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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
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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


386

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.