The Church, the Councils, and Reform: The Legacy of the Fifteenth Century (review)

The volume presents the papers of the Gettysburg Conference of the American Cusanus Society in 2004, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brian Tierney's Foundations of the the Conciliar Theory (Cambridge, UK, 1955). Tierney contributes the afterword "Reflections on a Half Century of Conciliar Studies" (pp. 313-27) to the volume, emphasizing that canon law alone is not sufficient to explain the rise of conciliarism, but needs to be complemented by theological ideas and traditions. Consequently, the papers in this volume come from different disciplinary approaches, not just examining canonistic sources but also covering a broad array of reform debates from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.

The volume opens with Gerald Christianson's paper, "The Conciliar Tradition and Ecumenical Dialogue" (pp. 1-24), in which the author sheds some light on the practice of "synodality" in the early Protestant churches. Christianson's optimistic look on Protestantism as "a revival of cooperative conciliarism" (p. 22), however, underestimates Martin Luther's ecclesiology and his suspicion against the general council and its claim to infallibility. Nelson H. Minnich provides an excellent survey on recent research on the conciliar period from 1409 to 1565; "Councils of the Catholic Reformation" (pp. 27-59) is a revised and extended version of the author's very rich and balanced article in Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 32 (2000), 303-37. Emily O'Brien, "Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini and the Histories of the Council of Basel" (pp. 60-81), rehearses the changing attitudes toward the Council of Basel in Enea Silvio's three historiographical accounts of the Basiliense dating from 1439 to 1464. Francis Oakley, "The Conciliar Heritage and the Politics of Oblivion" (pp. 82-97), summarizes a number of insights from his book The Conciliarist Tradition (Oxford, 2003), repeating his favorite idea of the "politics of oblivion" by which a "high-papalist constitutive narrative" (pp. 88-89) eradicated the conciliar tradition. Daniel Zach Flanagin introduces an often neglected aspect for conciliar studies. His paper, "God's Divine Law. The Scriptural Founts of Conciliar Theory in Jean Gerson" (pp. 101-21), retraces the strong biblical foundation of Gerson's theology, by which he arrived at alternative models of law and authority that criticized the predominant juridical ecclesiologies at his time. Continuing an earlier study in Cristianesimo nella Storia, 37 (2006), Michiel Decaluwe undertakes a reconstruction of the original text of Haec sancta and tries to identify three different interests in the formulation of the decree at Constance (pp. 122-38). As much as we welcome such philological efforts, the conclusions drawn from the tiny textual differences do not always seem to warrant the far-reaching conclusions. Natacha-Ingrid Tinteroff takes up the topic of councils as liturgical and pneumatological events. Her paper, "The Councils and the Holy Spirit: Liturgical Perspectives" (pp. 140-54), offers a theological reflection on the Church by comparing texts from Constance, Basel, and the Second Vatican Council and by emphasizing the "charismatic process" (p. 149) of councils over their legislative work. In "From Conciliar Unity to Mystical Union" (pp. 155-73), Jovino Miroy tries to establish a relationship between Cusa's Concordantia Catholica and his De docta ignorantia (pp. 155-73). Anxious to reconcile Cusa the philosopher with Cusa the canonist, Miroy sees Cusa's "Learned Ignorance" as "another way by which he redefined himself as a papalist" (p. 159). Morimichi Watanabe contributes a concise survey on "Pope Eugenius IV, the Conciliar Movement, and the Primacy of Rome" (pp. 177-93), while J. H. Burns presents Angelo da Vallombrosa, an unwavering papalist in support of Pope Julius II (pp. 194-211). Jesse D. Mann collects material on the idea of Mary as the only remaining believer during Christ's passion (also known as Ockham's "remnant ecclesiology") and highlights John of Segovia's rejection of the idea in his opusculum "De vera intelligentia...