SAINT FABIAN—A. D. 236

 

IT is said that the electors decided in favor of Fabian, son of Fabius, who was created pope on the 13th of January, 236, because a dove, after hovering about the heads of all present, during the election, at length alighted on the head of Fabian. The fact is stated by Eusebius. To the seven deacon-notaries appointed by Saint Clement I to collect the acts of the martyrs, Fabian added seven subdeacons, to assist the former in a task so pious and so important. He appointed seven other deacons of a superior order to oversee those of whom we have spoken. They were ordered to take care that the acts were written out with details, and not given in the few scant wordsto which they had been confined.

Fabian divided Rome into seven Rioni—quarters or districts—as Augustus had divided it into fourteen. That ancient civil division did not please Fabian; while in that which he adopted, the seven deacons who were charged to oversee the seven other deacons, and the seven subdeacons, could take care of the poor in the seven churches. In this ecclesiastical division originated the titles of the Cardinal-deacons, who at first were entitled Regionari. It has been stated that Fabian gave orders that on Holy Thursday the old oil of the holy chrism should be burned. It has also been stated that Fabian decreed that no one should be ordained priest at an earlier age than thirty years; that, in civil judgment, no priest could be either accuser, or judge, or witness; that the faithful should communicate three in every year; that priests who had become idiots as the result of illness should no longer be allowed to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice: and that marriage should be prohibited to the faithful to the fourth degree of consanguinity. While recounting these regulations, Novaes adds: "Nevertheless, I believe— although the sovereign pontiffs of the primitive Christian centuries must have made provision for the proper regulation of the Church— I believe and shall always assert that the decretals attributed to the pontiffs earlier than Saint Siricius, that is to say, earlier than the year 385, are apocryphal, with the exception of four decretals in the first three centuries. Those four are—one by Saint Clement, and three by Saint Cornelius. To these we may add some fragments of other genuine documents: viz., fragments of two decretals of Saint Stephen (year 253); of one of Saint Dionysius (year 250); of another of Saint Felix I (269); in the fourth century, two of Saint Julius (year 337); the twelve of Saint Liberius (year 352); and eight of Saint Damasus (year 366); all indicated by Monsignor Bartoli."

The same prelate also mentions, in his nineteenth chapter, the ninety-seven apocryphal decretals forged by Isidore Mercator, and attributed to the pontiffs who preceded Saint Gregory the Great, the sixty-fifth pope.

Stunt Cyprian, speaking of Saint Fabian, calls him an excellent man, and says that the glory of his death was conformable to the purity, the holiness, and the integrity of his life. He had the glory to banish from the Church a new heretic, Privatus, an African, who was prevously condemned by a council for enormous faults, and who endeavored by an insidious humility to impose upon the candor of the pope.

Many modern waiters have maintained that Saint Fabian baptized the Emperor Philip and his son, also named Philip; in which case Philip, the father, would have been the first Christian emperor. To those who, in common with so many historians who are supported by documents possesing the confidence and respect of all Christendom, maintain that Constantine was the first Christian emperor, Novaes replies, as do some other authors, that the two opinions are not necessarily irreconcilable. He argues that Philip might have been the first Christian emperor, and yet not have dared publicly to profess his Christianity. In all things there are such gradations. Always it is by gradations more or less distant that a free and noble conduct develops itself in the history of a people: there have always been precedents, more or less concealed, which have given the examples, and strengthened the courage of some successor who has been assisted by more favorable circumstances.

Caesarotti does not admit the Christian sentiments attributed to Philip, and he thinks that to doubt them is by no means to do any wrong to our holy religion. He who was a traitor to his prince, and the assassin of his pupil, would be no very desirable acquisition to the Christians; and if Philip had really desired to become a genuine Christian, his first step should have been to take off his crown and trample it under his feet, obtained, as it had been, by so much perfidy. Then he should have passed his whole remaining days in the Station of the Weeping. (The Weepers' Station, or Station of Tears, was the first of the lour degrees of the canonical penance. The penitents could not enter the church; they waited in the porch, covered with sackcloth, confessing their sins, and begging with tears and supplications that the faithful would pray for God's pardon for them.)

In five ordinations Fabian created either eleven or fourteen bishops, twenty-two priests, and seven or eight deacons. The different numbers are stated by different authors.

He governed the Church about fourteen years.

Having suffered martyrdom in the seventh persecution under Decius, this pope was burifid the cemetery of Saint Calixtus. He is reckoned among the canons regular.

The Holy See remained vacant during more than sixteen months, as the persecution under the Emperor Decius became more and more cruel. In this interval, between the death of Fabian and the elect on of his successor, the first of the antipopes made his appearance. His name was Novatian. With him began the first schism of the Church. Unfortunately, Novatian, who died at Rome in the pontificate of Sixtus II, had, during nearly two centuries, successors who were attached to that fatal schism which was extinguished by Celestine I.

Fabian kept up a correspondence with Origen, born at Alexandria in 185. Clement of Alexandria was his master. Both sexes crowded to the school of Origen. Few authors have been more industrious than he was, and few men have been admired for as long a time, and no one has been more, severely attacked and censured than he was during his life and has been since his death.

His works are an Exhortation to Martyrdom, and Commentaries on the Holy Scripture, which he was perhaps the first to explain as a whole. He labored on an edition of the Scriptures in six columns, entitled Hexaples. In his book of Principia, he has been supposed to have borrowed his system from the philosophy of Plato.

We also owe to Origen the Treatise against Celsus. That enemy of the Christian religion had insolently published his Discourse on Truth, a discourse full of insults and calumnies. In none of his writings has Origen displayed so much of either Christian or profane science as in this; nor in any other work has he brought forward so many strong and solid proofs. It is considered the most perfect and well-written defence of Christianity that antiquity has bequeathed to us.

It is remarkable that the objections cf Celsus are in most casses the same that are repeated by the philosophers of our age. Those copyists have not the merit of inventing errors and blasphemies; they are obliged to recur to the sophisms of sophists forgotten for sixteen centuries. Scarcely was Origen dead, when the disputes about his orthodoxy became stronger and warmer. Some Fathers defended him: others, including Saint Basil, and after him some of the commentators, aver that Origen did not think rightly as to the divinity of the Holy Ghost. Origen was condemned in the fifth general council. Saint Augustine wrote against the origenists.

 

SAINT CORNELIUS—A.D. 251