THE CHURCH IN CRISIS
A History of the ecumenical councils
Introduction to General (Ecumenical) Councils
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: On Councils and General Councils
First General Council of Nicaea, 325
First General Council of Constantinople, 381
General Council of Ephesus, 431
General Council of Chalcedon, 451
Second General Council of Constantinople, 553
Third General Council of Constantinople, 680-81
Second General Council of Nicaea, 787
Fourth General Council of Constantinople, 869-70
First General Council of the Lateran, 1123
Second General Council of the Lateran, 1139 |
Third General Council of the Lateran, 1179
Fourth General Council of the Lateran, 1215
First General Council of Lyons, 1245
Second General Council of Lyons, 1274
General Council of Vienne, 1311-12
General Council of Constance, 1414-18
General Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence, 1431-45
Fifth General Council of the Lateran, 1512-17
General Council of Trent, 1545-63
First General Council of the Vatican, 1869-70
Appendix |
Introduction: On Councils and General Councils
The history of the General Councils of the Church is a fascinating subject,
and to those unfamiliar with the history of the Church a subject which
bristles with difficulties of all kinds. This, I think, ought to be
understood from the beginning. Some of the problems raised by this or that
particular council will be considered in the chapter devoted to it. About
difficulties general to the subject I would like to say something in this
Introduction.
It is hardly possible to write the history of these twenty General Councils
as though they were sections hewn from the one same log. They are not a
unity in the sense in which successive sessions of Congress are a unity.
Each of the twenty councils is an individual reality, each has its own
special personality. This is partly due to the fact that each had its
origin in a particular crisis of Church affairs, partly to the fact that
they are strung out over fifteen hundred years of history, and that, for
example, the human beings who constitute the council can be as remote from
each other as the victims of the persecution of Diocletian in the fourth
century from the victims of Bismarck in the nineteenth. It is not through
any mechanical, material similarity of action, then, that the history of
such an institution, and its significance, can be understood. Where the
total action is spread over such vast spaces of time, and is discontinuous,
whoever attempts to relate the whole of the action is faced with problems
of a very special kind. And this speciality is, of course, bound up with
the fact that the body which threw up this device called the General
Council--the Church of Christ-- is itself unique in this, viz., its
possession of a recorded, continuous activity of nearly two thousand years.
Some, perhaps superficial, consideration of this vast timetable, 325-1870,
may be helpful at the outset, even to the reader who is not, by nature,
chronologically minded. Reading the list of the General Councils we can see
immediately two obvious groupings: the first eight were all held in eastern
Europe or in Asia Minor; all the rest in western Europe, in Italy, France,
and Germany. The eastern councils were Greek-speaking, the others Latin.
General Councils are frequent in some ages, and in others the centuries go
by without a single one. Thus, for the seventy years 381-451 there are
three General Councils, then one every hundred years down to 869. For 254
years there is now not a single General Council; then, in 190 years there
are seven (1123-1311). Another century goes by without a council, and in
the next hundred years (1414-1512) three are summoned. The Council of Trent
is called less than thirty years after the last of these three, and then
306 years go by before the twentieth council meets in 1869 ninety-two years
ago nearly.
Each of these councils has a history and a character all its own. The
history of the next council--how matters will go once the bishops meet--can
never be foretold from the history of the last. The powers and the
authority of the new council are, it is recognised, the same as its
predecessors possessed. The procedure may, and will, vary. One thing is
never constant: the human reaction of the council's component parts.
The first General Council met in 325. The Church had then been an
established fact for nearly three hundred years. How did councils begin--
i.e., meetings of bishops to discuss matters of common interest? When and
where did the first church councils take place? And what about the
beginnings of the "prestige" of these councils? That is, of the idea that
what bishops collectively agree is law has a binding force that is greater
than any of their individual instructions to their own see.
