www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Ecumenical Councils under the Pope?

A very-educated professor I know said that the Ecumenical Councils were always submited to Pope of Rome's aprooval, even before the Schism. Was it really like that?

Yes since Rome was the last court of appeal.
It only seems logical for this to happen.
Stephanos I
Rather sick right now so the answer was brief, I will have to do some more study on the issue for particulars.

My understanding Phillippe has been that you are correct that they were submited to the pope to approve. However, that approval was for concensus, since the pope was the Patriarch of the west. His approval was simply stating that yes, the church of the west agrees with this. I think, unfortunately, this has been viewed as "if the pope accepts it as ecumenical it is" it's only ecumenical if the pope accepts it as accepting it for the west, and the other patriarchs in the east accept it as well. Beyond the declared ecumenical councils of the 1st millenium their have been NO ecumenical councils since they were not accepted by both east and west...regardless of what some papists may say...(I don't mean papists in a derogatory sense, simply as those who hold to "what the pope says at all times goes without question" the last thing on my mind is "flame throwing" on Great and Holy Friday)

Ecumenical councils were the higher authority.

As Job says, the Pope (of Rome) was only giving his assent as head of the Church of Rome.

So Chalcedon and all subsequent Councils were not Ecumenical, correct?

Peace and God bless!

Without getting into an extended argument on the matter, it is a clear historical fact that most of the early councils now counted as ecumenical were not approved by Rome, or at least not approved for years, even decades later. Indeed, Rome had very little input on the early councils, with the exception of Chalcedon, and did not receive many of them, in whole or in part, at the time their canons were promulgated.

Examples include Constantinople I (381), which was [u]not[/u] accepted by Rome until the Council of Ephesus in 431, a lapse of fifty years during which time Rome did not receive the Creed of Constantinople or its "neo-Nicene" theology. Rome also did not accept Chalcedon unconditionally for many decades afterwards, for the same reason it did not accept Constantinople: it objected to the elevation of the Church of Constantinople to a status co-equal with Rome. Of the last three councils, Rome either did not participate or did not recognize the acts of those councils until well after the fact. Pope Benedict XVI, writing as Cardinal Ratzinger in [u]Reflections on the Liturgy[/u], noted that the Church of Rome never fully received the Second Council of Nicaea. with profound implications for its understanding of sacred images.

Conversely, there have been a number of councils received by the Church of Rome which were later disavowed by it, thus calling their ecumenicity into question. The most significant from an ecumenical standpoint are the Photian Synods of 869-870 (recognized by Rome as the "8th Ecumenical Council") and 879-880. Here, one should refer to the groundbreaking work of Father Francis Dvornik OP, who proved conclusively that the acts of the earlier council, which condemned Photios, were superseded by the latter council, during which the acts of the council of 869-870 were burned in a copper bowl. The council of 879-880 restored Photios and established the groundwork for a lasting [i]modus vivendi[/i] between East and West. The council was ratified by Pope John VIII, and thus by all rights should have been recognized by the West as the true 8th Ecumenical Council (and, indeed, its canons were duly recorded by the Church of Rome as such). Only in the second millennium, after the separation, did the council of 879-880 become embarrassing for the Church of Rome, which consigned it to the memory hole, and restored (quite unilaterally and anachronistically), the council of 869-870. About this same time, to explain how Rome could have allowed the restoration of a patriarch condemned at an ecumenical council, the myth of the "second Photian schism" was invented as a polemical tool. To see the state of the historical record prior to Dvornik, go to the on-line 1913 edition of the [b]Catholic Encyclopedia[/b].

Catholics should be careful to remember that the list of so-called "ecumenical councils" is really an invention of St. Robert Bellarmine in the 17th century, as a polemical tool against the Reformation. The list is not canonical, nor binding, and indeed, has been undergoing considerable review and revision since 1974, when Pope Paul VI referred to the Second Council of Lyons not as an Ecumenical Council but as a "general council of the Church in the West.

The recently published R[u]avenna Document[/u], which appears to have been received by the Holy See goes much further towards relativizing the second millennium councils held by the Latin Church without reference to the East, leaving both Churches in the position of recognizing only seven councils as truly "ecumenical"--not because they were approved by the Pope, but because they were received by the undivided Church as such.

An ecumenical council is not above or under the Pope. However, has no authority without the Pope's promulgation of its decrees. I think the Council of Constance is the point of reference of the relationship between Pope and council.

The Council of Constance was called by a King(Sigismund) to settle the Great Western Schism, truly a crisis which there were 3 to claiming to be Pope. "Conciliarism," being the prime issue. It deposed all of them and elected a new Pope(Martin V). It produced a decree called "Haec Sancta." Which I believe basically states that when there is not a valid Pope, an ecumenical council is given supreme authority in that situation.

The Ecumenical Councils were in fact ecumenical. They needed not the Orthodox or Protestants in order to be ecumenical. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church can not be divided by schism or those who left the Church. Also, all the Bishops of the Church in the entire world can not all be present due to various reasons(health, politics, travel restrictions, war, etc.), and thus not needed for all to be present in order for an ecumenical council

"...or at least not approved for years, even decades later."

But this is where some arguments I've heard find their force. Eventually, they were approved.

Alexis

I think that the point being made by Stuart is that the Catholic Churches of the East (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem) did see it see it as necessary to wait for Rome to approve the decisions of Ecumenical Councils. In fact it you look at the letters sent to Rome with the decisions of some of the Ecumenical Councils, the Council Fathers are forwarding them to Rome since Rome had the right to be informed.

