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Politics at the Council of Constance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
Extract
Was the Council of Constance a failure? We are apt to think so. True it deposed three popes, and burnt two heresiarchs and mildly condemned some unusually idiotic pamphleteering. It did restore unity to the Church desolated by half a century of schism. But it seemed as though the passion for unity had absorbed all the energies of men who had before talked not merely of unity, but of reformation—both in the head and members of the Church. For enduring reform men had to wait a full century, and when it came it came in other and rougher guides than that contemplated by Parisian doctors. But this was as nothing to the ruin that befel the constitutional schemes of the fathers. They were fond of asserting the superiority of councils to popes. They desired to take security for the future by clipping the wings of the Canonists, and (shall we say?) interpreting the ‘plenitudo potestatis.’ The Pope was still to be head, for Jesus Christ had founded a kingdom; but he was to rule with a Bill of Rights to restrain him to do what he ought, not what he liked. The decree ‘Frequens’ was to serve as a triennial act for the ecclesiastical revolution, and a council which was virtually the Church—at any rate as much so as the eighteenth century House of Commons was in Whig phrase ‘virtually’ the representative of the people of England—was to meet at short intervals to effect reforms and to teach the Pope his place.
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- Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1899
References
page 103 note 1 It is a curious fact that in most of the latter, mainly Jesuit, arguments as to the scope and validity of the Decree of the Council, no one appears to have thought fit to inquire as to the meaning of ‘tyrannus’ in the Decree, which was merely that of traitor and not of tyrant in the ordinary senses of oppressor and usurper.
page 104 note 1 Torquemada, who wrote on this subject at the close of the conciliar movement, is certainly no less emphatic than most of his predecessors. And, compared with Bozius, who wrote in the next century, even Augustin del Trionfo is
‘As moonlight is to sunlight, and as water is to wine.’
It is no wonder that Bellarmin found it well to declare, that in defending the temporal power of the Pope, he preferred his own methods, and was not bound by the dicta of Bozius.
page 104 note 2 It is strange how Presbyterian it became towards the close. All conciliar writers were inclined, like Dr. Hort, to interpret the great commission to St. Peter as given only in the name of the whole Church; but towards the close of the Council of Basel after Cesarini's departure, when the deposition of Eugenius was in progress, Louis d'Allemand and his friends, in search of a majority, were compelled to argue (or thought they were) for the fundamental equality of priests and bishops.
page 107 note 1 Was Erastus an Erastian? I have very grave doubts, and so apparently had his translator of fifty years ago. But it is too long a question to enter into here, save to point out that he wrote with no object of establishing secular authority, the position of Hobbes's Leviathan, but merely in order to protest against the employment of the ‘discipline’ of excommunication.
page 108 note 1 The questions on the subject of the nations are evidence of this, and the Concordats another.
page 108 note 2 Is it not possible that St. Augustine's influence in politics has been on a par with his theological importance? We cannot, indeed, find the system of Hildebrand or Innocent in the De Civitate Dei, but the governing notions of that book, the essential superiority of the spiritual to the secular state, and the conception of the Church as above all things a state, and the way in which secular politics are regarded, appear to contain the germ of that audacious vision of a Church-state ruling over the kingdoms of the earth which dazzled the eyes and directed the policy of Gregory VII. and his successors.