Detail from CHRIST HANDING THE KEYS TO ST PETER, Perugino, 1482. Sistine Chapel.
The Church’s one foundation is Christ
Does the inflated view of the papacy in some quarters today
have roots in a prior inflation that requires correction?
by Douglas Farrow
March 4, 2019
[Conclusion]:
Who or what is the ‘rock’?
To the very fine 1998 CDF document, “The Primacy of the Successor of Peter in the Mystery of the Church,” just about the only objection I would raise, after querying its optimistic estimation of the clarity of doctrinal development in this sphere, concerns its identification of Peter as “the rock on which Christ will build his Church” (§3).
- It is no private interpretation to say that Matt. 16:18 does not make a direct equation between Peter and the rock on which the Church will be built, an equation too readily made in the shorthand of later tradition and sometimes employed in dubious ways by advocates of a particular view of the Petrine office, including advocates occupying that office.
The Greek text does not permit a direct equation: κἀγὼ δέ σοι λέγω ὅτι σὺ εἶ Πέτρος, καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ τῇ πέτρᾳ [not Πέτρῳ] οἰκοδομήσω μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν καὶ πύλαι ᾅδου οὐ κατισχύσουσιν αὐτῆς. Even in Latin it cannot be justified:
et ego dico tibi quia tu es Petrus et super hanc petram [not Petrum] aedificabo ecclesiam meam et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam. “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church” – there is, quite obviously, a play on words here.
Peter, having been given that name at the choosing of the Twelve, now discovers why. He is so named precisely as and because he makes and will make the confession that is revealed to him from on high and confirmed by Jesus himself, the confession he and the other disciples are, for the moment, forbidden to make
(16:20).
It is entirely fitting that Jesus should employ a play on words when solemnly
founding his Church on the solid ledge or rock formation – that is what πέτρα means – of Peter’s act of confession. Not because it leaves his meaning obscure or open to dispute, but because it makes room for a rich understanding while providing a pithy formulation. (That in Aramaic, if he was speaking Aramaic, the formulation would have to be different, has no bearing on the matter, for it is in Greek that we have been given it.)
Jesus has already made clear that his own words are the solid rock, the
petra, on which any house that hopes to stand must be built
(Matt. 7:24ff.). Now he makes clear that the house he himself will build on them will be built by way of Peter’s confession, which will lie at its foundation.
Moreover, in preparation for the promise to Peter that he will bear on his shoulder the keys to this house, opening and shutting its doors – there is an allusion here to Isaiah 22 and the stewardship of Eliakim – Jesus’s play on words underscores the fact that
Peter’s confession is not an abstract truth, however foundational in itself for the Church’s baptismal confession and for Christian doctrine. Rather, it is a truth that lives among us through a charism that enables the confession to be made and through a permanent pastoral office devoted to it, whose occupants are charged to make it again and again in unity with the first confessor, blessed Simon Bar-Jona, whom God has fastened “like a peg in a sure place” and whom Jesus has made “a throne of honor” in his Father’s house by calling him Πέτρος: a piece of rock - when properly dressed, a building block, the one laid down through the eliciting of his confession when the work of building is commenced.
Church tradition has always acknowledged this and we must acknowledge it too.
We do the dominical words an injustice, however, when “on this rock I will build my Church and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” is so flattened out as to make Peter himself, rather than his confession of Jesus as “Son of the living God,” as “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36), the petra on which the whole house rests.
The Church is built on the words of Jesus, which are spirit and life (John 6:63), and also – yes, also! – on the response of Peter, whose confession of Jesus is joined to Jesus’s own testimony to the Father. We cannot ignore this without violating the text.
Yet once we have said that, we must go on to say that
Jesus himself is the rock, the cornerstone, the Church’s one foundation; for the words of Jesus are only spirit and life because Jesus himself is spirit and life. This is not the case with Peter. What then is the case?
