www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Papal Authority & the Cardinalate in regard to Eastern Hierarchs

Peter J,

Thank you for pointing it out to me.

It is common terminology to say that one has been elevated to the cardinalate. All you have to do is do a Google search to see the results.
I have always personally viewed the patriarchs as having precedence before the cardinals, so for a patriarch to be elevated to the cardinalate would sound odd.

I hope this clarifies it for you.

How about "The Patriarch was degraded to the Cardinalate"?

The Slavic branch of the Constantinopolitan family knows both titular archbishops and metropolitans. It also knows metropolitans as heads of autonomous (Japan & Ukraine) and autocephalous (Poland & Czech/Slovakia) Churches. The Greek branch has taken to giving every diocesan bishop the title metropolitan. An Archbishop head of an autonomous/autocephalous church with jurisdiction over metropolitans and with primatial rights is a major. So no figment of imagination or Latinizing, just the Latin tendency to meticulously define things. So while the title "Archbishop Major" may be a recent creation the position is as old as the Church of Cypus' autocephaly.

Then that just opens up the can of worms as to why not have the Papacy in Antioch? Is His Beatitude Gregory III not a direct successor of St. Peter? Or the Maronite or Syriac Patriarchs? If its simply "direct" succession from Peter, then we really should be speaking of a Triumvirate Papacy that is headed by the men who hold the Sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch (perhaps a view not too far from Gregory the Great's position though )

But we all know that Rome rejects such a view on the (not-solid) ground that Peter died in Rome, making the Bishop of Rome more direct of a successor then Alexandria or Antioch. So it is Rome that is the key here, not just because he is a "direct successor."

Or move it to Falls Church for that matter!

I stand by my words. The Archbishops of Cyprus, Sinai, Warsaw, Prague, Athens are, to be sure, heads of autonomous or autocephalous Churches but they are still TITLED archbishops. Major Archbishops are a clumsy neologism imposed by the hegemonic powers that be! I don't give a hoot in hell for Rome's penchant for meticulous precision. Be meticulously precise in your own backyard and let the Catholic East breathe on its own!

How is it "not solid"?

Leaving aside the quality and proper attributes of the position held by Peter, if you accept that Peter had a unique place among the bishops, the fact that he kept on living and functioning as a bishop is perfectly reasonable grounds for thinking the unique quality remained with him.

As such, he could hardly have left it behind in Antioch or any other place while he went on to be bishop of Rome. That is, he wasn't dead but he was still Peter.

In fact, if you're going to press this Triumvirate notion to it's logical conclusion, Peter ordained, say, five, who each ordained five, and so on, until you've got at least a few hundred "Equal Firsts among Equal(s) (Seconds?)" operating a co-papacy in the world today, alongside a few unlucky saps following behind also-rans like James and John. Either Peter was unique, or Peter was not unique. Just be reasonable and pick one.

Indeed, the Bishops of ACROD have all been titular bishops and the head of any Diocese in the Greek tradition of Constantinople has been awarded the title of Metropolitan - even the titular ones overseeing a Diocese under the Omophor like ACROD. I think that the UOC-USA has the same status as well.

Was St Peter a Roman?

He was, of course, a Melkite.

But, understand, the primacy of Rome is that of the Roman Church, which claimed it first under the principle of accommodation (Church organization should mirror civil organization; Rome is the capital of the Empire, ergo, Rome is the head of the Church), as well as by virtue of its wealth, its large number of martyrs, and the number of suffragan Churches that look to Rome for guidance.

Things become more complex after Constantine moves the capital to Constantinople. The principle of accommodation is recognized by the Councils of Constantinople and Chalcedon, which place Constantinople equal with Rome, since Constantinople is "New Rome". This not being acceptable to Old Rome, it developed the theory that Rome has priority because of its "double apostolic foundation" by both Peter and Paul. By late antiquity, Paul falls by the wayside, and Rome increasingly resorts to Matthew 16:18 as its rationale for holding primacy, but this was never universally recognized, even in the West.

However, Rome during most of the first millennium did develop a reputation for theological orthodoxy, ironically because of its reluctance to innovate and failure to establish its own unique school of theology (as did Alexandria and Antioch). Therefore, any new teaching or doctrinal expression needed acceptance by the Church of Rome if it was to be universally received, and any doctrine that did not would be viewed with suspicion.

Of course, by the end of the first millennium, having been left to its own devices due to the collapse of the Western Empire, the interruption of communications between East and West, and the increasing isolation of the Western Church, Rome became an innovator in its own right, and acted with surprise when its innovations (more often than not merely local usage that Rome, in its isolation, came to consider normative for all) were questioned by the rest of the Church, as Rome itself had once questioned innovations by the Eastern Churches.

