Ecclesiastical Letter - Letters of The Popes in The Period of The Early Church

Letters of The Popes in The Period of The Early Church

The popes began early, by virtue of the Primacy of the Roman Pontiff, to issue canon laws as well for the entire Church as for individuals, in the form of letters which popes sent either of their own will or when application was made to them by synods, bishops or individual Christians.

Apart from the Epistles of the Apostle Peter, the first example of this is the Letter of Pope Clement I (90-99?) to the Corinthians, in whose community there was grave dissension. Only a few papal letters of the first three Christian centuries have been preserved in whole or part, or are known from the works of ecclesiastical writers. As soon as the Church was recognized by the (Roman) State and could freely spread in all directions, the papal primacy of necessity began to develop, and from this time on the number of papal letters increased.

No part of the Church and no question of faith or morals failed to attract the papal attention. The popes called these letters; with reference to their legal character, decreta, statuta, decretalia constituta, even when the letters were often hortatory in form. Thus Siricius, in his letter of the year 385 to Himerius of Tarragona, a Greek Sophist, Rhetorician and archbishop of Tarragona. Or the letters were called sententiœ, i. e. opinions; prœcepta; auctoritates. On the other hand more general letters, especially those of dogmatic importance, were also called at times tomi; indiculi; commonitoria; epistolae tractoriae, or simply tractatoriae.

If the matter were important, the popes issued the letters not by their sole authority, but with the advice of the Roman presbytery or of a synod. Consequently such letters were also called epistolae synodiae. By epistola synodica was also understood in Christian antiquity the letter of the newly elected bishop or pope by which he notified the other bishops of his elevation and of his agreement with them in the Faith. Thus an epistola of this kind had a certain relationship to the litterae formatae by which a bishop certified, for presentation to another bishop, to the orthodoxy and unblemished moral character of an ecclesiastic of his diocese. Closely related to the litterae formatae are the litterae dimissoriae (dimissorials) by which a bishop sends a candidate for ordination to another bishop to be ordained.

While these names indicate sufficiently the legal character of the papal letters, it is to be noted that the popes repeatedly demanded in explicit terms the observance of their decrees; thus Siricius, in his letter of the year 385 to Himerius, and Innocent I in his letter of the year 416 addressed to Decentius, Bishop of Gubbio. In the same manner they repeatedly required from the persons to whom they wrote that these should bring the letter in question to the notice of others. Thus again Siricius, in his letter to Himerius; and Pope Zosimus, in the year 418 to Hesychius of Sabona.

In order to secure such knowledge of the papal laws, several copies of the papal letters were occasionally made and dispatched at the same time. In this way arose the letters a pari: a paribus uniformes, ta isa.

Following the example of the Roman emperors, the popes soon established archives (scrinium) in which copies of their letters were placed as memorials for further use, and as proofs of authenticity. The first mention of papal archives is found in the Acts of a synod held about 370 under Pope Damasus I. Pope Zosimus also makes mention in 419 of the archives. Nevertheless, forged papal letters appeared even earlier than this. But by far the greater number of the papal letters of the first millennium have been lost; only the letters of pope Leo I, edited by the Ballerini brothers, the "Registrum Epistolarum" of Gregory I, edited by Ewald and Hartmann, and the "Registrum Epistolarum" of Gregory VII, edited by Jaffé, have been more or less completely preserved.

As befitted their legal importance, the papal letters were also soon incorporated in the collections of canon law. The first to collect the epistles of the popes in a systematic and comprehensive manner was the monk Dionysius Exiguus, at the beginning of the sixth century. In this way the papal letters took rank with the canons of the synods as of equal value and of equal obligation. The example of Dionysius was followed afterwards by almost all compilers of the canons, Pseudo-Isidore and the Gregorian canonists, e.g. Anselm of Lucca, Deusdedit etc.