The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages (Routledge Revivals)

476-752

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138777842
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678168
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

There has been a tendency to the view the history of the early medieval papacy predominantly in ideological terms, which has resulted in the over-exaggeration of the idea of the papal monarchy. In this study, first published in 1979, Jeffrey Richards questions this view, arguing that whilst the papacy's power and responsibility grew during the period under discussion, it did so by a series of historical accidents rather than a coherent radical design.

The title redresses the imbalance implicit in the monarchical interpretation, and emphasizes other important political, administrative and social aspects of papal history. As such it will be of particular value to students interested in the history of the Church; in particular, the development of the early medieval papacy, and the shifting policies and characteristics of the popes themselves.

Part I

The Context

Chapter 1

The Ideological Context

The papacy based its ideology on two fundamental beliefs, which it clung to with a fanatical tenacity. The first was Rome’s primacy, and the papacy was extraordinarily sensitive on that subject. Roman primacy in the church derived initially from the fact that the papal see was sited in the capital of the Roman Empire. It was a considerable blow to papal prestige when the Western capital was shifted first to Milan, then to Ravenna, and finally, when the Western Empire fell, vanished altogether. That melancholy event meant that the sole and undisputed imperial capital was now Constantinople, the so-called New Rome beside the Bosphorus, which was the heart and powerhouse of the Eastern Roman Empire.

It was in response to this undermining of a political reason for the primatial claim that Rome developed the theory of a primacy based on apostolic and Petrine foundation. The enthusiasm with which these claims were elaborated testifies to Rome’s sensitivity on the subject. In the East, on the other hand, political status still determined ecclesiastical status and it was only natural that Constantinople should seek in the ecclesiastical hierarchy a ranking order commensurate with her status as imperial capital. It is no surprise, then, that the General Council of the church meeting at Constantinople in 381 decreed that Constantinople should rank second after Rome in status.¹

The pope made no objection to this. But in 451, when the Council of Chalcedon met, it was decreed that Constantinople should equal Rome in status.² Pope Leo I, architect of the Chalcedonian settlement, interpreted this as an attack on Rome’s primacy and refused to accept that particular canon. While there is reason to believe that the idea behind this canon was to humble not Rome but Alexandria, Constantinople’s main rival to supremacy in the Eastern church, Leo’s reaction was predictable. For to him it must have looked like the prelude to a proclamation of Constantinopolitan supremacy over Rome.

In fact Constantinople never sought a position superior to Rome’s. Rome’s Petrinity and apostolicity were never challenged either by the emperor, the patriarch or the Eastern church. Even though Rome had ceased to be the capital, she had given the empire its name, its laws, its governmental system, its ethos. Accordingly she was revered by the inhabitants of the Eastern Empire who, though Greek in language, culture and outlook, continued to call themselves ‘Romans’. This did not stop papal-imperial relations being marred by periodic papal outbursts on the subject of the primacy, outbursts sufficiently intemperate as to suggest that Rome never really recovered from the shock of ceasing to be the imperial capital. For all its battery of claims – the ‘keys of the kingdom’, the Petrine commission, double apostolic foundation and the rest – there remains the suspicion that for an institution as rooted in the psyche and traditions of the Roman world as the papacy was there could be no real peace of mind until Rome was once again the capital of the Roman Empire.

The claim to equal status by Constantinople remained a permanent worry to the papacy and exacerbated the difficulties which arose between Rome and Constantinople during the Acacian schism. Already divided by doctrinal differences, relations between the two churches were hardly improved when Pope Gelasius I – with characteristic lack of tact – dragged in the status question. He firmly rejected the Chalcedonian pronouncement on equal status³ and went so far as to deny Constantinople even metropolitan status.⁴ Even as the doctrinal differences underlying the schism were being resolved under Pope Hormisdas, the status question still nagged. At the same time as he signed the pope’s libellus of orthodoxy and renounced the heresy of his predecessors, the Constantinopolitan patriarch John II reaffirmed the equality of status between the two sees.⁵

The problem was finally resolved by Emperor Justinian I, the supreme autocrat but also the supreme Roman, who issued a law which stated:⁶

We decree in accord with the decisions of the Councils that the most holy pope of Ancient Rome is the first of all the priests and the holy bishop of Constantinople occupies the second see after the holy and apostolic see of Rome.

