The Watershed of Modern Politics by Francis Oakley

Author:Francis Oakley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

Conciliar Thinking from John of Paris to Matthias Ugonius and Christopher St. German

In their anxious attempts to restore authority in the church after a disputed papal election and the onset of a schism of unparalleled severity that had divided Europe first into two and then into three rival papal “obediences,” the conciliar theorists came to focus intently on one particular aspect of the church. Of the four marks of the church designated in the Nicene Creed—one, holy, catholic, apostolic—it had been the mark of holiness that had given rise to the earliest ecclesiological controversies of the Christian era. But in the great late medieval tide of debate concerning the very nature of the church that crested in the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century conciliar epoch, it was the mark of unity that lay at the very center of disagreement. And what was said about that mark of unity reflected the conflicted, even bipolar, nature of the canonistic constitutional legacy which, more than once in the course of this series, we have had reason to emphasize.62

If for the adherents of the more prominent high papalist position the key to that unity lay in the firm subordination of all members of the Christian community to a single papal head, for the others that key lay rather in the corporate association of those members. It was from the latter group that the conciliar theorists took their cue. They were firmly committed, and in this unlike Marsiglio, to the belief that the papal headship of the church was indeed of divine foundation. They were moved also by fugitive memories of the ancient pattern of thinking in which every bishop had been viewed as a successor of the apostle Peter, “joined” with his fellow bishops, as Cyprian had put it, “by the bond of mutual concord and the chain of unity”63 and, with them, responsible in collegial solidarity and via the practice of vital synodal cooperation for the well-being of the entire community of Christians. And that community was itself taken to form a single body with Christ, its “primary” or ultimate head. These two convictions the proponents of conciliarist views sought to combine. That is to say, and as J. H. Burns has rightly insisted,64 their argument with the high papalists was not an argument “for or against [papal] monarchy as such” but an argument about the nature of that papal monarchy. For they sought to harmonize their twin convictions by insisting that side by side with the institution of papal monarchy it was necessary to give the church’s communitarian or corporate dimension more prominent and routine institutional expression, most notably by the regular assembly of general councils representing the entire community of the faithful and capable of preventing the abuse of papal power by imposing constitutionalist limitations on its exercise.

In so doing, they unquestionably drew a great deal of inspiration from the essentially conciliar mode of governance characteristic of the ancient church for long centuries after the Council of Nicaea (325). That phase of

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