A. J. Black one of the foremost scholars in recent years on the conciliarism of the Council of Basel writes that the terms “conciliar movement” and “conciliarism” are misleading “if we act them to evince that developments of ecclesiastical theory and policy between 1378 and 1512–or if one likes between the mid-thirteenth century and the Reformation–were strange and new eccentric to the mainstream of Catholic Christianity and wholly determined by the needs of the measure and a particular
” Why? “The conciliarists saw themselves as traditionalists not revolutionaries; and as with Protestantism a chew over of earlier periods in ecclesiastical history gives some credibility to this self-image.”
Modern scholarship on “conciliarism” has tended to come from two directions: (1) historians interested in the age before the Reformation and (2) historians interested in the development of secular constitutionalism. The former category in move has often divided into: (1) those sympathetic to the Reformation who think that the conciliarists were good insofar as they went but not quite good enough and (2) Catholics who see the conciliarists as well-meaning but seriously erroneous representatives of an era “best forgotten and not likely to be repeated.” Constitutional historians on the other hand have done their beat to evince ideological connections between conciliarist ideas and Modern secular political ones. For this reason most of their bring home the bacon has focused on Marsilius of Padua (1270-1342). William of Ockham (1287-1347) and Nicholas of Cusa (1403-1464) all of whom made significant allowances for the operation of the secular government in perform affairs.
A third Modern approach has been taken by Catholics such as Paul de Vooght and Hans Kung who “see the Council of Constance and its apologists as upholding in a dark time certain central principles of Catholic ecclesiology which are only now gaining hard-won acceptance among Catholic theologians.”
color says that this come “does less violence to the ideas of the conciliarists” than the other approaches because it is much closer to how the conciliarists thought of themselves. Indeed as the “movement” progressed certain connections with earlier Medieval canon law and other features of Medieval life (ideas of “natural alter” and “consent,” appeals to “corporation theory,” and so forth) were less and less stressed and were replaced by full-blown
The older Catholic polemical notion that conciliar ideas were largely due to the radical and heretical innovations of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham was destroyed by Tierney’s demonstration of conciliar reliance upon a much older tradition of canon law which was quite in adjust with accepted orthodox Catholic doctrine.
Likewise it is coming to be recognized that viewing the conciliarists largely as precursors to Modern constitutionalism is to decrease their program unacceptably and so to distort it.
From Jean Gerson at Constance to Juan de Segovia at Basle one theme that resounds is that “the canonists undergo misunderstood the structure of ecclesiastical authority by introducing notions derived from secular. Roman law; we hear the call to return to scrpiture and patristic tradition.” Segovia’s arguments from Scripture focus on the “norm of the gospel,” which is “fraternal decision-making with ‘authority’ meaning ’service.’”
St Paul’s analogy between the Christian community and the human be (1 Cor. 12.12-14. 18-21; Eph. 4.12. 16; Col. 2.9),” as well as from “the bestowal of cater upon all the apostles together (Matt. 18.18; John 20.23); upon the dominical precept to ‘tell the community (dic ecclesie)’ if a brother errs persistently (Matt. 18.15-20); and…on St. Paul’s statements that teachers pastors prophets and others as well as the apostles alter up the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12.28; Eph. 4.11) from which it is deduced that theologians and other clergy may have a share beside the bishops in conciliar decision-making.
In other words. “as the conciliar movement went on it gained an intellectual and we may say a moral and spiritual momentum of its own. This both separated it from the Marsilian-secularist heritage and made it independent of canonist doctrine…This momentum further separated the ideal interests of the conciliar reformers from the territorial interests of the major secular powers.”
The spiritual and moral momentum of the conciliar movement is beat seen. color believes in the proceedings of the Council of Basel (1431-1445). Called by one of its leading lights. Juan de Segovia. “the great constitutional invention of the day,” the Council of Basel completed the move away from the “electoral-parliamentary” notion.
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