The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (III): the Fifth Century's Cautions and Caveats

In two previous installments discussing The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity, edited by Geoffrey Dunn of the Australian Catholic University, we noted some of the historiographical challenges such a book as this both poses and must also itself wrestle with; and then we discussed very briefly some of the fascinating insights of the fourth century, especially those pertaining to Pope Siricius, in whose letters (decretals) scholars increasingly detect the move from being merely bishop of Rome to a more universal primate or pope in a Petrine vein.

Now, let us turn our attention to the fifth century. The editor leads off this section with his chapter, "Innocent I and the First Synod of Toledo." Once again the interactions between the Spanish church and Roman bishop come in for close examination.

But quite apart from the particular conclusions Dunn reaches, I want to underscore the important hermeneutical and historiographical challenges this chapter itself gives witness to by its drawing of different conclusions after examining the same evidence as the two authors in the immediately previous section treating Roman-Spanish interactions, especially in Siricius's letters. Those earlier authors, discussed in my second part of this review essay, found evidence of a universalizing tendency and the beginnings of some kind of papal primacy extending beyond the Latin Church, or at the very least beyond Western Europe; but Dunn looks at the evidence and says that the interactions show a certain pre-eminence is being claimed by the Roman bishops, but only in juridical-appellate terms--not, that is, in either legislative or executive terms.

In this regard, Dunn's conclusions echo--as he very briefly acknowledges--what seems to have been the view of the council or synod of Serdica (Sardica) (modern Sofia in Bulgaria) in 343, which argued in favor--it would seem--of Rome functioning as a court of appeal that would not make the final decisions, but hear regional appeals, and then find other regional actors to re-try a case or to consider an appeal at the regional level.

Serdica has recently come in for renewed scholarly attention, not least in Hamilton Hess's The Early Development of Canon Law and the Council of Serdica and in Christopher Stephens's volume, Canon Law and Episcopal Authority: The Canons of Antioch and Serdica.

I think the enormously important and valuable lesson to draw from Dunn's chapter, and the other two chapters, as well as from the rest of The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (to be discussed in future parts), must be this: one must approach history with great humility and caution, aware that trying to draw definitive and binding conclusions admitting of no difference on the basis of conflicting, ambiguous, and incomplete briefs is a dangerous and likely foolish thing to do. History can be instructive but not normative, as Taft famously said.

Dunn and the two preceding authors, all looking at the same evidence, draw conclusions that differ in some important respects. All three, in my judgment, have made perfectly plausible cases, with judicious reasoning and careful display of the evidence, for why they have interpreted matters as they have. In doing so, they have reminded us once again why an appeal to the past will not solve the problems of the present. Catholic apologists fondly imagining the first millennium gives copious and unambiguous evidence of a Vatican I-like primacy will be discombobulated by this as much as Orthodox polemicists dismissing the very concept of Roman primacy as a perfidious power-grab by the Latins.

The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (II): the Fourth Century

When we were last met to discuss the very informative and important collection of essays recently published as The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity, I noted some of the historiographical problems which the editor, Geoffrey Dunn, treats in his introduction.

There he also notes that the book is designed to look at papal relations with: (i) his own church; (ii) other bishops; and (iii) civil authorities.

Today, let us cast a glance at some of the insights of the first section, devoted to the fourth century and consisting of three chapters.

In the first chapter, "The Pax Constantiniana and the Roman Episcopate," Glen Thompson reviews the data--which is conflicted in some cases--over the move from private worship in the pre-toleration period to more public worship and the concomitant construction of basilicas and other churches for such worship. Not surprisingly he notes that the rate of attendance and zeal for participation both decline after the legalization of Christianity. Additionally, he notes that while there is some evidence for monarchic episcopate in and for Rome in the fourth century, one should not assume that it was a highly developed, consolidated, centralized structure governing all Christian life in the city--that would assume far too many facts not in evidence.

In Marianne Saghy's "The Bishop of Rome and the Martyrs," we find documentation of the relationship that was forged, especially by Damasus, between Roman martyrs and Roman bishops. The most powerful example of this is of course the cult of devotion to Peter and Paul, who form the only church that could claim a dual apostolic foundation.

Though Saghy confines herself to the fourth century, it must be noted that in time, of course, the memory of this dual apostolic foundation would fade considerably in the Roman ecclesial imaginary--so much so that more than a quarter-century ago now, William R. Farmer and Roch Kereszty would publish an important aide-mémoire, Peter and Paul in the Church of Rome: The Ecumenical Potential of a Forgotten Perspective.

Christian Hornung's chapter, "Siricius and the Rise of the Papacy" rounds out this first section of The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity. She makes a convincing case, by means of analyzing the decretals and letters of Siricius (384-98), that his marks the first papal episcopate, the first papacy insofar as he clearly sees his office as one with the power to legislate for the whole Church. Responding to a letter from a Spanish bishop, Siricius uses the occasion to assert that he is heir to St. Peter; that his response is not just a pastoral letter from a brother bishop but a legal text in the mode of Roman imperial legislation; and that his response is not confined merely to the one Spanish case, but is to be taken as having universal authority in the whole Church.

Siricius comes up again in the next chapter, Alberto Ferreiro's "Pope Siricius and Himerius of Tarragona (385): Provincial Papal Intervention in the Fourth Century." This chapter looks at the same decretal and papacy as Hornung's chapter did, but widens the context and introduces important additional considerations, not least by noting that Siricius's intervention in the Spanish case was part of a series of interventions outside of the Italian peninsula. Siricius had, before the Spanish case, already been intervening in the affairs of the North African church.

Next up: the fifth century.

To be continued. 

