BROTHER MARTIN, POPE MARTIN, AND SAINT MARTIN:

ON THE CONDITIONS OF CHRISTIAN RECONCILIATION.

 

The Paul Wattson Lecture at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D, C., November 10, 1975, by Jaroslav Pelikan.

 

Today is the 492d birthday of Martin Luther, who was born on November 10, 1483. In keeping with pious custom, he was baptized on the following day, November 11, the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours, and hence was named "Martin." If his parents had waited another day, they could still have given him that name in honor of the saint of the day, for November 12 is the feast of Pope Martin I, who died in A.D. 655. Brother Martin, Pope Martin, and Saint Martin--these three Martins may be taken as representing three themes which are necessary con­ditions for Christian reconciliation. Reconciliation, or as he preferred to term it, "at-one-ment," was the lifelong dedica­tion of Paul Wattson, the founder of the Friars of the Atonement and the man to whose memory this lectureship is devoted. As an Anglican, he had concluded, as he said already in 1895, that "it was in the mind of the Divine Author of the Christian re­ligion to found on earth, not many Protestant sects, but one universal Church," and he worked to reestablish this ideal in the Anglican communion.

 

Father Paul did not live to see the fulfillment of his dream of reunion; and, like John Henry Newman before him, he became convinced that his only hope for finding the Catholicity he sought lay in his personal conversion to Roman Catholicism. He did then what he had to do, but we today have the right and the opportunity to look at the issues of at-one-ment in a different way. For through the thought and effort of men like Paul Wattson--and John Henry Newman--there is a new atmosphere in the Roman Catholic Church, one in which the in­tuitions these men had before they joined it have now found a more hospitable reception. The mind-set of either/or repre­sented by Vatican I has given way to the spirit of both/and enunciated at Vatican II. This change puts us into the happy position of being able to take seriously the entire life and career of Paul Wattson, including the years before 1909. That is why we can hold tonight what is, I am sure, the first cele­bration of the birthday of Martin Luther ever sponsored at The Catholic University of America, and can look at Brother Martin together with Pope Martin and Saint Martin as guides to a more comprehensive understanding of Christian reconciliation. For it is the fundamental thesis of this lecture that these three conditions of reconciliation are inseparable.

 

I

 

Brother Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar whose birth-- day we observe today, holds forth for us the first condition of Christian reconciliation that we must meet, separately and together, if we are to be equal to the responsibility of our time: reaffirmation of faithfulness to the Word of God.

 

"My conscience is captive to the Word of God, and it is neither safe nor honest to act against conscience." These words of Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521 sounded a battle cry of freedom that has found an echo through the centuries. "Luther at Worms," Lord Acton said, "is the most pregnant and momentous fact in our history," and Alexander Solzhenitsyn chose Luther's affirmation at Worms as a motto of heroism for his protagonist in The First Circle. Yet nowhere has this declaration of conscience been more dramatically reaffirmed than in the Declaration on Religious Liberty of the Second Vatican Council. In this Declaration the Council fathers identi­fied themselves with a development within the Roman Catholic tradition which, as John Courtney Murray had shown, did have a legitimate place in the history of the Church's teaching even though it was by no means the unanimous or even the preponderant message of the tradition. The issue of religious liberty was a prime example of Father Murray's conviction that the problem of the development of Christian doctrine is an indispensable prolegomenon to our consideration of other problems in Christian thought, including and especially the problem of ecumenism itself. From Murray, and above all of course from Newman, the generation of Vatican II has learned to pay attention to development of doctrine in a way that the generation of Vatican I did, not. One of the abiding results of that change is the Council's clarification of the Catholic principle, developed through centuries when the practice of the Church had negated it, that, in the words of the Catholic theologian who stood be­fore the Emperor at the Diet of Worms, "it is neither safe nor honest to act against conscience."

 

It has been necessary for Protestants, too, to develop an understanding of this principle. There is very little to be gained from a mutual exchange of recriminations or of statis­tics about religious persecution of Protestants by Roman Catho­lics and of Roman Catholics by Protestants. As Saint Augustine said in reply to such statistics when they were being cited by the Donatists, it is the truth that makes a martyr, not the death. What is important to learn is that respect for the in­tegrity of conscience, even of the erring conscience, is an achievement that can never be taken for granted, but that must be won over and over again by each of us, as individuals and as churches. A common repentance for our failure, as individuals and as churches, to practice this respect for conscience may well be the beginning of wisdom in Christian reconciliation. We would often be inclined to urge that it is neither safe nor honest to act against convention, that is to say our convention, rather than to affirm the rights of conscience and the duty to obey it.

