The popes: theory and fact

04/07/1998

'The papacy and the burden of history? was the theme chosen by the Reader in Church History in the University of Cambridge when he delivered The Tablet Open Day lecture last week (see Notebook). We publish below an abridged version. AT the beginning of this century it is not too much to claim that the greatest intellectual challenge facing the Christian Church was precisely the burden of history. The emergence of scientific history had disenchanted the past, and had posed with an immediacy never before known a series of questions which highlighted the apparent gulf between faith and fact. As source criticism, textual criticism, historical criticism turned the microscope and the dissecting knife on the texts of sacred Scripture, the gospels seemed to dwindle from timeless utterances of the holy Spirit to the laborious works of nameless editors, aimed very specifically at first-century audiences in Antioch, Rome, or the Hellenic Jewish diaspora.

And with the relativising of the gospels came the reduction to human proportions of their central figure. At the very moment when historical criticism began that great if reluctant rediscovery of the Jewishness of Jesus which is our century?s most remarkable contribution to the doctrine of Christ, the very presuppositions of that doctrine came to seem less credible. How could a wandering first-century apocalyptic prophet from one of the least savoury outposts of the Roman world be taken seriously as the eternal word of God? Was not the whole fabric of Nicene Christianity, its imaginings of the triune life of God projected into the obscure and sordid history of first-century Palestine, a fantasy, the hopeless Hellenising of an utterly different Jewish original? The search for the historical Jesus seemed to call into question the whole weight and direction of subsequent Christian history.

The problem of the papacy is, I take it, a subsection of this broader problem of the historical particularity of Christianity. How can historical institutions bear the weight of glory, how do they participate in eternity? For at least a thousand years, that grand question has for Catholic Christians had a more concrete expression ? what on earth have these greasy Italian monsignori to do with Christ and his Apostles?

Reformed Christianity attempted, in a variety of unsuccessful ways, to do away with the force of this question, to escape the burden of history. One method was to abolish history altogether, absolutising the authority of Scripture and setting it above all considerations of institutional development and historical change. Historical Christianity and its institutions, in this perspective, was emptied of supernatural significance, becoming no more than a series of endlessly repeated attempts to embody biblical Christianity in the present, with no one attempt or series of attempts having more significance than any other, since all ages and institutions were measured by the same timeless criterion of fidelity to the Bible.

This enterprise, I take it, ended as a respectable intellectual exercise with the arrival of historical and textual criticism of the Bible in the late eighteenth century, which reinserted the Bible itself into the historical process and thereby dissolved the absolute distance between the New Testament and the post-apostolic Church. Biblical fundamentalism, a mid-nineteenth-century invention, is a recidivist last stand against this devastating demystification ? though admittedly an immensely powerful one.

Another and in some ways more promising attempt within the Reformation to escape the burden of history was evolved within Anglo-Catholicism, which tried to liberate itself from the claims of history in process by conceding normative status to a single period of history, safely removed from the flux of the present by the passage of a thousand years. In the Anglo-Catholic theory Scripture was not the sole norm of Christian belief and practice. History too had ponderable weight ? but only remote and sacred history: the Church of the Fathers, the era of the first four, or six, general councils, against which all the teaching practice and institutions of the present must be measured. That theory found its most imaginative and persuasive expression in the Anglican writings of John Henry Newman, but the last of those Anglican writings, the Essay on Development, blew the theory to powder: its practical weakness as a system has been painfully shown more recently in the profound disarray and division of the Anglo-Catholic movement over such issues as the ordination of women. But, of course, attempts to escape from the burden of history are not the prerogative of the Reformation. From its very beginnings, the papacy has been surrounded with the mantle of timelessness, or rather, with a particular historical myth, whose vulnerability, considered simply as history, is every bit as problematic for Catholics as for anyone else. At least since the high Middle Ages the papacy has been understood as an institution directly created by Jesus Christ in his own lifetime: he willed that his Church should be ruled by the Apostles and their successors, and he gave to Peter, as leader of the apostles, the fullness of spiritual power, the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Peter came to Rome, and there appointed his own successors, whose names are recited to this day in the canon of the Mass ? Linus, Cletus, Clement, and so on down to John Paul II. All that the modern Church claims for the pope, his authority in doctrine and his power over institutions, is on this account a simple unfolding of the dominical bestowal of the keys, and the post-resurrection command to Peter to feed Christ?s sheep.

We have known for more than a century that the historical underpinning of this account is unfortunately not quite so simple. The Church of Rome during its first two centuries based its claims to precedence not on the Lord?s words to Peter, but on the preaching and death in Rome of two apostles, Peter and Paul. The commission in Matthew 16:18, Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, is quoted in no Roman source before the time of the Decian persecution, in the middle of the third century, and even then the claims which the Pope of the time tried to base on that quotation were indignantly rejected by the Churches of Africa to whom he was addressing himself.

