XXI.] THE COUNCIL OF ANTIOCH. 413 As I have had occasion to speak of the Council at Antioch in 341, I may add a few words as to what there took place. You will observe that we have now got half way through the fourth century, and that by this time Roman pretensions had very much advanced. However, the bishop of Rome was still contending not for a right of deciding Eastern questions, but only for that of being consulted about them. The Council of Antioch demanded that the bishop of Rome should acquiesce, without further inquiry, in the conclusions come to by Eastern councils with regard to the deposition of certain bishops, on pain of excommunication himself if he held communion with bishops who had been deposed. On that occasion twenty-nine useful canons were passed, which were afterwards, at Chalcedon, adopted into the code of the Universal Church. Pope Julius protested against these canons on the ground that he had not been summoned to that council, and that by Ecclesiastical law no canon was binding on the Church which had not received his assent. I don't know that we ought to allow Julius to be witness in his own cause; for this whole history is one of claims made by popes, at first meeting no recognition elsewhere, but by dint of pertinacious repetition at length obtaining more or less acceptance. The Greek historians, Socrates (ii. 8, 17) and Sozomen (iii. 10), appear simply to repeat what had been said by Julius. But if his words are fairly weighed, they seem to me to imply no more than this, that the bringing in new canons for the government of the whole Church was not proper to be done merely by local councils: Judgment ought to be given according to the canon of the whole Church, and not so as you have given it. ... You ought to have written to all of us that so we might have decided what was just.' And the first place in such a consultation, he maintains, is due to the bishop of Rome, especially in a matter relating to the see of Alexandria, which, according to Roman ideas, had been evangelized from Rome, viz. by Peter's 'interpreter,' St. Mark. would have claimed for his canons some higher origin than Sardica. Besides, as I have pointed out in the text, the Sardican decrees correspond well to the circumstances of the time to which they are attributed. I may remark, in passing, how what I said already as to the precedence of sees being merely determined by the civil greatness of their cities is confirmed by the instance of Antioch and Alexandria. In ecclesiastical associations Antioch was far the superior. It was the older Church, and claimed to have been presided over by St. Peter, while Alexandria only pretended to have been evangelized later by a disciple of Peter. But Alexandria was far the greater city, and so its bishop came to hold the second place after Rome; and accordingly, the trial of the case of Athanasius at Antioch was open to the objection that it seemed to subject the greater see to the less, besides that the place of trial was so remote from that where the facts to be investigated occurred. But to return to the claims made by Julius, while he protests against new canons made at Antioch without his knowledge and consent, he gives no intimation that he thought that new canons could have been made at Rome either without the consent of other Churches. Having spoken of Sardica, I may as well go on to speak of the well-known Roman attempt to pass off the decrees of that council as Nicene. The case of Apiarius is likely to be familiar to you. He was an African presbyter, excommunicated for misconduct by his bishop. He went to Rome, and prevailed on Pope Zosimus to take up his cause with some warmth. The Pope's interference and the claims on which it was founded were the subject of discussions in at least three African synods. Zosimus, you know, founded his right to interfere on the Sardican canons of which I have been speaking; but which he quoted as Nicene. The African prelates, in council assembled, declared that there was no such canon in their copy of the Nicene code; and they begged the Pope to write to Constantinople and Alexandria, requesting that the Greek copies there might be collated, in order to ascertain whether the disputed canons had really been passed at Nicæa. The Papal legates begged hard that the council would be content with this request to the Pope to examine into the matter for himself; but the council very wisely determined to send messengers of their own to the East to get copies of the Greek version of the canons of Nicea. The XXI.] THE CASE OF APIARIUS. 415 result of the mission appears from the final letter of the African bishops. In this, after giving a short account of what had been done, they request that the pope will not in future receive persons excommunicated by their synods, this being contrary to the canons of Nicæa. They protest against appeals to foreign tribunals; they deny the pope's right to send legates to exércise jurisdiction in his name, which they say is not authorized by any canon of the Fathers, and they request that the pope will not send any agent or nuncio to interfere with them in any business for fear the Church should suffer through pride and ambition. In fact, we can plainly see that the arrogance of the Papal representatives in Africa contributed greatly to the soreness which was felt at Roman interference. In defence of the false quotation of the Sardican canons as Nicene, it is alleged that it was the practice in books of canons to add to the earlier councils those of later, those of Sardica following next after the Nicene, and therefore quoted under the same heading. That the mistake was not purely accidental (as far as the Roman scribes were concerned) is made likely by a Roman manuscript of the canons still extant, in which the name Julius, which occurs in the Sardican decree, and which determines their date to that episcopate, is deliberately altered to Sylvester, who was bishop at the time of the Council of Nicæa. In the absence of any evidence to connect Pope Zosimus himself with this fraud, I willingly acquit him of deliberate forgery, and charitably believe that he erred in honest ignorance, having been imposed on by some too zealous