... It is equally bad ecclesiology to ask the question: was the Apostle Peter dependent on the Church of Jerusalem? I confess that, for me, the problem of Peter’s primacy seems to be a false problem; but the problem of Peter himself is real. I cannot possibly tackle the subject at present, or I should wander too far from the immediate point under review. It is enough simply to say that Peter stood in a place apart among the apostles, and that his ministry was unique in kind and had no later parallels. The Apostle Peter is the rock on which the Church is built, and will remain the rock until the coming of the Lord. But Peter’s place and his apostolic ministry could never have set him outside the Church’s boundaries. Another thing to note: belonging to the Church is concrete, not abstract—that is, you cannot belong to the Church in general, you have to belong to one church in particular: the Church of God is manifested as empirical reality in the local churches. This concrete way of belonging to a local church implies a relation of dependence upon it, though we should be careful to avoid describing this dependency in modern terms of law and jurisdiction, for grace is its foundation. The dependence is really on the will of God, who rules the Church’s life. In the early days of the Church of Jerusalem, the Apostle Peter was its head; this did not make him independent in regard to the Church, for in that case he could not have functioned as its head. Conversely, the Church of Jerusalem depended, to some extent, on Peter as being its head. During this phase of Peter’s life, his course of action had to run parallel to the action of the Church of Jerusalem, in full concord. So there is no surprise in the fact that, after his missionary journey and the conversion of Cornelius, Peter reported about them to the Jerusalem church assembly. How could he possibly withhold such an amazing story from them: an uncircumcised pagan received into the Church (for the first time, according to the Acts)! When they heard these things (that is, after hearing Peter’s account) they held their peace and glorified God, saying: “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18). Here was an example of the Church of Jerusalem bearing witness about the will of God, and submitting (the Church, not Peter alone) to God’s will. Legal submission (i.e., to a qualified authority) belongs to quite a different world, and Luke’s story makes no mention of it. We know almost nothing about St Peter’s doings after he left Jerusalem; but we can state with a high degree of probability that, whatever St Peter was doing, he was not dependent on the Church of Jerusalem, at least in a legalistic sense, and least of all as an apostle of Christ. If he had been dependent, we should have had to ask how and where his dependency could find concrete expression. After the “Apostolic Council” which Peter attended, as Acts recounts, he never came to Jerusalem again, so he cannot have participated in the Jerusalem church assembly. We are left with the supposition—most unlikely—that Peter sent in regular reports to Jerusalem. Still another hypothesis is suggested by O. Cullmann in his book on St. Peter: Peter was dependent not on the Church of Jerusalem but on St James in person, because he was the head of the Christian-Jewish mission.[30] This notion rests on the supposition that St James was actually the head of the Universal Church. But that is a highly questionable hypothesis without any data to support it; and it led O. Cullmann to the conclusion that the Christian Jews, no matter where they might be situated, were always dependent on St Peter. According to O. Cullmann, in one self-same church, say the Church of Rome, some of the faithful were dependents of St Peter, and others looked elsewhere. Such a supposition is quite inadmissible, because it leaves out the idea of the Church.
4. After James died, and still more after Jerusalem fell in A.D. 70, the Church of Jerusalem ceased to play the part of leading church. It disappeared from the historical stage: when it made a new entrance it appeared as a small church in the new pagan city of Aelia Capitolina, and the congregation was entirely composed of Gentile Christians. So far had its prestige crumbled, that even in Palestine leadership had passed to the Church of Caesarea; surely this is still further proof that the Church of Jerusalem had not held the primacy before the year 70. Primacy in any case is inseparably bound up with a man, not with a church. If the primacy had belonged to James, he would have passed it over to his successors; men despТsunoi like himself, that is, kindred of Christ in the flesh. To whom, then, was the priority which formerly belonged to the Church of Jerusalem transferred? The New Testament scriptures give us no guidance on this point, and so we have to look for an answer in the facts of history, and the premises of ecclesiology. If the local churches were gathered round one authoritative church in the beginning, why were they to do without such a center later on? We can strongly assert that no church could have inherited Jerusalem’s authority in full. The authority given to the Church of Jerusalem was unique and unrepeatable. True enough; but there is no need to ask whether another church could have inherited Jerusalem’s authority in full. We are only concerned to discover which had most authority among the churches—if not so great as the primitive authority of Jerusalem, at least greater than the others could boast of.