The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (I): Historiographical Problems

We have, for more than two decades, been living in a time of increasingly intense study of the role of the bishop of Rome in the first millennium. That call for study was, of course, given special impetus by the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, about which I have had a few things to say in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

Recent popes and scholars have sought--following Congar's "grand law of Catholic reform"--to find models from earlier in the Church's history that might be useful today. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it runs the risk of romanticizing the first millennium as a period of unity, when the reality is far messier than that. The further problem is--as the eminent Byzantine historian Robert Taft has often remarked--that "history is instructive but not normative." In other words, even if we find all sorts of attractive or plausible models from the first millennium, that in no way absolves us of the responsibility to decide what is necessary for our own time and context, vastly different in some ways from any earlier period of Church history. We cannot simply say "Well, the Fathers did it, so we must too" and imagine that that solves anything.

So this process of studying the first millennium remains important but is rather slow-going, primarily because as we study this vast and diverse period in more detail we are constantly confronted with evidence that does not fit anybody's pre-conceived notions.

A new collection further deepens our understanding of the papacy in this period, but further complicates matters also: Geoffrey Dunn, ed., The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (Ashgate, 2015), 273pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

At various times over the past millennium bishops of Rome have claimed a universal primacy of jurisdiction over all Christians and a superiority over civil authority. Reactions to these claims have shaped the modern world profoundly. Did the Roman bishop make such claims in the millennium prior to that? The essays in this volume from international experts in the field examine the bishop of Rome in late antiquity from the time of Constantine at the start of the fourth century to the death of Gregory the Great at the beginning of the seventh. These were important centuries as Christianity underwent enormous transformation in a time of change. The essays concentrate on how the holders of the office perceived and exercised their episcopal responsibilities and prerogatives within the city or in relation to both civic administration and other churches in other areas, particularly as revealed through the surviving correspondence. With several of the contributors examining the same evidence from different perspectives, this volume canvasses a wide range of opinions about the nature of papal power in the world of late antiquity.

Among the authors who have written chapters in this collection, we find the Orthodox scholar George Demacopolous, author of The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity, which I have elsewhere largely favorably reviewed. Demacopolous contributes a chapter, "Are All Univesalist Politics Local: Pope Gelasius I's International Ambition as a Tonic for Local Humiliation."

The patrologist Bronwen Neil, author, editor, or translator of such works as The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor and Pope Gelasius I, The Letters of Gelasius I (492-496) contributes a chapter, "Crisis in the Letters of Gelasius I: a New Model of Crisis Management."

Glen Thompson's chapter is "The Pax Constantiniana and the Roman Episcopate." Thompson is the translator and editor of the recently published The Correspondence of Julius I.

The book is divided into three sections treating the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. In subsequent entries in this series, I shall have more to say about some of the essays in each.

In his introduction, Dunn, a senior research fellow in the Centre for Early Christian Studies at the Australian Catholic University, notes some of the many challenges posed by studying the papacy in this time period. The question that is often asked is about the power of the pope in this time, and whether Vatican I's notion of "universal jurisdiction" was in fact promoted or discussed seriously in the antique period. Dunn acknowledges up front that answers to that question have varied and continue to vary, and part of the variance is determined by present political purposes as well as the ecclesial situation of a given scholar.

He raises the problem of whether scholars in 2015 can read antique evidence without allowing present considerations to control that reading, and without allowing, moreover, a reading that gives in to the temptation to see individual persons, practices, and texts as part of one grand narrative of historical or doctrinal development--what he calls reading "prochronistically, whereby modern ideas are projected back into the literary evidence" (2). As he goes on to say, "good scholarship should avoid looking at events in one period through the prism of later developments" (3).

There are other issues that bedevil study of this period, including the fact that much of it has not in fact been well studied at all. Apart from some really towering figures such as Leo I and Gregory I, few other popes have been studied in depth, and apart from these two, the correspondence of the rest of them, with rarest of exceptions, remains both untranslated into modern Western languages and often uncollected into Latin critical editions.

Dunn next acknowledges that much of what determined Roman pre-eminence in this period comes from its geopolitical situation as the largest city, the capital city, of the Roman Empire. This, of course, is simply a restatement of the "principle of accommodation" which Francis Dvornik made famous more than fifty years ago in his Byzantium and the Roman Primacy.

To be continued. 

The Bishop of Rome in Antiquity

As I mentioned earlier this month, in drawing attention to George Demacopoulos's forthcoming book on Gregory the Great, scholarship for the last decade and more, especially scholarship committed to overcoming the East-West divide, has been looking at various popes and leaders of the first millennium to see what we may need to re-learn from them today. In the various recent studies I have read, including Susan Wessell's splendid Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, both East and West have been discovering surprising things not only about the papacy and each other, but also about their own particular traditions in this process. A book released at the end of May promises to continue that process: Geoffrey D. Dunn, ed., The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (Ashgate, 2015), 270pp.

About this book (which contains an essay from the aforementioned Demacopoulos), the publisher tells us:

At various times over the past millennium bishops of Rome have claimed a universal primacy of jurisdiction over all Christians and a superiority over civil authority. Reactions to these claims have shaped the modern world profoundly. Did the Roman bishop make such claims in the millennium prior to that? The essays in this volume from international experts in the field examine the bishop of Rome in late antiquity from the time of Constantine at the start of the fourth century to the death of Gregory the Great at the beginning of the seventh. These were important centuries as Christianity underwent enormous transformation in a time of change. The essays concentrate on how the holders of the office perceived and exercised their episcopal responsibilities and prerogatives within the city or in relation to both civic administration and other churches in other areas, particularly as revealed through the surviving correspondence. With several of the contributors examining the same evidence from different perspectives, this volume canvasses a wide range of opinions about the nature of papal power in the world of late antiquity.