subordinate; and the same excuse may be made for the Papal use of the forged decretals of which I shall speak in another lecture. But these instances show how absurd it is to claim for the pope immunity from error in his declarations of doctrine, while he is allowed to be liable to error with regard to matters of fact. How can we put confidence in the judgment of one who is mistaken as to the facts which ought to guide his judgment? When a bishop of Rome has to decide what rights he shall claim for his see, it surely is important for him to know what rights early councils had recognized and what rights his predeces sors had exercised. If a pope should be entirely misinformed on these points, it is quite to be expected that he should form a false estimate of the rightful claims of his see. Of course if a person is determined to believe in Infallibility he will do so in defiance of all reason. I have already told you that there are those who have no difficulty in believing that the decisions of a council are infallibly true, even when it has been shown that the arguments which induced the council to come to these decisions are hopelessly bad. Such persons will not be shaken in their belief in the correctness of the pope's decisions by any proof that he has been led to them on false information. Yet if anyone tells us that it is incredible that God would leave His Church without an infallible guide, we can reply that it is quite as incredible that He would permit His appointed guide to proceed by such methods as ought, without a miracle, to lead him to false conclusions, and would take no heed to guard him against giving credence to forgery and lies.* At all events the case of Apiarius shows clearly that the right of receiving appeals was not an original possession of the see of Rome. Zosimus claimed it as a privilege bestowed by the great Council of Nicæa; the African bishops were ready to concede it if it had The use made of this distinction in the Jansenist controversy is well known (see p. 201). In 1653, five propositions, said to have been extracted from Jansen's book, were submitted to Pope Innocent X., who condemned them as heretical. The Jansenists, when called on to subscribe to this condemnation, found themselves able to do so without giving up their allegiance to their master. The propositions, no doubt, were heretical, since the pope declared them so, but they had never been asserted by Jansen, at least not in the sense in which they were heretical. The Jansenists were deprived of this evasion in 1656, by a new condemnation obtained from Innocent's successor, Alexander VII., in which not only were the five propositions declared to be heretical, but it was expressly stated that Jansen had asserted them in the heretical sense. The Jansenists then declared that the question whether the five propositions were heretical was one of doctrine, on which they were bound to submit to the pope's decision; but that the question whether Jansen had asserted them was one of fact, on which the pope was liable to be deceived by false information; and, therefore, that before they could accept his ruling it was necessary that the passages should be produced where Jansen had made the alleged erroneous assertions. The distinction relied on by the Jansenists is absolutely necessary to save Papal Infallibility on the Pelagian question, for the only defence that can be made for Zosimus is to assert that the pope's doctrine was sound all along, and that he was 1 XXI.] THE SECOND GENERAL COUNCIL. 417 been so bestowed, but asked for proof that it had been. That it belonged to the see by divine right does not seem to have been dreamed of on either side. Thus we see that even in the West at the beginning of the fifth century the pre-eminence of the bishop of Rome implied no right of absolute dominion, but was subject to strict constitutional limitations. The East had showed its independence still more plainly a little time before at the second general council. That council was, as I have already said, a purely Eastern body; and its decrees were made not only without Western assistance, but in some points in opposition to Western opinion. I refer particularly to disputes at the time as to who were the rightful occupants of the sees of Antioch, Constantinople, and Alexandria, when the competitors who had the strongest Western support were rejected. And yet the time was one when the voice of the West was likely to be listened to with unusual respect; for the Easterns had been under obligations to the West, both politically and ecclesiastically. They had quite lately been obliged to cry out for Western help when their Emperor perished at Adrianople in the most disastrous defeat the Roman arms had experienced since Cannæ. And the orthodox merely deceived as to the matter of fact whether Pelagius and Cælestius had contravened it. Yet if the Jansenist position be tenable, any heretic might safely disregard condemnation by the pope. The Jansenists, persecuted in France, found shelter in Holland, where they flourished for a time, and have preserved to our day a succession of bishops, which enabled them to consecrate a bishop for the Old Catholics. The late Dr. Tregelles, in his little book on the Jansenists, gives an account of an interview he had in 1850 with Van Santen, the Jansenist archbishop of Utrecht, who gave him particulars of an attempt made by Pope Leo XII. soon after his accession in 1827, through his legate, Cappucini, to obtain his submission. The most interesting thing in it is Cappucini's reply to Van Santen's plea that he could not subscribe the formulary which declared that the condemned propositions were in Jansen's book, because he himself had read the book, and knew that the propositions were not there: Pope Urban VIII. [the same who condemned Galileo] had by his bull, In eminenti, condemned Jansen's book, and forbidden the reading of it. In reading it at all you were doing a forbidden act, and could not expect God to give you clear light when you were thus acting in presumption. No knowledge, therefore, that you imagine yourself to have obtained in this unlawtul way, can conflict with the clear duty of implicit obedience to the Holy Father.' |