St. Peter, His Name and His Office, as Set Forth in Holy Scripture

But where did Vitringa and the supporters of his doctrine get courage to contradict the whole line of Fathers and their unbroken tradition? You would surely expect from them decisive arguments, and expressions from Holy Writ distinctly laying down no other than a hypothetical necessity of visible and external unity. But you may search in vain all over the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Acts, for any such. Not only is there no mention in them of such a distinction as that invisible unity is absolutely necessary, while external and visible unity is but hypothetically so, but this latter is plainly enjoined and set forth as the note which the mystical body of Christ, the true Church, cannot be without; and its violation is reckoned among those works of the flesh which exclude from the kingdom of God.

How, besides, can that be deemed necessary only under hypothesis, without holding and faithfully maintaining which you cut yourself off from the very fountain of blessing, and transgress and subvert the order appointed by God for attaining salvation? Such an assertion would be senseless. Yet in most of the Protestant confessions, – the Helvetic, art. xiv., the Galliean, art. xvi., the Scotch, art. xxvii., the Belgian, art. xxviii., the Saxon, art. xii., the Bohemian, art. viii., and that of the Remonstrants, art. xxii., – it is laid down as an indisputable principle, "That the heirs of eternal life are only to be found in the assembly of those called." What then do those who violate outward and visible unity, and withdraw from the outward and visible body of the Church? They stop up the very way which Providence has opened for their obtaining "the inheritance of sons."

For indeed Christ is the Saviour, but of His mystical body, which420 is the Church, which therefore He purchased with His own blood, joined to Himself by that closest bond of being His spouse, enriched with promises,421 provided with all manner of graces, and most nobly dowered with422 truth, charity, and the Holy Spirit, to give her at last salvation, and423"the weight of eternal glory." But have these things reference to a visible or an invisible Church? To a Church one and coherent, or rent and torn by factions? It is the Church which Christ founded, which He made to be424 "the light of the world," bound together by425 manifold external links, ordered to be one with the unity of a house, a family, a city, a kingdom; with that unity wherewith the Father and the Son are one; in which He placed426 pastors and doctors to bind and to loose, and to watch over the agreement of all the parts; which He founded upon Peter, committed in chief to Peter to rule and to feed it. Such, then, as fall off from one single visible Church are of the condition of those whom the Apostles of the Lord foretold, that "in the last time there should come mockers, walking according to their own desires in ungodlinesses: these are they who separate themselves, sensual men, having not the427 Spirit: " these tear themselves from their Saviour, lose the fruit purchased by His blood, and fall from the inheritance which the Head obtained for His body and His members.

Therefore the necessity of union with the one single visible Church is as great as the necessity of union with Christ the Head, as the necessity of the remission of sins, "for428 outside of it they are not remitted: for this Church has specially received the Holy Spirit in earnest, without whom no sins are remitted: " as the necessity of charity, "429for it is this very charity which those who are cut off from the communion of the Catholic Church do not possess," whence "430whatsoever thing heretics and schismatics receive, the charity which covers a multitude of sins is the gift of Catholic unity and peace: " as great, in fine, as the necessity not to involve oneself "in431 a horrible crime and sacrilege," "in432 the greatest of evils," one "by433 which Christ's passion is rendered of no effect, and His body is rent," by which434 the sin is committed of which Christ said, "It shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the world to come: " by which one is estranged "from the sole Catholic Church, which retains the true worship, in which is the fountain of truth, the home of faith, the temple of God, into which if any one enter not, or from which if any one go out, he loses the hope of life and eternal salvation. Let no one flatter himself in the spirit of obstinate contention, for life is at issue, and salvation, which without care and caution will be forfeited."435 Can any necessity be greater, or less conditional than this? Or what can be more plain than this statement of the simple and absolute necessity of visible unity and outward communion?

Where then are we to find the cause which induced so many learned and able Protestants first to imagine this distinction between the necessity of internal and external communion and unity, and then to deceive themselves and others with such a mockery? The real cause was, as I believe, that having denied the institution of the Primacy, and the authority lodged in it for the purpose of forming and maintaining unity, they were without a criterion or proof, in virtue of which, among so many Christian societies divided from and condemning each other, they could safely choose the one with which they were to be joined in communion, and the outward unity of duty and obedience. For they would readily conclude that the unity so often commended in Scripture, and so earnestly enjoined, could not be external, since God, who does not command impossibilities, had instituted no visible sign to mark that company of Christians, which alone among all the rest was the continuation and development of the Church founded by Christ, and built up by the Apostles.

