The aim of this paper is to examine the historical question as to whether mono-episcopal government existed in the local Church in Rome in the first century AD. It is not intended to engage upon the related task of theological reflection upon the role of bishops within the Church and their claim to be successors to the apostles in this role.

There has been a development in the Church’s understanding of ministry and authority, just as there has been a development in the Church’s understanding of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Leo the Great was as certain of the authority of the Petrine office, as he was of the reality of the two natures of the one person of Christ. The task of showing whether such developments were legitimate is ultimately a theological one, though it is one that will involve reflection upon history. It is not prima facie obvious that a high doctrine of the papacy does require that a single bishop exercised magisterial authority in Rome in the immediate post-apostolic age. Yet this question is only raised at this point so that it may be set aside. Here we consider the simpler historical question as to whether the evidence available requires, suggests, or excludes the supposition that Christian ministry in Rome in the latter part of the first century was mono-episcopal.

A blunt commentator on the things around us can argue that by failing to choose the ‘obviously better’ possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right, God cannot be both omnipotent and wholly good ‘. An underlying argument runs:

This, the Underlying Argument, is weaker than the Blunt Commentator’s original one. If it fails, the original one cannot succeed, but if it goes through, the original one does not necessarily go through. I number the main steps, chiefly to keep track of the assumptions.

In Part I, I argue that the Underlying Argument fails to prove the conclusion that God cannot be both omnipotent and wholly good; and that it fails, from ignoring a view exploiting the notion of blissful freedom: a theologians’ notion, but one already appealed to by at least one philosopher strongly sympathetic to the Blunt Commentator’s argument. In Part II, I draw attention to an ambiguity in ‘always go right’, with a view to pursuing, in Part III, consequences of a further ambiguity to be seen in ‘God cannot be both omnipotent and good’, demanding attention to two diverse forms of theism. One of these— ‘existence-theism’—is invulnerable to a Blunt Commentator’s argument, but can exploit some of the Underlying Argument’s steps to support a Blunt Commentator’s conclusion in the sense needed to impugn the other form, ‘character-theism’.

How do we make the invisible visible? How do we see, or touch, what others have made visible? Such questions can, of course, mean different things. They might be questions about how technology such as telescopes and microscopes have made visible the previously invisible things, and what (if anything) such technology leaves invisible. They might also be political questions about how previously invisible groups are made visible, and how invisible we can make ourselves to each other without ceasing to be. And there are equally important philosophical questions about whether the invisible is, if so what it means to make it visible, and whether in so doing we perfect or destroy it. Such questions are on the back burners of this essay.

But my focus is more specific. An exhibition Angels from the Vatican. The Invisible Made Visible has been touring the United States. These are artifacts of angels from the Vatican museum. Embattled church politicians might regard the title as oxymoronic; they would also not be surprised that it is sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation. But I think it is the sub-title rather than the title of the exhibition that raises (perhaps from the dead) many old and new questions about angels, precisely by considering angels under the rubric of “The Invisible Made Visible”.’ The exhibition, in its version at the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore, Maryland), consists of four galleries and a lengthy balcony-corridor of about one hundred paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts ranging from a sixth century before Christ Assyrian “winged genius” to a twentieth century painting by Salvador Dali.

At last Søren Kierkegaard is beginning to get the attentive reading he deserves. Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have all had their day, but Kierkegaard has always rolled along as a kind of fifth wheel. It was suspected that he was as great as the others, but no-one could quite say why. That was partly because he existed, for decades, only in the hasty and sometimes impressionistic translations of the Rev. Walter Lowrie, who began to translate him in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. These translations were indeed ‘works of love’. Lowrie’s translation of The Concept of Dread, for example, was completed ‘in a month of thirty-one days, working twelve hours a day’. In the 1980’s however, the Princeton edition called Kierkegaard’s Writings, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong began to appear, and these are scrupulously academic translations, with a plethora of learned notes. The edition is complete now—the last of the 26 volumes appeared in 1998.

In all this, the Danes themselves played little part. For them, Spren Kierkegaard was an irritation almost too great to borne while alive, and a bore to talk about ever since. The Danes could never understand why, from the 1950’s on, there was a steady stream of scholars and philosophers, coming to Copenhagen, nosing around the second-hand bookshops in the hope of finding first editions of Spren Kierkegaard. Only in the 1990’s did the penny finally drop. A huge grant was made in 1993 by the Danish National Research Foundation, to the tune of 27,500,000 Danish kroner, and a Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre was set up at the University of Copenhagen, under the direction of a handful of Danish scholars, with the aim of setting up and publishing a critical edition of his complete works. Thus, only 138 years late, the Danes took official cognisance of their greatest literary son. The edition, in 55 volumes, with an electronic version to follow, is about to roll off the press. The first five volumes of text and commentary were available as of 10 October 1998.