 

But it is sometimes forgotten, especially by secular ad­mirers of Luther's stand at Worms, that he prefaced his decla­ration of independence with a pledge of allegiance: "My conscience is captive to the Word of God." If repentance over our sins against conscience is the beginning of ecumenical wisdom, then the content of that wisdom is the reaffirmation of faithfulness to the Word of God. For Luther, the Christian conscience was, as he had said in On Christian Liberty just a year earlier, "a free lord of all" precisely because it was also, and first, captive to the Word of God. Faithfulness to the Word of God was Luther's justification for his reformatory work. In 1512 he had become a Doctor in Biblia, charged by university and Church with the responsibility of expounding the Scriptures. This he did first of all as a professor at the University of Wittenberg and then as an author. When he was pressed to reply what gave him the right to speak out as he did, he cited his doctoral oath, and he went on lecturing on various books of the Old and New Testament, "expounding the Scriptures for all the world and teaching everybody." Although he wrote many works of an edifying or a polemical sort, as well as hymns, letters, and disputations, his principal oeuvre is his exegetical lectures, from those on the Psalms, begun in 1513, to those on Genesis, concluded on November 17, 1545, three months before his death. Even the first thirty volumes of the American Edition of Luther's Works, which are devoted to his expository writings and lectures, do not contain all of his commentaries. His conscience was captive to the Word of God, and so was his lifework. All of his own writings he was quite willing to see disappear, but as he said in his battle hymn, "The Word they still shall let remain."

 

Yet it is significant that the hymn continues: "He's by our side upon the plain." For Luther, the Word of God meant, in the first and most basic sense, Christ the Word, the incar­nate Logos. Although he did not deny to the Logos a cosmological role as the agent of divine creation, Luther put more stress than the Greek fathers did on the function of the Logos as the prophetic speech of God. This was important for his understanding of the person and work of Christ, but in the present context we should note its importance for his view of Scripture. Luther's historic achievement as an exegete was to combine an insistence on the literal sense of the text with an even more christocentric interpretation of the text than the allegorical tradition had put forth. The authority of Scripture was derived from its character as the manger in which the Christ child lay. Faith­fulness to the Word of God began with faith in Christ and led to a faith-filled acceptance of the Scripture through which he exercised his sovereignty over the Church. To diminish the authority of Scripture was to limit the sovereignty of Christ as Lord and to cut the Church loose from the only sure mooring it had. No one, however ancient or learned or saintly, had a right to arrogate to himself the unique place of authority in the Church that belonged to the Word of God in the Bible.

 

And when Luther said that no one had that right, he really meant no one at all. In the Leipzig Debate of 1519, his op­ponent, Johann Eck, got him to admit that he thought that church councils could err and, indeed, that the Council of Constance had erred in condemning Jan Hus. Placing either councils or fathers on the same level as Scripture was an in­sult not only to Scripture, but to the fathers themselves, who had subordinated their own teachings to those of the prophets and apostles. "The beloved fathers," he said, "wanted to lead us into Scripture with their writings, but we use them to lead ourselves out of it." As Professor Kristen Skydsgaard of Copen­hagen has pointed out again, in an essay published earlier this year, "it is typical that in the subject index of The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ed. 1967) the word traditio does not occur, but traditiones does--and here we are referred to Menschensatzungen, human inventions and rules!" For Luther, Scripture was divine, tradition was human: Scripture did not need the support or the illumination of tradition, which was in fact dependent upon Scripture for its support and illumi­nation. It was blasphemous to maintain that God had kept back some truth from the Old and New Testament in order to disclose it bit by bit through the history of the Church, for this im­plied two sources of divine revelation. A faithful servant of the Word of God would take Scripture as it stood and follow it wherever it led, regardless of councils, fathers, and tra­dition.

