Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (5 page)

By the beginning of the third century, then, the church at Rome was an acknowledged point of reference for Christians throughout the Mediterranean world, and might even function as a court of appeal. When under attack for teaching heresy, the great Alexandrian theologian Origen would send letters appealing for support not only to the bishops of his own region, but to faraway Bishop Fabian at Rome, where he himself as a young man had made a pilgrimage. For the earliest Christians apostolic authority was no antiquarian curiosity, a mere fact about the origins of a particular community. The Apostles were living presences, precious guarantors of truth. The apostolic churches possessed more than a pedigree, they spoke with the voices of their founders, and provided living access to their teaching. And in Rome, uniquely, the authority of two Apostles converged. The charismatic voice of Paul, bearer of a radical authority rooted not in institution and organisation but in the uncompromising clarity of a Gospel received direct from God, joined with the authority of Peter, symbol of the Church’s jurisdiction in both heaven and earth, the one to whom the commission to bind and to feed had been given by Christ himself.

Yet we should also bear in mind that all these signs of the special status of the church and Bishop of Rome were a matter of degree, not of kind. No other community could claim succession to two Apostles, but apostolic authority and the responsibilities and status it
brought could be matched elsewhere. Other bishops and other churches sent gifts abroad, wrote letters of advice, rebuke or encouragement, and broke off communion with churches which were believed to have fallen into grave error. Irenaeus and Tertullian, in praising the glory of the Roman church, were praising the most notable example of a wider phenomenon. Come, urged Tertullian, ‘recall the various apostolic churches … Achaia is very near you, where you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, if you can travel into Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are near Italy, you have Rome, whence our authority [in Africa] is derived close at hand.’
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Africa, in the person of its greatest theologian before Augustine, acknowledged the weight of Rome’s authority. Yet even Africa might qualify and withdraw that allegiance. One of the most divisive issues in the life of the Church of the third century was the question of the treatment of those who lapsed from the faith during periods of persecution. Christianity had prospered within the empire, and by the early third century was a force to be reckoned with. In Rome, it was already a substantial property-owner, and by
AD
251 the church employed forty-six elders, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes and fifty-two lesser clerics, readers and door-keepers: it had over 1,500 widows and other needy people receiving poor-relief. Its total membership in the city may have been as many as 50,000.

In an empire which was now threatened by internal breakdown and by the external pressure of the Gothic hordes, the visibility and expansion of Christianity provided an ideal scapegoat. Pope Callistus (c. 217—22) was murdered inTrastevere by a lynch-mob who were probably angered by recent Christian expansion in the crowded district. Rome celebrated a thousand years of prosperity under its ancestral gods in 247. The ills of the empire were now laid at the door of the growing numbers of those who refused to honour those gods. Riots against Christians became commonplace, and in 250 the Emperor Decius launched an official pogrom against the Church. Leading Christians were rounded up, and forced to offer sacrifice, in return for which they were given a certificate of compliance. Bishops and other leaders were specially targeted, and many of these behaved with great courage. Pope Fabian (236–50) was among the first to be arrested, and died from brutal treatment in prison. But there was also mass surrender – the Church’s very success in recruiting huge numbers of the
superficially committed backfired, and all over the empire Christians queued up to comply with the law. The overworked officials in charge of the sacrifices had to turn crowds away, telling them to come another day.

Christianity laid immense weight on the value of suffering for the faith. The word martyr means ‘witness’, and the martyr’s death was the ultimate witness to the truth. By contrast, those who broke under persecution, offering the pinch of incense or the libation to the gods which the Roman state made the test of good citizenship, or those who simply surrendered the holy books or vessels of the Church – these people were considered apostates who had sacrificed their salvation. Opinion was bitterly divided about their ultimate fate and, more pressingly, about whether they could ever again be restored to membership of the Church. In Africa, the Christian community would eventually split down the middle on the issue. A hard-line party emerged in the fourth century, called Donatists after one of their leaders. They believed that any contact with lapsed clergy, including those
traditores
or traitors who without offering pagan sacrifice had nevertheless handed over books or Church goods, contaminated a church and all its members, and invalidated the sacraments which were administered in it. The Donatists formed a separatist pure Church, with their own elders and bishops.

