Khomiakov and the Mystery of Sobornost

The publisher recently let me know that in July they had released a study sure to be of interest to all students of ecclesiology, conciliar history, Russian theology and philosophy, and ecumenical relations: Alexei Khomiakov: The Mystery of Sobornost', eds., Artur Mrówczyński-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch, and Paweł Rojek (Pickwick, 2019), 260pp.

About this collection we are told:

Alexei Khomiakov (1804–1860), a great Russian thinker, one of the founders of the Slavophile school of thought, nowadays might be seen as one of the precursors of critical thought on the dangers of modern political ideas. The pathologies that Khomiakov attributes to Catholicism and Protestantism—authoritarianism, individualism, and fragmentation—are today the fundamental characteristics of modern states, of the societies in which we live, and to a large extent, of the alternatives that are brought forth in an attempt to counter them. Khomiakov’s works therefore might help us take on the challenge of rescuing Christian thought from modern colonization and offer a true alternative, a space for love and truth, the living experience of the church. This book serves as a step on the path toward recovering the church’s reflection on its own identity as sobornost’, as the community that is the living body of Christ, and can be the next step forward toward recovering the capacity for thought from within the church.

Be Not Afraid! (II): Anglican Blurbers and Anglican Content

As I noted in the first installment, the prospects of major structural reform to the Church make a lot of people nervous, and that anxiety is very considerably deepened if some of the alternative structures come from non-Catholic sources, including especially the Anglican Communion. For the Catholic Church has often been not merely a conservative organization--loathe even to acknowledge, let alone tolerate, external change in the world (think how long it took to make its peace with, e.g., human rights), especially if those external changes (e.g., the French Revolution) might seem to demand internal changes in Catholic structures, practices, or beliefs, at which point the Church has historically been not just conservative but in fact reactionary if not revanchist.

And yet...and yet, the Church has changed, and with surprising alacrity when circumstances demanded it. Thus, very quickly, judiciously, wisely, rightly and very recently new structures have come into being to fulfill new needs. In my chapter "The Principles of Accommodation and Forgetting," in the two-volume collection John Chryssavgis edited, Primacy in the Church, I discussed in detail several such examples in the Latin Church since the early 1980s down to 2010. In that period, the Church has not been conservative and stodgy, but flexible and nimble, creating at least three new structures--personal prelatures, military archdioceses, and the Anglican ordinariates, inter alia--because the needs of the Church required them. So the clear lesson we need to draw is that Church can change structures, and has done so in significant ways in order to serve the gospel and the salvation of the Christian people.

Surely those needs are vastly greater today. Surely, hemorrhaging massively from a crisis that (as the invaluable Christopher Altieri has reported) keeps on going, the need to change structures is even greater today than it was to accommodate small numbers of Anglicans in 2009, or even smaller numbers in Opus Dei in 1982. If the Church changed then in calmer days concerning fewer people in far less dire circumstances, the need to change when so much is under water and sinking fast is indescribably greater today. If, to put it bluntly, the rape of children as well as other men and women, and the utter destruction, including suicide, of their lives afterwards, does not justify major change, then all moral sense has been utterly degraded and the Church is hopelessly depraved.

Those two principles mentioned above--service to the gospel and the people--are the ones that must guide all discussions about change and reform in the Church, and they guided my writings of Everything Hidden Must Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.

I have, in the first installment and elsewhere, recently discussed how much the book was indebted to Orthodox thought, stressing that Orthodoxy has preserved its liturgical and theological patrimony with far fewer scars than the Latin Church has in the past half-century and more. So the idea that structural changes will bring a liberalization of doctrine--a common fear among some--is not borne out by the fact that Orthodoxy's deep conservatism and traditionalism exists within, and not in spite of, much more localized and synodal structures.