 

Yet where it led Luther was to the faith of the 318 fathers of the Council of Nicea, to an essentially Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ, to a vigorous defense of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and to a view of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist that was, as he him­self had to acknowledge, much closer to transubstantiation than to the ideas of his fellow Protestant apologists for Sola Scrip­tura. In short, Luther's doctrine of the sole authority of Scripture was far more radical in its formulation than in its execution. But when the idea of Sola Scriptura was cited by Zwingli to deny the real presence, by the Anabaptists to deny infant baptism, and, already during Luther's lifetime but es­pecially after his death, by those whom he called "neo-Arians" to deny the dogmas of the Trinity and of the two natures in Christ, this might--and, in my judgment, should--have prompted a reexamination of the relation between Scripture and tradition. It did not do so on the side of Luther and his followers at least in part because those who were upholding the authority of tradition were doing so at the expense of the authority of Scripture. Whatever the ambiguous formula of the fourth session of the Council of Trent may have meant to say, its official exponents were saying that tradition had a place alongside Scripture, and in some sense independent-of Scripture, as authority in the Church.

 

It has really been only in the twentieth century, above all, with the publication of Divino afflante Spiritu in 1943, that modern Roman Catholic theology has begun to heed the pro­phetic message of the Reformation on this very issue and thus to reaffirm in a remarkable new way its faithfulness to the Word of God. The result has been a renais­sance of biblical studies unmatched at least since the Refor­mation, as the record of this university shows. It has been accompanied on the Protestant side by some erosion of the biblical substance of preaching and piety, as well as by a de­cline of biblical scholarship. As a result, Roman Catholic work on the Bible is no longer, as for some time it threatened to be, a pale copy of Protestant exegesis, but has acquired a fresh­ness and vigor that may already have overshadowed Protestantism. More important, however, is the realization that the denomi­national provenance of a scholar in this field is not a reliable index to what the results of his investigation will be. Re­affirmation of faithfulness to the Word of God has brought in its wake a reaffirmation of the need and the possibility of Christian reconciliation.

 

II

 

The fateful outcome of  the doctrine of Sola Scriptura in Protestant theology, to which I have just referred, argues that a second condition of Christian reconciliation will have to be recovery of continuity with orthodox Christendom. For this prin­ciple of continuity, the career of Pope Martin I, whose feast is celebrated in the West on November 12 (and in the East on April 13), may serve as an instructive epitome.

 

Martin I became Pope in July 649 and died a martyr's death in September 655. (He is the last of the Popes to be venerated as a martyr.) The principal accomplishment of his tragic and brief pontificate was the further clarification of the doctrine of the person of Christ. Although earlier debate on this doctrine had been settled at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Eastern theology had not been able to leave the matter alone, Now the question became whether the one Christ of two natures, as de­fined at Chalcedon, had a human action and a divine action or "a single theandric action" and whether he had a human will and a divine will or a single will as the God-man. The debate evoked vigorous participation on both sides; and the two most eminent sees of Christendom, Old Rome in the person of Pope Honorius I and New Rome in the person of Patriarch Sergius I, had both come out in support of the notion of "one will." Even they, however, recognized the problematical quality of the whole debate. It was on this basis that Honorius warned against "the offense of recent innovations" and urged a return to the status quo ante bellum, the Chalcedonian formula. Shortly before Mar­tin became Pope, the Emperor Constans II had issued a docu­ment entitled Typos, putting a stop to the discussions of both action and will in Christ. He was doing this, he said, by the inspiration of God and in exercise of his own respon­sibility as custodian of "our precious faith." Further dispute over actions and wills was an act of disloyalty to the orthodox faith and to the imperial authority.

 

