Tag: conciliarism

Have I Got A Book for Ross Douthat?

Published on by D. G. Hart28 Comments

Last week Douthat reflected on what is becoming obvious — the change (at least in tone) in the papacy under Francis, though conclusive assessments are still premature. Douthat also argued that this change could be good for conservative Roman Catholics:

. . . to the extent that conservative Catholics in the United States find themselves actively disagreeing with Pope Francis’s emphases, whether on political issues or matters internal to the church or both, it might help cure them/us of the recurring Catholic temptation toward papolatry.

This temptation was sharpened for many Catholics by John Paul II’s charisma and Cold War statesmanship and then Benedict’s distinctive intellectual gifts, and by their common role as ecumenical rallying points for orthodox belief in an age of heresy. But if the tendency is understandable, it’s also problematic, because the only thing that Catholics are supposed to rely on the papacy for is the protection of the deposit of faith, and on every other front — renewal, governance, holiness — it’s extremely important for believers to keep their expectations low.

At various points during the last two pontificates, of course, it’s been liberal and heterodox Catholics who have consoled themselves with precisely this perspective, and with the belief that (as the writer Paul Elie put it, in an Atlantic article on the election of Joseph Ratzinger) “much of what is best in the Catholic tradition has arisen in the shadow of an essentially negative papacy.” But conservative Catholics need not agree with the liberal theological program to recognize that there is truth to the underlying insight. The papal office has been occupied by many more incompetents than geniuses, and there’s a reason why so few occupants of the chair of Peter show up in the litany of the saints. Or at least until so few until now — and here I agree absolutely with this point from Michael Brendan Dougherty, in a piece about the overlooked aspects of Francis’s now-famous post-Brazil interview:

For one thing, Pope Francis not only touted the impending canonizations of Pope John XIII and Pope John Paul II, but also the “causes” of Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul I. Are we seriously to believe that every recent pope was a saint, even when the church has experienced unbelievable contraction and criminal scandal under their pontificates? Seems like the Church needs an “Advocatus Diaboli” again to point out the faults of candidates for sainthood …

So popes are not all saints, and the pope isn’t identical with the church — and it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for conservative Catholics to reckon with this fact. Maybe this pontificate won’t be the time for that reckoning. But if the historical record is indicative, it won’t be permanently delayed.

Something that may also help conservative Roman Catholics find separation from the audacity of papal authority is Francis Oakley’s book, The Conciliarist Tradition (2003). That Douthat does not appeal to conciliarism, as if papalism is the only game in town, confirms Oakley’s thesis that conciliarism has been forgotten and that high-papalism is presumed to be the traditional view:

. . . it has been usual to concede that tattered remnants of that conciliar ecclesiology were to be found caught up in those provicincal, obscurely subversive, and usually statist ideologies that have gone down in history as Gallicanism, Richerism, Febronianism, and Josephinism. But those disparate, occluding, and (usually) ninetenth-century labels have themselves served, in fact, to conceal from us the prominence, tenacity, wide geographic spread, and essential continuity of that age-old tradition of conciliarist constitutionalism which, for long centuries, competed stubbornly for the allegiance of Catholics with the high-papalist or ultramontane vision of things so powerfully entrenched in Italy and at Rome. If the latter is so much more familiar to us today, it is so because it was destined after 1870 to become identified with Roman Catholic orthodoxy itself. And it is only, one cannot help suspecting, our very familiarity with that papalist outcome that has contrived to persuade us of the necessity of the process.

