In the middle of the ninth century, a radical change began in the Western Church, which dramatically altered the Constitution of the Church, and laid the ground work for the full development of the papacy. The papacy could never have emerged without a fundamental restructuring of the Constitution of the Church and of men’s perceptions of the history of that Constitution. As long as the true facts of Church history were well known, it would serve as a buffer against any unlawful ambitions. However, in the 9th century, a literary forgery occurred which completely revolutionized the ancient government of the Church in the West. It provided a legal foundation for the ascendancy of the papacy in Western Christendom. This forgery is known as the Pseudo–Isidorian Decretals, written around 845 A.D. The Decretals are a complete fabrication of Church history. They set forth precedents for the exercise of sovereign authority of the popes over the universal Church prior to the fourth century and make it appear that the popes had always exercised sovereign dominion and had ultimate authority even over Church Councils. Nicholas I (858–867) was the first to use them as the basis for advancing his claims of authority. But it was not until the 11th century with Pope Gregory VII that the these decretals were used in a significant way to alter the government of the Western Church. It was at this time that the Decretals were combined with two other major forgeries, The Donation of Constantine and the Liber Pontificalis, along with other falsified writings, and codified into a system of Church law which elevated Gregory and all his successors as absolute monarchs over the Church in the West. These writings were then utilized by Gratian in composing his Decretum. The Decretum, which was first published in 1151 A.D., was intended as a collection of everything that Gratian could find which could give historical precedent to the teaching of papal primacy, and therefore the authority of tradition, which could then carry the force of law in the Church. It had such success that it became the standard work of the law of the Roman Church and thus the basis of all canon law and Scholastic theology. Some Roman Catholic apologists claim that though there were forgeries in the Church, these really had very little impact upon the advancement and development of the papacy, since it was already an established reality by the time the forgeries appeared. Karl Keating, for example, states that practically all the commentators, with the exception of fundamentalists, agree with this assessment. But this is completely false. The historical facts reveal that the papacy was never a reality as far as the universal Church is concerned. There are many eminent Roman Catholic historians who have testified to that fact as well as to the importance of the forgeries, especially those of Pseudo-Isidore. One such historian is Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger. He was the most renowned Roman Catholic historian of the last century, who taught Church history for 47 years as a Roman Catholic. He makes these important comments:
In
the middle of the ninth century—about 845—there arose the
huge fabrication of the Isidorian decretals…About a hundred
pretended decrees of the earliest Popes, together with certain
spurious writings of other Church dignitaries and acts of Synods,
were then fabricated in the west of Gaul, and eagerly seized upon
Pope Nicholas I at Rome, to be used as genuine documents in support
of the new claims put forward by himself and his successors.
That
the pseudo–Isidorian principles eventually revolutionized the
whole constitution of the Church, and introduced a new system in
place of the old—on that point there can be no controversy
among candid historians.
The most potent instrument of the new
Papal system was Gratian’s Decretum,
which issued about the middle of the twelfth century from the first
school of Law in Europe, the juristic teacher of the whole of Western
Christendom, Bologna. In this work the Isidorian forgeries were
combined with those of the other Gregorian (Gregory VII) writers…and
with Gratia’s own additions. His work displaced all the older
collections of canon law, and became the manual and repertory, not
for canonists only, but for the scholastic theologians, who, for the
most part, derived all their knowledge of Fathers and Councils from
it. No book has ever come near it in its influence in the Church,
although there is scarcely another so chokeful of gross errors, both
intentional and unintentional (Johann Joseph Ignaz von
Döllinger, The
Pope and the Council (Boston:
Roberts, 1870), pp. 76-77, 79, 115-116).
The Protestant historian, George Salmon, explains the importance and influence of Pseudo–Isidore:
In
the ninth century another collection of papal letters…was
published under the name of Isidore, by whom, no doubt, a celebrated
Spanish bishop of much learning was intended. In these are to be
found precedents for all manner of instances of the exercise of
sovereign dominion by the pope over other Churches. You must take
notice of this, that it was by furnishing precedents that these
letters helped the growth of papal power. Thenceforth the popes could
hardly claim any privilege but they would find in these letters
supposed proofs that the privilege in question was no more than had
been always claimed by their predecessors, and always exercised
without any objection…On these spurious decretals is built the
whole fabric of Canon Law. The great schoolman, Thomas Aquinas, was
taken in by them, and he was induced by them to set the example of
making a chapter on the prerogatives of the pope an essential part of
the treatises on the Church…Yet completely successful as was
this forgery, I suppose there never was a more clumsy one. These
decretal epistles had undisputed authority for some seven hundred
years, that is to say, down to the time of the Reformation.
