6-19. The Codification of Church Law
We must not suppose that all this juggling with the name Nicene was in the strict sense fraudulent: we need not doubt the good faith of St Ambrose when he quoted a canon against digamous clergy as Nicene, though it is really Neocaesarean, or of St Augustine when he concludes that the followers of Paul of Samosata did not observe the "rule of baptism," because the Nicene canons ordered them to be baptized, or for that matter of popes Zosimus and Boniface because they made the most of the Sardican prescriptions about appeals to Rome, which their manuscripts treated as Nicene. The fact was that the twenty canons of Nicaea were not sufficient to form a system of law: the new wine must burst the old bottles, and by hook or by crook the code of authoritative rules must be enlarged, if it was to be a serviceable guide for the uniform exercise of church discipline. The spurious canon which the Gallican Isidore fathers on Hosius puts just this point; "quoniam multa praetermissa sunt quae ad robur ecclesiasticum pertinent, quae iam priori synodo . . . constituta sunt," let these other acts too receive sanction. In the fourth century the councils had committed their canons to writing. In the fifth century came the impulse to collect and codify the extant material into a corpus of Canon Law.
The first steps were taken, as might be expected, in the East. Somewhere about the year 400, and in the sphere of Constantinople-Antioch, the canons of half-a-dozen councils, held in that part of the world during the preceding century, were brought together into a single collection and numbered continuously throughout. The editio princeps, so to say, of this Greek code contained the canons of Nicaea (20), Ancyra (25), Neocaesarea (14), Gangra (20), Antioch (25), and Laodicea (59): it was rendered into Latin by the Isidorian collector, and it was used by the officials of the church of Constantinople at the Council of Chalcedon, for in the fourth session canons 4 and 5 of Antioch were read as "canon 83" and "canon 84," and in the eleventh session canons 16 and 17 of Antioch as " canon 95 " and " canon 96." The canons of Constantinople were the first appendix to the code: they are translated in the Isidorian collection, and they are cited in the acts of Chalcedon, but in neither case under the continuous numeration.
When Dionysius Exiguus, early in the sixth century, made a quasi-official book of Canon Law for the Roman church, he found the canons of Constantinople numbered with the rest, bringing up the total to 165 chapters: his two other Greek authorities, the canons of the Apostles and the canons of Chalcedon, were numbered independently. The earliest Syriac version adds to the original nucleus only those of Constantinople and Chalcedon, with a double system of numeration, the one separate for each council, the other continuous throughout the whole series. And in the digest of Canon Law, published about the middle of the sixth century by John Scholasticus of Antioch (afterwards intruded as patriarch of Constantinople), the "great synods of the fathers after the apostles " are ten in number — i.e. not counting the Apostolic Canons; the councils proper are brought up to ten by the inclusion of Sardica, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon — and "besides these, many canonical rules were laid down by Basil the Great."
Two features in the work of John the Lawyer illustrate the transition from earlier to later Canon Law. In the first place the list of authorities is no longer confined strictly to councils, to whose decrees alone canonical validity as yet attached in the fourth and fifth centuries: a new element is introduced with the Canons of St Basil, and by the time we arrive at the end of the seventh century, when the constituent parts of Eastern Canon Law were finally settled at the Quinisextine council in Trullo, the enumeration of Greek councils is followed by the enumeration of individual doctors of the Greek Church, and an equal authority is attributed to the rules or canons of both. In the second place John represents a new movement for the arrangement of the material of Church Law, not on the older historical and chronological method, by which all the canons of each council were kept together, but on a system of subject-matter headings, so that in every chapter all the appropriate rules, however different in date or inconsistent in character, would be set down in juxtaposition. Three of John's contemporaries were doing the same sort of thing for Latin Church Law that he had done for Greek — the deacon Ferrandus of Carthage in his Breviatio Canonum, Cresconius, also an African, in his Concordia Canonum, and Martin, bishop of Braga in north-western Spain, in his Capitula. But the day of the great medieval systematisers was not yet: these tentative efforts after an orderly system seem to have met at most with local success, and the business of canonists was still directed in the main to the enlargement of their codes, rather than to the coordination of the diverse elements existing side by side in them.
Early Greek Church Law was simple and homogeneous enough, for it consisted of nothing but Greek councils: even the first beginnings of the corpus of Latin Church Law were more complex, because not one element but three went to its composition. We have seen that its nucleus consisted in the universal acceptance of the canons of Nicaea, and in the grafting of the canons of other early councils on to the Nicene stock. Thus, whereas Greek canon law admitted no purely Latin element (and in that way had no sort of claim to universality), Latin canon law not only admitted but centred round Greek material. Of course, as soon as the idea of a corpus of ecclesiastical law took shape in the West a Latin element was bound to add itself to the Greek; and this Latin element took two forms. The natural supplement to Greek councils were Latin councils: and every local collector would add to his Greek code the councils of his own part of the world, Gallic, Spanish, African, as the case might be.
But just about the same time with the commencement of the continuous series of councils whose canons were taken up into our extant Latin codes, commences a parallel series of papal decretals: the African councils begin with the Council of Carthage in 390 and the Council of Hippo in 393, the decretals with the letter of Pope Siricius to Himerius of Tarragona in 385. Such decretal letters were issued to churches in most parts of the European West, Illyria included, but not to north Italy, which looked to Milan, and not to Africa, which depended on Carthage. As their immediate destination was local, not one of them is found in the early Western codes so universally as the Greek councils; on the other hand their circulation was larger than that of any local Western council, and some or others of them are found in almost every collection. It would even appear that a group of some eight decretals of Siricius and Innocent, Zosimus and Celestine, had been put together and published as a sort of authoritative handbook before the papacy of Leo (441-461). Outside Rome, there were thus three elements normally present in a Western code, the Greek, the local, and the papal. In a Roman collection, the decretals were themselves the local element: thus Dionysius Exiguus' edition consists of two parts, the first containing the Greek councils (and by exception the Carthaginian council of 419), the second containing papal letters from Siricius down to Gelasius and Anastasius II.
But even the code of Dionysius, though superior to all others in accuracy and convenience, was made only for Roman use, and for more than two centuries had only a limited vogue elsewhere. Each district in the West had its separate Church Law as much as its separate liturgy or its separate political organisation; and it was not till the union of Gaul and Italy under one head in the person of Charles the Great, that the collection of Dionysius, as sent to Charles by Pope Hadrian in 774, was given official position throughout the Franklin dominions.
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