The Pillar and Ground of the Truth

Every teaching in this book stands or falls with one question: what is the Church? Answer it wrongly, and everything that follows will be wrong with it. Answer it as the Apostles answered it, and the rest unfolds like a road.

So we begin where Saint Paul begins, with a picture. The Church, he says, is the pillar and ground of the truth. A pillar holds something up, so that all may see it. A ground holds something firm, so that nothing can shake it. The Church exists to hold the truth of God up before the world, and to hold it steady through the ages. The truth is her treasure, her charge, and her very reason for being. Take the truth out of the picture, and the pillar stands holding up nothing.

THE BODY AND ITS HEAD

But the Church is more than a keeper of truth. She is a living Body, and the truth runs in her like blood. When the risen Lord stopped Saul on the Damascus road, He did not ask, why persecutest thou My followers. He asked, why persecutest thou Me. Saul was striking Christians; Christ said the blows fell on Himself.

Here is the deepest fact about the Church, and a child can hold it: the Church is the Body of Christ, joined to Him as a body is joined to its head. She is not a club of people who admire Jesus. She is the continuation of His life in the world. Whoever touches her touches Him. Whoever is cut off from her is cut off from Him, for a hand severed from the body does not live on its own.

A New Martyr of our own century, Saint Hilarion of Verey, who died for this confession in the Soviet camps, restated the ancient fact in three sentences:

Christian life is Church life: the teaching alone, cut loose from the Body, is a sound and not a salvation. Hold this fast, for everything in the coming chapters, the wall included, exists to keep a soul inside this Body, and never to invent a way of being Christian apart from her.

THE FOUR MARKS

Because she is His Body, the Church bears the marks of her Head, and the Creed names four of them: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

One, because Christ is one and a body has one head; there cannot be two Churches any more than two Christs. Holy, not because her members are sinless, they are not, but because her Head is holy and her life is His life. Catholic, which means whole and universal: she holds the whole faith, for the whole man, in the whole world. Apostolic, because she is built on the foundation the Apostles laid, and has never left it.

These four marks are a test as well as a confession. A teaching that would make the Church many instead of one, or would trade her apostolic faith for a newer one, breaks the Creed at the root. Remember this, for the book will return to it when it weighs the errors of our own age.

THE HANDS AND THE FAITH

How was this Body built? Not from an idea, but from an event; and the event has a shape that still governs everything. The Lord chose Apostles, breathed on them, and gave them the Holy Spirit. At Pentecost the Spirit descended, and the Church stood in the world. The Apostles then did what builders do: they laid hands on faithful men, ordaining bishops; those bishops laid hands on others; and so the grace of the priesthood has been handed on, hand to hand, in one unbroken chain from that upper room to the altar of your own parish. Over the whole chain stands the Lord's promise: lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. The Fathers call this the apostolic succession, and it is one of the golden threads of the Church's life.

But mark carefully what is handed on, for here many go astray. What passes from hand to hand is not bare authority, as an office passes in a kingdom. It is authority together with the faith. The hands and the confession go together. A bishop stands in the succession of the Apostles only while he stands in the faith of the Apostles. The chain is a chain of true confession sealed by true ordination; and a link that abandons the confession has, by that abandonment, begun to break itself, whatever certificates it holds. Hold this double thread, hands and faith together, for it will explain, when we come to it, how the saints could honour the episcopate with their whole hearts and yet refuse a particular bishop who betrayed the faith.

THE HOUSE UPON THE ROCK

The Scriptures give one more picture, and it completes the first. The Church is a house built upon rock: Christ Himself is the cornerstone, the Apostles and prophets are the foundation, and the faithful are the living stones built into its walls. The roof that shelters the household is the grace of the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church into all truth. The doors and windows are the holy Mysteries: by Baptism we enter, by the Eucharist we are fed, by repentance we are restored when we fall.

A house is a single structure. One cannot live in the roof without the walls, or claim the cornerstone while quitting the building. And a house has an Architect. No man may build a house of his own beside it and call his the house of God, for whatever is raised outside the Architect's design must crumble. Hold that sentence too, for the schisms this book describes are all, in the end, houses built beside the House.

Saint Cyprian, the martyr bishop of Carthage, gathered all these pictures into images the Church has never forgotten. The Church is one as the sun is one, though its rays are many; as a tree is one, though its branches are many; as a spring is one, though many streams flow from it. Break a ray from the sun, and it is darkness. Break a branch from the tree, and it withers. And then Cyprian said the terrible, tender sentence that stands over this whole book:

Let no reader hurry past that. Everything this book will say about heresy, about walling off, about the narrow way between cowardice and schism, is said because of that sentence. If the Church were a human society, a man might leave one and join another as he changes cities. Because she is the Body of Christ and the mother of the living, to be truly cut off from her is to be cut off from life. Therefore the two great sins this book warns against, the sin of poisoning her faith, and the sin of tearing her body, are both, in their different ways, sins against life itself. The whole art of the confessor, which the saints will teach us chapter by chapter, is to resist the first sin without committing the second.

THE BRIDE ADORNING HERSELF

One last picture, the tenderest, answers a question that troubles some readers before they open a book like this. The Church we see today, with her icons and feasts, her vestments and chants and the intercession of the saints, looks so much richer than the bare assemblies of the first days. Has she not changed?

She has adorned herself, which is a different thing. The Church is the Bride of Christ, and across the centuries the Bride has been dressing for the marriage: the confession of the Trinity and of Christ's two natures, defined by the councils; the holy icons, which witness that God truly became man; the veneration of the Theotokos and the saints, who are alive in Christ; the feasts, the fasts, the sign of the Cross; and above all the Eucharist, the very Body and Blood of the Lord. These are not additions against the Apostles. They are the unfolding of what the Apostles planted, jewels given by the Bridegroom Himself. To strip them away is not to find a purer Church but to undress the Bride; and to keep her garment unspotted until the marriage is exactly what the confessors of every age, and this book after them, are labouring to do.