Let us turn to the facts. We know that the Church of Rome took over the position of “church-with-priority” at the end of the first century. That was about the time at which her star ascended into the firmament of history in its brightest splendor. We cannot tell exactly when this happened, for there was never a formal transmission of priority from Jerusalem to Rome. Even as early as the Epistle to the Romans, Rome seems to have stood out among all the churches as very important. Paul bears witness that the faith of the Romans was proclaimed throughout the whole world (Rom 1:
. The persecutions of Nero did not reduce the Church of Rome to nothing, but it was so badly damaged that some period of time was needed to arouse its spirit and collect its numerical strength. In the time of this transition, as we should expect, it could not play the part of the leading church. We do not know who held the priority during this comparatively short period: it may possibly have been Antioch, which stood in an important ecclesiastical position even in the time of St James. It may have been Ephesus, though this is less likely, for that church’s influence never spread beyond Asia Minor. If Ephesus had really possessed the priority then, surely it would have had possession at the end of the first century. However, we have a document which gives us our earliest reliable evidence that the Church of Rome stood in an exceptional position of authority in this period. This is the epistle of Clement of Rome. Modern theological scholars (especially Protestants) regard Clement of Rome as a name intimately associated with the beginnings of pre-Catholicism, or even of Catholicism at Rome. This is one of the great axioms to be found in modern theological learning, those formulas potent as magic spells, even when totally groundless. We know that Clement was “president” of the Roman Church: that is all. C. Dix, writing to defend the theory of apostle-bishops, considered that Clement was the heir and successor of the Apostles Peter and Paul in exactly the same way as (he thinks) Timothy and Titus had been. In other words, Clement is supposed to have been the bishop of a considerable number of churches, which were governed by presbyteries. This opinion belongs in a world of pure fantasy, and will not stand up to serious critical investigation.[31]
The epistle is not written by Clement alone; but in the name of the Roman Church. “The Church of God dwelling in Rome to the Church of God dwelling in Corinth.” This form of address already proves that the Roman Church did not set itself above the Church of Corinth; they are both called “Church of God.” There is no hint in the epistle of any claim being made by the Church of Rome to exercise any power over the Church of Corinth. If the Church of Rome had believed itself to be invested with a higher power, then the Epistle of Clement would surely have been written in a very different tone. We do not know exactly what had happened at Corinth; the epistle only mentions a “rebellion” against the presbyters, which had led to the presbyters’ (or rather, one presbyter’s) being ejected. This presbyter was the head of the Church, that is, he was the bishop. We again do not know by what means the news of these events had reached Rome. It is easy to suppose that the presbyter or presbyters thus ejected applied to the Church of Rome. But could they have thought Rome had the power to annul their ejection? This is most unlikely; the establishment or ejection of presbyters was the business of a local church. The real reason they applied to the Roman Church was that Rome might refuse to recognize the recent decisions made in the Church of Corinth; might refuse receptio of what had taken place in the Church of Corinth. The Church of Rome did that very thing: bore witness that the ejected presbyters had done nothing amiss, and said that their deposition was not in accordance with the will of God. This was not Rome laying down the law, but the Church bearing witness about what had happened within the Church. The epistle is couched in very measured terms, in the form of an exhortation; but at the same time it clearly shows that the Church of Rome was aware of the decisive weight, in the Church of Corinth’s eyes, that must attach to its witness about the events in Corinth. So the Church of Rome, at the end of the first century, exhibits a marked sense of its own priority, in point of witness about events in other churches. Note also that the Roman Church did not feel obliged to make a case, however argued, to justify its authoritative pronouncements on what we should now call the internal concerns of other churches. There is nothing said about the grounds of this priority; even though the text of the epistle mentions the Apostles Peter and Paul and their death under Nero’s persecution, and one might well expect this to have been enlarged upon as affording a foundation for Roman priority. Apparently Rome had no doubt that its priority would be accepted without argument. The only apology made is for not having sent a letter to the Church of Corinth earlier, so as to restore order there, the delay being due to persecutions.
5. We do not know if the Corinthian Church followed Rome’s advice, but we may fairly suppose that the voice of the Roman Church was heard. Anyhow, Clement’s epistle was held in high esteem at Corinth thereafter. This is an interesting fact, but it still does not prove that Rome’s priority was recognized by other churches. Our next task, there fore, is to find out were what the views of other churches. We find the first direct evidence about the priority of the Roman Church in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. Speaking of the Church of Rome, Ignatius uses the phrase “which presides” in two passages. “Ignatius also named Theophoros. . .to the church which presides in the land of the Romans.. .which presides in love (¢g£ph).”[32] The term agape is the hardest part of the passage to explain, but the difficulty vanishes if we take into account the special meaning Ignatius gave to agape: for him, agape meant “the local church in its eucharistic aspect.” Each local church is agape: all local churches together are also agape, because each local church, says Ignatius, is the Catholic Church and so manifests the Church of God in Christ. In the empirical sphere, however, the churches form a union based on love, and this union may also be spoken of in the same words. The Roman Church “presides” in love, that is, in the concord based on love between all the local churches. The term “which presides” (prokaqhmšnh) needs no discussion; used in the masculine it means the bishop, for he, as head of the local church, sits in the “first place” at the eucharistic assembly, that is, in the central seat. He is truly the president of his church. Because a local church was by nature identical with the concord of all the churches in love, an image came naturally to Ignatius’ mind: he pictured the local churches grouped, as it were, in a eucharistic assembly, with every church in its special place, and the Church of Rome in the chair, sitting in the “first place.” So, says Ignatius, the Church of Rome indeed has the priority in the whole company of churches united by concord. We are not told by Ignatius (or by Clement, either) why the Church of Rome should preside, and not some other church. To Ignatius it must have seemed self-evident, and proofs a waste of time. In his period no other church laid claim to the role, which belonged to the Church of Rome. At the beginning of the second century, the Church of Alexandria had not yet appeared on the historical scene, but seemed to lurk in some mysterious shadow. As for the Church of Ephesus—Ignatius did indeed send them an epistle, but it does not contain the least allusion to their having any special role. The only important church after Rome was Antioch—they could have claimed leadership—but Ignatius himself attributes this role to Rome, although he is quite clear that great respect is due to his own church and to himself. It is enough to compare his epistle to the Church of Rome with the other Ignatian epistles; one immediately feels the difference of tone. In his other epistles he teaches like a doctor; but when addressing Rome, he does not venture to give any advice at all. Every line in this epistle is charged with special deference to “the church that presides in love.”