Aha! says the suspicious interlocutor, but what about the Anglicans? You not only talk about their structures with approval, but you got one of their biggest names, their most learned and accomplished theologians in fifty years at least, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to blurb your book! (This was my publisher's doing, I would add. Let me publicly pay tribute to John Riess of Angelico Press, who has been absolutely superb to work with. I know editors at far larger and longer established presses who are not nearly half as devoted as detailed as he has been.) About my book, Williams very kindly wrote:

This book eloquently and cogently pleads for the Roman Catholic Church to be released from the captivity of an over-centralized, over-individualized model of authority, arguing that this model is at the heart of many other dysfunctionalities. While we should harbor no illusions about the problems alternative systems may face, Adam DeVille makes a strong case for seeing the existing paradigm as both quite recent in its development and as consolidating a damaging set of attitudes to clerical power. A sober, theologically informed, and very significant work. —RT. REV. ROWAN WILLIAMS, Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, former archbishop of Canterbury, and author of many books, including a lovely book on icons of Christ, and another on icons of his mother, and Dostoevsky and a book on Bulgakov.

But if one Anglican wasn't enough, a second also wrote kindly of the book:

“Adam DeVille’s proposal for cleansing and reform in the Catholic Church today is crystal-clear: the Church must stop being governed by a caste of clerical guardians and start governing itself. How might this happen? The way it has always happened: through the practice of conciliar government, or to speak Greek, synodal government. Councils are not a panacea against mortal ills, but they do excel over all the alternatives when it comes to the cardinal virtue of a system of government—namely, accountability. Conciliar government is shared government. DeVille wants to see it instituted on all levels: parish, diocese, national church, and global communion. In this learned, passionate, and ecumenically informed book, DeVille leaves his readers eager to get to work on his proposal today.” —PAUL VALLIERE, Professor Emeritus of Butler University, whose book Conciliarism I drew on in my own. His earlier work Modern Russian Theology is something of a landmark work, widely read and rightly so.

So you, DeVille, got two Anglicans to endorse your book. Aren't Anglicans the ones who--unlike the Orthodox--have both localized synodal structures and gay priests, lesbian bishops, and innovations and heterodox deviations beyond numbering?! Surely you cannot want them to be a source of anything, a model of any kind of structures that the Catholic Church might want to contemplate?

These are not arguments, of course, but sneers; they are not reasoned claims but smugness and snobbery. And smugness, as Flannery O'Connor once famously said, is the Catholic sin. Since it is Lent, let us set it aside and repent of it.

But let us also make some necessary distinctions between the disciplinary nature of structures and the doctrinal nature of magisterial teaching. For Catholics the former can change while the latter cannot, and the relationship between the two is by no means unidirectional or simplistic--change one and the other changes with it. Nonsense!

Here we also need--as I do in the book--to tackle those questions head-on, noting that as someone who spent the first 25 years of his life as an extremely active Anglican who participated as a voting member in many local, diocesan, and national synods, I know the problems (doctrinal disorder among them) within that communion, but those are not problems likely to be replicated in any significant way within the Catholic Church for reasons I discuss in the book. I also note that Catholics must "be prone to an acute form of sanctimonious blindness to assume that there is no such disarray within Catholicism."

Even with our own internal disarray on doctrine and much else, Catholicism, however, as even the earliest ARCIC documents conceded, has one matchless gift that the Anglican Communion lacks: a formal and binding teaching authority that has, e.g., given us a universal catechism (which I bought and devoured in 1992 when it was first published, a full five years before I became Catholic).

My proposals, borrowed from Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, are modified to take account of certain weaknesses of both, and to fit them more felicitously within Catholic structures. Thus what I propose in the book are modified versions whereby what is best in provincial and regional structures is maintained while also accounting for a significant trans-national role exercised by the bishop of Rome as the universal “sentinel” whose job “consists precisely in ‘keeping watch’ (episkopein)” over “all the particular Churches” in which “the una, sancta, catholica et apostolica Ecclesia is made present” as Pope John Paul II put it so compellingly in Ut Unum Sint, on which I wrote my first book. So, to put it succinctly, in no way do I propose that the pope become the rather impotent titular figure who holds either the see of Canterbury or Constantinople. But neither do I allow the pope of Rome to maintain his totally unjustified and unjustifiable monopoly on power, a situation made all the worse by the disgusting fawning personality cult which has surrounded him for nearly 200 years, the utter abolition and destruction of which cannot come soon enough.

