineffable thanks, that we are the sheep of his hand, whom he foresaw when he said: I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, that there may be one flock and one shepherd » — Augustine, on Ps. LXXVII. You have the answer to all three questions briefly summed up by the same author: « In the synagogue we understand the people of Israel, since it too is commonly called their own synagogue, although it has also been called Church. But ours the Apostles never called a synagogue ⁵ but always Church, either for the sake of distinction, or because there is some difference between the congregation, whence synagogue, and the convocation, whence Church took its name; namely that flocks are usually gathered... but to be called belongs rather to those who use reason, as men do » — Id., on Ps. LXXXI.

5°. By the significations proposed so far, the Church is directly understood as still tending on the way toward its supreme perfection and its ultimate end; yet by this very fact the Church is also connoted with respect to this term of perfection and glorification, for which it is prepared and directed along the way. For when Christ « loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water in the word of life, that he might present to himself the Church in glory, not having spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind, but that she might be holy and without blemish » (Eph. V. 25 f.); this purification and sanctification of the Church is indeed effected in the present stage, but so, and to this end, that it may at last be fully perfected in the term of glorification, where, without spot or wrinkle in all its members, it will be holy and without blemish. Augustine often admonished about this connection and connotation of the Church in the term of glorification with the present stage of preparation, in his books against the Donatists, the forerunners of the Cathar heresy. « Wherever in these books (On Baptism against the Donatists) I have mentioned the Church not having spot or wrinkle, it is not to be understood as if it already is, but as one being prepared to be so, when it shall appear glorious » — Augustine, Retract. II. 18. Now it « makes the increase of the body for its own building, » but then it will be consummated « into a perfect man, into the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ » (εἰς μέτρον ἡλικίας τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ) Eph. IV. 12–16.

Now the Church, in the sense with which we conclude this nominal question, is sometimes directly named as considered according to its final perfection. Thus the Apostle celebrates « the Church of the firstborn who are written in heaven » Heb. XII. 23. Let this suffice concerning the name; concerning the thing itself, in what follows.

« The Church of God, considered in its most ample notion, is the supernatural society or city of all those, whether angels or men, from Adam to the consummation, who are united to God under Christ the head, adhering to him by faith while on the way and by the beatific vision in the term, into the communion of saints. »

I. All rational creatures were indeed made, by the very essential order of nature, for God, the principle and the last end, the first truth and the highest good, to be known and loved in a manner congruent with their natural faculties, and to attain their own perfection and natural blessedness (that is, not above but according to the exigence of the rational nature), with God known and loved as their ultimate end. Whence also in the natural order all rational creatures would have, or ought to have, a natural union with God as principle and end, and by this very fact with one another, by knowledge and by love, whether still on the way toward the term or already established in the term. This order of natural communion of rational creatures could be called the kingdom of God the creator; it is not, however, the Church of God in the nobler signification, which is now proper to the kingdom of God the sanctifier, namely, according to sacred usage, including the supernatural calling of creatures (τὴν ἐκκλησιν) through superadded gifts to an end which is above the exigence and the power of created nature.

Now indeed into this supernatural order itself the whole universe of rational creatures, namely angels and men, have been raised, and either are being led on the way, by gifts of grace, toward the end of the supernatural vision and enjoyment of God, or have already been brought to this final vision and enjoyment in the gifts of glory.

a) Of the angels, those who, while they were on the way, fell through sin, these, fallen from their end through a perversion of intellect and will and stripped of all supernatural gifts, remain excluded from this order forever; but those who persevered in truth and charity, having now attained the ultimate end in the eternal vision and glorification, constitute, or rather complete, the heavenly hierarchy.

b) The human race, through sin in the first parent, its root according to the physical order and its origin (originating) according to the moral order, inasmuch as he, constituted in original justice, represented his whole race for the inheritance or the privation of those gifts, was deprived of sanctifying grace and of the other gratuitous gifts, and therefore, exiled from the supernatural end, was not, however, abandoned as justice would have allowed, but was restored by the gratuitous mercy of God. For the Word of God willed, from this very stock of the first Adam, to assume human nature and to be born as the second Adam, so that, as head for the members, by satisfying and by merit he might repair grace and glory. In the eternal divine counsel itself of the incarnation of the Redeemer Word, it is therefore clear that the work of redemption, or the redeemed world, has been decreed, which through the application of redemption in the second act (as we shall see in its place) is the Church acquired by the blood of God (Acts XX. 28). « The Lord said to me: You are my son, today I have begotten you; ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession » Ps. II. 7, 8; CIX (Heb. CX).

Accordingly, just as all men by nature are born from the first Adam as children of wrath in the fallen state, so through the grace of redemption they are to be grafted into the second Adam by faith, hope, and charity. « What is written, that there is no other name under heaven given to men in which we must be saved, holds good for saving the human race from that time on from which the human race was corrupted in Adam; for as in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive. For as in the kingdom of death no one is without Adam, so in the kingdom of life no one is without Christ » Aug. ep. 190 (al. 157). The foundation and root of the gifts and supplies flowing from Christ the head, however, is faith (Council of Trent, sess. VI, c. 8), by which, as by a first joining (Eph. IV. 16), the members are inserted into Christ the head of the restored state. Those, therefore, who lack faith are members under Christ the head of the whole restored order only by destination and by what is due; in fact, however, they remain cut off from him in habit, though not in all actual and transient graces ¹.

Moreover, there are two principal and, as it were, distinct stages for the restoration of the whole human race and its insertion into Christ the second Adam, because the great mystery of piety was, from the beginning immediately after the fall, in promise, and over the course of the ages in continual preparation, but was not manifested in the flesh until the fullness of time (1 Tim. III. 16; Col. I. 26; Gal. IV. 4). In the earlier stage the members were formed beforehand for Christ the head, who was the expectation of the nations; in the other they are formed into the same head Christ, who has now been « made perfect for all who obey him, the cause of eternal salvation » (Heb. V. 9). There the preformation is by faith in the promised Redeemer; here the formation is by faith in the same Redeemer now sent. Whence there all sacrifices, sacraments, and institutions were types and a pedagogy leading to Christ; here they are the thing itself and the cause of actual union or insertion into Christ; there shadows, here the body (Col. II. 17); there prophecy foretelling, here the gospel fulfilling. The grace is indeed the same, but there it came from the merits of Christ still future, and therefore more sparingly, here from the same merits now accomplished, and hence more abundantly. « Not by a new plan, says St. Leo, did God provide for human affairs, nor with late mercy; but from the constitution of the world he established one and the same cause of salvation for all. For the grace of God, by which the whole multitude of the saints has always been justified, was increased, not begun, at the birth of Christ; and this great mystery of piety, with which the whole world has now been filled, was so powerful even in its signs that those who believed the promise obtained no less than those who received the gift » — St. Leo, sermo 23 (de Nativ. 3), n. 4; cf. sermo 24, n. 1. The same more clearly in the books On the Calling of the Gentiles: « Nor in the earlier ages did that same grace fail the world, which after the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ has been diffused everywhere... But since in that people, to whom both kinds of instruction were given (through the written law and through the testimony of all creation), no one was justified except by grace through the spirit of faith, who can doubt that those who could please God, from whatever nations and at whatever times, were set apart by the spirit of God's grace? Which, though more sparing and more hidden before, never failed in any age, one in power, different in quantity: by an unchangeable counsel, in a manifold work » — De vocat. gent. L. II, c. 4, 5. Therefore, by faith and grace from the beginning to the end of the ages, all the faithful are joined in Christ and to Christ, and form one Church in the wider sense, in which we now consider it. « The just went before, believing in him as one to come, just as we believe in him who has come... yet the same faith joins both those who believed that he would come and those who believed that he had come » — Aug. in Io. tract. 45, n. 9. « The saints before the law, the saints under the law, the saints under grace, all these, perfecting the body of the Lord, have been constituted members of the Church » — St. Gregory, L. V, ep. 18, ad Io. Ep. C. P. « Our Creator has a vineyard, namely the universal Church, which from the righteous Abel ² up to the last elect, who is to be born at the end of the world, has put forth, as it were, as many branches as it has brought forth saints. » He then enumerates all the ages in which « from the beginning of this world to its end he has not ceased to gather preachers to instruct the people of the faithful. » From Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to the coming of the Lord, from the coming of the Lord to the end of the world, « first through the fathers, and afterwards through the teachers of the law and the prophets, and finally through the Apostles, as through workmen, he has labored in the cultivation of the vineyard (namely of the universal Church) » — Id., in Evang. hom. 19, n. 1.

These are, as it were, a commentary on the doctrine of the Apostle, where he joins the old economy of the remission of « former sins » through faith in the propitiation of Christ still to come with the economy of justification now present through faith in the same propitiation already accomplished. « Justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as propitiation through faith in his blood, for the showing of his justice (of justifying justice), because of the remission of former sins in the forbearance of God (ἐν τῇ ἀνοχῇ τοῦ Θεοῦ, in the patience of God), for the showing of his justice at this time (of satisfaction already rendered), so that he himself may be just and may justify him who is of the faith of Jesus Christ » (both in the present and in the preceding time) Rom. III. 25, 26; Heb. IX. 15.

If therefore we regard the grace of redemption in Christ Jesus, which justifies through faith (as its root and foundation) in his blood, all who through true faith belong to Christ the head constitute, under Christ the head, one people of God: in the economy of preparation from Adam to the coming of Christ, and in the economy of perfection from Christ to the end of the ages (cf. Tract. de Trad. th. XXVI). Hence, often in the Psalms and in the Prophets, speech about the sons of Abraham, the father of all believers, about Israel, Jerusalem, Sion, is such that the one people of God is regarded according to the twofold economy, and what is said in those oracles applies to it partly according to the one and partly according to the other, or in a less full sense according to the former and in a fuller sense according to the latter. Read, for example, the last chapters of Isaiah, chapter 41 and following. Indeed, very often not only this double stage of the Church on the way is included, but at the same time also its state of glorification in the term, of which we shall now speak briefly.

II. Just as the ancient economy of beginning is joined with the new economy of perfection, so this is joined with the final state of glorification (cf. Tract. de Sacram. in genere th. II). Christ, by satisfaction, redemption, his merits, the supply of all graces, faith, hope, and charity, joins together into one people of God not only the men of both economies, of whom we have spoken (he himself the chief cornerstone, in whom every building, fitly framed together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord), but the people of God on the way toward the term remains joined with its brethren, who are now already consummated in the term through these same merits of Christ, where faith and hope pass into vision and enjoyment, but charity never fails, and is perfected in the enjoyment according to the perfection of vision. By the same reasoning, already on the way, having become fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God (Eph. II. 19), they have communion with the holy angels, who are all ministering spirits, sent to serve for the sake of those who receive the inheritance of salvation (Heb. I. 14). « One city of God, of which one part sojourns in us, and the other part, in them, lends aid » — Aug., De civ. Dei L. X, c. 7; Enchirid. c. 56.

All the faithful, therefore, from Adam to the end of this world, while they are engaged on the way amid the manifold variety of charisms, graces, virtues, and merits, and among whom must also be counted the souls of the just after death, who must still be purged by punishments and thus led to the term; all the orders of the saints already consummated, and the choirs of angels, in such a great distinction of degrees of holiness and glory, from the Virgin Mother of God, queen of the celestial and terrestrial hierarchy, to the last saint who reigns there, constitute one supernatural city of God, by vocation, government, beatification, grace and glory, under the one head Christ, who, as in his own person he has united the divine and the human nature, so, as mediator between God and men, he, the God-man himself, has reconciled earthly things with heavenly.

In this way Paul teaches that those things which are in heaven and those which are on earth are joined through Christ, and under Christ the head, into one Church. « He is the head of the body, the Church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself may hold the first place; because in him it has pleased all fullness to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, whether those on earth or those in heaven » Col. I. 18. This pacification of things on earth and things in heaven in the one head Christ the Apostle elsewhere calls the recapitulation of all things that are in heaven and on earth in Christ, or the restoration to the one head Christ: ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ. This recapitulation is indeed accomplished through the redemption of the fallen race on earth, restoring the ruin which had been wrought in the heavenly hierarchy by the fall of the angels, as the Vulgate interpreter renders it: « to restore all things in Christ, those in heaven and those on earth, in him » Eph. I. 10. Thus Augustine explains the words of the Apostle: « Therefore also for the angels takes place whatever of men is redeemed through his death and freed from evil, since with them in a certain way it returns to grace, after the enmities which sins made between men and the holy angels; and through the very redemption of men the losses of that angelic ruin are repaired. And certainly the holy angels, taught by God, by the eternal contemplation of whose truth they are blessed, know how great a number from the human race is awaited to complete the integrity of that city. For this reason the Apostle says: to restore all things in Christ, those in heaven and those on earth in him. For those in heaven are restored when that which fell from them among the angels is replaced from men; and those on earth are restored (finally) when the men themselves who are predestined to eternal life are renewed from the old age of corruption » — Aug., Enchirid. c. 61, 62. This is the Church of God according to the most ample signification which we now use, in its threefold state of militant, purgative and triumphant, of which the first two belong to those on pilgrimage and are temporary, the third is final and eternal; and all of them are recapitulated in Christ and under Christ, who is the head of the body, the Church, holding the first place in all things. Ambrose, explaining the description of the Church in Eph. IV, argues thus: « One temple of God in all, and one dwelling of the heavenly habitation in the spirit of all. In which, I think, a connection of faith and spirit must be understood not only of holy men but of all believers, and also of all the higher rational Virtues and Powers, so that through a certain harmony of virtues and ministries one body from all the spirits of rational nature may cling to its head, Christ » — Ambros. ep. 76, n. 13, ad Irenaeum. Augustine often explains this most ample universality of the Church under Christ. « Christ is our head; we are the body of that head (the militant Church). Are we alone, and not also those who were before us? All who from the beginning of the age were just have Christ as head. For they believed that he would come, whom we now believe has come; and in his faith they too were healed, in whose faith we also are: so that he might be also the head of the whole city of Jerusalem, all the faithful from the beginning to the end being numbered, the legions and armies of angels being added too, so that it becomes one city under one king, and one province under one emperor, happy in perpetual peace and salvation, praising God without end, blessed without end » — Aug. in Ps. 36, serm. 3; in Ioan. tract. 45; ep. 102 (al. 49); de catechiz. rudib.; cf. St. Thomas, 3, q. 8, a. 4.

Therefore the incarnate Word, Christ Jesus, even considered as man, is the head of this whole Church, joining to himself, and among themselves, with the one and triune God, angels and men ³. For this reason the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, is described in such terms that with that city of those consummated in heaven the supernatural city on earth, with all its spiritual gifts, is connected, as in Paul, or at least connoted, as in John. For « God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places » (Eph. I. 9), that is, supernatural ones (ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις). To the members of the Church still pilgrim on earth Paul says: « You have come to Mount Sion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem ⁴, and to the multitude of many thousands of angels, and to the Church of the firstborn who are written in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, πνεύμασι δικαίων τετελειωμένων, and to Jesus the mediator of the New Testament, and to the sprinkling of blood » Heb. XII. 22–24. John saw the heavenly Jerusalem coming down to earth, where heaven and earth are joined, and in this joining the state of those militant on earth is transformed into the state of those triumphant in heaven: one holy city, the new Jerusalem, and the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. This Paul also wrote to the Corinthians: « For you are the temple of the living God, as God says: I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people » (2 Cor. VI. 16). But a preparation of newness in mourning and sorrow, which are the first things, precedes; full newness follows, where the first things have passed away and will be no more ⁵. « And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them, their God; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain shall be any more, for the first things have passed away » Apoc. XXI. 2–5.

This is the heavenly Jerusalem, one Church in heaven and on earth. « The heavenly Jerusalem is called that whose citizens are all the sanctified men who were, and who are, and who will be, and all the sanctified spirits too, whoever in the high parts of the heavens obey God with pious devotion... The king of this city is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, by whom the highest angels are ruled, and the Word, taking up man, so that by him men too might be ruled » — Aug., de catechiz. rudib. c. 19. Most beautifully in the hymn for the dedication of the Church is the heavenly city of Jerusalem celebrated, in the blessed vision of peace, as the gleaming city of heaven surrounded by thousands of thousands of angels; but at the same time in its building, as stones are polished by the blows of the chisel and by much hammering of the workman, they construct this mass.

III. From all that has been declared so far, the notion of the Church of God, considered in this wider sense, is sufficiently clear. It is constituted by all rational creatures which, subject to Christ the head by a supernatural, habitual gift pertaining to sanctification, are by it either ordered on the way to the end of eternal glorification or have arrived at that end in the term. These supernatural gifts, therefore, are the bond that unites, and the formal cause by which the same creatures, to a degree that varies with the diversity of gifts, are joined as members with Christ the head, in Christ with God the sanctifier, and in Christ and God with one another, into the society of the Church of God: « that you also may have fellowship (κοινωνίαν) with us, and our fellowship may be with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ » 1 John I. 3; 1 Cor. I. 9. Among these habitual gifts for those on pilgrimage on earth, faith is the root and foundation of all, as the first habitual disposition toward holiness; the beatific vision is the consummation and crown of all, as the ultimate term of holiness. If therefore we call the gifts, from the lowest to the highest, insofar as they are the form of this supernatural society, by the common name holiness, expressing this concretely as that which informs rational creatures, the Church of God must be called the supernatural society of saints, or in the solemn formula of the creed, the communion of saints. For although saints, in the fuller sense and by excellence, are those who have been sanctified through the indwelling Holy Spirit and through the habit of grace, in heaven and on earth; nevertheless, by biblical usage all the faithful, among whom are also sinners deprived of justifying grace, are called saints; and so faith itself, as the first disposition to that perfect holiness, is taken as the form through which the faithful not yet justified participate in the name of saints: Acts IX. 32; Rom. I. 7; XII. 13; XV. 25 ff.; 1 Cor. I. 2; XIV. 33; XVI. 1; 2 Cor. I. 1; 1 Tim. V. 10, and elsewhere. The Roman Catechism, speaking of the Church of the New Testament itself: « The faithful are called saints, it says, who have been made the people of God, and who by faith and the baptism received have consecrated themselves to Christ, although they offend in many things and do not fulfill what they have promised » (Part I, c. 10, §15).

The definition by which the Church of God is called communion of saints is not hindered by the fact that in the creeds the holy Church and the communion of saints seem to be distinguished. For a) the Church, in the creeds at least directly, is not taken in that wider sense in which we now consider it, but according to the determined state in which it was instituted on earth by Christ, and about which we must speak throughout this whole treatise. b) If the Church in the profession of the creed is understood, with St. Augustine (Enchir. c. 56), in the wider sense, the article on the communion of saints does not differ in subject from the preceding one on the holy catholic Church; but, as the Roman Catechism says (l.c. §24), it is « as it were a certain explanation » of it.

From the declared sense in which the form of holiness is understood in the definition of the supernatural society or communion of saints, the opposition to the Quesnellian doctrine condemned in the Constitution Unigenitus is clear. By that doctrine, under the name of saints who alone are the members of the Church, from the whole complex of the statement, only the just perfected in charity and predestined are designated (Props. 72, 73, 74, 75, 78); and so it belongs to the errors of the Protestants about the invisible Church, which we shall refute in its place.

If the definition must be stated simply, without explanation, then to exclude ambiguity it can be said that what we called holiness, from true faith on earth to the blessed vision in heaven, is denominated from the act as true and supernatural worship of God, where the habit, as disposition toward the act, is also included. Hence the Church of God, in the sense in which we now speak, will be called the society or communion of those adhering to God by true supernatural worship. See Gregory de Valentia, Analysis Fidei L. IV, c. 2; Wirceburg., T. I, disp. II, n. 79. Thus also St. Augustine, embracing at once « the whole Church, not only from the part that is pilgrim on earth, but also from that which in heaven has always clung to God », says that « it is all instituted to worship the one God » (Enchirid. c. 56).

Corollary. Since Christ, as will be declared in the following theses, instituted his Church on earth with special laws and a special form, besides this Church of Christ there is now no other Church on earth, nor can there be. More is therefore required for someone to belong simply as a member to the Church of Christ, which is one and the only Church on earth, than what suffices for the more general notion of Church, whose essential and sufficient form for those on pilgrimage on earth we have said to be true faith. Hence, when Suarez (De Fide, disp. IX, sect. 1, n. 3, 13–19), with other theologians, distinguishes in the Church of Christ itself faith alone as the essential form, from the other properties and institutions determined by Christ in his Church, so that that essential form suffices not only for the more general notion of the Church of God on earth, as we have said, but also for the character of the Church of Christ, and therefore catechumens, excommunicated persons, and schismatics themselves, as long as they retain faith, simply are and ought to be counted as members of the Church of Jesus Christ: this manner of teaching or of speaking, I say, is not to be admitted, as will be expressly demonstrated in its place, although the disagreement among Catholic theologians is rather in the manner of speaking than in the thing itself.