- First, he is a living stone in the sense supplied at 1 Pet. 2:4–10 and Eph. 2:19ff., the sense in which every member of the Church is a living stone.
- Second, he is a stone laid by God alongside the cornerstone. Jesus makes this clear by calling him Petros, by giving him the keys, by making him a shepherd for his sheep
(John 21:15–19).
So those Protestant or even Orthodox brethren who wish to abstract Peter’s confession from Peter himself are mistaken, as Pius insists at Mystici 41:
“They, therefore, walk in the path of dangerous error who believe that they can accept Christ as the Head of the Church, while not adhering loyally to His Vicar on earth. They have taken away the visible head, broken the visible bonds of unity and left the Mystical Body of the Redeemer so obscured and so maimed, that those who are seeking the haven of eternal salvation can neither see it nor find it.”
And that holds even if
Pastor aeternus would have been better not to say of Peter, without careful qualification,
et ecclesiae catholicae fundamentum (“and the foundation of the catholic church,” PA 2).
Before proceeding, permit me parenthetically to make one further exegetical point regarding Matthew 16, lest another bit of ecclesial shorthand somehow misdirect us, obscuring the larger context in which our pericope is placed by the Evangelist:
To equate Hades with hell (a common mistake for which there is at least an excuse in the ambiguity of the Latin word
inferi, among those who have not bothered themselves with the Greek) is to do violence to the dominical decree or promise that immediately follows in verse 18, the need for which is dramatically underscored in 16:21ff.
- The promise that the gates of Hades will not prevail against the Church is first of all a promise to the martyrs, to those who witness to Christ with their own blood, as Peter himself eventually did, though in that honour he was not the first.
- It is not a promise that no doctrinal or liturgical or moral device of the devil will ever shake the Church so long as it remains properly Petrine.
- Of course it is the forces of Satan, for whom hell has been prepared as a final destiny, that not only engineer such devices but also arrange the temporal fate of the martyrs. So it is perfectly fine to say that the gates of hell – meaning by metonymy those who are already being driven back towards its gates and in due course, when the great apostasy is finished and anti-Christ is defeated, will be driven through them by the host under St. Michael’s command – shall not prevail against the Church.
But once again, that is a secondary sense and a kind of theological shorthand, which must not be allowed to elide the primary sense containing the wonderful assurance that
neither life nor death can separate us from the love of God and that the Church will not fail with its martyrs, be they ever so numerous. Rather their blood will be as seed, in Tertullian’s famous expression. This part of the text no more justifies focusing the life of the Church on Peter than does the earlier part.
The loosening peg
To recapitulate: Matthew 16 requires us to affirm that Peter’s act of confession is incorporated into that towering ledge of rock on which the glorious edifice of the Church comes down from heaven to rest.
- Like Mary’s
fiat mihi, its incorporation belongs to the wonder of God’s grace, who (as Augustine observes) makes us without us but does not save without us.
- Read properly, it requires us to affirm that in the city of God – which, as the Apocalypse says, has twelves gates and a wall with “twelve foundations, and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” –
the Petrine gate is the central and foremost one.
- It does not require us to affirm that Peter himself is that ledge.
- It does not require us to affirm even that Peter is the first and foremost of the city’s living stones. That surely would be Mary, and there are doubtless others who, in their way, will prove more glorious than he.
-
Yet it does require us to allow that Peter himself occupies a special place and a special office, since he is given the keys that work the gates and make the city accessible or inaccessible while it is being built.
This gift and this assignment are merely temporary and provisional, mind you.
- When the city is complete it will still rest upon the words and deeds and person of Jesus.
- It will still rest,
mutatis mutandis, on Peter’s act of confession of Jesus, as indeed on every other act of confession.
- All will be conjoined as lesser “amens” to the great “Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation”
(Rev. 3:14), just as the confessors themselves will be united with him in person in the perfection of his mystical body.
- When complete, however, the city to which they belong, which they indeed compose, will no longer require the Petrine ministry, for its gates will always be open and never be shut
(Rev. 21:25).
