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Martin V, before he closed the Council of Constance, duly announced that
the General Council would meet five years thence, April 23, 1423, at Pavia.
And at the appointed time he sent legates to preside at the council there
in his name. They found awaiting them two abbots only. Gradually, as the
months went by, a handful of bishops and lesser dignitaries straggled in--
the number never exceeded twenty-five. Then the plague came to Pavia, and
the council moved to Siena. Its members never got any further than a long-
drawn-out discussion about the relation, in law, between the General
Council and the papacy. Gradually the bishops began to leave, and just
eleven months after its inauguration the council was dissolved. But, once
again, the provisions of the decree Frequens were carried out. Before the
last members of the council had departed it was announced to them that
seven years hence, in 1431, the General Council of the Church would come
together again, this time at Basel in Switzerland.
By the time that this council met, Martin V was no more. He had found it a
very onerous task to set up anew the central administration of the Church
in what was little better than a city in ruins. The animosities and
personal rivalries of the curiously assorted cardinals who had elected him-
-relics of three rival papal regimes--naturally reasserted themselves. He
added a fourth group to the Sacred College by his own nominations. Little
wonder that this pope ruled his cardinals with a firm hand. Could the
possibility ever be far from his mind that the schism would revive? Did he
really lament, as he saw the council of Siena turn out a fiasco? There were
elements in Rome whom it pleased to assert that Martin V dreaded the very
thought of General Councils, and, as the date approached for that of Basel,
insulting notices were placarded on St. Peter's, warning the pope of his
duty in threatening terms. But death delivered Pope Martin from these
anxieties, February 20, 1431.
His successor, elected almost immediately, was not one of the cardinals
created since the restoration of unity, not alas the capable Giuliano
Cesarini, but a nephew of Pope Gregory XII whose resignation had smoothed
the path at Constance, sixteen years before--the cardinal whose creation,
in 1408, had been the immediate occasion of Gregory's cardinals deserting
him and uniting with the cardinals who had deserted Benedict XIII. The new
pope took the name Eugene IV. He was to rule for sixteen years, and to die
with the council now summoned, still active if excommunicated and, though
long moribund, still rebellious. The history of the reign of Eugene IV is,
in one respect, little more than the history of the Council of Basel.
Cesarini, appointed to preside over the council (by Martin V), had also
been commissioned as legate to the Catholics of Germany, now engaged in a
holy war against the Hussite heretics of Bohemia. The summer of 1431, which
should have seen the hosts of bishops converging on Basel, was spent by the
legate with the Catholic army. On August 14 it was wiped out, at the bloody
battle of Taussig. Ironically, as it proved, the legate had had the new
pope's permission to delay the opening of the council until the Hussites
had been dealt with! Three weeks after the battle, a very much changed man,
Cesarini reached Basel, to find what the other legates had found at Pavia.
Almost nowhere, it seemed, were bishops interested in General Councils. The
great wave of enthusiasm which had carried the decree Frequens had crashed
more rapidly than it had risen. The Council of Basel opened on December 14,
1431, with a mere handful of bishops present.
One of the factors in the troubles that now began was the vacillation of
the papal will, Pope Eugene reviving, in this, memories of his uncle, Pope
Gregory. Another was the geographical distance that separated the pope's
city from that of the council--a good seven hundred miles north to the
frontier and then across all the mountains of Switzerland, fifteen to
twenty days' journey, five centuries ago. In other words, the maximum of
causality to bring about contradictory decisions in an anxiety-ridden
superior. Four months after the first session, before the council had
really begun its work, the legate received from him the surprising order to
dissolve it and send the bishops home (January 10, 1432). The date of this
bull was the previous December 18. But, despite the able and conciliatory
Cesarini, the bishops refused to budge. They remembered the resolutions of
Constance--had they not, at their first session, solemnly reaffirmed the
decree Frequens?--and they reminded the pope of all this, by renewing the
resolutions, and gave him sixty days to withdraw his bull. Otherwise ...
This was on February 10, 1432, at the second session of the council.