In opposition to the political implications of the Typos, Pope Martin convoked a synod in 649 (of which more in a moment). But he was acting also in opposition to the definition of conti­nuity implied by the Typos. Orthodoxy was to be found only in continuity with the Council of Chalcedon, but this did not imply an abdication from the responsibility of facing the challenge that had arisen. Therefore Martin, after quoting Pope Leo I and the symbol of the Council of Chalcedon, went on to insist that this required "without doubt that [Christ] had the will and the action of each" nature. Although the doctrine of one action and the doctrine of one will had arisen only now, he said in another place, they had in fact been condemned by "all the holy fathers and the definitions of the five ecumenical councils" when these had affirmed Christ to be "perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity." True continuity with the orthodox faith of the Council of Chalcedon consisted in drawing forth what it had meant from what it had said, not simply repeating its formu­las. Although Martin did accuse his opponents of "tampering" with the text of Pseudo-Dionysius to make it conform with their ideas, he was, as one of his bishops wrote to him, defending "the decrees of the orthodox fathers" by his "apostolic doctrine and orthodox church" when he extrapolated from the Chalcedonian symbol to assert two actions and two wills in the incarnate Logos. If the incarnate Logos was perfectly human in every re­spect, the Pope asked, "then why not also in will and in action in accordance with our nature?" The absence of specific refer­ence to "will" or "action" in the conciliar documents did not exclude these from consideration in a theology that wanted to be in continuity with Chalcedon, But just as it was in conformity with that council to say that if Christ was never sad He did not liberate our nature from sadness, so it was also appropriate to attribute to Chalcedon the doctrine that Christ had a truly human will.

 

Continuity with orthodox Christendom required, then, that one hold to the doctrine of the 630 fathers of the Council of Chalcedon; but it required as well that when the occasion arose, there be other assemblies to deal with a new threat to orthodoxy. The Lateran Synod of 649, summoned by Pope Martin to discuss the doctrine of two actions and two wills in Christ, solemnly repeated the creed of Chalcedon in condemnation of the pro­ponents of "one action" and "one will." It authorized re­search into the textual variants of patristic writings, especially of the controverted passage from Pseudo-Dionysius. It ordered a Greek codex of Pseudo-Dionysius to be brought from the papal archive, translated into Latin, and read to the bishops. The charge that the heretics had been altering the writings of the fathers, especially those of the Areo­pagite, made it essential that the Urtext be established. At the Lateran Synod of 649, as at the Third Council of Constantinople, held a generation later in 681, paleography and textual criticism were basic tools of theological method. Nevertheless, the council and the synod shared with Pope Martin the definition of continuity with orthodox Christendom as a continuity of sub­stance, not simply of terminology, and therefore they also de­clared the doctrine of two actions and two wills in Christ to be the teaching of the orthodox Church in spite of the silence--or worse yet, the equivocation--of eminent church fathers and authoritative church councils on this doctrine.

 

At the Lateran Synod, the See of Rome was hailed, through its current incumbent, Pope Martin, as "the apostolic and chief see," and this by a group of Greek abbots and priests who had been in Africa and who were now in Rome. Nevertheless, we do find the Pope referring the controverted questions to a synod, and eventually it was, of course, referred to an entire ecumenical council. Even before the synod, the Pope spoke out, vigorously and officially: "We anathematize, he declared solemnly, "the wicked heretics, together with all their wicked dogmas, also the godless Ecthesis and the most godless Typos." He did not have to wait for a synod to act before taking steps himself. But he did attach his authority to that of a synod. When, for example, a bishop of Gaul needed to be instructed about the heresy of one will in Christ, Pope Martin sent him his own encyclical plus "the volumes of the synodical acts" of the Lateran Synod. His treatment of the debacle of his predecessor, Pope Honorius, may somewhat cha­ritably be described as cautious. Whatever Pope Martin's own view of Honorius may have been, the Council of Constantinople in 681 did condemn "Honorius, who was at one time pope of Old Rome," and from Martin's attitude toward the authority of ecu­menical councils we would have at least some grounds for con­jecturing that the continuity with orthodox Christendom which he cherished might include a reluctant acceptance of this a­nathema.

 

There is no need to conjecture on another aspect of this continuity, for the record is quite unambiguous. To find a peritus on the complex theological and philosophical problems raised by Monenergism and Monotheletism, Pope Martin turned not to a Latin but to a Greek, to the greatest Greek theologian of the time (and one of the greatest of all time), Maximus Confessor. As Peitz has shown in his study of the two men, Maximus provided the Pope with many of the weapons he used against the proponents of one action and one will, since he had been the spokesman for the orthodox doctrine in a dis­putation with Pyrrhus of Constantinople at Carthage in 145. From the text of this remarkable disputation, as well as from his other works, we can recognize in Maximus the one thinker of the seventh century, whether in the East or in the West, able to put the seemingly abstruse dispute over Monotheletism into its proper context. As John Meyendorff has said, "only with Maximus Confessor did there appear a theologian who not only was capable of going beyond the narrow horizons of the dispute. . ., but also was able to provide a glimpse of a complete system of thought that answered in a new way the problems posed by Origenism." Through this alliance with Greek theology, Pope Martin recovered, for a brief time, a truly ecumenical definition of continuity with orthodox Christendom.