- The keys that belong to the steward of the house of David will not be required.
- The master key, the key of David, will still be required; for our Lord Jesus Christ will remain forever our
princeps and
pontifex, our one mediator and monarch, if in such a way that God himself “may be everything to everyone”
(cf. Luke 1:33, Rev. 3:7, and 1 Cor. 15:20–28).
- But not Peter’s keys, which will be redundant.
Peter’s keys are very much required at present, however, first and foremost for the orderly proclamation of salvation in Jesus Christ and for provision or denial of forgiveness of sins.
- Those tasks are Peter’s first of all, though not Peter’s alone. The entire apostolic college shares in this along with him, per Matt. 18:18 and John 20:23
(cf. Lumen gentium 22).
- Neither does the juridical task, which is made necessary by the evangelical and the sacramental tasks, belong to Peter alone.
- Acts 15 provides the model for sharing all three tasks, though there are points where Peter’s particular judgment must be sought and deemed final. What those points are is not our concern here, for Matthew 16 tells us nothing about them.
Our concern here is to say what the text requires us to say, viz.,
that the evangelical must always have priority, the doxological and sacramental following from it and being closely united with it, per Matt. 28:18ff.
“Given its episcopal nature, the primacy of the Bishop of Rome is first of all expressed in transmitting the Word of God; thus it includes a specific, particular responsibility for the mission of evangelization, since ecclesial communion is something essentially meant to be expanded” (CDF 'Primacy' 9).
To say this is not at all to suggest that his primacy lacks jurisdictional power, or that it reduces to “a primacy of honour and the shadowy right of giving advice and admonition.”
- For in all three capacities the Petrine ministry provides “a principle of cohesion” backed by
a “power of commanding, forbidding, and judging which is properly called jurisdiction” (Satis 12).
Yet if Peter is not properly called the Church’s “visible foundation stone” except by synecdoche – that is, in connection with his confession
- we cannot put his jurisdictional tasks and powers in the first place.
- Nor should the latter be treated in terms of a
plenitudo potestatis by which the heavenly authority of Christ is transferred wholesale to him, over against his fellow bishops.
-
That is and has been a recipe for disaster, exacerbating rather than removing the threat of schism.
- What is more, it is and has been disastrous in generating burdens for Peter that he cannot possibly bear, whether like Innocent III or Boniface VIII he fervently wishes to bear them or like Benedict XVI (who as Cardinal Ratzinger was the primary author of “Primacy”) he finds them unbearable.
Since we have made much of Jesus’s allusion to Isaiah 22, let us not forget how that passage concludes: “They will hang on him the whole weight of his father’s house, the offspring and issue, every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons. In that day, says the Lord of hosts, the peg that was fastened in a sure place will give way; and it will be cut down and fall, and the burden that was upon it will be cut off, for the Lord has spoken.”
In suggesting that the papacy has been dangerously inflated, and in calling for a more modest conception of it, I am not calling, as De Mattei imagines, for abandonment of juridical responsibility.
I am, however, expressing a very deep concern that
we have hung far more on the papacy than it can or should bear, to the detriment of the juridical dimension not least, and that we are witnessing again – perhaps for the final time, though I do not profess to know – the loosening of the peg.
We have for a good while been misreading our own shorthand, from which we have invented a Peter who would hardly recognize himself:
- a Peter surrounded by bureaucrats, used and abused by bureaucrats; - a Peter surrounded indeed by unworthy episcopal colleagues who have engineered a moral and doctrinal and liturgical crisis on a massive scale.
In our haste to fill clerical posts at every level, and by reason of our centralized methods for doing so, we have turned Peter’s immediate jurisdiction into anything but “an expression of mutual interiority” (“Primacy” 6).
Worse, to borrow words from St. Basil (Ep. 190),
we have become accustomed to indifference by long exposure to unsatisfactory men. Just how unsatisfactory we have come much too lately to discover, though at least in that discovery we are less indifferent that we were. Would that “Peter” were not now indifferent.