The pope's reason, given in the bull, was the invitation sent from Basel to
the Hussites to attend and state their case. On this important issue there
were now to be two policies, the papal and that of the council. With such a
matter in debate, and the acutely critical state of Catholics in Germany
and Bohemia, there was no saying how affairs would end--especially under so
weak a character as this particular pope.
The King of France summoned his bishops, and they begged him to support the
council. The emperor, Sigismund still, took the same line. The council
"summoned" the pope to take his proper place at its deliberations, and the
cardinals with him--the latter were given three months to appear. More, the
council provided for the chance that the pope might die while it was in
session, and it forbade him to create any new cardinals until the present
crisis ended (June 20). This was the constitution of Constance in action,
with a vengeance.
The pope was now all conciliation. In a bull of August 20 he gave the
council leave to negotiate with the Hussites, and to make plans for the
reformation of abuses in Germany. He had spoken of another council, to meet
in Bologna in 1433, and he now left the choice of the place to the council.
But the council (three cardinals at the moment, plus thirty-two bishops and
abbots, plus a legion of doctors) was resolved that the pope should cry
Peccavi, explicitly assenting to its doctrine that General Councils cannot
be dissolved without their own consent. They told the pope explicitly that
only General Councils are infallible.
The English king, Henry VI--or the regent who ruled in that child's name--
now joined with the emperor and the French. It was quite a combination. The
pope, out of his twenty-one cardinals, could only really rely on six, and
in December the council gave him sixty days to withdraw his bull of
dissolution explicitly, and to approve all it had done so far.
Long before this reached him Eugene had made another conciliatory move--the
Bologna council would really be the Basel council continued, only in this
sense had he ever dissolved the Basel council. When this decision reached
Basel, during the fatal sixty days, it only stiffened the resolution of the
little group to extort the fullness of what they insisted were their
rights. The discussions with the pope's envoys were long and heated. Then
on April 27--it is now 1433, of course--the council promulgated eight new
shackling decrees about the papal authority. On July 13 it deprived the
Holy See, forever, of all right to appoint bishops and abbots, and ordered
that before being installed as pope the newly elect should, for the future,
take an oath to observe this enactment--the enactment of a couple of dozen
bishops plus a crowd of theologians and canonists. They reminded the pope
how patiently they had so far dealt with him, and once more commanded him
to withdraw his original bull.
And on August 1 the pope did precisely this.
Even so the council was not satisfied. The pope must admit that he was in
the wrong when he issued the bull, and must accept the council as a true
General Council and as having been such all through (September 11). And
now, at the moment when Eugene IV was preparing a wholesale nullification
of the council's antipapal decrees, he suddenly found himself a fugitive
from his own state, a distinguished exile enjoying the hospitality of the
Florentine republic. A Milanese army had invaded his state, giving out that
it had come to punish the pope, and domestic treachery had helped it.
From Florence, December 15, the pope made what was to be his last surrender
to the council. This bull acknowledged that the pope's dissolution bull of
1431 had been the cause of all the trouble. Eugene praised the council for
the good work it had done, and bade it continue with the reform of the
papacy as well as of the rest of the Church. All sentences passed against
the council were annulled. This surely was the nadir of papal action.
When the bull was read to the council, February 5, 1434, it declared itself
satisfied. Yet once again it renewed the decrees of Constance about the
General Council's superiority to the pope, and on June 9, 1435, it
abolished the main source of the Curia Romana's revenue, the taxes payable
on a bishop's appointment (annates) declaring them to be simony--which was
certainly not the case however onerous they might prove.
The council, like its predecessor, now began to take to itself the general
administration of the Church. It busied itself with the Jewish question,
and legislated against clerical concubinage. It made useful changes in the
procedure about excommunications, and about appeals from sentences given in
the bishops' courts. In the face of all which, the pope gave not a sign
that he knew what was afoot, except to notify the council that the pope is,
nonetheless, its superior.
