The Essence of the Papacy and the Church: A Philosophical Analysis

This article offers a philosophical analysis of the papacy and the Church in the first millennium, and of their transformation in the Latin West after the Gregorian reforms, using Kit Fine’s non-modal essentialism and E. J. Lowe’s Four-Category Ontology. Its central thesis is the following: if this framework provides the correct individuation criteria for institutional entities, then, first, historical evidence supports the conclusion that the consensus-bound papacy of the early Church and the supremacy-based papacy of the modern Roman Catholic Church are numerically distinct ecclesiological realities, and that the first-millennium Church is numerically distinct from the post-Gregorian Church. And, second, this the same framework shows that Eastern Orthodoxy continues to preserve the ecclesial realities that are the first-millennium papacy and Church. Hence, the article argues that the post-Gregorian transition represents an ontological replacement of the papacy and the church of the first-millenium rather than an organic development, and that it is, in fact, the Eastern Orthodox Church constitutes the authentic continuation of these first-millennium ecclesiological realities. The framework thereby provides conceptual resources both for reframing the nature of the Great Schism as an asymmetrical divergence rather than a symmetrical rupture, and for identifying Eastern Orthodoxy as the tradition that preserves essential identity with the undivided Church of the first-millenium.

Keywords: Essentialism, Ecclesiology, Papacy, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy