RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Novatian
qua non of salvation, but does not certainly involve the final judgment of God, the attempt to separate the wheat and tares on earth must be an invasion of the divine prerogatives. The Church is no longer the fellowship of the saints and the elect, but the indispensable institution from which that fellowship proceeds. Its indispensability consists in the sacraments which it dispenses, including absolution, which, however, do not guarantee salvation. As a moral institution also it is indispensable, since all the virtues gain value in God's sight only in and through it. The performance of these functions presupposes an organization and is attached to the priesthood, as summed up in the episcopate, which in its unity guarantees the authenticity of the Church.
When, on the other hand, Novatian and his party asserted that it was both the right and the duty of the Church to cut off grievous sinners 2. The finally (though apparently Novatian Novatian himself did not push this to the ex- Position, treme), when they denied that it had the power of absolving those guilty of idolatry and left them to the immediate judgment of God, it was evident that his conception of the Church, its absolution, and its priesthood was, or in course of time became, entirely different from that of his opponents. His thesis that God alone can forgive sins does not empty the conception of the Church of all significance, but assures the strictly religious meaning of it, restricting the extension of the Church in favor of its intensive force. If the Church, as the community of the baptized who have received God's pardon, is really the communion of saints and of salvation, it can not tolerate the unholy among its members without losing its character. A good idea of Novatian's attitude is to be obtained from the pseudo-Augustinian treatise QucBstiones veteris et novi testamenti, although there may be a few traces of later development in it. The Church is the body of Christ, and must be kept holy as he is holy. Through baptism, in which all sins are forgiven, each individual becomes a member of Christ, and all together compose the body. For all sins after baptism there is penance and forgiveness in the Church, except for idolatry (and possibly fornication); for these, as in the strict sense sins against God, there is no forgiveness on earth. Apostasy is the sin against the Holy Ghost, received by the Christian in baptism and lost by this sin, since there is only one baptism. The Church can not take back those who have thus sinned against God; logically, it has no power to forgive such a sin. It is bound to preach and these sinners to practise penance, as to the duty of which there is no limitation in Scripture. The abstract possibility exists that God will forgive these sinners, since all things are possible with him; but nothing can be certainly predicated as to this. The Catholic Church, by restoring those who have fallen into idolatry (and fornication) completely destroys the constitution of the Church; since all make up the one body, the holy are contaminated by the evil, and the body perishes. Though it may retain the correct traditio and professio, its members have lost their hold on salvation and their right to the Chris-
tian name, which belongs only to a pure Church and is thus found onfy among the followers of Novatian.
The historical judgment of Novatian's movement will depend on the point of view, whether it is that
of primitive antiquity or of the require-
3. Criticism ments of the time. Unquestionably
of these the schismatics preserved valuable
Positions, relics of ancient tradition. The idea
that the Church is a fellowship of saints and of certain salvation is primitive, although its representatives in the third century did not draw the full consequences of it. But they refused to identify the constitutional attributes of the Church with the religious, or confuse actuality with possibility; they maintained the old conception of baptism as a gift and an unconditional obligation. It was, however, both unjust and unmerciful to inflict severer penalties on the libellatici than on other grievous sinners. The boast of being a community of saints was one which at that time could not be made without gross self-deception or the rending asunder of the Christendom of the day. The only means of purification which the Novatianists employed was at the time quite inadequate to reform the Church. ' Since their doctrine and every-day life did not differ essentially from those of the Church, their penitential discipline is seen to be an archaic survival of doubtful benefit, and their rejection of the Catholic sacraments (in the practise of rebaptism) revolutionary. Aside from unedifying personal conflicts, the bishops carried through the great change of attitude with wisdom, caution, and relative strictness. It was best for the Christendom of c. 250 that the Church should be regarded as an institution to train souls for eternal happiness, supplied with means of grace and practical penalties, and that the distinction between repentance and ecclesiastical penance should be abandoned. There was need of a line of action based on the circumstances of the moment, and of a close adherence to the bishops as pillars of the Church. It was not the least important result of the crises provoked by the Decian persecution that they forced the bishops of the various national churches to stand together and finally placed full jurisdiction in their hands. Nothing before or after contributed so much as these crises to the establishment of the imperial Church of later days.*
IV. Later History: For the western Church the controversy was not ended by the exclusion of the party of Novatian. The primitive survivals still to be found in Cyprian, which may be summed up in the formula that the requirements made by the Novatianists of all Christians were to be applied to the clergy, were the cause, in consequence of the persecution of Diocletian, of a terrible disturbance in Africa — the Donatist schism (see Donatism). In Rome, also, there was a renewal of conflict over penitential discipline, of which unfortunately little is known (see Marcellus), and the Luciferian
* There is room for difference of opinion as to whether the line of development indicated in the closing sentences of the paragraph above was really " best," and whether the more rigorous discipline of the Novatianists would not have been better. A. h. n.
Novatian Numbers