Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Eastern Orthodoxy's Witness to Papal Primacy: The Acacian Schism of 484-519

My recent posts (January 10th; January 14th; and January 17th) on the Eastern Schism elicited some lively responses. Most engaging for me personally were some thoughtful comments from Dan Jones protesting Rome's notion of Papal Primacy based on the assumption that Catholic ecclesiology, centered on the Holy See and Vicar of Christ, is a historical development emanating from a faulty neo-Platonic theology of "absolute simplicity" found in Western Christology and theology of Original Sin. Whether this bold inference, and the assumption on which it is based, stand the test of reason is a discussion for another time. However, I am particularly struck here by the singular absence of comment from the Eastern Orthodox quarter on some historical data that seem to me all but ineluctable. My first post offered several examples of testimony to Papal Primacy in the ancient Church. Rather than address these directly, our friends turn to arcane theological considerations, claiming that these are the root of the problem with the Western assumption of Papal Primacy. However, their theological case is far from clear, and more importantly it ignores the blatant historical fact that the early Church accepted Papal Primacy right up through the history of the Church they claim to be Orthodox, as opposed to Catholic. As an example of what I mean, I offer a discussion of the Acacian Schism of 484-519. You can find it in my post for January 19th on my Scripture and Catholic Tradition blog.

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