Nevertheless, in the epistle to the Church of Rome, we find no reference to its power over the other churches, and Ignatius does not say anything about the Bishop of Rome. This is puzzling to us, but also proves that Ignatius had absolutely no idea of Roman primacy. Priority, to him, did not imply the notion of power. Priority must, of course, be so understood as to correspond with the way in which the local churches are understood. If every church’s life is founded on love, if love underlies all relation with other churches, then priority too must spring from love and be a living example of love’s authority. Ignatius almost certainly knew of Clement of Rome’s epistle, in which the Church of Rome refused to countenance the ejection of Corinthian presbyters; but he had never heard of any standards laid down by the Church of Rome to regulate doctrine or discipline. If such standards existed, he would certainly have applied them to various issues, especially to his doctrine of bishops. He writes to the Romans: “As for you, you have been grudging to none, you have taught others. I can only wish that what you enjoin on others by your instructions may carry due weight.”[33] But the words are used in a very limited sense. The reference is solely to moral issues, and here especially to envy, which had been the chief subject of Clement’s epistle.
Ignatius, in another saying even harder to explain, says that the Church of Rome “presides in the region of the Romans” (prokaqÁtai ™n tТpJ cwriou `Rwma…wn). What does this mean? We can be sure that Ignatius was not talking here about the Roman Church presiding in Rome itself, for such an expression would be meaningless: a bishop can preside over a church, but a church cannot preside over itself. We must therefore suppose that Ignatius is talking about the Church of Rome’s presidency among the local churches situated “in Roman country.” We do not know what churches these were, but it is an established fact that other churches in central Italy did exist at the time of Ignatius. His words justify our supposing some kind of union between various Italian local churches; among them the Roman Church possessed the priority. If so, a further conclusion may be drawn: in the period of Ignatius of Antioch, besides the one great union of all local churches, more limited unions had come into being, groups of churches round one particular church which had the most authority. Such unions had arisen through the force of events. After all, it was not always either easy or essential to invoke Rome, with her then supreme priority. It was much simpler and more convenient to approach some less distant church, possessed of greater authority than her neighbors. Ecclesiastical hierarchy had always been there, ever since the churches first began. The church-in-priority certainly had authority, but this did not prevent a daughter-church from also having an authoritative position among churches lesser than itself; only, of course, its authority could not be so great. Ignatius regards Rome as the church-in-priority, and his witness on this point agrees with the Roman Church’s self-witness, as we find it in the Epistle of Clement.
6. We shall find other evidence about the Roman position in Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons. His Adversus Haereses contains a famous passage, which has provoked a great many arguments. This is unquestionably the most important document of all with regard to the position of the Roman Church. The author is a father of the Church in the second half of the second century, a man who enjoyed very high prestige. The passage has come down to us in a Latin translation, and this makes it difficult to interpret in many places. I have chosen to quote the Latin because there is, so far, no generally accepted translation.
Ad hanc enim ecclesiam propter potentiorem principalitatem necesse est omnem convenire ecclesiam, hoc est eos qui sunt undique fideles, in qua semper ab his qui sunt undique conservata est ea quae est ab apostolis traditi.[34]
This sentence has been discussed for centuries, almost word by word; but the most important point has never been discussed at all—nobody has asked whether Ireneus was here talking about the Church of Rome. In other words, does the exordium ad hanc enim ecclsiam point to the Church of Rome? Till now all theologians, of every confession and trend, have agreed on assuming that the church in question was undoubtedly Rome. But Pierre Nautin challenged this consensus quite recently in his important article: “Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. III, 3, 2. Church of Rome or Church Universal.”[35] In his opinion, Irenaeus is not talking about the Church of Rome, far from it; he means the Church Universal. A very original point of view this—even paradoxical. That a viewpoint is paradoxical does not necessary commend it to our favor, but neither does it prove that the viewpoint is wrong, for truth often wears the guise of paradox, even in the field of theological inquiry. P. Nautin’s article is very interesting, not only for its main thesis, which may be accepted or rejected as we please, but for the many fascinating observations it contains. I cannot of course linger over details now, but I must make up my mind for or against Nautin’s main thesis. If he is right, and the passage in Adv. Haer. III, 3, 2, has nothing to do with the Church of Rome, then it has no further interest for me. And the remarkable thing is that the author of the article himself comes to the same conclusion; the famous passage loses its former importance to scholars under the light of his interpretation; its content is now a platitudinous truth, i.e., every church should be in accord with the Church Universal.
Nautin’s fundamental premises, which prove his interpretation of Adv. Haer. III, 3, 2, right or wrong, lie in the assertion that Irenaeus’ ecclesiology was “universal.” If this universal type of ecclesiology had not yet come into being in Irenaeus’ time, Nautin’s interpretation simply disintegrates; Irenaeus cannot have been talking about the Universal Church if the idea was foreign to his thought. Readers of the article might find all the arguments convincing, if only Nautin had given really clear proof that this idea of a Universal Church was in Irenaeus’ mind from the start. We find no such proof in his article; he never even raises the question of what ecclesiology Irenaeus believed.
Let us suppose Nautin was right, and that the idea of a Universal Church can really be found in Irenaeus. If so, the sentence in question is no longer important and, worse still, the whole structure of Irenaeus’ argument suffers the same fate. Irenaeus calls on apostolic tradition to correct the mistaken heretics. This tradition, he says, is guarded in every local church by the succession of bishops.[36] It was not in his power to find proof of this in each local church, so he confines himself to one set of bishops only, and enumerates the bishops of Rome, a church in which apostolic tradition and the faith proclaimed to mankind have been guarded up to his own times. This should be enough to confound those who set up irregular conventicles. This is the reason (says Nautin) why all churches, including those in heresy, must be in accord with the Universal Church, if they claim really to be churches. But if Irenaeus is truly discussing the Universal Church, how could he suppose that accord with it would seem to the heretics an argument against their own heterodoxy—or an argument to the faithful proving the apostolic tradition was true? ‘What does “being in accord with the Universal Church” really mean? ‘When we and our contemporaries say, and we often do, that the faithful should be in accord with the Church, we surely mean in accord with the doctrine preserved by the Church, as characterized and ex pressed in the symbols of the Faith, the decisions of ecumenical councils, the writings of the Church’s fathers and the liturgical life. None of these things were there in the second century (or almost none); only the Scripture and the tradition were preserved in each local church by the good offices of successive bishops. In the second century, to insist on accord with the Universal Church as a necessity is simply to pass from concrete to abstract: the concept of the Universal Church is itself an abstraction. Finally and essentially, any arguments against heretics based on the concept of the Universal Church really involve accepting the heretical attitude. The heretics could always reply that their doctrine was right and in accord with “the Church,” that is, with the aeon “ecciesia” in their system of emanations. As for their attitude to Scripture and Tradition—go back to Irenaeus’ own words:
When we convict them by Scriptural proofs, they turn their attack upon the very Scriptures... Again, when we appeal to the Tradition, which comes from the Apostles, and is kept in the churches by the successions of presbyters, they reject that Tradition (III, 2, 1—2).
Irenaeus leaves no room for the opinion of P. Nautin; for if his sentence is taken to refer to the Universal Church, then it will appear absolutely isolated from its context.
I must confess that P. Nautin’s arguments do not convince me. It seems to me that Irenaeus was referring to the Church of Rome in Adv.Haer. III, 3, 2, and that there can be no argument about this. I admit that some of his expressions remain a little obscure to us, and our interpretations are just hypotheses, some plausible and others not. But the general sense of the sentence is clear enough, at least for my own purposes.[37] As I showed above, Irenaeus believed he could confine himself to enumerating the succession in a single church, viz. the Roman Church, although he might have enumerated the successive bishops in every local church, as he says himself. He gives his own explanation for choosing the Church of Rome: he saw it as “the very great and the very ancient church, known to all, which the two most glorious apostles Peter and Paul founded and constituted.”[38] This last remark must have had some special value to Irenaeus, we suppose; to us it is rather disconcerting. No doubt Irenaeus knew some things about the foundation of the Roman Church which we do not know today. In any case, if we take the Latin text as our starting-point, we cannot draw the conclusion that Irenaeus thought that the Church of Rome was founded and constituted by Peter and Paul simultaneously. There is a strong possibility that the Latin translator brought together, in his translation, two actions which were separate in the mind of Irenaeus—namely, the foundation and the constitution of the Church at Rome. “In it,” he goes on, “the Apostolic Tradition was preserved by the succession of bishops.” A little before, Irenaeus insists that anyone looking for the truth can find it in the Tradition of the Apostles, which every local church has preserved. So we must suppose he though that the Apostolic Tradition and the Faith proclaimed to man kind were preserved in the Roman Church more fully than in others, or, at least, in a more manifest way. Later, Irenaeus points to this Church— Rome—as the one to which all other churches must convenire. Nautin, like most of his predecessors, thinks the verb convenire means “to be in agreement or accord.” But this is not the only possible meaning. I think a likelier sense of convenire here is address oneself to, turn to, have recourse to.” The sense of the remark would then be: every local church should have recourse to the Church of Rome. Irenaeus himself confirms this sense of convenire (Adv. Haer. III, 4, 1) in explaining what he had said about the Church of Rome:
If at any time some simple question of detail should happen to provoke a dispute, surely the oldest churches, and those in which the Apostles lived, are the ones we should have recourse to (recurrere) , and they will give us something very certain, and very clear, on the case in question.
This passage in Irenaeus illuminates the meaning of his remarks about the Church of Rome: if there are disputes in a local church, that church should have recourse to the Roman Church, for there is contained the Tradition which is preserved by all the churches.
The two meanings of convenire—accordance and recourse—are close but not identical. “Being in accord” would mean that the Church of Rome can declare the norms, like edicts, with regard to faith and church discipline equally; and that the other churches must be in accord with these norms—in fact, they must accept them. This sense does not fit the context here, nor does it agree with what we know about the Church of Rome in the pre-Nicene period. The Church of Rome did not then initiate any decisions in the realm of faith, or of discipline either. Rome’s vocation consisted in playing the part of arbiter, settling contentious issues by witnessing to the truth or falsity of whatever doctrine was put before them. Rome was truly the center where all converged if they wanted their doctrine to be accepted by the conscience of the Church. They could not count upon success except on one condition—that the Church of Rome had received their doctrine—and refusal from Rome predetermined the attitude the other churches would adopt. There are numerous cases of this recourse to Rome, but I will cite only one. According to Tertullian’s story, Praxeas had managed to sway Pope Victor (or Zephyrinus) to condemn Montanism, and had also predisposed him, to some extent, in favor of monarchianism. In the treatise Against Praxeas, Tertullian’s negative feelings toward Rome are plain to the reader; he says that Praxeas has crucified the Father and driven away the Paraclete. Praxeas obviously cannot have done this all by himself, arid Tertullian’s object of attack was not him, but the Church of Rome, which is accused of doing it for him. The Montanist Tertullian expresses the utmost dislike for “the great church,” but he also understood very well that Rome’s place and value were to be reckoned with: in his own words, Rome was the church unde nobis quo que auctoritas praesta est. This does not mean that the Church of Rome never settled any internal dogmatic question on its own initiative, as other Churches did; but generally the Roman bishops in this period preferred not to be involved in the dogmatic disputes going on at Rome When they did interfere, the results were often unfortunate.
Let us return to the text of Irenaeus. He says that every local church, if contentious problems arise, must (necesse) have recourse to the Church of Rome. Necesse in Irenaeus does not suggest any legal obligation. The necessity springs from a more inward duty, reflecting the very nature of the Church: the duty of appealing, if there is disagreement, to the church which has the greatest authority. This church bore her witness on events in the other churches; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, events in the Church. The witness was not a verdict backed by the force of law, and, as such, constraining the other churches to obey. It was a free act when the local churches followed Rome’s witness; they were accepting witness from a fellow-church because of its higher authority. But Rome’s witness was not less valid, but had higher validity than any and every legal verdict. If there has ever been a time in church history when the catch-word, Roma locuta, causa finita, stood for something real, that time was before the Church of Rome had any powers by law.
As Irenaeus saw things, the necessity of appealing to the Church of Rome was based on its potentior principalitas. What does this expression mean? Perhaps one day the relevant line from Irenaeus will be discovered in a Greek text; that would be the only chance of finding an answer to our question, an answer acceptable to all.[39] We have not yet been fortunate enough to find it, so we must be content with hypotheses for the present. There has been some progress recently made in interpreting Irenaeus’ phraseology. Fewer and fewer defenders can be found for the view that Irenaeus means, by potentior principalitas, “primacy” of the Church of Rome, in the present-day sense. We should note that F. Sagnard, in his translation of the Third Book of Adv. Haer., renders “propter potentiorem principalitatem” “by reason of the more powerful authority of its foundation.” This may not be altogether exact, but to me he seems correct in thinking that Irenaeus was talking about authority rather than power. But since, in the first place, we have no hope of finding the meaning of Irenaeus’ word by the method of philological analysis, and in the second place, we cannot find the exact Greek equivalent, the problem seems to me soluble only if we start from Irenaeus’ characteristic ideas. He was wont to say, “The Church of Rome is the very great, very ancient church, known to all others, and founded and constituted by Peter and by Paul.” Might not potentior principalitas be simply an expression to describe Rome’s particular position thus conceived? This church possesses the greatest authority among the churches; consequently it is the church with the priority. Surely, then, we could rightly say that the phrase potentior principalitas means “priority”; this would correspond with the Greek ¢rcaiТthj. The fact that this is the greatest priority shows that it is not the only one, and therefore does not exclude the priority of other churches in the more limited circles of local churches. Irenaeus had said himself, as we know, that litigious question might be referred to churches founded by apostles, such as those of Smyrna and Ephesus.
The language of Irenaeus, thus interpreted, excludes the idea of Roman primacy. Dom B. Botte has rightly pointed out that Irenaeus was not the man who formulated primacy.[40] One might say, however, that he was the formulator of Roman priority among all local churches whatsoever. The tone of Irenaeus echoes Ignatius when he describes the particular position in which Rome stood, and which no other church shared. “Presiding in love” in Ignatius corresponds with the potentior principalitas in Irenaeus. Irenaeus also agrees with Ignatius in his recognition that certain churches have their own priority, in the more limited circles of local churches. Irenaeus, like Ignatius, bears witness to the attitude of local churches concerning the Church of Rome, and we can be quite sure that their witness was identical to the way the Roman Church itself viewed its own position. Thus, to Clement, on the one hand, and Ignatius and Irenaeus on the other, the priority enjoyed by the Roman Church was due to authority of witness: or, to use more modern language, it possessed priority of receptio. The Church of Rome had a special position, and this was not only the result of its actual status in fact; it also implied having a very definite ecclesiological system, which said that each local church was the Church of God in all its fullness. This system is what I have called eucharistic ecclesiology. Having made this analysis, I find one question still to be answered: to what extent did the Church of Rome, and particularly its bishops, act in accordance with their position, as I have explained it above?
