Early Christian Political Theories in the Works of Francis Dvorník

0493194 - SLÚ 2019 RIV CZ eng J - Článek v odborném periodiku
Vavřínek, Vladimír
Early Christian Political Theories in the Works of Francis Dvorník.
Byzantinoslavica. Roč. 76, 3 - Supplementum (2018), s. 65-77. ISSN 0007-7712
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378017
Klíčová slova: Dvorník, František * Christian political theories * Roman primacy * pentarchy * principle of Apostolicity
Obor OECD: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

The political thinking of the early Christianity had to cope with two fundamental problems: it was their relation to the Roman state, the relation between imperium (the secular power) and sacerdotium (the spiritual power), and the problem of inner hierarchic organization of the church structure that in the end culminated in the strives of the recognition of the primacy of the Roman see. After the permission of Christianity as one of the official religions the principle of adaptation of church institutions to the administrative structure of the Roman empire was accepted. Primacy of the bishop of Rome, the capital of the empire, was recognized without any objections. Nonetheless, when Constantinople a bit later tried to enforce its claim for a foremost position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy on the ground that it was the residential city of the emperors the bishops of Rome began to justify their primacy in the church claiming that as the successors of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, they were appointed at the head of the church by Christ himself. This principle of Apostolicity was later adopted in the East as well and became the ideological basis of the theory of church pentarchy, i.e. the co-operation of five leading patriarchal sees founded by Apostles of which the bishop of Rome was entitled to enjoy the honorary primacy only, but not any juridical rights. In the course of further evolution due to the different political conditions the church in the West attained either a total or at least a partial independence from the secular power while in Byzantium the two remained closely intertwined.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0289038