So the deadlock lasted through 1435 and 1436, by which time a new question
had arisen--the Greek emperor, fearing the very days of his state were
numbered, had for some years been making approaches to end the centuries-
old schism. The council, as well as the pope, sent envoys to Constantinople
to treat with him. The Greeks, not surprisingly, preferred to do business
with the pope--the juridical position apart, what could the council do for
the Greeks but pass resolutions? and how could the Greeks hope to achieve
the aim of union with the pope by first making friends of the men who had
all but dethroned him? Pope Eugene now had a new birth of courage. He
denounced the council to the princes of Christendom for what it really was,
arranged with the Greeks that Ferrara would be a suitable meeting place,
and sent to Basel a bull transferring the council to that city (September
18, 1437). The legates left Basel, for Ferrara, in the December following--
six years to a month since the council's first session--and many of the
bishops left with them. The debris left at Basel was, by this, scarcely
visible. Its arrogance and claims and language were, of course, more
imperial than ever.
The attendance at the first eight General Councils had been all but wholly
Greek--the legates of the pope the only Latins in the assembly. At the rest
of the series, the attendance had been just as exclusively Latin. Only at
the Ferrara-Florence sessions of this council of Eugene IV, did
Constantinople and Naples, Milan and Ephesus ever sit down together. And
the doctrinal business that brought them together was not the usual
business of the condemnation of some new erroneous interpretation of the
Christian faith, but Reunion, the demonstration--on the part of the Latins-
-that the Latin theology meant precisely the same as the Greek in matters
where, for centuries now, the Greeks had been shunning the Latins as
heretics.
Behind this interest in theological questions there lay, on both sides, the
very urgent matter of the new Mohammedan threat to Constantinople, almost
the sole remnant of the ancient empire still in Christian hands. These
particular Mohammedans, the Ottoman Turks, had built up their vast power in
the last eighty years or so, conquering various minor sultanates in Asia
Minor, driving the Byzantines from the southern shores of the Black Sea,
and from all that classic land of western Asia Minor where, of old, were
such cities as Nicaea and Nicomedia and Chalcedon and Ephesus--occupying
the countries that nowadays are Greece and Bulgaria and southern
Yugoslavia. Constantinople was by this time a small island in a sea of
Mohammedan territory. The population, 1,000,000 or so in the great days,
had shrunk to a mere 50,000. The frontier was but a two days' ride from the
walls.
It had at last been driven home to the great Christian state likely to be
the next to be attacked, Venice, that it had been folly to allow the Turks
to conquer so much almost unhindered, and, like any good state whose one
real interest is commerce, to trust for its own security to good diplomatic
and trade relations with them. And so the Latin power that had inflicted
the death blow of 1204, was now coming forward, anxious to save the
remnants. And in 1431, to quicken the chances of a new kind of
understanding, a Venetian patrician had been elected pope--Eugene IV, cast
for other roles than the duel with the ridiculo-serious Council of Basel.
The Greeks themselves were divided, politically no less than theologically.
The long-standing hatred of the Latins, burnt into their very nature by the
crime of 1204, was as active as ever with many. The feeling of religious
distrust--Latin help must mean Latinisation--was general. As to the
imminence of the danger, no doubt, as with the imminent danger of secession
a century ago, people were too used to the menace to realise it was a fact.
When, finally, the papal envoys and the emperor John VIII and the patriarch
of Constantinople came to an understanding, and the bishops were chosen, in
a synod, to accompany them to the council, and all set off on the long ten
weeks' sea voyage to Venice, they left behind them a city very largely
hostile to their journey and its objectives. And the pro-Reunion emperor
knew this only too well. And when, the great reconciliation effected, he
returned to Constantinople he did not dare to publish the fact. Nor did his
brother, the last of the successors of Justinian, Constantine XII, until
1452, the very eve of the final catastrophe.
