Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  Damasus was also wary of taking sides in the quarrels which were still tearing apart the Church in the East. Hard-pressed supporters of Nicaea in the East like Basil the Great repeatedly begged his support. Damasus stalled, and sent a series of lofty letters eastwards, addressing his fellow bishops there not as ‘brothers’, the traditional formula, but as ‘sons’, a claim to superiority which was noticed and resented. With no intention of embroiling himself in the nightmare complexities of the Eastern theological debates, he thought the right procedure was for the bishops of the East to establish their orthodoxy by signing Roman formulas. His position was enormously strengthened by the accession as emperor of the Spanish General Theodosius, a devout Catholic who detested Arianism and who in February 380 issued an edict requiring all the subjects of the empire to follow the Christian religion ‘which Holy Peter delivered to the Romans … and as the Pontiff Damasus manifestly observes it’. In the following year Theodosius summoned a general council at Constantinople – the first since Nicaea – and this Council, at which no Western bishops were present and to which Damasus did not even send delegates, succeeded in formulating a creed, incorporating the Nicene Creed, which provided a satisfactory solution to the Arian debates. This Constantinopolitan/Nicene Creed is still recited every Sunday at Catholic and Anglican eucharists.

  But, in addition to its doctrinal work, the Council of Constantinople issued a series of disciplinary canons, which went straight to the heart of Roman claims to primacy over the whole Church. The Council decreed that appeals in the cases of bishops should be heard within the bishop’s own province – a direct rebuttal of Rome’s claim to be the final court of appeal in all such cases. It went on to stipulate that ‘the Bishop of Constantinople shall have the pre-eminence in honour after the Bishop of Rome, for Constantinople is new Rome’.17

  This last canon was totally unacceptable to Rome for two reasons. In the first place it capitulated to the imperial claim to control of the Church, since Constantinople had nothing but the secular status of the city to justify giving it this religious precedence. Worse, however, the wording implied that the primacy of Rome itself was derived not from its apostolic pedigree as the Church of Peter and Paul, but from the fact that it had once been the capital of empire. Damasus and his successors refused to accept the canons, and the following year a council of Western bishops at Rome issued a rejoinder, declaring that the Roman see had the primacy over all others because of the Lord’s promise to Peter – ‘Tu es Petrus’ – and because both Peter and Paul had founded the see. The bishops went on to specify that if Rome was the first See of Peter, then the second was not Constantinople, but Alexandria, because it had been founded from Rome by St Mark on the orders of Peter, and the third in precedence was Antioch, because Peter had once been bishop there before he came to Rome.

  Damasus’s pontificate exposed the growing rift between Eastern and Western perceptions of the religious importance of Rome. The troubles of Liberius had made it clear that imperial oversight of the Church, and the overwhelming imperial priority of unification, might put Pope and Emperor at odds. But Rome itself was increasingly remote from the centre of imperial affairs. No emperor since Constantine had lived in Rome, and even the Western emperors based themselves in the north – at Trier, Aries and especially Milan. Milan had been the centre of Constantius’ attempts to impose Arianism on the West, and an Arian bishop, Auxentius, remained in office till his death in 374.

  Auxentius was succeeded as bishop by an impeccably orthodox career civil servant, the unbaptised Governor of the city, Ambrose, and it was Ambrose, not Damasus or his successor Siricius (384–99), who would become the dominant figure in the life of the Western Church in the last quarter of the fourth century. Ambrose set himself to increase the influence of the see of Milan, taking on the metropolitan role over the north Italian bishoprics formerly exercised by Rome, involving himself in episcopal appointments as far away as the Balkans, attracting clergy and religious to the city from Piacenza, Bologna, even North Africa. He presided over the creation of a series of great churches which would establish Milan as a Christian capital, in a way which Rome itself, still dominated by paganism, could not hope to do. The Basilica Nova at Milan, now buried under the present Duomo, was a gigantic church, almost as big as the Pope’s cathedral church of St John Lateran, and unique outside Rome. Inheriting a bishopric in which Arianism was deeply entrenched, Ambrose set himself at the head of a movement to restore Nicene orthodoxy, mobilising the bishops of the West behind the Catholic cause. Above all, in a series of confrontations with the imperial family he marked out the boundaries of secular and ecclesiastical power, refusing to surrender any of the city churches for the use of Arian troops in the imperial army, denying the right of the imperial courts to judge in ecclesiastical cases, preventing Church funds being used to rebuild a synagogue destroyed in a religious riot, and finally excommunicating the Emperor Theodosius for having ordered the punitive massacre of civilians at Thessalonica after the murder of an imperial official. Ambrose was the real leader of the Western Church, and his biographer Paulinus significantly remarked of him that he had ‘a concern for all the churches’, a Pauline text often invoked by the popes.