A fatal overreach
Pace Professor De Mattei, it is not just modernism that troubles us – we may save our arguments about what constitutes modernism for another time – but a certain mediaevalism too, the unhappy kind that hangs on the pope “the whole weight of his father’s house, the offspring and issue, every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons.”
This unhappy kind shows itself in
Unam sanctam, to which Pius appeals without the explicit qualifications that are needed, though some of them, thankfully, are implicit. It will serve present purposes to say a bit more about
Unam sanctam, which violates an important principle articulated in the aforementioned CDF document when it insists that “the exercise of the Petrine ministry must be understood … on the basis of the gospel” (§7) and that it cannot be conceived as a political monarchy, much less as the tyranny that De Mattei himself rejects.
Cardinal Burke, in a very helpful article on Peter’s
plenitudo potestatis “in service of the unity of the Church,” goes to some trouble to hedge that notion round with qualifications. There is no hint of a papal monarchy, political or otherwise, as far as I can tell, in his analysis. What immediately strikes the reader of
Unam Sanctam, however, is Boniface’s monarchical mien. That, and the fact that qualifications of his
potestas are refused a hearing.
There are times when only a simple yes or no will do. “He was, or he was not? What is fitting to say?” Such questions are rightly raised when the Church is confronted by heresies such as the Arian heresy, which can only be addressed by an answer that, though it lead to a thousand qualifications in other matters, itself admits of none. “He was, he always was!” But here, in the matter of the relation between the two swords? Here, where the question is a subtle and complex one, fraught with eschatological tension between arrangements appropriate to the city of God and those appropriate to the city of man?
The whole point of Boniface’s stormy bull, from the ominous rain of its opening allusion to Noah’s ark, through the mounting waves of its assault on the monster with two heads, to the thunderclap of its final line –
Porro subesse Romano Pontifici omni humanae creaturae declaramus, dicimus, definimus, et pronunciamus omnino esse de necessitate salutis! (
Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff) – is to demand submission of one and all, inside the Church and out, without any qualification whatsoever, under pain of damnation. Just as everything is subject to Christ, whom God has made Lord of all, so every human creature is subject to the Roman pontiff.
In the words of the
Decretum Gratiani – words in their narrow legal sense true, but in any broader sense untrue – it is the pope’s duty to judge all men, and Boniface clearly means to do his duty. He rejoices at having subjects rather than being a subject (Civ. 14:11).
Let us recall a little more of the bull’s final paragraph, where he argues that “it is a law of the divinity that the lowest things reach the highest place by intermediaries,” and that “spiritual power surpasses in dignity and in nobility any temporal power whatever.” It belongs, then, he says, “to spiritual power to establish terrestrial power and to pass judgement” on it.
“Thus is accomplished the prophecy of Jeremias concerning the Church and the ecclesiastical power: Behold today I have placed you over nations, and over kingdoms… If the highest power of all err, it can be judged only by God, and not by man, according to the testimony of the Apostle: The spiritual man judgeth of all things and he himself is judged by no man… Therefore whoever resists this power … resists the ordinance of God, unless he invent like Manichaeus two beginnings… We declare, we say, we define and proclaim to every human creature that to be subject to the Roman Pontiff is entirely necessary for salvation.”
The translation can be tweaked (as I have here) but the logic is plain.
All power has been given to Christ. Christ’s power has been given to Peter. Therefore all who hope for salvation must be subject to Peter, as if to Christ, and all means all.
Plain, and plainly wrong – an innovation that falsifies whatever moment of truth it contains.
The invisible Christ is manifest in the visible Pontiff; there is therefore no distinction between subjection to the one and subjection to the other.
In the name of Christ, let us happily confess, Peter could bind and loose from sins or cause the lame to walk. Paul could deliver over to Satan, or restore again to light and life. All the apostles could speak and act in his holy name. But no one supposed any such equation as this. Had he heard of it, perhaps Peter himself might have supplied some hint.