The ceremonial splendour of the Venetian reception of the Greeks (February
8, 1438), the liturgical wonders at Ferrara, are in almost shocking
contrast to the realities. They did not, for the emperor, mask the
realities. He had come to do what lay in him for the religious reunion of
the East and West, expecting then to discuss for the common salvation of
Christendom, a united military project. But not one of the kings of Europe,
not a single leading prince, ever came to the council. To the hostile
people awaiting his return, John VIII could not show a single treaty of
alliance. The princes had remained fixed in that indifference to the fate
of the East that had been theirs ever since the fall of Acre in 1291. The
pope's appeal was but sounding brass to them, as in all the last hundred
and fifty years. Is there ever a time when political situations are
hopeless? If so, this was certainly one of them. Let a contemporary speak,
a shrewd, professional diplomatist, later to be a pope and to organise the
last of the crusades.
"The titles of pope and emperor are now no more than empty words, brilliant
images. Each state has its own prince, and each prince his own special
interests. Who can speak so eloquently as to persuade to unity under a
single flag so many powers, discordant and even hostile? And even should
they unite their forces, who will be so bold as to undertake to command
them? What rules of discipline will he lay down? How will he ensure
obedience? Where is the man who can understand so many languages that
differ so widely, or who can reconcile characters and customs that so
conflict? What mortal power could bring into harmony English and French,
Genoese and Aragonese, Germans, Hungarians and Bohemians? If the holy war
is undertaken with an army that is small, it will be wiped out by
unbelievers; if the army is of any great size, it will court disaster just
as infallibly through the insoluble problems of manoeuvre and the confusion
that must follow. To whatever side one turns, one sees the same chaos."[314]
Such was the atmosphere in which, at Ferrara and at Florence, whither in
January 1439 the pope transferred the council, the bishops discussed the
theological matters that had divided East and West these many centuries.
The emperor John's disappointment at the council is understandable. That
theological topics, once brought to the fore by the pressure of political
necessity, would have so dominated the event that nothing but theology was
spoken of in the council--who would have expected this? There was not a
reference to the plight of the East, so far as we know, and not even the
palest imitation of that papal speech at another council which had launched
the First Crusade.[315] Most surprisingly, even to us, yet so it was.
In the first joint session, April 9, 1438, the council (117 Latins and 31
Greeks)[316] decreed, without any trouble, that this was a General Council.
And then the theological tourney began. Despite the emperor--for so
apprehensive was he that differences here would speedily end the council,
that he had meant the plight of the East to be first discussed, and the
means to remedy this. It was with the greatest difficulty that the Easterns
were brought to the point of stating why they thought the Latins were
heretics, and to a discussion of the Latin reply. The main dividing
questions were the orthodoxy of the Latin theology about the relation of
the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son (the Filioque question), of the
Latin theology about the purification of souls after death (Purgatory), of
the Latin use of unleavened bread in the Holy Eucharist (the Greeks used
ordinary bread), and of the Latin claim that the pope is, by God's ruling,
the supreme earthly ruler of the whole Church of Christ.
As to procedure, the pope's plan was that a joint commission of ten Greeks
and ten Latins should first study each topic and then their report be
discussed. But the emperor's objection to all and any discussion of
theology held up this plan. At last he agreed to the Purgatory question
being debated. After two months of this (June-July 1438) the Greeks agreed
that what the Latins taught was what they too believed. There was then a
lull for a good three months, and finally the emperor was brought round to
consent to a discussion of the Filioque. This proved the most lengthy of
the council's tasks--a thorough investigation and criticism of all the old
writers, the champions of orthodoxy at Nicaea, and Ephesus and Chalcedon,
Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzen, Cyril, and the rest. By June 8, 1439, the
Greeks had been satisfied that the Latins, despite their use of the words
"and from the Son" (i.e., Filioque), did not hold a doctrine other than
their own, and that the addition of the word Filioque to the original creed
had been lawful since, at the time it was made, it was the sole means of
warding off an heretical interpretation of the original text.
The question which, of all others, we might expect to have caused storms--
the claim of the popes that their see is the mistress-see in fact, and not
a mere primacy of honour--went through with comparatively little trouble,
in little more than a week.
It took a week to draft the text of the decree setting forth the agreement-
-this took the form of a papal bull, Laetentur Coeli--and then on July 5
the 133 Latins and the 33 Greeks signed it, the pope also and the emperor.
