how it was illustrated by symbol in the monuments of the Catacombs; we have heard the language of Prudentius, calling St. Peter the leader of the new Israel; to these we must add the testimony of an Eastern solitary, the Egyptian St. Macarius, who lived some fifty years earlier, and who states the same thing more distinctly, saying that “Moses was succeeded by Peter,” and that “to him [St. Peter] was committed the new church and the new priesthood.”
We are far, however, from having done justice to the idea as it existed in the mind of the ancient church, if we separate the notion of Peter being a second Moses from that particular act in the life of the Jewish leader which we have seen specially attributed to the apostle—viz., the striking of the rock; and in our interpretation of this act we must be careful to take into account all that the ancient Fathers understood by it. Let us listen to the commentary upon it preached in a public sermon somewhere about the middle of the fifth century. Speaking in Turin on the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, St. Maximus uses these words:
“This is Peter, to whom Christ the Lord of his free will granted a share in his own name; for, as the Apostle Paul has taught us, Christ was the rock; and so Peter too was by Christ made a rock, the Lord saying to him: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ For as water flowed from a rock to the Lord’s people thirsting in the wilderness, so did the fountain of a life-giving confession come forth from the mouth of Peter to the whole world wearied with the thirst of unbelief. This is Peter, to whom Christ, when about to ascend to his Father, commends his lambs and sheep to be fed and guarded.”
The doctrine which is here taught is plain and undeniable. Allusion
is clearly made to a twofold idea: first, Christ in his own nature is the shepherd of the sheep, and the rock whence flows the fount of living water in the desert; but by an act of his own sovereign will, by his own special appointment, when about to leave the world, he assigns the office of chief shepherd to Peter, and he communicates to Peter a share in his own attributes, so that he too from henceforth becomes a rock whereon the church is built, and from him flows the fount of heavenly doctrine and life-giving faith which was first revealed to him by the Father, and then by him proclaimed and preached throughout the whole dry desert of the world.
Did this thought originate with the Bishop of Turin? Was it a conceit of his own fancy, the fruit of a lively imagination? Or are his words only a link in the chain of ancient tradition, handing on to others the same truth which he had himself received from his forefathers?
One thing is certain: that the pope was preaching the very same thing in Rome about the same time. Each year, as the feast of SS. Peter and Paul—which was also the anniversary of his own consecration—came round, Pope Leo exhorted the bishops and others who heard him to lift up their minds and hearts, to consider the glory of the Prince of the Apostles, who was inundated (he said) by such copious irrigations from the fount of all graces that whereas there were many which he alone received, none passed to anybody else without his having a share in them. “The divine condescension,” he says again, “gave to this man a great and wonderful participation in his own power, so that, though he chose that some things should be common to him with the other
apostles, yet he never gave except through him what he did not withhold from the rest”; and then he goes on to interpret the words of Christ to Peter in this manner; he says: “The formation of the universal church at its birth took its beginning from the honor of Blessed Peter, in whose person its rule and its sum consist; for from his fountain the stream of ecclesiastical discipline flowed forth into all churches.” Twenty years earlier Pope Innocent praises an African council for having referred some question to Rome, “knowing what is due to the Apostolic See, since all we who occupy this place desire to follow the apostle himself, from whom the very episcopate and all the authority of this title spring; that nothing, even in the most distant parts of the world, should be determined before it was brought to the knowledge of this see; … that so all waters should flow from their parent source and the pure streams of the fountain should well forth uncorrupted throughout the different regions of the whole world.”
It may be said, perhaps, that these are mere figures of speech and rhetorical illustrations, and that there is no proof that the writers intended any reference whatever to the miraculous stream from the rock in the desert.
We cannot, in reply to this question, undertake to trace back an unbroken catena of authorities, from the fifth century to the first, clearly expressing the same idea; but we can say with truth that it is continually recurring in all writings which have occasion to speak of the unity of the church, especially in the controversies of the third century against the Novatians; that the types of the rock and the fount, symbols of the origin and unity of