From this distinction between the general notion of the Church of God on earth, whose form we have said is faith, and the special state of the Church in the New Testament, it is understood that no one has ever been saved, or can be saved, who has not in act itself belonged, or does not belong, to the Church according to that general notion: « without faith it is impossible to please God » (Heb. XI. 6), and « the just lives by faith » (Rom. I. 17; Gal. III. 11). Yet those in the Old Testament who died « according to faith » and were « proved by the testimony of faith » (Heb. XI. 13, 39) were saved without belonging to the special state of the Church determined by Christ; and still may be saved those who, with a perfect disposition of soul, are fitted to this state of the Church, although, being inculpably hindered, they are not in act and simply its members. Suarez (l.c. n. 18) bent this distinction to confirm his somewhat unsuitable way of considering and speaking. After he has tried to prove that catechumens are simply members of the « present Church », he answers the objections raised against it. « The things adduced to the contrary, he says, prove only that catechumens are not in the Church as to those peculiar conditions and as it were accidents, which Christ added to the Church; but not that they are not in it as to those which are as it were the substance of the Church, which has always been the same; and these two are to be distinguished in the Church as it now is. » For he saw on the one hand that men could be saved by faith perfected in charity, who in act do not participate in the state of the Church determined in the New Testament; and on the other hand, at least in n. 18, he preferred the manner of saying that conjunction with the true Church is necessary for salvation by a necessity of means, not only by desire (as Bellarmine had said, de Eccles. L. III, c. 3) ⁶ but in act: hence he concluded that the substance and the essential form of the Church, for any state, is uniquely true faith; and so he referred the rest, which constitute the Church of Jesus Christ in its own proper special form and distinguish it from the Church of the Old Testament, « as to accidents. » This manner of speaking cannot be approved by us; indeed by a similar argument it could be urged that all those articles of faith which were not at all times to be explicitly believed even in the Old Testament are « accidental » in the Christian profession; and thus Tertullian (against Praxeas c. 31) and other Fathers would have wrongly called the profession, e.g., of the Holy Trinity « the substance of the New Testament »; which we do not think it right to suppose, even if perhaps the explicit faith in articles of this kind, as many theologians and with them Suarez teach, is not, for the New Testament either, simply of necessity of means, but only of divine precept (cf. Suarez, disp. XII, sect. 4).

« The patriarchal Church, from Adam onward, was contained as a less conspicuous beginning, in the profession of the true faith and in the true worship of God; compared with this state the form of the Church, not universal for all nations but peculiar in the people of Israel instituted by God through Moses, appears more expressed in the unity of the sacred ministry, of rule, and of the magisterium; yet even this was only a foreshadowing and an introduction to the Church of Jesus Christ in the perfect state of the New Testament. »

As long as we consider the Church of God on earth, setting aside for the moment the consideration of the final state in the heavenly consummation, according to the more general notion declared above, namely the society of the faithful, or of those who worship God in true worship, the members of this society are understood to be joined by true faith and true supernatural worship of God, with God and with one another; for unless they were associated by some common bond, there would be no communion or society; unless this bond were constituted by faith and the worship of God, there would be no religious society, and therefore no Church. Nevertheless, everyone sees that this notion, precisely because it is generic, is too indeterminate and abstract. For it does not say by what safeguards the one true faith is kept and propagated in the society of the faithful through the succession of generations; by what form of government this city of God is ruled; by what common rite of divine worship, which among men must be not only internal but also external, the same communion of saints honors God and is itself sanctified ¹; it does not say, I repeat, by what teaching authority of faith, what rule of sacred government, what ministry of sanctification or priesthood the religious society itself is formed and shaped. By how much more perfect, in universality, is the unity, the perpetuity, and the holiness to be formed and maintained through the magisterium, the sacred rule, and the ministry for the sanctification and salvation of the members (of all these, namely the profession of faith, of government, and of divine worship), by so much more perfect is the religious society itself; or, by so much more perfect is the state of the Church.

Now indeed, just as generally in the economy of the revelation and salvation of the human race through Christ the Redeemer, divine omnipotence and wisdom, justice and mercy distinguished a threefold stage, by which it continually advanced from the less perfect to the more perfect until the fullness of time; so also specifically in the state of the Church, which is formed and perfected through this very economy of revelation and salvation as its concrete expression, the same degrees of advancing perfection are observed, from the beginning to growth and to fullness. For the threefold state is clearly distinguished: the Church patriarchal, or (as it is commonly called) of the law of nature; the Church Mosaic; and the Church of Jesus Christ, of the Word now incarnate, which, remaining now an unshaken kingdom (Heb. XII. 28), awaits no other consummation of its state than from faith to vision in the heavenly Church.

I. The Church in the state of beginning was instituted for the restoration of the human race immediately after the fall, through the promised seed of the woman, which for her, and she who through it, shall crush the head of the serpent ² (Gen. III. 15). For the supernatural revelation made to the first parents about God, about his law and worship, about the angels and about eternal life, above all about the future Restorer and the expiation of sins, together with internal grace joined to the external graces, and thus faith and hope in God and in the Redeemer, and their greater perfection, charity: these supernatural gifts, I say, from the merciful will of God, on account of the future merits of Christ as head, were prepared for all the posterity of Adam in the state of redemption, and were conferred on those who cooperated in act (cf. Heb. XI.). By faith therefore, not only of the heart but, according to the condition and the exigence of human nature, also by the profession of the mouth (Rom. X. 10), by worship of the true God not only internal but also visible and external, by sacrifices and sacraments ³ were gathered into a religious society and a communion of « the sons of God », distinct and separated by religion from the impious « sons of men » (Gen. VI. 2, 4).

Augustine describes the city of God, or the Church of that first age, both before and after the flood, thus: « Therefore among those peoples of men of that time... we shall seek, if we can find it, that city of God which is wandering on earth, which was led down to the flood and the ark, and which is shown to have persisted in the sons of Noah through their blessings, especially in the greatest of them, who is called Shem... The series of generations, therefore, must be held from Shem himself, so that it may show the city of God after the flood, just as the series of generations from him who is called Seth showed it before the flood... When therefore we seek the city of God among those seventy-two nations (Gen. X), we cannot affirm that at the time when they had one lip, that is one speech, the human race had already become estranged from the worship of the true God, so that only in those generations true piety remained, which descend from the seed of Shem through Arphaxad and tend toward Abraham; but from that pride of building the tower up to heaven... an earthly city appeared, that is, a society of the impious; whether therefore it was not before, or was hidden, or rather both persisted, the pious indeed in the two sons of Noah who were blessed and in their posterity, and the impious in him who was cursed and in his progeny... is not an easy judgment. For perhaps, which is indeed more credible, already in the sons of those two, even before Babylon began to be built, there were despisers of God, and among the sons of Ham worshippers of God; yet we must believe that both kinds of men have never been lacking on earth » — Aug., civ. Dei L. XVI, c. 9, 10.

But just as revelation itself, both about God and about the moral and liturgical law and about the future Redeemer, was less ample and less distinct in those beginnings (see St. Thomas, 2-2, q. 174, a. 6; cf. Tract. de Tradit. th. XXVI), so also the Church, which is the concrete expression and sum of revelation itself, was less conspicuous. It had indeed, as its forming principle, the priesthood, religious rule, and the magisterium of the patriarchs, who, as it is written of Noah (2 Pet. II. 5), were « heralds of justice » (Tract. de Trad. th. XX; cf. Mauclerus, de Monarch. eccles. T. I, p. 226; Phillips, Ius eccles. T. II, p. 347; Haneberg, Histor. revel. sect. I, c. 4); and God himself calls them « his prophets and anointed ones » (Gen. XX. 7; Ps. CIV (CV) 15; 1 Chron. XVI. 22), which St. Augustine also notes. « And Noah himself, the patriarch... and others above and below, up to this time, when kings (namely, from Samuel onward, in the time of the kings properly so called, the prophets) began to be in the people of God, on account of certain things done or signified or foretold by them, which pertained to the city of God and the kingdom of heaven, we can not unreasonably call prophets, especially because we read that some of them were expressly named so » — Aug., civ. Dei L. XVII, c. 1. Yet in all these offices both the divine institution and the perpetual succession, and the function itself, were determined not so much by positive laws as by an internal divine instinct. Whence also sacrifices and sacraments and the whole ritual worship, in general, indeed were instituted by God, but in species and in particulars, especially up to the immediate preparation of the peculiar people of God in the calling of Abraham, appear to have been left to the determination of the heads of families or patriarchs themselves. To this specific determination applies what St. Thomas says: « just as in the state of the law of nature men were moved to worship God by no law given outwardly but only by an inner instinct, so also by an inner instinct it was determined for them what sensible things they should use for the worship of God » — St. Thomas, 3, q. 50, a. 5, ad 3.

Hence the visible unity of the Church, still looser and only begun, was for the most part reduced to one profession of the true faith and to the truth of divine worship; and by this very fact the body of the Church, which is held together by unity, was constituted, as it were, in its first formation and still imperfect. Yet in this Church, or city of God, « above and below Noah », the truth of faith and of divine worship was preserved both by perennial tradition through the ordinary patriarchal ministry, and was explained by increments of new revelations, through the extraordinary prophetic ministry. For to all of them, in their office of « heralds of justice », there belonged in their own way what God said expressly of Abraham: « I know that he will command his sons and his house after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, and do judgment and justice » Gen. XVIII. 19. But the extraordinary office of the prophets is to be recognized in them for the further explanation of revelation « on account of certain things done or signified or foretold by them (namely, by the supernatural illumination and motion of the Holy Spirit, either together with an external divine locution or without it), which pertained to the city of God, the kingdom of heaven. » Cf. Suarez, de Legibus L. I, a. 3, n. 12; L. IX, c. 6, n. 21; c. 7, n. 5, 6.

II. Since the whole old economy was preparation and type for the incarnate Word and for his Church, and prophecy for the gospel, for this purpose God chose a peculiar people for himself and instituted it through the ministry of Moses; in which, as prophetic revelation became clearer day by day and the meaning of the types more manifest, so the form of the Church would be more expressed.

1°. Divine worship was instituted by God himself through the hand of the mediator (Gal. III. 19), and was determined singly in sacrifices, sacraments, ceremonies, and solemnities, in the very unity of the sacred tabernacle or temple, in which alone the public worship of God by sacrifices was ordinarily to be celebrated, for the visible union of the whole Church of Israel.

2°. For the administration of this divine worship and its perpetual preservation, ministers were consecrated by God's command and instituted in a certain succession fixed by God's law, according to the threefold hierarchy of one high priest, the priests of the second order (4 Kings XXIII. 4), and the Levites ministering (λειτουργούντων) (1 Chron. XVI. 4, etc.).

Through these very priests the whole people was to be governed and judged in sacred matters. « If you perceive that the judgment is difficult and ambiguous with you... arise and go up to the place which the Lord your God shall choose; and you shall come to the priests of the Levitical race and to the judge who shall be in that time, and you shall ask them, and they will declare to you the truth of the judgment; and you shall do whatever they say, who preside in the place which the Lord shall choose, and who teach you according to his law... but he who is proud and refuses to obey the command of the priest who in that time ministers to the Lord your God, and the decree of the judge, that man shall die, and you shall take away the evil from Israel » Deut. XVII. 8 ff.

3°. From these very things it is clear that not only the right of government, but also, consequently, the ordinary magisterium of the priests follows, for the preservation and interpretation of the divine law and doctrine. « And you shall know that I have sent this command to you, that it might be my covenant with Levi (and with his posterity), says the Lord of hosts... For the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his mouth, because he is the angel (messenger) of the Lord of hosts » Mal. II. 4–7; Lev. X. 10, 11. The priest is indeed the angel of the Lord, a name by which the prophets too are sometimes called (Hagg. I. 13; Mal. III. 1), so that they seek the teaching of the divine law from his mouth; for this is what the Hebrew name תורה, teaching, expresses.

Eminent in the threefold office of sacred ministry, rule, and magisterium, the high priest held together the unity both of the hierarchy and of the whole people in divine worship, in sacred discipline, and in doctrine.

4°. Nevertheless, that ancient economy was only a preparation for the New Testament, « a pedagogue leading to Christ, a guard toward that faith which was to be revealed, an introduction to a better hope; there the law given through Moses, here grace and truth made through Jesus Christ; there the spirit of bondage, here the spirit of the adoption of sons » (John I. 17⁴; Rom. VIII. 15; Gal. III. 23, 24; IV. 24–26; Heb. VII. 19). And so the old economy, compared with the new to which it led, was imperfect both in worship and in sacrifices, which are called shadows of future goods (Heb. IX, X); and in discipline, which, accommodated to a carnal people in the « works of the law », was so far the « law of carnal commandment » (ibid. VII. 16); and in doctrine, which was yet to be completed and finally consummated through the incarnate Word himself. Wherefore also the priesthood, as an essential part of the whole economy, was imperfect in the efficacy of its ministry, in the power of sacred rule, and in the truth of its magisterium; and so the priesthood itself, with its sacrifices, in the Mosaic Church was an introduction and prefiguration of the perfect priesthood and sacrifice in the Church of Jesus Christ. « If the consummation was through the Levitical priesthood... why was it still necessary that another priest should arise according to the order of Melchisedech, and not be called according to the order of Aaron? For when the priesthood is transferred, it is necessary that the law also be transferred » Heb. VII. 11, 12.⁵ « You have drawn all things to yourself, O Lord, for when the veil of the temple was torn, the holy of holies departed from the unworthy high priests, so that figure might be changed into truth, prophecy into manifestation, law into gospel. You have drawn all things to yourself, O Lord, so that what was done under shadowy signs in the one temple of Judea, the devotion of all nations everywhere might celebrate in full and open sacrament. For now both the clearer order of the Levites (deacons), and the greater dignity of the Elders (presbyters), and the more sacred anointing of the priests (bishops)... Now also, with the variety of carnal sacrifices ceasing, one offering of your body and blood fulfills all the differences of victims... and so you bring all mysteries to perfection in yourself, so that as there is one sacrifice for every victim, so there is one kingdom from every nation » — St. Leo, sermo 59 (al. 57), c. 7.

5°. This imperfection of the old priesthood, namely in the magisterium, about which not all theologians think alike, requires a more careful explanation. Certainly in that Church of Israel, to which « the oracles of God were entrusted » (Rom. III. 2), which was specially chosen and destined by God to preserve the integrity of revelation already given, and to perfect it day by day with new revelations of divine truth and of the divine counsels, so that the fullness of time might be prepared, in which from this very people, as from a thirsty land and from the root of Jesse, as a flower, the expectation of the nations would rise as a sign of the peoples (Gen. XLIX. 10; Is. XI. 1, 10; LIII. 2; Rom. IX. 6); in this Church, I say, a magisterium suited and necessary to so exalted an end, and therefore equipped with supernatural charisms for infallibility (cf. Tract. de Tradit. th. VII), could not be lacking. Whence several theologians hold that infallibility in preserving and proposing the doctrine of faith is to be asserted for the Aaronic priesthood itself, simply, or at least until the coming of the promised Christ himself (cf. Bellarmine, de Concil. L. II, c. 8). But this opinion has so many contrary difficulties, in either form, that it cannot be demonstrated by firm arguments. Some affirm that the priests, even in Christ's time and in Christ's very condemnation, erred not in doctrine but only about a fact (what fact, pray? namely that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Christ, which, as the end, embraced the whole preceding doctrine, and, as the foundation, the whole subsequent doctrine); or that they erred indeed in mind as private men, but not in publicly proposed doctrine by sacerdotal power, since the high priest, as John testifies (XI. 51), prophesied and so taught divine truth by a divine instinct. But these things are manifestly refuted from the whole evangelical history, and especially from the solemn and judicial sentence by which the high priests and their whole council pronounced that Christ was to be rejected and condemned, because he made himself the Son of God (Matt. XXVI. 63–66; XXVII. 1; Mark XIV. 53, 61–64; Luke XXII. 66–77; John XIX. 6, 7, 15); cf. Stapleton, De principiis fidei L. II, c. 12. But if, with Bellarmine in the same place, you concede that the priests erred by a doctrinal error in designating to the people the very person of the Messiah already present, when by solemn judgment they pronounced that Christ was to be rejected as an « impostor » and a « blasphemer, because he made himself the Son of God »; then you cannot demonstrate from the very end of the magisterium in the Church of Israel that a charism of infallibility was attached to the Aaronic priesthood considered in itself before the coming of Christ, which nevertheless ceased when the Messiah came, while that same priesthood still remained legitimate. For the end of the magisterium, at least by far its principal end, was to prepare the ways of the Lord, and to show forth the « desired of all nations » (Hagg. II. 8), both proximately to the peculiar people of Israel and to all the nations themselves. If therefore it is established that the magisterium with the charism of infallibility was not connected with the Aaronic priesthood, considered in itself, in the recognition and showing forth of Christ already present, by which the whole preceding preparation had to be completed and finished; then we cannot demonstrate from the very end of the magisterium in the Mosaic Church that a perfection of infallibility belonged to the magisterium of the Aaronic priesthood considered in itself before Christ, which certainly was lacking, with Christ present, in the principal acts of recognizing and showing forth the Savior promised and already sent. This so essential difference in the ordinary magisterium of the Old Testament, that it was infallible before Christ and became fallible when Christ was already present, would have to be demonstrated by express testimonies of Scripture or of Christian tradition. But that such testimonies cannot be brought forward for the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium of the synagogue, while luminous ones stand for the infallibility of the magisterium in the Church of Christ, Bellarmine himself (in the same place, ch. 6) admits quite clearly. For when Calvin objected the fallibility of councils in the Old Testament, he replied, among other things, that it is not permitted to transfer the imperfection of the magisterium of the Old Testament to the magisterium of the Church of Christ: « For the Church has more certain and greater promises of God than the synagogue; nor do we read anywhere about the synagogue what Christ says of the Church (Matt. XVI.): upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; nor what the Apostle says (1 Tim. III.): that it is the pillar and ground of the truth; nor is it written of Caiaphas (or of his predecessors), but of Peter (and his successors): I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail (Luke XXII.) » — Bellarmine, l. c.

Therefore the charism of infallibility, which it is not right to deny also in the magisterium of the Church of the Old Testament, seems to be conceived in another way, from the very proper character of that economy. Since there the divine truth was to be explained by continual new revelations, from this very fact the extraordinary mission of the prophets, who were namely to be ministers of revelation, is understood to be intimately bound and joined with the proper end of that economy. Whence to the magisterium of divine religion (in doctrine and morals) pertained not only the ordinary sacerdotal office but also the extraordinary prophetic office. To this prophetic office belonged no less the guarding and true declaration of revelation and law already promulgated, than its further explanation and increase through new revelations. If therefore the ordinary magisterium at any time failed through its own fault, the prophetic charism of the extraordinary magisterium supplied the defect, for the infallible preservation of divine doctrine and faith in the Church of Israel. Hence the prophets are also shepherds of the people (Jer. XVII. 16, Hebrew; cf. Zech. XI. 4), and watchmen set upon the walls of Jerusalem, who « shall not keep silent all day and all night forever... until (God) sets Jerusalem as praise in the earth » (namely the Church of the New Testament), Is. LXII. 6, 7; cf. XXI. 11. Indeed, the extraordinary prophetic charism, in certain singular causes and occasions, was connected with the high priesthood, as when the high priest was commanded to seek the answers of the Lord through the Urim and Thummim, which in the Vulgate (Lev. VIII. 8) is rendered « teaching and truth » (cf. Num. XXVII. 21; 1 Kings XIV. 18; XXII. 10; XXIII. 9, etc.). The evangelist John indicates this connection of the freely given charism, for certain extraordinary occasions, with the high priesthood (XI. 51), when he says that Caiaphas, at that very time when he was prevaricating in his ordinary office of magisterium, also, though unknowing, prophesied by an extraordinary instinct, « since he was high priest of that year. »

Therefore the infallible custody of the deposit existed indeed also in the Mosaic Church; but not through the promised perpetual assistance of the Spirit of truth for the ordinary magisterium (as in the New Testament); rather, insofar as both offices, the ordinary of the priesthood and the extraordinary of prophecy, are considered as joined. Hence the mission of the prophets constituted an intrinsic element, and as it were an integral part, by the character of that economy; and so their succession was not only morally continuous and manifest until the return from the Babylonian exile, but also under the second temple the charism of inspiration did not cease, as both the books written by inspiration and other facts demonstrate (see Tract. de Scriptura, thes. XI, corollary 2). Wherefore, considering only perpetuity, the prophetic office in the Old Testament could be called ordinary; but since by this name, in divine institutions, is understood not only perpetuity but rather an order of succession or propagation according to a certain and fixed law, whereas the spirit of prophecy, bound to no certain law or means of communication, as a gift freely given, breathes where it wills; therefore also in that economy the prophetic office was and ought to be called extraordinary.

6°. From what has been said it is understood how God was able to permit the transgression of the old priesthood in the magisterium, even then, and most of all, when « the end of the law, Christ, » came, so that in him the law and the prophets might be fulfilled as in their end, to which they were ordered, and by him, as the consummator of faith, might be fulfilled in the ultimate perfection of revelation and of divine institutions. Just as those who infallibly foretold Christ as to come were prophets with an extraordinary magisterium, so he who showed Christ as present (now let us say nothing of Simeon, Anna, and others) was a prophet with an extraordinary magisterium, and more than a prophet, of whom it was written by the ancient prophets: « behold, I send my angel before your face, who shall prepare your way before you » (Matt. XI. 9, 10). « The law and the prophets until John; from then the kingdom of God is evangelized (now present) » (Luke XVI. 16). Indeed, what is infinitely greater, the Word himself made flesh, through whose divinity, as inspiring cause, and to whose divinity and humanity, as final cause, the prophets spoke the words of the Lord, he himself, I say, now the Lord of the prophets, who is ὁ προφήτης (John I. 21; VI. 14; VII. 40; Matt. XXI. 11) and the one master (Matt. XXIII. 8, 10; John XIII. 13, 14), being present, bore witness by himself and of himself, consummating in his divine person the fullness of the prophetic office and of divine teaching (Deut. XVIII. 15; Acts III. 22). He was himself shown to all the people, the preceding prophecies of the law and the prophets having been fulfilled, which fulfillment Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets, witnesses of his divine magisterium in the transfiguration, also exhibit sensibly (Matt. XVII. 3, 5; see St. Leo, sermo 51, c. 4); attested by works and miracles as by divine seals, designated by the preaching of the forerunner, and declared by the heavenly Father in the solemn initiation of his magisterium as the Son to be heard before all others (Luke III. 22; IX. 30–35; John V. 33–37, 39, 46; X. 38; XV. 24, etc.).