To begin with the last point, it is a safe statement that from the moment
when history first shows us the Church of Christ as an institution, the
exclusive right of the Church to state with finality what should be
believed as Christ's teaching is manifestly taken for granted. To bring out
a theory of belief, or to propose a change in morals which conflicts with
what the Church universally holds is, from the very beginning, to put
oneself fatally in the wrong. The immediate, spontaneous reaction of the
Church to condemn thinkers with new and original views of this kind is
perhaps the most general, as it is the most striking, of all the phenomena
of the Church's early history, so far back as the record goes.[1]
When it was that bishops first formed the habit of coming together in
council, we do not know. It is such an obvious act, on the part of
officials with like problems and responsibilities and authority, that to do
this was second nature surely. What we do know is that as early as the
second century (100-200 A.D.) it was the custom for the bishops who came
together for a bishop's funeral to take charge of the election of his
successor. Here is one likely source, it is suggested, from which came the
council of bishops as a recurring feature of ordinary Christian life.
About the year 190 a furious controversy as to the date at which the feast
of Easter should be kept, shook the whole Church, and the pope, St. Victor
I, sent orders to the places most troubled that the bishops should meet and
report to him their findings. And a series of councils were then held, in
Palestine, in Asia Minor, and in Gaul. Sixty years later when, with the
great career of St. Cyprian, the mists clear away from Roman Africa, we
perceive that the bishops' council is already a long-established practice
there. The bishops of Africa meet in council, indeed, twice every year.
What they decreed on these occasions was law for the whole of Christian
Africa. These councils were well attended; in 220 there were seventy-one
bishops present, and at another council, ninety. At St. Cyprian's council
of Carthage in 256, there were eighty-seven. There was a similar,
systematic conciliar action in Egypt and in Syria and Palestine.
In the early years of the next century we have records of councils in Spain
(Elvira, 300) and in France (Arles, 314) with the names of bishops present
and a list of the laws they enacted. The Catholic Church may, indeed, be a
Church made up of churches (i.e., dioceses) but never, so this history
seems to show, of dioceses where each bishop acts without any reference to
the rest.
When the emperor Constantine publicly became a follower of Christ (312) he
was immediately faced with the grave African problem known to history as
the Donatist Schism. Necessarily, and in a very brief space of time, he was
familiarised with the function of the council of the bishops, as an
instrument of church government. It was natural, inevitable indeed, that
when a few years later the Arian crisis arose, all concerned, the emperor
and the bishops, should think of a great council as the first move in the
restoration of order. The novel feature in 325 was that not only the
bishops of the locality affected were convoked, but the bishops of the
whole Catholic world.[2] This was to be not a regional or provincial
council, but a council for the church in general--a General Council.
The universal belief that the Church of Christ, in its day-to-day business
of teaching the doctrine of Christ, is divinely preserved from teaching
erroneously, entailed the consequence that (to use a modern terminology)
the General Council is considered infallible in its decisions about belief.
If the official teachers as a body are infallible as they teach, scattered
about the world in their hundreds of sees, they do not lose the promised,
divine, preserving guidance once they have come together in a General
Council. And once General Councils have taken place we begin to meet
explicit statements of this truth. The councils themselves are explicitly
conscious of it when, making their statement of the truth denied by the
innovator, they bluntly say of those who will not accept their decision,
Let him be anathema. St. Athanasius, who as a young cleric was present at
Nicaea, can refer to its decree about Arianism as something final, the last
all-decisive word: "The word of the Lord, put forth by the Oecumenical
Council at Nicaea is an eternal word, enduring for ever."[3] Eighty years
or so later than this the pope, St. Leo I, warning the bishops assembled at
the General Council of Chalcedon to leave untouched the decisions of Nicaea
about the rank of the great sees of the East, speaks of Nicaea as "having
fixed these arrangements by decrees that are inviolable," and says, "These
arrangements were made by the bishops at Nicaea under divine
inspiration."[4] This was in the year 451. His successor, St. Gregory the
Great, writing about 594 to the patriarch of Constantinople, has a
reference to the special prestige of the first, doctrine-defining General
Councils which equates their work with that of Holy Scripture: "I profess
that as I receive and venerate the four books of the Gospels, so I do the
four councils," which he proceeds to list: Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in
381, Ephesus 431, Chalcedon 451. These, he says, "are the four squared
stone on which the structure of the holy faith arises."[5]
Nowhere in these early centuries, in fact, do we find any member of the
Church questioning the truth as the General Councils have defined it. What
they teach as the truth is taken to be as true as though it were a
statement of Scripture itself. The question was never raised, seemingly,
that the greater or smaller number of bishops who in response to the
summons attended, in any way affected the peculiar authority of the General
Council; nor the fact that all but all of these bishops were from the
Greek-speaking East.
