The primary purpose of this article is to critically consider the extent of a prevailing principle, known variously as the sensus fidelium, sensus fidei or the consensus fidelium, in the early church. I will frame a rough introduction to this discussion by analysing two texts in particular: Origen's Dialogue with Heraclides and other bishops in the presence of laypeople from around 244–9; and the Dialogue of Heraclian with Germinius, a dialogue between Heraclian, a layperson, and Germinius, bishop of Sirmium, from 366. In the case of Origen's dialogue, Origen makes a point of illustrating to a mixed audience, including those who likely do not have any theological education, how one might steer between monarchianism/patripassianism and ditheism. In the case of the Dialogue of Heraclian, we are introduced to the trial of a layperson, Heraclian, with some theological understanding, defending himself before a bishop, Germinius, concerning the use of homoousios to describe the Son's relationship with the Father. These two texts represent a unique perspective on early doctrinal and liturgical developments: both portray the laity as having some sense of theological acumen – at least enough to witness complex discussion, and at most enough to weigh in on the debate in a meaningful way that represents a ‘consensus’ of belief.
As a way of working backward, it might be proffered that in the modern Catholic Church, from Vatican II's Lumen gentium to the 2014 International Theological Commission report on the ‘Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church’, this sense of widespread belief and practice is, to a certain degree, taken for granted.Footnote 1 Evidence for a ‘common faith’ among all levels of Christian initiation and leadership is appealed to on nearly universalistic grounds. The 2014 report, especially, appeals to the New Testament and mentions that the sensus fidei was applied in a more systematic way during the Reformation, but the document uses patristic sources in an ad hoc fashion. Patristics scholars are not unfamiliar with the sources consulted: Tertullian says that the remarkable similarity in Christian teaching around the world is a sign of the work of the Spirit; and then we jump to Augustine, who says that the whole church bears witness to truth, from ‘the bishops to the least of the faithful’.Footnote 2 The document also invokes statements by John Cassian and Vincent of Lérins. Finally, Jerome is pointed to as a source for how faith is worked out by the worship of the church together, though this only in the context of the veneration of relics. And beyond these sources cited by the International Theological Commission, we have plenty more examples; perhaps the most obvious being Athanasius, who in the face of the faith splintering before him declared that at least Christians were not like the pagans who argue with each other about philosophy. Thankfully, he says, the holy fathers and their flocks all agree on the truth.Footnote 3
This review of contemporary appeal to the sensus fidelium, while hardly comprehensive, provides a background against which to ‘fill out’ how modern theologians might conceive of the sensus fidelium by looking contextually at more types of evidence from the tumultuous third and fourth centuries.Footnote 4 In particular, I am interested in instances of dialogue that publicly include all tiers of Christian participation – a sort of setting where we might, if allowed to read the present back into the past, imagine it to be nearly impossible for any good thing to come out, much less any true sense of consensus.
This involves the careful intersection of a couple different trajectories in both the textual and liturgical record of the church:
1. The ever-widening and solidifying gap in participation between lay and clergy (and later, monastics) in not just worship, but also doctrinal deliberation; and
2. The ever-shrinking public nature of theological debates,Footnote 5 which some have attributed to the increasing hierarchalisation of the church, along with stronger and stronger repression of difference.Footnote 6 In this context, there emerged a seeming disconnect between the use of a ‘decidedly elite literary form’ in contrast to the sermon.Footnote 7
Nothing I will offer in this exploration is contextually novel. Scholars such as Paul Smith, working on the Apostolic Constitutions, are investigating the nature of the power and authority held by bishops and asserted by texts.Footnote 8 Alexandre Faivre has explored the emergence of the laity in the early church by textually tracing shifts in authority and divisions between lay and clergy from the New Testament through the church's first five centuries.Footnote 9 Interestingly, most of the early textual evidence seems to suggest that the difference between clergy and lay is in what they do, not what they believe. This clearly changes at some point. There were obvious questions about who could baptise or who could serve the eucharist, for example. But much of the development of the rift between clergy and laity was as much about financial and property management as it was anything particularly doctrinal; and herein might be one of our hurdles in thinking about the sensus fidelium. Though the greatest theological minds to which the church appeals were predominantly clergy, this appears to have been the result of the stratification of Christianity, which in turn became a cause of the further stratification of Christianity.
