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Extrapolations from the first century without taking into consideration the actual historical situation of the Church are both anachronistic and misleading. Corinth, as it turns out, considered itself a suffragan Church of Rome (because Paul founded the Corinthian Church, and in the first century--and for the next five hundred years--Rome was the Church of Peter and Paul), and Clement is writing in response to a letter from Corinth asking for Rome's intervention in an internal dispute. It's not a matter of universal jurisdiction--the Church had no conception of "jurisdiction" at that time--but of a pastoral response from a daughter Church asking for guidance.

Your use of 1 Clement is an example of a kind of patristic proof texting that I find quite as objectionable as the scriptural proof texting used by certain kinds of Protestants (the acclamation of Pope Leo at Chalcedon being another). Neither examines the entire context of a document, both end up being ahistorical, post hoc rationalizations for legitimizing the status quo. No purpose is served by it, other than to reiterate entrenched polemical positions; most certainly they do not shed any light on the historical developments that got us to where we are today.

By the way, there is considerable doubt as to whether the Church of Rome even had a monarchical episcopate of the type found in the Church of Antioch under St. Ignatios. Rome, being an extremely conservative Church from its inception (a trait it retained down to the end of the first millennium, after which it was just brimming with all sorts of new ideas), may not have made the final distinction between episkopoi and prebyteroi, and the Church may have been governed by a council of presbyters with one being protos among them. Another reason to be careful when extrapolating from isolated documents of the first century AD.

Dear brother Dan,

It's not true that the Corinthian Church made no appeal to the Church in Rome. The Epistle of Clement explicitly states, "Owing, dear brethren, to the sudden and successive calamitous events which have happened to ourselves, we feel that we have been somewhat tardy in turning our attention to the points respecting which you consulted us."

The Pope's exercise of universal solicitude has almost always been in an appellate capacity. I can think of only one instance when the Pope made a unilateral decision - it occurred during the Muslim invasions of the Middle East, wherein the See of Jerusalem was left without a Patriarch. The Pope assigned an apostolic administrator to care for the Jerusalem Church until a new Patriarch could be elected.

Blessings,
Marduk

First of all, St. Ignatius, and many of his supporters, appealed to Rome. So it was not "unilateral."

Secondly, can you detail for us the qualitative difference between the actions of Pope St. Martin and Pope St. Nicholas in their relations to the Eastern Church?

These "florid honorifics" are not the basis for the belief in the headship of the bishop of Rome. They only serve to support what more ample proofs already make evident.

Blessings

The unilateral intervention of Rome begins with the Photian controversy of the 860s, when Pope Nicholas I took it upon himself to depose Photios, Patriarch of Constantinple and reinstate his predecessor Ignatios Neos. Ignatios did not appeal, his followers did. See Francis Dvornik, The Photian Schism.

The real controversy was about Bulgaria, in any case. Had Photios acknowledged Roman jurisdiction over Bulgaria (something beyond his authority to do), it is quite certain that Photios would not have been deposed. Which points out another problem with granting one Church jurisdiction over another. "Nobody can be judge in his own case"--except the Pope, of course.

As to the florid honorifics, any reference to them at all as proving something about Papal primacy one way or the other is greatly misplaced.

I am not using the term "modernism" in the technical sense applied by the popes of the late 19th century, because from my perspective the West embraced modernist theology beginning with the Scholastics, and that modernism eventually brought about the renaissance and the enlightenment, i.e., the rebirth of paganism, which has had a detrimental theological impact on the West that is still felt today.

The papacy - as it has been lived and understood in the West throughout the second millennium - is part of the problem, and not the solution.

The best way to move ecumenical dialogue forward, as I said in an earlier post, is to proceed along the lines laid out in the documents of the Joint International Commission:

Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church [sites.google.com]

The Role of the Bishop of Rome in the Communion of the Church in the First Millennium [chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it]

The second document in particular is helpful, because it makes note of the fact that all bishops are successors of St. Peter, and not merely the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch (See St. Gregory the Great, Registrum Epistolarum, Book VII, 40).

My views on the nature of primacy can be found expressed in the post linked below:

Ecclesiology of Communion

Dear brother Stuart,

That's a distinction without a difference. St. Ignatius did not himself appeal, but the followers of St. Ignatius were sent by him from his place of exile. So I'll maintain that this was not a unilateral intervention by Rome.

Furthermore, it was the Emperor and St. Photius himself who invited Rome to judge on the matter between him and Ignatius in a Synod of 861 A.D. So your complaints of unilateral interference are for naught.

One should also note that Photius took it upon himself to excommunicate the Pope and the Latins first in 867. I think this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Bulgaria did not enter the picture. It was jurisdiction over southern Italy and Dalmatia that was a cause of tension. The issue over those territories was over 2 centuries old, so your claim that Photius would not have been deposed if not for that matter cannot be believed.

So instead of one Pope, we'll have many Popes, each one presenting the same monarchical, tyrannical danger in their respective jurisdictions, with the added danger that there will be many different faiths and schisms for the Church.

