The Church Of The Western Empire

The period between the closing years of the fourth century, in which the

struggle was still going on between heathenism and Christianity (§ 81),

and the end of the Roman Empire of the West is of fundamental importance

in the study of the history of the Christian Church of the West. In this

period were laid the foundations for its characteristic theology and its

ecclesiastical organization. The former was the work of St. Augustine, the

most powerful religious personality of the Western Church. In this he

built partly upon the traditions of the West, but also, largely, upon his

own religious experience (§ 82). These elements were developed and

modified by the two great controversies in which, by discussion, he

formulated more completely than ever had been done before the idea of the

Church and its sacraments in opposition to the Donatists (§ 83), and the

doctrines of sin and grace in opposition to a moralistic Christianity,

represented by Pelagius (§ 84). The leading ideas of Augustine, however,

could be appropriated only as they were modified and brought into

conformity with the dominant ecclesiastical and sacramental system of the

Church, in the semi-Pelagian controversy, which found a tardy termination

in the sixth century (§ 85). In the meanwhile the inroads of the

barbarians with all the horrors of the invasions, the confusion in the

political, social, and ecclesiastical organization, threatened the

overthrow of all established institutions. In the midst of this anarchy,

the Roman See, in the work of Innocent I, and still more clearly in the

work of Leo the Great, enunciated its ideals and became the centre, not

merely of ecclesiastical unity, in which it had often to contest its

claims with the divided Church organizations of the West, but still more

as the ideal centre of unity for all those that held to the old order of

the Empire with its culture and social life (§ 86).