That's what a seventh century Saint and Church Father of the east had to say about accommodation, and he quite explicitly connects the Church of Rome to St Peter without mentioning his name. He rather alludes to the words of Christ to St Peter in Matthew 16.

Get over it, Stuart, and please don,t put forth as historical fact what is historical conjecture. Fr Dvornik advances this theory of accommodation in an attempt to find common ground between the historical rejection of papal claims by the Orthodox, and those claims made by Rome. I think his position is stated much more subtly and sensitively than yours, and offers points for fruitful dialogue.

Chalcedon 451 ratified Canon 3 of Constantinople 381 and extended the jurisdiction of this See to Thrace, Asia, Pontus and what would later become missionary territories.

As it was initially convoked, Council of Constantinople was not an ecumenical council, but was convoked to deal with problems of the eastern church. Dvornik sees Canon 3 as an attempt to limit the jurisdiction of Alexandria, and even though Alexandria eventually accepted the Canon it did not abandon its claim to precedence in the east.

Fr Dvornik states that everything that happened in the church of the east between the fourth and middle of the fifth century can be explained on the rivalry between Alexandria and Constantinople and the claim of Alexandria to have first place among the churches of the east. It was through the intercession of Cyril of Alexandria that Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, was accused of Heresy, brought before the Council of Ephesus in 431 and condemned. He was deposed and sent into exile.

The action of 451 troubled Rome which perceived that the new Imperial city was seeking more than a primacy of honor. It reveals for the first time a desire of the east to run its own affairs and confirms a particularistic tendency taking hold in the east.

The phrase, “primacy of honor,” refers quite specifically to a status that the Church of Constantinople sought for herself and obtained at the Ecumenical Council held in that city in 381. Canon 3 of that Council can be viewed as an affirmation that the primacy of elder Rome was not one of honor but of fact, and thus, of jurisdiction. There cannot be two primacies. There can, however, be one of fact and one of honor. The effort on the part of new Rome to seek a position of honor seems to acknowledge what would be an anomaly and a disaster for the unity of the Church. In fact, at this point, the Church of Constantinople never questioned the old Roman primacy.

Maximus, of course, had an agenda to pursue, and was enlisting Rome not because of its Petrine foundation, but because--as the extract above says, "Rome is the greatest of all the Churches". I'm pretty sure Maximus the Confessor would have considered Pastor aeternus to be an heretical innovation, because, well, it was.

Oh, and like most people today, you have no real conception of what primacy of honor actually meant in late antiquity. But I have written on that at length--go look it up.

I can't speak for most people, but for myself I am quite certain my knowledge is deficient. I will read what you have to say about "primacy of honor", although I do feel what I had to say about it in my previous post approximates the truth.

I do not have the text before me, but I do believe Fr Dvornik felt that at Chalcedon Constantinople sought more than a primacy of honor. With Canon 28 at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 Constantinople sought a presidence of jurisdiction. This was another matter. It brought a swift reaction from elder Rome. Pope Leo objected and refused to accept this Canon, primarily because it did not specifically affirm that elder Rome held the primacy because of its Petrine character; seemed to undermine the ecclesiastical order established at the Council of Nicea, and, what is more, was passed in the absence of the papal legates.

As far as what St Maximus had to say, I will say this, then let it go. It is obvious to me, and I think many others, that he does in fact connect the Church of Rome's greatness and place among the churches to its Petrine origins. If not, why would he directly allude to the words Christ addressed to Peter? The churches recognized this greatness from the very foundation because of its connection to Peter's authority given to him by Christ, not because it was the seat of imperial power. I do believe he is expressing the faith of the undivided Church in the seventh century.

Dvornik did know what the term meant. You think it means being something like the Lord Mayor of London, and getting to cut ribbons at the opening of new cathedrals and making pretty speeches. But in an honor-based society, primacy of honor conveyed much more influence than a mere primacy of jurisdiction.

As I said before (many, many times), there is a difference between potestas (or imperium) and auctoritas. The former is juridical power, and adheres to an office, while the latter is effectively charismatic, and adheres to a person. Auctoritas could always trump potestas, depending upon how much one had. A privatus (private citizen) holding no office, let alone one with potestas, could dominate and overrule a magistrate with imperium--as often happened in the early Church.

At the Council of Nicaea, the true leaders were not the bishops, but rather the confessors, those who had suffered under the recently ended persecutions. Similarly, later in Church history, monastics with no office whatsoever (e.g., Maximos the Confessor, or St. Simeon Stylites) had the auctoritas to oppose not only bishops but also emperors.