The Roman church had its own bitter experience of persecution, and of both heroism and failure under persecution. Both experiences were manifest in its bishops. To the heroism of Pope Fabian was added that of Pope Sixtus II (257–8), arrested in 258 while presiding over worship in one of the funerary chapels in the catacombs. To avoid reprisals against his congregation he surrendered himself to the officers in charge of the raid, and was summarily beheaded with his deacons. By contrast, in the later persecution under Diocletian in 303, Pope Marcellinus (296–304?) would cave in to pressure. He surrendered copies of the scriptures and offered sacrifice to the gods. He died a year later in disgrace, and the Roman church set about forgetting him.

In Rome as in Africa, hard- and soft-line responses to the problem of the lapsed developed. In the wake of Pope Fabian’s death, the church in Rome delayed electing another bishop till persecution eased. In the interim, the brilliant presbyter Novatian played a leading role in running the church, and all the indications are that he expected to become bishop in due course. Instead, the majority of the clergy and their lay supporters elected a far less able man,
Cornelius (251–3). Novatian refused to accept the election, and his supporters had him consecrated by three bishops from the south Italian countryside: he set up as a rival to Cornelius. The key to this fiasco almost certainly lay in the two men’s attitudes to the lapsed. Novatian was a hard-liner, believing that those who had denied the faith could never again be received into the Church, while Cornelius favoured the restoration of the repentant after they had done appropriate penance. It seems likely that the less able man was elected to implement this more realistic and humane pastoral policy.

Cornelius was a mild and unambitious man, who basked in the support of his fellow bishops – he gathered sixty of them at Rome to back his claims over those of Novatian, and collected letters of communion from those further afield. In particular, he won the approval of Cyprian of Carthage, the leading African Bishop. Cyprian had a very exalted view of the episcopal office, and emphasised the dignity of every bishop in his own church. He accepted the special standing of the see of Rome, ‘the chair of Peter, the primordial [or “principal”] church, the very source of episcopal unity’. But Cyprian did not mean by this that other bishops were subordinate to the Pope. He himself, like many other bishops in the early Church, used the title ‘Pope’, which only came to be confined to the Bishop of Rome from the sixth century. Christ had indeed founded the Church on Peter, but all the Apostles and all bishops shared fully in the one indivisible apostolic power. There were, therefore, limits to Cyprian’s deference to Rome, and that deference was to be stretched to its limits within a couple of years, with the election as pope of an aristocratic Roman, Stephen.

Stephen (254–7) was a member of the Julian family, and he was a bishop in the mould of Pope Victor, not Pope Cornelius. He was imperious, impatient, high-handed. He quickly got himself into Cyprian’s bad books by rashly readmitting, not merely to communion but to office, a Spanish bishop who had been deposed for lapsing into paganism during the Decian persecution. Further provocation came when Stephen failed to take action against a Novatianist Bishop of Aries who was refusing the sacraments to the repentant lapsed even on their deathbeds. The Bishop of Lyons reported the matter to Cyprian – an interesting comment in itself on their understanding of shared episcopal responsibility for all the churches, as opposed to an exclusively papal role. Cyprian had then vainly pleaded with Stephen to excommunicate the Bishop of Aries. The
request was of course also a tacit acknowledgement of Rome’s superior jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the Pope evidently resented Cyprian’s interference. The final breach came when Stephen intervened directly in Africa, and challenged Cyprians practice about the rebaptism of heretics. Though Cyprian was a moderate in his willingness to receive back the repentant lapsed, he refused to recognise any sacraments administered in the hard-line breakaway churches of the Novatianists, who had established themselves in Africa. Converts baptised by Novatianist clergy were now seeking admission to Catholic communion: they were rebaptised as if they were pagans.

Behind Cyprian’s practice here was a stern doctrine which denied that any grace could flow to human beings outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church. Rome took the milder view, which would eventually become the accepted teaching, that every baptism was valid provided it was duly performed in the name of the Trinity, whatever the status of the minister, and whether or not he was in heresy or schism. Stephen therefore ordered that returning schismatics should not be rebaptised, but simply admitted again to the Church by the laying on of hands.