In effect Justinian was repealing the Chalcedonian canon and reinstating the Constantinople canon of 381. Justinian was one of the most active defenders of the theory of papal primacy, acknowledging it in a letter to Pope John II, ‘the head of all the holy churches’⁷, and in several laws.⁸ It was also widely accepted in the Eastern church, being confirmed, for instance, in a letter of the Syrian monks to Pope Hormisdas⁹ and in a letter from the bishops of Epirus to the same pope, grandly addressed as Princeps Episcoporum.¹⁰

Yet there was another quarrel between Rome and Constantinople under Popes Pelagius II and Gregory I when the assumption by Patriarch John IV of the title ‘Oecumenical Patriarch’ was assumed to be another attack on the Roman primacy. In fact it was not, because ‘Oecumenical Patriarch’ simply meant supreme within his own patriarchate. It was a title that had been accorded to Popes Leo I, Hormisdas and Agapitus, just as it was accorded to Patriarchs John II, Epiphanius, Anthimus and Menas. The emperor Constantine IV, when inviting Pope Donus and Patriarch George to attend the sixth General Council of the church, calls them both ‘Oecumenical’, confirming its non-exclusivity.¹¹ The Gregorian quarrel was resolved in 607 by the issue of an edict by the emperor Phocas to Pope Boniface III confirming Rome’s primacy.¹² It was reconfirmed during the seventh century by Emperor Constans II to Pope Vitalian, by Emperor Justinian II to Pope Constantine and by the sixth General Council of the church at Constantinople in 680–1.¹³

Despite Rome’s hypersensitivity about her status, there is no sign anywhere in the period of a bid by Constantinople to topple Rome or usurp the primacy. Even the attempt to secure equality was abandoned. The ready use by Easterners of the apostolic and Petrine terminology when addressing or/referring to Rome shows a perfect willingness to accept Rome on her own stated terms. So, for instance, at the Council of Chalcedon, the entire assembly rose to its feet, crying: ‘St Peter has spoken through Leo.’ So wrote the bishops of Cyprus to Pope Theodore in 643:¹⁴

Christ our God has instituted your apostolic see, o holy head, as a God-fixed and immovable foundation. For you, as truly spoke the Divine Word, are Peter, and upon your foundation the pillars of the church have been fixed and to you he committed the keys of the kingdom. He ordered you to bind and to loose with authority on earth and in heaven. You are set as the destroyer of profane heresies, as teacher and leader of the orthodox and unsullied faith.

In similar terms, the Palestinian bishop Stephen of Dor announced to the 649 Lateran synod that Palestine looked to Rome, ‘to the chair which rules and presides over all, the head and the highest’.¹⁵ These examples could be multiplied many times over, and under the circumstances Rome’s concern seems thoroughly unjustified.¹⁶

The concrete expression of Rome’s primacy is to be found in the claim to appellate jurisdiction over the whole church, first enunciated at the Council of Sardica in 343. It gained acceptance in the West, helped by the endorsement of Western emperors. It was a principle frequently stressed by the popes in their dealings with the East, notably by Gelasius I, who typically and bluntly claimed: ‘that the voice of Christ, the traditions of the elders and the authority of the canons confirms that (Rome) may always judge the whole church’.¹⁷ But it seems to have been resented by the Eastern church, which was perfectly prepared to concede a primacy of respect but rarely of jurisdiction to Rome. Such cases as did go to Rome on appeal seem to have been mainly those of condemned clerics turning to the pope as a desperate last resort. Typical perhaps is the case recounted in the Vitae Patrum of two Egyptian monks, who having castrated themselves to avoid the temptations of the flesh, were excommunicated by the patriarch of Alexandria. They appealed against the sentence both to the patriarch of Jerusalem and to the patriarch of Antioch and when these appeals failed, they tried the pope, who also confirmed the excommunication.¹⁸ Whether or not the principle was put into practice seems to have depended entirely on personality and circumstance.