In both books, then, I have followed faithfully the idea of an "ecumenical gift exchange," a notion that was reiterated and given concrete expression as recently as last August when, in the latest ARCIC document (“Walking Together on the Way: Learning to Be the Church—Local, Regional, Universal"), Catholics are asked “to look humbly at what is not working effectively within one’s own tradition, and...to ask whether this might be helped by receptive learning from the understanding, structures, practices, and judgements of the other.” This is a notion given detailed consideration by the late Margaret O'Gara in her 1998 book, as well as an extremely valuable and very learned collection edited by Paul Murray, Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism.

The Ghosts of Conciliarisms Past

There are certain books that are easily forgotten, and there are others that are impossible to forget. In this latter category is Francis Oakley's 2003 book The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870. Given that the problems of papal and conciliar or synodal authority are very alive and well in both Orthodoxy and Catholicism at the present moment, this is a book that will not go away--nor should it.

For those of us who work, as I do, in the areas of the papacy, ecclesiology, and ecumenism, it is a book whose treatment of conciliarism systematically dismantles all the easy retroactive rubbishing of the Council of Constance and the self-serving claims of centralized papal authority which began at Constance, were dogmatized at Vatican I, and since then have shot through the stratosphere since Vatican II, to the detriment of us all. As I noted here, Oakley has made it impossible for Catholics to do anything other than rest very uneasily when Constance is raised.

And it is raised again in Conciliarism and Heresy in Fifteenth-Century England: Collective Authority in the Age of the General Councils by Alexander Russell and published this summer by Cambridge University Press, as Oakley's book was.

About this new study we are told:

The general councils of the fifteenth century constituted a remarkable political experiment, which used collective decision-making to tackle important problems facing the church. Such problems had hitherto received rigid top-down management from Rome. However, at Constance and Basle, they were debated by delegates of different ranks from across Europe and resolved through majority voting. Fusing the history of political thought with the study of institutional practices, this innovative study relates the procedural innovations of the general councils and their anti-heretical activities to wider trends in corporate politics, intellectual culture and pastoral reform. Alexander Russell argues that the acceptance of collective decision-making at the councils was predicated upon the prevalence of group participation and deliberation in small-scale corporate culture. Conciliarism and Heresy in Fifteenth-Century England offers a fundamental reassessment of England's relationship with the general councils, revealing how political thought, heresy, and collective politics were connected.

The Councils of the Orthodox Churches

Some publishers have the luck of timing on their sides. In this year leading up (one hopes!) to the much-promised and much-delayed "great and holy synod" of Orthodoxy, we will see published in April a hefty edited collection, part of the Corpus Christianorum Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta (CCCOGD 4) series from Brepols Press: Alberto Melloni, ed.,The Councils of the Orthodox Churches in the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Era (approx. 900 pp.).

About this volume the publisher tells us:

This volume comprises the critical edition – sometimes the very first critical edition – of the Councils of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, namely those sharing the professoin of faith defined in the first seven Ecumenical Councils (COGD 1). Among them one may find the Protodeutera (861), the Council of Constantinople of 879, the Tomos Unionis (920), the Local Synods of Constantinople against the Syro-Jacobites (1030) and against John Italos (1082), the Council on ‘My Father is greater than me’ (1166), on the Filioque (1285) and on Palamas (1341-1351), the Synod of 1484, annulling the so-called union of Florence (COGD 2), the Synods about Lucaris, the Panorthodox Synods of Jerusalem (1672) and Constantinople (1872), the Local Synods of Constantinople (1691 and 1755), and additional materials, like the Patriarchal decision of annullment of the Excommunications between Rome and Constantinople (paralleled in COGD 3).