By this magisterium Christ, now that the revelations of faith and the divine institutions have been completed by himself and, once the Holy Spirit was sent, through the Apostles, remains perpetually in his Church, for the custody and explanation of the whole deposit, himself the one master, through his legates, instituted by himself in perpetual succession, furnished with the charism of truth and always protected by his presence, teaching in his own name and authority. All of this shall be explained and demonstrated more distinctly in its place. It is recalled here in passing, so that it may be clear on how many grounds the ordinary magisterium of the Church surpasses the ordinary magisterium of the synagogue: by reason of the incarnate Word, from whom the magisterium itself and its whole authority is derived and shared; by reason of the doctrine now consummated; and by reason of the indefectible assistance of the Spirit of truth. From this very perfection it is understood why the extraordinary prophetic magisterium, intrinsic to the old economy because of its imperfect state and still to be perfected, is by no means among the perpetual institutions of the economy now perfected (cf. Matt. XI. 11–13; 1 Pet. I. 10–12). There Moses and the prophets were as servants in the house of God, inspired many times and in many ways (as through successive parts and different degrees: πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως) to cultivate the old Testament and to prepare the new; here the Son of God, in his own house, has already completed the New Testament and the unshaken kingdom, and he remains the author and perfecter of faith with his Church all the days until the consummation of the age (Heb. I. 1; III. 3–6; XII. 2, 27, 28).

The sum of all that we have demonstrated in this thesis is finally recalled here. The whole preceding state of the Church, both primitive, from Adam, by its destination universal for all nations, and Mosaic, for the peculiar people of God, as a real prophecy in types, as a verbal prophecy in announcements and foretellings, and generally as preparation and introduction of a better hope in all institutions and laws, was ordained to the Church of Jesus Christ, as to the real gospel in the mysteries and things fulfilled, as to the verbal gospel in the doctrine of mysteries and things now present, and finally to the consummation of the mercies of God in grace and truth. « The redemption of the Savior... has so arranged the sacrament of its great piety that, until the consummation of the world, the appointed fullness of generations should run its course, but the renewal of the origin through the justification of undiscriminating faith should pertain to all the ages past... Nothing in the Christian religion differs from the ancient signs, nor has salvation ever been hoped for by the just who went before except in the Lord Jesus Christ; the dispensations, indeed, varied according to the reason of the divine will, but shining forth in the same thing, both in the testimonies of the law, and in the oracles of prophecy, and in the offerings of victims; for so it was fitting that those peoples be instructed, that what they could not grasp when revealed they might receive veiled, and that the authority of the Gospel might be greater, to which so many signs and so many mysteries of the pages of the Old Testament have served... Nothing of the legal institutions, nothing of the prophetic figures has remained which has not wholly passed over into the sacraments of Christ... so that the messengers have rightly ceased, now that the things announced have come, nor is the reverence for the promises emptied, because the fullness of graces has been manifested » — St. Leo, sermo LXVI (de passion. Dni XV), c. 12. Certainly the fullness has been manifested in the Church of Jesus Christ; indeed the Church itself is called by Paul (Eph. I. 23) the fullness of Christ, also in this present state of the Church, in which it still militates on earth, teaching and believing in faith, ruling and obeying in hope, sanctifying and being sanctified in charity: « a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for acquisition » (1 Pet. II. 9).

« In the institutions and laws of the Old Testament, there must be distinguished: 1°. those which were in themselves necessary for salvation, pertaining to the eternal and universal Testament, from the others which were precepts only for the peculiar people and for the time of introduction to a better hope; 2°. within these very peculiar institutions one must distinguish those which by their principal end were typical of the Christ to come and of his Church, so that after they were fulfilled in Christ, their observance is to be regarded as abolished and dead, and after the sufficient propagation of the Church, altogether forbidden and deadly; but others, which, without at least a proximate and immediate prefiguring of Christ, pertained to the political or external religious discipline of the synagogue, though the obligation of divine law has now been removed in the Church of Christ, can nevertheless be permitted, or even prescribed, by custom or by human ecclesiastical law. »

The form of the Church, as it was imperfectly in the Old Testament, as has been declared in the preceding thesis, did not cease through defect but through the announced perfection, which was prefigured even in the synagogue itself; for the veil of the Old Testament « is done away in Christ » (2 Cor. III. 14), by a progress similar to that by which, in the present stage of the Church, « when that which is perfect has come, that which is in part shall be done away » (1 Cor. XIII. 10). Wherefore it is worthwhile to inquire briefly here how, in this transition from the imperfect to the perfect, the cessation of the old institutions, which are said by the Apostle to have been done away in Christ (τὸ καταργούμενον), has taken place.

I. In the Old Testament, those things which we generally call spiritual (in distinction from those which the Apostle, Heb. VII. 16, calls « the law of carnal commandment »), namely those pertaining to the grace offered and given in view of the merits of the Restorer of human nature fallen in the first Adam, to faith, hope, and charity, to the end of eternal life: all these, I say, are and always were of the eternal Testament, destined for all nations and all times. These therefore remain common to the people of God, or to the Church, in every economy, whether patriarchal, or in the fuller Mosaic, or in the perfection of the New Testament; although in the last, in keeping with its very perfection, after the « great mystery of piety » has been completed, they are more abundant in themselves and wider in extent. « For the grace of God, by which the whole multitude of the saints has always been justified, was increased, not begun, at the birth of Christ » — St. Leo, sermo XXIII (de Nativ. III), c. 4 (cf. thes. II, III). But since these spiritual things were given at any time from the merits of Christ, and since their perfection is the proper character of the New Testament, therefore they are sometimes said to have always pertained to the New Testament, even in the time of the Old. Cf. St. Augustine, contra Faust. L. IV; St. Thomas, 1-2, q. 107, a. 1.

These must be distinguished entirely from what was proper to the Old Testament in the Mosaic economy, insofar as it contained the shadow, type, and preparation for Christ to come, and for the New Testament promised in the Old and prefigured in it. To this typical order belong all the political and liturgical institutions, or judicial and ceremonial ones (as the theologians customarily call them), whether principally and in themselves, or at least indirectly, insofar as they were given by God through Moses for forming and preserving that peculiar people, so that in it the preparations for the Christ to come and for his Church might be kept and explained through the successions of times; and thus (as Paul says of certain historical events of that people) « all these things happened to them in figure » (1 Cor. X. 11).

What pertains to the spiritual order Augustine calls « precepts of the life to be lived »; theologians, using a generic name, call them moral, and they are theological, pertaining to faith and morals, and therefore to the eternal Testament. These have neither been changed in the Church of Jesus Christ nor can be changed, except by explanation and by bringing them to the state of the perfection of the New Testament (cf. Matt. V. 21 ff.; XIX. 8 f.). But those things which belong to the typical order, comprised under the name judicial and ceremonial, are called by Augustine « precepts of the life to be signified. »

Under these latter precepts the Mosaic synagogue was constituted in its own and peculiar manner, so that when these were removed in their signification of future things, their value, and their purpose, the whole peculiar character and form of the synagogue was removed. « The priesthood having been transferred (the principal subject and center of the judicial and ceremonial precepts), it is necessary that the law (of the whole peculiar Testament) also be transferred » Heb. VII. 12. Now indeed all these institutions, from their very intimate nature as types and preparations for Christ and his coming work, of their own accord ceased in this their signification and value, as they were fulfilled in Christ, now present, and in his Church, now constituted: « which are the shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ » Col. II. 17. Augustine discourses on these things most fully in his books against Faustus. « When a Jew says to me: why do you keep the Old Testament, whose precepts you do not observe? I answer: the Christians observe even from those very books (of the Old Testament) the precepts of the life to be lived; but the precepts of the life to be signified were then rightly observed, when those things which have now been revealed were foretold. Wherefore I do not even observe these things thus for religion, yet I hold to them as a testimony, just as also the carnal promises which are contained there, whence the Old Testament is properly so called, although eternal things have been revealed to me to be hoped for » — Aug., cont. Faust. L. X, c. 2. He disputes much more fully about these things in L. XIX, cc. 8, 9, 10, 11.

Therefore the cessation of the old judicial and ceremonial institutions, and so of the synagogue as true Church, has taken place by fulfillment in Christ and in the Church of Christ; this cessation, I say, is understood as the transition from the future to the present, from shadow and figure to body and signified thing, from promise to gift, from prophecy to gospel: « I came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it » Matt. V. 17.

II. Nevertheless, so that we may judge rightly about those divine but temporary institutions, and about their extinction at the apostolic time and afterward, when they were now dead or deadly, four very different modes of observance must be distinguished in them: a) observance in the formal reason of promises and types, as still awaiting Christ; b) observance held necessary from perpetual institution and divine law; c) observance in the reason of a religious institution once given by God to the sons of Israel, no longer necessary but nonetheless permitted; d) observance not to be retained from the divine law of the Old Testament, but imposed by human law.

1°. It is clear that the first mode of observance, for the time of the New Testament, involves the denial of Jesus Christ. In this mode the synagogue, persisting, denied and perverted the proper reason and purpose of the Old Testament itself; and thus, through apostasy from its own law, it fell into an unbelief contrary to true faith and to the Church of the New Testament, promised and prefigured by that very law, as the Savior reproached them: « There is one who accuses you, Moses, in whom you hope (ἠλπίκατε); for if you believed Moses, you would perhaps believe (ἐπιστεύετε ἄν) also me » John V. 46. The Apostle himself explains this thus: « Israel, pursuing the law of justice, did not arrive at the law of justice. Why? Because not by faith, but as if by works (of the law): for they stumbled at the stone of stumbling... Not subject to the justice of God; for the end of the law is Christ, unto justice for every believer » Rom. IX. 27 f.

Accordingly, after the manifestation of Jesus Christ and the fulfillment of these in him, the judicial and ceremonial precepts of the old law always were and remain not only dead, that is, neither necessary nor useful, but altogether deadly. « If certain deeds and celebrations which were future-announcing figures were still done by Christians, nothing would be signified except that those things which were then foretold by figures had not yet come. For what is still foretold as to come either has not yet come, or if it has already come, it is foretold in vain or deceitfully » — Aug., cont. Faust. L. XIX, c. 8.

2°. As to the second mode of observance which we named, by obligation of the divine law, still remaining: this obligation, and the necessity of observance for salvation, once the redemption was completed through the death of the cross, objectively and in itself certainly ceased, even for the Jews themselves, and all the more for Christians from circumcision. For that peculiar law, given for one peculiar people, never obliged the other nations, and consequently the faithful from the Gentiles; and for the people of Israel itself, as we said just before, it was only a pedagogy to Christ and to his Church and to the perfection of the new law. « But before faith (the new law) came, we were kept under the law, shut up in that faith which was to be revealed; so the law was our pedagogue in Christ (εἰς Χριστόν), that we might be justified by faith; but when faith came, we are no longer under the pedagogue » Gal. III. 19 ff. Where God through Jeremiah (XXXI. 31) promised a « new Testament », the Apostle adds a comment: « In saying new he has made the first old; and what grows old and aged is near to perishing » Heb. VIII. 8–15. « But now he promises, saying: Yet once more I will move not only the earth but also the heaven (Hagg. II. 6). Now that he says yet once more declares the transference of things movable, so that those things that are immovable may remain. Therefore, receiving the immovable kingdom, we have grace » ib. XII. 26.

After the promulgation, therefore, of the Christian faith of the New Testament, the immovable kingdom, it was never permitted to hold or teach the observances of the pedagogy, of the Testament made old and of the already translated movable things, as if they still persisted in their value and in their binding force. Against those who taught that the ceremonies of the law must be observed from obligation, as necessary for Christian justice, the Apostle wrote his whole letter to the Galatians. « Behold, I, Paul, tell you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing... You are estranged from Christ, you who are justified in the law; you have fallen from grace » Gal. V. 2. Augustine explains this passage: « To them it was said: if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing; who therefore wished to be circumcised because they thought that otherwise they could not be saved in Christ. In this mind, with this will, with this intention, whoever then was circumcised, Christ profited him nothing at all... He therefore accuses those who believed themselves justified in the law, not those who observed those legitimate things in honor of him by whom they were commanded, understanding both for what purpose of foretelling the truth they had been commanded, and how long they ought to endure » — Aug., ad Hieron. ep. 82, n. 19.

3°. Another mode, therefore, of observing the legal things, which Augustine indicates in his last words, could be altogether different from both preceding ones: namely, if, conceding and professing that the transference of the old law has already taken place, and that therefore the necessity or obligation of these ceremonies has ceased, the same legal institutions were nevertheless observed, either out of veneration for their origin and for the tradition of so many centuries among the people of God, or, in Augustine's words (ad Hieron. ep. 40, n. 6), « out of the custom of solemnity, not from the necessity of salvation; » or for reasons of prudent economy, in the way in which Augustine (ep. 82, n. 9) warns that Paul himself at times observed the legal things, « lest they be thought to be condemned by the doctrine of Christ as sacrilegious, or written without God's command, and to show that neither were the Jews at that time to be prohibited from them as from wicked things, nor the Gentiles compelled to them as necessary. »

That this mode of observing the legal things was for some time permitted, and that therefore those things, although already dead, were not yet deadly, is demonstrated by the deeds of the Apostles themselves, and especially of Paul, which embody the doctrine: Acts XVI. 3; XVIII. 18; XXI. 20–26. As to doctrine, and even as to the mode of conduct and the practice considered generally, there was indeed full agreement between the Apostles Peter and Paul.

For just as the Apostle of the Gentiles constantly taught that the obligation of those ceremonies had ceased, and therefore that they no longer conduced to Christian justice, not only for the Gentiles but also for the Jews; yet so he became to the Jews as a Jew, in order to gain the Jews; to those who are under the law, as if he were under the law, though he was not under the law, that he might gain those who were under the law (1 Cor. IX. 20); and he circumcised Timothy « because of the Jews » (Acts XVI. 3); and he himself observed the legal ceremonies, lest the faithful from circumcision, or Jews not yet converted to the faith, be led into the opinion that the Apostle condemned the old law in himself and taught (as they used to say) « a departure (ἀποστασίαν) from Moses » (Acts XXI. 21). But this very thing, concerning the abolished and in no way necessary observance of the ceremonies of the law, was first proclaimed and defined by Peter in the Council of the Apostles, directly indeed for the converted faithful from the Gentiles, but at the same time also for the Jews (Acts XV. 10, 11). This doctrine he confirmed by his own mode of conduct: « For being a Jew, he lived in the manner of the Gentiles (ἐθνικῶς) and not in the Jewish manner » Gal. II. 14. On the other hand, he tolerated it just as Paul did, and where he feared the scandal of the Jews, or (as Paul says) « fearing those who were of the circumcision » (Gal. II. 12), he himself observed the ceremonial laws. The difference of economy between the two Apostles consisted in the application of one and the same doctrine to the particular condition of the Antiochenes. For since (by special providence) Paul had been entrusted with « the Gospel of the uncircumcision, as Peter with that of the circumcision », the one, Paul, wished the greater regard to be had for the Gentiles, lest they be led into error about the necessity of the legal things; the other, Peter, for the Jews, lest they be turned away from the Christian Church ¹. Gal. II. 7, 11–14.

From the teaching and practice of the Apostles it is certain that that ceremonial law, although already dead, was nevertheless not yet deadly in those first beginnings of the Christian Church. But no less, from the very reason and nature of that temporary permission, from the consensus of the Fathers and indeed of the whole Church, and from definitions and condemnations against heretics, it is established that the observance of those ceremonies, of legal circumcision and of the other old sacraments, of the Levitical priesthood, of the sacrifices, and of the other sacred things of this kind, soon began, when « the Christian Church had been already established and more widely diffused among the nations », to be altogether illicit, and therefore deadly. In the decree for the union of the Jacobites issued in the Council of Florence (4 Feb. 1442), after the definition of the cessation of the legal things of the Old Testament, and the declaration « that whoever, even after the passion, puts hope in legal things and submits himself to them as if necessary for salvation, as if the faith of Christ could not save without them, has sinned mortally », a further explanation is added: « Nevertheless the Holy Roman Church does not deny that from the passion of Christ until the Gospel was promulgated those things could be kept, provided that they were not believed to be necessary for salvation; but it asserts that after the promulgation of the Gospel they cannot be kept without the loss of eternal salvation. Therefore it declares all who after that time observe circumcision, the sabbath, and the other legal things to be alien to the faith of Christ, and that they cannot be partakers of eternal salvation, unless at some time they repent of those errors. » The same is stated in summary in the Profession of Faith prescribed by the Holy See for the Orientals.

The time is not, indeed, defined more strictly by those words, « after the Gospel was promulgated »; yet it seems right to say that this promulgation, sufficiently ample and widely diffused among the nations, coincides with the foretold final destruction of the holy city and temple, and with the dispersion of the Church of Jerusalem, which was made up of Christians from circumcision. From that time, therefore, the observance of the laws and rites of the synagogue began to be not only negatively unnecessary, but privatively proscribed and pernicious. Indeed, that prophetic law had already lost the life of its office, as Augustine says; nevertheless, until the extreme execution of the sentence pronounced by Christ the judge against the city and the temple, it had to be religiously carried to burial; but once buried under the ashes of the city and temple, it cannot be brought to light without violating the divine economy established in the institution of the Church. « Why should I not be allowed to say that the Apostle Paul and the other Christians of right faith ought then to have commended those old sacraments truly, by observing them a little, lest those observances of prophetic meaning, kept by the most pious fathers, be thought diabolical sacrileges to be detested by posterity? For when faith had come, which was foretold by those observances and revealed after the death and resurrection of the Lord, they had lost, as it were, the life of their office. Nevertheless, just as dead bodies had to be carried in some way to burial by the duties of their kinsfolk, not feigned (as St. Jerome had said) but religious; yet not to be abandoned at once, or thrown to the detractions of enemies as to the bites of dogs. Therefore now, whoever of the Christians, even if he is of the Jews, should wish to celebrate these in the same way, digging up the buried ashes, will not be a pious bearer of the body, but an impious violator of the burial. » — Aug., ad Hieron. ep. 82, n. 15–17; cf. cont. Faust. L. XIX, c. 17. The Judaizing sects, who contended that those observances were perpetual by divine law, fell into heresy, and « while they wished to be both Jews and Christians, they could be neither Jews nor Christians. »

4°. There remains for us, from the questions proposed, the last one: whether, and within what limits, the observances which were divinely prescribed to the people of Israel in the Old Testament as ceremonial can be imposed on the faithful by the Church to be kept for a pious and fitting discipline; not indeed by divine law (since they have been abrogated), but by its own ecclesiastical laws, or by an equivalent lawful custom?

Benedict XIV, in his encyclical letter (1 March 1756) addressed to the bishops of the Greek rite, to commend and explain a new edition of the Euchologion, illustrates this doctrine on the Mosaic legal things at length, §§ 59 ff. « Although with the Gospel promulgated the ceremonial precepts of the old law have ceased... nevertheless it is within the power of the Church of Christ, with just concurring reasons and for grave causes, to restore the obligation of observing some of the ceremonial precepts which were in the old law, although, as we have indicated, they have been abrogated in the new; provided that the precept is not of the number of those which in the old law were chiefly ordained to prefigure the Messiah to come, such as, for example, circumcision and the sacrifices of animals, as Vasquez observed for our purpose; but that it is of the kind which pertained to external discipline and bodily cleanliness, in whose class must certainly be counted those things prescribed about clean and unclean foods. This assumption is confirmed no less by the discipline of the Western Church than of the Eastern, and indeed by the monuments of earlier centuries. » So the most learned Pontiff. Also in the decree for the Jacobites cited above, the doctrine of the Holy Roman Church is first put forward: « that the distinction in the Mosaic law between clean and unclean foods belongs to the ceremonial things which passed away and ceased to be effective when the Gospel arose; » and further, « that no nature of food that human society admits is to be condemned, nor is there to be a distinction among animals... whatever kind of death they die; » nevertheless there too account is taken of « the regular and ecclesiastical discipline »; for it concludes: « although for the health of the body, for the exercise of virtue, for regular and ecclesiastical discipline, many things not forbidden (by the divine law) may and ought to be forgone, because according to the Apostle all things are lawful but not all things are expedient. »

Many and principal ceremonial laws had their own foundation and form in the signification of the types of the Christ to come and of the Church of Christ, in which therefore other institutions, prefigured by those old typical ceremonies, are as the complement of prophecy. To this belong the sacraments of the old law, and in the first place the sacrament of circumcision, as a sign of the Redeemer to be born from the seed of Abraham, and as a seal of adoption into that peculiar people, and therefore as a type of the future adoption of sons in the Church of the New Testament through sanctification in baptism, which is « the circumcision not made by hand, but the circumcision of Christ » Col. II. 11, 12; cf. Rom. II. 29. The same holds of the priesthood and of all the old sacrifices, since in the New Testament they are wholly excluded, both by the bloody sacrifice on the cross, to which those were referred, and by the priesthood according to the order of Melchisedech, in which, by divine institution, « the variety of carnal sacrifices ceasing, one offering of the body and blood of Christ fulfills all the differences of victims » (St. Leo, sermo 59, c. 7). Besides sacraments and sacrifices, there are referred here the sacred things connected with them to the peculiar form of external worship, and the observances ² pertaining to legal cleanness or holiness, which Paul (Heb. IX. 9, 10, 13) calls « the ordinances of the flesh imposed until the time of correction », if indeed these sacred things and observances are considered not singly, apart, but in their complex, by which they constituted the peculiar ritual and priestly character of the typical people and its separation from all the nations.

