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Granted that Jesus Christ established in the person of St. Peter a central sovereign authority over the Church; it is still not clear how and for what purpose this authority could have passed to the Roman Church and the Papacy.” This is the reply which sincere Orthodox have been compelled by the evidence to make to us. In other words, they admit that the stone was shaped by no human hand, but they shut their eyes to the great mountain which has grown out of it. And yet the phenomenon is amply explained in Holy Scripture by similes and parables which are familiar to everyone, though for all that none the better understood.
Though the transformation of a stone into a mountain is only a symbol, the transformation of a simple, almost imperceptible seed into an infinitely larger and more complicated organism is an actual fact. And it is by just this fact that the New Testament foretells and illustrates the development of the Church, as of a great tree which began in an imperceptible grain of seed and today gives ample shelter to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air.
Now, even among Catholics, we meet with ultra-dogmatic spirits who, while justly admiring the vast oak tree which covers them with its shade, absolutely refuse to admit that all this abundance of organic forms has grown from a structure as simple and rudimentary as that of an ordinary acorn. According to them, though the oak arose out of the acorn, yet the acorn must have contained in a distinct and discernible form, if not every leaf, at least every branch of the great tree, and must have been not only identical in substance with the latter but similar to it in every detail; whereupon ultra-critical spirits of the opposite school set to work to examine the wretched acorn minutely from every angle. Naturally they discover in it no resemblance whatever to the entwining roots, the stout trunk, the leafy branches or the tough corrugated foliage of the great tree. “What humbug!” they exclaim, “the acorn is simply an acorn and can never be anything else; it is only too obvious where the great oak and all its characteristics came from. The Jesuits invented it at the Vatican Council; we saw it with our own eyes — in the book of Janus.”
At the risk of appearing to be a free-thinker to the extreme dogmatists and of being at the same time labeled a Jesuit in disguise by the critics, I must affirm the unquestionable truth that the acorn actually has a quite simple and rudimentary structure and that though all the component parts of a great oak cannot be discovered in it, yet the oak has actually grown out of the acorn without any artificial stimulus or infringement of the laws of nature, but by its own right, nay, even by divine right. Since God, Who is not bound by the limitations of time and space and of the mechanism of the material world, sees concealed in the actual germ of things all their future potentialities, so in the little acorn He must not only have seen but ordained and blessed the mighty oak which was to grow from it; in the grain of mustard seed of Peter’s faith He discerned and foretold the vast tree of the Catholic Church which was to cover the Earth with its branches.
Though Peter was entrusted by Jesus Christ with that universal sovereign authority which was to endure and develop within the Church throughout its existence upon Earth, he did not personally exercise this authority except in a measure and in a form suited to the primitive condition of the Apostolic Church. The action of the prince of the Apostles had as little resemblance to modern papal administration as the acorn has to the oak; but this does not prevent the Papacy from being the natural, logical and legitimate development of the primacy of Peter. The primacy itself is so marked in the historical books of the New Testament that it has never been disputed by any theologian of good faith, whether Orthodox, rationalist or Jew.1 We have already cited the eminent Jewish writer Joseph Salvador as an unbiased witness to the historical foundation of the Church by Jesus Christ and to the outstanding part allotted to Peter in its foundation. A writer equally free from Catholic bias, David Strauss, the well-known leader of the German school of critics, has found himself compelled to defend the primacy of Peter against Protestant controversialists whom he accuses of prejudice.2 As regards the representatives of Eastern Orthodoxy, we cannot do better than quote once more our one and only theologian, Philaret of Moscow. For him the primacy of Peter is “clear and evident.” 3 After recalling the fact that Peter was entrusted by Christ with the special task of confirming his brethren (Luke xxii. 32), that is to say, the other Apostles, the famous Russian prelate continues thus: “In point of fact, although the Resurrection of our Lord had been announced to the women who came bearing spices, this did not confirm the Apostles in their faith in the event (Luke xxiv. ii). But when the Risen Lord had appeared to Peter, the other Apostles (even before the appearance to them all together) declared with conviction: The Lord is risen indeed and hath appeared to Simon (Luke xxiv. 34). Finally, when it is a question of filling the gap left in the Apostolic band by the apostasy of Judas, it is Peter who is the first to draw attention to the fact and to take the decisive step; when the moment arrives, just after the descent of the Holy Spirit, for the solemn inauguration of the preaching of the Gospel, “Peter standing up . . . ”; when the foundations of the Christian Church are to be laid among pagans as well as among Jews, it is Peter who gives Cornelius baptism and thus, not for the first time, fulfills the utterance of Christ: Thou art Peter, etc.” 4