On July 6, 1439, it was promulgated in a solemn session of the council.
The definition about the kind of thing the pope's authority is, runs as
follows: "In the name of the Holy Trinity ... We, with the assent of the
holy and General Council of Florence, define, in like manner, that the holy
Apostolic See and the Bishop of Rome, have a primacy [tenere primatum]
throughout the whole world, and that the Bishop of Rome himself is the
successor of St. Peter and the prince of the Apostles, and that he is the
true vicar of Christ, and the head of the whole Church, and the father and
teacher of all Christians; and that to him in St. Peter there was committed
by Our Lord Jesus Christ full power to pasture, to rule and to guide the
whole Church; as is also contained in the acts of the General Councils and
in the sacred canons."[317]
And now the Greeks went home. The first of them left, for Venice, within
the fortnight; the last--the emperor John--on August 26. They sailed from
Venice October 19. Not until February 1 did they reach Constantinople. Most
of them were still in Florence when there arrived another group of
Orientals seeking reunion with the Roman see. These were Armenians from
Constantinople and the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea, but
commissioned by their patriarch. They were Monophysites, their churches
relics of the reaction that had followed the Council of Chalcedon, now a
thousand years ago. We have come to you our head," they said to the pope.
"You are the foundation of the Church. Every member that has left you is
sick, and wild beasts have devoured the flock that has separated itself
from you.... You who have the power of the heavenly keys, open to us the
gates of eternal life."[318] After weeks of daily conferences with the
cardinals whom the pope appointed, an understanding was reached and the
bull commonly called the Decree for the Armenians was promulgated, November
22, 1439.
It is of vast length, and begins with the verbatim repetition of the creeds
of Nicaea and Constantinople (381). Next comes, also word for word, the
definition of faith of the Council of Chalcedon, (the two natures of Christ
our Lord) and of the General Council of 680-81 (the two wills and the two
operations). There is also, for the acceptance of these Armenians, a
specific declaration that Chalcedon is a true General Council and that St.
Leo's teaching--the Tome--is authoritative. We know all too little of the
later history of this group, but apparently they were still in communion
with Rome when, thirty years later, the Turkish advance wiped out the
colony of Caffa.[319]
Eugene IV had begun his negotiations with the Armenians somewhere around
1434. But it was only during the council that he made his first approach to
the Monophysites of Egypt and Abyssinia (August 22, 1439), in the first
weeks of the talks with the Armenians, The Franciscans who carried the
pope's letters to "the Emperor of the Ethiopians," and also to "the Emperor
of the Indians," were many months on the road. In Cairo they delivered to
the successor of St. Cyril his copy of the reunion bull Laetentur Coeli,
who, acknowledging this, wrote to the pope that whoever did not accept what
the holy synod at Florence had decreed should be held as a heretic. And in
the same city these envoys met the Monophysite rival who also claimed to be
the successor of St. Cyril--and of "St Dioscoros" too. This personage, the
patriarch of the Copts, was no less pleased at the message the Franciscans
brought, and he appointed one of his monks, the abbot Andrew, to return
with them to the pope. It was on August 31, 1441, that Andrew made his
appearance in the council.
The Copt and the Latin bishops had no language in common. Andrew spoke in
Arabic, which was translated first into Italian, and then into Latin. The
gist of his address was a plea that the pope who had brought back the
Greeks and the Armenians into communion with himself would do as much for
the Copts. All the traditional complimentary language about the pope is
brought into use--those compliments which are yet so much more, since they
are made up of the popes' own descriptions of their unique rank; and since,
also, they are never used by these Easterns to anyone but the popes. Eugene
IV is here described as God's earthly vicar, St. Peter's successor, "head
and teacher of the universal church"[320] At the same time another Coptic
dignitary presented himself, sent by the Abyssinian abbot Nicodemus, from
Jerusalem.
