Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (review)

 The times are not long since gone when, for church historians, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were of interest mainly because "they were the age which nursed the [Protestant] Reformation" (William Hunt). With the abject humiliation of Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303, one simply embarked on the tides of destiny, to be swept forward with irreversible momentum over seas scattered with the wreckage of thirteenth-century hierocratic ambitions, to arrive at one's destination on October 31, 1517, with the banging of Luther's hammer ringing in one's ears. And one of the required ports of call on that providential voyage was the scandal of the Great Schism and the sharp challenge posed by the Conciliar movement to the high pretensions of the papal monarchy.

It is, of course, no longer fashionable to write history in that way; nor, in this interesting and informative essay on the role played by "conciliarism" and/or "conciliarity" in the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Reformation, is Paul Avis moved by any nostalgia for the old preoccupation with the providential role played by the "Forerunners." Nor, beyond that, is he quite wil1ing to endorse J. T. McNeill's later (and more complex) argument that the Reformers were "in a large sense the heirs of the Conciliarists" (p. 107). Instead, in this well-informed and "first full-length study" of the matter, while acknowledging obvious discontinuities, he is concerned to describe, probe, and draw renewed attention to the widely-ignored strands of continuity that link the conciliarist ecclesiology hammered out during the Great Schism with the subsequent ecclesiological commitments of the Lutheran, Reformed, and, above all, Anglican churches. An eminently worthwhile project, and he is to be commended for undertaking it.

General Secretary to the Council for Church Unity of the Church of England, Avis acknowledges that his "motive in undertaking this study ... is ... not purely historical" (p. xiii). Having himself come to the conclusion that "the Continental and Anglican Reformers adhered in slightly different ways to a modified conciliarism and that they should be understood against that background" (ibid.), he expresses the hope that "closer acquaintance with the conciliar contribution to Reformation thought" will foster among members of all Christian denominations the "sense of a tradition that bridges the Roman Catholic-Reformation divide and holds promise for the future unity of the Church" (p. 107).

In an effort, then, to promote that sort of closer acquaintance Avis presents here a careful, descriptive analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century conciliarism and then proceeds to an examination in the light of the conciliarist legacy of the ecclesiological preoccupations and practices of the churches of the Reformation. The account he gives is solid and informative, though marred in its medieval phase by the assumption (p. 87) that "there was no true pope" when the Council of Constance enacted its celebrated superiority decree Haec sancta (an assumption that would have surprised most of the council fathers who, even as they moved to depose him, viewed John XXIII as verus papa), and, still more, by the inexplicable transposition of the Summa de ecclesiastica potestate of Augustinus Triumphus (d. 1328) to the year 1473 "in the period of papal resurgence after the abortive reforming councils" (p. 100). That slip notwithstanding, the more taxing problem dogging the case he sets out to argue lies elsewhere. It lies, instead, in a disabling fluidity in the meanings he attaches across time to the vexing term "conciliarism." While he is certainly persuasive on the point that a preoccupation with "conciliarity" is common to the histories of both Roman Catholicism and the churches of the Reformation, I do not believe that the same can be said of his further claim that there was also some...