Thus, it may be the case that thinking about these two texts, one pre-Constantinian and one post-Constantinian, with particular attention to their primary aims, may help us understand better the way we can think of there being any sort of consensus fidelium that carried the ‘non-negotiables’ of the early Christian faith forward. Further, I will draw light to areas that are still matters of disagreement among scholars of late antiquity.
The Dialogue with Heraclides
A fair amount is known about the document called the Dialogue with Heraclides. It was among the papyri discovered at Tura, just south of Cairo, in 1941, containing works by Origen and Didymus the Blind. Robert Daly, author of the English critical edition of the text in the Ancient Christian Writers series, supposes, based on the condition of the papyri, that rather than being stored away in a cave for safekeeping after the condemnation of Origen and Didymus at Constantinople 553, they had been chucked into the cave in which they were found as a part of purge of heretical or dangerous documents. So, along with a treatise on the Passover, this Dialogue with Heraclides was a great find.Footnote 10 The critical edition was first published in 1949 by Jean Scherer, and that edition was condensed into a Sources Chrétiennes volume.Footnote 11 It is a bit odd for a work belonging to the genre of a dialogue in lacking much contextualisation for the exchange, and this either indicates that the dialogue portion of the document we have is simply pretence for Origen to talk;Footnote 12 that Origen or the scribe purposely wanted to exclude the initial ‘negotiations’ regarding the format or the terms of the debate to avoid shame/humiliation if one side had basically won an early victory;Footnote 13 or that the dialogue is fragmentary, like several of the other works found in the bundle of papyri.Footnote 14 Though it is the only extant dialogue of Origen, Scherer points to evidence that there were other dialogues of Origen once stored in the library at Caesarea, among them disputes with certain Valentinians (c.229); with Julia Mamaea, the mother of Severus Alexander who requested Origen to tutor her son (c.231–2); and a public dispute at the Synod of Bostra (c.238–44).Footnote 15
What we have in the Dialogue is a cross-examination between Origen, who was not a bishop, and several bishops, including Heraclides, Maximus, Denis and Demetrius, regarding the orthodoxy of Heraclides, that takes place somewhere between the years 244–9. In contrast to the later Dialogue of Heraclian, here we are in the trinitarian ‘Wild West’ of the third century. Daly summarises the work as a ‘fascinating picture of a church struggling to steer a safe course between the Scylla of monarchianism and patripassianism, towards which Heraclides seems to incline dangerously, and the Charybdis of ditheism, towards which Origen seems to incline’.Footnote 16
Bernard Capelle has deduced that the practical matter leading to this evolving theological dispute is ‘how one is to offer the (official, public) prayer of the Church’.Footnote 17 Origen guides Heraclides closer to an orthodox position, though, as Daly described, this new formulation is more similar to ditheism than ‘proper’ trinitarianism. This is really a question about the divinity of the Word, who should be seen as playing some part in the reception of prayers; Origen says it is better to pray ‘to God … through Jesus Christ by reason of his communication in divinity with the Father’.Footnote 18 This then leads to a discussion of how Christ's divinity plays into his resurrection, and Origen must now affirm the complete humanity of Jesus for the sake of the future resurrection of humans. When Maximus interjects, the discussion steers towards the inner composition of humans, and of Christ.
The conversation diverges when Origen opens the floor for other theological questions, and Denis wonders if a human's soul is located in the blood. This question appears to stem from the Septuagint's translation of the Hebrew nephesh with psychē, as Daly highlights.Footnote 19 Origen does not answer the question outright, but instead uses Paul's language in Romans, 2 Corinthians and Colossians to demonstrate that there is a difference between the ‘interior’ body and ‘exterior’ body, though each are semantically, if not analogously, related.
