HEIR OF ST PETER

Leo’s views on the primacy of the bishop of Rome prepared the ground for future papal leaders’ tendentious relations with other sees, especially that of Constantinople. Leo’s rejection of Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon, which claimed equal dignity for the see of Constantinople, created a lasting cloud over relations between Rome and the churches of the East (ep. 114). Leo has often been cited as the first bishop of Rome to have a

strong sense of Roman primacy. He saw himself as the ‘heir of St Peter’ not as an individual person but in virtue of his office as leader of the Church of Rome that had been founded by the apostle Peter. Rome’s claim to apostolic status was doubled by the tradition that Paul had also been martyred in Rome, like Peter, during the reign of Nero. The historical basis for this line of succession was the Letter of Pope Clement I to James the brother of the Lord, in which Clement claimed to have been personally anointed as the third (or fourth) bishop of Rome by the apostle himself. This forgery was written in the late second or third century, and had been translated into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia in the first decade of the fifth century (Neil 2003: 38). Leo was not the first bishop of Rome to describe himself as the heir of St Peter, basing his claim to authority on the Petrine commission in Matt. 16: 18-19: You are Peter, and on this rock I build my church, etc. On the other hand, Leo may have been the first to use the term ‘the unworthy heir’ (indignus heres), a phrase that Ullmann regarded as a deliberate borrowing from Roman legal terminology.1

However, in Roman law the ‘unworthy heir’ was one who was legally unable to claim an inheritance. The legal meaning of this phrase fits ill with Leo’s understanding of himself as Peter’s successor, inheriting from the first apostle the keys to the kingdom of heaven and the spiritual powers of binding and loosing. Leo’s declaration of ‘unworthiness’ was intended only in a moral sense. Having inherited the

leadership of the Roman see via an uncontested election, Leo believed it was his right and responsibility to offer leadership not just to the Church of Rome but also to the wider church. Leo’s commitment to the theory of Roman primacy was usually tempered in practice by the strong sense of collegiality that informed most of his dealings with other bishops. On matters of local custom, Leo did not always insist on imposing the Roman way: for example, he agreed to adopt in the West the Church of Alexandria’s calculation of the date of Easter in 455.2