7. I have already mentioned Clement of Rome and his way of understanding the position of the Church of Rome. Clement was obviously a man of mark, and his epistle to the Corinthians is an extremely important document; but his action still fails to supply an answer to the question we raised above. In his time, the Church of Rome had only recently taken cognizance of its prioritarian position. I lack the space here to give an account of the history of the Roman Church in the pre-Nicene period; nor is it, indeed, called for. We know too little about some of the Roman bishops of that time; we cannot form an idea of how they regarded the position of the Roman Church; so I will be content to sketch the characters of two of these men, who are its most striking representatives—Pope Victor (189-198) and Pope Stephen (254—257).
Pope Victor, like Pope Stephen, has his place among the greatest men of action in the Roman Church. Some say, or rather insist, that Victor was the first Pope of Rome. This question—was Victor the first pope or not—is a matter for much discussion; but one thing is beyond doubt, that Victor, like Stephen, was an extremely colorful personality, a most commanding figure. Nobody in the pre-Nicene period acted like these two; but does this justify the conclusion that they understood the position of Rome in a way different from Irenaeus? Their own characters might suffice to make them act as they did, while yet remaining within the ancient ideological framework of priority. They were not alone in acting energetically. Did Cyprian act with less energy than Stephen? John Chrysostom and Basil the Great also showed great energy in action, yet nobody is going to say that they were the first popes of the Orient. Why then should we take Victor’s energetic action as grounds for thinking him the first Pope of Rome?
When people speak of Victor as the first Pope, they have in mind his action during the Paschal controversies. In these controversies, many things still remain obscured from our sight. We do not really know why Victor raised the Paschal question; did it arise from a domestic situation inside the Roman Church, or was it first raised by the churches of Asia Minor? Eusebius (our only source) did not pass Victor’s epistle down to us, which is strange, considering that he included the epistle of Polycrates in his History. We must not forget that when Victor addressed the churches of Asia Minor with a peremptory demand (if it was), he did so at a time when he had the backing of a virtual majority of churches. This peremptory demand surely means just that the Church of Rome had refused to accept the practice of Asia Minor. The churches of Asia Minor stood in isolation, since nearly all the other local churches had followed Victor’s lead. Let us avoid the common mistake of talking about the churches of Asia Minor being “excommunicated.” At the end of the second century, nobody thought it possible for one church to excommunicate another, nothing could be at issue beyond a breaking of brotherly communion between the churches. In his epistle to Victor, Irenaeus blames him for refusing to act in the gentle way of the presbyters, his predecessors; he did not accuse Victor of grasping special power over the Church for himself. Victor’s behavior was still within the bounds of ordinary ecclesiastical practice. If Victor had ventured to go further than any one before him, the fact is easily explained by his character. Apparently he was of African origin; and in Carthage at this period there was a sort of Christian cult of Rome. We have only to recall the dithyrambic praise of Rome which we find in Tertullian’s De praescriptione haereticorum. We simply have no data to justify the assertion that Victor, assuming the concept of the Universal Church, took the situation of the Roman Church to mean primacy of power.
As for Pope Stephen—has history treated him quite fairly? We nearly all start with a preconceived idea that, in the battle between him and Cyprian, Cyprian was right, and “the tyrant” (as Cyprian had called Stephen) was wrong. Did Stephen base his actions on a new ecclesiastical ideology, and did Cyprian keep to tradition? It would be more exact to say that neither of them kept to the traditional idea altogether, and that Cyprian had less respect for it than Stephen. Cyprian was possibly right in the case of the Spanish bishops, Basilides and Martial, but Stephen’s behavior was perfectly in keeping with the prioritarian role which the Roman Church had to play. The principle of priority needed no modification to allow for his granting the pleas of the Spanish bishops. In Clement’s time, the Corinthian presbyters had appealed to Rome with the same purpose, that is, to ask that no act of receptio should be made concerning the recent events in Corinth. Any church and any church member could appeal (convenire was Irenaeus’ word) to any other church, and particularly to the church-in-priority. Cyprian asserts that the Spanish bishops were reinstated by Stephen.[41] But here we surely have something more like Cyprian’s own interpretation. Stephen had refused to recognize the eviction of the Spanish bishops, and consequently the setting-up of new bishops in their place was also not countenanced. In other words, there was no receptio for this act. Stephen’s behavior was perfectly natural, and in this case especially because Spain was in the direct sphere of Roman influence, not of Carthaginian. The Spanish churches, according to Cyprian, appealed to Carthage (that is, to the Carthaginian council of bishops) for comfort and help. The Carthaginian Church could have taken its own line and kept Rome in formed, pointing out that Basilides had led Stephen into error. Cyprian did nothing of the sort. The Council, of which he was president, decided that the new bishops had been regularly established, and that their establishment could not be made invalid because their predecessors were improperly reestablished by Stephen. Even if Stephen’s actions went beyond the limited scope which the Roman Church’s priority allowed him—if, that is, he really did make the decision to reestablish the evicted bishops—Cyprian’s action was nonetheless an innovation. He opposed the witness of the church-in-priority by the decisions of his council, and claimed for the council’s decrees the force of law.