Perhaps Bishop Irenaeus, that greatest of the early theologians who himself spent much time in Rome, would have managed to say something more of Peter than that Christ “pronounced him blessed, because he acknowledged Him to be the Son of the living God”
(Haer. 3.21.8), or of the Roman see that all the churches should be in harmony with it.
And let us not try to save the appearances by construing the sorry end of the universal reign of Boniface as a kind of martyrdom, as if he suffered what Peter suffered, or Irenaeus for that matter. That does the very idea of martyrdom a grave injustice.
Rather by his fatal overreach he lurched, as it were, towards nothingness (cf. Civ. 14:13). According to Dante, though Dante had his own reasons for saying so, he likely found it. Why, then, do some still follow him, if only at a distance?
God forbid, however, that we should enter the lists on the side of Boniface’s similarly ambitious and arrogant opponent, Philip the Fair, or concede anything at all to those who afterwards presumed with Marsilius and Ockham to justify, against Boniface’s radical papalism, an equally radical royalism cum conciliarism.
The latter dared (as the O’Donovans remark in their political sourcebook, From Irenaeus to Grotius, p. 423) to present as an alternative “the novel face of secular political monism, the counterface of the dominant hierocratic monism of the papalists.”
We can and must reject both faces of this Janus-like Christendom, for both represent a serious distortion of Christian truth. What unites them is the old Eusebian error.
Jesus has gone up to heaven, where he rules invisibly; his visible authority over all things is now vested in an earthly vicar.
- For the papalists that’s Peter, for the royalists Constantine.
- Both allow that there must be priestly as well as kingly representation, but the papalists argue that the priestly takes precedence over the kingly and the royalists that the kingly takes precedence over the priestly.
- Neither are thinking eschatologically and both are inventing earthly powers that have no basis in reality.
We ought to insist with Gelasius that the Church/State distinction is essential and that the spiritual sword is ultimately more significant to human weal than the temporal sword. Boniface was not wrong about that.
- We ought not, however, to obscure in any way the fact that no one but Jesus – Peter included – is fit to combine the kingly and the priestly offices in his own person or to occupy both.
- The royalists made their case by assigning the kingly office to Christ’s divinity and the priestly to his humanity, that they might elevate princes over prelates.
In his work on the consecration of bishops and kings, the Norman Anonymous offers an early (c. 1100) and already egregious distortion from the royalist side:
Each of them, therefore, is Christ and God in the Spirit; each, in fulfilling his office, has the role and image of Christ and God, the priest Christ’s priestly role and image, the king Christ’s kingly role and image; the priest Christ’s lower, human office and nature, the king Christ’s higher, divine office and nature. For Christ the God-man is truly and supremely king and priest.
- He is king by virtue of his eternal divinity: not made, not created, not inferior to or separate from the Father, but equal to and one with the Father.
- He is priest by virtue of his assumption of humanity, made so according to the order of Melchizedek, created, and so subordinate to the Father.
- As king he created all things, rules all things, governing and preserving men and angels alike.
- As priest he has redeemed mankind alone, that they may reign with him.
There was one all-inclusive reason for his becoming a priest and offering himself in sacrifice: that mankind might be his partner in his kingdom and royal power. The Kingdom of Heaven is promised to believers throughout Scripture, but we are never promised the Priesthood of Heaven. The conclusion is plain: Christ’s royalty is superior and of greater moment than his priestly power, just as his divinity is superior and of greater moment than his humanity (Irenaeus to Grotius, 255).
Not to be outdone, the papalists in effect assigned to the pope both offices. In
Unam sanctam we have a retort to the royalists almost as egregious, in that
it so unites Peter to Christ as to make submission to his rule necessary for the salvation of every creature.
