6-15. The Three Great Sees
Of course there never had been a time when some churches had not stood out above the rest, and the bishops of those churches above other bishops. The Council of Nicaea, side by side with the canons that prescribed the normal organisation by provinces and metropolitans, recognised at the same time certain exceptional prerogatives as guaranteed by "ancient custom." In Egypt especially, Alexandria eclipsed its neighbour cities to a degree unparalleled elsewhere in the East; and while it might not have been easy to sanction the authority of the Alexandrine bishop over the whole of "Egypt Libya and Pentapolis," if it had been quite unique in its extent, the Nicene fathers could shelter themselves under the plea that "the same thing is customary at Rome."
A gloss in an early Latin version of the canons interprets the Roman parallel to consist in the "care of the suburbicarian churches," that is to say, the churches of the ten provinces of the Vicariate of Rome — central and southern Italy with the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Over these wider districts the Roman and Alexandrine popes respectively exercised direct jurisdiction, to the exclusion in either case of the ordinary powers of metropolitans. The further prescription of the Nicene canon that "in the case of Antioch and in the other provinces" the churches were to keep their privileges, was understood by Pope Innocent to cover similar direct jurisdiction of Alexander of Antioch over Cyprus; and a version of the canons "transcribed at Rome from the copies* of the same pope defines the sphere of Antioch as "the whole of Coele-Syria."
What was it then that had given these three churches of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch the special position to the antiquity of which the Nicene council witnesses? Roman theologians from Damasus onwards would have answered unhesitatingly that the motive was deference to the Prince of the Apostles, who had founded the churches of Rome and Antioch himself, and the church of Alexandria through his disciple Mark. But this answer is open to two fatal retorts: it does not explain why Alexandria, the see of the disciple, should rank above Antioch, a see of the master, and it does not explain why our earliest authorities, both Roman and non-Roman, so persistently couple the name of St Paul with the name of St Peter as joint patron of the Roman Church. Cyprian is the first writer to talk of the "chair of Peter" only.
Therefore we are driven back upon the secular prominence of the three cities as the obvious explanation of their ecclesiastical dignity. Yet if the appeal to history of the two councils which elevated Constantinople to the second place was thus not without a large measure of justification, their bald expression of Byzantine theory does not really, any better than the contemporary Roman view, cover the whole of the facts. If rank and influence in the ecclesiastical sphere depended, more than on anything else, on rank and influence in the civil sphere, it did not depend on it entirely. The personality and memory of great churchmen went for something. Carthage was no doubt the civil capital of the dioecese of Africa, and Milan of the dioecese of Italy: but it would be rash to assert that the inheritance which St Cyprian left to Carthage and St Ambrose to Milan was quite worthless or ephemeral. And if this was true of the great bishops of the third and fourth centuries, it was still more true of the apostles whom the whole Church united in venerating. Legends of apostolic foundation were often baseless enough, but their very frequency testified to the value set upon the thing claimed.
Throughout the course of the long struggle with Gnosticism, the teaching of the apostles was the unvarying standard of Christian appeal: and evidence of that teaching was found not only in the written Creed and Scriptures but in the unwritten tradition of the churches and episcopal successions founded by apostles. "Percurre ecclesias apostolicas," cries Tertullian confidently to his adversary: "habemus adnumerare eos qui ab apostolis instituti sunt episcopi in ecclesiis et successiones eorum usque ad nos" is Irenaeus' rendering of the same argument. And both the Gallican and the African writer go on to select among apostolic churches the church of Rome — "ista quam felix ecclesia," "maximae et antiquissimae et omnibus cognitae ecclesiae traditionem et fidem" — as for themselves the obvious witness of this teaching. From the second century onwards a catena of testimony makes and acknowledges the claim of the Roman Church to be, through its connexion with St Peter and St Paul, in a special sense the depository and guardian of an apostolic tradition, a type and model for other churches.
The pontificate of Damasus (366-384) has been more than once mentioned in the preceding pages as the period of the first definite self-expression of the papacy. The continuous history of Latin Christian literature does not commence till after the middle of the fourth century ; the dogmatic and exegetical writings of Hilary in Gaul (c. 355) and Marius Victorinus in Rome (c. 360) are the first factors in a henceforward unbroken series. On the beginnings of this new literary development followed quickly the movement, of which we have already noticed symptoms in other directions, for interpreting existing conditions and constructing out of them a coherent and scientific scheme. These conditions had grown up gradually, naturally, and almost at haphazard : it now seemed time to try to put them on to a firm theological basis, and in the process much that had been fluid, immature, tentative, was crystallised into a hard and fast system.
It fell to the able and masterful Damasus, in the last years of a long life and a troubled pontificate, to attempt what his predecessors had not yet attempted, and to formulate in brief and incisive terms the doctrine of Rome upon Creed and Bible and Pope. A council of 378 or 379, after reciting the Nicene symbol, laid down the sober lines of Catholic theology as against the various forms of one-sided speculation, Eunomian and Macedonian, Photinian and Apollinarian, to which the confusions of the half-century since Nicaea had given birth; and the East could do no better than accept the Tome of Damasus, as seventy years later it accepted the Tome of Leo. Another council in 382 published the first official Canon of Scripture in the West — the influence of Jerome, at that time papal secretary, is traceable in it — and the first official definition of papal claims. Roman primacy ("ceteris ecclesiis praelata," "primatum obtinuit") is grounded, with obvious reference to the vote of the council of 381 in favour of Constantinople, on "no synodal decisions" but directly on the promise of Christ to Peter recorded in the Gospel. Respect for Roman tradition imposes next a mention of "the fellowship of the most blessed Paul"; but the dominant motif reappears in the concluding paragraph, and the three sees whose prerogative was recognised at Nicaea are transformed into a Petrine hierarchy with its "prima sedes" at Rome, its "secunda sedes" at Alexandria, and its "tertia sedes" at Antioch.
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