In bearing this witness to the truth, the eloquent doctor of the modern Russian Church is but the echo of the still more eloquent doctor of the ancient Greek Church. St. John Chrysostom long ago anticipated and triumphantly refuted the objections to the primacy of Peter which are made even today on the ground of certain incidents in the record of the Gospel and of the Apostolic Church, such as Simon’s denial in the High Priest’s palace, his relations with St. Paul, and so forth. We refer our Orthodox readers to the arguments of the great Œcumenical Doctor.5 No papist could assert more forcibly and insistently the primacy of power (and not merely of honor) which belonged to Peter in the Apostolic Church. The prince of the Apostles, to whose care all were committed by Christ (άτε αυτος πάντας εγχείρισθεις) had, according to this saintly writer, the power of nominating a successor to Judas on his own authority, and if on this occasion he called in the assistance of the other Apostles, it was by no means of obligation, but simply of his good pleasure that he did so.” 6
Holy Scripture tells us of the primacy of Peter; his right to absolute sovereign authority in the Church is attested by Orthodox tradition; but no one possessed of any historical feeling or indeed of any ordinary common sense would expect to find legally defined powers taking effect according to fixed rules in the primitive Church, not only of the period when “the multitude of believers had but one heart and one soul,” but also long after. There is always the temptation to expect to find in the acorn the branches of the oak. The real and living seed of the supreme authority of the Church which we discern in the prince of the Apostles could only be displayed in the primitive Church by practical leadership on the part of Peter in every matter which concerned the Universal Church, and this is what we actually find in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.7
Since there are actually critics who do not recognize the personality of St. Paul in his epistles, there will always be some who will not observe the outstanding part played by St. Peter in the foundation of the Church. We will not stay longer to refute them, but we will pass on to the objection raised against the succession of Rome to the position of the Galilean fisherman.
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1. The same sincerity is not usually found in Protestant writers. The best among them, however, admit the fact of the primacy though they make fruitless attempts to interpret it according to their liking. Take, for instance, the words of M. de Pressensé (Histoire des trois premiers siècles du Christianisme, 1st ed., vol. i. pp. 358-360): “Throughout these early years the Apostle Peter exercised a predominant influence; the part which he played at this date has been adduced as a proof of his primacy. But on closer examination of the evidence it is clear that all he did was to develop his own natural gifts (!) purified and enhanced by the Spirit of God.” “Moreover St. Luke’s record lends no color to any notion of a hierarchy. Everything in St. Peter’s behavior is natural and spontaneous. He is not official president of any kind of apostolic college.” (M. de Pressensé is obviously confusing the accident of a more or less pronounced official status with the substance of primacy.) “He only acts on the advice of his brethren” — according to Protestant ideas, it seems, advice excludes authority — “whether in the choice of a new Apostle or at Pentecost, before the people or before the Sanhedrin. Peter had been the most humiliated of all the first Christians, hence the reason that he was promoted the most rapidly.” With this kind of facetiousness, Protestantism seeks to evade explicit texts of Holy Scripture after declaring Scripture to be the one and only source of religious truth.
2. Vie de Jésus (tr. Littré, Paris 1839), vol. i. part 2, p. 584; cf. p. 378.
3. Sermons and Addresses of Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow (1873 etc.), vol. ii. p. 214.
4. ibid.
5. The Greco-Russian Church, as is well known, specially attributes this title to three ancient Fathers: St. Basil of Cæsarea, surnamed the Great, St. Gregory Nazianzen, surnamed the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom. They have a feast in common on January 30 in our calendar.
6. Works ix. 27, 30-31.
7. Those of our Orthodox readers who find neither the authority of saintly Fathers such as John Chrysostom nor that of Russian theologians such as Mgr. Philaret sufficient to convince them of Peter’s unique place in New Testament history will perhaps be amenable to what may be called statistical proof. Since it occurred to me that none of Jesus’ intimate disciples had so considerable a claim to a prominent place as St. John, the beloved Apostle, I counted up the number of times that John and Peter are mentioned respectively in the Gospels and Acts, and found the proportion to be about 1 to 4. St. Peter is mentioned by name 171 times (114 in the Gospels and 57 in the Acts), St. John only 46 times (38 times in the Gospels, including the instances where he refers to himself indirectly, and 8 times in the Acts).
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