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Council and Pope: The Modern Relevance of Conciliarism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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Late-medieval conciliarism provides one theoretical model for the structure of the church, and in particular for its decision-making processes. The development of councils as a means of settling disputes which could not be settled at the local, episcopal level, and of making decisions binding on the church as a whole, in particular of defining the true faith, remains, so far as I am aware, still clouded in our fragmentary knowledge of the early church. But we may guess that the use of councils developed steadily and ‘organically’, as did the priesthood and episcopate, as the church developed its own (in many ways) unique structure in response to the needs of the time. The same appears to be true of the development of the Roman primacy. The notion that the Roman church was the final court of appeal in theological and ecclesiastical disputes, and the corresponding notion that it was incapable of error, were first developed (though I do not know how widely they were accepted in the East) in the late 4th and 5th centuries. Some, such as St Athanasius, regarded the consent of Rome as the touchstone of a true council. ‘Infallibility’ as applied to the Roman see in this sense was thus a very ancient doctrine, and some have found it as early as I Clement (96 AD.). But it was quite a different matter to say that the Roman see (or even the pope in person) could pronounce a final, binding decision on a matter of faith without an oecumenical council. As Professor Tierney has recently shown, papal ‘infallibility’ in this ‘strong’ sense was a product of disputes between the friars and the French episcopate in the late 13th Century, and it was accepted by very few prior to the Council of Florence (1439), and not all that widely thereafter. The normal view of medieval canon-lawyers was that the pope was supreme in jurisdiction, i.e. his word was law in settling disputes, but that as regards defining faith a council was required; indeed, in matters of faith, he was both fallible and impeachable.
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- Copyright © 1975 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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