THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 097
The Development of Canon Law
6-18. The Development of Canon Law
2. Canon Law, even more clearly than the Creed, owed its development to the work of councils.
The conception of a Church Law, ius ecclesiasticum, ius canonicum, was not matured till the fourth century, and then largely as a result of the new position of the Church in relation to the State, and in conscious or unconscious imitation of the Civil Law. Down to the close of the era of persecutions the discipline of the Church was administered under consensual jurisdiction without any written code other than the Scriptures, in general subordination to the unwritten regula, the "rule of truth," "the ecclesiastical tradition." Primitive books like the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apostolic Church Order give us a naive picture of the unfettered action of the bishop as judge with his presbyters as assessors
But as time went on the questions to be dealt with grew more and more complex; it became no longer possible to keep the world at arm's length, and the relations of Christians with the heathen society round them required an increasingly delicate adjustment; the simplicity of the rigorist discipline, by which in the second century all sins of idolatry, murder, fraud, and unchastity were visited with lifelong exclusion from communion, yielded at one point after another to the demands of Christian charity and to the need of distinctions between case and case. The problem became pressing when the persecution of Decius suddenly broke up the long peace, and multitudes of professing Christians were tempted or driven to a momentary apostasy. The Novatianist minority seceded rather than hold out to these unwilling idolaters the hope of any readmission to the sacraments: the Church was forced to face the situation, and it was obviously undesirable that individual bishops should adjudicate upon similar circumstances in wholly different ways. It was here that St Cyprian struck out his successful line: his first councils were called to deal with the disorganisation which the persecution left behind it, and the bishops at least of Africa were induced to agree upon a common policy worked out on a uniform scale of treatment.
There is, however, nothing to shew that at Cyprian's councils any canons were committed to writing, to serve as a permanent standard of church discipline. That crucial step was only taken fifty years later, as the persecution initiated by Diocletian relaxed and the bishops of various localities could meet to take common counsel for the repair of moral and material damage. During the decade 305-315 the bishops of Spain met at Elvira, the bishops of Asia Minor at Ancyra and at Neocaesarea, the Western bishops generally at Aries; and the codes of these four councils are the earliest material preserved in later Canon Law.
The decisions of such councils had however no currency, in the first instance, outside their own localities, and even the Council of Aries was a concilium plenarium only of the West; but the feeling was already gaining strength, and it was quite in accordance with the ecclesiastical policy of Constantine, that uniformity was desirable even in many matters where it was not essential, and an oecumenical council offered unique opportunities of arriving at a common understanding So we find the Council of Nicaea issuing, side by side with its doctrinal definition, a series of disciplinary regulations, among which are incorporated, often in a greatly modified form, some canons of the Eastern Council of Ancyra and some canons of the Western Council of Aries.
These Nicene canons are the earliest code that can be called Canon Law of the whole Church, and at least in the West they enjoyed something like the same finality in the realm of discipline that the Nicene Creed enjoyed in the realm of doctrine. "Other canon than the Nicene canons the Roman church receives not," "the Nicene canons alone is the Catholic Church bound to recognise and to follow," writes Innocent of Rome in the cause of St Chrysostom. Leo does not exclude quite so rigorously the possibility of additions to the Church's code: but the Nicene fathers still exercise an authority unhampered by time or place, "mansuras usque in finem mundi leges ecclesiasticorum canonum condiderunt, et apud nos et in toto orbe terrarum."
The principle was simplicity itself, but it came to be worked out with a naive disregard of facts. On the one hand the genuine Nicene code was not accepted quite entire, and where Western tradition and Nicene rules were inconsistent, it was not always the tradition that went under: the canon against kneeling at Eastertide is, in all early versions that we can connect with Rome, entirely absent; the canon against the validity of Paulianist baptism was misinterpreted to mean that the Paulianists did not employ the baptismal formula. On the other hand many early codes that had no sort of real connexion with the Nicene councils sheltered themselves under its name and shared its authority. The canons of Ancyra, Neocaesarea and Gangra, possibly also those of Antioch, were all included as Nicene in the early Gallican collection. The canons of Sardica, probably because of the occurrence in them of the name of Hosius of Cordova, are in most of the oldest collections joined without break to the canons of Nicaea: and a rather acrimonious controversy was carried on between Rome and Carthage in the years 418 and 419, because Pope Zosimus cited the Sardican canons as Nicene, and the Africans neither found these canons in their own copies nor could learn anything about them in the East. The original form of the collection known as Isidore's was apparently translated from the Greek under Roman auspices at about this time: the canons of Nicaea are those "quas sancta Romana recipit ecclesia," the codes of the six Greek councils Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, and Constantinople follow, and then the Sardican canons under the heading "concilium Nicaenum xx episcoporum, quae in graeco non habentur sed in latino inveniuntur ita."
A Gallican editor of this version, later in the fifth century, combines the newer material with the older tradition in the shape of a canon proposed by Hosius, giving the sanction of the Nicene or Sardican council to the three codes of Aneyra, Neocaesarea, and Gangra.
To obtain a deluxe leatherbound edition of THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, subscribe to Castalia History.