In any case, the problem is not that drastic if one understands "jurisdiction" to mean solicitude, which is what it really should be.

I doubt they would have expressed such "florid honorifics" if they did not mean something by them. What could that be? And why are they directed to the Bishop of Rome, and no one else? As I stated, these expressions are founded on a more basic belief about Rome and her bishop. In any case, I've personally never regarded the expression "Peter has spoken through..." as indicative of papal primacy, but rather papal infallibility.

Blessings,
Marduk

Well, that just shows you haven't studied late Roman and Byzantine rhetoric. Because, while Peter may have spoken through Leo, at various times he was also said to have spoken through a number of other Churchmen, while on several occasions, Christ Himself was said to have spoken through the mouth of one Emperor or another. No, they did not mean it. They were just insufferable suck-ups.

As for the rest, I refer you back to Dvornik, who is considered the definitive authority on the matter. If his book is hard to find, you can find most of his information in J.M. Hussey's The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire.


There is no evidence for that, is there? Unless, of course, you are pointing at the "other" Pope, who is the Archbishop and Patriarch of Alexandria? The ecclesiastical organization of the Great Church of Alexandria was shaped by its very early experiences as a hotbed of gnosticism, and the Archbishops assumed powers and perquisites that the Popes of Rome did not get until the late 19th century--for instance, the power to appoint directly every bishop within his jurisdiction.

On the plus side, even the great Cyril himself did not claim to have universal jurisdiction (but don't cross him within the boundaries of the Church of Alexandria).

Marduk,

Your points are well made. While the "florid honorifics" do not prove the Roman claims, they certainly lend support to it. These claims did not emerge from an ecclesiastical vacuum, and carry far more weight than the Orthodox denial of those claims. We do not need to prove who is right in our dialogue with the Orthodox, but Catholics, east and west, do not need to "save face" either. Honesty on both sides will serve us well as we dance together towards the truth.

For everyone's interest:

Greek bishops reject papal primacy [theorthodoxchurch.info]

As an historian, I have spent considerable time reading contemporaneous documents from late antiquity, some relating to Church matters, others purely secular. After a while, you recognize a rhetorical style, one which emerged from a tightly regulated, hierarchical society in which honors and dignities were more important than wealth in determining one's social status and political power. From our modern perspective, they are obsequious beyond belief, and applied today to someone like, say, President Obama, we would think we were reading parody or satire.

However, if you look at the titles and dignities accorded to our own ecclesiastical leaders (e.g., the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Patriarch of Antioch, the Pope of Alexandria and the Pope of Rome), we can see--particularly in the case of Eastern Christian leaders--that this style lives on, albeit in a symbolic, highly ritualized manner. You cannot ascribe anything substantive to such acclamations, titles or honorifics, other than that they were formulaic and indicative of the status of the person to whom they were addressed.

Since the acclamations given to the various Popes in late antiquity were also extended to other bishops of Patriarchal status (and even to some secular leaders), the best you can hope to prove is the "pentarchy" was a de facto reality, even if no conciliar documents spell out the theory of pentarchy.

Do you think St. Maximos, Confessor, was using this same florid rhetorical style in his letter to Peter when he wrote of Pope Martin I? Dvornik has a very interesting footnote (15) at the end of chapter 5 in "Byzantium and the Roman Primacy". It's on page 98 in my old copy. It seems that St. Maximos was under the impression that their was conciliar or synodal backing for what he wrote. His words do not prove the Roman claim, but they certainly lend support to it. As an historian, I think you,d be hard pressed to deny that.

From Fr. Kimel's link:Since when has the entire Church worshipped using a single uni-form Liturgy? Never. Is the difference between Greek, Antiochian, Copt, Indian, Armenian, and Roman merely "local traditions and customs" or are they local orthodox expressions of the fullness and universality of the Church catholic?

St. Maximos, versed as he was in court rhetoric (he was a trained civil servant and aid to Emperor Heraclius I before taking monastic vows) knew the proper modes of address. Moreover, he was writing polemically and had an agenda. Since he was opposing both the patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria, he needed to appeal to a higher authority, hence proclaiming an exalted view of papal authority was in his interest.

The key to understanding the nature of the primacy in the first millennium is not in the documents alone, but in how the documents were interpreted, and how primacy was actually exercised. That, incidentally, is the point of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in his 1985 statement that the Catholic Church can demand no more of the Orthodox than was received in the first millennium. Neither infallibility nor universal jurisdiction were part of the consensus fidei in the first millennium.

The Greek statement is unintentionally "ultamontane" in its thrust. I tend to discount the theological import most statements of this sort emanating from the Church of Greece because they are burdened with lots of cultural and political baggage. Ever since it broke away from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the 19th century, the Church of Greece has been extremely jealous of its independence from any and all forms of primacy. Yet, increasingly, this denigration of the existence and necessity of some form of universal primacy is being rejected by other Orthodox theologians.