A Roman Loyalist and the Undivided Church

No feature of Boniface’s life is more liable to anachronistic misreading than his loyalty to Rome. He swore an oath of obedience to the apostolic see, received the pallium, served as papal legate, and bound his whole mission to the authority of the pope — and a reader looking back across the schism of 1054 may be tempted to see in this either a proto-papalism to be claimed by one side or an embarrassment to be explained by the other. This file insists on reading Boniface’s Roman loyalty strictly in its own pre-Schism setting: what it meant in the eighth century, what it did not yet mean, and why the schism cannot honestly be projected backward onto a saint of the undivided Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

The Fact of His Roman Loyalty

There is no minimizing the fact. Boniface’s attachment to Rome was deep, deliberate, and lifelong. He went to Rome to receive his commission rather than be ordained at home; he took a new name from the pope’s hand; he swore, on the body of Saint Peter, an oath of obedience to the apostolic see; he received the pallium and acted as papal legate; he organized the German church on the Roman pattern and bound it to Roman canonical order; and he made his reform of the Frankish church an extension of Roman discipline (see The Commission from Rome; Tangl 16 / Emerton, Letter 16; trans. Emerton 1940). His correspondence with three popes is among the warmest and most deferential in the collection. To call him a Roman loyalist is simply accurate.

The question is not whether he was loyal to Rome but what that loyalty meant — and here the discipline of reading in historical context is everything (METHODOLOGY §4).

What It Meant in the Eighth Century

In the eighth century the Church was undivided. Rome was the senior apostolic see of the West — the see of Peter and Paul, the touchstone of orthodoxy and canonical order in the Latin half of Christendom, possessed of immense and genuine prestige — and it was one of the five great patriarchal sees (Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem) of a single Church that confessed one faith, held seven councils in common (the seventh, Nicaea II, would meet in 787, a generation after Boniface’s death), and recognized in the bishop of Rome a primacy of honor and a special witness to the apostolic faith (Ware 1993; on the undivided Church, The Pre-Schism Church). For a Western churchman of Boniface’s day, loyalty to Rome was loyalty to the first see of his own portion of the one Church — the natural anchor of orthodoxy and order for a Latin Christian, and especially for an Anglo-Saxon, whose church had been founded by a Roman mission and had chosen Rome at Whitby (see Wessex and the Anglo-Saxon Church).

For a missionary in particular, the Roman connection had a concrete and defensible logic. It gave Boniface an authority independent of the unstable and often-corrupt local powers; it supplied a single coherent canonical and liturgical standard to plant in a disordered church; and it lent his foundations a legitimacy no local patron could match (Wood 2001; Sullivan 1953; see The Commission from Rome). His Roman loyalty was, in its setting, the loyalty of an orthodox Western Christian to the senior apostolic see of the undivided Church, harnessed to the practical needs of mission.

What It Did Not Mean

It is here that anachronism must be refused. Boniface’s loyalty to Rome did not mean, and could not have meant, the things that the word “papacy” would come to carry after the divisions of later centuries (METHODOLOGY §4; Ware 1993). It did not mean the doctrine of papal infallibility, defined only in 1870. It did not mean the universal, immediate jurisdiction of the pope over every diocese in the manner of the high-medieval and modern Roman Church. It did not mean assent to the Filioque as a dogma imposed on the universal Church — the Filioque was not yet part of the Roman creed in Boniface’s day, and the controversy over it lay in the future. It did not mean any of the specific doctrinal and jurisdictional claims over which East and West would eventually divide in 1054 and after, because those claims had not yet been formulated (Ware 1993; Wood 2001). To read Boniface’s oath to Peter’s see as an endorsement of the later papal monarchy is to read into the eighth century a Rome that did not yet exist.

Boniface’s oath itself, read in context, is the oath of a missionary bishop to maintain the faith and unity of the Roman Church and to remain in canonical obedience to it — modeled on the oath of the suburbicarian bishops of the Roman province, a disciplinary and canonical bond, not a charter of the later papal claims (Tangl 16 / Emerton, Letter 16; Levison 1946). That such an oath would later be cited in defense of expanded papal authority is a fact about later history, not about Boniface’s intention or the meaning the act bore in 722.

Even-Handedness in Both Directions

The discipline of non-anachronism cuts both ways, and honesty requires acknowledging both. On one side, it is anachronistic for a Roman Catholic reading to enlist Boniface as a witness for the later developed papacy: his Roman loyalty was real but belonged to the undivided Church and did not contain the later dogmas in germ in any way he would have recognized (Ware 1993). On the other side, it is equally anachronistic for an Orthodox reading to treat his Roman loyalty as an embarrassment or a deviation requiring apology: in the eighth century, loyalty to the orthodox see of Rome was not a betrayal of Orthodoxy but an expression of it, for Rome was then orthodox and in communion with the East, and the Anglo-Saxon devotion to Rome was the devotion of saints whom the Orthodox Church honors (Ware 1993; on Boniface’s veneration, see The Orthodox Reception). Boniface cannot be claimed by the post-Schism papacy, and he need not be defended against it; he belongs to the time before the wound, when loyalty to Rome and Orthodox faith were not yet two things.

The Saint Before the Schism

The right way to hold Boniface, then, is as a saint of the undivided Church whose Roman loyalty is a fact of pre-Schism history, neither to be weaponized nor to be apologized for. He served the see of Rome when that see was orthodox and the Church was one; his oath, his pallium, his legatine work, and his alliance-building all belong to the first millennium and must be read in its terms (METHODOLOGY §4; see The Papacy and the Carolingians). The schism that would later make “Rome” a contested word was three centuries in the future and entirely outside his horizon. To project it onto him — in either direction — is to falsify the history and to lose the saint. What Boniface knew was one Church, with Rome its first Western see; what he gave his life to was the planting of that one Church’s faith among the heathen; and that is how the Orthodox tradition, which honors the pre-Schism Western saints, rightly receives him (see Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, which concerns the later divergence not present in his day).

References

The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (The oath of obedience to the apostolic see, Letter 16; the papal correspondence.)
Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The form and model of Boniface’s oath.)
Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The strategic and contextual meaning of Boniface’s Roman loyalty.)
Sullivan, Richard E. “The Carolingian Missionary and the Pagan.” Speculum 28 (1953): 705–740. (The institutional logic of Roman-authorized mission.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The undivided Church of the first millennium; the primacy of Rome before the schism; the pre-Schism Western saints.)