The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity

Introduction

Introduction On June 29, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI ratified a document prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that sought to clarify the Roman Catholic Church’s position on certain contemporary ecclesiological questions rooted in the proclamations of Vatican II. Among other things, the document defined other Christian traditions as ‘‘defective’’ because ‘‘communion with the Catholic Church, the visible head of which is the Bishop of Rome and the Successor of Peter, is not some external complement to a particular Church but rather one of its internal constitutive principles.’’1 In other words, membership in the ‘‘one Church of Christ’’ is actualized, according to this text, by solidarity with the bishop of Rome, and this assertion is justified on the basis of the biblical Peter’s link to the ancient see. However contentious such a declaration may be, all students of Christian history are familiar with papal claims to ecclesiastical authority. Equally familiar is the justification for this authority on the basis of the special connection between Peter the apostle and the bishops of Rome who are said to ‘‘inherit’’ his primatial authority. And while there is certainly no shortage of historical studies that have sought to chronicle the so-called rise of the papacy from late antiquity into the Middle Ages, there seems to be a surprising dearth of investigations into the circumstances under which this Petrine connection was initially promoted, how those proclamations evolved, and how they were perceived by other Christians at the time. What differentiates the present study from previous histories of the papacy is that it is not so much concerned with chronicling the acts of any particular pope or ecclesiastical conflict as it is devoted to understanding the emergence of a particular kind of discourse, the Petrine discourse, which helped to make possible what we might now call a papal theory. As such, the current project is not a history of the early papacy per se so much as it is a study of how the literary and ritualistic embellishment of a link between the historic Peter and the papal see of subsequent centuries functioned within a 2 introduction series of existent and interconnected late ancient discourses of authority and exclusion. With that goal in mind, this book offers three overlapping levels of investigation and analysis. First, it seeks to identify the content, shape, and shifting parameters of what I call the ‘‘Petrine discourse’’ between the two most creative and dynamic popes of late antiquity—Leo the ‘‘Great’’ (bishop of Rome 440–461) and Gregory the ‘‘Great’’ (bishop of Rome 590–604).2 Second, this book offers a historical narrative that emphasizes the ways multiple actors employed, extended, transformed, and/or resisted the Petrine discourse for their own purposes. Third, this project provides a revisionist history of the papacy, particularly as it relates to the escalations in its rhetorical claims to ecclesiastical authority in this period. This revisionist history challenges the dominant narrative of an inevitable and unbroken rise in papal power from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. Resisting the temptation to interpret late ancient papal claims to authority as representing actualized or actualizable power and international respect, I argue that the escalations of papal rhetoric, almost always linked directly to a Petrine claim, were often born in moments of papal anxiety or weakness. In other words, whenever a Roman bishop in this period claimed to be the primary or sole arbiter in dogmatic, moral, or judicial conflicts, especially if that claim was rhetorically bolder than those that preceded it, we would be well served to consider whether or not such a statement was uttered in response to the same bishop’s authority having been threatened, challenged, or simply ignored by a particular audience .3 As we will see, those humiliations came in many forms and from many places, both domestic and international, lay and ecclesiastical. Employing this three-pronged analysis, I will argue that specific features of the Petrine discourse contributed to the survival and, ultimately, the exceptional status of the bishop of Rome. We will see, for example, that the elasticity of the Petrine topos in papal hands was of fundamental importance to the discursive presentation of the papacy’s hegemonic claims and the ultimate willingness of other Christians to authenticate those claims through their own use of them.4 Despite (or perhaps because of) the malleable character of the Petrine topos, however, we will also notice that the papal presentation...