It is therefore manifest that these rites, containing a profession of an economy imperfect and to be completed by the coming Redeemer, can neither be restored by ecclesiastical law nor tolerated by the Church among its faithful. In this matter St. Augustine most effectively expresses his agreement with St. Jerome, who seemed to understand him otherwise: « Just as you freely pronounce that the ceremonies of the Jews are both harmful and deadly for Christians, and that whoever has observed them, whether from Jews or from Gentiles, has fallen into the abyss of the devil; so I wholly confirm this your word, and add: whoever has observed them, whether from Jews or from Gentiles, not only truly but also feignedly, has fallen into the abyss of the devil » — Aug., ep. 82, n. 17, 18.

From all the foregoing it appears how much those are in error who foresee a future time in which the Jewish people, converted to Christ, in the rebuilt temple of Jerusalem, together with the eucharistic sacrifice of the immaculate Lamb, will by divine command also offer the sacrifices of the old form and restore the other sacred things.

Quite distinct from what we have recalled must be the judicial laws and certain individual ceremonial ones, which had their foundation not in the typical signification of things to come in the New Testament, but in disciplinary, ethical, and political considerations generally regarded. Therefore, from this very foundation of the ethical or political order, or, as is said in the decree for the Jacobites, for the health of the body, for the exercise of virtue, for regular and ecclesiastical discipline, observances of this kind, which were, and although they were, prescribed in the Old Testament by the Mosaic law for the people of Israel, may in the New Testament also be permitted, or even prescribed, for Christians by lawful authority. That this is not a renewal of the old divine law now abolished, but a new imposition of human law, is manifest in itself; although for its honesty and fitness it can, and usually does, appeal to the old law given by God himself. Thus the abstinence of the Mosaic law from « blood and what is strangled » was prescribed by the Apostles themselves even for Christians from the Gentiles (Acts XV. 20, 29; XXI. 25); and although « with the cause of this apostolic prohibition ceasing, the effect also ceased » (decree for the Jacobites), and therefore it ceased to be properly an apostolic law; nevertheless the same abstinence was kept for many centuries in the Western Church, and in some Eastern Churches down to our own age, either by custom or by positive ecclesiastical law; and this also held for certain uncleannesses of the body or of foods established in the old law. On these matters, besides the encyclical letter of Benedict XIV cited above, the theologians may be read, and among them Suarez, de Legibus, L. IX.

From what has been said one may note in passing in what sense certain laws which are in themselves ecclesiastical are sometimes referred to the Mosaic law, and under this relation are called divine. Namely, when the very substance of the thing commanded is derived from the natural law (granted the institutions of the supernatural order), but the determined manner is prescribed by the Church in the same form as the Mosaic ceremonial law, appeal is rightly made, in commendation of such a prescription, to the old law given by God himself. Thus the right of sacred pastors to a suitable support is derived from the natural law, and in the New Testament too it is confirmed by positive declaration (1 Cor. IX. 7 ff.; 1 Tim. V. 17, 18); but the manner of this support by the receipt of tithes in the Mosaic economy belonged to the ceremonial or (if you prefer) judicial law (Suarez, l. c., chap. 19, n. 18). Wherefore, since the obligation from that divine law has ceased, the law of tithes, considered formally, is to be counted for the New Testament as ecclesiastical. Nevertheless, Innocent III in the Decretals (L. III, tit. 30, cap. 26, Tua nobis) declares the obligation, nature, and consecration of the tithes of the New Testament from the divine law of the Old Testament, since the reason in the priesthood of the New Testament is equal or stronger than in that old Levitical priesthood ³. In this way is also explained the divine right of ecclesiastical immunity, even in those things in which the exemption, formally considered, is not by divine but only by canonical right; on which matters may be consulted Bellarmine, de Clericis L. I, cc. 28, 29; Suarez, de Religione, T. I, L. III, c. 8, n. 10; contra Reg. Angl. L. IV, toward the end.

« Although the solemn division between the power of order and the power of jurisdiction is most true and most necessary; nevertheless the power of jurisdiction, which in that two-membered partition is taken generically, can, and for greater clarity and because of its mutually diverse properties ought, to be distinguished in sacred Theology into the power of governance or of jurisdiction specifically so called, and into the power of the authentic magisterium, infallible in its fullness; so that the threefold distinction of priesthood or sacred ministry, ecclesiastical rule, and authentic magisterium is to be regarded as theologically true. »

We confess that this thesis is not placed in its proper position if the internal order of things is considered in itself. But since in the preceding theses we have already presupposed the threefold power instituted by God in the Church, and much more because we think that this distinction — not a division, but a distinction of ecclesiastical rule or jurisdiction specifically so called and of the infallible magisterium, according to formal reasons very different from one another — is to be retained by us above all in what follows, for the Church of Jesus Christ, and is of great use in sacred theology: for these external reasons it has pleased us to explain and vindicate this distinction in these prolegomena, as far as is needed, so that false interpretations and attacks may be guarded against or removed.

I. The division of ecclesiastical power into the power of order and the other of jurisdiction generally considered is usually stated so that the former is referred to the real body of Christ, namely to the sacrifice and the Eucharistic sacrament, and the latter to the mystical body of Christ or to the members of the Church. Since this manner of speaking, to comprehend the full division, seems to need many explanations, we shall declare the same thing from theological principles a little differently. We shall say nothing that ought not to be accepted by all Catholics; yet there are several things whose theological demonstration we shall not give here, but suppose to be drawn from other places.

The Church, the kingdom of truth and holiness (John XVII. 17 ff.; XVIII. 37), Christ the Redeemer acquired with his blood, through satisfaction and merits consummated by the sacrifice on the cross; and he founded it by his institutions and disposed it to this end, that in it, here on earth, all men might be prepared through faith in revealed truth, through the holiness of hope and charity and of the other supernatural virtues, for the kingdom of vision and enjoyment in heaven. Now the holiness merited for us, Christ, as we know from revelation, confers in his Church first of all ex opere operato, mediately indeed through the propitiatory and perennial unbloody sacrifice of his body and blood, by which the satisfactions and merits of the bloody sacrifice once offered, and efficacious forever (Heb. X. 14), are applied for the granting of actual graces for the remission of sins and for the bestowal of holiness (cf. de Euch. sacrif. th. XII, XIII.); but immediately the opus operatum of sanctification is through the sacraments, which from their institutor Christ and from his satisfaction and merits have dignity and efficacy for conferring holiness itself, namely habitual grace, on all who put no obstacle in the way (cf. de Sacram. in genere th. VI–IX.).

Therefore, just as in the Church of Christ sacrifice and sacraments were instituted for sanctification ex opere operato, so for this sacred ministry the priesthood is consecrated; or, to speak in the concrete, priests have been instituted by Christ the supreme priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech, who by a ministerial power communicated to each of them by him offer the sacrifice of the New Testament and confer the sacraments. Now the power of the priesthood is itself communicated ex opere operato through the sacrament of Order, and is sealed with an indelible character (Tract. de Sacram. in genere th. XII, XIII.). For this reason it follows the nature of the character in its properties; and so in all who are marked with the same character it is the same and efficacious for all the acts for which it is instituted; in this its efficacy, or as to its value, it is independent not only of the merits of the minister but also of every higher power in the Church; indelible in this life; and finally communicable to no one who lacks the character corresponding to this power.¹. This power of the priesthood is what, on account of the mode of its conferral and its immutability and its independence in value, is called the power of order, so that it may be distinguished from the other, of jurisdiction.

II. The priesthood, with the sacrifice and the sacraments and with the opus operatum of grace, is indeed essential in the Church of Jesus Christ, the priest for ever, for the holiness by which he willed to sanctify it and to present it glorious to himself (Eph. V. 26, 27); yet with these things his infinite love and providence toward his Church have not been sufficiently provided for. For in those same ministers, the Apostles and their successors until the consummation of the age, to whom he gave the fullness of the priesthood, he instituted another power, which comprehends both infallibility in teaching, for the propagation and perpetual preservation of the integrity of faith, and supernatural governance in ruling, for the undefective holiness of Christian morals.

There is therefore, first of all, the power and the office, divinely enjoined, of preaching — under the protection of Christ and the assistance of the Spirit of truth who abides with them forever (John XIV. 16) — not only to the subjects in the Church but to all nations; and of explaining and preserving in its integrity the doctrine and law of God and its divine sanctions. The fullness of power, as we shall soon see from Suarez's explanation, « in this genus is nothing other than that the power is for teaching with the assistance of the Holy Spirit and with infallible certitude. » Further, so that this power of infallibly teaching in the visible kingdom of Christ — which, though not of this world, is in this world — may be more effective in guarding the very deposit of sacred doctrine, in securing the unity of faith in the kingdom of truth, and above all in ruling the kingdom of holiness, the power of governance has been joined and intimately united with it by the divine author and consummator of faith (Heb. XII. 2), which is properly the power of ecclesiastical rule (Titus II. 15), or of governance. For to Peter, as the ancient theologians spoke, together with the key of knowledge for infallibly opening the doctrine and law of God, there was committed at the same time the key of power for ruling by his laws, judgments, and sanctions; so that, according to the prayer and command of Christ, he might confirm his brothers with unfailing faith in teaching and with power in ruling (Luke XXII. 32). There were given by Christ not only teachers but, at the same time, teachers and pastors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ (Eph. IV. 11, 12; cf. de Tradit. th. XXV. n. I.); the bishops, set by the Holy Spirit to rule the Church of God (Acts XX. 28); and constituted leaders (ἡγούμενοι) to exact obedience and subjection, who are bound to keep watch as those who will render account for the souls of their subjects (Heb. XIII. 17).

This whole power, considered in its complex, is and is most rightly called, in the generic sense of the name, power of jurisdiction; for from both reasons, from infallibility in teaching as well as from the power of ruling, it induces, by its definitions and its laws, an obligation of obedience according to hierarchical subordination, though in a different mode. But concerning this unity and distinction, of what kind it is, we shall speak a little later. Meanwhile let it be noticed how great is not only the real distinction but the diversity between power of jurisdiction and power of order.

III. We shall set out this diversity between the power of order and of jurisdiction in a few words, although it may already be established from what has been said.

1°. The power of order is essentially bound up with the sacramental character. On the other hand, that of jurisdiction does not depend essentially on the character; whence jurisdiction, not only episcopal but also supreme and full over the whole Church, which belongs to the Roman Pontiff, can be present without the episcopal character. This indeed in fact takes place whenever a Pontiff is elected who is neither a bishop, and perhaps neither a priest nor a deacon: by divine institution, namely, through lawful election and the consent he gives, Christ immediately confers the whole power of jurisdiction on the one designated; and this is separate from the power of order, for the latter, not the former, is conferred by the sacrament of Ordination or Consecration.

2°. In those in whom the sacramental character is the same, in all of them the power of order is the same; so there are no differing degrees in them as regards this power: « wherever there is a bishop, whether at Rome or at Eugubium... he is of one and the same priesthood » (Jerome, ep. 146 ad Evang.).

But in the power of jurisdiction there exists a hierarchical subordination and a distinction of grades, partly by divine right, as is the supreme and universal power of the successor of Peter, and as under him other bishops participate in it; by ecclesiastical right there is also a subordination among the bishops inferior to the Roman Pontiff. The former subordination is essential, according to the divine constitution of the Church, and therefore unchangeable; the latter, among the bishops themselves, is indeed connected with the constitution of the Church, but is mutable according to those conditions which are governed by ecclesiastical right.

3°. Lacking the sacramental character, as is plain from what has been said, one can have no power of order; whence this cannot be delegated, nor conferred in any other way except through sacramental ordination itself. But one marked with the sacramental character always validly exercises, on his side, the power of his order, which can never be restricted or taken away. That its exercise may be forbidden, and thence rendered sacrilegiously illicit, follows from the hierarchical subordination of divine or even ecclesiastical right in the grades of jurisdiction.

From this same subordination it is manifest that the power of jurisdiction, insofar as it is considered not as supreme but as inferior in the individual bishops, is both liable to restriction, suspension, and removal by the superior, by which act the acts become not only illicit but altogether invalid; and that it can be delegated to others within the limits established by divine or ecclesiastical right. Hence, with what we said under 1° assumed, it is clear why, by delegation of the Supreme Pontiff, whether this is made by a general law or by a particular disposition and act, those who are not bishops can have jurisdiction by which they concur in ecumenical Councils not only to decide on matters of ecclesiastical discipline but also to define matters of faith; for this latter too pertains not to the power of order but to the power of jurisdiction considered generically.

4°. Finally, the efficacy of the power of order through the sacrifice and the sacraments is ex opere operato, immediately for the sanctification of souls by the gifts of inner grace; although indeed these at the same time pertain to the most noble part of the Church, insofar as it is visible.

The efficacy of jurisdiction, in itself and immediately, concerns the visible unity of the profession of faith in the kingdom of truth, and the visible governance of the kingdom of holiness; but, as to its end, it concerns faith itself and interior holiness, ex opere cooperantium.

IV. But what is chiefly in question for us is not the distinction or division of the power of jurisdiction, generically considered, from the other power of order; rather, whether and how, within that very power of jurisdiction, the two formal reasons, the power of the divine magisterium and the power of ecclesiastical rule, or of jurisdiction specifically so called, are to be judged distinct from one another?

1°. That we may forestall at the outset some suspicion of novelty somewhere thrust upon us, let us first look at the manner of thinking and speaking about this matter among the more ancient theologians. Suarez certainly speaks as if he supposed a distinction commonly received and known in itself, requiring no proof or defense. Where he demonstrates that the Constitution of Gregory XIII, Ascendente Domino, is not merely disciplinary but dogmatic, and therefore infallible « from the fullness of power », he takes the distinction of the twofold key, of doctrine and of jurisdiction, as certain and necessary. « Because the power must be fitted to the act, it is certain that here the discourse is not only about the power of jurisdiction, but chiefly about the power which is called the key of knowledge; for this was per se necessary for making this declaration (namely the declaration of doctrine, for which the power of jurisdiction alone would not have been sufficient). But the fullness of power in this genus is nothing other than that the power is for teaching with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and with infallible certitude » (Suarez, de Relig., T. IV, l. III, c. 4, n. 11). He assumes the same distinction in the defense of the Apostolic letters by which Paul V condemned the doctrine and forbade the use of the oath imposed by the King of England, James I, on Catholic subjects « to detect and repress papists »; where I would have you note the author's observation: the key of knowledge pertains to the condemnation of error considered in itself, while the key of power, or of jurisdiction, is referred to the persons to whom the command or prohibition is given. « The formula of the oath, he says, contains much that is contrary to religion and good morals; therefore the Pontiff, in reprobating it, used the lawful power of the keys: namely, by the key of knowledge declaring the injustice and malice of that oath, which is the proper office of a pastor, to whom it belongs to feed the flock of Christ; and by the key of power prohibiting the use of such an oath... To reprobate a false doctrine it is not necessary to be the competent judge of its author, nor to hear him otherwise than through his writings; but to prohibit such an oath under precept, jurisdiction over those to whom the precept is directed is indeed necessary, which Catholic Englishmen acknowledge in the Supreme Pontiff as in their own pastor; rightly, therefore, could the Pontiff impose such a prohibition on the English, especially since he did not so much make a new law as declare the divine and natural law about avoiding an illicit oath and fleeing the profession of false error (by the key of knowledge), and confirm it by his precept (by the key of power). With regard to the king, however, although it is most true that the Pontiff is his competent judge, as we have shown above (from the character of baptism), nevertheless in this act he exercised no judgment of jurisdiction over the king » (Defens. fidei cont. Reg. Angl. l. VI, c. 7). He exercised no judgment of jurisdiction over the king; but surely also for the king, as for all others, by « declaring the malice of that oath » and « reprobating the false doctrine », he exercised « the power which is called the key of knowledge », for which, considered in itself, no judgment of jurisdiction is needed, as Suarez teaches throughout the whole context.

In the same sense, but with a somewhat different division of the keys, the distinguished Louvain theologian Thomas Stapleton speaks; for on the one hand he places the key of knowledge, on the other the keys of power, both of order and of jurisdiction. « The keys of the Church, he says, can be divided into the key of knowledge and of power... To the key of knowledge belongs the opening of the Scriptures (or, more universally, of the revealed doctrine and law), which Christ exercised at Luke XXIV, and about which he said to the lawyers: you have taken away the key of knowledge (Luke XI. 52). The power of the keys is either of order or of jurisdiction. Jurisdiction itself is either in the external forum, by excommunicating, suspending from office, granting indulgences, and enacting laws (generally: legislative, judicial, coercive); or in the internal, by remitting sins. All this most ample and adequate power of the keys was promised by Christ the Saviour to Peter alone in this place (Matt. XVI) » (Stapleton, Opp., T. I, de Princip. fidei, l. VI, c. 1).

It is enough to have indicated these things in passing, so that from the very way of speaking of the ancient theologians it may appear that the magisterium and the imperium of jurisdiction in the Church were so understood by them that neither did they themselves call their distinction into doubt, nor did they think it could be called into doubt. But lest the distinction itself be taken in a perverse way, its formal reasons must be defined a little more precisely. For the sake of clarity and brevity we shall consider the supreme power in the head of the Church, from which application to the power of the lower grades can easily be made, with the limitations which follow from the subordination and dependence of the inferior on the superior being, of course, saved and retained.

2°. First let it be noted what the union is between the key of the magisterium and the key of jurisdiction. The whole material object of the sacred magisterium is also, or can be, the object of jurisdiction; and conversely, supreme jurisdiction, at least insofar as its acts refer to the governance of the whole Church, includes infallible magisterium. When the revealed doctrine of faith or of morals² is defined by the Pontiff ex cathedra or in an ecumenical Council, the definition itself includes both infallible magisterium and supreme jurisdiction over the whole Church; or rather, the definition is made, with the Holy Spirit assisting, by an act of infallible magisterium, insofar as the doctrine itself is declared divinely revealed, or at least a truth closely linked with a revealed dogma; but an act of jurisdiction is included insofar as the doctrine, by the definition itself, is intimated to all the faithful (or rather, to all the baptized) to be held under the penalty of an explicit or implicit anathema or of another censure. Besides, the Church, by the power of jurisdiction, surrounds the divine faith, the divine laws, and the divine institutions, for their safer custody and application, with its own laws too, as with a wall and a rampart; it exercises its judgments against transgressors and enacts its penalties. But in all these things, if not in time, at least by nature, there is presupposed the formal, or equivalent, declaration by the magisterium of the truth of the doctrine, of the laws, and of the divine institutions. Likewise, on the other side, the Church, in its laws which it enacts by the power of jurisdiction concerning universal governance, the sacred liturgy, and the holiness of Christian morals, at the same time, in the same act, exercises the power of magisterium concerning the honesty and holiness of its own such laws; and on this foundation of infallible magisterium rests the infallibility of the Church in governing and legislating. Insofar as an act of magisterium directly or at least indirectly regarding the whole Church is or is not included in laws and precepts, from this is taken the proper reason for the distinction which Bellarmine (de Rom. Pontif. l. IV, c. 5), with other theologians, draws between « precepts of morals », in which the Roman Pontiff cannot err, and « those in which it is not absurd that the Pontiff errs. »

3°. That this union and at the same time distinction may become clearer and be more effectively proved, let us consider « the supreme power of jurisdiction » and « the supreme power of magisterium also » in the Roman Pontiff; of which the former was defined in chapter four and the latter in chapter five of the Constitution Pastor aeternus in the Vatican Council. Chapter four is « on the force and nature of the primacy of the Roman Pontiff. » The formal conciliar definition declares this force and nature to be « full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church »; and a little before, in the doctrinal exposition, it is said of the power of jurisdiction that « to it the pastors and faithful of each rite and dignity, both singly and all together », are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience. Now this power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, and the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience toward it, is taught to be valid not only, indeed, but yet above all in matters that pertain to faith and morals: full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, « not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in those that pertain to the discipline and governance of the Church spread throughout the whole world. » The power of jurisdiction, therefore, is over the Church, over pastors and faithful, who, both singly and all together, are bound toward it by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience; and this also, and especially, in matters pertaining to faith and morals; but it is not said to be a jurisdiction over the matters or the doctrine of faith and morals. Even concerning these matters, concerning the doctrine of faith and morals, the supreme power is comprised in the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, which is the power of infallibly defining the truth of those matters, namely the doctrine of faith and morals, with the Holy Spirit assisting; but of this the Council treats in the following chapter five, as of a power distinct yet not separate, since both are contained in the primacy, from the power of jurisdiction which it had declared in the preceding chapter four.

