§ 60. The Papaoy.
Literature, as in §55, aJid vol. i. § 110.
At last the Roman bishop, on the ground of his divine iiistitutiou, and as successor of Peter, the prince of the apostles,
' Comp Gieseler, i. 2, p. 215 sqq. ; and Wiltsch, i. '72 sqq., 431 aqq.
300 TIIIKD PEEIOD. A.D. 311-590
advanced liis claim to be primate of the entire chiircli, and visible representative of Christ, who is the invisible supreme head of the Christian world. This is the strict and exclusive sense of the title, Pope.'
Properly speaking, this claim has never been fully realized, and remains to this day an apple of discord in the history of the church. Greek Christendom has never acknowledged it, and Latin, only under manifold protests, which at last conquered in the Reformation, and deprived the papacy forever of the best part of its domain. The fundamental fallacy of the Roman system is, that it identifies papacy and church, and therefore, to be consistent, must unchurch not only Protestantism, but also the entire Oriental churcli from its origin down. By the "una sancta eatliohca apostolica ecclesia" of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed is to be understood the whole body of Catholic Christians, of which the ecclesia Romana^ like the churches of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, is only one of the most prominent branches. The idea of the papacy, and its claims to the universal dominion of the church, were distinctly put forward, it is true, so early as the period before us, but could not make themselves good beyond the limits of the West. Consequently the papacy, as a historical fact, or so far as it has been acknowledged, is properly nothing more than the Latin patriarchate run to absolute monarchy.
By its advocates the papacy is based not raei-ely upon church usage, like the metropolitan and patriarchal power, bi.t upon divine right ; upon the peculiar position which Christ
' The name papa — according to some aa abbreviation oi pater patr urn, but more probably, like the kindred abbas, irdinras, or irdirai, pa-pa, simply an imitation of the first prattling of children, thus equivalent to fatlicr — was, in the West, for a long time the honorary title of every bishop, as a spiritual father ; but, after the fifth century, it became the special distinction of the patriarchs, and still later was assigned exclusively to the Koiuan bishop, and to him in an eminent sense, as father of the whole church. Comp. Du Cange, Glossar. s. verb. Papa and Pater Patrum ; and Hoffmann, Lexio. univers. iv. p. 5G1. In the same exclusive sense the Italian and Spanish papa, the French pape, the English pope, and the German Papst or Pabst, are used. In the Greek and Russian churches, on the contrary, all priests are called Popes (from ird-n-as, papa). The titles apostolicus, vicarius Chruti, rimmiis pond/ex, sedes apostolica, were for a considerable time given to various b'flh oits and their sees, but subsequently claimed exclusively by the bishops of Rome,
§ 60. THE PAPACY. 301
assigned to Peter in the well-known words : " Thou ort Peter and on this rock will I build my clnirch." ' This passage was at all times taken as an immovable exeffetical rock for the papacy. The popes themselves appealec? .*o it, times without number, as the great proof of the divine institution of a visible and infallible central authority in the church. According to this view, the primacy is before the apostolate, the head before the body, instead of the reverse.
But, in the first place, this preeminence of Peter did not in the least aflfect the independence of the other apostles. Paul especially, according to the clear testimony of his epistles and the book of Acts, stood entirely upon his own authority, and even on one occasion, at Antioch, took strong ground against Peter. Then again, the personal position of Peter by no meana yields the primacy to the Eoman bishop, without the twofold evidence, first that Peter was actually in Rome, and then that he transferred his prerogatives to the bishop of that city. The former fact rests upon a universal tradition of the early church, which at that time no one doubted, but is in part weakened and neutralized by the absence of any clear Scripture evidence, and by the much more certain fact, given in the E^ew Testament itself, that Paul labored in Pome, and that in no position of inferiority or subordination to any higher authority than that of Christ himself. The second assumption, of the transfer of the primacy to the Poman bishops, is susceptible of neither historical nor exegetical demonstration, and is merely an inference from the j^rinciple that the successor in office inherits all tlie official prerogatives of his predecessor. But even granting both these intermediate links in the chain of the papal theory, the double question yet remains open : first, whether the Poman bisliop be the only successor of Peter, or share this honor with the bishops of Jerusalem and Antioch, in which
' Matt. xvi. 18: 1,\) el nerpos, koX itiX rainrt t^ ireTpa [mark the change of the gender from the masculine to the feminine, from the person to the thing or the truth confessed — a change which disappears in the English and German versions] 3iKo5oiJ.ii(TO) fJLOV TTjr eKKAi^fflaf, Ka\ Trv\at otSou oi> KartffX'^<''ovatv auTTJj. Comp. the commentators, especially Meyer, Lange, Alford, Wordsworth, ad loc, and my Hist of the A-post. Church, § 90 and 94 (N. Y. ed. p. 350 sqq., and 374 sqq.).