And indeed, the very roots of what may be called the foundation myth of the papacy are themselves uncomfortably complicated. The Church established itself in Rome some time in the AD 40s: we now know that for the best part of the century that followed, there was nothing and nobody in Rome who could recognisably be called a pope. Christianity in Rome evolved out of the Roman synagogues, and to begin with it was not so much a single Church as a constellation of independent churches, meeting in the houses of wealthy converts or in hired halls and public baths, without any central ruler or bishop. The Roman synagogues ? there were 14 of them in the first century ? unlike the synagogues in other great Mediterranean cities like Antioch . . . were all independent, with no central organisation or single president, and to begin with at least, the churches of Rome also functioned independently. Many of them were in any case ethnic or regional churches, groups of Syrian, Greek, Asian residents in Rome, using their own languages, following the customs of the Christian communities back in their home regions.

Elsewhere in the first century, episcopacy emerged as the dominant form of church order ? the rule of each church by a single senior presbyter who took the lead in ordinations and the celebration of the Eucharist, and who was the focus of unity for all the Christians of a city or region. But Rome, probably because of the complexity and ethnic and cultural diversity of the Christian communities of the capital of the world, was very slow to adopt this system.

In the conventional accounts of the history of the papacy, the letter of Clement, written from Rome to the Church at Corinth around the year AD 95, is often thought of as the first papal encyclical, attributed to Pope Clement, Peter?s third successor and the last pope personally known to the Prince of the Apostles. In fact, the letter is written on behalf of the whole Roman Church, it is unsigned, and the author speaks unequivocally of the elders who rule the Church, in the plural.

EVERYTHING we know about the Church at Rome in its first century or so points in the same direction, to a community which certainly thought of itself as one Church, but which was in practice a loose and often divided federation of widely different communities, each with its own pastors and its own distinctive and often conflicting liturgies, calendars and customs. It was in fact the threat of heresy within this seething diversity, and the Roman need to impose some sort of unity and coherence on the Church in the city, that led to the emergence of the Roman episcopate, and the firming up of the Roman community?s pride in the life and death among them of the two greatest apostles, into a succession narrative. By the 160s the graves of Peter and Paul had shrines built over them and were being shown to Christian visitors to Rome: by the early third century the bishops of Rome were being buried in a single crypt in what is now the catacomb of San Callisto, as a sort of visible family tree stretching back, it was believed, to the apostolic age. But all this was a construct, tidying the mess and confusion of real history into a neat and orderly relay race, with the baton of apostolic authority being handed from one bishop to another.

This symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present, and it is a notable feature of the New Testament itself. My point is not that any of this disproves the claims we would wish to make for the papacy: it is perfectly open to us to read this process as providential. Nevertheless, the recognition that the emergence of the bishops of Rome was the result not straightforwardly of a direct and immediate act of the incarnate word of God in his own lifetime, but rather of a long and uncertain evolutionary process, which might conceivably have run a different way, surely rules out any absolutist understanding of the nature of papal authority.

And it seems to me not only to rule out absolutism, the bully?s version of papal theory, but even the poignant and noble understanding of the loneliness of office which is the most inspiring and admirable side of the ultramontane understanding of the papal office. Six weeks after his election, the greatest of all modern popes, Paul VI, jotted down some notes on the burden he had assumed. The post, he wrote,

is unique. It brings great solitude. I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome. Jesus was alone on the cross. . . . My solitude will grow. I need have no fears; I should not seek outside help to absolve me from my duty. My duty is to plan, decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd. And to suffer alone . . . me and God. The colloquy must be full and endless.

That is a noble vision of the papacy, one conceived as service, not as power, but it is emphatically not one conceived as a partnership with others. It would be a crass sensibility which was not moved by the fidelity and courage in Christian discipleship which underlay Pope Paul?s vision, but at the risk of crassness one is bound to note that it is, in the long run, derived at least in part from an understanding of the nature and origin of the papacy which is just plain wrong. In the alternative story, papal authority is not the lonely prerogative of an individual, the inevitably singular burden of the apostle, but the focusing in one man of something which inheres in the whole community, and which from the beginning was exercised, and transmitted to the present, collectively or collegially.

Getting the story right can also illuminate for us the character of the institution which has resulted from the historical process. The emergence of the popes was a response to an unusually chaotic and diverse religious situation in the hub of empire, a city as pluralistic as modern New York or San Francisco.

From its earliest appearance, the papacy has been preoccupied with issues of unity and uniformity, the imposition of Roman order on regional diversity ? and from the beginning it has been resisted, and been rebuked by other Christian leaders who were able to appeal to its own remote past against its more authoritarian and tidy-minded present.

In the face of history, then, we cannot quite subscribe to the notion of the papacy as timeless, founded by Our Lord?s command in the beginning and maintaining through all the vicissitudes of time the constant exercise of that divine mandate. But another version of that story can be told, less direct, in which the history of the papacy is the history of the steady unfolding of its inner reality. In this version of papal theory, full weight is given to the transformations of history. What remains constant, however, is the inner reality of the papacy, a mission revealed in the biblical sources and the early history of the Church, and steadily rendered clearer and clearer in its long march through time.