It also includes the first publication of five synodika of Orthodoxy: Georgian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian and the Greek synodikon with a new edition of the oldest surviving version of the latter (eleventh century), which was the basis for the subsequent translations. Moreover the volume will represent the Conciliar tradition of the Patriarchate of Moscow and of all Russias, including the Stoglav (1551), and the Councils of Moscow of 1666/7 and 1917/8 and more recent Councils of the 21st Century.

Among the editors of the critical editions Hilarion Alfeeev (Moscow), Frederick Lauritzen (Venice), Bernadette Martin Hisard (Paris-Rome), Giovanni Guaita (Moscow), Vassa Kontouma (Paris), Kirill Maksimovič (Moscow), Riccardo Saccenti (Bologna), Michel Stavrou (Paris), Tatijana Subotin Golubović (Belgrade), Anna Maria Totomanova (Sofia). The editorial staff includes Frederick Lauritzen, Georghios Vlantis, Cyril Hovorun, Davide Dainese.

Melloni is no stranger to editing such collections of this. I have on my shelf his invaluable 2005 collection which he co-edited with Silvia Scatena, Synod and Synodality: Theology, History, Canon Law and Ecumenism in New Contact.

That collection was very useful when I was giving no little thought to the questions of synodality and patriarchal structures in the life of the Church, East and West, in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

Will They or Won't They? On the Holding of Church Councils East and West

We will presently know whether the much-promised and much-delayed 'great and holy synod' of Orthodoxy will happen this spring or not. Latest indications--no surprise here--indicate that the Russians want to scupper the whole thing, which is exactly what I feared, as many others have as well. Still, I hold out at least a little bit of hope that the council will come off if only to see that the Russian bully does not get his way.

Holding councils is always a tricky business, as recent Catholic experience abundantly and painfully indicates. But going back further than 1962-65, one finds in conciliar history all kinds of surprises arising that were not anticipated by those who felt the need to call a council in the first place.

I am sometimes asked to recommend books about councils, and herewith a few that I often suggest to people:

I usually begin by suggesting people read Leo Davis's The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology (Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1988), 347pp.

Though now nearly 30 years old, it remains in print and for good reason: it is a short, concise, clearly written overview of each of the seven councils, giving enough detail, history, and context without overwhelming the reader.

A Jesuit like Davis, the historian Norman Tanner has authored several invaluable works, including The Councils of the Church: A Short History (Crossroad, 1991), 144pp.

Taking a wider, longer look at councils and the whole phenomenon of 'conciliarism' or 'synodality,' Tanner more recently authored The Church in Council: Conciliar Movements, Religious Practice and the Papacy from Nicaea to Vatican II, which I reviewed in detail here.

Tanner is also the scholar who has given Anglophones the critical edition of the councils, in his invaluable two-volume Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Georgetown UP, 1990), 2528pp. This edition contains the Latin and Greek texts alongside English translations.

Among Orthodox scholars treating the question, there are several noteworthy books. The late Orthodox canonist and Archbishop Peter L'Huillier authored The Church of the Ancient Councils: The Disciplinary Work of the First Four Ecumenical Councils. 

But perhaps the best place to give us a sense of the likely surprises and turmoil to come out of this year's synod--if it happens--is Patrick Viscuso's fascinating book, A Quest For Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress, An Analysis and Translation of Its Acts and Decisions (Inter-Orthodox Press, 2007), 205pp.

Viscuso documents that the 1923 gathering, which can be counted as the origins of the push for the synod that may happen later this year, was a brave, controverted, confused, but hopeful gathering of some but not all Orthodox leaders--in other words, it was just as messy as every other such gathering in conciliar history East or West. As the nearest analogue to what we are likely to see in 2016, this book pays careful revisiting this year.

