Die erste Dekretale: Der Brief Papst Siricius' an Bischof Himerius von Tarragona vom Jahr 385 (JK 255): Aus dem Nachlass mit Ergänzungen herausgegeben von Detlev Jasper by Klaus Zechiel-Eckes (review)

After his fabled victory at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine ended the persecutions of Diocletian and extended to Christianity the status of a tolerated religion, one with powerful support from the uppermost reaches of the imperial government. Thirteen years later, bishops from across Christendom convened at Nicaea under the emperor’s aegis. As a robust conciliar tradition emerged, Peter’s successors awaited the institutional and bureaucratic developments befitting their central position in the empire. A great part of these accrued during the reign of Theodosius. The edict Cunctos populos, promulgated at Thessalonica on 28 February 380, bound Roman subjects to profess the faith proclaimed by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria, formally enforcing Nicene orthodoxy. The preceding years had seen legislation establishing procedural rules for ecclesiastical courts, freeing Christian clergy from public service and taxation, and proscribing heresy. These measures coincided with the pontificate of Pope Damasus I (d. 384), who brought to bear a corresponding insistence on the authority and the dignity of his office. Among other things, he articulated a vision of Roman primacy that circumvented the rival claims of other sees by drawing on Jesus’s familiar statement to Peter in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Upon this rock I will build my church. . . And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven’ (Matt. 16:16-18).