Last modified on Tuesday August 03, 2004 at 9:39 PM EDT
From another point of view, there is bound to be an hierarchical gradation in spiritual fatherhood in proportion to the extent of the social units which it embraces. We know that the Church is natural humanity transubstantiated. Now natural humanity is constituted on the analogy of a living body. A physical body is a complex unity made up of relatively simple units of different degrees in a complicated relationship of subordination and coordination.
The main degrees of this physical hierarchy are three in number. The lowest degree is represented by the relatively simple units, the elementary organs or organic elements of the body. In the middle degree we find the limbs of the body and its organs properly so called, which are more or less composite. Finally, all these members and organs are subordinate to the unity of the whole body controlled by a central organ.
Similarly in the political organism of natural humanity, which was to be regenerated by Christianity, relatively simply units — tribes, clans, rural communities, small states — were united in composite collectivities more or less subdivided, nations at different stages of development, provinces of varying extent; finally all the provinces and nations were united in the universal monarchy, governed by a unique social organ, the city of Rome, a city which concentrated in itself the whole world and was at once urbis et orbis.
This was the organism which was to be transubstantiated by Christianity. The body, historic humanity, was to be regenerated in every part in accordance with the order of its composition. And since Christ established a spiritual fatherhood as the basis of this regeneration, that fatherhood had to take form in accordance with the given variations in the forms of society.
There were therefore three degrees in the spiritual fatherhood or the priesthood: each primary social community or village, transubstantiated into a Church, received a spiritual father or priest; and all these priests together formed the lower clergy or the priesthood properly speaking. The provinces of the Empire, transubstantiated into eparchies or dioceses of different orders, each formed a large family with a common father in the person of the archiereus or bishop, the immediate father of the priests under him and through them of all the faithful of his diocese.
But all the spiritual social units of this second order represented by the episcopate, the particular Churches of cities, provinces and nations governed by prelates of all degrees (simple bishops, archbishops, metropolitans, primates or patriarchs) are only members of the Universal Church which must itself be manifest as a higher unit embracing all these members. The mere juxtaposition of its parts is not in fact enough to constitute a living body. It must possess a formal unity or substantial form which definitely embraces in actuality all the particular units, the elements and organs of which the body is composed.
And if the particular spiritual families which between them make up mankind are in reality to form a single Christian family, a single Universal Church, they must be subject to a common fatherhood embracing all Christian nations. To assert that there exist in reality nothing more than national Churches is to assert that the members of a body exist in and for themselves and that the body itself has no reality.
On the contrary, Christ did not found any particular Church. He created them all in the real unity of the Universal Church which He entrusted to Peter as the one supreme representative of the divine Fatherhood towards the whole family of the sons of Man.
It was by no mere chance that Jesus Christ specially ascribed to the first divine hypostasis, the heavenly Father, that divine-human act which made Simon Bar-Jona the first social father of the whole human family and the infallible master of the school of mankind.
'It is not flesh and blood which have revealed it to thee — but My Father Who is in heaven.' God the Holy Trinity is as indivisible in His action ad extra as in His inner life. If St. Peter was divinely inspired, it was by God the Son and God the Holy Ghost as much as by God the Father, and since it was a matter of inspiration it might have seemed more appropriate to make special mention of the Holy Spirit who spake by the prophets.
But it is just here that we see the divine reason which governed every word of Christ, and the universal significance of His utterance to Peter. For it was not a matter of asserting that in this particular instance Simon had been inspired from above; that was as possible for him as for any of his fellows. But it was a matter of establishing in his favor the unique institution of universal fatherhood in the Church, the image and instrument of the divine Fatherhood; and therefore it was above all to the heavenly Father that the supreme reason and sanction for this institution was to be referred.
―Russia and the Universal Church, pp. 198–200