How these fundamental, primitive notions developed, how all that they
seminally contained matured and expanded through the centuries, this is the
very subject-matter of the chapters that follow. And here will be found, in
its due place, some account of the controversies that later arose as to the
relation (the constitutional relation, so to speak) of the General Council
to its president the pope. What the role of the pope has been in the
General Council is, necessarily, a main topic of all these chapters. But it
may be useful to say a word about this here, and something also about the
nature of the bishops' role.
The General Council is then a purely human arrangement whereby a divinely
founded institution functions in a particular way for a particular purpose.
That divinely founded thing is the teaching Church, i.e., the pope and the
diocesan bishops of the Church of Christ. The teaching is an activity of
the Church that is continuous, never ceasing. The General Council of the
teaching Church, in all the sessions of the occasions on which it has met,
in the nineteen hundred years and more of the Church's history, has sat for
perhaps thirty years in all, at most. It is an exceptional phenomenon in
the life of the Church, and usually it appears in connection with some
great crisis of that life.
Ever since the popes were first articulate about the General Council, they
have claimed the right to control its action and, to take their place in it
(whether personally or by legates sent in their name) or by their
subsequent acceptance of the council, to give or withhold an approbation of
its decisions, which stamps them as the authentic teaching of the Church of
Christ. Only through their summoning it, or through their consenting to
take their place at it, does the assembly of bishops become a General
Council. No member of the Church has ever proposed that a General Council
shall be summoned and the pope be left out, nor that the pope should take
any other position at the General Council but as its president. The history
of the twenty General Councils shows that the bishops--a section of them--
not infrequently fought at the council the policies of the popes who had
summoned the council, and fought even bitterly. But in no council has it
been moved that the bishop of X be promoted to the place of the Bishop of
Rome, or that the Bishop of Rome's views be disregarded, and held of no
more account than those of the bishop of any other major see. There are,
indeed, gaps in our knowledge of the detail of all these events; the mist
of antiquity, at times, no doubt obscures our view, but through the mist at
its worst the general shape is ever discernible of a Roman Primacy
universally recognised, and submitted to, albeit (at times) unwillingly--
recognised and submitted to because, so the bishops believed, it was set up
by God Himself.
To the General Councils of the Church there have been summoned, in the last
850 years, as well as the bishops, other ecclesiastics of importance, the
General Superiors of religious orders, for example, and abbots of
particular monasteries. But these are present by concession. The essential
elements of the General Council are, in addition to the pope, the bishops
ruling their sees. And the bishops are present as the accredited witnesses
of what is believed throughout the Church. This is the traditional,
standard conception of their role on these occasions. And for typical
modern statements, contained in well-known textbooks used throughout the
Church today in hundreds of theological classrooms, this from Christian
Pesch, S.J.,[6] may be quoted: "The bishops do not come together in order
to think up something new out of their own minds, but in order to be
witnesses of the teaching received from Christ and handed out by the
Church"; and this too from Fr. Dominic Prummer, O.P.: The bishops gathered
in a General Council are not mere counsellors of the pope, but real
legislators; which is why each bishop signs the acta of the council as
follows: 'I, James, bishop of X, defining have subscribed my name.'"[7]
As to the role of the General Council vis-a-vis any controversy about the
Christian Faith, in connection with which it may have been summoned, this
has never been more luminously stated, in a single sentence, than by John
Henry Newman, with reference, indeed, to the first council of the great
series, but, as history alone would show, a statement true of them all. ".
. . it must be borne in mind that the great Council at Nicaea was summoned,
not to decide for the first time what was to be held concerning our Lord's
divine nature, but, as far as inquiry came into its work, to determine the
fact whether Arius did or did not contradict the Church's teaching, and, if
he did, by what sufficient tessera[8] he and his party could be excluded
from the communion of the faithful."[9] And Newman's own great hero, St.