C. From the same source must the third Protestant doctrine on unity be derived. 436Jurien filled up the sketch of this, which 437Casaubon, 438Claude, and 439Mestrezat had drawn, and it became so popular as not only to infect a large number of Protestants, but to exert a withering influence on certain unstable members of the Catholic body. It teaches that we must believe not only in an internal and spiritual, but in a visible and external unity, for the Scriptures plainly urge its necessity, and Christian tradition fully describes it, so that there is not a truth more patent or established on greater authority; but this unity is restricted within narrow bounds, and confined to the articles called fundamental, though as to how many these are no one defender of the system is agreed with another. For it is sufficient for Christians not to differ in the profession of such articles for them to be deemed members of one and the same Church. Whence they infer that one and the same true Church is made up out of almost all Christian societies, the Roman, the Greek, the Nestorian, the Eutychian, the Waldensian, the Lutheran, the Anglican, and the Calvinist, for their differences, important as they are, offer no hindrance to the unity which Christ enjoined, the Apostles preached, the creeds express, and universal tradition demands.

As Bossuet,440 the brothers Walemburg,441 Nicole,442 and even some Protestants have most fully dealt with this portentous opinion, there is no need to urge much against it here. I prefer repeating the question, what occasion the Protestants had to get up so unheard-of a paradox, and a system so absurd? It was twofold: one theoretical, and the other practical.

The theoretical was this. The crime of heresy, depicted in Scripture, and Christian antiquity, with colours so dark, had gradually lost its foulness and its magnitude in the minds of Protestants, who had, at length, come to the pass of reckoning religious, as well as civil, liberty, among the unquestionable rights of man. As if, all other human acts being subject to a law, those alone which proceed from the intellect are exempt: as if the difference between right and wrong, which embraces the whole range of man's life, did not relate to its noblest part, in the acts of the intellect and the reason: as if God had laid down a law of justice, charity, fortitude, and prudence, but entirely omitted a law443 of faith: as if the will submitted to a law of good, but the mind owned no law of truth: or as if God cared for the boughs and leaves, but took no thought of the root.444 But what could Protestants do? Having allowed to all full license of thought, and overthrown the authority which ruled the mind, they were forced, while they kept the name of heresy, to give up the thing meant by it, and the effects springing from that thing: they were forced to attenuate to the utmost the crime of heresy, and to reduce to the smallest possible number the articles necessary to be believed by all; they were forced to extend beyond all measure the Church's limits, while they contracted beyond all measure the range of necessary unity.

Besides the theoretical, there was a practical occasion in those schisms which, not merely in later or in mediæval times, but in the first ages also, rent the Christian society. Jurien and Pfaff appeal to these, pretentiously enumerating those which arose under Popes Victor, Cornelius, Stephen, Urban VI., and Clement VII., and those named from Donatus, Meletius, and Acacius. Then they ask if the true Church of Christ can be thought to consist in one single society perfectly at union with itself. They allege many conjectures against this, but dwell on the argument, that in defect of a visible external test, such an assertion could not be maintained without imposing upon all a most intolerable burden of searching out where is the true doctrine and the legitimate ministerial succession: for it is not until those are found, that, at length, that one single society will be recognised, with which, as the only true Church, unity of Communion is to be kept.

Now, I profess that I do not see how this argument can be met, if the institution of the Primacy, and its proper function to form and maintain unity, be rejected. For, without this, by what visible token among so many Christian societies, divided by intestine dissension, and condemning each other, can you distinguish the one which has the character of the true Church, and the right to exact communion with itself? There is none to be found; and so, either all hope of finding the true Church must be relinquished, or an enquiry must be undertaken into purity of doctrine, and legitimate ministerial succession, on the termination of which the only true Church will at last be found. But as this latter course is to by far the greater number of men impossible, dangerous445 to all without exception, and most foreign to the Christian temper, the only conclusion remaining, is, that the selection of a Primacy with the power of effecting unity impressed upon it, is most intimately involved and bound up in the visibility and unity of the true Church.

And quite as closely is it bound up with that other test of the Church, its Catholicism. We are not to believe Voss and King,446 in their assertion that this test began to be applied first in the fourth century, for the purpose of distinguishing the genuine company of the orthodox, and the true body of Christ, from heretics and schismatics. For we find the Church distinguished by the epithet of Catholic, not merely in the records of the fourth447 and fifth448 century, but in those of the third,449 and the second,450 at the beginning of which S. Ignatius wrote, "Follow all of you the bishop, as Jesus Christ the Father; and the body of presbyters, as Apostles. But reverence deacons, as the command of Christ. Without the bishop let nothing of what concerns the Church be done by any one. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist which is under the bishop, or with his sanction. Where the bishop is, there also let the multitude be; as, where Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church."451 As, therefore, that cannot be the Church of Christ, which is not Catholic, we ought to investigate the meaning which is given to this word by the consent of all orthodox believers.