The Messiness of Synodality

It always astonishes me that my students are astonished at the development of Christian doctrine. These innocents, knowing very little even recent American history, know absolutely nothing about ancient Christian history. They seem fondly to have imagined—if they have thought about the matter at all—that, e.g., the Nicene Creed “had fallen from heaven quite unexpectedly during Good Friday luncheon some years back” (to use one of the lines from Evelyn Waugh’s uproariously politically incorrect novel Black Mischief). When they discover that it did not—that the creed was a lengthy process of synodal or conciliar debate going on for decades—they are not only amazed but some of them even a little disgusted. The raw humanity of the Church--which, I must remind them, has two natures, as Christ did: divine and human--seems to be rather disdainful to some. (Others, of course, can see only the human side, and therefore reductionistically and simplistically assume that every decision was the result always and only of political machinations of the most sordid and self-interested variety, with no possible room for the Holy Spirit to drop His ready-made creeds into the diners' laps.)

When we cover the era of The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology, starting at Nicaea I in 325 and ending with Nicaea II in 787, and spending the most time on Chalcedon in 451, every one of them in classes going back nearly a decade has professed to be amazed at how messy, protracted, polemical, and confrontational the process was by which Christological doctrine was shaped and defined, not least in the creed. In the passive-aggressive argot of today, they ask: Why was everyone so “divisive”? Wasn’t the reaction to Arius rather “extreme”? Couldn’t they have just tolerated a diversity of opinions? After all, who cares how many natures Christ has, or what the relationship, if any, between them is. This is all irrelevant nonsense--isn't it? We can still be nice persons whether Christ has one nature, two, or 391,704.

Eventually, of course, the Church was guided to understand the dyophysite nature of Christ, and to settle other related and controverted matters. But it took time and effort lasting centuries. There was, then, no neat, tidy, simple, quick process for the formation of doctrinal claims that most of us take for granted today and have seemed settled for ages if not forever. It was a process taking decades and centuries, and in the meantime there was a lot of unsettled opinion and a great deal of vigorous, and occasionally violent, fighting. A very good, if dense, book for the formation of Christological doctrine remains that of Khaled Anatolios (whom I interviewed here), Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine.

Such is the way of synods and councils, East and West, ancient and modern. As we finish the seemingly endless commemorations of Vatican II this year, Catholics of a certain age--now fewer and fewer with each passing year--will remember the tumult in the post-conciliar period. Those with longer historical memories will know that whether it is Nicaea I, Chalcedon, Lateran IV, Trent, or some other synod, it takes decades for things to settle down, and in the meantime the process remains often painfully messy. Indeed, in not a few cases, things get worse after a synod/council, and the question is often raised: was the "cure" not worse than whatever the precipitating "disease" was? Such is the way synodality down through the ages.

I mention all this in anticipation of what I fully expect to be a shambolic synod in Rome in October, picking up where last year's session left off. I've talked to many people who have been disconcerted by the messiness and controversy last fall, but such concern is, in part, likely a function of just how unfamiliar the West is with synodality, though there is a long history of the same going back to the earliest centuries, as I documented in my book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

For those wishing more depth and detail on the topic, see the hefty scholarly collection (of uneven quality, and with articles in French and other European languages), Synod and Synodality: Theology, History, Canon Law and Ecumenism in New Contact.

Other works, most of them mentioned or reviewed on here over the years, that may be of interest would include Paul Valliere's rather uneven but still insightful Conciliarism: A History of Decision-Making in the Church.

Valliere's title does not really treat what one expects under the heading of "conciliarism," on whose history, in the West, Francis Oakley is the doyen. As I have noted before, Oakley's book on the topic, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870, discussed in depth here, is a deeply disturbing one raising age-old questions that nobody has bothered to answer--preferring instead to ignore them or "forget" them. I am using part of it in a lecture I am giving at Fordham next month at the OTSA meeting.

Finally, I would recommend a rich collection discussing ecclesiological and ecumenical issues, including synodality: Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism.