  The career of Ambrose is a salutary reminder of the limits of the papal primacy in the age of the great councils. But Ambrose’s dominant position in Italy was built on a high doctrine of the papacy, not on an attempt to erode it. He had been brought up as a child in Pope Liberius’ Rome. A sister had taken the veil as a nun from Liberius’ hand in St Peter’s, and the Pope was a familiar visitor to the house. Ambrose had been fascinated as the women of the family clustered around Liberius, kissing his hand, and the boy had amused and infuriated his relatives by imitating the Pope’s stately walk and offering his own hand to be kissed by the womenfolk. It was from Liberius’ career that he had his first lessons in resistance to imperial diktat, and there was nothing anti-papal about Ambrose’s campaign to increase the influence of Milan. Indeed, the high prerogatives of the papacy were vital to Ambrose, for he frequently justified his activities as being carried out on behalf of the Pope. In 381 he masterminded the Council of Aquilea, which had despatched a letter to the Emperor in support of Damasus against the antipope Ursinus, in which Rome was described as ‘the head of the whole Roman world’. From Rome flowed ‘the sacred faith of the Apostles … and all the rights of venerable communion’.18 Not surprisingly, Ambrose’s Arian enemies saw him as Damasus’ toady, obsequiously buttering up the Pope to increase his own influence. For his part, Ambrose promoted the cult of Peter and Paul in Milan as a pledge of shared religious loyalty to the Apostles, and Damasus encouraged him by sending him relics of the Apostles – the silver casket in which they came to Milan from Rome survives in the church of San Nazaro. Ecclesiastically, Ambrose’s northern Italy was as yet a raw frontier. Its handful of bishoprics were scattered over vast, largely pagan areas, and nothing bound them together, or to Milan, except their common allegiance to Rome and Rome’s Apostles. Ambrose’s dominance in the region reminds us of the limitations of the papacy’s leadership in the West, but it also reminds us of the powerful symbolic and practical need for that leadership. If the fourth-century papacy had not existed, it would have had to be invented.

  IV THE BIRTH OF PAPAL ROME

  The conversion of Constantine had propelled the bishops of Rome into the heart of the Roman establishment. Already powerful and influential men, they now became grandees on a par with the wealthiest senators in the city. Bishops all over the Roman world would now be expected to take on the role of judges, governors, great servants of state. Even in provincial Africa Augustine would complain bitterly of the devouring secular responsibilities of the bishop. In the case of the Bishop of Rome, those functions were complicated by his leadership of the Church in a pagan capital which was the symbolic centre of the world, the focus of the Roman people’s sense of identity. Constantine washed his hands of Rome in 324, and departed to create a Christian capital in the Ea
st. It would fall to the popes to create a Christian Rome.

  They set about it by building churches, converting the modest tituli (community church centres) into something grander, and creating new and more public foundations, though to begin with nothing that rivalled the great imperial basilicas at the Lateran and St Peter’s. Over the next hundred years their churches advanced into the city – Pope Mark’s (336) San Marco within a stone’s throw of the Capitol, Pope Liberius’ massive basilica on the Esquiline (now Santa Maria Maggiore), Pope Damasus’ Santa Anastasia at the foot of the Palatine, Pope Julius’ foundation on the site of the present Santa Maria in Trastevere, Santa Pudenziana near the Baths of Diocletian under Pope Anastasius (399–401), Santa Sabina among the patrician villas on the Aventine under Pope Celestine (422—32).

