The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity by George E. Demacopoulos (review)

Despite what one might gather from a quick glance at its title, George E. Demacopoulos’s excellent study does not detail the rise of an increasingly powerful late antique papacy. Rather, Demacopoulos is up to something subtler and less grandiose. The Invention of Peter centers its narrative on the evolution of a distinct Petrine discourse up to the period of Gregory the Great. While the late antique architects of this discourse, from the mid-fourth-century pope Damasus to Gregory, sought to strengthen the historically tenuous connection between Saint Peter and the ecclesiological authority of the Roman episcopate, the real beneficiaries of this distinctive, Petrine connection would not arrive until centuries later. Yet, the early and central medieval popes, who, along with their archivists and clerks, would further refine and streamline the language of Petrine authority, are only occasionally foreshadowed by Demacopoulos. According to the author, too many scholars of the late antique Church have assumed from the bold claims to Roman episcopal privilege made by popes like Leo I and Gelasius I that these figures actually commanded the formidable power and respect suggested by such claims.

In opposition to this view of early papal authority, Demacopoulos convincingly argues that instances wherein popes invoked the “Petrine topos” in their communication with ecclesiastical colleagues or secular leaders directly coincided with moments of frustration, insecurity, and the relative weakness of the Roman See vis-à-vis rival authorities. In particular, the emperors in the East and the imperially-bolstered Constantinopolitan Church possessed significantly more effective authority; the Roman episcopate was increasingly considered an afterthought in East-West theological and ecclesiological quarrels. Within the temporal scope of this study, the apparent gains in terms of papal power and prestige appear spotty at best, with Roman episcopal authority waxing and waning through the early years of the seventh century. Nor by this terminal point had the Petrine discourse become the singular, exclusive domain of the papacy: In an epilogue to the main narrative, we find a sly, Petrine-inflected critique of Pope Gregory I, used rather audaciously in the vita of Gregory of Agrigentum to lament the pope’s alleged lapses in pastoral practice. Given that the advocacy of proper pastoral care is, and was, often considered Pope Gregory’s greatest legacy, such criticism is certainly telling of the papacy’s still-shaky position in the period following his death.

Leading up to this fascinating denouement, Demacopoulos’s primary focus is deliberately narrow and specific, centering on an acutely observant analysis of Petrine discourse and the moments of its deployment in Late Antiquity. Demacopoulos demonstrates that the social transition from Late Antiquity to the early medieval world produced a potent discourse which would serve as a firm foundation for later papal power, but not, by the beginning of the seventh century, a particularly strong and authoritative trans-personal papal office. This central contention is important and potentially far-reaching in its implications, not only for scholars of Late Antiquity or those specializing in the early papacy, but for specialists in other areas as well. Carolingianists, for instance, stand to acquire a better understanding of the complex character of relations between secular rulers and the Roman Church in the centuries preceding Charlemagne’s coronation by Pope Leo III. Scholars interested in the medieval uses of Pope Gelasius’s oft-cited claim to papal privilege in Epistle 12 (Ad Anastasium) will likewise benefit much from Demacopoulos’s insightful exegesis of the letter, as well as of Gelasius’s less well-known, though hardly less remarkable Tractate 6 (Against Andromachus and the Other Romans Who Hold That the Lupercalia Should Be Celebrated According to Ancient Custom), both translated in full and included as appendices. Despite historians’ relative familiarity with Gelasius’s bold argument to the emperor Anastasius—that priestly auctoritas, and particularly that of the “Apostolic See,” trumps imperial potestas—Demacopoulos notes that, prior to his work here, no...