If we
want to know what share these letters had in the building of the
Roman fabric we have only to look at the Canon Law. The ‘Decretum’
of Gratia quotes three hundred and twenty-four times the epistles of
the popes of the first four centuries; and of these three hundred and
twenty–four quotations, three hundred and thirteen are from the
letters which are now universally known to be spurious (George
Salmon, The
Infallibility of the Church (London:
John Murray, 1914), pp. 449, 451, 453).
In addition to the Pseudo Isidorian Decretals there were other forgeries which were successfully used for the promotion of the doctrine of papal primacy. One famous instance is that of Thomas Aquinas. In 1264 A.D. Thomas authored a work entitled Against the Errors of the Greeks. This work deals with the issues of theological debate between the Greek and Roman Churches in that day on such subjects as the Trinity, the Procession of the Holy Spirit, Purgatory and the Papacy. In his defense of the papacy Thomas bases practically his entire argument on forged quotations of Church fathers. Under the names of the eminent Greek fathers such as Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Abbott, a Latin forger had compiled a catena of quotations interspersing a number that were genuine with many that were forged which was subsequently submitted to Pope Urban IV. This work became known as the Thesaurus of Greek Fathers or Thesaurus Graecorum Patrum. In addition the Latin author also included spurious canons from early Ecumenical Councils. Pope Urban in turn submitted the work to Thomas Aquinas who used many of the forged passages in his work Against the Errors of the Greeks mistakenly thinking they were genuine. These spurious quotations had enormous influence on many Western theologians in succeeding centuries. The following is a sample of Thomas’ argumentation for the papacy using the spurious quotations from the Thesaurus:
Chapter thirty-four
That the same (the Roman Pontiff) possesses in the Church a fullness of power.
It
is also established from the texts of the aforesaid Doctors that the
Roman Pontiff possesses a fullness of power in the Church. For Cyril,
the Patriarch of Alexandria, says in his Thesaurus: “As Christ
coming forth from Israel as leader and sceptre of the Church of the
Gentiles was granted by the Father the fullest power over every
principality and power and whatever is that all might bend the knee
to him, so he entrusted most fully the fullest power to Peter and his
successors.” And again: “To no one else but Peter and to
him alone Christ gave what is his fully.” And further on: “The
feet of Christ are his humanity, that is, the man himself, to whom
the whole Trinity gave the fullest power, whom one of the Three
assumed in the unity of his person and lifted up on high to the
Father above every principality and power, so that all the angels of
God might adore him (Hebr. 1:6); which whole and entire he has left
in sacrament and power to Peter and to his Church.
And Chrysostom
says to the Bulgarian delegation speaking in the person of Christ:
“Three times I ask you whether you love me, because you denied
me three times out of fear and trepidation. Now restored, however,
lest the brethren believe you to have lost the grace and authority of
the keys, I now confirm in you that which is fully mine, because you
love me in their presence.”
This is also taught on the
authority of Scripture. For in Matthew 16:19 the Lord said to Peter
without restriction: Whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be
bound also in heaven.
Chapter thirty-five
That he enjoys the same power conferred on Peter by Christ.
It
is also shown that Peter is the Vicar of Christ and the Roman Pontiff
is Peter’s successor enjoying the same power conferred on Peter
by Christ. For the canon of the Council of Chalcedon says: “If
any bishop is sentenced as guilty of infamy, he is free to appeal the
sentence to the blessed bishop of old Rome, whom we have as Peter the
rock of refuge, and to him alone, in the place of God, with unlimited
power, is granted the authority to hear the appeal of a bishop
accused of infamy in virtue of the keys given him by the Lord.”
And further on: “And whatever has been decreed by him is to be
held as from the vicar of the apostolic throne.”
