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Damasus (366–84), who had served as deacon under both Liberius and Felix, would inherit some of the consequences of his predecessor’s exile. His election in 366 was contested, and he was confronted by a rival pope, Ursinus, whom he only got rid of with the help of the city police and a murderous rabble. Damasus was a firm opponent of Arianism and, with the support of a new and orthodox emperor, would resolutely stamp out heresy within thecity. But the street battles and massacres of Ursinus’ supporters with which his pontificate had begun left him vulnerable to moral attack, and very much dependent on the goodwill and support of the city and imperial authorities.
    Damasus was also wary of taking sides in the quarrels which were still tearing apart the Church in the East. Hard-pressed supporters of Nicaea in the East like Basil the Great repeatedly begged his support. Damasus stalled, and sent a series of lofty letters eastwards, addressing his fellow bishops there not as ‘brothers’, the traditional formula, but as ‘sons’, a claim to superiority which was noticed and resented. With no intention of embroiling himself in the nightmare complexities of the Eastern theological debates, he thought the right procedure was for the bishops of the East to establish their orthodoxy by signing Roman formulas. His position was enormously strengthened by the accession as emperor of the Spanish General Theodosius, a devout Catholic who detested Arianism and who in February 380 issued an edict requiring all the subjects of the empire to follow the Christian religion ‘which Holy Peter delivered to the Romans … and as the Pontiff Damasus manifestly observes it’. In the following year Theodosius summoned a general council at Constantinople – the first since Nicaea – and this Council, at which no Western bishops were present and to which Damasus did not even send delegates, succeeded in formulating a creed, incorporating the Nicene Creed, which provided a satisfactory solution to the Arian debates. This Constantinopolitan/Nicene Creed is still recited every Sunday at Catholic and Anglican eucharists.
    But, in addition to its doctrinal work, the Council of Constantinople issued a series of disciplinary canons, which went straight to the heart of Roman claims to primacy over the whole Church. The Council decreed that appeals in the cases of bishops should be heard within the bishop’s own province – a direct rebuttal of Rome’s claim to be the final court of appeal in all such cases. It went on to stipulate that ‘the Bishop of Constantinople shall have the pre-eminence in honour after the Bishop of Rome, for Constantinople is new Rome’. 17
    This last canon was totally unacceptable to Rome for two reasons. In the first place it capitulated to the imperial claim to control of the Church, since Constantinople had nothing but the secular status of the city to justify giving it this religious precedence. Worse, however, the wording implied that the primacy of Rome itself was derived notfrom its apostolic pedigree as the Church of Peter and Paul, but from the fact that it had once been the capital of empire. Damasus and his successors refused to accept the canons, and the following year a council of Western bishops at Rome issued a rejoinder, declaring that the Roman see had the primacy over all others because of the Lord’s promise to Peter – ‘Tu es Petrus’ – and because both Peter and Paul had founded the see. The bishops went on to specify that if Rome was the first See of Peter, then the second was not Constantinople, but Alexandria, because it had been founded from Rome by St Mark on the orders of Peter, and the third in precedence was Antioch, because Peter had once been bishop there before he came to Rome.
    Damasus’s pontificate exposed the growing rift between Eastern and Western perceptions of the religious importance of Rome. The troubles of Liberius had made it clear that imperial oversight of the