David Albert Jones’ article purports to address a strictly historical question: did the Church in first-century Rome have a single presiding bishop? His argument is designed to examine and refute the view (found in my history of the popes among other places) that the rule of a single bishop was slow to develop in Rome, and that, consequently, the later Roman episcopal lists (most notably that provided by Irenaeus towards the last quarter of the second century) represent a retrospective tidying up of what had been in fact a messier and more complex situation.

Behind this apparently straightforward agenda, however—the sorting out of the facts as far as we can discover them—Fr Jones has another and more pressing objective. He wants to suggest that those like myself who hold that the emergence of the monoepiscopate in Rome was a post-apostolic development, still incomplete at the beginning of the second century, do so not on the basis of the evidence, but because they are in the grip of an unCatholic mindset which colours—and in his view distorts—historical judgement. So, on the first page of his article, he identifies the position he is criticising as “the classic Protestant account of the matter dating from at least as far back as Harnack”. I am intrigued by that adjective “Protestant”. What work is it doing in the fabric of Fr Jones’ argument? It is of course true that Harnack read the evidence in this way: but then so did his older contemporary Louis Duchesne, a Catholic priest with a fair claim to be considered the greatest of all Catholic Church historians, and certainly the greatest nineteenth- century historian of the early Papacy.

But let a noise or scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which seemed—had perhaps for long years seemed—to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word ‘death’ should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future?

These words written by Marcel Proust, and proceeding from the mouth of the narrator, Marcel, in Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, may appear somewhat foreign to the proper concerns of Christian theology. The language as such is hardly alien, deploying as it does the imagery of Christian liturgy and mysticism: the awakening of what seems dead, the transcending of time, the overcoming of the fear of death—and all this through a form of ‘celestial nourishment’ first introduced into the narrative through the memory of the madeleine once tasted on Sunday mornings by the young Marcel before attending Mass.

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the death of the first two Dominican masters at the University of Oxford, Robert Bacon OP and his student and successor Richard Fishacre OP. From the former there survives only a Psalms commentary and a sermon. From the latter, however, we have a number of works, including the earliest Sentences Commentary composed in England. Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences offered to their readers, which eventually included all candidates for the degree of master of theology at the leading medieval universities, a systematic exposition of texts from the Fathers, principally St. Augustine. It was therefore seen as the locus of speculative or “dogmatic’ theology as opposed to “moral” theology, the locus of which was the Scriptures.

This role for Lombard’s work, moreover, was reaffirmed in a so— called epistola secreta, a sealed letter, issued by Pope Innocent IV and addressed to Robert Grosseteste, who was at the time bishop of Lincoln but who still kept a close watch on developments at the studium where he had spent so much time and invested so much energy.

One hundred years ago two Mrs Wards, not related to each other, were writing novels in England. Mrs Humphry Ward had achieved instant fame in 1888 with Robert Elsmere. This story of an earnest clergyman who loses faith in organized religion keyed into Victorian anxieties and controversies about faith and doubt. Its author, born Mary Augusta Arnold, was a granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby and a niece of Matthew Arnold; she was a woman of high intellectual and scholarly attainments, a devout agnostic but keenly interested in religion. Ten years later she turned her attention to Catholicism, in Helbeck of Bannisdale, a character study of a Catholic squire in the Lake District. Mary Ward had good personal reasons for being interested in Catholicism. Her father, Thomas Arnold Junior, was one of the ‘wanderers’ who flit through Victorian religious history. He became a Catholic under Newman’s influence when he was in his thirties, but reverted to Anglicanism some years later. After several more years he returned to the Catholic Church, just in time to stop him from being elected Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, which was still dominated by the Anglican establishment. Arnold then remained a Catholic until his death in 1900. In his later years he was Professor of English at University College, Dublin, where he was a friend and colleague of the Professor of Greek, Fr G.M.Hopkins SJ. Arnold’s changes of direction were intensely painful to his non-Catholic family. Mary Ward felt the pain, but she loved her father and tried to understand his beliefs.

The Jewish community in Rome in the first century was indeed very large (some tens of thousands) and not unified but divided between several central synagogues. The early Christian community in Rome was also large, sprawling and diverse, accustomed to receive incomers from all parts of the world and somewhat subject to factions. It would have been difficult to exercise leadership effectively over such a body. This is not in dispute. What is at issue is simply and solely the question of whether, within Rome in the first century, there was an office of president of the college of ministers, that is, the office of a single presiding bishop of the church in Rome.

Dr Duffy writes that ‘we can afford to be honest historians, and let the evidence lead us where it will’. Yet what is at issue is what counts as evidence, and, in particular, whether it is legitimate to use the great wealth of second-century sources as a guide to first century practice. The Shepherd of Hermas says that the role of sending letters to other local churches was proper to Clement. Dr Duffy claims that this assertion ‘seems to imply [he was] the presbyter in charge of foreign correspondence’. If Clement dealt with other churches, are we to presume that this was all he did? The suggestion is left unexamined that Clement had authority to issue letters to other churches because it was he who presided over the local Church of Rome. Should not the fact that there are many other examples of bishops who wrote on behalf of the local church, and that Clement is counted by second century Roman lists as presiding over the local church, count as evidence?