The Moscow Council

It often happens in the world of academic publishing that deadlines get changed. And so even though I drew attention to this book nearly a year ago, in anticipation of a Fall 2014 publication, it seems that it will finally be in print at the end of next month. And it is a hefty tome well worth waiting for, not least for all those interested in recent Christian, especially Russian Orthodox, history, as well as those with interests in ecclesiology.

Hyacinthe Destivelle, The Moscow Council (1917-1918): The Creation of the Conciliar Institutions of the Russian Orthodox Church, trans. Jerry Ryan and eds. Michael Plekon and Vitaly Permiakov (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 488.
About this book we are told:

By the early twentieth century, a genuine renaissance of religious thought and a desire for ecclesial reform were emerging in the Russian Orthodox Church. With the end of tsarist rule and widespread dissatisfaction with government control of all aspects of church life, conditions were ripe for the Moscow Council of 1917-1918 to come into being.  The council was a major event in the history of the Orthodox Church. After years of struggle for reform against political and ecclesiastical resistance, the bishops, clergy, monastics, and laity who formed the Moscow Council were able to listen to one other and make sweeping decisions intended to renew the Russian Orthodox Church. Council members sought change in every imaginable area—from seminaries and monasteries, to parishes and schools, to the place of women in church life and governance. Like Vatican II, the Moscow Council emphasized the mission of the church in and to the world.

Destivelle’s study not only discusses the council and its resolutions but also provides the historical, political, social, and cultural context that preceded the council. In the only comprehensive and probing account of the council, he discusses its procedures and achievements, augmented by substantial appendices of translated conciliar documents.  Tragically, due to the Revolution, the council's decisions could not be implemented to the extent its members hoped. Despite current trends in the Russian church away from the Moscow Council’s vision, the council’s accomplishments remain as models for renewal in the Eastern churches.

Councils of the Church

There are certain scholars who justly acquire the reputation of being figures whom one must read even if they are offering a recitation of the phone-book set to Galician chant or Louisiana jazz or whatever. One of those is Paul Valliere, author of such widely and highly received studies as Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Eerdmans, 2001), 453pp. He is the author of a recently released study Conciliarism: A History of Decision-Making in the Church (Cambridge UP, 2012, 302pp.), about which the publisher informs us:

Conciliarism is one of the oldest and most essential means of decision-making in the history of the Christian Church. Indeed, as a leading Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann states, 'Before we understand the place and the function of the council in the Church, we must, therefore, see the Church herself as a council.' Paul Valliere tells the story of councils and conciliar decision-making in the Christian Church from earliest times to the present. Drawing extensively upon the scholarship on conciliarism which has appeared in the last half-century, Valliere brings a broad ecumenical perspective to the study and shows how the conciliar tradition of the Christian past can serve as a resource for resolving conflicts in the Church today. The book presents a conciliarism which involves historical legacy, but which leads us forward, not backward, and which keeps the Church's collective eyes on the prize - the eschatological kingdom of God.

I've just recently finished reading this excellent book, and will have more to say about it soon. But in the meantime if you are a Christian of any tradition--Protestant (most especially Anglican), Catholic, or Orthodox--you will want to read this book to deepen your understanding of Christian history in general, and in particular the nature and history of councils in the Church. Those who follow the current conflicts in the Anglican Communion will also find this a cogently written book that attends to current debates while it is also immersed in the relevant conciliar history which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants all share. 

Conciliarism in the Church

I have discussed before the very serious and unmet challenges posed, at least in and to Western ecclesiology, by the broad phenomenon of conciliarism. I have also had some detailed things to say about the role of councils and synods in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity. Now a new book continues the discussion. 