  These churches were a mark of the upbeat confidence of post-Constantinian Christianity in Rome. The popes were potentates, and began to behave like it. Damasus perfectly embodied this growing grandeur. An urbane career cleric like his predecessor Liberius, at home in the wealthy salons of the city, he was also a ruthless power-broker, and he did not hesitate to mobilise both the city police and the Christian mob to back up his rule. His election had been contested, and he had prevailed by sheer force of numbers – as the Liber Pontificalis put it, ‘they confirmed Damasus because he was the stronger and had the greater number of supporters; that was how Damasus was confirmed’.19 Damasus’ grass-roots supporters included squads of the notoriously hard-boiled Roman fossores, catacomb diggers, and they massacred 137 followers of the rival Pope Ursinus in street-fighting that ended in a bloody siege of what is now the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

  Damasus and Ursinus were competing for high stakes: as the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus commented sardonically,

  I do not deny that men who covet this office in order to fulfil their ambitions may well struggle for it with every resource at their disposal. For once they have obtained it they are ever after secure, enriched with offerings from the ladies, riding abroad seated in their carriages, splendidly arrayed, giving banquets so lavish that they surpass the tables of royalty…20

  Ammianus’ gibe about gifts from rich women was no random shot. An imperial decree in 370 forbade clerics from visiting the houses of rich widows or heiresses, and Damasus himself was nicknamed matronarum auriscalpius, ‘the ladies’ ear-tickler’. But the new worldliness of the Roman church and its bishops was not the sole invention of its clergy. Since the mid third century there had been a growing assimilation of Christian and secular culture. It is already in evidence long before Constantine in the art of the Christian burial-sites round the city, the Catacombs. With the imperial adoption of Christianity, this process accelerated. In Damasus’ Rome, wealthy Christians gave each other gifts in which Christian symbols went alongside images of Venus, nereids and sea-monsters, and representations of pagan-style wedding-processions.

  This Romanisation of the Church was riot all a matter of worldliness, however. The bishops of the imperial capital had to confront the Roman character of their city and their see. They set about finding a religious dimension to that Romanitas which would have profound implications for the nature of the papacy. Pope Damasus in particular took this task to heart. He set himself to interpret Rome’s past in the light not of paganism, but of Christianity. He would Latinise the Church, and Christianise Latin. He appointed as his secretary the greatest Latin scholar of the day, the Dalmatian presbyter Jerome, and commissioned him to turn the crude dog-Latin of the Bible versions used in church into something more urbane and polished. Jerome’s work was never completed, but the Vulgate Bible, as it came to be called, rendered the scriptures of ancient Israel and the early Church into an idiom which Romans could recognise as their own. The covenant legislation of the ancient tribes was now cast in the language of the Roman law-courts, and Jerome’s version of the promises to Peter used familiar Roman legal words for binding and loosing – ligare and solvere – which underlined the legal character of the Pope’s unique claims.

  For Damasus, the glory of the saints had to be naturalised as Roman. Many of Rome’s martyrs had come from elsewhere, but their deaths in the city had made them honorary citizens. He collected and reburied the bodies of the great saints, composing verse inscriptions for the new tombs which were carved in a specially devised lettering based on classical models. His inscription for the joint shrine of Peter and Paul at San Sebastiano is typical, and it directly tackled the claim made by the Eastern bishops in Pope Julius’ time, that Peter and Paul belonged to the Christian East just as much as to Rome: ‘Whoever you may be that seek the names of Peter and Paul, should know that here the saints once dwelt. The East sent the disciples – that we readily admit. But on account of the merit of their blood … Rome has gained the superior right to claim them as citizens. Damasus would thus tell your praises, you new stars.’21 The pagan love of Roma Aeterna, the Eternal City, took on a new and specifically Christian meaning, which attached itself to the papacy, and its inheritance from Peter and Paul. This was not achieved without struggle, most famously the confrontation with the pagan senators led by Symmachus in 384 to preserve the pagan Altar of Victory in the Senate. Damasus mobilised Ambrose to lobby on his behalf in Milan, and the altar was abolished, leaving the statue of the Goddess to be reinterpreted by later ages as an angel. Prudentius, the great Latin hymn-writer, though well aware of the persistence of paganism among the conservative senatorial families, celebrated Rome as the capital of a world united in the Christian faith: ‘Grant then, Christ, to your Romans a Christian city, a capital Christian like the rest of the world. Peter and Paul shall drive out Jupiter.’ In the visual equivalent of Prudentius’ prayer, the Apostles appear in the togas of Roman senators in the apse-mosaic of the church of Santa Pudenziana, built at the end of the fourth century.22

