Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition by Eamon Duffy Read Free Book Online

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 thesepassages 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’. 12 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 inconsequence, 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.
    It was Diocletian, tough Dalmatian career-soldier and great