After the force and nature of the primacy has thus been defined, by which the Roman Pontiff has full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, the Council teaches that, besides this, and together with it, « the supreme power of magisterium also » is comprised in the Apostolic primacy itself. It is not sufficient, therefore, to believe the supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church also in matters pertaining to faith and morals; together with it is to be believed the supreme power of magisterium also.³ There were among Catholics, before the definition of the Vatican Council, those who indeed admitted the Roman Pontiff's supreme power of jurisdiction in matters pertaining to faith and morals, insofar as, namely, it was already established, from the consent of the Church or from the definition of an ecumenical Council, what the truth of matters of faith and morals was; but they denied, or called into doubt, or at least contended that it was not to be defined as an article of faith, the supreme and by this very fact infallible power of magisterium. The Council, however, does not in any way exclude — as is manifest in itself — that to exercise the power of jurisdiction in matters pertaining to faith and morals, the truth of the doctrine must at least in order of reason be presupposed; but it teaches that in the Pontiff himself there is not only the supreme power of jurisdiction but also of magisterium, by virtue of which, in defining a doctrine of faith or morals, he is endowed with infallibility through the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, so that his definitions are irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the Church.

From definitions of divinely revealed truth issued by the fullness of the power of magisterium — which (as Suarez rightly said) is nothing other than infallibility through the assistance of the Holy Spirit — there immediately arises, for all, not only the baptized but also the non-baptized, and therefore those not subject to the jurisdiction of the Church (considering the matter in itself and abstracting from excusing ignorance), the obligation of divine faith on account of the authority of God revealing. At the same time, however (as we have already said), in the definition itself the supreme power of jurisdiction is exercised, to which all pastors and faithful are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience; while the Pontiff, discharging the office of Pastor and Teacher of all Christians, not only by defining the revelation of truth makes it certain for all to be believed with divine and Catholic faith (which is done by the supreme power of the infallible magisterium), but also by his supreme power of jurisdiction enjoins on all Christians subject to him the duty of true ecclesiastical obedience, and he fortifies the custody of the divine faith itself with ecclesiastical penalties, either implicitly or explicitly, as in the dogmatic canons.

The Council itself, in so far as the pastoral office is the supreme magisterium, declares two functions by which it is evidently distinguished, in its formal reason, from the power of jurisdiction specifically so called. First, in order that the Roman Pontiffs might satisfy this pastoral office of the power, namely of the magisterium, of which alone it there treats, « they always gave untiring labor that the salutary doctrine of Christ might be propagated among all the peoples of the earth; » secondly, « with equal care they watched that where it had been received it might be preserved sincere and pure. » Therefore the supreme power of magisterium extends also to the non-baptized unbelievers; for not by voluntary charity alone, which can and should belong to any Christian, but by virtue of the pastoral office, the supreme power of magisterium comprehends all the peoples of the earth to be taught by the command and institution of Christ: « Go, teach all nations. » But the supreme power of jurisdiction specifically so called is over the whole Church, i.e., over all who are bound to the Church by baptism, and not over others: « For what have I to do with judging those who are outside? For God will judge those who are outside. » The former therefore, by Christ's institution and divine right, extends more widely than the latter; and by this very fact they are understood to be distinct. But is it perhaps the case that within the Church, in order that doctrine be preserved sincere and pure, the magisterium does not act under its formal aspect, by which it is distinguished from the power of jurisdiction? Indeed, the Council describes most clearly how the Roman Pontiffs, above all and especially, preserve the sincere and pure doctrine of Christ, not now by the power of commanding or of jurisdiction, but by that which, according to the prayer and promise of Christ, « I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail », is the power, with the Holy Spirit assisting, of infallibly knowing, expounding, and defining the revelation handed down by the Apostles, and thus of guarding the deposit of faith. This description indeed says nothing other than that fullness of the power of teaching with the assistance of the Holy Spirit and infallible certitude, which the ancients called « the key of knowledge »; the Council, however, most aptly, according to the constant doctrine and manner of speaking of Scripture, calls it « the supreme power of magisterium ». In the dangers that arose in matters of faith, the Council says, the Roman Pontiffs, according to the condition of the times and of affairs, employing now one and now another aid, « defined those things to be held which they had known, with God's help, to be consonant with the Holy Scriptures and Apostolic Traditions. For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter so that they might, by his revelation, make known a new doctrine, but so that, with his assistance, they might holily guard and faithfully expound the revelation handed down through the Apostles. » Moreover, all the orthodox Fathers and Doctors followed their expounded and defined doctrine as Apostolic: from what reason, I ask, first and chiefly moving them? Namely, « fully knowing that this holy See of Peter remains untouched by every error forever, according to the divine promise of our Lord and Saviour made to the prince of his disciples: I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and you, when you have turned again, confirm your brethren. »

Nevertheless, as we have already declared above, in the definition and custody of the deposit the supreme power of jurisdiction is joined and subjoined to the infallibility of the magisterium. The Council itself indicates this conjunction of both powers sufficiently, not only in chapter four, as we have seen, but also in this fifth chapter « on the infallible magisterium ». It places indeed, as the matter itself requires, for knowing, expounding, defining, and guarding the revelation handed down by the Apostles (of which it had spoken in the preceding context), first and principally « this charism of truth and of faith that never fails, divinely conferred on Peter and on his successors in this chair ». The function of infallibility in teaching, or of infallible magisterium, must be first in every definition and in the custody of the deposit; for from this charism comes their irrefragable certitude and irreformable firmness. Nevertheless, the successors of Peter, instructed by this charism, discharge their lofty office not only « so that the whole flock of Christ may, through them, be turned away from the poisonous food of error and nourished with the pasture of heavenly doctrine », but also « so that, the occasion of schism removed, the whole Church may be preserved as one, and, resting on this foundation, may stand firm against the gates of hell ». All of which things, because and insofar as doctrine is concerned, though they require at least in order of reason the prior function of infallible magisterium, this function, however, in the present order of providence is not, and cannot be, alone in the visible militant Church; but to this very end of unity and firmness the power of jurisdiction is also joined and subjoined even in doctrine, which, after what has been said above, needs no further declaration.

4°. Now we can set forth, as it were in one view, the chief distinctions we have brought out between the power of magisterium and the power of ecclesiastical rule, or of jurisdiction specifically so called.

a) In the amplitude of its extent, from the institution of Christ the Saviour of the world, the power of magisterium reaches more widely than that of jurisdiction: to all nations, not only those already gathered into the Church but also those to be called into the Church. Hence, in its place we shall see that many things were prescribed and done in the discipline of catechumens, as they are still done now according to the condition of times and affairs, which might seem to proceed from the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; certainly, however, they had and have their foundation not in this but in the power of magisterium.

b) The object of the magisterium, formally considered (i.e., insofar as it is magisterium), is the infallible manifestation, exposition, and definition of the divine doctrine, of the law, and of the sanction in rewards and penalties by divine justice; and, through this infallibility in teaching, the custody of the whole sacred deposit.

The object of jurisdiction is not the manifestation of revealed truth and law, but its application, defense, and vindication in the Church, by the laws, precepts, judgments, and sanctions proper to ecclesiastical rule, of that truth and law as manifested through the infallible magisterium.

c) From the authentic preaching, exposition, and definition of doctrine as revealed by the infallible magisterium there immediately arises the obligation of obedience of divine faith (ὑπακοὴ πίστεως, Rom. I. 5; Gal. III. 2), i.e., obedience of faith on account of the sole formal motive of the authority of God revealing; although which truths, and in what sense, are to be believed as revealed is made known through the proposition of the infallible magisterium: we believe whatever the Church proposes to be believed, because God has revealed it. This is what Augustine said: « We therefore, who are and are called Christians, do not believe in Peter (as the formal object on account of which we believe, and as the end toward which we tend by faith), but in him in whom Peter believed, built up by the words of Peter (through the magisterium derived from Christ) about Christ... That master of Peter, Christ, in the doctrine which leads to life, he is our master » (one is your master, Christ, revealing, and by the magisterium participated in Peter and in the Church preserving the revealed doctrine) (Augustine, City of God, L. XVIII, c. 54, n. 1). And this obligation of obedience of faith, precisely because it is on account of the authority of God revealing, is equal in all; to it the defining Pontiff or Council is subject no less than any other men, whether within the Church or (considering the thing in itself and objectively) outside the Church. The power of jurisdiction indeed is also instituted by Christ the King and derived into his kingdom, the Church; but it is an ecclesiastical power proper to the Pontiff and to others to whom it is communicated in an ordinary office, by virtue of which they govern not by divine but by their own ecclesiastical laws, judgments, and sanctions; and by all these they also apply, guard, and vindicate, toward their subjects, the doctrine and the divine law handed down through the infallible magisterium, subjects who in Christ's kingdom are liable to jurisdiction according to hierarchical subordination.

Therefore the power of jurisdiction concerns, per se and immediately, not internal but external acts in the visible kingdom of Christ; the power of magisterium first and per se attains and binds the inner mind and will. Hence, whoever denies by an interior act alone a doctrine defined by the power of the infallible magisterium is, before God and in his conscience bound to God, a heretic who falls away from the unity of faith and of the Church, so long as he persists in this sin; he is condemned not by the judgment of ecclesiastical jurisdiction but by that of God and of his own conscience. But when he betrays heresy by an external act, he is subject to the power of jurisdiction and to its judgment and penalties according to the sanctions of ecclesiastical laws. This distinction, certain on other grounds theologically and juridically, we have declared more expressly in the dogmatic Constitution defining the preservation of the Mother of God from every stain of original sin. After the words of the definition, pronounced indeed from the fullness of the power of the infallible magisterium, declaring this doctrine to be revealed by God and therefore to be held firmly and constantly by all the faithful, the Pontiff concludes: « Wherefore, if anyone should presume to think in their heart otherwise than as has been defined by us, which God forbid, let them know and further understand that they are condemned by their own judgment, that they have suffered shipwreck in the faith and have fallen away from the unity of the Church; and besides, by that very act they subject themselves to the penalties established by law, if they have dared to signify what they think in their heart by word or in writing or by any other external means. »

Therefore the power of magisterium concerns not only the external forum but, proximately and directly, the internal forum. The power of jurisdiction of which we speak pertains to the external forum, because although it indeed binds conscience before God, nonetheless by its laws, judgments, and sanctions it is occupied, proximately and directly, with the objects of the external forum. For the power of jurisdiction in the internal forum is of a different kind, and sacramental, for remitting sins in conscience and before God.

d) The power of magisterium does not constitute its own object, namely the truth of doctrine and of divine law; but by infallibly declaring it as revealed by God, it adds nothing of its own and takes nothing from the divine, as the holy Fathers have so often warned (cf. Tract. de Tradit.). Hence doctrines and laws once infallibly proposed or defined by the magisterium are unchangeable, and there is no power of abrogating, changing, or dispensing from them.⁴ By the same reasoning, the interpretation of divine law by the magisterium is only inherent; if at any time divine law seems to be applied by a somewhat extensive interpretation, this is done through the legislative power of jurisdiction.

On the other hand, the power of jurisdiction constitutes its own laws, and thus new law is established, or can be established, which, both in its origin and in its force, or in its dispensation, modification, or abrogation, depends on the very power of jurisdiction.

Hence there is that difference of language in the definitions of the magisterium, declaring the truths of faith to be believed, and in the decrees of the power of jurisdiction, establishing ecclesiastical laws to be observed; which St. Athanasius explains, as the Nicene Fathers employed it excellently. « About Easter they wrote thus: the following decrees have been made (ἔδοξε τὰ ὑποτεταγμένα); for then it was decreed that all should obey. But about faith (namely about the creed and the truths defined in it) they did not at all say it has been decreed, but thus the Catholic Church believes; and at once they confessed what they believe, so as to declare that their view is not a more recent but an apostolic one; and what they wrote was not invented by them, but is the very thing the Apostles taught. » (Athanasius, de Synod. Arimin. et Seleuc. n. 5.)

There are therefore weighty reasons for sacred Theology why the power of jurisdiction, which in its diversity from the power of order is generally considered and called so, is itself distinguished in the kingdom of the truth of faith and the holiness of morals: insofar as it is the supreme power of ecclesiastical rule, or of jurisdiction specifically so called, over the whole Church; and insofar as it is the supreme power of the infallible magisterium; just as the ecumenical Council itself defined and declared each of them in distinct chapters, not confounding them as one but enumerating them as two; so that these two keys of St. Peter are to be deemed joined together and inseparably united, yet not confused into one; since both were indeed given by Christ for binding and loosing, but in a different way, with regard to the extent, to the special object, and to the efficacy or nature of the loosings and bindings.

After the preliminary remarks and general considerations on the Church of God that we have set down, we shall now throughout this whole treatise be concerned solely with the Church of Jesus Christ, acquired by his blood and established on earth in its own proper form as the embodiment of the New Testament, as God himself has set it forth in words and deeds. We shall first treat of the very institution of this Church of Christ.

« The Church of the New Testament, to be established by Christ from all nations as universal and perennial, was foretold in the prophecies of the Old Testament and described as one kingdom: a kingdom of power in its own governance, a kingdom of truth in its own magisterium, a kingdom of sanctification in its own priesthood; which whole power is, originally and as from a fountain, in Christ the Founder, and is communicated by participation to his ministers, to govern, to teach, and to sanctify the Church in its members. »

1°. Just as in the Old Testament types and prophecies have as their chief object the Messiah the Saviour himself, so almost everywhere his work is foreshadowed and foretold together with Christ: « Behold his reward is with him, and his work before him; as a shepherd he will feed his flock, in his arm he will gather the lambs » (Is. XL. 10; LXII. 11). This work of the Messiah in effect, at once the reward and fruit of the work that merits, which the prophets foresaw as intimately joined with the Redeemer of the human race himself and in unity with him, is his universal kingdom among all nations: « All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall adore in his sight; for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he shall rule over the nations » (Ps. XXI. 28, 29). « Give your judgment to the king, O God, and your justice to the son of the king... In his days justice shall spring up, and abundance of peace, until the moon be taken away; and he shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth¹... and all the kings of the earth shall adore him, all nations shall serve him » (Ps. LXXI. 1 ff.; Zach. IX. 10).

This kingdom to be founded by the Son of God, who is also the Son of man, is foretold as universal of all nations, and likewise as perennial for all times: « And in the days of those kingdoms the God of heaven will raise up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, and its kingdom shall not be delivered to another people (no other kingdom shall ever be substituted for it or succeed it, as the four worldly kingdoms will be substituted one for another and succeed one another); but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and itself shall stand for ever. In accordance with what you saw, that a stone was cut from the mountain without hands, and it broke the clay, and the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the gold (the four worldly empires are counted, ascending from the clay and iron of the last Romans to the gold of the Assyro-Babylonians), the great God has shown the king what shall come hereafter. » « I beheld therefore in the night vision, and lo, with the clouds of heaven one like the Son of man came, and came even to the Ancient of days, and they presented him before him. And there was given him power and honour and kingdom, and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him: his power is an everlasting power, which shall not be taken away, and his kingdom which shall not be corrupted » (Dan. II. 44; VII. 13, 14, 27; Hag. II. 7, 8, 22, 23).

2°. This universal kingdom of all nations and perennial kingdom of all times is promised as one kingdom, so that, in the knowledge, adoration, and worship of the true God, there shall be one people, one holy city, as a new Israel and a new Jerusalem and a new temple on Sion. « Arise, arise, put on your strength, O Sion, put on the garments of your glory, O Jerusalem, holy city... for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem: the Lord has bared his arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God » (Is. LII. 1 ff.). « Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem, for your light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you... and the nations shall walk in your light... and your heart shall be enlarged, when the multitude of the sea shall be turned to you, the strength of the Gentiles shall come to you... and your gates shall be opened continually, day and night they shall not be shut, that the strength of the Gentiles may be brought to you, and their kings may be led... and they shall call you the city of the Lord, Sion of the Holy One of Israel »² (Is. LX. 1 f.; XL. 8–23). « And it shall come to pass in the last days,³ the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall hasten, and shall say: come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths; for out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem... and the Lord shall reign over them in Mount Sion from henceforth and for ever » (Mich. IV. 1 ff.; Is. II. 2 ff.; Zach. VIII. 3–8). « And it shall come to pass in that day, living waters shall go out from Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea, and half of them toward the hindmost sea (the western); in summer and in winter they shall be. And the Lord shall be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord shall be one, and his name one... And all who remain of all the nations which came against Jerusalem (formerly hostile to the Church) shall go up year by year, to adore the King, the Lord of hosts » (Zach. XIV. 8 ff.).

3°. This new people of Israel, new Jerusalem, city of the Lord, new Sion, as is promised in the prophets, shall be constituted in its own proper form of governance, of magisterium, and of priesthood, which is derived from one supreme king, teacher, and priest, Christ.

a) Christ will be the supreme king in this supernatural kingdom of peace; but since it is a perennial and visible kingdom on earth, other shepherds and princes will be constituted by him as participants in his empire, who in his name and by his power shall govern the people of God over the whole earth. « But I am appointed king by him over Sion, his holy mountain. The Lord said to me: you are my Son, this day have I begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the bounds of the earth for your possession » (Ps. II. 6). « A child is born to us, and a son is given to us, and the government is upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, God, Mighty, Father of the world to come⁴, Prince of Peace; his empire shall be multiplied, and of peace there shall be no end; he shall sit upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom (the type transferred to the antitype), to confirm it and strengthen it with judgment and justice, from henceforth and for ever » (Is. IX. 6, 7). « And I will raise up over them (the sheep of the Lord) one shepherd, who shall feed them, my servant David; he shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd; and I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David in the midst of them; I the Lord have spoken » (Ezek. XXXIV. 23 ff.; XXXVII. 24–28). « I will gather the remnant of my flock from all lands... and they shall grow and be multiplied; and I will raise up shepherds over them, and they shall feed them... Behold the days come, says the Lord, and I will raise up to David a branch⁵ of justice, and a king shall reign, and shall be wise, and shall do judgment and justice » (Jer. XXIII. 3–6). In the wondrous Psalm XLIV, after the notable description of Christ the bridegroom and of his bride the Church, the words are addressed to Christ: « in place of your fathers⁶ sons have been born to you; you will make them princes over all the earth » (ib., 17).

b) The same king and shepherd, promised upon the throne and the everlasting kingdom of David, is also promised as the faithful prophet, whence his kingdom is as much a kingdom of peace as of truth and of justice. Already in the institution of the ancient and typical people of Israel, God promised to Moses, the legislator and prophet of the people: « I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brethren, like to you (by the likeness of the principal thing prefigured to the figure and the image shadowing it forth — the son in his house to the faithful servant in the house of God), and I will put my words in his mouth »; and Moses announced the promise to the people: « The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet of your nation and of your brethren, like to me; him you shall hear » (Deut. XVIII. 15–19; cf. Matt. XVII. 5; John VI. 14; Acts III. 22, 23; VII. 36). This prophet, promised to Moses and through Moses, is in view when, in the last stage of the old economy, the people committed the kingdom and the supreme priesthood to the family of the Asmoneans, « until there arise a faithful prophet »⁷ (1 Macc. XIV. 41).

« Sons of Sion, exult and rejoice in the Lord your God, because he will give you a teacher of justice, and will make to come down upon you the early and the latter rain (the autumn and the spring rain), as in the beginning » ⁸ (Joel II. 23). Hence « out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem » (Mich. loc. cit.⁹); and God promises the same Jerusalem: « I will make all your sons taught by the Lord, and a multitude of peace to your sons; and you shall be established in justice » (Is. LIV. 13; Jer. XXXI. 33, 34; XXXII. 38–40). Moreover, since this divine magisterium must be perennial, « I will give you shepherds according to my heart, and they shall feed them with knowledge and doctrine... and all nations shall be gathered together to it in the name of the Lord in Jerusalem, and they shall not walk any more after the perverseness of their most wicked heart » (Jer. III. 15 ff.).

Wherefore the name of this new Jerusalem shall be city of truth, and Sion shall be called mountain of holiness. « I will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth, and the mountain of the Lord of hosts the sanctified mountain (in the Hebrew text mountain of holiness)... Behold I will save my people from the land of the east and from the land of the setting of the sun... and they shall be to me a people, and I will be to them God, in truth and in justice » (Zach. VIII. 3, 7, 8).

c) As the Church is foretold as the kingdom of peace and the kingdom of truth in Christ and under Christ the supreme king and teacher, from whom men appointed by him shall perennially share in the power of the kingdom and of the magisterium, so the same kingdom has been announced as to be sacerdotal, through Christ the supreme priest and sanctifier, from whom a ministerial priesthood is derived to the men taken up by him.

α) From the visions of the prophets, in Christ the diadem of the king and the diadem of the priest are intimately united for his perennial kingdom; and therefore the union of both holds continually in this kingdom, so that it is sacerdotal. Jesus, son of Josedech, the high priest, is expressly called a type foreshadowing the Messiah: « Hear, Jesus, great priest, you and your friends... men that foreshadow: for behold I will bring my servant the East » (צֶמַח, branch, an undoubted name of the Messiah) (Zach. III. 8). Now in this man foreshadowing, the prophet is commanded to join the priestly diadem to the royal one, so that there may be continually « the counsel of peace », that is, of unity between the two powers. « You shall take gold and silver, and make crowns (cf. Apoc. XIX. 12), and put them on the head of Jesus, son of Josedech, the great priest; and you shall speak to him, saying: thus says the Lord of hosts: behold a man, the East is his name... and he shall build a temple to the Lord; and he shall bear the glory, and he shall sit and rule upon his throne, and he shall be a priest upon his throne, and the counsel of peace shall be between those two¹⁰... and those who are far off shall come and build in the temple of the Lord » (Zach. VI. 11 ff.). St. Epiphanius, Heresy XXIX, nn. 2–4, discourses at length on the union of royal and priestly dignity in Christ, and through Christ in the Church.