Some version of this account, it seems to me, is fundamental to any Catholic belief in papal authority. As it stands, however, it is probably far too tidy. The process by which the papacy has emerged as the administrative and ideological centre of the largest wing of a divided Christendom has been by no means straightforward and progressive. The later doctrinal centrality of Rome for Catholics cannot, I think, be read out of the history of the formative stages of Christian doctrine: the papacy did indeed play a decisive role at the Council of Chalcedon, when the so-called Tome of Pope Leo the Great provided the council with the essential formulation of Catholic incarnational teaching. But this was a highly unrepresentative event: for the most part the early papacy contributed nothing whatever to the shaping of fundamental Christian teaching, and the creative centres of the Church lay elsewhere, in the East.

Nor has the institutional unfolding of the papacy been a story of steady upwards evolution. Papal claims reached their height in the central Middle Ages. Bernard of Clairvaux told his pupil, Pope Eugenius III: In truth there are other doorkeepers of heaven and shepherds of flocks: but you are more glorious than all of these . . . . They have flocks assigned to them, one to each: to you all are assigned, a single flock to a single shepherd. You are called to the fullness of power.

Bernard made these lofty claims in a treatise designed to teach the pope the obligation to serve others, and to reform himself and the papacy, but the same claims were turned by the popes into a platform from which to dominate and cow the world, as Boniface VIII attempted to do in the Bull Unam Sanctam, in which he declared that it was altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff. Everything the modern papacy claims, and very much more, such as the right to appoint emperors and to depose kings, was then claimed for the popes. Yet in the centuries that followed, the reality of papal authority declined drastically, not simply in the countries of the Reformation, but among all the Catholic powers of Europe. The Baroque papacy inhabited buildings which spelled out a megalomaniac vision of papal dominance, but the reality was that the popes were increasingly reduced to ceremonial figures, preoccupied with preserving their interests in Italy, increasingly marginalised in the councils of kings.

The modern papacy, therefore, is not the product of a steady evolution from simple beginnings, the natural growth of some essential acorn into a mighty oak. In some real sense it is, rather, the result of an historical catastrophe, the French Revolution. The revolution swept away the Catholic kings who had appointed bishops and ruled Churches. The hostile secular states which emerged to replace them in nineteenth-century Europe attempted to control the influence of the Church in public life, but were glad to leave its internal arrangements to the pope.

If one had to single out the most crucial and important practical power possessed by the modern popes, it would certainly be the right to appoint the bishops of the world. It is salutary to remind ourselves that the popes did not possess this power in canon law till 1917, and that as a matter of fact the practice of direct papal appointment of bishops did not become general until well towards the end of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the decision of the anti-papal kings of Italy not to exercise this traditional prerogative of the secular ruler. Most of the bishops appointed by the pope before then were in fact appointed by the pope functioning not as universal pastor, but as primate of Italy or as secular ruler of the papal states. The 1917 Code of Canon Law, itself, which lies at the heart of papal domination of the modern Church, owed at least as much to the Napoleonic Code as to holy Scripture, and most of the actual exercise of papal authority in the modern Church is rooted in quite specific aspects of the institutional and intellectual history of the last 200 years.

IT is not my argument that the papacy is built on false claims and ought to be dismantled: the papacy is a fact, as the institutional Church is a fact, the end-product of the unimaginably complex journey through time in which the word of God announces itself to humankind. As Catholic Christians we can neither undo the past nor start with a blank page, for we know that the dwelling of God is among us, and all of us are creatures of time, constituted and given identity as much by what has happened to us, by our own past, as by anything we ourselves choose or do. The papacy is one of the concrete forms in which order, unity and fidelity to the truth have been preserved within the Church: we might not have designed it had we been given an entirely free hand, but free hands, like free lunches, are not a feature of life as we know it. The papacy is the way things have worked out.

But neither am I arguing for historical fatalism. To understand how the papacy came to be what it is may not radically alter the way we view it or the reverence we pay it. But it can and should shade and nuance our expectation of how it is exercised, if only by telling us that things were not always so, and will not always be so. Catholicism is a sacramental religion, looking to the perishable things of time as vehicles of the eternal, seeking not to escape history but to encounter within it the living word of God. The temptation in such a religion is to sacralise the temporal until it ceases to be itself, to make the water of baptism or the bread of the Eucharist unrecognisable as water or bread. In the same way, the tradition has endlessly been tempted to apply to the imperfect and incomplete Church language appropriate to the glorified bride of Christ in heaven: we have moved from our faith that the God-awful collection of weird people we call the Church is collectively the bride of Christ, destined to appear one day without spot or blemish, to the claim that the institutional Church is without spot or wrinkle ? in short that, like Stalin?s Russia, we never make mistakes.

It is because Catholics place so high a value on the papacy that we need constantly to remind ourselves that it is, like everything else in this sublunary world, a creature of time and circumstance. It has not always been so, it will change beyond our imaginings, and one day it will pass away.

At papal coronations, as the pope was carried into St Peter?s, it was once the task of a barefoot Franciscan to step into the route of the procession and to light a torch of flax, which flared and went out. The Franciscan cried out, Sancte Pater, sic transit gloria mundi: Holy Father, thus passes away the glory of the world. The ritual has long since been abolished, but I like to think that in the work of the historian its spirit lives on.