Likewise,
Cyril, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, says, speaking in the person of
Christ: “You for a while, but I without end will be fully and
perfectly in sacrament and authority with all those whom I shall put
in your place, just as I am also with you.” And Cyril of
Alexandria in his Thesaurus says that the Apostles “in the
Gospels and Epistles have affirmed in all their teaching that Peter
and his Church are in the place of the Lord, granting him
participation in every chapter and assembly, in every election and
proclamation of doctrine.” And further on: “To him, that
is, to Peter, all by divine ordinancebow the head, and the rulers of
the world obey him as the Lord Jesus himself.” And Chrysostom,
speaking in the person of Christ, says: “Feed my sheep (John
21:17), that is, in my place be in charge of your brethren” (St.
Thomas Aquinas, Against
the Errors of the Greeks. Found
in James Likoudis, Ending
the Byzantine Greek Schism (New
Rochelle: Catholics United for the Faith, 1992), pp. 182-184).
With the exception of the last reference to Chrysostom all of Thomas’ references cited to Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, Chrysostom and the Council of Chalcedon are forgeries. The remainder of Aquinas’ treatise in defense of the papacy is similar in nature. Edward Denny gives the following historical summary of these forgeries and their use by Thomas Aquinas:
As
the Pseudo-Isidorian
Decretals were
by no means the first, so they were not the last forgeries in the
interests of the advancement of the Papal system. Gratian himself, in
addition to using the forged Decretals and
the fabrications of others who preceded him, had incorporated also
into the Decretum fresh
corruptions of his own with that object, but amongst such forgeries a
catena of spurious passages from the Greek Fathers and Councils, put
forth in the thirteenth century, had probably, next to the
Pseudo-lsidorian Decretals, the widest influence in this
direction.
The object of this forgery was as follows: The East had
been separated from the West since the excommunication by Pope Leo IX
of Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and that of
the former by the latter in July 1054, in which the other Eastern
Patriarchs concurred. The Latins, especially the Dominicans, who had
established themselves in the East, made strenuous efforts to induce
the Easterns to submit to the Papacy. The great obstacle in the way
of their success was the fact that the Orientals knew nothing of such
claims as those which were advanced by the Roman Bishops. In their
belief the highest rank in the Hierarchy of the Church was that of
Patriarch. This was clearly expressed by the Patrician Babanes at the
Council of Constantinople, 869. ‘God,’ he said, ‘hath
placed His Church in the five patriarchates, and declared in His
Gospel that they should never utterly fail, because they are the
heads of the Church. For that saying, “and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it,” meaneth this, when two fall they
run to three; when three fall they run to two; but when four
perchance have fallen, one, which remains in Christ our God, the Head
of all, calls back again the remaining body of the Church.”
They
were ignorant of any autocratic power residing jure divino in the
Bishop of Rome. They regarded Latin authors with suspicions as the
fautors of the unprimitive claims of the Bishop of Old Rome; hence if
they were to be persuaded that the Papalist pretensions were
Catholic, and thus induced to recognise them, the only way would be
to produce evidence provided ostensibly from Greek sources.
Accordingly a Latin theologian drew up a sort of Thesaurus Graecorum
Patrum, in which, amongst genuine extracts from Greek Fathers, lie
mingled spurious passages purporting to be taken from various
Councils and writings of Fathers, notably St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril
of Alexandria, and Maximus the Abbot.
This work was laid before
Urban IV, who was deceived by it. He was thus able to use it in his
correspondence with the Emperor, Michael Palaeologus, to prove that
from ‘the Apostolic throne of the Roman Pontiffs it was to be
sought what was to be held, or what was to be believed, since it is
his right to lay down, to ordain, to disprove, to command, to loose
and to bind in the place of Him who appointed him, and delivered and
granted to no one else but him alone what is supreme. To this throne
also all Catholics bend the head by divine law, and the primates of
the world confessing the true faith are obedient and turn their
thoughts as if to Jesus Christ Himself, and regard him as the Sun,
and from Him receive the light of truth to the salvation of souls
according as the genuine writers of some of the Holy Fathers, both
Greek and others, firmly assert.”
Urban, moreover, sent this
work to St. Thomas Aquinas…The testimony of these extracts was
to him of great value, as he believed that he had in them
irrefragable proof that the great Eastern theologians, such as St.
Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and the Fathers of the Councils
of Constantinople and Chalcedon, recognised the monarchical position
of the Pope as ruling the whole Church with absolute power.
Consequently he made use of these fraudulent documents in all honesty
in setting forth the prerogatives of the Papacy. The grave result
followed that, through his authority, the errors which he taught on
the subject of the Papacy were introduced into the schools, fortified
by the testimony of these fabrications, and thus were received as
undoubted truth, whence resulted consequences which can hardly be
fully estimated.