β) Christ is foretold, in the proper sense, as priest, who by his bloody sacrifice was to acquire for himself the Church of all nations. « He was offered because he himself willed it, and did not open his mouth; he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter... if he shall lay down his life for sin¹¹, he shall see a long-lived seed... by his knowledge shall my just servant justify many, and he shall bear their iniquities; therefore I will divide to him very many, and he shall divide the spoils of the strong, because he delivered his soul unto death » (Is. LIII). By this sacrifice of Christ all the ancient typical sacrifices are to be abolished. « Sacrifice and oblation you did not desire; but ears you have perfected for me. Holocausts and sin offerings you did not ask: then I said, Behold, I come... I have declared your justice in the great Church... I have not hidden your mercy and your truth from the great assembly »¹² (Ps. XXXIX. 7 ff.)

γ) The priesthood of Christ is foretold as « eternal according to the order of Melchisedech », who as priest of the Most High offered bread and wine in a type (Ps. CIX. 4; Gen. XIV. 18). According to this order of Christ's priesthood there is foretold, in his Church, a future perpetual unbloody sacrifice « from the rising of the sun to its setting », for the glorifying of God's name « among the nations » (Mal. I. 11), a prophecy of which we treated in the Tract. de Euch. sacrif. th. X.

Hence it further follows, and is foretold by the prophets too, that there is also a perpetual priesthood in the Church, certainly instituted and derived from the supreme priest according to the order of Melchisedech. « I come to gather together with all nations and tongues (Heb. all nations and tongues), and they shall come and see my glory. And I will set in them a sign¹³, and I will send of them who shall have been saved to the nations, to the sea (תרשיש, Tartessus), to Africa, and Lydia drawing the bow, to Italy¹⁴ and Greece, to the far-off islands, to those who have not heard of me, and who have not seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory to the nations... And I will take from them priests and Levites, says the Lord. For as the new heaven and the new earth... so shall your seed and your name stand » (Is. LXVI. 18 ff.; Mal. III. 3, 4). « In those days and at that time I will make David to bud forth a branch of justice (the name of the Messiah; cf. Is. IV. 2; Jer. XXIII. 5; Zach. III. 8; VI. 12)... for thus says the Lord: a man of David shall never fail who shall sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; and of the priests and of the Levites a man shall never fail before my face (ministering before me), who shall offer holocausts and burn sacrifice and slay victims all days... If my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night can be made void, so that there be no day and night¹⁵ in their time, then my covenant may be made void with David my servant, so that there shall not be of him a son who reigns on his throne; and the Levites and priests, my ministers. As the stars of heaven cannot be counted, nor the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the seed of David (those who are of Christ, whom he shall make to bud forth as the branch of justice for David), and the Levites my ministers. » (Jer. XXXIII. 15 ff.)

It is manifest that, as the eternal kingdom of Christ, of another and more sublime order than the typical kingdom of David, is here promised as foreshadowed, so in this kingdom there is promised a priesthood of another order, corresponding to the very nature of the kingdom: as there is a new earth and a new heaven, so a new priesthood, more sublime than the Levitical priesthood which was in the type (cf. Heb. VIII, IX; XIII. 10). As Paul (Heb. VII. 11–14) demonstrates, from this among other things, that Christ is not of the tribe of Levi, that his priesthood is of another order and not Levitical, so also the priests and Levites in the kingdom of Christ are promised by the prophets, in the passages cited, as future, not of the Levitical race but to be taken from all nations, to be multiplied, and to offer sacrifices until the consummation of the age, as long as there shall be day and night¹⁶. But since the priesthood is transferred and changed, it is necessary that there be a transfer and change of the law, of external worship, and in particular of sacrifice (Heb. VII. 12), which we have seen foretold elsewhere to be one, unique, according to the order of Melchisedech in the type. Therefore when Jeremiah seems to transfer to the priests in the kingdom of Christ¹⁷ the diverse species of the sacrifices of the old economy, in which the prophet himself and those to whom he was directly prophesying stood, nothing else is to be understood than that one sacrifice, foreshadowed through all those typical sacrifices, will succeed them all. « With the variety of carnal sacrifices ceasing, the one oblation of your body and blood fulfills all the differences of victims... so that as there is one sacrifice for every victim, so there is one kingdom from every nation » (St. Leo, sermon 59, c. 7; cf. sermon 68, c. 3). « The priest himself, the mediator of the New Testament, offers, according to the order of Melchisedech, the table of his body and blood; for this sacrifice has succeeded all those sacrifices of the Old Testament which were immolated in the shadow of the future. Wherefore we understand also that voice of the same mediator speaking by prophecy in Psalm thirty-nine: sacrifice and oblation you did not desire; but a body you have perfected for me; for in place of all those sacrifices and oblations his body is offered, and is ministered to participants » (Augustine, City of God, XVII, c. 20, n. 2). « The one true mediator... is also the priest, himself offering and himself the oblation. Of this reality he willed the sacrifice of the Church to be the daily sacrament; and the Church, since it is the body of that head, learns to offer itself through him¹⁸. Of this true sacrifice the manifold and various signs were the ancient sacrifices of the saints, so that this one thing was figured through many, as one thing is said in many words, so that it might be greatly commended without tedium. To this supreme and true sacrifice all false sacrifices (imperfect, in shadow and figure, cf. Heb. VIII. 7) gave way. » (Ibid., l. X, c. 20.)

The few passages we have cited suffice for us to understand that the indefectible kingdom of Christ on earth, cohering in itself with its own governance, magisterium, and priesthood, to be acquired by Christ the Redeemer himself with his blood, and to be founded from all nations for the eternal salvation of all nations, was most clearly announced in the prophets; so much so that this eternal and universal kingdom constitutes one of the most distinguished characters and most illustrious marks of the promised Messiah. Many other oracles of the prophets pertaining to this could easily be adduced, which shine with no less light: Is. XI. 1, 11, 12; XL. 2, 9; XLII. 6, 10; LI. 3–7; LIV; LXII; LXV. 16 ff.; Hos. II. 16 ff.; III. 5; Joel II. 27–32; III. 16–21; Amos III. 16 ff.; IX. 11; Zeph. III. 14; Zach. II. 10; XIV. 8, 9. A rule for distinguishing the prophecies which are referred, either in the immediate or in the typical sense, to Christ and¹⁹ to his Church, can be deduced from the manner of St. Paul's citation, Rom. XV. 8–12.

The prophecies of the promises and the completion of their execution cast light upon one another, and confirm one another by a manifest seal of divinity; so we must now pass to the consideration of that very completion.

« Although the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven are not always taken in one and the same sense in the Scriptures, in the Gospels, nevertheless, 1°, by this name is announced the kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth, as a society standing in itself and through itself in its own proper form, distinct and different from other societies: of an order, namely, not earthly but supernatural, although constituted on earth out of men; which same unity, constituted in itself and in the proper form of the kingdom, 2°, is described and announced by Christ the Founder under other names and symbols of parables. »

I. The kingdom of God is indeed also the kingdom of the Creator in the natural order. « The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein; for he has founded it upon the seas » (Ps. XXIII. 1; XLIX. 12). « The Lord has prepared his throne in heaven, and his kingdom shall rule over all... bless the Lord, all his works, in every place of his dominion » (Ps. CII. 19, 22; CXLIV. 11, 12; 1 Par. XXIV. 11, 12; Tob. XIII. 1; Dan. III. 100; IV. 31). But the compound phrase kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, and kingdom simply in relation to God, in the New Testament is applied only to the supernatural kingdom, which Christ the Redeemer acquired with his blood and procured for men, and which, insofar as it is on earth, he himself formed by his own laws, institutions, and gifts, and « presented to himself as glorious. » This supernatural kingdom of Jesus Christ is considered under a threefold aspect.

1°. Directly regarded are the graces, virtues, gifts, and internal spiritual adornments; while their manifestation in the conspicuous institutions of the kingdom and in its external visible form is signified or presupposed only indirectly. To the Pharisees, who imagined the Messiah's kingdom as external, in prosperity and worldly glory, the Lord Christ replies: « The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor shall they say, Behold here, or behold there; for behold, the kingdom of God is within you » (ἐντὸς ὑμῶν ἐστιν) (Luke XVII. 20, 21; cf. XII. 31). « For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but justice and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost » (Rom. XIV. 17¹; 1 Cor. IV. 20; cf. Matt. XIX. 12).

2°. Often the kingdom consummated in eternal life is directly signified, where God reigns in all the saints and all the saints reign with him; yet in very many passages the kingdom on earth is also included at the same time, as the preparation for the consummated kingdom itself. « Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the children of the kingdom (the Jews, called first to the kingdom on earth) shall be cast into exterior darkness » (Matt. VIII. 11; Luke XIII. 28); « who has called you to his kingdom and glory » (1 Thess. II. 12); « that you may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which (ὑπὲρ ἧς) you also suffer » (2 Thess. I. 5); « he will save into his heavenly kingdom » (2 Tim. IV. 18; cf. Matt. V. 3, 10; VII. 21; XXVI. 29; Mark IX. 46; X. 23–25; Luke XXII. 16, 18, 29, 30; XXIII. 42; John III. 3, 5; Acts XIV. 21; 1 Cor. VI. 9, 10; XV. 50; Gal. V. 21; Eph. V. 5; Jas. II. 6; 2 Pet. I. 11; Apoc. V. 10).

Sometimes this kingdom is celebrated insofar as, with the number of the saints now complete and with bodies also glorified, the city of God will be perfect in all its parts. After describing his second coming « with great power and majesty », and enumerating its signs, the Lord adds: « When you see these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is near » (Luke XXI. 31). « Then the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God and the Father... but he must reign (in the kingdom on earth), until he has put all his enemies under his feet » (1 Cor. XV. 23–28). « I charge you before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming and his kingdom » (2 Tim. IV. 1; Matt. XIII. 43; XXV. 34; Apoc. XXII. 5).

If the interpretation of several Fathers were true, of Matt. XVI. 28; Mark VIII. 39; Luke IX. 27, the bodily glorification of Christ himself in his still mortal life would be called the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of God. « Properly and significantly he had promised that some of the disciples standing by would not taste death before they saw the Son of man coming in his kingdom, that is, in royal splendour, which he willed to be seen by those three men (Apostles), belonging specially to the nature of the man he had assumed » (St. Leo the Great, sermon 51, c. 2; Chrysostom, in Matt. hom. 56, al. 57, n. 1, and others). But the meaning of the kingdom of God is to be preferred (as Mark and Luke have it), of which we shall speak immediately; so that it is understood, with St. Gregory the Great and others, that the kingdom of God is this Church of Christ, established and widely propagated on earth (St. Gregory, in Evang. hom. 32, n. 6).

3°. This meaning of kingdom of God, kingdom of Christ, kingdom of heaven is very frequent in the New Testament: it is used to designate directly by these names the visible kingdom of its own proper name and proper form, to be established by Christ among men and from men on earth, where the discourse is of the announcing promise, or established, where it is of a fact already accomplished. In this visible kingdom there is certainly included, as dowry and inner property, that which we saw designated in the first place by the name kingdom of God; and there is connected, as term and end, what we said was signified in the second place, namely the consummated kingdom of God. Yet the kingdom directly signified in this third sense is distinguished (by an inadequate distinction) from the former, as the whole from its formal part; while toward the other it stands as the begun toward the perfect, or as the means toward its end. Here we treat of the institution of the kingdom so considered, not as already accomplished but as announced in the Gospels.

II. Just as in the prophetic announcements of the coming Messiah we saw a universal and incorruptible kingdom designated as his work together with himself, so in the announcement of the execution and fulfilment is declared the end and work of the coming of Christ: the constitution of his kingdom, which is to endure perennially among men. This constitution of the kingdom of Christ therefore comprises in summary the whole work and end of the great mystery of the incarnation: the redemption of the world, the expiation of sin, the sanctification and salvation of the human race, and the supreme glorification of God in this kingdom, in the world redeemed, sanctified, and saved, which is the Church united to its head, Christ the Redeemer and Saviour.

1°. Indeed, in the angel's announcement of the incarnation, these three things are declared as the sum of the whole mystery: the person, who is the Son of the Most High, and the Son born at once of the Virgin Mother, and therefore God and man, Emmanuel, God with us, according to the prophecy of Isaiah declared in this very announcement in words and fulfilled in fact (see de Incarnat. th. XV.); then the name of Jesus, and in it, implicitly, the end and office of the Redeemer; finally, this office and this end, described explicitly in the eternal kingdom of the Redeemer, to be established among the redeemed and from the redeemed, according to the preceding types and prophecies in the old economy of preparation. « Behold, you shall conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son (the Holy Ghost shall come upon you, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow you); and you shall call his name Jesus; he shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High (the Holy which shall be born of you shall be called the Son of God); and the Lord God shall give him the throne (τὸν θρόνον) of David his father; and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end » (Luke I. 31–35). In the angel's declaration to St. Joseph, the very name Jesus, Saviour comprises all those things which are explicitly preached in the announcement to the most blessed Mother. Both announcements of the angel are further illuminated by the holy Evangelist, who expressly attests in them the fulfilment of the prophecy concerning Emmanuel: « That which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost; and she shall bring forth a Son, and you shall call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins. Now all this was done that the word might be fulfilled which the Lord spoke by the prophet, saying: behold a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is God with us » (Matt. I. 20–23).

That the throne of David and the kingdom in the house of Jacob directly signify the visible kingdom on earth as the completion of the preceding types in the people of Israel is clear from the very words, although the connection with the consummated kingdom in heaven is at the same time indicated. Hence also the duration for ever (εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας) for each form of the kingdom is to be taken according to the subject matter: in the one form it lasts until the consummation of the age and without end of corruption (Dan. II. 44; VII. 14), though not without end of perfection; in the other, simply without end, for ever.

The supernatural character of this eternal kingdom, and therefore its diversity and eminence over the kingdoms and societies of the natural order, and by this very fact its proper form and its standing in itself, is evident from the person of its founder and king, who is the Son of the Most High and the Son of man, God with us; and from its end and innermost reason, which is salvation from sins, so that it is the kingdom of sanctification in the fulness of time, and of holiness in eternity.

2°. The preaching of the forerunner to prepare the way of the Lord was this: « Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand » (Matt. III. 2). By the testimony of Christ himself, after the economy of preparation in the law and the prophets, from John onward begins the Gospel of the economy of fulfilment, which is called and is the kingdom of God. « The law and the prophets until John; from that time the kingdom of God is evangelized » (Luke XVI. 16; cf. Matt. XI. 12, 13). Hence the Gospel of Jesus Christ himself and of his disciples is comprised in this summary, that it is the Gospel, or the word of the kingdom. « Jesus came into Galilee preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand »; « Jesus went about preaching the Gospel² of the kingdom »; « he who hears the word of the kingdom »; « this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations »; « and I must evangelize the kingdom of God to the other cities also, because for this (εἰς τοῦτο) I was sent »; To the Jews who rejected the Messiah promised and sent, he himself said: « The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation (one nation, because one kingdom) that shall bring forth its fruit » (Matt. IV. 23; IX. 35; XIII. 11, 19; XXI. 43; XXIV. 14; Mark I. 14; Luke IV. 43; VIII. 1; IX. 2, 11, 60; XVIII. 17; Acts I. 3; VIII. 12; XIX. 8; XX. 25; XXVIII. 23, 31).

3°. The Jews, not only the carnal but all also the pious and spiritual, expected the kingdom of the Messiah on earth according to the predictions of the prophets; indeed this expectation of the kingdom coincided with the expectation of the coming of the Messiah. For one of the solemn names for designating the properties and marks of the Messiah was Son of David, or Israel (John I. 49; Matt. II. 2; XXVII. 11; John XIX. 19–22). Hence, to celebrate the prophecies fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, these acclamations are held as synonymous: « blessed is he who comes, the king of Israel » (John XII. 13–16; Luke XIX. 38); « who comes, the Son of David » (Matt. XXI. 9); and « blessed is the kingdom of our father David that comes » (Mark XI. 10).

This expectation of the Messianic kingdom, although it was erroneous in men of carnal mind as to its character, nonetheless as to the thing itself, namely of a visible kingdom and of its own constitution and form to be founded among men, by which the typical kingdom of the Old Testament would be perfected and transferred into the prefigured kingdom of the New Testament, is most manifestly approved and confirmed by Christ himself and by the sacred writers: both in the manner in which we saw Christ and the Apostles declaring their whole preaching to be the Gospel of the kingdom expected by the people; and in the manner in which they presented this kingdom, prefigured and promised in the Old Testament, as the throne of David, the eternal kingdom of the Son of David, the kingdom of Emmanuel; and in the manner in which they approve and describe the expectation of the Israelites. « Joseph of Arimathea himself also (like the other disciples, cf. Matt. XXVIII. 57) was waiting for the kingdom of God » (Mark XV. 43; Luke XXIII. 51); « that these two sons of mine may sit in your kingdom... he said to them: it is not mine to give, but to them for whom it is prepared by my Father » (Matt. XX. 21); « will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? And he said to them: it is not for you to know the times or the moments (of this restoration, certainly of a supernatural and universal kingdom); but you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you, and you shall be witnesses to me... even to the uttermost part of the earth » (Acts I. 6).

4°. In the immediate preparation for the sacrifice of the cross, by which he was to acquire the kingdom, Christ the Redeemer professed himself a king, and a kingdom to himself, his kingdom, truly in this world; for the whole question, both of the Jews and of Pilate, was about the visible kingdom in this world; and this kingdom, which they denied, he claimed to be his own, but of another order than they imagined, namely of the supernatural order. « My kingdom is not of this world... but now my kingdom is not from hence. » Augustine comments on these words, which are sufficiently clear in themselves: « He did not say, My kingdom is not in this world, but is not of this world... he did not say, now my kingdom is not here, but is not from here; for here is his kingdom until the end of the age » (Augustine, in Ioan. tract. 115, n. 2). Of himself, the acquirer and founder of the kingdom, Christ said: « You are from beneath, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world » (John VIII. 23; XVII. 13–16). He was a true man in this world, but a man who, being a divine person, is God through his other, divine, nature; so also his kingdom, a radiant splendour and an expressed image of the God-man, is a true visible kingdom in this world, yet by all its causes and gifts a kingdom of the supernatural order; and in this sense, though visible, it is spiritual, constituted out of men and in men, a divine-human kingdom not of this world. And that the disciples, the citizens of the kingdom, should each reproduce in themselves this very image of the kingdom, expressed after the model of Christ, he himself commanded, and asked of the Father, in that testamentary prayer after the last supper: « When he had loved his own who were in the world... and the world hated them, because they are not of the world, as I am not of the world » (John XIII. 1; XV. 19; XVI. 11, 12, 16).

Moreover, the supernatural order of his kingdom Christ declares in that answer to Pilate not only negatively, that it is not of this world, but also positively, as from the first and essential property of the kingdom: that it is a kingdom of truth; for he founds his kingdom on the truth, which he himself, the King of truth, brings from above to men in the world and reveals. « You say (that is, you say what is true, cf. Matt. XXVI. 64) that I am a king: for this I was born, and for this I came into the world (cf. John XVI. 28, etc.), that I should give testimony to the truth; everyone who is of the truth hears my voice » (John XVIII. 36, 37). As Jerusalem was foretold as the city of truth and Sion as the mountain of holiness (th. VI.), so this foundation of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, who is the truth and the life itself (ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή) (John XIV. 6), is preached above all in the New Testament, as we shall see in its place. « Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ »; « he will give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you for ever, the Spirit of truth »; « the Spirit of truth shall teach you all truth »; « the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth » (John I. 17; XIV. 16; XVI. 13; 1 Tim. III. 15). This truth is what sanctifies the citizens in the kingdom of truth. « You shall be truly my disciples, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free »; « sanctify them in the truth » (ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ); « he begot us by the word of truth, that we might be some beginning of his creature » (ἀπαρχήν τινα τῶν αὐτοῦ κτισμάτων) (John VIII. 32; XVII. 17, 19; Jas. I. 18).

Thus, in the very beginnings of the Gospel and in the immediate preparation, the kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, kingdom of Jesus Christ, or even simply the kingdom, is declared to be established by the Redeemer himself from men and for men on earth, to be substituted for the imperfect kingdom of Israel which prefigured this kingdom of the New Testament; and thus a visible kingdom, subsisting in its own proper form and unity, to endure perpetually (« he shall reign for ever »); universal, from all nations (« the Gospel of the kingdom in the whole world »); a supernatural kingdom of truth and holiness, whose citizens are disciples and sons of the truth, just as the kingdom itself and its king and founder are: in this world but not of this world.

III. This same kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth is exhibited under another figure, of one flock to be constituted by Christ himself, the good shepherd, out of all nations, as his sheep to be redeemed by his blood and to be fed by himself, the great shepherd, also through shepherds as ministers, for the eternal salvation of Christ's sheep. Also by manifold parables the Lord himself wished to illustrate the Gospel of the kingdom, in which, as we saw, the summary of evangelical preaching and of the immediate preparation is comprised, and to set it as before the eyes, of what kind this kingdom of God on earth, one and universal, is to be.

1°. In the Old Testament the people of Israel, the peculiar people of the true God, is often described as the flock of sheep of the Lord. « He is the Lord our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand » (Ps. LXXIII. 1; LXXVIII. 13; XCIV. 7; XCIX. 3; Jer. XXIII; Ezek. XXXIV; Mic. VII. 14, and often elsewhere). The Lord reproves the shepherds of Israel, namely the priests and princes of the theocracy of the Old Testament, who scattered the flock; and, having rejected them, he foretells that a new Israel, the flock of God from all nations, shall be substituted, over which the Lord of the sheep will raise up « one shepherd, his servant David, who shall feed them, and he himself shall be their shepherd. » « And my servant David shall be king over them, and there shall be one shepherd of them all... and I will make with them a covenant of peace, it shall be an everlasting covenant with them » (Ezek. XXXIV. 23; XXXVII. 24, 26; Zech. XI. 7). Under this one shepherd, who is « the branch of David », God promises: « I will raise up shepherds over them, and they shall feed them; they shall not fear any more, nor be dismayed » (Jer. XXIII. 4, 5). These shepherds are promised for the new Jerusalem, not of one people but of all nations. « And I will give you shepherds according to my heart, and they shall feed you with knowledge and doctrine... In that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord (not the ark of the old covenant, but the new city of God shall be wholly the throne of the Lord), and all nations shall be gathered to it in the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem » (Jer. III. 15, 17). (See th. VI.).

Now Christ the Lord declares this one flock, this promised one fold from all nations, under one shepherd, to be his flock of sheep, and himself to be the one shepherd.

a) He announces himself as the good shepherd, because by the shedding of his blood for the salvation of his sheep he gathers them, indeed he makes them his own sheep. « I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd gives his life for his sheep »; « and I lay down my life for my sheep »; « and I give them eternal life » (John X. 10, 11, 15, 28).

He gathers the sheep and feeds them by the doctrine of his magisterium, and rules them by the power of his empire; and thus men become the sheep of Christ, following his magisterium by the hearing of faith and his empire by the holiness of morals. « You do not believe, because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; and I know them, and they follow me »; « I am the good shepherd, and I know mine, and mine know me » (John X. 14, 26, 27).

As there is one shepherd, so there shall be one fold, not only from the sons of Israel but equally also from the Gentiles, under one shepherd. « And I have other sheep that are not of this fold; and them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd » (John X. 16).

b) This one shepherd (ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός, with the article) is Christ himself. But since he willed that his fold on earth, and one fold, should perpetually exist, for he promised that no one would snatch the sheep, at least as they are collectively one flock and one fold, out of his hand, which is the very hand or power of the Father (John X. 28–30); therefore by himself, by his own authority as the one shepherd, other shepherds are to be instituted for his ministry, who in relation to his fold feed in his name and by his authority, and in relation to Christ are fed as his sheep. There will therefore be other shepherds, but none by any authority other than his, who is the one divine shepherd. But what the form of the flock and of the shepherds will be, after the Lord and good shepherd has himself ceased to feed his own sheep visibly on earth, is to be treated much more fully and distinctly in the declaration of the execution itself, which does not belong to this place. We shall then understand how the divine shepherd committed his whole fold, which we have just seen announced by him as sanctified by the sacrifice of his life, governed by his doctrine and power, gathered from all nations so as to be one under one shepherd, with power communicated by himself, to one supreme shepherd, his vicar, so that by visible ministry the unity of the visible fold might be preserved perpetually: « feed my lambs, feed my sheep » (John XXI. 15–17). But just as for unity he instituted one supreme and universal shepherd of the whole flock, so, by reason of the unity and at the same time the universality of the flock, he willed that under that one shepherd there should be many shepherds, each of whom, indeed, does not feed the whole flock, but « feed the flock of God which is among them, providing for it » (ἐπισκοποῦντες) (1 Pet. V. 2). All the shepherds³ in the earth ministering to the one Christ are members, as St. Augustine speaks, of the divine shepherd whose sheep are his own; and thus one shepherd and one fold. « Let the fold of the Lord have prelates, both sons and hirelings. But the prelates who are sons are shepherds. If they are shepherds, how is there one shepherd, unless because they are all members of one shepherd, whose own sheep they are? » (Augustine, in Ioan. tract. 46, n. 5).

2°. While Christ the Lord announces the kingdom of God that he is to found on earth, he often describes in parables of what kind it will be; in these he either explicitly declares, or implicitly indicates by the very universality of his kingdom, that this kingdom of his is to be substituted for the old typical kingdom, conspicuous in its own proper form and constitution. In it not one peculiar people, as that typical economy instituted by God was, but all nations, the transformed world, without distinction of nation and race, are embraced.

The kingdom of God of the Old Testament is described by the prophets among a peculiar people under the symbol of a vineyard planted by the Lord God, which, separated from the forests and the wild deserts, or from all nations alien to it, constituted the kingdom of God, certainly visible in its own name and proper form. « You have brought a vine out of Egypt; you have cast out the nations, and planted it... you planted its roots, and it filled the land » (Ps. LXXIX. 9 ff.; Is. V. 1 ff.; Jer. II. 21; XII. 10; Ezek. XIX. 10 ff.). Now Christ the Lord takes up the same parable for his kingdom on earth, and to declare the transference of the kingdom of God to the nations, who will be one nation because one kingdom; and at the same time he describes the cause of this transference, or rather the removal of the kingdom from the Jewish people, foretold by the prophets: because « Christ shall be slain, and the people that shall deny him shall not be his... and he shall confirm the covenant with many » (Dan. IX. 26, 27). The Saviour's description is this: « There was a man, a householder (οἰκοδεσπότης), who planted a vineyard, and put a hedge round about it, and dug in it a winepress, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen. » Almost in the same words the founding of the kingdom of God among the people of Israel is described in Is. V. 2, concluding: « for the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel. » The master of the house, the Lord of the vineyard, which he had abundantly furnished with all defences and supports, sent his servants in a continuous succession (prophets and other faithful ministers), that he might receive fruit from the husbandmen. But they struck one, killed another, stoned another. « And last of all he sent to them his Son (having one most beloved Son, in Mark; his beloved Son, in Luke), saying: they will reverence my Son. But the husbandmen... seized him and cast him out of the vineyard and killed him »⁴. What will the Lord of the vineyard now do to those husbandmen? « He will destroy those evil men miserably, and will let out his vineyard to other husbandmen (he will give it to others, in Mark and Luke), who shall render him fruit in due season... Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation that brings forth its fruit » (Matt. XXI. 33 ff.; Mark XII; Luke XX).

With this parable of the vineyard there is intimately joined another, in which the kingdom of heaven on earth is represented as the marriage feast of the king's Son. We shall treat in its place of the marriage of the Son of God made flesh with the Church, and of the Church as bride; there we shall also see the espousal already described in the Old Testament with the one peculiar people of God, but so that the unfaithful bride was to be repudiated and replaced by « an everlasting espousal », in which the Lord says: « I will say to what was not my people: you are my people; and he shall say: you are my God » (Hos. II).

Each part of this symbol of the marriage corresponds to each part of the former parable, so that the one signification of both is manifest. « The kingdom of heaven is like to a king who made a marriage for his son. And he sent his servants to call them that were invited (καλέσαι τοὺς κεκλημένους) to the marriage, and they would not come. Again he sent other servants... but they made light of it... and the rest laid hold on his servants, and having treated them contumeliously, killed them. » What the husbandmen, to whom the vineyard representing the kingdom of God on earth was first let out, did to the servants sent in succession to demand the fruit, the same thing the invited guests, who were first and before others invited and thus prepared by the king himself for the marriage, did to the king's servants sent in a similar succession. But what in the former parable is the sending of the Son whom they killed, here is the marriage of the Son which they despised. Hence, as there he will destroy those evil men miserably, the vineyard of the kingdom of God is given to others, and this kingdom is transferred to the nations; so all the same things are repeated in the marriage feast of the Son, which are the kingdom of heaven itself on earth. « But the king... destroyed those murderers and burned their city (Jerusalem, the centre of the typical kingdom)... Go therefore into the highways, and whomsoever you shall find, call to the marriage. And the servants going out into the ways gathered together all they found, both bad and good⁵, and the marriage feast was filled with guests. » To this is added that great distinction among the guests: that for the present state of the marriage feast of the kingdom, among those adorned with the wedding garment there are also those who have not the garment of justice; and among the just in one visible kingdom there are also sinners. « But the king went in to see the guests, and he saw there a man who had not on a wedding garment » (Matt. XXII. 2–14). But concerning this stage of the one, universal, visible kingdom of heaven on earth, in which there are sinners together with the just, the Gospels present another series of parables of Christ the Saviour, which the Bishops of Africa, following Augustine, pressed especially against the Donatists; wherefore those parables are to be reserved for another place, where we shall deliberately treat of the members of the Church.

That the vineyard let out to the nations, and the guests gathered from the streets and lanes who recline at the marriage of the King's Son, signify, this very thing is exhibited through the kingdom of heaven under the symbol of the grain of mustard seed, though shadowed in very few words: « The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed... but when it is grown it is greater than all herbs, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and dwell in its branches » (Matt. XIII. 31, 32). The kingdom of heaven, to be founded on earth by Jesus Christ, from beginnings that by human estimation are very small and despised, grows far more sublime than all earthly kingdoms, embracing all nations for their life and salvation. Thus also the transformation of the world in the kingdom and through the kingdom of Jesus Christ is shadowed, while it is said: « the kingdom of heaven is like to leaven », which, though very small in quantity and hidden, pervades and transforms the whole mass of flour: « she hid it in three measures of meal (cf. Gen. XVIII. 6) until the whole was leavened » (Matt. XIII. 33).

Without going further, from what has been said in the thesis it is sufficiently clear in what form the Saviour Christ, from his manifestation in the flesh and from the first beginnings of his preaching and preparation, declared that his divine religion, the truth revealed by him, and the holiness prescribed by him, were to be instituted and founded. Namely, the divine plan was not merely to reveal religion as in the abstract, which individuals would follow privately, each by the persuasion of faith and by the morals of his life left to himself, bound by no bonds of authority, power, obedience, and subjection, as in a philosophical school; but rather, just as we saw it foretold by the prophets, so from the promised and sent Redeemer, at the very beginnings of the execution, it was announced that out of all nations there should be founded the kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God on earth, one and universal; and this kingdom itself is to be formed by the faith and profession of the revealed truth, by the discipline and institutions of supernatural holiness; and thus in this kingdom, by social unity through authority and power, both the whole community and each individual by himself are to be preserved and governed in the profession of revealed truth and in the attainment of supernatural holiness. Therefore the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Jesus Christ, whose foundation has been announced by him in the way we have seen, is in concreto the very religion of Jesus Christ, which cannot exist without and outside this form of kingdom.

« Christ the Lord, in the very form of his preaching, displayed as in a model the form of his Church; and this form, constituted in a visible and living authority on the one hand and in obedience of faith toward that same authority on the other, he transmitted into the Church, when he began its institution by calling faithful disciples, and from all of them by the choice of the twelve Apostles, to whom, constituted into one body under himself as one head, he communicated authority to claim the obedience of faith, while at the same time preparing a perennial participation in fuller power and a hierarchical unity under one visible head, for the time when his visible presence would be withdrawn. »

I. Christ the Lord, as is manifest from the whole Gospel, from the beginning of his preaching showed himself above all to be the divine legate and the Messiah promised, and expected by the Jews at that very time according to the oracles of the prophets (cf. P. Patrizi, In Evangel., diss. 26, n. 7, and diss. 27, c. 4, p. 4), who therefore was to complete in doctrine, in worship, and in the kingdom of God what had been foretold and prefigured about the Messiah and his kingdom throughout the whole patriarchal, Mosaic, and prophetic economy. After the supernatural manifestations of the promised Messiah at his very birth (Luke II. 8–19, 25–38; Matt. II. 1 ff.), John was sent, in the spirit of Elias and more than a prophet, to show that he was now present and to prepare the way of the Lord (Matt. III. 1–14; Mark I. 1–8; Luke I. 15–17, 68–79; III. 1–17; John I. 15, 36; III. 27 ff.). In the very solemn initiation of his preaching, the visible appearance of the Holy Spirit and the voice of the Father declaring him to the whole people « his beloved Son, in whom he was well pleased » (Matt. III. 16, 17; cf. XVII. 5; John XII. 28, 30); miracles, continuous throughout his whole public life and wrought with a manifest direction and even an express declaration to the same end, of winning faith in a divine mission ¹; prophecies fulfilled in his birth, life, and teaching ²; the divine holiness of his life, repugnant to falsehood of doctrine and to the grasping or usurpation of divinity (cf. Phil. II. 6); the very doctrine and manner of teaching, in which the light of truth shone in the holiness and sublimity of the mystery, majesty in ineffable sweetness, divinity in humanity ³; all these things (subsequently completed and confirmed through the passion and death foretold in each of its circumstances, through the resurrection, through the mission of the Holy Spirit and the building of the Church) were so many rays of external light illuminating the divinity of the doctrine and of the person, by which, with the inner light of grace added, Jesus of Nazareth was shown to be evidently credible and to be believed, as the Messiah promised and sent by the Father according to the prophecies of the Scriptures: king of Israel, savior and one shepherd of the people of God, sponsor of the new and eternal covenant, father of the age to come, desired by all nations, in whom all generations were to be blessed, the Son of God begotten in the eternal day, whose going forth was both from the beginning, from the days of eternity, and last of all from Bethlehem; God himself coming to save, Emmanuel, God-with-us.

Christ, by his mission from the Father and by the supreme authority thus demonstrated, demands full « obedience of faith » to his doctrine of truth and to his precepts and institutions of holiness, under the sanction of eternal life or eternal death. « For God so loved the world, as to give his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. He who believes in him is not judged; but he who does not believe is already judged, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God » (John III. 16, 18, 36). « If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love; as I also have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love » (John XIV. 15, 21, 24; XV. 10, 14; 1 John II. 3, etc.).

II. This form of authority divinely given in teaching and in sacred rule, on the one hand, and of the « obedience of faith » answering to it, on the other, Christ willed not only for the time of his visible presence, in his divine person, in whom the divine authority of truth and of lawgiving in teaching and commanding was inherent originally and essentially « (the way, the truth, and the life); » but he willed the same form to be the inner and proper form of his whole kingdom on earth. He made this manifest at the very first initiation of his kingdom, both by preparing that form in deeds as it was to be, and by promising it in words.

1°. Indeed, when Christ the Lord first began to preach the kingdom of God to be established by him on earth, he at once called disciples and joined them in one society, by a lasting sharing of life, to himself as their « Lord and Master » (John XIII. 14), and from these he chose twelve, whom he constituted as one special college, distinguished by many prerogatives from his other faithful; and this with a solemnity expressly noted in the Gospel. « And it came to pass in those days, that he went out into a mountain to pray, and he continued all night in the prayer of God. And when day was come, he called to him his disciples, and chose twelve of them, whom also he named Apostles: Simon, whom he surnamed Peter, and Andrew his brother » etc. (Luke VI. 12 ff.) ⁴ (cf. John VI. 67–69; Acts I. 21, 22).

It is most worth noting that from then on they are constantly called, by a collegial name proper to them, as one moral body: those twelve, with the article, οἱ δώδεκα (Matt. X. 1; XI. 1; XX. 17, 24; XXVI. 14, 20, 47; Mark III. 14; IV. 10; VI. 7; IX. 34; X. 32; XI. 11; XIV. 10, 17, 20, 47; Acts VI. 2). Indeed they retain the same name twelve as their proper name even after the death of the traitor and before the election of Matthias (John XX. 24; 1 Cor. XV. 5, in the Greek text), when elsewhere they are called eleven, οἱ ἕνδεκα (Matt. XXVIII. 16; Mark XVI. 14; Luke XXIV. 9; Acts I. 26). By this same name, οἱ ἕνδεκα, the college is called even when only ten are present (Luke XXIV. 33; cf. John XX. 24). Conversely the name twelve is kept to designate the whole college even at a time when, with Matthias and Paul assumed, there are already thirteen Apostles in the true sense (Matt. XIX. 28; Apoc. XXI. 14).

That these twelve were already distinguished from all the other disciples by a higher office is clear from the very fact and manner of their election; from the name given them, Apostles, that is, legates of Christ in his kingdom; from expressions that set this distinct college over against the other disciples and faithful of Christ, e.g. « the eleven and those who were with them » (οἱ ἕνδεκα καὶ οἱ σὺν αὐτοῖς), cf. Luke XXIV. 9, 33; and from the way in which the office of the Apostles is explicitly marked off, as authentic testimony, even before the coming of the Holy Spirit, in opposition to any other witnesses however fit by faith and knowledge: « It is necessary that of these men who have been with us all the time ... one become a witness with us of his resurrection ... show whom you have chosen to take this ministry and apostleship (κλῆρον τῆς οἰκονομίας ταύτης καὶ ἀποστολῆς) ... and he was numbered with the eleven Apostles » (Acts I. 21 f.). But of all this there is no need, for the whole economy of Christ clearly shows the special relation the Apostles have in the kingdom of God, both to the Lord by whom they are sent, and to all the other disciples, whether united or to be united, for whom they are sent.

2°. Considering therefore the Apostles in this earlier stage of preformation, of which we are now speaking, we see first of all the Lord instructing these chosen twelve, beyond the rest of the multitude of disciples, in the mysteries of the kingdom of God for their ministry as legates, expressed by the very name apostleship. The whole Gospel story bears witness to this. « Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them in parables ... But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear » (Matt. XIII. 11, 16). « I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from my Father (to be revealed to men), I have made known to you » (ἐγνώρισα ὑμῖν, either explicitly in itself or at least implicitly in the promise of the Holy Spirit) (John XV. 15; cf. XVI. 12). The purpose of this special institution is declared in the precept that what they heard apart, and as if in darkness, they should « speak in the light and preach upon the housetops » (Matt. X. 27).

Hence first of all we see them in the intimate company of Jesus as he goes through cities and villages preaching and proclaiming the kingdom of God: « he went about ... preaching and evangelizing the kingdom of God, and the twelve with him » (Luke VIII. 1). Then indeed the Lord sends the twelve themselves to « preach the kingdom of God, » enjoining on them the same form he used himself, namely that, the divine mission having been shown by signs and powers, to the authority of preaching and teaching there should correspond, on the other side, the duty of obedience of faith under the sanction of eternal damnation on the day of judgment. The form, the demonstration, the authority, and the sanction of the Apostles' preaching are the same as in the preaching of Christ himself; except that in Christ, as the only-begotten sent by the Father, the power and authority are as it were in the fountain, while in the Apostles they are the same but derived from Christ, since they are men sent by him. Of Christ's preaching it was said: « Then he began to upbraid the cities in which most of his mighty works were done, because they had not done penance ... It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for you; and you, Capharnaum ... I say to you, that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom at the day of judgment than for you » (Matt. XI. 20 ff.). Of the Apostles: « These twelve Jesus sent, commanding them ... go, preach, saying: the kingdom of heaven is at hand; heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils ... and whoever shall not receive you nor hear your words (ἀκούσῃ – ἀκοὴ τῆς πίστεως?) ... amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah at the day of judgment than for that city » (Matt. X. 5–15; Luke IX. 1–6).

The divine Master established, as a general principle, the derivation of authority from Christ to his legates, as we have said. The first and most basic statement of it is found in the choice and mission of the twelve Apostles: « These twelve Jesus sent, commanding them ... go, preach ... he who receives you, receives me; and he who receives me, receives him who sent me » (Matt. X. 5, 7, 40). But so that all power in the kingdom of Christ may be understood as derived by participation from the power that exists originally and as a model in Christ himself, the King, Teacher, and Priest, and so that the distinction of degrees of the hierarchy in the same kingdom may already be shown in outline, the Lord, after the college of the twelve Apostles had already been instituted in that authority of legates ⁵, « appointed also other seventy-two, and sent them two by two before his face into every city and place whither he himself was to come. » These men, though sent by him, he did not create as Apostles, nor did he make them equal to the Apostles; yet the same principle of derivation, and consequently the reference of authority back to its very fountain, Christ, certainly holds for them too: « He who hears you, hears me; and he who despises you, despises me; and he who despises me, despises him who sent me » (Luke X. 1, 16).

