In Appendix V: “Abbbot Chapman and Nicaea,” Anglican G.G. Coulton wrote
the following in his study critical of Papal Infallibility:
From his Catholic Truth Society Pamphlet, The First Eight General Councils and Infallibility, 1908, pp.
10-11.
“Who was the
President [of the Council]? Pope Silvester could not come. Had he wished his
legate to preside he must have sent a bishop. In fact, he was represented by
two priests. Probably Hosius of Cordova, who, alone, signed before these two
legates, presided. A Greek historian, Gelasius of Cyzicus, in a somewhat mythical
history of the Nicene Council, written 150 years later, of which part only has
been printed, repeatedly makes Hosius president and representative of the Pope.
This only shows what a Greek writer, a quarter of a century after the Council
of Chalcedon, took to be a matter of course. In the seventh century, and afterwards,
Greeks and Latins were certain that the Papal legates had presided. It is much
more likely that [the Emperor] Constantine nominated Hosius as president, and
that the bishops were glad to agree . . . Did the Pope solemnly confirm it [the
Council]? No act of the Council remain, and we are driven to conjecture. I am
inclined to think that no Papal confirmation was ever given.”
So Abbot Chapman
wrote in his first edition. In the third (1928) his preface pleads that recent
studies “may give us more confidence in the carefulness of Gelasius as a
historian.” But how much, even so? This person, writing 150 years after the
event, is the first to mention a fact which, if true, would be one of the most
important in the history not only of the Nicene Council, but of the whole
Christian Church. His history, in every other respect which can be checked,
quite deserves Abbot Chapman’s first verdict “somewhat mythical.” It was
written a quarter of a century after the Council of Chalcedon, which had almost
as much altered the balance between Papacy and the rest of Christendom as the
Great War has altered the balance between America and Europe. Yet this
Gelasius, whose mythicality is not altogether withdrawn but only modified
between the first and the third edition, is the only reed upon which any
apologist can lean in his attempt to escape the otherwise unavoidable
conclusion that, at the time of the Council of Nicaea, nobody looked upon the
Pope—not even did Silvester look upon himself—as the Christ-given Infallible
Arbiter of Christendom. Even if the Pope himself had presided there in person,
the fact would take us but a little way. On the other hand, his absence, and
the absence of any weight attributed by the Council to these two Roman priests,
would have been looked upon as conclusive in any historical question where no
overwhelming religious or political issues had been at stake. (G.G. Coulton, Papal Infallibility [London: The Faith
Press, 1932], 262-64, comments in square brackets in original)