  The Romanisation of the papacy was more than a matter of external decoration. Self-consciously, the popes began to model their actions and their style as Christian leaders on the procedures of the Roman state. In the last months of Damasus’ life the Bishop of Tarragona in Spain wrote to the Pope with a series of queries about the ordering of the day-today life of the Church. Damasus died before the letter could be answered, and it was one of the first items across the desk of his successor, Pope Siricius (3 84–99). The Pope replied in the form of a decretal, modelled directly on an imperial rescript, and, like the rescripts, providing authoritative rulings which were designed to establish legal precedents on the issues concerned. Siricius commended the Bishop for consulting Rome ‘as to the head of your body’, and instructed him to pass on the ‘salutary ordinances we have made’ to the bishops of all the surrounding provinces, for no ‘priest of the Lord is free to be ignorant of the statutes of the Apostolic See’.23

  Siricius quite clearly had no sense that he was inventing anything, as his references to the ‘general decrees’ of his predecessors show: it may be that this form of reply to enquiries had already become routine. Yet his letter is a symptom of the adoption by the popes of an idiom and a cast of mind which would help to shape the whole mental world of Western Christendom. The apostolic stability of Rome, its testimony to ancient truth, would now be imagined not simply as the handing on of the ancient paradosis, the tradition, but specifically in the form of lawgiving. Law became a major preoccupation of the Roman church, and the Pope was seen as the Church’s supreme lawgiver. As Pope Innocent 1 (401–17) wrote to the bishops of Africa, ‘it has been decreed by a divine, not a human authority, that whatever action is taken in any of the provinces, however distant or remote, it should not be brought to a conclusion before it comes to the knowledge of this see, so that every decision may be affirmed by our authority’.24

  This serene confidence in the Roman see was maintained in part by the immersion of the Roman clergy in a distinctive mental world. Round the papal household there developed a whole clerical culture, staffed by men drawn often from the Roman aristocracy, intensely self-conscious and intensely prou
d of their own tradition – Jerome dubbed them ‘the senate’. Damasus himself was a product of this world, the son of a senior Roman priest who had himself founded a titulus church. Pope Boniface was the son of a Roman priest, Innocent I was the son of his predecessor as pope, Anastasius I (399—401), and had served his father as deacon. Indeed it was routine for the Pope to be elected by the senior clergy from among the seven deacons . The deacons dressed like the Pope himself in the distinctive wide-sleeved dalmatic with its two purple stripes, and they formed the heart of the papal administration – Boniface I (418–22) Leo I (440–61), and Felix III (483–92) were all succeeded by their archdeacons. In this clerical world, memories were long, and records were carefully kept. The tradition of Rome was thought of as part of the law of God, and preserved accordingly. ‘The rules rule us,’ declared Celestine I (422—32), ‘we do not stand over the rules: let us be subject to the canons’.25

  These claims went largely unchallenged in the West, and even in strife-torn Africa, though interventions there by the inexperienced and clumsy Greek Pope Zosimus (417–18) caused a good deal of resentment. By and large, Innocent I’s conviction that the faith had been sent from the Apostles at Rome to the rest of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa and Sicily was accepted, and Rome’s theoretical and practical primacy acknowledged in consequence. In practice, however, that primacy was experienced, and understood, quite differently in different regions of the West. In most of peninsular Italy, the Pope was in effect the sole Archbishop, and his power was wide-ranging and very direct. The popes called and presided at synods, ordained the bishops, intervened to regulate discipline and enforce the canons. Outside Italy, this metropolitan authority obtained directly only in those parts of the West where the popes had succeeded in establishing and maintaining vicariates, a succession of local episcopal representatives through whom they exercised supervision – at Aries in Gaul in the fourth century, revived in the sixth century under Pope Symmachus (498–514), in Illyria (the Balkan region) from the late fourth century, and briefly for Spain at Seville under Pope Simplicius (468–83). These apostolic vicars were thought of as sharing the papal ‘care for all the churches’, and the popes permitted them to wear the distinctive papal white woollen stole or ‘pallium’ as a sign of their co-operation in the papal ministry.