6-12. A Surfeit of Councils
Not the least important result of the new direction given by Constantine to the relations of Church and State was the authorisation and encouragement of episcopal assemblies on a larger scale than had in earlier days been possible. Where difficulties, disciplinary or doctrinal, proved beyond the power of local effort to resolve, councils were planned of a more than provincial type. The Council of Aries in 314 was a general council, concilium plenarium, of the Western Church, summoned by Constantine as lord of the Western Empire, to terminate the quarrel in Africa between the partisans of Caecilian and the partisans of Donatus.
Judgment went in favour of Caecilian, whose party, because they alone now remained in communion with the churches outside Africa, were henceforward the Catholics, while the others became a sect known after the name of their leader as the Donatists. The dispute between Alexander and Arius at Alexandria was in its beginning as purely local as that between Caecilian and Donatus, but the issue soon came to involve the comparison of the fundamental theologies of the two great rival schools of Alexandria and Antioch. From a council such as Aries it was but a step to the conception of a general council of the whole Church, where bishops from all over the world should meet for comparison of the forms which the Christian tradition had taken in their respective communities, for open ventilation of points of controversy, and for the removal of misunderstanding by personal intercourse.
Constantine, now master of an undivided empire, organised the first oecumenical council at Nicaea in 325. The great experiment was not an immediate success : the Nicene council rather opened than closed the history of Arianism on the larger stage, and it was not till after the lapse of half a century that wisdom was seen to be justified of its works, though the very keenness of the struggle made the long delayed and hardly won triumph more complete in the end. No council ever fastened its hold on Christian imagination in quite the same way as the Council of Nicaea.
Not that there was ever any quarrel between the supporters and the opponents of the Homoousion as to the rightness of the procedure which had been called into being. The weapons with which the council and the creed were fought were rival councils and rival creeds: the verdict of the court was to be set aside by renewed trials and multiplied appeals in the hope of modifying somehow the original judgment. Of all these supplementary councils none was strictly general, though on three occasions — at Sardica and Philippopolis in 343, at Ariminum and Seleucia in 359, at Aquileia and Constantinople in 381 — councils representing separately the Greek and the Latin episcopate were held more or less at the same time in East and West. Others, like that of Sirmium in 351, were held, wherever the emperor happened to be in residence, by the bishops attached at the moment to the court : others again were local and provincial. The atmosphere of Rome was never perhaps quite congenial to councils yet even the Roman Church was swept into the movement, and the pronouncements of Pope Damasus (366-384) came before the world under the guise of conciliar decisions.
The experience of the fifty years that followed the Council of Tyre in 335 taught the lesson that it was possible to have too much even of a good thing. Pagan historian and Christian saint from different starting points arrived at the same conclusion. Ammianus Marcellinus, criticising the character and career of the Emperor Constantius, noted caustically that he threw the coaching system quite out of gear because so many of the relays were employed in conveying bishops to and from their councils, "per synodos quas appellant," at the expense of the State. And Gregory of Nazianzus, in the year 382, refused to obey the summons to a new council, because, he says, he never saw "any good end to a council nor any remedy of evils, but rather an addition of more evil as its result. There are always contentions and strivings for dominion beyond what words can describe."
Perhaps it was partly by a natural reaction against councils, in those districts especially where they had followed most quickly upon one another, that the tendency to aggrandise the important sees at the expense of other bishops — and at the expense therefore of the conciliar movement, since in a council all bishops had an equal vote — seems about this time to take a sudden leap forward. Valens the Arian and Theodosius the Catholic alike made communion with some leading bishop the test of orthodoxy for other bishops. A first edict of Theodosius on his way from the West to take up the Eastern Empire in 380 expresses Western conceptions by naming in this connexion only Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alexandria: a later edict from Constantinople in 381 places Nectarius of Constantinople before Timothy of Alexandria, and adds half-a-dozen bishops in Asia Minor and a couple in the Danube lands as centres of communion for their respective districts.
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