We will turn next to the baptismal controversies. I admit the great difficulty of forming an objective opinion about the actions of the two antagonists. Stephen’s epistle has reached us through the comments made on it by Cyprian and Firmilian of Caesarea, both his enemies. Do their epistles give us the content of Stephen’s epistle in a fair and exact way? It should be noted that the Latin text of Firmilian’s epistle, found in the epistles of Cyprian, is not really a translation, but an adaptation from Firmilian’s Greek original text: Cyprian wanted propaganda against Rome and adapted the text to suit his own angle.[42] This is why we cannot base our theories entirely on Firmilian’s epistle. One further note; the question about the baptism of heretics and schismatics was not raised by Stephen in the first place: Cyprian started it, having for years pressed all churches, including Rome, to accept the practice of Carthage in this matter. Cyprian, supported on this point by the Councils of Carthage, did indeed reserve the right to every bishop to act as he saw fit, on the one condition of answering for his actions before God; but in fact he allowed no objections to stand in his way. Cyprian saw it not as an administrative problem, but as the regula catholica. A refusal to follow Cyprian’s principles would indeed have created enormous practical difficulties. Imagine the case of a heretic—especially a Novatianist—enrolled in the Church by Rome and then migrating to Carthage. How would Cyprian have acted? In his eyes such a person had not received baptism.
Stephen flatly refused to follow Cyprian concerning the baptism of heretics. Is his refusal evidence that Stephen believed Rome’s situation, and his own, to depend upon the notion of primacy and power? Why indeed should Stephen have followed Cyprian’s line about the baptism of heretics when the Church of Rome had a different practice from that which Cyprian commended? Cyprian’s extraordinary insistence shows that he, and not Stephen, was trying to exercise some sort of leadership over the whole Church by means of his councils. Stephen was probably first in citing the logion in Mt 16:18. But Cyprian drove him to do so. Had not Cyprian first sent to Rome his treatise De Unitate Ecclesiae, which uses the magic words cathedra Petri? Had he not written that whoever deserts “Peter’s Chair” is putting himself outside the Church automatically? Had he not told Cornelius in his letter that Rome was cathedra Petri et ecciesia principalis unde unitas sacerdotalis exorta est?[43] If Stephen wrote, as Cyprian alleges, that he was the successor of Peter, such an assertion would not have gone beyond what Cyprian had said already. We must admit that Stephen’s position was very difficult. First, Cyprian had rebelled against Stephen’s decision when Stephen refused to recognize the deposition of the Spanish bishops. Next comes a peremptory demand that Stephen depose Marcian, the Bishop of Arles. It is no exaggeration to say that Cyprian wished Stephen to follow his directions, as his predecessor Cornelius had done before. But when Stephen took to speaking in Cyprian’s style, Cyprian then found his own opinions inadmissible in Stephen’s mouth; he rebelled against them passionately and brought against Stephen the councils he had convoked.
Of course Stephen’s own mind may well have glided from one idea to another, and he may sometimes have taken the priority of the Roman Church to imply primacy of power. There is a world of difference between priority of authority, in the realm of witness, and primacy of power; but a change from the former to the latter was quite easy, once the idea of the Universal Church began to find favor. It came to Rome from various directions: from Carthage first of all. It next entered into the religious mind through Jewish-Christian literature; and finally it found expression in Montanism. Apart from Gnostic literature, the Didache is the first document which contains any notion of the Universal Church; and in Montanism the idea of the Universal Church was actually put into practice. Before Catholic Rome had even come on the scene, claiming dominion over the Universal Church, there was a Montanist Rome at Pepuza.
Even supposing that Stephen wanted to be a real pope—and I think it unlikely—his was an isolated example and had no immediate consequences. Cyprian’s ecclesiological system met opposition, even in his lifetime, and similar ill-success attended Stephen’s attempts to carry out Cyprian’s theory in practice, always supposing that he ever attempted anything of the sort. The doctrine of the Universal Church was not entirely accepted by the conscience of the pre-Nicene Period. Before the beginning of the Nicene period, Rome did not hold the primacy of power. After Stephen, the Roman Church forgot about “the Chair of Peter” for a long time. Is it not remarkable that the edicts of Gallienus, Licinius and Constantine seem unaware of the Universal Church and Rome its president? They only speak of local churches in isolation. Catholic theologians complain, with reason, that Constantine overshadowed the Bishop of Rome, and that Sylvester’s pontificate was extremely insignificant.[44] To Constantine, the primacy of the Church of Rome did not exist. Further, it could not exist in his consciousness, because it had no legal character. And while it is true that the witness of pagan emperors and of the semi-Christian Constantine has no decisive value for us, it is hardly likely that when these emperors published their edicts of toleration, they could be unfamiliar with ecclesiastical organization. The decision of the Emperor Aurelian, in the case of Paul of Samosata, cannot be taken as evidence to support the primacy of the Bishop of Rome; the Emperor wanted evidence that Antioch was loyal, and saw a guarantee of this if the Bishop of Antioch were given recognition by his Italian colleagues and by the Bishop of Rome.
