6-16. The Struggle for Patriarchal Rights Among the Sees
St Augustine's theory of the Civitas Dei was, in germ, that of the medieval papacy, without the name of Rome. In Rome itself it was easy to supply the insertion, and to conceive of a dominion still wielded from the ancient seat of government, as world-wide and almost as authoritative as that of the Empire. The inheritance of the imperial traditions of Rome, left begging by the withdrawal of the secular monarch, fell as it were into the lap of the Christian bishop. In this connexion it is a significant coincidence that the first description which history has preserved to us of the outward habit of life of a Roman pontiff belongs to the same period, probably to the same pope, as the formulation of the claim to spiritual lordship. Ammianus was a pagan, but not a bigoted one. He professes, and we need not doubt that he felt, a genuine respect for simple provincial bishops, whose plain living and modest exterior "commended them to the Deity and His true worshippers."
But the atmosphere of the capital, the "ostentatio rerum Urbanarum," was fatal to unworldliness in religion. After relating that in the year 366 one hundred and thirty-seven corpses were counted at the end of the day in the Liberian basilica, on the occasion of the fight between the opposing factions of Damasus and Ursinus, the historian grimly adds that the prize was one which candidates might naturally count it worth any effort to obtain, seeing that an ample revenue, showered on the Roman bishop by the piety of Roman ladies, enabled him to dress like a gentleman, to ride in his own carriage, and to give dinner-parties not less well appointed than the Caesar's.
Some forty or fifty years after Damasus the Roman author of the original form of the so-called Isidorian collection of canons, incorporating in his preface the substance of the Damasine definition on the subject of the three Petrine sees, adds to Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch mention also of the honour paid, for the sake of James the brother of the Lord and of John the apostle and evangelist, to the bishops of Jerusalem and Ephesus. Mere veneration of the "pillars" of the apostolic Church is not enough to account for this modification of the original triad ; the reasons must be sought in the circumstances of the day. If Ephesus is said to "have a more honourable place in synod than other metropolitans," it may be merely that Ephesus, the most distinguished church of those over which Constantinople, from the time of St John Chrysostom, asserted jurisdiction, was a convenient stalking-horse for the movement of resistance to Constantinopolitan claims; but it is also possible that the phrase was penned after the oecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431, where Memnon of Ephesus was seated next after the bishops of Alexandria and Jerusalem.
If the bishop of Jerusalem is "accounted honourable by all for the reverence due to so hallowed a spot," and nevertheless "the first throne," sedes prima, "was never by the ancient definition of the fathers reckoned to Jerusalem, lest it should be thought that the throne of our Lord Jesus Christ was on earth and not in heaven," we cannot help suspecting that at the back of the writer's mind hovers an uneasy consciousness that the apostolic traditions of Rome, which were so readily brought into play against Constantinople, might find an inconvenient rival in Jerusalem. Not that at Jerusalem, apart from a certain emphasis on the position of James the Lord's brother, there was ever any conscious competition, with Rome: but it was true that, about the time that this canonical collection was published, the see of Jerusalem was just pushing a campaign of aggrandisement, carried on for over a century, to a triumphant conclusion.
The claims of Jerusalem were comparatively modest at the start, and it did not occur to Damasus for instance that they need be taken into serious consideration. Two initial difficulties hampered their early course. Although Jerusalem was the mother church of Christendom, and the home and centre of the first apostolic preaching, Aelia Capitolina, the Gentile city founded by Hadrian, had no real continuity with the Jewish city on the ruins of which it rose. The church of Jerusalem had been a church of Jewish Christians, the church of Aelia was a church of Gentile Christians, and for a couple of generations too obscure to have any history. A probably spurious list of bishops is all the record that survives of it before the third century. Then came the taste for pilgrimages — in A.D. 333 a pilgrim made the journey all the way from Bordeaux — and the growing cult of the Holy Places: Jerusalem was the scene of the most sacred of Christian memories, and locally at any rate Aelia was Jerusalem.
From the time of Constantine onwards the identification was complete. The second difficulty was of a less archaic kind, and took longer to circumvent Aelia-Jerusalem did not even dominate its own district, but was quite outshone by its near neighbour at Caesarea. Politically Caesarea was capital of the province : ecclesiastically it was the home of the teaching and the library of Origen, and the Origenian tradition was kept alive by Famphilus the confessor and by Eusebius, bishop of the church at the time of the Nicene council. It was hardly likely that the council would do anything derogatory to the friend of Constantine, the most learned ecclesiastic of the age: and in fact all the satisfaction that the bishop of Jerusalem obtained at Nicaea was the apparent right to rank as the first of the suffragans of the province — like Autun in the province of Lyons, or London in the province of Canterbury. Local patriotism felt the sop thus thrown to it to be quite unsatisfying, and for a hundred years the sordid strife for the first place, as Theodoret calls it, went on between the bishop of Jerusalem and the bishop of Caesarea. In the confusion of the doctrinal struggle it was easy enough for an orthodox bishop to refuse allegiance to an Arianising metropolitan: and Caesarea being in close relations with Antioch, it was natural for the bishops of Jerusalem to turn to their neighbours at Alexandria, nor, we may suppose, was Alexandria disinclined to favour encroachment upon the territory of its Antiochene rival.
Western churchmen, with their profound belief in the finality of every decision of Nicaea, looked coldly on the movement, and it is one of the counts in Jerome's catalogue of grievances against John of Jerusalem. But at the first Council of Ephesus, with Cyril of Alexandria in the chair and John of Antioch absent, Juvenal of Jerusalem secured the second place, though he still failed to abrogate the metropolitical rights of Caesarea. At the Latrocinium of Ephesus in 449, again under Alexandrine presidency, he managed to sit even above Domnus of Antioch. The business of the Council of Chalcedon was to reverse the proceedings of the Latrocinium, and it might have been anticipated that with the eclipse of Alexandrine influence the fortunes of Jerusalem would also suffer. But a timely tergiversation on the doctrinal issue saved something for Juvenal and his see: the council decreed a partition of patriarchal rights over the East between the churches of Antioch and Jerusalem.
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