Paul Valliere, author of the acclaimed study Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Eerdmans, 2001), has recently published what looks to be a fascinating book on a topic very much in need of careful consideration and in-depth study: Conciliarism: A History of Decision-Making in the Church (Cambridge UP, 2012), 302pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Conciliarism is one of the oldest and most essential means of decision-making in the history of the Christian Church. Indeed, as a leading Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann states, "Before we understand the place and the function of the council in the Church, we must, therefore, see the Church herself as a council." Paul Valliere tells the story of councils and conciliar decision-making in the Christian Church from earliest times to the present. Drawing extensively upon the scholarship on conciliarism which has appeared in the last half-century, Valliere brings a broad ecumenical perspective to the study and shows how the conciliar tradition of the Christian past can serve as a resource for resolving conflicts in the Church today. The book presents a conciliarism which involves historical legacy, but which leads us forward, not backward, and which keeps the Church's collective eyes on the prize--the eschatological kingdom of God.

I greatly look forward to reading this, discussing it on here, and interviewing the author.  

The Church in Council

I know not a few who call themselves Christian who are complete naifs when it comes to Christian history in general, and doctrinal history in particular. But then too many people today are too ignorant of history, and this includes many Christians who seem to think that, e.g., the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed fell from the sky one day during lunch. They are, or at least affect to be, horrified when they learn of the process of deliberation, including heated confrontation and division, that went into the councils of the Church and the formation of her creeds and canons.

We have a new book out to give fresh examination of not only all the councils, but the whole idea of conciliarity or sobornost:

Norman Tanner, The Church in Council: Conciliar Movements, Religious Practice and the Papacy from Nicea to Vatican II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 272pp.

Norman Tanner, a Jesuit, has done extremely important historical work as well as work on the councils in previous books, including his two-volume critical edition of the conciliar decrees from Nicaea I to Vatican II. 

The publisher provides us the following blurb about the book:

Councils have been of fundamental importance to the historical development of the Catholic Church. From the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to the reforming Second Vatican Council of 1962-5, the conciliar movement has more often than not represented the interests and prerogatives of the mass of the faithful: frequently -- especially from medieval times -- as a bulwark against the untrammelled supremacy of the Pope. Norman Tanner is arguably the outstanding scholar of church councils writing in English and his work provides an essential framework to our understanding of the development of Western Catholicism. In this volume, which assembles some of his best work on the topic, he reflects on the legacy of conciliarism, and shows how and why the apostolic spirit of Nicaea was to resurface at Vatican II.

The table of contents: 

Introduction * Is the Church too Asian? * Was the Church too Democratic? * The African church and the first five ecumenical councils * The Eucharist in the Ecumenical Councils * Mary in the Ecumenical Councils of the Church * Historiography of Vatican II in the Anglophone World * Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Councils * The Book of the Councils: Nicaea I to Vatican II * Ecumenical Councils and non-Christian Religions * The image of John XXIII and Paul VI in the Anglo-Saxon World during and after Vatican II * Greek Metaphysics and the Language of the Early Church Councils: Nicaea I (325) to Nicaea II * Appendix: Publications on Church Councils by Norman Tanner

I look forward to seeing The Church in Council: Conciliar Movements, Religious Practice and the Papacy from Nicea to Vatican II  reviewed later this year in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. 

Conciliarism and the Catholic Crisis of Authority

The papacy is of course at the top of the agenda of the official international Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, which recently finished meeting in Vienna. The debate turns, in significant part, on conceiving of a balanced exercise of papal authority ("the one") vis-à-vis synodical ("the many"). These are not new debates. I treat them at some length, in the modern period, in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy. In the West alone, there has been a long-standing debate about how synodical/conciliar authority is to be exercised, and whether it can ever "trump" papal authority. The scholar who has most helped us understand this 600-year-old debate is Francis Oakley in The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870 (Oxford University Press, 2008, 312pp).

This is a paperback version of a disturbing book first published in 2003. Oakley, one of the most distinguished and prolific of medieval historians, has, for more than forty years, been investigating the diverse set of beliefs called “conciliarism.” This latest work makes invaluable contributions in lucid and taut prose that brilliantly condenses sources in many languages. Oakley begins by asking how it is that the Latin Church has been so successful in engaging in “a quite startling instance of institutional (and institutionally sponsored) forgetting” (2) about the teachings of the Council of Constance (1414–18).

