«Quis es? Sacerdos magnus, summus Pontifex». Some stages in the elaboration of papal primacy and the Old Testament tradition between the 11th and 12th centuries

Abstract

The study examines a number of sources, (in particular: De consideratione by Bernard of Clairvaux, Ep. 48 by Pier Damiani, Descriptio ecclesiae lateranensis, De sacra imagine Ss. Salvatoris in palatio lateranensi, Descriptio ecclesiae vaticanae) produced in Rome especially at the Lateran basilica and the monastery of the Three Fountains between the mid-11th and mid-12th centuries. Recourse to themes and elements of the Old Testament tradition can be traced, and the texts can be placed in connection with a tradition of recovery and reworking of Old Covenant traditions in relation to the process of defining papal primacy in the context of ecclesiastical reform between the mid-11th and mid-12th centuries.

The recovery of the Old Covenant tradition and, within this, in the midst of the process of progressive self-awareness and universal affirmation of the prerogatives of the papal figure, the development and insistence on certain themes prove particularly congenial and effective, such as, for example, the juxtaposition between the figure of the pontiff and Melchizedek, the figure of the sacred priest-king. From the beginning of the 13th century the supremacy of the Lateran and its identification with the figure of the pontiff seemed to lose that character of axiomaticity that they seemed to possess during the previous century. We are at the end of a trajectory in which the figure of the pope and his attributes became more defined and connoted with an eschatological character that helped project the figure of the pope, vicar of Christ, into a dimension of universal pre-eminence. The indissoluble bond between the pope and the Lateran may begin to loosen and the links with the Old Testament tradition and the interpretation of the figure and role of the pope in a prophetic/monastic/eschatological key in connection with the themes of the Old Covenant seem to weaken, but it does not disappear, rather it continues to flow karstly, one only has to admire the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to be aware of this.