Now, two points are signified in it, one of which is its material, the other its formal, or essential, part. Its material part is, that the geographical extension of the true Church be such that its mass be morally452 universal, absolutely great, and eminently visible, but comparatively with all heretical and schismatical sects, larger and more numerous. Of this material meaning attached to the epithet, Catholic, we find abundant witnesses in all453 the orthodox writers who defended the cause of the Church against the Donatists, and again, against the Luciferians,454 and Novatians; and likewise, in those who have explained the creeds,455 and, as occasion offered, have touched on the force of the term Catholic.456 But the same first cited witnesses tell us that universal diffusion is not sufficient, and that we require another element to infuse a soul into this universally extended body, and to bring it to unity.

For two properties are continually recurring in Christian records, one of which may be called negative, the other affirmative. The force of the former is to expel from the circle of the one true Catholic Church all sects of heretics and Schismatics: of the latter, that this Church consist in one single communion and society, whose members cohere together by hierarchical subordination.

But is it true that both these points are so plainly and constantly inculcated? To remove all doubt we will quote the authors who most distinctly assert the one and the other. As to the first, there are 457Clement of Alexandria, 458Tertullian, 459Alexander of Alexandria, 460Celestine, 461Leander, the Emperor Justinian;462then again the Councils of Nice,463 Sardica,464 and the third of 465Carthage; nay, the heretics466 themselves; and all these agree in asserting that there is one only ancient Catholic Church, outside of which the divine patience endures and bears with heresies, which are as thorns. Thus in language ecclesiastical and Christian nothing can be considered as more certainly proved than that the epithet of Catholic is distinctive, and shows the communion which rejects from its bosom all heresies and all schisms. It was with great reason, therefore, that467Pacian wrote what468Cyril of Jerusalem, and469Augustine very frequently repeated, "Our people is divided from the heretical name by this appellation, that it is called Catholic."

Moreover this unity, which we have said may be called negative, is necessary indeed to the understanding of the Church as Catholic, but is by no means sufficient to complete the idea of Catholicity. To it therefore must be added the affirmative unity, by which Catholicism is not only divided from heretics and schismatics, but becomes in itself a coherent body with members and articulations. It is to the assertion and maintenance of this unity, which is the soul of Catholicity, and without which it cannot even be conceived, that has reference what we so often read in the monuments of antiquity about the 470necessity of communion among the members of the Church and the 471tokens and means of that communion. There are very distinct and innumerable testimonies about it in the ancient Fathers,472 declaring its necessity, and setting forth its mode of composition and coherence.

For to set forth the mode of this is the plain drift of what 473Irenæus writes in confutation of heretics by the tradition of the Apostolical churches: "For since it would be very long in the compass of our present work to enumerate the successions of all the Churches, taking that Church which is the greatest, the most ancient, and well known to all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, by indicating that tradition which it has from the Apostles, and the faith which it announces to men, which has reached even to us by the succession of bishops, we confound all those, who, in whatsoever manner, either through self-pleasing, or vain glory, or blindness and evil intention, 474gather otherwise than they ought. For to this church on account of its superior chiefship, it is necessary that every Church should come475 together, that is, the faithful who are everywhere; for in this Church the tradition which is from the Apostles has been ever preserved by those who are everywhere. …By this ordination and succession, the tradition and preaching of the truth, which is from the Apostles in the Church, has reached down to us. And this proof is most complete, that it is one and the same vivifying faith, which has been preserved, and handed down in truth, in the Church from the Apostles to the present day."

The churches, therefore, which are everywhere diffused, derive that strength and harmony of parts, out of which the whole body of the Catholic Church is made up, from the fact of their agreeing in the unity of faith and preaching with that Church of Peter, which is the greatest, the chief, and the more powerful. It follows that the Primacy of Peter, and the authority inherent in it to effect unity, is that principle which Christ selected, that the Church which He had set up might be Catholic, and bear the note of Catholicity on its brow.

And Cyprian would set forth the same mode of communion, when he speaks of the coherence of bishops, by which both the Catholic episcopate is made one, and the Church one and Catholic. For as the several communities draw the unity of the body from the unity of the prelates to whom they are subject; so all prelates, and the communities subject to them, constitute one Catholic episcopate and one Catholic Church, because they cohere with the principal church, the root and matrix, which is the Church of Peter, upon whom the Lord founded the whole building, and whom He instituted to be the fountain and source of Catholic unity.476

These words are a clue to understand 477Tertullian's meaning, when, already become a Montanist, he called the Catholic Church, whose discipline he was attacking, the Church near to Peter– "Concerning your opinion, I now enquire whence you claim this right to the Church. If because the Lord said to Peter, 'Upon this rock I will build My Church,' 'to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven,' or 'whatsoever thou shalt bind or loose on earth, shall be bound or loosed in heaven,' you, therefore, pretend that the power of binding and loosing is derived to you, that is, to all the Church near to Peter; how do you overthrow and change the manifest intention of the Lord in conferring this on Peter478 personally, 'Upon thee I will build My Church,' and 'I will give to thee the keys,' not to the Church, and 'whatsoever thou bindest or loosest,' not what they bind or loose." Now he used this mode of speaking because it was customary with Catholics, who were wont to exhibit nearness with Peter as the characteristic of the Church, and the necessary condition for sharing that power, whose plenitude and native source Christ had lodged in Peter.