During the time of the Councils the Catholic Church in the Eastern Empire was in fact much larger numerically than the Catholic Church of Rome. It is said, as a rough guide, that at this period the evangelisation of the Eastern Empire was very successful, with 7 out of 10 citizens being Christian. By way of contrast, Rome and Western Europe count count on about 3 out of every 10 citizens being Christian.

Here is a graph showing these statistics:
http://img21.imageshack.us/my.php?image=graphstatisticsschismdv.gif

"But this is where some arguments I've heard find their force. Eventually, they were approved."

And during the period in which Rome did not receive the teachings of a council, was Rome teaching error because it rejected what later became the received faith of the Church? Or was the doctrine that Rome rejected during those years heretical because Rome did not agree with it, but then became orthodox once Rome did?

As a specific example, was Chalcedonian theology false because Rome did not accept the use of the term hypostasis to explain the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit within the divine essence, but then became true once Rome decided that hypostasis was an acceptable term? Or was Chalcedonian theology inherently true, whether Rome approved of it or not? In which case, was Rome's fifty year rejection of Chalcedonian theology an example of Rome being on the wrong side of doctrine? One cannot have it both ways.

Attempts to define ecumenicity in juridical terms will founder, inevitably, on such inconsistencies of history, as well as the futility of trying to define truth a priori through a set of extrinsic criteria. Orthodox theologians are absolutely correct--and an increasing number of Catholic theologians agree--when they state that ecumenicity can only be determined through an organic process of reception, and not by legalistic formulations, for as we have seen, there have been councils considered ecumenical that were never formally ratified by the Church of Rome, and conversely, there were councils ratified by the Church of Rome that never became ecumenical.

This leaves the problem I hinted at earlier, namely that many of the Councils that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox consider Ecumenical were not, in fact, "determined by an organic process of reception". They were, in fact, rejected by a very large portion of Apostolic Christians and Bishops.

Peace and God bless!

"This leaves the problem I hinted at earlier, namely that many of the Councils that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox consider Ecumenical were not, in fact, "determined by an organic process of reception". They were, in fact, rejected by a very large portion of Apostolic Christians and Bishops."

One would presume you refer to the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, the former rejected by a large chunk of the Antiochian school of theology, including what we now call the Assyrian Church, the latter rejected by large swaths of the Alexandrine school of theology, including the Coptic, Syrian and Armenian Churches. In both cases, it would appear opposition to those councils was based first on the modes of expression used in them, which were alien to other schools of theology; second, to misundestandings resulting from terminological confusion; and third, from cultural/political conflicts unrelated to theology.

In fact, as modern scholarship shows, there is very little to choose from among the Christology of the Chalcedonian, Oriental Orthodox, and Assyrian Churches; all essentially profess the same thing, but do not approve of the way in which the other Churches express it. The so-called Nestorians objected to what appeared to be monophysitism in the teachings of Ephesus; the so-called monophysites to the denigration of Cyril of Alexandria they perceived in Chalcedon (as well as the implicitly di-physite manner in which Chalcedon was implemented by some bishops). These differences were exacerbated by strong cultural-political trends exploited by the Persians (in the case of the Nestorians) and the Muslims (in the case of the non-Chalcedonians.

Strong-arm tactics by Constantinople did not make matters easier, but in fact the separation of both the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox from the Western (Chalcedonian) Churches was not something that happened automatically; it took several centuries to evolve. during which (especially in the case of the Oriental Orthodox) numerous attempts were made to find a Christological formula that was true and acceptable to all. Only the crisis faced by the Byzantine Empire in the 7th century (the Persian and then the Muslim invasions) put an end to this process; the truncated Byzantine Empire, being exclusively Chalcedonian, turned inward on itself and no longer showed much interest in resolving the issue, as survival took a front seat. All this is explained very carefully and clearly in Meyendorff's "Christ in Byzantine Theology".

Some fifteen hundred years after the fact, when tempers had cooled and the political issues were moot, modern scholars, examining primary documents on all sides were able to separate rhetoric and polemic from substance, the culturally and historically conditions expressions of doctrine from its unchanging content, and thus were able to begin the process of reconciliation.

The existence of "agreed joint Christolological statements" between the Oriental Orthodox on the one hand, and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox on the other, as well as the separate statement between the Assyrian Church and the Catholic Church, represent de facto reception of the teachings of the third through seventh Ecumenical Councils, though none of the statements requires any party either to explicitly accept or reject the wording of any conciliar document. Instead, they all agree on the content of those councils, expressed in the manner most appropriate to each family of Churches.

Sometimes reception can be very slow, indeed.

StuartK,

Interesting! Thanks.

Father Ambrose,

That's an interesting chart, although I don't see how it shows the statistics of what percentage of people in the Western part of the Empire were Christian as compared to the Eastern part. The chart shows what percentage of Christians was "Orthodox," "Catholic," and "Other," which is something entirely different (and uses faulty terminology in the first place). And are Oriental Orthodox and Assyrians being included in the "Orthodox" category? If not, why is there not a sharp jump up for "Other" after the Second and Third Ecumenical Councils?

And, Stuart, although the historical facts are interesting (and known very well to Ghosty, I'm sure), I don't see how they directly address Ghosty's point. Could you clarify? Regardless of circumstances, it still seems large portions of the Church rejected the Ecumenical Councils.

Alexis