The Consiliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 94 BOOK REVIEW THE CONSILIARIST TRADITION: CONSTITUTIONALISM IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 1300-1870 BY FRANCES OAKLEY The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870. By Francis Oakley. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pages xi + 298. Cloth, £50.00/$80.00, ISBN 0-19-926528-3. Francis Oakley, president emeritus of Williams College and distinguished medievalist, sets out to rescue the conciliarist tradition from “institutionally sponsored forgetting”(16). He provides a succinct but thorough scholarly account of that tradition not only in its golden age of the Councils of Constance and Basel (early 15th century),but also of its continuation down to the French Revolution and the First Vatican Council (1869-70) of Newman’s time. This volume is a remarkably successful tour de force and a must-read for any ecclesiologists who are still willing to grapple with what might be called “organizational” issues or the question of authority in Roman Catholicism. After 1378, when two or three popes simultaneously claimed the obedience of an otherwise undivided Western or Latin Christianity,the Council of Constance came together to heal the schism. It had to disqualify the three popes or antipopes and elect a new one. This it accomplished on the basis of its own solemnly promulgated claim to represent the whole church, and thus, in certain circumstances, to overrule even a validly elected pope. Oakley lays out all the complications of this conciliar stance, which always included an affirmation of papal primacy by divine institution, often in the form of a monarchy tempered by conciliar authority representing the church at large. In the 1960s,Paul de Vooght and Hans Küng,as well as Oakley himself,reminded us of this, but the phenomenon then faded from view in ecclesiastical studies: perhaps a focus on infallibility edged papal primacy to the sidelines. At the same time,historians investigated conciliarism with increasing attention. What Oakley now adds to the picture,besides summing up recent historical work,is the demonstration that, outside Rome, conciliar ideas remained a viable position among Catholics (and others) for another four or five hundred years. The attempt to rule such ideas out of court did not succeed at the Council ofTrent,for example. Conciliar ideas continued to constitute a third position, hardly known today, neither Erastian (statist) nor papalist (asserting an untrammeled divine-right monarchy). 95 Students of Newman will learn that some anti-absolutist Anglican writers were partial to conciliarism, as were English Catholic “Cisalpines.” Conciliarism was of course a strand in Gallicanism; eventually French Jansenists took up the signature tactic of appealing from a papal condemnation to a future council. When the revolutionary Constitution of the Clergy and the subsequent concordat between Napoleon and the pope shook and undermined ecclesial Gallicanism, the hour for ultramontanism’s victorious campaign struck. None of this was calculated to commend the conciliar tradition to Newman and his friends as they converted to Catholicism. At mid-century Manning still regarded conciliarism as the most dangerous current of thought troubling Catholicism in Britain. Henri Maret’s attempt to reconcile ultramontane concerns with conciliarist constitutionalism before Vatican I gets its due at Oakley’s hands. Although episcopal conciliarism had doughty defenders at Vatican I, the need of the hour in the eyes of most of the council fathers was for centralized,unencumbered papal authority. In the event, conciliarism seemed altogether out of the question. In this case, at least, and for the century following, Manning spoke truly, “Dogma conquers history.” Oakley considers very briefly two possible approaches that a theologian who respects history might take, only to question their applicability. An argument for the development of doctrine, at least in Newman’s continuity-stressing version, would hardly do justice to the discrepancies between Constance and Vatican I. A recourse to “reception” that could conceivably do the job would have “to take a rather aggressive form” (262). Earlier Oakley notes that the tactic of categorizing the pertinent decrees of Constance as one-time “emergency measures” has been abandoned by historians, even those like Hubert Jedin who took the 1870 formulation as determinative. Would it be rash to find in this important work implicit suggestions of new...