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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: COR-CRE |
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COUNCIL (Lat. concilium, from cum, together, and the root cal, to call) , the general word for a convocation, meeting, assembly. The Latin word was frequently confused with consilium (from consulere, to deliberate, cf. consul
The present article is confined to a history of the development of the ecclesiastical council, summoned to adjust matters in dispute with the civil authority or for the settlement of doctrinal and other internal disputes. For details see under separate headings, NICAEA, &c. From a very early period in the history of the Church, councils or synods have been held to decide on matters of doctrine and discipline. They may be traced back to the second half of the 2nd century A.D., when sundry churches in Asia Minor held consultations about the rise of Montanism. Their precise origin is disputed. The common Roman Catholic view is that they are apostolic though not prescribed by divine law, and the apostolic precedent usually cited is the " council " of Jerusalem (Acts xv.; Galatians ii.). Waiving the consideration of vital critical questions and accepting Acts xv. at its face value, the assembly at Jerusalem would scarcely seem to have been a council in the technical sense of the word; it was in essence a meeting of the Jerusalem church at which delegates from Antioch were heard but apparently had no vote, the decision resting solely with the mother church. R. Sohm argues that synods grew from the custom of certain local churches which, when confronted with a ' For the Greek Council see BouLE; for the Hebdomadal Council see OxFoRD; see also ENGLAND: Local Government.serious problem of their own, augmented their numbers by receiving delegates from the churches of the neighbourhood. Hauck, however, holds that these augmented church meetings, which dealt with the affairs of but a single church, are to be distinguished from the synods, which took cognizance of matters of general interest
Every important alteration in the constitution of the Church - has affected the composition and function of synods; but the changes were neither simultaneous nor precisely alike throughout the Roman empire. The synods of the 2nd century were extra-ordinary assemblies which met to deliberate upon pressing problems. They had no fixed geographical limits for membership, no ex-officio members, nor did they possess an authority w hich did away with the independence of the local church. In the course of the 3rd century came the decisive change, which increased the prestige of the councils: the right to vote was limited to bishops. This was the logical outgrowth of the belief that each local church ought to have but one bishop (monarchical episcopate), and that these bishops were the sole legitimate successors of the apostles (apostolic succession), and therefore official organs of the Holy Spirit. Although as late as 250 the consensus of the priests, the deacons and the people was still considered essential to the validity of a conciliar decision at Rome and in certain parts of the East, the development had already run its course in northern Africa. It was a further step in advance when synods began to meet at regular intervals. They were held annually in Cappadocia by the middle of the 3rd century, and the council of Nicaea commanded in 325 that semi-annual synods be held in every province, an arrangement which was not systematically enforced, and was altered in 692, when the Trullan Council reduced the number to one a year. With the multiplication of synods came naturally a differentiation of type. In text-books we find clear lines drawn
capital of the province, and attempted to legislate on all sorts of questions. The state had nothing to do with calling them, nor did their decrees require governmental sanction. Various abortive attempts were made to set up synods of patriarchal or at least of more than provincial rank. In North Africa eighteen such synods were held between 393 and 424; during part of the 5th and 6th centuries primatial councils assembled at Arles; and the patriarchs of Constantinople were accustomed to invite to their " endemic synods " (o coot Ev6,wovaat) all bishops who happened to be sojourning at the capital . Papal synods from the 5th and especially from the 9th century onward included members such as the archbishops of Ravenna, Milan, Aquileia and Grado, who resided outside the Roman archdiocese; but the ,territorial limits from which the membership was drawn