Athanasius, writing only thirty-four years after Nicaea, has a similar
thought when he draws attention to the different way the Council of Nicaea
spoke when it was making laws about ecclesiastical discipline and when it
was facing the problem of Arius. "The fathers at Nicaea speaking of the
Easter feast say 'We have decided as follows.' But about the faith they do
not say 'We have decided,' but 'This is what the Catholic Church believes.'
And immediately they proclaim how they believe, in order to declare, not
some novelty, but that their belief is apostolic, and that what they write
down is not something they have discovered, but those very things which the
Apostles taught."[10]
This little book of mine--"little," surely, for it surveys twenty General
Councils and fifteen hundred years of history--has no claim on the reader's
notice beyond its purpose to say how each of these councils came to be, and
what each achieved. Many questions about General Councils as such, and
about particular General Councils, are inevitably not even alluded to. I
have no ambition to write a survey course in which everything is mentioned
and nothing taught. Nevertheless there are some serious matters that cannot
be omitted, and yet can only be dealt with summarily--the new theories
which became heresies, for example, and the orthodox statements of the
truth which the theories perverted. In summary accounts of such things the
impression is easily conveyed that these disputes are a mere war of words.
Actually, what any study of the voluminous writings on both sides reveals
is that the conflicting minds are of the first order, that the points at
issue are the fundamentals of revealed truth, and (a very important
circumstance that often has escaped the historian's notice) that the
contestants are passionately in earnest, not as rivals in scholarship or
philosophy, but as pastoral-minded bishops, anxious about the salvation of
men's souls. A master mind, reviewing a situation we shall shortly be
studying, affords an illustration of this.
"Cyril, it may be, was overharsh in the words he used, words used without
enough reflexion. Deep within him his passionate attachment to the truth
that Christ is a single being was intertwined with the innermost strands of
the mysticism of the East. For the disciple of Theodore of Mopsuestia, as
for the disciple of Pelagius, the question of the relations between man and
God is, above all, a question of merit and no-merit. In the great book of
deserts each man's account is kept in two columns, debit and credit. As a
man's merits pile up, as he lessens his faults, so does his situation
improve. At the end God balances the account, and places us according to
the excess of credit over debit. Moralism pure and simple, this way of
looking at things, and not religion at all. Where, in such a system, does
the Incarnation come in? or the cross of Christ? Here, Jesus Christ is our
model, nothing more. Here we never meet our true saviour, our redeemer, He
who by His divine presence purifies everything, lifts all to a higher
plane, consecrates all, makes divine beings of us so far as the limits of
our nature allow this communication of divinity.
"Very, very different is the spirit that gives life to the theology of St.
Cyril. Here, Jesus Christ is truly God-within-us. The Christian makes a
direct contact with Him, by a union of natures, a mysterious union indeed,
under the sacramental veil of the Eucharist. Through this body and this
blood he comes to make the contact with God, for these have, in Jesus
Christ, a union (equally a union of natures ) with divinity. . . . To the
poor peasant working in the fields of the Delta, to the dock labourer at
the port of Pharos, Cyril gives the message that, in this world, he can
touch God. And that through this contact, whence springs a mystical
kinship, he can receive an assurance about the life hereafter; not only the
guarantee that he is immortal, but that he will be immortal joined with
God."[11] Such can be the practical importance of "abstract theological
thought."
And, with reference to the stormy history of the first eight councils,
events of a thousand to sixteen hundred years ago, we may remind ourselves
that the actors here are Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians; their natural
temperament and sense of nationality was not a whit less ardent than it can
show itself to be in their descendants of this mid-twentieth century.
And now, to bring these introductory remarks to an end, it will perhaps be
helpful to draw attention to one feature particularly of the history of the
first seven councils. This is not so much the serious differences of
opinion as to the interpretation of the basic mysteries of the Christian
religion, which is their main concern, but rather the way these
differences, at times, seem to turn so largely on different ways of
understanding the terms used to express or explain the doctrine. Since all
this is likely to be unfamiliar to the general reader, to him I would say
some words of the great authority I have already made use of, a writer who
all his life was ever conscious that the course of true historical study is
strewn with difficulties.