Now I only have one task left—to draw some conclusions from what I have been saying above. Universal ecclesiology, so prevalent in modern theology, is not really primitive. It came to replace eucharistic ecclesiology, which was the only one known in apostolic days. The foundations of universal ecclesiology were formulated for the first time by Cyprian of Carthage. With Constantine, a new factor comes into the Church’s life, namely the Roman Empire and the Roman Caesar. This new factor led to the predominance of universal ecclesiology in the mind of the Church. In spite of all the difference there is between these two types of ecclesiology, they agree in both accepting the idea that the whole Church must follow a single directive. For the pattern of universal ecclesiology, a unique, personal power founded on rights is a necessity. It is impossible construct a universal ecclesiology without admitting the idea of primacy, nothing but the exigencies of controversy could produce anything so artificial. The question of whether the primacy should belong to the Bishop of Rome or not is quite a different matter. In the pattern of eucharistic theology, power of one single bishop simply does not exist in any case, because power based on right does not exist. But this is not to say that eucharistic ecclesiology rejects the idea that the whole church should follow a single directive; this idea springs from the basic doctrine of eucharistic ecclesiology. According to this doctrine, one of the local churches possesses the priority, which is manifested in its greater authority of witness about events in other churches, that is, events in the Church of God in Christ, since every local church is the Church of God in Christ with all fullness. To put it otherwise, universal ecclesiology and eucharistic ecclesiology have different conceptions on the question of Church government: the first conceives this government as a matter of law and rights, and the second regards it as founded on grace. The idea of primacy, inherent in universal ecclesiology, is an idea subsequent to that of priority, just as this ecclesiology was subsequent to eucharistic ecclesiology; the concept of primacy is really the same as that of priority, only looked at from a lawyer’s point of view. This explains why, in the pattern of universal ecclesiology, the primacy belongs to one of the bishops, who is at the head of the Universal Church; but in the pattern of eucharistic ecclesiology, the priority belongs to one of to one of the local churches, and only belongs to the bishop through his church. No priority belongs to the bishop personally; he possesses it only through the local church. Priority is a concept founded on the idea of grace: it is a gift of grace, given by God to one of the local churches; and its nature is a gift of witnessing, in the name of the Church, about all that goes on within the same Church. This shows that everything happens in the Church, not outside it or over it. For this reason—that priority is a gift of witness—it cannot be fully accounted for on empirical grounds. We cannot explain why the apostle Peter occupied a special place among the apostles and had a special mission, nor why Paul was chosen by God to be the apostle to the Gentiles, nor yet why the priority, first possessed by the Church of Jerusalem, was handed on to Rome. The end of the reckoning brings us to a dilemma: we have simply to accept either priority and eucharistic ecclesiology or primacy and universal ecclesiology. By denying both we reject the idea that the Church has a single directive—and that is an essential proposition in the doctrine of the Church.
The Orthodox Church is absolutely right in refusing to recognize the contemporary doctrine that primacy belongs to the Bishop of Rome; however, this rightness does not lie in the numerous arguments that have been brought against primacy, but in the very fact of non-recognition. The arguments against primacy offered by Orthodox school-theology seem to suffer from some lack of clarity and finish. This can be explained by the fact that eucharistic ecclesiology is still alive, deep down, in the Orthodox soul; but Orthodoxy on the surface is under the shadow of universal ecclesiology, and also of contemporary ecclesiastical organization. The attribute of “catholicity,” which (in eucharistic ecclesiology) belongs to the episcopal church, has now been transferred to the auto cephalous church—a unit, in fact, half political and half ecclesiastical. Naturally, the episcopal church loses its catholicity and becomes a part of the autocephalous church. To this latter, alone, modern Orthodox theology ascribes the ability to be free and autonomous. Orthodox theology indeed rejects the idea of primacy on the universal scale, but it recognizes a partial primacy at the center of every autocephalous church, a primacy belonging to the head of that church. We are concerned here with primacy, not priority, for priority implies that every local church has fullness of ecclesiastical esse. The autocephalous churches, meanwhile, have become divided and separated, for the idea of a single directive has faded since the fall of Byzantium. Ever since the second Ecumenical Council, Constantinople has been trying to bring off a pan-Orthodox primacy, but all her attempts have failed. It would be most unwise to talk
“Eastern Pope,” as though the Patriarch of Constantinople set himself to copy the Bishop of Rome, and wrong whether we take an ideological or a historical view. But no doubt various inner motives did impel the Patriarch of Constantinople to follow along the road to primacy, within the pattern of a universal ecclesiology. In modern times, the unity of the Orthodox Church is becoming a sort of abstract ideal, with no means of manifesting itself in the real life of the Church. Anyone who regards the pan-Orthodox or Ecumenical Council as an organ manifesting the Church’s unity is just putting things in the wrong order, consequences before foundation. In fact, the pan-Orthodox Council should be the consequence of Orthodox Church unity; it should be guided by a church or a bishop; and it cannot be a foundation for this unity.
In the long course of the struggle against the Roman Catholic position about the primacy of Rome, Orthodox doctrine has lost the very notion of priority. And the Catholic Church lost sight of the idea even earlier, during its struggle for a single directive in the Church, which it has now transformed into primacy. If we take the respective positions of the two churches as they stand, there is no hope of resolving the question of primacy. We can only accept the tragedy, but with our eyes open, and without that romantic sentimentality which only adds bitterness to the everlasting discussion about primacy. “The unity of the faith in the bond of peace.” Unity of faith still reigns within the Orthodox Church, but without union in love; and neither exists between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches. Why is this? Surely because the mind of the Church has become unaware that the Church of God should be directed by a local church, one church among all the others. They all possess catholicity; but priority of authority, by giving witness about events in the Church’s life, is something that belongs only to the church “which presides in love.”
From:
http://www.golubinski.ru/ecclesia/primacy.htm