Finally, the dialogue concludes with a poorly timed interjection from Demetrius asking about the immortality of the soul. Origen uses this as an opportunity to quickly expound upon the three types of death humans face: ‘1) death to sin, when we live to God; 2) death to God, when a soul sins; 3) the ordinary (μέσον) death when we leave our bodies, or are dissolved. All human beings die, but no human soul ever dies this third death.’Footnote 20
Here I am primarily interested in how the two main ‘trajectories’ introduced above – the widening gap in participation and the shrinking nature of public debates – intersect. How do we assess the public nature of Origen's disputation, how do we assess the impact of what Origen has to say on his audience and to what extent does all this work together to preserve the sensus fidelium claimed by the modern church reflecting on the early church? Beyond Origen's opening statement that ‘the whole Church is here listening’ when first confronting Heraclides on the accuracy of his confession (which is based on John 1:1–3), what shall we glean from this work?Footnote 21
Daly pulls together a few sources to give us direction. First, Origen often seems not to have simply one receiver or audience in mind when working, as scholarship on Origen's exegesis by Daly himself, Crouzel and de Lubac, especially, has shown. Daly emphasises no fewer than four possible hearerships/readerships: 1) Jews, whom Origen thought would benefit from seeing how Origen finds Christ throughout the text of the Old Testament; 2) gnostics (with an intentional lowercase ‘g’ – γνωστικοί) who were continually looking for texts whose ‘literal’ meanings could easily be discounted, thus shaping the canon further to their theological devices; 3) the ‘simple faithful’ (πιστικοί), ‘who clung to the literal meaning as the word of God, but in a way that left them open to the ridicule of the heretics; and 4) the ‘perfect or spiritual [πνɛυματικοί] who were willing and able to search behind the literal meaning for the more true spiritual meaning’.Footnote 22 As Daly remarks, drawing on Crouzel, this range of audience seems to have led Origen into trouble more than once for ‘saying and writing things that were disturbing to the simple faithful’.Footnote 23 Moreover, this breadth of possible auditors seems to be reflected in several different places or types of address in the dialogue:
1. Origen's reflection on the public nature of his discussion on prayer during his initial dialogue with Heraclides;
2. Origen's exhortations calling others to both right conduct and right belief;
3. Origen's addressing of Denis's question on the soul being in the blood; and
4. Origen's articulation of the virtues of the path of martyrdom, which at this time of pre-legalisation (and at best occasional shaky toleration) of Christianity would still have been seen as the ultimate goal of the Christian life.
For the sake of space, here I will address the first three of these issues. First, I wish to focus on Origen's reflection on the public nature of his discussion on prayer during his initial dialogue with Heraclides:
Care must be exercised in the way one speaks of these things because this subject has been the cause of much agitation in this church. Requests are frequently written for [doctrinal formulas] to be signed, that the bishop should sign, and that those who are under suspicion should also sign, and that one should sign in the presence of all the people so that there will be no further dissension or dispute in the matter. Oblation is constantly made to God the all-powerful through Jesus Christ by reason of his communication in divinity with the Father. Nor is it made twice but [once] to God through God. I will seem to speak daringly: in prayer it is necessary to respect the conventions, otherwise one becomes subject to the text. … A bishop thus stands over all. If not, and the conventions are not observed, new problems rise. He who is in one respect a bishop or a presbyter, is in another respect not a bishop and a presbyter. He who is in one respect a deacon, is in another respect not a deacon or a layperson. Whoever is a layperson in one respect, in another respect is not, and does not attend assemblies. If this makes sense, let these conventions be kept.Footnote 24
Unfortunately, the latter portion of this excerpt is, in the words of Daly, ‘garbled’, so his translation is conjectural.Footnote 25
Origen is here referring to efforts to try to nail down some aspect of christological or trinitarian doctrine by calling attention to repeated requests to sign off on doctrinal formulas.Footnote 26 However, he does so here with special attention to the way local churches worship, as this discussion of prayer refers not simply to private prayer, but almost certainly to the public prayer over the eucharist (προσφορά). In Origen's appeal for theological accuracy, he has in mind two levels of the participation of the entire church: at deliberation and worship. Here and elsewhere, Origen appears to be implying a causal link between public dialogue in the presence of laypeople and their participation in the sacraments; in other words, we might say that because all levels of initiated people participate in churchly worship (in which ‘simple’ doctrinal statements regarding the relation between Father and Son are plainly stated), all levels therefore should participate in the deliberative processes of these practices. Despite the remaining power of ecclesiastical hierarchies, nevertheless all to some degree stand on an even footing before the altar.