"First of all," says Newman, "and in as few words as possible, and ex
abundanti cautela: Every Catholic holds that the Christian dogmas were in
the Church from the time of the Apostles; that they were ever in their
substance what they are now; that they existed before the formulas were
publicly adopted, in which, as time went on, they were defined and
recorded, and that such formulas, when sanctioned by the due ecclesiastical
acts, are binding on the faith of Catholics, and have a dogmatic
authority....
"Even before we take into account the effect which would naturally be
produced on the first Christians by the novelty and mysteriousness of
doctrines which depend for their reception simply upon Revelation, we have
reason to anticipate that there would be difficulties and mistakes in
expressing them, when they first came to be set forth by unauthoritative
writers. Even in secular sciences, inaccuracy of thought and language is
but gradually corrected; that is, in proportion as their subject-matter is
thoroughly scrutinized and mastered by the co-operation of many independent
intellects, successively engaged upon it. Thus, for instance, the word
Person requires the rejection of various popular senses, and a careful
definition, before it can serve for philosophical uses. We sometimes use it
for an individual as contrasted with a class or multitude, as when we speak
of having 'personal objections' to another; sometimes for the body, in
contrast to the soul, as when we speak of 'beauty of person.' We sometimes
use it in the abstract, as when we speak of another as 'insignificant in
person.' How divergent in meaning are the derivatives, personable,
personalities, personify, personation, personage, parsonage! This variety
arises partly from our own carelessness, partly from the necessary
developments of language, partly from the defects of our vernacular tongue.
"Language then requires to be refashioned even for sciences which are based
on the senses and the reason; but much more will this be the case, when we
are concerned with subject-matters, of which, in our present state, we
cannot possibly form any complete or consistent conception, such as the
Catholic doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. Since they are from the
nature of the case above our intellectual reach, and were unknown till the
preaching of Christianity, they required on their first promulgation new
words, or words used in new senses, for their due enunciation; and, since
these were not definitely supplied by Scripture or by tradition, nor for
centuries by ecclesiastical authority, variety in the use, and confusion in
the apprehension of them, were unavoidable in the interval.... Not only had
the words to be adjusted and explained which were peculiar to different
schools or traditional in different places, but there was the formidable
necessity of creating a common measure between two, or rather three
languages--Latin, Greek, and Syriac."[12]
NOTES
1. For a succinct, popular account of which cf. my own History of the
Church, vol. I, chaps. III, IV, passim. For an authoritative, documented
account cf. Pierre Batiffol, L'Eglise Naissante (the whole book). This has
been translated into English as Primitive Christianity.
2. The Greek word for "the whole world" is oikoumene, whence our modem
adjective "oecumenical," which is used with reference to councils of the
Church as an equivalent for "general."
3. Letter to the Africans, in Rouet de Journel S.J., Enchiridion
Patristicum, no. 792. The full titles of all books quoted will be found in
Appendix II.
4. Ibid., no. 2185.
5. Ibid., no. 2291.
6. Praelectiones Dogmaticae (5th ed., 1915) vol. 1, p. 313. The footnotes
in this book do not give the authorities for the statements in the text,
but only the source of the quotations.
7. Definiens subscripsi. The passage I have translated is in Prummer,
Manuale Theologiae Moralis, 5th ed., 1928, I, 119.
8. Testing token.
9. "Apostolical Tradition," an article in the British Critic, July 1836,
reprinted (1871, and many times since) in Essays, Critical and Historical,
vol. I, 125.
10. Epistola de Synodis, par. 5, in Rouet de Journel, S.J., Enchiridion
Patristicum, no. 785.
11 Monseigneur Louis Duchesne, Les Eglises separees, 38-40. I came across
this passage in Bardy, Les Luttes Christologiques apres le Concile de
Chalcedoine, i.e., Fliche and Martin, vol. 5, 273, n. 1.
12. J.H. Newman, On St. Cyril's Formula (1858), reprinted in Tracts,
Theological and Ecclesiastical (1874), pp. 287-90.
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