It was improbable that the Greeks, who had ample
means of discovering the real character of these forgeries, should
finally accept them and the teaching based on them; but in the West
itself there were no theologians competent to expose the fraud, so
that these forgeries were naturally held to be of weighty authority.
The high esteem attached to the writings of St. Thomas was an
additional reason why this should be the case (Edward
Denny, Papalism (London:
Rivingtons, 1912), pp. 114-117).
Von Döllinger elaborates on the far reaching influence of these forgeries, especially in their association with the authority of Aquinas, on succeeding generations of theologians and their extensive use as a defense of the papacy:
In
theology, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, the spurious
passages of St. Cyril and forged canons of Councils maintained their
ground, being guaranteed against all suspicion by the authority of
St. Thomas. Since the work of Trionfo in 1320, up to 1450, it is
remarkable that no single new work appeared in the interests of the
Papal system. But then the contest between the Council of Basle and
Pope Eugenius IV evoked the work of Cardinal Torquemada, besides some
others of less importance. Torquemada’s argument, which was
held up to the time of Bellarmine to be the most conslusive apology
of the Papal system, rests entirely on fabrications later than
the pseudo-Isidore,
and chiefly on the spurious passages of St. Cyril. To ignore the
authority of St. Thomas is, according to the Cardinal, bad enough,
but to slight the testimony of St. Cyril is intolerable. The Pope is
infallible; all authority of other bishops is borrowed or derived
frorn his. Decisions of Councils without his assent are null and
void. These fundamental principles of Torquemada are proved by
spurious passages of Anacletus, Clement, the Council of Chalcedon,
St. Cyril, and a mass of forged or adulterated testimonies. In the
times of Leo X and Clement III, the Cardinals Thomas of Vio, or
Cajetan, and Jacobazzi, followed closely in his footsteps. Melchior
Canus built firmly on the authority of Cyril, attested by St. Thomas,
and so did Bellarmine and the Jesuits who followed him. Those who
wish to get a bird’s–eye view of the extent to which the
genuine tradition of Church authority was still overlaid and
obliterated by the rubbish of later inventions and forgeries about
1563, when the Loci of
Canus appeared, must read the fifth book of his work. It is indeed
still worse fifty years later in this part of Bellarmine’s
work. The difference is that Canus was honest in his belief, which
cannot be said of Bellarmine.
The Dominicans, Nicolai, Le Quien,
Quetif, and Echard, were the first to avow openly that their master
St. Thomas, had been deceived by an imposter, and had in turn misled
the whole tribe of theologians and canonists who followed him. On the
one hand, the Jesuits, including even such a scholar as Labbe, while
giving up the pseudo–Isidorian
decretals, manifested their resolve to still cling to St. Cyril. In
Italy, as late as 1713, Professor Andruzzi of Bologna cited the most
important of the interpolations of St. Cyril as a conclusive argument
in his controversial treatise against the patriarch Dositheus (Johann
Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, The
Pope and the Council (Boston:
Roberts, 1870), pp. 233-234).
The authority claims of Roman Catholicism ultimately devolve upon the institution of the papacy. The papacy is the center and source from which all authority flows for Roman Catholicism. Rome has long claimed that this institution was established by Christ and has been in force in the Church from the very beginning. But the historical record gives a very different picture. This institution was promoted primarily through the falsification of historical fact through the extensive use of forgeries as Thomas Aquinas’ apologetic for the papacy demonstrates. Forgery is its foundation. As an institution it was a much later development in Church history, beginning with the Gregorian reforms of pope Gregory VII in the 11th century and was restricted completely to the West. The Eastern Chruch never accepted the false claims of the Roman Church and refused to submit to its insistence that the Bishop of Rome was supreme ruler of the Church. This they knew was not true to the historical record and was a perversion of the true teaching of Scripture, the papal exegesis of which was not taught by the Church fathers (An analysis and documentation of the church father’s interpretation of the rock of Matthew can be found here)
Dr. Aristeides Papadakis is an Orthodox historian and Professor of Byzantine history at the University of Maryland. He gives the following analysis of the Eastern Church’s attitude towards the claims of the bishops of Rome especially as they were formulated in the 11th century Gregorian reforms. He points out that on the basis of the exegesis of scripture and the facts of history, the Eastern Church has consistently rejected the papal claims of Rome:
What
was in fact being implied in the western development was the
destruction of the Church’s pluralistic structure of
government. Papal claims to supreme spiritual and doctrinal authority
quite simply, were threatening to transform the entire Church into a
vast centralized diocese…Such innovations were the result of a
radical reading of the Church’s conciliar structure of
government as revealed in the life of the historic Church. No see,
regardless of its spiritual seniority, had ever been placed outside
of this structure as if it were a power over or above the Church and
its government…Mutual consultation among Churches—episcopal
collegiality and conciliarity, in short—had been the
quintessential character of Church government from the outset. It was
here that the locus of supreme authority in the Church could be
found. Christendom indeed was both a diversity and a unity, a family
of basically equal sister-Churches, whose unity rested not on any
visible juridical authority, but on conciliarity, and on a common
declaration of faith and the sacramental life.