This certain and undoubting judgment of Catholics, Tertullian himself, before his error, had clearly expressed in his book, De Scorpiace, c. x., where he says, "For if you yet think the heaven shut, remember that the Lord here (Matt. xvi. 19) left its keys to Peter, and through him to the Church." Nearness, then, with Peter, and 479consanguinity of doctrine thence proceeding, are no less necessary to the Church, that it may be the Catholic Church which Christ founded and built upon Peter, than that it be partaker in those gifts which, again, He Himself granted only to unity, as it is effected in Peter and by Peter.

Now not only the most ancient Fathers, as Irenæus, Tertullian, and Cyprian, but the whole body of them, assign the origin of this to Peter. This they make the vivifying principle of agreement, society and unity, without which the Church can neither be intrinsically Catholic, nor the mind conceive it as such. It is so stated by 480Pacian, 481Ambrose, the 482Fathers of Aquileia, 483 Optatus, 484Gregory Nazianzen, 485Jerome, 486Augustine, 487 Gelasius, 488Hormisdas, 489Agatho, 490Maximus Martyr, and, to shorten the list, by Leo491 the Great. It is in setting forth the unity of the Catholic episcopate that he writes what ought never to be forgotten by Christian minds: "For the compactness of our unity cannot remain firm, unless the bond of charity weld us into an inseparable whole, because, as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. For it is the connection of the whole body which makes one soundness and one beauty; and this connexion, as it requires unanimity in the whole body, so especially demands concord among bishops. For though these have a like dignity, yet have they not an equal jurisdiction; since even among the most blessed Apostles, as there was a likeness of honour, so was there a certain distinction of power, and the election of all being equal, pre-eminence over the rest was given to one, from which mould, or type, the distinction also between bishops has arisen, and it was provided by a great ordering, that all should not claim to themselves all things, but that in every province there should be one whose sentence should be considered the first among his brethren; and others again, seated in the greater cities, should undertake a larger care, through whom the direction of the universal Church should converge to the one See of Peter, and nothing anywhere disagree from its head."

And, if I do not deceive myself, the direct drift of all this is to answer the question, whether the doctrine of Peter's Primacy, and its virtue, as the constituent of unity and Catholicity, is contained in the most solemn standard of faith, the creed. For although there are unimpeachable testimonies to prove that the creeds were not published and explained to Catechumens, in order to convey to them a full and complete Christian instruction; and though it be proved further to have been the purpose of the Church's ancient teachers to omit many points in the creeds which were to be set before the initiated at a more suitable season afterwards, it may nevertheless be said that the most commonly received articles of the creed may be regarded as so many most fruitful germs, from which the remaining doctrines would spontaneously spring. And so, to keep within our present point, what is more plain than that the sum of doctrine concerning Peter's Primacy, contained in the Bible, illustrated by the Fathers, and defined by Councils, is involved in that article of the creed in which we profess that the Church is one and Catholic? No doubt there nowhere occurs in the creeds, expressed in so many words, mention of Peter, or of the Primacy bestowed on him, or of hierarchical subordination; yet it is most distinctly stated that the Church is one and Catholic. What meaning, then, were the faithful to give to those epithets? What were they to intend in the words, I believe one Catholic Church? What but the meaning of the words themselves, which they received from the Church's teachers together with the creeds? But they could not form the conception of one Church and that Catholic, without thinking likewise of one Catholic principle of the Church; nor could they assign the dignity of that one Catholic principle to any other but Peter, whom alone they had invariably been taught to have been set over all. For what S.492 Bernard wrote in mediæval times, "For this purpose the solicitude of all Churches rests on that one Apostolic See, that all may be united under it and in it, and it may be careful in behalf of all to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," must be considered nothing but a repetition of the faith which resounded through the whole world, from the very beginning of the Christian religion.

Unless, therefore, any can be found who prefer asserting either that true believers never understood what they believed, in professing the Church to be one and Catholic, or that they understood this otherwise than it had been universally and constantly explained by the Church's teachers; it must be admitted, that faith in Peter's Primacy, and in the power bestowed upon it for the purpose of making the visible kingdom of Christ one and Catholic, is coeval with that profession of the creeds which sets forth the Church as one and as Catholic.493