3°. The college of the twelve Apostles itself, though not yet fully constituted in its final form and perfection, was nevertheless already being prepared by Christ the Lord, during his mortal life, for this full constitution, chiefly as regards the hierarchical order.

a) As long as the visible Lord and Master himself was living with the Apostles, there was neither place nor need for another visible head, or center and bond of unity. But on every occasion Christ himself warns and foretells that for the future time after his departure, one of them is to be set up over them and above them as greater, first, leader (ἡγούμενον) in the kingdom of God on earth. Whenever he speaks of his departure from the Apostles, almost always a question arises among them: « which of them seemed to be the greater? » They therefore did not yet know any « greater » among themselves, but they were quite certain that one would be such for the time of the constituted kingdom of Christ on earth. In the Lord's answers to these questions, three things are usually contained, explicitly or implicitly: that no one as yet is constituted greater among them, and that he alone is their leader and master (ὁ καθηγητής); that, however, someone from among them is to be constituted greater and leader in his place, when he will no longer be visibly with them; and that the ministry he gives, in the exercise of power, is very different from the ambitious domination of princes among the nations, so that the leader, although greater in power, nevertheless in humility feels himself the minister of all, after the example of the Lord and Master himself. That is, he exercises the power of the greater not for his own advantage and ambition, but for the common fruit and salvation in the kingdom of God. « And there was also a strife among them, which of them seemed to be the greater (for that time, namely, when what Christ said was to come to pass: the Son of man goes, according to what is determined; from which prediction this strife arose). And he said to them: the kings of the nations lord it over them, and those who have power are called benefactors ⁶. But you not so; but let him that is greater among you become as the younger, and he that is the leader as the minister. For which is greater, he that sits at table, or he that serves? is not it he that sits at table? but I am in the midst of you as he that serves » (Luke XXII. 24 ff.; cf. Matt. XX. 24–28; Mark X. 42–45). « The Lord and Master » (John XIII. 13, 14, 16) sets himself up as the example in both respects, first with regard to true power and authority. There will therefore be in the kingdom of God someone among the Apostles who is greater and leader (ὁ μείζων, ὁ ἡγούμενος), together with power and authority; which also appears from the opposition between leader and minister, greater and lesser, for he who in fact will be greater and leader is to be as the lesser and the minister, not in fact and power but in the manner of his exercise. Lastly, this is clear from the comparison drawn between the greater and the leader in the kingdom of God and the true power with its perverse exercise among the kings of the nations. Therefore the Lord, secondly, sets himself up as the example as regards the exercise of power in his kingdom. The Lord often repeats the same promise and warning about the future primacy of one, and about the manner of its exercise: « If anyone wishes to be first (πρῶτος), he shall be the last of all and the minister of all » (Mark IX. 33, 34). He had spoken of the true authority of the Pharisees and scribes, insofar as « they sat on the chair of Moses »; from this he infers: « all things, therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you (ὅσα ἐὰν εἴπωσιν ὑμῖν τηρεῖν), observe and do. » Then indeed he rebukes their manner of exercising authority and their works: for they bind heavy and insupportable burdens, do all their works that they may be seen by men, love (φιλοῦσι, with ambition and pride) the first places at table, the first seats, greetings in the marketplace, and to be called Rabbi by men (καλεῖσθαι ῥαββί, ῥαββί). From this he passes to authority, and to the manner of exercising it in his own kingdom: « But you, do not be called Rabbi; for one is your Master (ὑμῶν ὁ καθηγητής), and all you are brothers; and call no one father upon earth, for one is your Father, who is in heaven; nor be called masters (καθηγηταί), for one is your Master (ὁ καθηγητής), Christ. He who is greater among you (ὁ δὲ μείζων ὑμῶν) shall be your minister » (Matt. XXIII. 8–11; cf. XVIII. 1; Luke IX. 46 f.). Thus there is one Master, Christ, in a twofold way: one visible Master for the time in which he spoke, of his visible presence on earth; and one Master for all future time, for which he chiefly spoke. For all authentic magisterium and all power (τὸ καθηγεμονικόν) in his kingdom is only a participation derived from him, and this external teaching has no efficacy except from his internal teaching; therefore « all shall be taught by God » (θεοδίδακτοι, cf. Tract. de Trad., ed. 2, p. 107 ff.). Just as there is one Master, Christ, so there is one Father in heaven, in the sense, namely, of eminence (καθ' ὑπεροχήν). This does not exclude but includes, just as in the natural order so in the kingdom of Christ, fatherhood and teaching through participation. Therefore the Lord adds, « He who is greater among you »; yet this very thing is not for pharisaic pride « (do not be called Rabbi) », but for ministry unto salvation « (shall be your minister). »

b) This greater, first, leader among and over the Apostles the Lord, in this stage of his mortal and bodily presence, had not yet constituted, but he clearly designated Simon, and prepared the very reality of this primacy, and declared its ground and manner.

This preparation is already contained in Simon's very first calling, when Jesus gave him the name Peter, or foundation: « Jesus, looking upon him, said: You are Simon the son of Jona; you shall be called Cephas, which is interpreted Peter » (John I. 42). In the choice, and again in the mission of the twelve Apostles, this name Peter is noted more expressly; and by reason of this name and of the thing signified, Peter is not only everywhere placed first in order, but is also explicitly declared first among the Apostles. « He chose twelve of them, whom also he named Apostles: Simon, whom he surnamed Peter, and Andrew his brother, James, and John » etc. (Luke VI. 14). « And calling together his twelve disciples he gave them power over unclean spirits ... Now the names of the twelve Apostles are these: the first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, James ... These twelve Jesus sent » (Matt. X. 2 ff.; Mark III. 16). By the facts themselves the Lord set him apart from the other Apostles as leader. Not only among those whom he admitted to a special confidence is Peter everywhere noted as first, but the divine Master seems to act almost always with him alone, above the rest. At the raising of Jairus's daughter, « he did not allow anyone to enter with him but Peter, and James, and John »; at the transfiguration, « he took with him Peter, and James, and John ... But Peter and those who were with him (Πέτρος καὶ οἱ σὺν αὐτῷ) ⁷ were heavy with sleep; and waking they saw his majesty ... Peter said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here »; at the agony on the Mount of Olives, « he took with him Peter, and James, and John ... and he came and found them sleeping, and said to Peter: Simon, are you sleeping? could you not watch one hour with me? watch and pray » (Luke VIII. 51; IX. 28 ff.; Mark XIV. 33 ff.). He bids Peter let down the nets for a catch of fishes, and when « astonishment had seized him, and all who were with him (πάντας τοὺς σὺν αὐτῷ), and likewise James and John ... Jesus said to Simon: Fear not; from now on you shall be a catcher of men » ⁸ (Luke V. 10). When the Apostles, seeing Jesus walking on the sea, were troubled and said it was a phantom, « Peter, answering (to the word of the Lord, It is I, fear not), said: Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you upon the waters; and he said: Come ... and immediately Jesus, stretching out his hand, took hold of him » (Matt. XIV. 28). When those collecting the didrachma (the temple tax) ask, « Does not your master pay the didrachma? », the Son of God works a miracle to pay it for himself and for Peter at once, as one juridical person together with him: take the fish, « and when you have opened its mouth you will find a stater; take that and give it to them for me and for you » ⁹ (Matt. XVII. 27).

These first outlines, as it were, of the greater, first, leader among the Apostles are not to be considered singly but all together, so that they may finally be understood as converging on the explicit declaration of this primacy. For the Lord Christ, in the last year of his preaching, when he first began to foretell to the disciples his departure, his passion and death (Mark VIII. 31–33), and a few days before he displayed his glorification in the transfiguration on the mountain, and again at the last supper, when he was about to pass from this world, promised in plain words and with solemn testimony that he would build his Church upon Peter alone, chosen from all the Apostles, a name then first used in the Gospels for the Church; and that in this one city of God, to be built so upon the rock that the gates of hell would never prevail against it, since it is an eternal kingdom which will not be given to another nation, and Christ himself will reign in the house of Jacob for ever, he would give to this same Peter the supreme power of the keys, to loose and to bind whatever pertains to that visible kingdom of heaven on earth, so that just as this kingdom itself, begun on earth, looks to the consummated kingdom in heaven, so also the power looks to that end and has force and value in relation to it (Matt. XVI. 18). The reason for the rock and for the promised power of the keys in the kingdom of heaven is explained according to one¹⁰ inner element at the last supper, when Christ, the corner stone and foundation, promises of himself that he will so strengthen Peter's faith that through Peter he will confirm the brethren, that is, the whole brotherhood in the world that is to be strengthened in faith (1 Pet. V. 9), that is, the whole Church; and thus the Church, founded upon the rock, will be the pillar and firmament of truth (Luke XXII. 32). But since these things are already a declaration of the inner reason of the kingdom of God on earth, according to its monarchical form, we must treat of them elsewhere, in the explanation of the very constitution¹¹ of the Church.

4°. When Christ promised and prepared the supreme power in the city of God, in the kingdom of heaven, to be future in one first and leader, and designated Simon Peter for this, he certainly did not dissolve the college of the twelve Apostles. But just as then it was one under Christ as visible head, so he willed its unity to be firm and to be preserved for all future time, as long as the Church persists against which the gates of hell will not prevail; and therefore also in apostolic succession, under one visible head substituted for himself, with vicarious and participated power. Hence, a short time after the promise of that supreme power of the keys made to Peter alone, before all and over all the Apostles, Christ also declares the power of sacred rule in the Church, insofar as it is to be constituted in the apostolic college, not separately from Peter, but together with Peter and in subordination under him, just as this subordination is already contained in the promise made earlier to Peter alone ¹².

It is manifest that by Christ the Lord, Matt. XVIII. 17, 18, judicial power and power of rule in general for and in the Church is designated as future; but the question is to whom in the Church that power is to be conferred, and what is, as they are wont to say, its determinate subject. The whole discourse of Christ in that chapter of Matthew (compare Mark IX. 34 ff.) is directed to the Apostles. « In that hour the disciples (οἱ μαθηταί) came to Jesus » (Matt.); « sitting down, he called the twelve » (τοὺς δώδεκα) (Mark). To this college of twelve disciples, in the course of his discourse, he announces among other things the matters that now concern us. « If your brother shall offend against you, go and rebuke him ... if he will not hear you, take with you yet one or two more ... And if he will not hear them, tell the Church; and if he will not hear the Church, let him be to you as the heathen and the publican. Amen I say to you, whatever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven; and whatever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven. » In those words, tell the Church; if he will not hear the Church, there is signified a judgment and a juridical sentence to be pronounced by the Church, so that the obstinate may be excluded as heathens and publicans, in contrast to the private correction from the duty of charity, which is treated in the immediately preceding verses. But such juridical power already presupposes, of itself, not the whole Church as subject of power, but certain persons in the Church who are invested with that right and office, and this by no one other than the very author of the Church, who here speaks and announces the institution to come in the Church ¹³. But there is no need for this deduction, since the meaning of the name Church is clearly determined by the words themselves in the immediately following context: amen I say to you (to the Apostles, τοὺς δώδεκα), whatever you bind, whatever you loose upon earth, shall be bound, loosed in heaven. In the preceding verses the Church is indicated less explicitly as binding and loosing; here that power is explicitly promised to those twelve alone, the Apostolic college in the Church, that is, for all future times as long as the Church persists. So the question is about ordinary power, and power to be propagated to the succession of the Apostolic college, as already promised by Christ the founder to be ordained and disposed with Peter and under Peter; for extraordinary power, which was in the individual Apostles and does not pass to successors, must be established not from this and similar passages but from elsewhere. Moreover, the words of Christ, whatever you bind, whatever you loose, certainly refer also to the judicial power indicated in the immediately preceding verses, and include it, but they extend much more widely to the government of the Church, of which we shall speak in their proper places.

Therefore, just as the hierarchy under one visible head was prepared by Christ the Lord, while still living his mortal life with the Apostles, to preserve unity in the Apostolic college itself, as we saw a little while ago, so in the same stage of mortal life the whole Church was predisposed, so that the one Church itself, for the preservation of unity, is distinguished according to that part which has the power of binding and loosing, and according to that part which is not the subject but only the object and end of that same power. The Church that rules and the Church that is ruled are not two Churches but one Church, with members unequal in rights and duties, distinguished by Christ the founder himself.

III. The economy in the preaching of Christ the Lord appears manifestly so arranged that, just as hierarchical authority and unity in the Church, of which we have spoken, so also universality, the abolition of the synagogue of the one Jewish people, and the substitution of the Church of all nations, were prepared and preformed in the mortal life of Christ, yet not consummated before the sanction of the new Testament through the death of the testator and the effusion of his blood (cf. Luke XXII. 20; Heb. IX. 15 ff.). Of his own personal preaching the Lord declares: « I was not sent but to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel » (Matt. XV. 24). At the same time he declares, concerning his death: « I lay down my life for my sheep; and I have other sheep that are not of this fold, and them I must bring » (John X. 16). He prefigures this future universality of the fold in the facts and deeds of his mortal life: in the calling of the Magi to adore the King of the Jews, whose star they had seen in the east (Matt. II); in the commendation, confirmation, and hearing of the faith, both of the Samaritans (John IV; Luke XVII. 18), and of the Syrophoenician woman (Matt. XV. 28), and of the centurion asking the healing of his servant (Matt. VIII. 5 ff.), and of other Gentiles (John XII. 20, 23); in the first fruits of the confession of the Gentiles (the centurion and those with him), already in the very death of Christ, according to the symbolic preaching, in the languages of the Gentiles of the Roman world and through it of the whole world, inscribed on the standard of the cross (Matt. XXVII. 54; Luke XXIII. 38).

Moreover, during the time of his mortal life the Lord commends, by word and deed, the sanctity of the Temple at Jerusalem, the observance of the ceremonial law, and the authority of those teaching the law of Moses in the chair of Moses (Matt. XXI. 12, 13; XXIII. 2, 3, 17–21, 23; XXVI. 18; John II. 16; V. 35; XVIII. 20). But at the same time he announces that the time is near when the Temple at Jerusalem will no longer be the sanctuary of public worship and sacrifices; the house of that old economy will be deserted; the city, with its temple as the seat of Mosaic worship, will be destroyed by perpetual desolation; and the kingdom of God is to be taken from the Jews. Hence he declares and promises that a new, universal economy is to be substituted for the particular old one: for public worship will not be restricted to one place, but is to be celebrated everywhere; the kingdom of God will be given to a nation that bears its fruit; the Gospel will be preached as a testimony to all nations; many will come from east and west into the kingdom of heaven, while the children of the kingdom will be cast out into exterior darkness (Matt. VIII. 11, 12; XXI. 43; XXIII. 38; XXIV. 2, 14, 15; John IV. 21–24). What Christ foretells in words, he shows in particular deeds: the transformation of the synagogue. For the judicial Mosaic law he substitutes mercy ready for penitents, in the absolution of the adulteress (John VIII. 8, 11). He takes into his communion among the faithful the one cast out of the synagogue (John IX. 22, 35–38; cf. XVI. 2). He shows the old liturgical and ceremonial law as subject to himself as lawgiver, changeable and to be changed, because he is « greater than the temple, » and « the Lord also of the Sabbath » (Matt. XII. 6, 8).

By the same reasoning by which the preaching of the Savior himself, directed immediately to the sheep of the house of Israel, at the same time preformed the universal Church, the mission of the Apostles, too, though in this earlier stage still particular, contained the preparation of the future universal mission, after the redemption was accomplished, for establishing the kingdom of God among all nations. « These twelve Jesus sent, commanding them, saying: go not into the way of the Gentiles, and enter not into the cities of the Samaritans; but go rather to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel. » This preaching is enjoined: « the kingdom of heaven is at hand »; but since this kingdom will be not only among the sheep of the house of Israel, but among the nations, and will be the promised kingdom of the Son of man, the Lord soon adds: « You shall be led before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the nations ... amen I say to you, you shall not finish the cities of Israel till the Son of man come » (Matt. X. 5–7, 18, 23). When he himself foretells his death for the redemption of the world, he declares that this coming of the Son of man is the coming of his kingdom: « Amen I say to you, there are some of those standing here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom », or as in Luke, « till they see the kingdom of God », and in Mark, « till they see the kingdom of God coming in power » (Matt. XVI. 28; Mark VIII. 39; Luke IX. 27). « Because some of the disciples were to live so long in the body that they would see the Church of God built and raised against the glory of this world, by a consoling promise it is now said: there are some standing here who shall not taste death until they see the kingdom of God » (St. Gregory the Great, in Evang., hom. 32, n. 6).

IV. Just as the external form of authority and of hierarchical distinction, of the visible unity and universality of the Church, such as was to be constituted for all future time, was still contained in promise and preparation, so also the internal charisms and gifts of the Holy Spirit, whether considered in the individual Apostles or in all of them in unity, had not yet in this earlier stage been conferred in their fullness. They were still promised as the price of Christ's blood, and before the redemption was complete were only partly tasted in advance, as it were by way of a pledge. « For the Spirit was not yet given (in the promised fullness), because Jesus was not yet glorified » (John VII. 39). « It is expedient for you that I go; for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you ... I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now; but when that Spirit of truth comes, he will teach you all truth » (ibid. XVI. 7 ff.). St. Gregory Nazianzen declares this donation of the Holy Spirit, by certain stages, as follows: « The Spirit was given to the disciples in three ways, and as much as they could receive, according to three times: before Christ was glorified by the passion; after he was glorified by the resurrection; after his ascension into heaven. » The first donation, as Gregory continues there, was more hidden, for the expulsion of diseases and demons (Matt. X); the second more manifest, by insufflation for the remission and retention of sins (John XX); the third in a certain way substantial (οὐσιωδῶς, as one might say), namely in visible form, in tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost, and with the effect of the fullness of gifts (Gregory Naz., Orat. 41, al. 44, n. 11).

In the economy of redemption, then, Christ the Savior first merited, by the price of his blood, the very sanctification of the world and therefore the full constitution of his Church, which is the sanctified world; and therefore he reserved it to the work of the Holy Spirit, whose mission, as the proximate cause of the full building of the Church, is thereby understood as the principal effect of the merits of Christ, containing in itself, as in a beginning, all the other effects for the kingdom of grace and of truth. « As the Savior, coming, became the fulfilment of the law and the prophets, so the fulfilment of the Gospel is the Holy Spirit. Christ coming established what is from the Father, namely the things said in the law and the prophets; therefore Paul says, Christ is the fulfilment of the law. The Holy Spirit coming fulfilled the things of the Gospel. Whatever is in the law, Christ fulfils; whatever is in the teaching of Christ, the Spirit fulfils ... The Son fulfils the things of the Father, and does not speak of himself; the Spirit fulfils the things of the Son, and does not speak of himself » ¹⁴ (Serm. de Spir. S., among the works of Chrysostom, ed. Maurin., T. III, pp. 808, 809). Atonement for the world comes first, in the work of mercy through the death of the incarnate Son of God; the sanctification of the redeemed world, through the full constitution of the Church in all graces and gifts, follows from that death as a work of love, and is therefore appropriated to the Spirit of holiness and sanctification. « Why did the Spirit not come before he departed? Because the curse was not yet removed, sin not yet loosed, but all were still liable to punishment; for that reason he did not come. He himself (Christ) could do these things, but he allows him (the Spirit) to work miracles, so that they may learn his dignity ... For this reason he himself was made flesh, reserving the operation for the Spirit » ¹⁵ (Chrysostom, in John, hom. 78, al. 77, n. 3).

Thus from Christ himself as head, in his still mortal life and before his blood was poured out as the price of acquisition (Acts XX. 28), we see the institution of the Church begun and preformed, both according to its external and conspicuous form and according to its internal and spiritual form, or, as Paul says (Eph. IV. 4), according to the unity of body and spirit. The visible form is established by Christ himself in visible authority, which living men are to exercise, on the one hand, and thereby the obedience of faith (which is founded in faith and exercised by faith) toward that same authority, on the other, by which the whole body and society of the faithful is contained and ruled. For those who exercise the authority communicated to them by Christ are themselves, constituted together into one body, bound in turn to obedience of faith toward a higher authority. While Christ himself was still visible on earth, the one leader and master (εἷς ὁ καθηγητής) teaches, rules, and holds together the whole body of teachers and of the obedient by his supreme authority, and comprises all of it in himself, communicating to the Apostles only for particular ends and as it were at intervals. But by these very acts of communication, and by explicit promises, he prepares the Apostles and the whole Church for a fuller and perennial communication of his authority, by which, since he would no longer visibly converse with men, he would substitute both one vicar in the supreme power and, in hierarchically arranged power, all the Apostles and the Apostolic college joined in unity. By this substitution and communication it comes about that the one Master, Christ, through the visible authority instituted in his legates (2 Cor. V. 20), himself perennially teaches, rules, and holds together his Church. To this full institution of the Church of Christ, whose preparation we have considered so far, we are now led by the very order of doctrine.

Now that the redemption of the world has been accomplished through the bloody sacrifice and the price of the acquisition of the Church has been paid, the divine Savior, « until the day on which, having given commands through the Holy Spirit to the Apostles whom he had chosen, he was taken up » ¹, « presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them for forty days and speaking of the kingdom of God » to the same men, Acts I. 3. Therefore the Lord, present, spoke to them frequently, not only to demonstrate his resurrection but so that he might complete the institution and the constitution of the kingdom of God on earth; for the words declare clearly both the frequency of the appearances and their purpose. « Staying with them (the disciples) for forty days, he opened their hearts... and ordered and instructed them for the preaching of his doctrine and teaching, arranging the solemn discipline of the New Testament » Lactantius, de mort. persecut. l. I. c. 2. « Those days, then, which passed between the Lord's resurrection and his ascension did not pass in idle course, but great sacraments were confirmed in them, great mysteries were revealed » S. Leo, sermo 1 de Ascens. Although, however, as with the other deeds and words of Christ, so also about these appearances and instructions during those forty days, not everything has been written (John XX. 30; XXI. 25); yet those things which pertain to the institution and constitution of the Church, of which we now speak, are so comprehended as to the thing itself in the written Gospels that the Catholic tradition seems necessary not so much for their completion or enlargement as for a secure and distinct understanding. The appearances of the Lord during those days to the Apostolic college, though not always in full, are described in the Gospels as five: the first on the very evening of the day of the resurrection, the second after eight days, both at Jerusalem (Luke XXIV. 36–43; John XX. 19–29; cf. 1 Cor. XV. 5); the third in John XXI; and the fourth in Matthew XXVIII. 16–20, in Galilee ²; and the fifth finally at Jerusalem, when the Lord ascended into heaven (Mark XVI. 14–19; Luke XXIV. 44–51; Acts I. 4–9; cf. 1 Cor. XV. 7). Of these epiphanies, the second is mentioned in the Gospels only insofar as it pertained to showing the truth of the resurrection; it was made for the sake of Thomas, and can be regarded as a part or supplement of the first. In the remaining four Christ, « speaking of the kingdom of God, » completed that institution and constitution of the kingdom which we have mentioned. We shall therefore consider them in the very order in which they occurred; for there is no more suitable order of exposition to be found than that which incarnate wisdom arranged in the events themselves and in the teaching connected with the events.