Three Sees of Peter in the Roman ecclesiological tradition of the end of the 4th — the first half of the 5th centuries

The article is devoted to the development in the Roman church tradition of the idea of a special status in the Universal Church of the three Peter’s sees: Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. The question of the origins of this ecclesiological construction is connected with the possibility of attributing the third part of the Decretum Gelasianum to the Council of Rome, 382. This hypothesis still causes debate in the scientific literature. The author analyzes references to the special status of Peter's sees in the subsequent tradition up to the middle of the 5th century. We are talking about the texts of Popes Innocent I, Boniface I and Leo the Great, as well as Praefatio longa, which is an introduction to the Nicene canons and dated from the same time. The peculiarity of these texts in comparison with the third part of the Decretum Gelasianum is the correlation in one form or another of the idea of the special ecclesiastical status of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch with the canons of Council of Nicaea (325). The 6th Nicene canon establishes the jurisdiction of the See of Alexandria over Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis and notes the special significance of Rome and Antioch, but in this text these sees do not line up in any hierarchy, in contrast to the texts of the Roman ecclesiological tradition. There is also no mention in this canon of St. Peter. Considering these circumstances, the author supports the dating of the third part of the Decretum Gelasianum by the period of the pontificate of Pope Damasus I (366–384), believing that the idea of the special status of the three Peter's sees was originally formulated without connection with the 6th canon of the Council of Nicaea, but then was further confirmed by a peculiar interpretation of this text. On the whole, the idea of special significance in the Universal Church of the three sees of Peter is interpreted in the article as a polemical construction, directed mostly against the claims of Constantinople to the status of the New Rome and not strongly correlated (unlike the later model of the pentarchy) with the really existing regional ecclesiatical structures.