What was forgotten, and why? Constance was called to try to bring an end to the great Western Schism, which, at one point, had successive rival claimants to the papacy in three concomitant lines: Roman, Pisan, and Avigonese. It was assembled legally under Pope John XXIII, a product of the Council of Pisa (1409), which had tried to heal the schism and only succeeded in deepening it by introducing this third papal contender, who is today counted by Rome as an “anti-pope.” John fled the scene when the political winds shifted against him. The fathers of Constance, who recognized John as legitimate pope, were unsure how to proceed in his absence, and the council came close to falling apart (which puts the lie to one of many misconceptions about this council, viz., that the bishops were “episcopalists” engaged in some kind of proto-Protestant power grab). But seeing the Church’s ever deepening disarray, the bishops screwed up their courage and went on to issue their famous decree, Haec Sancta:

this holy synod of Constance, which is a general council, for the eradication of the present schism and for bringing unity and reform to God’s church in head and members, legitimately assembled in the holy Spirit to the praise of almighty God, ordains, defines, decrees, discerns and declares … that … it has power immediately from Christ; and that everyone of whatever state or dignity, even papal, is bound to obey it in those matters which pertain to the faith, the eradication of the said schism and the general reform of the said church of God in head and members.

To Catholic ears of the last 150 years, this decree sounds radical and wholly sui generis – because of the aforementioned institutional forgetting – but Oakley shows how deeply it was grounded in the relevant and widespread canonical theory and practice of the day, and how it had even deeper, more ancient roots in the communio ecclesiology of the early Church, in the light of which Haec Sancta, he insists, is “impeccably orthodox." Misconceptions abound about this decree. One after another they wither under Oakley’s scrupulous scholarship, until we are left finally, nearly 600 years after the fact, to face the question: what should be made of this decree that is deeply unsettling to the claims of the modern papacy? What, in other words are we to make of the fact that “a divided Christendom had indeed been reunited but only because a general council, acting in the absence of its papal head, had formally claimed on certain crucial issues to be the legitimate repository of supreme power in the Church” (42)? How can this be reconciled with modern (i.e., post-Vatican I) notions of papal authority? Yet without some attempt at synthesis if not reconciliation, there are massive caesura in modern papal historiography and theology, and papal treatment of Constance ends up looking capricious and self-serving.

In examining these questions, Oakley allows no escapes here through the usual dodges about Constance’s early sessions, which produced Haec Sancta, being ultra vires. Other evasions about “emergency” situations, “development of doctrine,” or lack of “ecumenical” status (conveniently given only to select decrees from Constance, the rest, as with the above passage, being retroactively rubbished by timorous popes) all collapse in the face of the relevant evidence he has relentlessly amassed. Oakley not merely closes off all such escapes, but seals the doors, leaving nowhere to turn but to face squarely the question: what is the proper relation between council and pope, and why has one modern notion (i.e., that which culminated in Pastor Aeternus) been the only one allowed to exist with official sanction, all others in earlier councils having been bundled off into an ecclesio-historical gulag?

This question acquires even greater prominence when one realizes that Orthodox-Catholic unity will not be possible absent a renewed understanding of the role of councils and synods vis-à-vis the pope. Bringing Constance in from the outer darkness might prove helpful here. Thus one can only echo Oakley’s epilogue, where he challenges ecclesiologists (and, one presumes, ecumenists) to “steel their resolve and bring themselves to attend to the particular instance of unfinished business” (262). Until that is done, he asks plaintively, “can one hope to erect a future capable of enduring, if one persists in trying to do so on the foundation of a past that never truly was?”

These are questions to which, presumably, Oakley is returning in a forthcoming book, co-authored with Michael Lacey, to be published also by Oxford early next year: The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity. I greatly look forward to reading it.