 

The Western version of continuity with orthodoxy has too often ignored this resource, proceeding as though one patriar­chate in the Church could act unilaterally and as though its synods (such as Pope Martin's Lateran Synod) could be put on the same level as ecumenical councils (such as the Council of Constantinople that followed the Lateran Synod). The fault is not in the first instance one of Western canon law, but of Western theology. During much of its history, Western theology has confined itself largely to Latin sources, and even the controversies between Protestantism and Roman Catholi­cism were for the most part predicated on a common acceptance of the Augustinian heritage. Yet many of the points of doctrine in those controversies, such as for example the relation be­tween grace and merit, would have been put into quite a different light if they had been placed into the context of the teaching of all of orthodox Christendom, including the theology of Maxi­mus Confessor. While it is undoubtedly true that in the first six centuries of the Church there were many more heresies of Eastern than of Western origin and that, at least at Chalcedon, it was Latin clarity and evangelical simplicity that carried the day for othodoxy, it is no less true that this simplicity has needed the deepening and enriching power of Greek Christianity to be rescued from the moralism and rationalism that so easily beset it.

 

Christian reconciliation in our time must recover its con­tinuity with orthodox Christendom--and it is important to spell "orthodox" with both an upper-case and a lower-case "O." One of the principal sources of the spiritual renewal that took place at the Second Vatican Council was the wealth of the Eastern Christian tradition. Liturgy came to be seen as the action of the worshiping people of God; spirituality drew upon the thoughts and prayers of such masters of the spiritual life as Gregory Nazianzus and Maximus; and even the polity of the Western Church moved significantly toward the Eastern pat­tern with the new (and yet ancient) concept of collegiality. Contemporary Protestantism has an even greater need for conti­nuity. The continuity that was visible in the theology of the Reformers can no longer be assumed to be present in their de­scendants, whose anti-Catholicism has sometimes led them to apostasy. When the Protestant "church father of the nineteenth century," Friedrich Schleiermacher, made the doctrine of the Trinity an appendix to his book of dogmatics, The Christian  Faith, he was merely being honest about the role played by this dogma in much of the non-Roman theology of the West. And when Albert Schweitzer spoke of the need to resurrect the his­torical Jesus from "the grave-clothes" of Chalcedon, he showed that the Christology of Luther and Calvin had given way to a radically different teaching. Thanks to the ecumenical movement, this trend has been reversed, and the reestablishment of com­munication with the Christian East, past and present, has made a significant contribution to the recovery of continuity. It would, I think, be fair to say that Protestant theology today is no less open to such a recovery than is Roman Catholic theology, and that they are now engaged in it together. For they have come to realize, as my late colleague Alexander Bickel said in speaking of Edmund Burke, that "continuity… [is] the principle of reform, not of opposition to it,"

 

III

 

Both Martin Luther and  Pope Martin, by their careers and by their very names, pointed beyond themselves to the third Martin, who was the first of them in time, Saint Martin of Tours, who died in 397. His life and work represent the third of our conditions for Christian reconciliation, reconsti­tution of the structures of apostolic authority,

 

In his remarkable Life of Saint Martin, Sulpitius Severus describes a dramatic encounter between Martin and the Emperor Maximus. In the presence of the Emperor, he tells us, "the priestly dignity had, with degenerate submissiveness, taken a second place to the royal retinue," But then he continues: "In Martin alone apostolic authority continued to assert it­self." And in a later chapter of the same Vita, describing his own relations with the saint, Sulpitius speaks of being overcome by Martin's presence and "authority," From the mighty deeds that he wrought Martin acquired such standing, says an earlier chapter, "that, as being reckoned holy by all, he was also deemed powerful and truly apostolic." In another account of Martin, the one contained in his Dialogues, the same author describes him as a representative of the Latin West who was worthy of being compared with the saints of the Greek East, These and other testimonies suggest that Martin made an impression on his contemporaries, as well as on later history, for which the Latin word "auctoritas," with its overtones of preternatural and numinous quality, seemed the most appropriate expression. To us, of course, the work "authority," especially "apostolic authority," carries institutional implications as well; and in the history of the quest for Christian reconciliation, the structures of institutional authority in the Church have been both an obstacle and a resource, as has, for that matter, the very question of their status within the doctrine of the Church. Therefore the reconstitution of these structures claims a rightful part in any approach to reconciliation.

