December 2020
Vol. VIII, No. 12
A gold glass (the bottom of a vessel with gold inserted between layers of glass) with the busts of Peter, pope Damasus and two other saints, from the Roman catacombs, fourth century. Photo: CKD, RU Nijmegen.
Damasus certainly was not the only one who recognised the potential of the apostle Peter as an anchor for Roman affairs. In fact, the reception of Peter is larger in the Latin West than in the Greek East. The Roman claim to the apostle was very old and remained uncontested, as far as we know. Surely, Peter did come from the East, as Damasus “deliberately” admitted: moreover, the main text about his life, that promulgated the story of his martyrdom in Rome, was written in Greek, came from Syria (probably) and dates to 180 CE. It was the tradition of Peter’s death in Rome (impossible to prove historically, although not inconceivable) that determined the reception of the apostle. This tradition was very old and, as a consequence, extremely prestigious.
Once Christianity had risen to power during the reign of Constantine (306-337 CE) and a full-blown Christian society and culture emerged, the apostle Peter could function as an anchor to all kinds of societal, political, religious and cultural innovations. Historical developments do not bother about historians’ periodizations, such as Antiquity or Middle Ages. Therefore, in the conference I co-organised in 2017 and in the resulting proceedings The Early Reception and Appropriation of the Apostle Peter (60-800). The Anchors of the Fisherman it was attempted to overcome these boundaries: although we were scholars working in different disciplines and traditions and on different historical periods we used one concept: Anchoring Innovation.
This concept, developed by professor Ineke Sluiter and used in classical research programmes in the Netherlands, does not take innovations in Antiquity at face value: it asks why they were there and what explains their success. Some innovations completely failed (one may think of the alternative location for Peter’s death at the current Tempietto by Bramante in Rome that never could eclipse the Vatican), others were extremely successful, such as the introduction of a Galilean fisherman as the founding father of the Christian community in Rome. But innovations need anchors: something (a place, an object, a ritual, a way of thinking) or someone (a hero, a saint, Peter), in other words, an anchor, to connect to in order to make the new look familiar.
Peter was a perfect anchor: he was rooted in Roman society from very early onwards, leader of the apostles according to the gospels, martyr of the Christian faith under an emperor with a diabolic reputation (Nero was even branded as the antichrist in early Christian times) and a humble fisherman with whom ordinary people could also identify. This anchor was therefore cast in many places. We find the anchoring process in inscriptions, as in the one quoted above and other papal epigraphy, but also in architecture (St. Peter’s, San Sebastiano, but also in many others), literature (Prudentius’ hymns, Sedulius’ Biblical epic), art (sarcophagi, mosaics), ritual (liturgy), nomenclature (the pope’s claim of the title pontifex maximus, still used) and elsewhere. Christian innovators made use of the prestige of the apostle in order to be accepted and successful.
Peter, the fisherman. Mosaic from Ravenna, sixth century. (Photo: CKD, RU Nijmegen)
After the first phase, in which the reception of the figure of Peter was still very much determined by the (Eastern) sources of the New Testament and apocryphal texts, the figure of the apostle was anchored fairly well in Rome: innovations could now also be anchored in places and traditions that had recently been created in the capital. The dispute with Simon the Magician, reported in the book of Acts and taking place in far-away Samaria, was transported to Rome, where the imprints of the knees of Peter and Paul can still be admired in the Santa Francesca Romana church: the apostles genuflected in prayer at the Forum Romanum asking the Lord to pull down the flying (!) magician (the prayer was heard). Again, as in the case of Damasus, it is clear that Peter’s Eastern origin could be transformed to a Roman belonging in creative ways.
These transformations were closely connected to many other fascinating issues, such as the relationship between Peter and Paul. The two were closely connected from the very beginnings of the petrine cult, but every now and then groups tried to promote the one over the other. Roman history was dealt with by replacing the bloody foundation of the city of Rome by Romulus and Remus, where the latter was killed by the former, by a symbolical foundation of Christian Rome, realised by the two apostles. Just as the geographical centre of Rome, the Forum, was claimed by Christians as décor for the biography of the apostle, Roman traditions were creatively reworked into a narrative that offered a place to the apostle, to whom the keys of heaven were trusted by Christ.
It was not only Peter’s position and Rome’s prestige, but first and foremost the potential of Peter to function as an anchor that brought the apostle to other remote places. From Rome, the reception of the apostle became widespread and was taken over in examples such as early Christian sarcophagi in France or liturgical texts in Gaul and Spain. Here the book ends: it is up to others to show how anchoring processes around the apostle continued through the Renaissance into modern times, until the present day.
Roald Dijkstra is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at KU Leuven.
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