Cyprian, however, refused to accept this ruling, and organised two synods of African bishops to condemn it. The Pope was not mentioned, but it was obvious who was the target of Cyprian’s remarks in his preamble that ‘none of us sets himself up as a bishop of bishops or exercises the powers of a tyrant to force his colleagues into obedience’.
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Not surprisingly, the clergy he sent to Rome to inform the Pope of these moves were turned away unheard. Enraged by the African bishops’ temerity, Stephen wrote to the churches in Asia Minor who followed Cyprian’s tougher line on rebaptism of heretics, threatening to cut off communion with them, though he died before he could carry out this threat.

The incident had a broader significance. Though his letter does not survive, we know from Cyprian’s comment on it that Stephen had backed up his condemnation of the African churches with an appeal to Matthew 16: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.’ During Pope Cornelius’ lifetime, Cyprian had written a treatise on the
Unity of the Catholic Church
, in which he had bolstered his own authority and that of the Pope against the Novatianist schism by stressing the unique role of the See of Peter as the foundation of unity. He now rewrote the treatise, editing out these
passages and denying that the Bishop of Rome had any special claim on Christ’s promise to Peter. It was indeed the foundation of the See of Rome – but it was also the charter for every other bishop, all of whom shared in the power of the keys given to Peter. For Cyprian, therefore, it was folly for Stephen to ‘brag so loudly about the seat of his episcopate and to insist that he holds his succession from Peter’.
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Significantly, however, even at the height of his confrontation with Stephen, Cyprian avoided open attacks on the authority of Rome, and he suppressed the details of the Pope’s maltreatment of his envoys. Rome remained a fundamental symbol of the unity of the episcopate, with whom an absolute breach was unthinkable.

The death of Stephen in 257, and the heroic martyrdom in the following year of his successor the Greek Pope Sixtus, followed six weeks later by Cyprian’s own execution, defused this potentially disastrous confrontation – Sixtus, Cornelius and Cyprian would all in due course be commemorated together in the most solemn prayer of the Roman Church, the Canon of the Mass. But in many ways this was the first major crisis of the papacy, and it was charged with significance for the future. Stephen’s invocation of Matthew 16 is the first known claim by a pope to an authority derived exclusively from Peter, and it is the first certain attempt by a pope to exert a power over other bishops which was qualitatively different from, and qualitatively superior to, anything they possessed. Till the reign of Stephen, the Roman church’s primacy had been gladly conceded, rooted in esteem for a church blessed by the teaching and the martyrdom of the two great Apostles to the Jews and to the Gentiles, and augmented by the generosity and pastoral care for other Christian communities which had marked the Roman church in its first two centuries. With the confrontation between Stephen and Cyprian, the divisive potential of papal claims became clear.

III T
HE
A
GE OF
C
ONSTANTINE

The Roman empire in the third century was divided by civil war, and swept by plague and disease. It was ruled by a bewildering succession of emperors (twenty-five in forty-seven years, only one of whom died in his bed) thrown up by an army increasingly staffed by terrifying foreigners. In the ferment of oriental religions and new philosophies, old certainties were dissolving: it was for many an age of acute anxiety. For the Church, by contrast and partly in
consequence, it was an age of growth and consolidation. In the melting-pot of empire, Christianity alone seemed to offer a single overarching intellectual and moral frame of reference, a simple code conveyed in vivid stories by which men and women could live. The parables of Jesus struck home where the arguments of the philosophers faltered. The Church’s episcopal framework provided a remarkable network crossing the whole civilised world and a little beyond, and its charitable activities offered a life-line to the (Christian) poor in a state which no longer had the resources or the will to help them. In the Decian persecution, the resolution of the martyrs had offered an example of certainty and courage in sharp contrast to the weary routine which characterised much official pagan religion. In the freedom from persecution which descended on the Church for the last forty years of the century, Christianity became a dominating presence in many of the cities of the empire, especially in the East. The steps of the Emperor Diocletian’s favourite palace at Nicomedia commanded a fine view of the Christians’ new basilica in the town.