In the second collection of exhortations calling others to both right conduct and right belief, it seems contextually plausible that Origen is not simply sermonising to the crowd that they need to be good Christians by drawing on 1 Timothy, Ephesians and 1 Corinthians, but that the very point of these doctrinal debates is to help correct the possible disjuncture between beliefs and activities.Footnote 27 While this dialogue is, in a sense, a process of publicly ‘commenting on the Scripture’,Footnote 28 it demonstrates how in Origen's time the partition between clergy and lay is still quite permeable – not just because Origen is using the opportunity to preach to the laity, but especially because he is preaching to bishops ‘above’ him.
The third location of Origen's appeal to a blended audience appears as address to Denis’ question on the soul being in the blood.Footnote 29 This is a longer section, and I simply want to turn attention to a small portion:
These problems are rather delicate. We need hearers with a keen mind. I call upon my hearers therefore to be on their guard not to make me liable to the reproach that I am throwing sacred things to dogs [cf. Matt 7:6], to shameless souls. For those given to bark, the cynics, those given to debauchery and abusive language, all they do is howl like dogs. I must not cast holy things before such people. Thus I call upon my hearers not to make me incur the reproach of casting forth the magnificent pearls which I am attempting to collect, like merchants demonstrating merchandise to those wallowing in the impurities of the body, and thus of doing business with swine [cf. Matt 7:6]. … Thus, since the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls [Matt 13:45], if I find these beautiful pearls and, after purchasing them at the cost of hard work and night vigils, throw them to pleasure-loving souls and those given to the filthy things of the body and all wrapped up in impurity, I too will have done wrong because I cast pearls before swine [cf. Matt 7.6]. And when the swine receive the pearls, not seeing their beauty or perceiving their excellence, they will stomp on them by reviling what was correctly expressed; and not only do they stomp on the pearls but, turning back, they will revile the ministers of the pearls.Footnote 30
This passage demonstrates well the intersection of Origen's care for his diverse public audience, and his care for doctrinal accuracy. He points directly to the ‘delicacy’ of this issue (λɛπτός) due to the complexity not simply of the issue of the interior and exterior person, but of navigating the application of any of this to our understanding of Christ that might avoid saying either too much or too little at the risk of grave reproach. Origen's appeal to his listeners, though rhetorically evocative, is fairly simple: he is trying to be accurate, and he expects of his audience not an outright reaction to what he's saying, but contemplation. This applies across all stations of learning, but Origen notes especially that, while he will be exceedingly embarrassed if what he says is ignored, the real sufferers are going to be the local priests who disseminate these teachings handed down from these bishops. Origen says in other places, like his homily on Leviticus (5:7), that priests ‘had in principle to be perfect in their knowledge of doctrine as well as in their behavior and in virtue’.Footnote 31
Thus, there is an appeal not simply for everyone in attendance to be on the same page intellectually, but that by being on the same page behaviourally or ethically, the complexities of the ‘intellectual’ dialogue might be better received by all. Origen's concluding remarks to this aside are poignant: ‘Whoever enters Jesus’ house is his true disciple. He comes in by thinking with the Church, by living according to the Church.’Footnote 32
Dialogue of Heraclian with Germinius
When we move into the fourth century, there is a degree to which we are dealing with a very different landscape. With the legalisation of Christianity and with the overt politicisation of the church, we encounter a rapidly shifting landscape that sees the increasing consolidation of power under bishops. However, what remains constant is the reception of doctrine in churches, and if the complaints of certain writers (such as Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius of Caesarea) are to be believed, this is where the real trouble lies.Footnote 33 Richard Vaggione reminds us that no theological deliberation takes place in a vacuum, and at stake with the promulgation of creeds to churches is the risk that they not only could, but would be rejected by their ‘ultimate audience … not a specialized one but that far larger body of ordinary men and women who made up their congregations at home. It was because Nicaea had failed to satisfy them that the bishops had to try again.’Footnote 34
Seemingly because of this, if we believe Theodoret's recounting of the activities of the mid-fourth century nearly a hundred years later, the frequency of public debates briefly increased dramatically all across the East after Nicaea:
And so when the blasphemous doctrine had been disseminated in the churches of Egypt and of the East, disputes and contentions arose in every city, and in every village, concerning theological dogmas. The common people looked on, and became judges of what was said on either side, and some applauded one party, and some the other.Footnote 35
Socrates describes how, after the death of Constantine, the tenets of so-called ‘Arianism’ ‘became gradually diffused throughout the court, and among the officers of the imperial household and guards, until at length it spread itself over the whole population of the city’.Footnote 36 Sozomen actually recounts that the effect of this dissemination was that ‘disputations concerning doctrines again became prevalent, both in private and in public, and revilings and animosities were renewed’.Footnote 37
What lies before us is an example of just that: a public disputation concerning doctrine, in which Heraclian, Firmianus and Aurelian, three laypeople, were put on public trial for their pro-Nicene beliefs by at least one bishop, Germinius, who co-authored the so-called ‘blasphemy’ of Sirmium along with Valens of Mursa and Ursacius of Singidinum, and certain other priests.Footnote 38 Specifically, we are inserted into an argument over the use of the word homoousios, which though arguably still a word of a technical nature, was under consideration by those outside the episcopate.Footnote 39 And make no mistake, by this point in 366, levels of authority and stratification impact the dialogue from the very beginning: Germinius immediately questions Heraclian's knowledge by asking if he's at least a deacon, or perhaps a priest. Heraclian's response is noble from the Nicene side: ‘Neither priest nor deacon. I speak as one of the least of all Christians, [but I speak] for my life.’Footnote 40 Heraclian draws his authority from scripture itself, which is of course more of a rhetorical jab than a true statement of contradistinction vis-à-vis his opponents.
And while change after change to the creeds were being disseminated through the churches, still it seems the baptismal recitations remained relatively the same. Even so, I would argue, cracks were forming in the pavement of the sensus fidelium underneath the feet of Christians (both in the West and the East),Footnote 41 as demonstrated not just by the classist overtones of Germinius, but by the first lengthy exchange between Germinius and Heraclian, in which the stage for debate is partly set by the very terms of baptismal blessing:
Germinius: Tell me, Heraclian: I baptized you – in what way did you receive it from me?
Heraclian: I received from you: ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’ I did not receive ‘into a greater God and a lesser God, the latter created.’ You say the same thing about the Holy Spirit.
Germinius: If the Spirit is not created the Apostle Paul was a liar when he said that through Christ ‘all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible.’ If the Spirit was not created through him, then not ‘all things’ were created through him.Footnote 42
This provokes a scriptural debate that leaves Germinius unable to explain a grammatical twist in a prophecy in Isaiah 48 that the Nicenes used to explain the pre-existence of the Son, which, of course, angers and embarrasses Germinius because of the amateur-level dialectic prowess with which he is depicted.Footnote 43
Fascinatingly, we read that members of the crowd attempted to intervene and speak for Heraclian as a layperson who successfully argued in some capacity – whether in a local church, or in a larger setting, the text doesn't tell us – against the ‘sinister heresies of Photinus’, and thus could not possibly be a heretic.Footnote 44 Germinius responds by appealing to the authority of another bishop (Eusebius of Nicomedia) who had apparently rubber-stamped Germinius’ theology. This theology unfortunately includes the confessions that ‘the Son had a beginning before the ages from the Father’, and that ‘the Holy Spirit is the Chief of the angels [and] archangels. For just as the Son is not like the Father in every particular, neither is the Holy Spirit like the Son.’Footnote 45 Heraclian uses obvious texts against him, the primary one being Philip's request in John 14 that Jesus show him the Father, and Jesus’ response: ‘Show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?’Footnote 46
After this, the scriptural debate bounces between Heraclian and two other figures: Theodore, a priest, and someone named Agrippinus. Heraclian's general refrain to his accusers is that anything in scripture dealing with the supposed lesser stature of Christ is due solely to the operation of his will to be subject to the Father; but by no means does this make the Son substantially inferior to the Father. Indeed, this also elevates the Holy Spirit to the sharing of that same divine substance. So, in this public dialogue Heraclian is represented as formulating what would more or less be regarded orthodox trinitarian theology.
