Free Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition by Eamon Duffy Page B

papacy was more than a matter of external decoration. Self-consciously, the popes began to model their actions and their style as Christian leaders on the procedures of the Roman state. In the last months of Damasus’ life the Bishop of Tarragona in Spain wrote to the Pope with a series of queries about the ordering of the day-today life of the Church. Damasus died before the letter could be answered, and it was one of the first items across the desk of his successor, Pope Siricius (3 84–99). The Pope replied in the form of a decretal, modelled directly on an imperial rescript, and, like the rescripts, providing authoritative rulings which were designed to establish legal precedents on the issues concerned. Siricius commended the Bishop for consulting Rome ‘as to the head of your body’, and instructed him to pass on the ‘salutary ordinances we have made’ to the bishops of all the surrounding provinces, for no ‘priest of the Lord is free to be ignorant of the statutes of the Apostolic See’. 23
    Siricius quite clearly had no sense that he was inventing anything, as his references to the ‘general decrees’ of his predecessors show: it may be that this form of reply to enquiries had already become routine. Yet his letter is a symptom of the adoption by the popes of an idiom and a cast of mind which would help to shape the whole mental world of Western Christendom. The apostolic stability of Rome, its testimony to ancient truth, would now be imagined not simply as the handing on of the ancient paradosis , the tradition, but specifically in the form of lawgiving. Law became a major preoccupation of the Roman church, and the Pope was seen as the Church’s supreme lawgiver. As Pope Innocent 1 (401–17) wrote to the bishops of Africa, ‘it has been decreed by a divine, not a human authority, that whatever action is taken in any of the provinces, however distant or remote, it should not be brought to a conclusion before it comes to the knowledge of this see, so that every decision may be affirmed by our authority’. 24
    This serene confidence in the Roman see was maintained in part by the immersion of the Roman clergy in a distinctive mental world. Round the papal household there developed a whole clerical culture, staffed by men drawn often from the Roman aristocracy, intensely self-conscious and intensely proud of their own tradition – Jerome dubbed them ‘the senate’. Damasus himself was a product of thisworld, the son of a senior Roman priest who had himself founded a titulus church. Pope Boniface was the son of a Roman priest, Innocent I was the son of his predecessor as pope, Anastasius I (399—401), and had served his father as deacon. Indeed it was routine for the Pope to be elected by the senior clergy from among the seven deacons . The deacons dressed like the Pope himself in the distinctive wide-sleeved dalmatic with its two purple stripes, and they formed the heart of the papal administration – Boniface I (418–22) Leo I (440–61), and Felix III (483–92) were all succeeded by their archdeacons. In this clerical world, memories were long, and records were carefully kept. The tradition of Rome was thought of as part of the law of God, and preserved accordingly. ‘The rules rule us,’ declared Celestine I (422—32), ‘we do not stand over the rules: let us be subject to the canons’. 25
    These claims went largely unchallenged in the West, and even in strife-torn Africa, though interventions there by the inexperienced and clumsy Greek Pope Zosimus (417–18) caused a good deal of resentment. By and large, Innocent I’s conviction that the faith had been sent from the Apostles at Rome to the rest of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa and Sicily was accepted, and Rome’s theoretical and practical primacy acknowledged in consequence. In practice, however, that primacy was experienced, and understood, quite differently in different regions of the West. In most of peninsular Italy, the Pope was in