 

If the structures of the Church are to be truly apostolic, it is inadequate for them merely to lay claim to apostolic foundation, as though this legitimized them in perpetuity. As the career of Martin of Tours shows, an apostle of Christ is first of all a disciple of Christ; and a disciple is one who stands under the discipline of Christ. Martin lived by that discipline. He was a devoted follower of tradition and had a reverence for the authority of Christian antiquity. This expressed itself above all in his loyalty to the orthodox teachings of the Church, as these were being formulated and defended by his mentor and patron, Hilary of. Poiters, who, with Ambrose, transmitted to Western Christendom the results of the trinitarian controversies following the Council of Nicea. We are told that Martin, as the pupil of Hilary, carried on the struggle against the Arian heresy; but the Life of Saint Martin, unlike the nearly contemporary Life of  Saint Antony by Athanasius, does not contain the discourses supposedly delivered by the saint in the defense of the faith. At issue in the Arian controversy was the question whether the Christ under whose discipline believers stood possessed the equality with God that entitled him to such faith and obedience. As discipleship implied discipline, so apostolic authority under Christ depended on the prior acknowledgement of the authority of Christ as Son of God and Lord.

 

The discipline of Christ manifested itself in Martin in such a way, as Sulpitius Severus says, that those who read his life "shall be roused to the pursuit of true knowledge, and heavenly warfare, and divine virtue," The most famous anec­dote illustrating this discipline is the story of Martin's giving his cloak to the poor man he met at the gate of the city of Amiens--a scene portrayed many hundreds of times by painters, especially in France. It is easy to forget that this incident took place before Martin's baptism, so that in a vision Christ says: "Martin, who is still a catechumen, clothed me with this robe." Then Martin, who had been a soldier, en­listed as miles Christi. All his further accomplishments, all the glory that his deputation was to acquire in the following years, and all the administrative responsibilities that he assumed were dependent for their validity on this prior commitment. The concluding chapter of his Life says of him: "Never was there any word on his lips but Christ, and never was there a feeling in his heart except piety, peace, and tender mercy." Even when he was carrying out the duties of his public office, we are told, he gave evidence of his life of prayer and disci­pline. The apostolic authority of his ecclesiastical office was suffused with the authority that came from the discipline of a follower and disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

It was, nevertheless, through his ecclesiastical office that Martin made history. In 372 he was named Bishop of Tours. Perhaps the most memorable incident of his episcopal administra­tion came in connection with the treatment of the heretic Priscillian, who had been condemned by a Spanish synod for teaching a brand of Gnosticism, Various bishops, including Pope Damasus and Ambrose of Milan, joined in rejecting the claims of Priscillian and his followers that they were ortho­dox believers. As we have seen, Martin of Tours was no less rigorous than these other bishops in his opposition to false doctrine, which would include the false doctrine of the Priscillianists. Nevertheless, he opposed the use of capital punishment as a means by which the state would enforce the orthodoxy of the Church. In 383 Maximus became Emperor of the Western Empire and, to vindicate his loyalty to the orthodox cause, had Priscillian condemned by the Synod of Bordeaux. Martin thereupon interceded with the Emperor and was given a promise by Maximus that Priscillian would not be killed. That promise was not kept. In the words of Gibbon, "the theory of persecution was established by Theodosius, whose justice and piety have been applauded by the saints; but the practice of it, in the fullest extent, was reserved for his rival and colleague Maximus, the first, among the Christian princes, who shed the blood of his Christian subjects on ac­count of their religious opinions." Gibbon adds: "It is with pleasure that we can observe the humane inconsistency of Martin of Tours, who, on this occasion, asserted the cause of toleration." This brought a collision with the Emperor, in which Bishop Martin stood his ground against the repressive measures that were being used to support the orthodoxy in which he devoutly believed.