The entire Roman system was based on the careful avoidance of the appearance of naked power, which is why the Augustan principate was based on the concept of "primacy of honor". Looked at objectively, Augustus held very little potestas in his own hands, and much of that was symbolic. For instance, he kept control of a couple of provinces (one was Egypt, the breadbasket of Rome), he paid the army out of his own pocket, and he was awarded the tribunicia postestas (tribunician power) to veto legislation. But he preferred to rule through the machinery of the Republican government, and particularly through the position of Princeps Senatus (First Man of the Senate), an honor that went back into the early days of the Republic.

The Princeps Senatus held no office, though he was usually one of the ex-consuls, possibly even a former censor. He was not elected to his position, it was awarded by the consensus of his fellow senators--there was no need to vote, because everybody just knew who the Princeps Senatus was. His formal privileges were few--he could speak first after the consuls, and he was always allowed the last word in any debate. But he remained just a single senator. Despite that, his prestige was enormous, and such was the respect for his auctoritas and dignitas that it was almost impossible to ram through legislation against his will.

This was a model of governance and leadership the early Church understood quite well, since it applied at all levels of civil governance, from the Imperial down to the rudest village.

Within the Western Church of the late fourth century, who do you think counted for more? Ambrose Bishop of Milan, or the morally compromised Damasus Bishop of Rome? The answer to the question is obvious, but the reason may not be apparent to those who are wedded to the notion of Papal potestas: in an honor-based society, the Church honored Ambrose more than it did the putative Pope.

This annoys people raised in a contractual society, in which duties and responsibilities, powers and their limits, have to be spelled out in mind-numbing detail. But the Church understood honor, and when it awarded a primacy of honor, it saw no reason to define jurisdiction or power beyond the usual geographic boundaries. That's why a document like Unum Sanctum or Pastor Aeternus would be unthinkable to the Fathers--it reveals a total change in the understanding of relationships within the Church. "The mighty among the Gentiles lord it over you, and call themselves benefactors, but it shall not be so with you". That kind of self-effacing leadership, one based on honor, authority and prestige, is what governed the patristic Church, and there was neither the need not the desire to define relationships within or among the Churches in secular terms of power and jurisdiction. When such terms were used, it marked not the success, but the failure of Church governance.

As to why Maximos made oblique reference to the keys and the gates of hell, it might do well to remember that it was commonly held at the time that all bishops were the heirs of Peter, and all held the keys--but among the Churches, Rome presided in love, because of its auctoritas, not its potestas or jurisdiction--both of which were negligible outside of its own province.

Well, Peter denied Christ and made a fool of himself over the issue of unclean foods, but the Apostolic position he held remained in tact. Many leaders have betrayed their office throughout history, but it did not negate the authority and power attached to that office. It just made them ineffective leaders. So be it. These juridical terms, I'm sure you understand, are always used analogously within the context of the Church and carry with them the admonitions of Christ which often are ignored by prelate and peon alike.

If you think I'm a fan of Pastor Aeternus you have the wrong man. I believe it was ill-timed and poorly worded, but I feel its stretching it to call it heretical.

Speaking of stretching; I think you've made poor St Maximos pretty thin. As in:


Thanks for the history lesson, but I still feel you are given to a great deal of historical conjecturing.

I will just conclude my post with what I have written before on this forum:

Through all the vicissitudes of political upheaval in Italy and western Europe, the ecclesiastical turmoil of the Protestant Reformation, the discovery and colonization of a new world, and the creation of the modern national state, even her own catastrophes of exile, anti-popes and Borgian corruption, Rome has held on to her preeminent role within the church. Her sole claim today, as it was in ancient times, is not based on anything Rome was or became politically, but on the role the small community of Jewish Christians was given in the first century because the chief of the Apostles presided there, ordained its first bishop and gave up his life as a martyr therein. The addition of the presence and martyrdom of St Paul at the same time only strengthens the claim of this preeminent Church.

Keep in mind that for the first two centuries of her life the Church of Rome was severely persecuted by the Imperial powers in that city. The Church there would have little reason to believe or take any pride in, as was the case of Constantinople in the fourth century, that she held primacy in the Church because she was located in the old Imperial city. Yet it is precisely in this period of persecution that the tradition of her apostolic authority develops and flourishes! It flourishes today, and ecclesiastical and secular historians have to come to grips with that. The role of Peter as embodied in the Bishop of Rome is either a gift of Christ to the Church, or, as the Rev. Ian Paisley and some of the monks of Mt Athos would have it, the Anti-Christ.