While the entirety of the dialogue is fascinating, I turn now to the conclusion, after Heraclian's final full confession of faith:
Once Heraclian had said this Germinius became full of fury and indignation and began to denounce him and say: He is a heretic because he says Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are a complete God. He is a homoousian, don't put any trust in him. Then he asked the people that if anyone considered themselves a servant or handmaid of God they should spit on him because he was already dead. And he swore on oath that he should be sent into exile.
Heraclian: God . . . will also free me and save me from your hands. But when he had said this, the priests and deacons all said: He is not to leave here until he has anathematized the bishops he named, whose faith he says he holds. This was said to Heraclian and Firmianus and the other brothers, but they wouldn't do it. … [A]fter they dismissed them, some of their partisans shouted: ‘Take them to the Proconsul! Let them be executed! They caused an uprising and out of one people made two!’ Then they forced them to sign the heretics’ creed. Then they redoubled their voices, saying: ‘Take them to the Proconsul! Let them be executed!’ Then Germinius said, ‘No, brothers [and sisters]! They don't know what they're saying. If [this teaching] won over bishops, how much more so these fellows.’Footnote 47
Scarcely a hundred years removed from Origen's pleas for martyrdom, we now see martyrdom being called upon Christians by other Christians. The mob mentality of reacting to Heraclian and his compatriots’ refusal to buy into the homoian creed is fascinating. Simonetti points to how, though the emperor Valentinian was generally ‘Nicene’ in his faith, his public policy was one of neutrality – to the point where public policy could support either side in the doctrinal debates if they were able to successfully levy a charge of ‘disturbance of public order’ against their opponents. While the death penalty seems severe here for an internal debate, such was reality.Footnote 48 It is ironically Germinius himself who is depicted as seeing reason, and draws attention to that pathway of information between clergy and lay – that even despite Heraclian's depth of knowledge and ability to publicly debate, it is the fault of the pro-Nicene bishops for his belief, not his own fault.Footnote 49
If Simonetti is correct that this entire public debate is a literary farce that veers toward hagiography, what is the point of circulating this form of doctrinal teaching at all?Footnote 50 It seems unlikely that a document such as this would be circulated as simply a martyrological tool of Nicene defenders, as there is no martyrological conclusion, and it certainly would not suffice to prove that there existed a Nicene sensus fidelium. Is this dialogue simply a literary form reserved for the elite? Is it an exercise in creative writing? Or does it more accurately demonstrate the trajectory of theological division in the mid-fourth century, a time past the ‘golden age’ of theological argumentation before and just after Nicaea when ‘ownership’ of one's ability to articulate the mysteries of the Trinity fell more on the ‘simple’ and less on bureaucrats? In light of the above examination, the latter appears more likely.
Conclusion
So, what might we say as a way of an initial conclusion regarding the sensus fidelium, the way Origen and Heraclian dialogue publicly and what that means for the way modern theologians might look at the way the early church honed its doctrine across several strata of authority?
