Religion

On the Use of Honorifics

 

In “Papal Primacy in the First Councils, Part 7,” I stated:

Derek L. Ramsey

I now highlight that McCready calls him “Pope Saint Leo the Great.” This is quite a mouthful. I bring this up because effusive praise is not excellent grounds for an unbiased presentation. It would be one thing to quote the epideictic and panegyrical styles of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon as the tradition of the times. It would be quite another for a modern man to try to imitate that style unironically.

Well, it turns out this is not a unique phenomenon.

Twitter Thread
The Presbytery Inn

Protestantism didn’t arrive in 1517. Celtic Christians were already saying “The Pope of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm” in the 6th century.

St Columbanus in a letter to Boniface IV:

The position which Columbanus took up was substantially this—’Your jurisdiction as Bishop of Rome doesn ot extend beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. I am a missionary from a church of God among the Barbarians, and, though temporarily within the limits of your territorial jurisdiction and bound to regard you with respect and deference, I claim the right to follow the customs of my own church handed down to us by our fathers.’
Andrew Bylar

Come on man. He prays “the holy Pope, his Father“, to direct towards him “the strong support of his authority, to transmit the verdict of his favour”. He apologizes “for presuming to argue as it were, with him who sits in the chair of Peter, Apostle and Bearer of the Keys“.

…

Dissident South

It’s pedantically fallacious to cite honorifics.

2 Comments

  1. Eric Sanders

    I went and tried to read Columbanus’ letters. Nearly Unreadable because of the proffusion of honorifics. Which I assume is why the Catholic editors added them. I can’t and don’t believe these characters really said all that stuff, “holy father” and so on, especially when telling the pope that his doctrine is false and he’s got Easter on the wrong day. The Catholic editors had to add these honorifics in order to hide that the guy was against the pope; making him a daint is step 2. Step 1, edit his writings to praise the pope; step 2, make him a Catholuc saint. “See, he was Roman Catholic, brother.” Not buying it. Most of church history is fake and pure delusion. Just stick with the Bible. All these other documents are either purely made up or heavily edited by liars. But since they were so busy editing the canons of councils (or just inventing them whole cloth) and “saints” they pretty well didn’t have the time to do much to corrupt the Bible (pericope adulterae aside).

    1. Derek L. Ramsey

      Here is what I wrote in “Papal Primacy in the First Councils, Part 5:”

      My favorite part is where they call Dioscorus “the most devout bishop of Alexandria” even as they excommunicate him for supposed acts of treason and heresy. My second favorite part is where they call the Emperor—not Christ or the Bishop of Rome—”the divine head.”

      The honorifics contained in the Council of Chalcedon make the document almost unreadable and render its conclusions absurd.

      With respect to the use of excessive honorifics, there is a massive difference in tone between the canons of the councils in the 4th century before the rise of Roman Catholicism (i.e. Nicaea and Constantinople) and the ones after (i.e. Ephesus and Chalcedon) in the 5th century.

      The honorifics—like “most devout”—are formal lies that should have no place in the church. They utterly invalidate any and every alleged ecumenical authority ascribed to those latter councils.

      Here is Tim Kauffman’s analysis of what happens when you take Ignatius’ colorful language, full of honorifics, literally.

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