The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870 (review)

In 1969 a brilliant young medievalist published a short book very much in the spirit of the times: Council over Pope? Towards a provisional ecclesiology. In it Francis Oakley, then an associate professor of history at Williams College, advocated a revival of the conciliar model of the Church that had been constructed as a response and solution to the Great Western Schism. This was not the first time that an attempt was made to correct the growth of papal centralizing authority with an appeal to the "constitutional" model of the Church; varieties of Gallicans in the early modern period did just that, and also many of the anti-infallibilists in the time of Vatican Council I. All attempted to balance the "pole of Papal power with the pole of episcopal authority," to quote the great ecclesiologist Yves Congar. Were these undertakings to restore conciliar theory related? Do they constitute a specific tradition that could be traced and followed from the late medieval period to the modern times and eventually be revived? This is the perspective adopted by the now President emeritus of Williams College in a work that recapitulates a lifetime of research and reflection and brings back his early recommendation. The dense and well structured study opens with a masterly introduction to the historical background of the movement (chap. 1), in which he endeavors to show a "pattern of conciliar thinking," identified as "the classical age of conciliar theory." At the heart of the argument are the content and legitimacy of Haec sancta (1415), the decree of the Council of Constance that affirms the superiority of council over pope. After a review of the conflicting interpretations of the decree, he presents a minute historical investigation of the context (the council did depose John XXIII, while acknowledging him as the legitimate pope) as well as early commentaries on the text, principally by Jean Gerson, the Chancellor of the University of Paris (chap. 2), concluding (p. 98): "it seems clear that Constance intended it to be something more universal and less time bound then a mere emergency measure cobbled together to cope with the crisis at hand. It mandated for the future an understanding of the nature of the church and of its constitution." In the succeeding chapters Oakley examines the continuity of this interpretation into modern times.

Chapter 3 focuses on a famous controversy on conciliar authority between the Parisian Jacques Almain and the Dominican Tommaso de Vio, known as Cajetan (1512–1514), which he places in the larger historical, canonical, and theological contexts. Oakley emphasizes in particular the contribution of John Mair, Almain's former teacher, who, by that time, grounded his conciliarist ideas in natural law and affirmed that on the matter of ecclesiastical polity there were two viable opinions, one contending that the pope is above the council, the other defending the opposite (p. 129).

Unsurprisingly, it is this "Gallican" tradition that the author continues to investigate in the following chapters, a tradition that had become quite disparate, as demonstrated by the selected examples. After an eclipse during the religious wars, it was renewed at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Edmond Richer, Syndic of the Sorbonne, who published Gerson's works and wrote a history of councils. Richer was rebuked for his extreme positions, but his followers continued to present conciliarism as the authentic doctrine of the French School, among them Louis Ellies Du Pin, and Antoine Arnauld, who briefly appear in this review. Du Pin was not a "Patristic scholar" (p. 178) but a prolific historian and influential theologian; as editor of the works of Gerson and other writers of the conciliar period, he contributed to a renewal and re-interpretation that deserved more scrutiny [See my articles in the Revue d'Histoire de l'Église de France (1986) and Lias (1991)]. The fact that Arnauld was another exponent of conciliarism marks an association that portends the difficulties his disciple Pasquier...