Boniface, to be sure, is sometimes defended by appeal to Aquinas; specifically to the latter’s brief remark at Contra Errores Graecorum 2.38, which he likely has in view. For Thomas himself says that “to be subject to the Roman Pontiff is necessary for salvation” or that it arises by necessity from our need of salvation (
sit de necessitate salutis). Those on the ark, so to say, must heed the orders of its captain so that the ship will remain on an even keel. Thomas appeals here to Cyril’s Thesaurus and to a letter of Maximus.
But what does Cyril actually say?
“Christ is followed thus: as his own sheep we should hear his voice, abiding in the Church of Peter and not being inflated by the wind of pride,” lest by quarreling we allow the devil to engineer once more our departure from paradise.
And what does Maximus say? Nothing, in fact, quite like what Thomas says he says:
“The Church united and established upon the rock of Peter’s confession we call according to the decree of the Savior the universal Church, wherein we must remain for the salvation of our souls and wherein loyal to his faith and confession we must obey him” (
coadunatam et fundatam super petram confessionis Petri dicimus universalem Ecclesiam secundum definitionem salvatoris, in qua necessario salutis animarum nostrum est manere, et ei est obedire, suam servantes fidem et confessionem).
But
even in the words Thomas here puts in the mouth of Maximus, we have a Church “united and established upon the rock of Peter’s confession,” not on Peter the rock.
- This is the Church in which we must remain for salvation and to which we must be obedient, “preserving her faith and confession.”
- Neither of these patristic authorities, nor Thomas’s use of them, justifies the exaggerations of
Unam Sanctam or its categorical imperative.
And what shall we say of Leo X, who at the Fifth Lateran Council rearms
Unam sanctam as a weapon against the Pragmatic Sanction?
“Since subjection to the Roman pontiff is necessary for salvation for all Christ’s faithful…, for the salvation of the souls of the same faithful … [we] renew and give approval to that constitution” (
et cum de necessitate salutis existat omnes Christi fideles Romano Pontifici subesse … pro eorundem fidelium animarum salute … constitutionem ipsam … innovamus et approbamus). See Tanner, DEC 1: 643f).
Leo at least speaks of “all the Christian faithful” rather than “every human creature,” though he goes on to name virtually every human creature he can think of, at least in France. Notice, however, how he deploys Matthew 16, which no longer refers to a Church that rests on the rock of Peter’s confession, as Aquinas rightly has it, but rather to the authority of popes over the Church:
“Moreover, when he was about to depart from the world to the Father, he established Peter and his successors as his own representatives on the firmness of a rock. It is necessary to obey them…, so that whoever does not obey, incurs death” (DEC 1: 640).
While the words
in soliditate petrae Petrum eiusque successores vicarios suos insituit do not quite turn Peter or his office into the rock,
they do turn our attention from Peter’s confession of Christ to our own confession of Peter, which is the very problem we are trying to address.
- Now, no Catholic can in good faith deny that the Petrine office is essential (hence fundamental) to the Church militant or that Peter is head of the apostolic college and as such head of the Church.
- No Christian or would-be Christian can safely ignore the fact that there are keys to the kingdom and that these keys belong first to Peter (δώσω σοι τὰς κλεῖδας, not δώσω ὑμῖν) and then also to the rest of the college; that where respect for them is lacking, the presence or integrity of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is also in some degree lacking.
- No bishop should fail to acknowledge that without communion with Peter his episcopacy is compromised; or fail to recognize in Peter one who is authorized to pass judgment on matters of faith and morals in and with and for the college, and to pass judgment as necessary on particular people in any diocese.
- No person of any description can safely ignore the gospel that Peter is obligated and enabled to confess.
- No secular ruler can rightly overlook matters of fundamental justice that Peter brings to his attention, including the matter of first importance when it comes to justice, which is the obligation to give thanks to God.
All of this, however, can and should be maintained without making Peter into Boniface’s universal monarch or anything remotely like it, thus compromising the truth that Jesus Christ, who has passed through the heavens, is the Church’s one foundation and mankind’s only Supreme Pontiff.