Before the form of the provincial synod had become absolutely fixed, there arose in the 4th century the oecumenical council. The Greek term auvobos olKOV/1EYUC112 (r) (used by Eusebius, Vita Constantin, iii. 6) is preferable to the Latin concilium universale or generale, which has been applied loosely to national and even to provincial synods. The oecumenical synods were not the logical outgrowth of the network of provincial synods; they were creations of the imperial power. Constantine, who had not even been baptized, laid the foundations when, in response to a petition of the Donatists, he referred their case to a committee of bishops that convened at Rome, which meeting Eusebius calls a 2 From ii OlKOVvrr (TO. the inhabited world; Latin oecumenicus or universalis. The English forms "oecumenical" and " ecumenical " are both used. synod. After that the emperor summoned the council of Arles to settle the matter. For both of these assemblies it was the emperor that decided who should be summoned, paid the travelling expenses of the bishops, determined where the council should be held and what topics should be discussed. He regarded them as temporary advisory bodies, to whose recommendations the imperial authority might give the force of law. In the same manner he appointed the time and place for the council of Nicaea, summoned the episcopate, paid part of the expenses out of the public purse, nominated the committee in charge of the order of business, used his influence to bring about the adoption of the creed, and punished those who refused to subscribe. To be sure, the council of Nicaea commanded great veneration, for it was the first attempt to assemble the entire episcopate; but no more than the synods of Rome and of Arles was it an organ of ecclesiastical self-government--it was rather a means whereby the Church was ruled by the secular power. The subsequent oecumenical synods of the undivided Church were patterned on that of Nicaea. Most Protestant scholars maintain that the secular authorities decided whether or not they should be convened, and issued the summons; that imperial commissioners were always present, even if they did not always preside; that on occasion emperors have confirmed or refused to confirm synodal decrees; and that the papal confirmation was neither customary nor requisite. Roman Catholic scholars to-day tend to recede from the high ground very generally taken several centuries ago, and Funk even admits that the right to convoke oecumenical synods was vested in the emperor regardless of the wishes of the pope, and that it cannot be proved that the Roman see ever actually had a share in calling the oecumenical councils of antiquity. Others, however, while acknowledging the futility of seeking historical proofs that the popes formally called, directed and confirmed these synods, yet assert that the emperor per-formed these functions not of his own right but in his quality as protector of the Church, that this involved his acting at the request or at least with the permission and approval of the Church, and in particular of the pope, and that a special though not a stereotyped papal confirmation of conciliar decrees was necessary to their validity. In the Germanic states which arose on the ruins of the Western Empire we find national, and diocesan synods; provincial synods were unusual. National synods were summoned by the king or with his consent to meet special needs; and they were frequently concilia mixta, at which lay dignitaries appeared. Although the Frankish monarchs were not abolute rulers, nevertheless they exercised, the right of changing or rejecting synodal decrees which ran counter to the interests of the state. Clovis held the first French national synod at Orleans in 511; Reccared, the first in Spain in 589 at Toledo. Under Charlemagne they were occasionally so representative that they might almost be ranked as general synods of the West (Regensburg, 792, Frankfort, 794). Contemporaneous with the evolution of the national synod was the development of a new type of diocesan synod, which included the priests of separate and mutually independent parishes and also the leaders of the monastic clergy. The papal synods came into the foreground with the success of the Cluniac reform of the Church, especially from the Lateran synod of 1059 on. They grew in importance until at length Calixtus II. summoned to the Lateran the synod of 1123 as " generale concilium." The powers which the pope as bishop of the church in Rome had exercised over its synods he now extended to the oecumenical counci]s. They were more completely under his control than the ancient ones had been under the sway of the emperor. The Pseudo-Isidorean principle that all major synods need papal authorization was insisted on, and the decrees were formulated as papal edicts. The absolutist principles cherished by the papal court in the 12th and 13th centuries did not pass unchallenged; but the protests of Marsilius of Padua and the less radical William of Occam remained barren until the Great Schism of 1378. As neither the pope in Rome nor his rival in Avignon would give way, recourse was had to the idea that the supreme power was vestednot in the pope but in the oecumenical council. This " conciliar theory," propounded by Conrad
