The Internal Development Of The

The characteristic Eastern and Western conceptions of Christianity began

to be clearly differentiated in the early years of the third century. A

juristic conception of the Church as a body at the head of which, and

clothed with authority, appeared the bishop of Rome, had, indeed, become

current at Rome in the last decade of the second century on the occasion

of the Easter controversy, which had ended in an estrangement between the< r />
previously closely affiliated churches of Asia Minor and the West,

especially Rome (§ 38). Western theology soon became centred in North

Africa under the legally trained Tertullian, by whom its leading

principles were laid down in harmony with the bent of the Latin genius (§

39). In this period numerous attempts were made to solve the problem

arising from the unity of God and the divinity of Christ, without recourse

to a Logos christology. Some of the more unsuccessful of these attempts

have since been grouped under the heads of Dynamistic and of Modalistic

Monarchianism (§ 40). At the same time Montanism was excluded from the

Church (§ 41), as subversive of the distinction between the clergy and

laity and the established organs of the Church's government, which in the

recent rise of a theory of the necessity of the episcopate (see above, §

27) had become important. In the administration of the penitential

discipline (§ 42) the position of the clergy and the realization of a

hierarchically organized Church was still further advanced, preparatory

for the position of Cyprian. At the same time as these constitutional

developments were taking place in the West, and especially in North

Africa, there occurred in Egypt and Palestine a remarkable advance in

doctrinal discussion, whereby the theology of the apologists was developed

in the Catechetical School of Alexandria, especially under the leadership

of Clement of Alexandria and Origen (§ 43). In this new speculation a vast

mass of most fruitful theological ideas was built up, from which

subsequent ages drew for the defence of the traditional faith, but some of

which served as the basis of new and startling heresies. Corresponding to

the intellectual development within the Church was the last phase of

Hellenic philosophy, known as Neo-Platonism (§ 44), which subsequently

came into bitter conflict with the Church.