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269 The Procedural Quest for Unity and Its Obstacles 6 The fashion by which Christian agreement has been reached has generally been “conciliar” in the broadest sense: some gathering, even if only in response to a previous dictate, that, through some process or other has its members—representative or not—“agree” with a final outcome of statement or practice. Such conciliar agreement in this broad sense functions in congregationalist communities all the way to monarchically ordered ones— somewhere and somehow the “many agree.” We have asked the question as to what such an agreement amounts to, and we have faced several intrinsic difficulties relating to personal and collective uncertainties and communicative obstacles, such that it appears difficult to know quite what two distinct minds or hearts are doing, let alone collectives of such distinctions, when we say they are “in agreement.” And historical experience suggests that whatever we may have thought about such agreement, it is something difficult to prove or sustain. Nonetheless, “agreements” are indeed reached and announced as such and often invoked and applied normatively within churches. What then is being in fact referred to in these cases? I will argue in this chapter that such agreement gains its received social force mainly through its coherence with certain procedural norms, which may well be qualified variously according to theological or metaphysical claims but which, in the end, rely solely on their asserted and received regularity. This is not only an ecclesiastical claim; it is also one that tracks with general political developments and selfunderstanding in the West and more widely. At the same time, however, and for all its de facto ordering, such procedural agreement (and unity) has 270 A Brutal UNity consistently failed to describe what Christians would like to say about unity. Procedural agreement—an outcome based on following accepted procedures of decision making—may be a necessary ecclesial approach to take in the face of divisive violence, but it is hardly adequate to the realities of the Christian gospel as given and preached. It may also be, on its own terms and in the present era, intrinsically unstable in any case. Conciliarism’s Proceduralist Turn The high point of conciliarist practice is generally agreed to be the Council of Constance (1414–1418). Not only did its gathering proceed from a range of self-conscious reflection and organization on the nature of council and agreement, but it actually achieved a major goal in reuniting the divided papacy and thereby demonstrating the power of unified ecclesial decision making based on communal deliberation and commonly supported outcomes. Constance tends to be remembered for its 1415 decree usually known as Haec Sancta, which “declares” the council’s status as pneumatically governed and supreme in its authority. This authority, the decree states, is given to the council “directly from Christ,” and it applies to various key areas of the Church’s life: “[E]veryone of whatever estate or dignity he be, even papal, is obliged to obey in those things which belong to the faith, and to the eradication of the said schism, and to the general reform of the said Church of God in head and members.”1 Whether this authority of the council was temporary, and/or held in a way limited to just these stated areas of ecclesial life at just this time, has been a matter of debate, one revived at the time of Vatican II.2 But if most commentators reckon some success at unifying the papacy, most agree that the council failed in its goal of “reform”; indeed, its inadequacy in this regard was but the first in a string of conciliar failures, whose extent contributed to the perceptions of ecclesial impotence that drove aspects of radical reform in the sixteenth century. This is worth pointing out here, since it is just the “reform” aspects of conciliar decision making that are bound to the council’s procedural unity, and its failure, therefore, was yet 1 As cited in C. M. D. Crowder, Unity, Heresy, and Reform, 1378–1460: The Conciliar Response to the Great Schism (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 83. 2 For a discussion in the context of Vatican II, see Oakley’s overview of the debate in Francis Oakley, Council over Pope? Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), chap. 4, 105–30. For earlier arguments in the immediate wake of Constance, see Michiel Decaluwe, “Three Ways to Read the Constance Decree Haec Sancta (1415): Francis Zabarella, Jean Gerson, and the...

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