The true head of the Church is not Christus et Petrus, as Boniface has it. That is not how we avoid the monstrosity of two heads. We avoid the monstrosity of two heads by confessing one true head, as Pius does. Petrus is a foundation and a head only in another, and very much secondary, sense.
But it is time now to say more about the problem of visibility and invisibility, through which this matter becomes confused, and about the eschatological frame of reference we need to liberate us from the twin errors of royalism and papalism, Gallicanism and papolatry, secularism and social kingship theory, modernism and fundamentalism, etc.
Before doing so I want only to underscore a point already made among the prolegomena. The answer I am giving to the question, Who or what is Peter?, is an answer that disturbs some for the same reason Vatican II disturbs them.
Roberto de Mattei is explicit about his own discomfort with the notion “of a ‘dynamic mission’ of Peter, interconnected with the concept of the Apostolic College,” a notion that is “the daughter of the Second Vatican Council more than of the Catholic Tradition.”
The council in question, he thinks, has daughters that do not belong to the Catholic tradition in any legitimate sense. That surely is true, but
De Mattei appears to imply that these daughters are legitimate children of the council, which itself is somehow illegitimate because of its dalliance with modernism.
I do not agree, and I repeat that
one who takes that view cannot refuse to others the right to find weaknesses and unsolved problems elsewhere in tradition. As for those who pretend that there are no such weaknesses, even in
Vatican II, they can have nothing to say at all.
For they cannot deny that the Francis revolution is a deliberate attack on the putative weaknesses that its architects find in past tradition – those architects have made that perfectly clear – and they cannot deny either that the present pope is party to the revolution. So there would appear to be a weakness somewhere.
Thinking eschatologically
Lest I be misunderstood: I do not propose that our failure to think eschatologically is the only or even the main weakness on which we might put a finger. I do think it a weakness that must be rectified. It is present even in Mystici, where the visibility/invisibility category still dominates.
What is said there, and said well enough –
“that there is only one chief Head of this Body, namely Christ, who never ceases Himself to guide the Church invisibly, though at the same time He rules it visibly, through him who is His representative on earth” – is contextualized, as it must be, by reference to our Lord’s “glorious Ascension into Heaven,” at which he leaves behind in Peter this vicar or representative.
But Jesus’s ascension does not exactly invite us to think in terms of the visible and the invisible, at least not as our primary category. It invites us to think in terms of the biblical narrative of ascent and descent, including especially the ascent and descent of Moses during the exodus. Let us turn again to Hebrews in illustration.
At first glance Hebrews might seem to employ the very categories we are questioning:
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old received divine approval. By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear” (11:1–3).
But Hebrews is not speaking in a Hellenist or Platonic mode, as some imagine. It is speaking in Hebraic mode – in
the Magnificat mode, we might say – the mode in which something is made from nothing, and what is thought to be something is brought to naught by what is thought to be nothing.
- In this mode the visible and the invisible have to do with what appears to man to be the case and with what, because of God, actually is the case; or with what is now and what is not yet, but will surely come to pass.
So, for example, we also read:
“Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death” (Heb. 2:8f.; cf. 2 Cor. 4:16ff.). In other words, we see things as they really are and as they will be, while unbelief sees only what is deceptively familiar.
Used thus, the visible/invisible contrast is indispensable, but the frame of reference is eschatological. The dualism of an invisible and eternal heaven and a visible earth, where the things of heaven are imitated or manifested by creaturely signs, is not on offer here. The whole account moves towards the new Sinai and the new Zion of chapter 12.
- Who could imagine the author of Hebrews turning from this account, or from his argument that what was once foreshadowed on earth in the priestly cultus of Israel is now being fulfilled by Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary
(8:1ff.) and is eucharistically anticipated by those who wait for their Lord at the foot of the mountain
(12:18ff.), to say what Boniface says?
- Who can imagine him saying,
“Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control; so every creature that hopes to be saved must be subject to Peter”?