The other basic belief and one which is closely related to the primacy is Rome’s belief in itself as the bastion of orthodoxy, or as Pope Felix III put it, ‘executrix of the Chalcedon council on behalf of the Catholic faith’.¹⁹ It was this which caused Rome to seek to implement her primacy. Rome’s experience since the legalization of Christianity by Constantine the Great in 313 had been that the Eastern churches were fundamentally unsound on the definition of the faith. Pope Gelasius put it into words when he talked slightingly of ‘the Greeks, among whom there is no doubt that many heresies abound’. Gregory I echoed him a century later saying: ‘We know of a truth that many bishops of Constantinople have fallen into the whirlpool of heresy and have become not only heretics but heresiarchs’.²⁰ First Arianism and then Monophysitism had arisen, heretical interpretations of Christianity which had gained not only wide currency in the East but also patrons at the imperial court. It was this experience which confirmed Rome in its belief that the primacy must be asserted in order to ensure that the true faith remained inviolable. For Rome the true faith was enshrined in the Chalcedonian Creed, the definition of orthodoxy based on Pope Leo’s Tome, presented to the Council of the Church called by the emperor Marcian in 451 to solve the christological controversy and accepted by it. Rome’s position in the controversy had been vindicated and the papacy, buttressed by this considerable theological triumph, became entrenched in the idea that it was the guardian and protector of the true orthodoxy. For Rome there could be no departure whatever from the Chalcedonian principles laid down by Pope Leo. Pope Hormisdas summarized this view perfectly when he wrote in his libellus:²¹ ‘It is in the apostolic see that the Catholic religion has always been preserved without stain.’ Justinian too acknowledged this when he wrote: ‘each time heretics have arisen in our midst, it is by a sentence and a true judgment of this venerable see [i.e. Rome] that they have been condemned’.²²

Papal Rome’s actions throughout this period were dictated not by an ideological blueprint for the establishment of a governmental scheme in which the Pope outranked everyone but by two very precisely defined ideas – that the papacy had primacy within the church and that it was the defender of an already defined, perfect and unalterable orthodoxy. Against the first, there was little argument from the rest of the church. Against the second, there was much, for when orthodoxy came into question, complex theological issues were raised.

What the papacy did not do in this period was to seek a position of permanent superiority to the emperor, and herein lies the kernel of the dominant theme – if one is required – for papal history between 476 and 752. It was not a conflict between cultures (East versus West) or between institutions (imperium versus sacerdotium) or between jurisdictions (Rome versus Constantinople) so much as the essential schizophrenia of the papal position which accurately reflects the uneasy dualism of the world in which it found itself, an inner tension that could never be resolved without some drastic step that in this period was never contemplated or even articulated.

The prevailing view of society was of two coterminous bodies, the Roman Empire and the Christian church, both divinely ordained but with essentially different if complementary spheres of influence. The Christian Roman Empire – the Sancta Respublica – represented a fusion of two elements which when in harmony strengthened and unified, but when in disharmony provoked in the papacy a crisis of identity. It was under Constantine I that the Roman imperial tradition, reinforced by Hellenistic divine kingship theory, was fused with Greek Christian thought. The result was a concept of a world state ruled by the emperor, God’s chosen vicegerent, which in its order and harmony and devotion to the ruler reflected the order and harmony and devotion to God in the kingdom of heaven.

It was not just a fusion of ideas that the Christian Roman Empire involved, it was also a fusion of structures. In every aspect of the Christian church can be seen reflections of the empire. The provincial structure of the church and its hierarchical chain of command were clearly based on that of the empire. Indeed the Council of Chalcedon decreed that the church should adapt its organization to conform with changes in the civil organization. Thus when the civil diocese of Italy was divided in two during the Diocletianic reforms, the ecclesiastical diocese was divided also. Italia Annonaria in the north formed a diocese headed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Context
• Part II The Papacy under the Ostrogoths
• Part III The Papacy under the Empire
• Part IV The Popes
• Part V The Papal Administration
• Afterword
• Appendix 1 The Popes
• Appendix 2 Papal Vacancies
• Appendix 3 Papal Ordinations
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index