5. The Conciliar Movement.
It was natural that
there should be some tension in the Middle Ages
be-
tween the idea of the Church as the
entire community
of believers, collectively sustained and inspired by the
Holy Spirit, and the notion of a clerical hierarchy,
imposed
from above, and deriving a special authority
from outside the system, i.e.,
direct from Christ. It had
been noted that if Peter had received the power
of
“binding and loosing” (in Matthew 16:18-19)
this
particular prerogative had been extended after the
Resurrection
to all the Apostles (in John 20:22-23);
but though the effect of this was
to widen the basis
of authority in the Church, it did not in reality
override
the prevailing view that the bishop of Rome, as the
representative of Saint Peter, had the effective power
of government. The
term “Roman Church” was
ambiguous—it could
mean the local church of the city
of Rome but also it could signify the
entire congrega-
tion of the faithful. It
was the latter that was supposed
to be preserved against error, not in the
sense that
lapses here and there were impossible, but in the sense
that the Church in its entirety would never go astray—
there
would never be heresy in all its parts at a single
time.
Even this stress on the wide-ranging community of
believers, was not taken
to mean that the community
as such could carry on the work of government
without
the directing hand of the papacy; and those who glori-
fied General Councils of the Church
normally assumed
that the pope himself would actually summon these
bodies and lead them—that, indeed, his own authority
came to its
maximum when he worked through a
General Council. On the other hand, it was
possible
to consider that, though the church in Rome had played
a
distinguished part in the establishment and mainte-
nance of orthodoxy, the pope as a man might fall into
error; and
if he notoriously supported what had long
been regarded as heresy, his
authority would be ipso
facto at an end. It
came to be asserted that the same
would be true if he were publicly and
obviously guilty
of serious crime.
The possibility of such contingencies raised the
question of the part which
the College of Cardinals
or General Councils might have to play at the
moment
when the incapacity had to be declared. It has been
pointed out
that in canonist writers of about A.D. 1200
are to be found anticipations
of all the main assertions
of the Conciliar Movement. Yet this was the time
when
the papacy under Innocent III was making the highest
possible
claims and asserting that all other jurisdictions
in the Church were only a
derivation from Rome.
In the thirteenth century, however, the development
of the kind of canon law
which treated the Church
as a corporation tended to increase the possible
lever-
age of conciliar ideas. There now
appeared more of
the suggestion that a corporation is the source of
the
authority of its head, that all members of a corporation
should
take part in decisions which affect the whole
body, that a corporation could survive as a unity if
it lost
its head, and could take the necessary measures
to rectify the default in
the leadership. Such ideas were
able to develop at the very time when papal
publicists,
for their part, were continuing the line of thought
which
had brought the authority of Innocent III to
its height. Amongst writers
hostile to the papacy the
idea arises not only that the cardinals could act
on
behalf of the pope when he himself was defaulting in
some way, but
also the idea that in serious matters
the pope should always act in
consultation with the
cardinals—and moreover the idea that the
cardinals
had the authority to summon a General Council.
In all this we find the insertion of what the modern
student would regard as
“constitutional” ideas into
canonist reflections on
Church government. The sup-
porters of the
Conciliar Movement at the beginning
of the fifteenth century could feel
that they were by
no means innovators—that, indeed, they were
follow-
ing principles with a long and
respectable ancestry,
principles essentially orthodox.
In any case, the Great Schism—the scandal of two
lines of
successive popes reigning contemporaneously
and dividing the
West—made it necessary to turn to
just that kind of thinking
which envisaged the Church's
power of self-rectification during a failure
in the su-
preme leadership. The Schism lasted
for nearly thirty
years, and, though almost all of the popes elected
during this period had sworn to resign if their depar-
ture would help the cause of unity, the promises
were
not kept. If either of the rival popes summoned a
General Council
it could only be a party affair and
the two colleges of cardinals failed in
their attempts
to persuade their respective popes to issue a joint
invitation to a Council. When in 1409 a Council was
called by cardinals at
Pisa, its legality was doubtful,
and though it pretended to depose the two
existing
holders of the papal office and secure the election of
a
third, the real effect of this was to make the situation
worse—there were now three claimants to the dignity
instead of
two. It is understandable if such an im-
passe
provoked much discontent with the general con-
dition of the Church, and stimulated a great deal of
thinking about
the position of both popes and General
Councils.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that the
nation-states were now
becoming more important and
governments that had the choice of adhering to
one
pope rather than another acquired more power over
their national
churches. Their diplomacies (particularly
during the Hundred Years' War
between France and
England) affected their ecclesiastical loyalties
(the
English disliking a pope at Avignon, for example); and
when the
Emperor Sigismund combined with one of
the rival popes to summon the more imposing Council
of
Constance, it was through diplomacy conducted
with various national
governments that he secured a
broad basis for the assembly. This body
attacked the
papal problem in 1415, and began by deposing the
successor of the pope who had gained office as a result
of the Council of
Pisa—they struck at the very pope
who had joined Sigismund in
summoning the new
Council. The resignation of another claimant was
then
secured; and, though the pope at Avignon refused to
give way, the
diplomacy of Sigismund prevented his
having the support of reigning
monarchs.
The Great Schism was for practical purposes healed
and a new pope, Martin V
(1417-31), was appointed—a
man who, once in authority, opposed
the conciliarist
ideas then prevalent. The cry had gone up that a
General Council was superior to the pope and it was
decreed at Constance
that a Council should be sum-
moned at least
every ten years. There were some who
urged that even laymen should have a
place in such
a Council, which was being regarded as a repre-
sentative body. Another Council
which assembled at
Basel in 1431 refused to be dissolved at the
command
of another pope, and it brought absurdity to a higher
degree
than before, for it threatened a renewal of
schism by presuming to depose
the pope and to ap-
point another one. The
excesses of the radicals fright-
ened some of
the moderates into conservatism, how-
ever, and
in any case it was the pope rather than the
Council who had the power to
execute a policy ef-
fectively.
In 1439 a rival Council which the pope had sum-
moned to Ferrara decreed that a Council was not
superior to a pope;
and though a dwindling body went
on meeting at Basel, they came to terms in
1449,
abandoning their adhesion to the man whom they had
presumed to
appoint to the papal office. They had
humiliated a supreme pontiff and
compelled him to
treat with them after he had decreed their
dissolution;
but they brought the whole Conciliar movement to
a
miserable end.