 

In other ways, too, Martin bore his ecclesiastical office in a manner that was consistent with his pattern of life before his elevation. "Full alike of dignity and courtesy," his biographer says of him, "he kept up the position of a bishop properly, yet in such a way as not to lay aside the objects and virtues of a monk." This way of life had been the object of a lifelong commitment. When he was twelve, he had already been interested in becoming a hermit, but was prevented from taking this step because of his tender age. After being consecrated bishop, he withdrew from the immediate environs of his cathedral and established a monastery outside Tours, which eventually became a community of eighty men who devoted themselves to the religious life under Martin's spiritual direction. While he occupied a structure of apostolic authority, he practiced apostolic simplicity. Of all his contemporaries, he singled out Paulinus as, he said, "almost the only one who in these times had fully obeyed the precepts of the Gospel" by "parting with his great possessions and following Christ." The memory of Martin of Tours as "truly apostolic" served to remind subsequent bishops and their followers of what it meant to be a successor of the apostles, Even in the imperial days of the medieval Papacy, this ideal was never quite forgotten; its warning to the prelates, as immortalized in the famous painting of Giotto, was articulated in the vision of Pope Innocent III of Saint Francis upholding the world,

 

The need for that reminder is an ecumenical one, to which those who have occupied structures of apostolic authority in all the churches have had to learn to give heed, What has come to be called "triumphalism" is not confined to any single segment of Christendom, but neither is the capacity for reconstituting structures of authority to bring them into conformity with the apostolic norm. It must be ac­knowledged, moreover, that the reconstitution of church structures in our own time has been brought on at least in part by the secular Zeitgeist, which, in anticlerical tracts, novels, and jokes, has called attention to the discrepancy between Christian claims and ecclesiastical realities. This new view of structure has served to bring reconciliation among Christians closer than it ever was when the various churches were so prosperous and powerful that they did not need one another. If at times the bureaucracy of ecumenism has threatened to rival that of the churches, the summons to apostolic authority has still proved to be too powerful to muffle. More perhaps than in any generation of modern times, we have seen this apos­tolic authority reasserted and reconstituted in the ministry of such followers of Christ as Dom Helger Camara, Trevor Huddle­ston, Eivind Berggrav, Martin Luther King, and Dorothy Day. And-as this has brought the churches closer to their Founder and Lord, it has also brought them closer to one another,

 

If we judge by traditional labels and slogans, we can identify each of the three conditions I have been describing with one segment of Christendom. Faithfulness to the Word of God has been the theme in the name of which many Protestants have opposed both the demands of continuity and the claims of apostolic structures. Continuity with orthodox Christen­dom has been asserted by some leaders of Eastern Orthodoxy in a way that appeared to subordinate both the Word of God and the structures of the Church to the authority of antiquity. And the structures of apostolic authority have been defined and defended within Roman Catholicism in a manner that appeared to make both Scripture and tradition say whatever the rulers of the Church wanted them to say. Each of these pictures is, of course, a caricature, but like many caricatures each has enough truth in it to be uncomfortable. Christian recon­ciliation is impossible so long as the proponents of any one of these conditions insist upon it at the expense of the other two. But such reconciliation has come as far as it has in our time because we have begun to learn that these conditions are interdependent, and that we are interdependent.

 

And therefore-‑

the reaffirmation of faithfulness to the Word of God:

O God, Who makes Covenant,

Whose promise Thou wilt never break,

Make strong Thy servants militant

With faith and love no pow'r can shake,

Thy Word prevail, when foes assail,

Lest we should fail, lest we should fail;

 

the recovery of continuity with orthodox Christendom:

The night in which He was betrayed

Our Lord took bread, gave thanks and brake.

Likewise the cup when He had prayed,

"My Body 'tis, and Blood, partake,"

This food supply, nor us deny,

Lest we should die, lest we should die;

 

and the reconstitution of the structures of apostolic authority:

What Thou has pledged to pass must come,

Thou shalt "repair the breach" of old,

The "other sheep" with those of Rome,

Shall constitute one only Fold.

This pledge recall, when hosts appall,

Lest we should fall, lest we should fall.

 

Veni Creator Spiritus!