In Origen's case, I am most convinced by Richard Lim's assessments of this dialogue. Lim notes: ‘In his repeated attempts to reconcile divided Christian communities, Origen never took for granted an ideal, apostolic consensus omnium among Christians; instead, he saw unity as the fruit of constant vigilance.’Footnote 51 In the Roman West (and presumably also in the Alexandrian East), Lim summarises that ‘the rhetoric of concord assumed greater weight as social reality became increasingly characterized by fragmentation, conflict, and anarchy’.Footnote 52
This judgement is, to some degree, substantiated by Athanasius’ witness that part of the reason for Constantine's favouring the homoousians is because the homoiousians at Nicaea brought their accusations against Athanasius as ‘a multitudinous mob’ and ‘a Babel of sounds’.Footnote 53 By the time we arrive at the flurry of councils in the mid-fourth century, where the Dialogue of Heraclian with Germinius is set, we see the rapid change of Christian ‘culture’ becoming entangled in the dance between politics local and imperial, and as the gap widened between bishop and priest and layperson (not to mention the monastics), public appeals to a sensus fidelium may have been as much about quelling dissensus for the sake of maintaining and centralising power as it was trying to actually do serious exegesis.Footnote 54 Lim concludes that, while Christians appealed to ‘simplicity’ as a moral high ground, they failed to uphold the unspoken social grace of ‘deference’:
The difference between them is great: deference is an unspoken rule of conduct enmeshed in a complex system of social exchange, whereas simplicity is a vocal ideology promoted by interested parties to mimic the former. The distinction is not trivial. Origen saw simplicity as a quality natural to some Christians, but later Christians would plead that other Christians, even if they did not consider themselves to be such, should nevertheless become simplices.Footnote 55
And, for Origen, it is perhaps helpful to reflect upon how this works out practically at even the weekly meeting for worship: everyone can be involved in and contribute meaningfully to the life of the church as long as they behave in an orderly way.Footnote 56
However, it is easy to feel that by the end of the fourth century there was less import to Christian debate insofar as it related either to the state or to the average church. In one of Basil the Great's canons, he laments how lax the process had become of admitting anyone to the priesthood: ‘a great number of servants are to be found in every village, but not one deserving to minister at the altar … most of them are resorting to ecclesiastical service as a means of escape from military service’.Footnote 57 Who would be left on the local level to carry on the sensus fidelium if no one were matching intellectual assent with sturdiness of ethic, the way Origen modelled?
In fact, it may be that Origen's very appeal was the implicit cause of the downfall of dialogue. As Lim concludes in a recent essay, drawing from several other scholars:
the rise of curial bishops coincided with the rise in importance of the pastoral role and the sermo humilis. The public sermon served as a universal form of address that reifies the hierarchical difference between preacher and audience. This asymmetry that is a cornerstone of the sermo humilis stemmed from the pastoral ideology around which episcopal authority developed.Footnote 58
Richard Miles notes that, by the time we reach Augustine's era, we are faced with a period wherein ‘doctrinal power-play increasingly revolved around reciprocal pressure being placed on those whose opinions were considered to count rather than open dialectical discussion of opposing points of view, so letters’ functioned as the most vital tools for ‘the creation and ordering of textual elite communities’.Footnote 59 In other words, Miles surmises that at about this time the bishops talked loudly about dialogue and process, but in reality the lay audience increasingly vanished under the weight of the theological elite. Ramsay MacMullen has wryly remarked that seemingly few, if any, of the bishops of the late fourth century onward, from Chrysostom to Basil to Gregory of Nyssa to Augustine, seemed to have figured out what to say to those on the opposite spectrum of learning, wealth or both; Augustine sounds especially out of touch when he calls landowners, not urban beggars, ‘poor’.Footnote 60
Documents like these two dialogues reflect this rapid shift in the stratification of the church, such that it may be time to reconsider the way the modern church utilises inherited texts to reflect the sort of ‘consistency’ to the faith that is deemed necessary to legitimise the authoritative transmission of doctrine. Underlying both documents is an understanding that participation in Christian practices is as important for ensuring the transmission of a common core of beliefs as are theological treatises. The sensus fidelium, we might conclude, is therefore not simply a ‘myth’ propagated by powers of structure; but as the church aged, and political pressures waxed and waned on congregations spread across a wide geographical expanse, that there remained any discernible consensus at all was due primarily to the fact that people worshipped together even when they could not debate together. The intersection of the two trajectories of the widening of the gap between lay and clergy with the shrinking relevance of public theological debate served to concentrate the consensus as an ‘ideal’ within the vaulted ceilings of basilicas (or monastic arcades), while the ‘real’ consensus remained in the nave.Footnote 61
