English Conferences of Ernest Renan: Rome and Christianity. Marcus Aurelius — Marcus Aurelius — John Shaqi
English Conferences of Ernest Renan: Rome and Christianity. Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius · en
According as the Church of Jerusalem sank, the Church of Rome rose, or,
rather, a phenomenon was evidently manifested in the years which
followed the victory of Titus. It was that the Church of Rome became
more and more the inheritor and the substitute of the Church of
Jerusalem. The spirit of the two churches was the same: what was a
danger at Jerusalem became an advantage at Rome. The taste for tradition
and the hierarchy, and the respect for authority, were in some sort
transplanted from the parvises of the temple to the Occident. James, the
brother of the Lord, had been a sort of pope at Jerusalem. Rome is about
to take up the part of James. We shall have the pope at Rome. Without
Titus, we should have had the pope in Jerusalem, but with this great
difference, that the pope at Jerusalem would have extinguished
Christianity in about one or two hundred years, while the Pope of Rome
has made it the religion of the universe.
Here appears a very important person, who seems to have been the head of
the Roman Church in the early years of the first century, concerning
whom I am happy to find myself in accord with one of your most scholarly
and enlightened critics, Mr. Lightfoot. I speak of Clement Romanus. In
the penumbra in which he remains, enveloped and almost lost in the
luminous dust of a beautiful far-off history, Clement is one of the
grand figures of early Christianity: one would say that it was the head
of an old effaced fresco of Giotto's, recognizable still from his golden
aureola, and some dim features of striking purity and sweetness. One
thing is beyond doubt: it is the high rank which he held in the utterly
spiritual hierarchy of the church of his time, and the unequalled credit
with which he sustained it. His approval made the law. All parties clung
to him, and wished to shield themselves under his authority. It is
probable that he was one of the most energetic agents of the grand work
that was about to be accomplished: I mean the posthumous reconciliation
of Peter and Paul, without which union the work of Christ could only
have perished. His high personality, aggrandized by tradition, was,
after that of Peter, the most holy figure of the primitive Christian
Rome.