- Who can imagine him saying,
”Truth be told, we don’t actually see Jesus now, but it’s okay because we do see Peter”?
The very thought is fantasy.
[BLASPHEMY?!?!]
The eschatological and eucharistic horizon within which the author of Hebrews is working – the same horizon controls the entire New Testament – is wiped away when the visible and the invisible are arranged vertically, so that what happens in heaven is triumphantly mirrored on earth rather than seen by the eyes of faith as still approaching earth.
- It is no denial of Peter as chief among the apostles to insist that there is no parallel to be drawn between an invisible princeps et pontifex and a visible one.
- Boniface’s whole argument is stitched together from inapposite texts in a fashion more worthy of the innovators criticized by Irenaeus and Basil than of a pope.
- By means of this stitching he promotes an image of Peter, not as one called to feed Christ’s sheep and to strengthen his brothers on the via crucis, which is the image both Matthew and John present, but rather as one who rules on earth with a
plenitudo potestatis that makes of Psalm 110 a Petrine prophecy, and of Peter a kind of pro tempore messiah. “Christ sits there, at God’s right hand. Him you cannot see, but me you can see. Do you wish to obey him that you might be saved? Then obey me!”
Now perhaps I am being too harsh on Boniface. In any case, that is neither the message nor the tone of popes like Pius XII.
- Yet papalism of that sort, which requires at a minimum the correction it receives in
Lumen gentium, is still operative in some minds today.
- Not only in the minds of traditionalists but also in the minds of modernists, who have taken advantage of it to effect the Francis revolution.
- It belongs to the kind of thinking that always has to say
Christus et... before it has even said Christus.
Christus et Petrus,
Christus et Maria,
Christus et Ecclesia are good things to say, but they must be said in such a way that
the wonder of this gracious et – of our Lord’s sharing the womb of Mary, of giving Mary permanently and Peter provisionally a special role in his own
dominium, of making the Church his very own body and a royal priesthood to his God and Father –
does not allow our gaze to be directed away from him and back somehow to ourselves, to our pet pieties or politics that we suppose the only really authentic ones.
- Those who long not so much for sight of the glory of the Lord returning like Moses from the mountain of God, as for sight of the sedia gestatoria, high and lifted up, and of a papal train that fills the temple, know only the false
et.
-Likewise those who make of the pope the very font from which flows every clerical grace and power, as he wills and where he wills and when he wills; who attribute to him the visible crown of the triplex
munus rather than the three stewardly responsibilities belonging to him, and to the whole college after him and with him, not through him.
A very able Catholic theologian once said to me, not altogether in jest, that he wished the papacy would revert to being the office of an old Italian man who spoke no foreign languages and whose primary task was to run his own diocese well. I am not proposing anything quite so modest as that, just as I am not accusing traditionalists such as my present interlocutor of anything like the papalism caricatured in the previous paragraph.
I am, however, by means of this caricature, pointing out the danger of fighting fire with fire; that is, of
trying to meet the present crisis, which threatens the dissolution of doctrinal and moral and liturgical authority in the Church, by fanning the very flames the innovators are fanning.
In short, by pitting Vatican I against Vatican II rather than seeking in both councils, imperfectly refracted in each, the light of our one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He, we know, is coming to sit in judgment on us all, beginning perhaps with Peter as Moses began with Aaron (though Peter is not Aaron), yet certainly not ending there.
Therefore we pray, and this Lent let us pray the more urgently:
Attende Domine, et miserere, quia peccavimus tibi.
(Hearken, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
for we have sinned against thee)
To Thee, highest King, Redeemer of all,
do we lift up our eyes in weeping:
Hear, O Christ, the prayers of your servants.
Attende Domine, et miserere, quia peccavimus tibi.
Right hand of the Father, corner-stone,
way of salvation, gate of heaven,
wash away our stains of sin.
Attende Domine, et miserere, quia peccavimus tibi.