In the past, historians concerned with the conciliar movement clearly felt obliged to explain how it could be that the seeds of such a consitutionalist ecclesiology could have contrived to germinate in the stonily monarchical soil of the Latin Catholic Church. But in thus framing the issue, or so I will be suggesting, they were picking up the conceptual stick at the wrong end. Given the depth of its roots in the ecclesiological consciousness of Latin Christendom and the strength with which it endured on into the modern era and right across norther Europe, the real question for the historian at least may rather be how and why that constitutionalist ecclesiology perished and, in so doing, left so very little trace on our historical consciousness. For perish it certainly did . . . Vatican I’s definitions of papal primacy and infallibility had seemed to leave Catholic historians with little choice but to treat the concilar movement as nothing more than a revolutionary moment in the life of the Church, and Catholic theologians with no alternative but to regard the conciliar theory as a dead issue, an ecclesiological fossil, something lodged deep in the lower carboniferous of the dogmatic geology. (16-17)

Perhaps with folks like Jason and the Callers in mind, Oakley wrote this:

. . . . Theologians of non-historical bent may doubtless be content to explain why this had necessarily to be so. Historians on the other hand, may be forgiven for wanting to rescue from the shadows and return to the bright lights of centre stage the memory of a tradition of thought powerful enough, after all, to have endured in the Catholic consciousness for half a millennium and more. (18-19)

So when Jason and the Callers embraced the papacy, they believed they were only doing what Roman Catholics had always done. Turns out that conciliarism (especially if you rummage around in the Eastern Church) has deeper historical roots than papalism. In which case, Jason and the Callers confirm Oakley’s point about the forgetfulness of traditionalist Roman Catholics about tradition.

Step Aside Beza and Locke, Say Hello to Almain and Mair

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

A week away gave me the chance to read another very impressive book by Francis Oakley, this time on conciliarism. I will be posting about the implications of Oakley’s argument not only for claims of papal supremacy but also for considering the relations between the Middle Ages and the Reformation. But for now, here’s an earlier argument from Quentin Skinner on the import of medieval conciliarism for resistance theory and revolution:

The study of radical politics in early modern Europe has for some time been dominated by the concept of “Calvinist theory of revolution.” I have now sought to suggest that strictly speaking no such entity exists. The revolutions of sixteenth-century Europe were, of course, largely conducted by professed Calvinists, but the theories in terms of which they sought to explain and justify their actions were not, at least in their main outlines, specifically Calvinist at all. When the Calvinist George Buchanan stated for the first time on behalf of the Reformed Churches a fully secularized and populist theory of political resistance, he was largely restating a position already attained by the Catholic John Mair in his teaching at the Sorbonne over a half a century before. Mair and his pupils had bequeathed to the era of the Reformation all the leading elements of the classic and most radical version of the early modern theory of revolution, the version most familiar to us from the closing chapters of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. It only remained for Mair’s pupil Buchanan to take over the concepts and arguments he had learnt from his scholastic teachers and press them into service on behalf of the Calvinist cause. (“The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution,” in After the Reformation, 324-25)

Striking to observe is Skinner’s account of when the scholastic conciliar ideas regained traction in Europe:

Early in the sixteenth century these legal and conciliarist ideas were revived and extended by a group of avowed followers of Ockham and Gerson at the University of Paris. The occasion for this development was provided by the fact that the French king, Louis XII, became involved in a quarrel with Pope Julius II in 1510, after the collapse of the League of Cambrai. Alarmed by Louis’ decisive victory over the Venetians in the previous year, Julius sought to repudiate the alliance he had formed with the French in 1508. Louis responded by appealing over the pope’s head to a General Council of the Church, calling at the same time on the University of Paris to confirm his claim that the Church as a body possessed a higher authority than the pope. The professors at the Sorbonne produced in reply a number of systematic works of political theory, defending the idea of popular sovereignty not only as a claim about the government of the Church, but also as a thesis about the location of political authority in the State.

Skinner notes that one of these professors was John Mair (1467-1550), under whom Buchanan and Calvin studied.

For Almain as well as Mair the point of departure in the analysis of political society is the idea of the original freedom of the people. . . . The origin of political society is thus traced to two complementary developments: the fact that God gave men the capacity to form such communities in order to remedy their sins; and the fact that men duly made use of these rational powers in order to “introduce kings” by “an act of consent on the part of the people” as a means of improving their own welfare and security. (321-22)

Rather than the papacy being a solution to the disorder of the modern world, the popes’ assertion of power in the heady days of the 13th and 14th centuries may have produced reactions that allowed republicanism and constitutionalism to eventually prevail in the West.