opinion lacks legal validity. In other words, the oecumenical council is now practically in the position of the senate of an absolute monarch. It is in fact an open question whether a council is to be ranked as reallyoecumenical until after its decrees have been approved by thepope. (See VATICAN COUNCIL, ULTRAMONTANISM, INFALLIBILITY.) The earlier oecumenical councils have well been called " the pitched battles of church history." Summoned to combat heresy and schism, in spite of degrading pressure from without and tumultuous disorder within, they ultimately brought about a modicum of doctrinal agreement. On the one side as time went on they bound scholarship hand and foot in the winding-sheet of tradition, and also fanned the flames of intolerance; yet on the other side they fostered the sense of the Church's corporate oneness. The diocesan and provincial synods have formed a valuable system of regularly recurring assemblies for disposing of ecclesiastical business. They have been held most frequently, however, in times of stress and of reform, for instance in the 11th, 16th and 19th centuries; at other periods they have lapsed into disuse: it is significant that to-day the prelate who neglects to convene them suffers no penalty. At present the main function of both provincial and oecumenical synods seems to be to facilitate obedience to the wishes of the central government of the Church. The right to vote (votu;n definitivum) has been distinguished from early times from the right to be heard (votum consultativum). The Reform Synods of the 15th century gave a decisive vote to doctors and licentiates of theology and of laws, some of them sitting as individuals, some as representatives of universities. Roman Catholic canonists now confine the right to vote at oecumenical councils to bishops, cardinal deacons, generals or vicars general of monastic orders and the praelati nullius (exempt abbots, &c.); all other persons, lay or clerical, who are admitted or invited, have merely the votum consultativumthey are chiefly procurators of absent bishops, or very learned priests. It was but a clumsy and temporary expedient, designed to offset the preponderance of Italian bishops dependent on the pope when the council of Constance subdivided itself into several groups or " nations," each of which had a single vote. In voting, the simple majority decides; yet such is the importance attached to a unanimous verdict that an irreconcilable minority may absent itself from the final vote, as was the case at the Vatican Council. The numbering of oecumenical synods is not fixed; the list
ciliengeschichte, 2nd ed., I. 59 f.) : A.D. t. Nicaea I. 325 2. Constantinople I.. 381 3. Ephesus 431 4. Chalcedon 451 5. Constantinople II. 553 6. Constantinople III. 68o 7. Nicaea II. 787 8. Constantinople IV. 869 9. Lateran I. I123 to. Lateran II. . . 1139 11. Lateran III. . . 1179 12. Lateran IV. . 1215 13. Lyons I. 1245 14. Lyons II. . 1274 15. Vienne . 1311 16. Constance (in part) 14141418 17a. Basel (in part) . . 1431 if. 17b. Ferrara-Florence (a continuation of Basel) . 14381442 18. Lateran V. 15121517 19. Trent . 15451563 20. Vatican 1869187o (Each of these and certain other important synods are treated in separate articles.) By including Pisa (1409) and by treating Florence as a separate synod, certain writers have brought the number of oecumenical councils up to twenty-two. These standard lists are of the type which became established through the authority of Cardinal R. F. Bellarmine (15421621), who criticized Constance and Basel, while defending Florence and the fifth Lateran council against the Gallicans. As late as the 16th century, however, " the majority did not regard those councils in which the Greek Church did not take part as oecumenical at all " (Harnack, History of Dogma, vi. 17). The Greek Church accepts only the first seven synods as oecumenical; and it reckons the Trullan synod of 692 (the Quinisextum) as a continuation of the sixth
worship .Protestant Councils.The churches of the Reformation have all had a certain measure of synodal life. The Church of England has maintained its ancient provincial synods or convocations, though for the greater part of the 18th and the first part of the 19th centuries they transacted no business. In the Lutheran churches of Germany there was no strong agitation in favour of introducing synods until the 19th century, when a movement
1644, 37 vols.) (the first very extensive work) ; P. Labbe (not Labbe) and G. Cossart, Sacrosancta concilia (Paris, 1672, 17 vols.), with supplement by Etienne Baluze (Baluzius), 1683 (based on above) ; J. Hardouin (Harduinus), Conciliorum collectio regia maxima (Paris, 1715), II tomi in 12 vols. (to 1714; more exact; indexed; serious omissions) ; enlarged edition by N. Coletus (Venice, 17281732), supplemented by J. D. Mansi, Sanctorum conciliorum et decretorum nova collectio (Lucca, 1748, 6 tomi). Convenient but fallible is Mansi's Sacrorum conciliorum et decretorum nova et amplissima collectio (Florence, 17597767; completed Venice, 17691798, 31 vols.) ; facsimile reproduction by Welter (Paris, 1901 ff.), adding (torn. 0) Introductio seu apparatus ad sacrosancta concilia, and (torn. 17B and ,8B) Baluze, Capitularia regum Francorum, and con- tinuing to date by reproducing parts of Coletus and of Mansi's supplement to Coletus, and furnishing (tom. 37 ff.) a new edition of the councils from 1720 on by J. B. Martin and L. Petit. A careful text of Roman Catholic synods from 1682 to 187o is Collectio Lacensis (Acta et decreta sacrorum conciliorum recentiorum, Friburgi, 187o ff.), 7 vols. End of Article: COUNCIL (Lat. concilium, from cum, together, and the root cal, to call) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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