Thursday, June 11, 2020

G.G. Coulton on Dom John Champan, Nicea, and the Question of Papal Authority and Infallibility

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 Yet this Gelasius, whose mythicality is not altogether withdrawn but only modified between the first and the third edition, is the only reed upon which any apologist can lean in his attempt to escape the otherwise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)

 

One can find a copy of Dom John Champman's book on the first 8 general councils here.


It is not just the first council of Nicea in 325 that is problematic for modern Catholic dogmatic theology vis-a-vis the Bishop of Rome; in the second council of Nicea, held in 787, we see, at best, the Bishop of Rome held a position of "first among equals." For more, see:


Abbé Guettée on the Status of the Bishop of Rome at the Second Council of Nicea