The linguistic difficulties, it may be imagined, caused much delay, and no
doubt not all misunderstandings were cleared up. The bull of reunion
(February 4, 1442) was, again, immensely long.[321] Once again the teaching
of Chalcedon is verbally repeated--but, this time, with an explicit
condemnation of Dioscoros. Of "the Emperor of the Indians" we know nothing
at all; and of "the Emperor of the Ethiopians" only this that, eighty years
later than the Council of Florence, Clement VII received a letter from his
successor saying that in the royal archives there was a letter from pope
Eugene IV to the emperor Jacob, and naming the Abyssinian monk who had
brought it.[322]
Two years later than the reconciliation of the Copts, when the Council had
been translated (for the third time) to Rome,[323] the ghosts of yet another
ancient council reappeared, when the Nestorian archbishop of Edessa, in the
name of his patriarch, accepted the faith of the Council of Ephesus (431).
Once again, what now bore fruit was the zeal of Franciscan missionaries,
some of whom in the fourteenth century had made the long overland journey
as far as the Nestorians of China.
Finally, in the same Lateran period of the council, two schismatic bodies
from Cyprus were reunited--the Chaldeans (so-called) who were Nestorians,
and the Maronites who were Monophysites (August 7, 1445).
This is our last date in connection with the council. At what date the pope
formally brought it to an end, and why, we do not know. It is a most
singular thing that no record has survived of a public act of this
importance, in the history of the papacy, and in a century so well known to
us.
But at Basel the little rump continued to sit, and for yet another four
years.
The Basel reaction to the opening celebrations at Ferrara in 1438 had been
to "suspend" the pope from the exercise of his functions. Eugene replied by
an excommunication. The Baselites now proclaimed that the Constance decree,
Sacrosancta,[324] about the autonomy of General Councils, was an article of
the Catholic faith, and because of Eugene's ignoring this decree they
deposed him (July 25, 1439).[325] And then, once the complicated business
of the reunion with the Greeks was settled, the pope, in the bull "Moyses
vir Dei" (September 4, 1439), delivered judgment on these revolutionary
acts of 1415. They were utterly null and void, he said, because they were
the work of a "council" that represented not the Church but the "obedience"
of "John XXIII, as he was called in that obedience,"[326] done at a time
when, at Constance, the schism was still dominant.
Various European princes had seized the opportunity of the scandal to take
sides with the Baselites (Aragon) or to declare themselves neutral (France
and the Emperor)--always with the hope of "concessions" as the price of
support, whether of church revenues or rights of jurisdiction. This was the
beginning of a quiet blackmailing of the Holy See that went on for
centuries, a permanent feature of international life indeed, whose greatest
achievement was the supremely wicked suppression of the Society of Jesus,
on the eve of the French Revolution.
At Basel the sacrilegious farce moved logically to the furthermost depths.
The assembly elected a "successor" to Eugene, the widowed Duke of Savoy. He
called himself Felix V (November 5, 1439) As there was but one cardinal at
Basel, the legal problems of securing a clearly valid election will be
obvious. They were solved by the expedient of creating, from the body of
the council, an electoral college: the solitary cardinal, 11 bishops, 7
abbots, 13 theologians, and a licentiate of Canon Law; 33 in all.
Felix and his supporters were soon at loggerheads, about the simple, crude
business of cash. And soon he had left them, to return to his princely
solitude at Ripaille. The council found it had less and less work to do.
When, after the death of Eugene IV (February 23, 1447) the emperor
abandoned his pretence of neutrality, and came out on the side of his
successor, Nicholas V, Basel asked the council to find another home. When
Felix made his submission to the new pope, the council also gave in, going
through a formal motion of accepting the "abdication" of Felix, and of
"electing" Nicholas V, pope of course ever since the conclave two years
before. Nicholas, once a poor scholar and now a princely-minded humanistic
pope, was generous to these clerical pests in the hour of his triumph. He
made Felix a cardinal and gave him a pension, and he restored the red hat
to the late president of the council, who had crowned Felix and given him
episcopal consecration, the archbishop of Arles, Louis d'Aleman.
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