The ecclesiology of
communion and fraternity of the Orthodox, which was preventing them
from following Rome blindly and submissively like slaves, was based
on Scripture and not merely on history or tradition. Quite simply,
the power to bind and loose mentioned in the New Testament had been
granted during Christ’s ministry to every disciple and not just
to Peter alone…In sum, no one particular Church could limit
the fulness of God’s redeeming grace to itself, at the expense
of the others. Insofar as all were essentially identical, the fulness
of catholicity was present in all equally. In the event, the Petrine
biblical texts, cherished by the Latins, were beside the point as
arguments for Roman ecclesiology and superiority. The close logical
relationship between the papal monarchy and the New Testament texts,
assumed by Rome, was quite simply undocumented. For all bishops, as
successors of the apostles, claim the privilege and power granted to
Peter. Differently put, the Savior’s words could not be
interpreted institutionally, legalistically or territorially, as the
foundation of the Roman Church, as if the Roman pontiffs were alone
the exclusive heirs to Christ’s commission. It is important to
note parenthetically that a similar or at least kindred exegesis of
the triad of Matt. 16:18, Luke 22:32 and John 21:15f. was also common
in the West before the reformers of the eleventh century chose to
invest it with a peculiar ‘Roman’ significance. Until
then, the three proof–texts were viewed primarily ‘as the
foundation of the Church, in the sense that the power of the keys was
conferred on a sacerdotalis
ordo in
the person of Peter: the power granted to Peter was symbolically
granted to the whole episcopate.’ In sum, biblical Latin
exegetes before the Gregorian reform did not view the New Testament
texts unambiguously as a blueprint for papal sovereignty; their
understanding overall was non–primatial.
The Byzantine
indictment against Rome also had a strong historical component. A
major reason why Orthodox writers were unsympathetic to the Roman
restatement of primacy was precisely because it was so totally
lacking in historical precedent. Granted that by the twelfth century
papal theorists had become experts in their ability to circumvent the
inconvenient facts of history. And yet, the Byzantines were ever
ready to hammer home the theme that the historical evidence was quite
different. Although the Orthodox may not have known that Gregorian
teaching was in part drawn from the forged decretals of
pseudo–Isidore (850’s), they were quite certain that it
was not based on catholic tradition in either its historical or
canonical form. On this score, significantly, modern scholarship
agrees with the Byzantine analysis. As it happens, contemporary
historians have repeatedly argued that the universal episcopacy
claimed by the eleventh–century reformers would have been
rejected by earlier papal incumbents as obscenely blasphemous (to
borrow the phrase of a recent scholar). The title ‘universal’
which was advanced formally at the time was actually explicitly
rejected by earlier papal giants such as Gregory I. To be brief,
modern impartial scholarship is reasonably certain that the
conventional conclusion which views the Gregorians as defenders of a
consistently uniform tradition is largely fiction. ‘The
emergence of a papal monarchy from the eleventh century onwards
cannot be represented as the realization of a homogenous development,
even within the relatively closed circle of the western, Latin,
Church’ (R.A. Marcus, From
Augustine to Gregory the Great (London:
Variorum Reprints, 1983), p. 355). It has been suggested that the
conviction that papatus (a
new term constructed on the analogy of episcopatus in
the eleventh century) actually represented a rank or an order higher
than that of bishop, was a radical revision of Church structure and
government. The discontinuity was there and to dismiss it would be a
serious oversight (Aristeides Papadakis, The
Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy (Crestwood:
St. Vladimir’s, 1994), pp. 158-160, 166-167).