The council and its reception: how the Church knows her own voice

1. The question the wall raises

The fifteenth canon shields those who cease the commemoration of a hierarch openly preaching a condemned heresy before any synodal verdict, and everything in that shield points forward to the verdict itself. The confessor does not depose; he appeals. His whole standing, as the studies on obedience and defilement have argued, is provisional, an economy of the storm that waits upon the Church gathered. But this makes the nature of the gathering the load bearing question of the whole position. A council is not self certifying. The word has been worn by assemblies the Church now names with grief or with contempt. So the question must be faced in the open: when bishops gather and speak, by what marks has the Church known whether the voice was hers?

2. It seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us

Begin where the Church begins, at the council of the Apostles in Jerusalem. The question was real, the parties were real, and the deliberation was real: there had been, Scripture says plainly, much disputing. And the decree that ended it opens with a clause that has governed every true council since:

To the Holy Ghost, and to us: the council speaks in one breath for the Spirit and for the gathered Church, because the Lord promised both presences, that where two or three are gathered in His name He is in the midst of them (Matt. 18:20), and that the Spirit of truth would guide His own into all truth (John 16:13). This is the whole dignity of the institution, and its whole limit. A true council does not manufacture the faith by majority; it recognizes and declares the faith once delivered (Jude 3), and its authority is exactly the authority of that recognition. The bishops at Nicaea did not invent the divinity of the Son; they refused, in the Church's name, to unsay it. Which means the council's credential was never the gathering as such. It was the gathering in His name, that is, in His faith; and an assembly gathered against the faith has forfeited the promise it invokes, whatever it calls itself.

3. The honest record: councils that erred

The tradition itself keeps the sober ledger, and no one kept it more bluntly than a saint who presided over an Ecumenical Council. St Gregory the Theologian, who had seen the assemblies of the Arian age from within, wrote to a friend who urged him toward yet another synod:

The weariness is a confessor's, not a cynic's, and the history behind it is beyond dispute. In 359 the twin councils of Ariminum and Seleucia, gathering the great majority of the episcopate of West and East under imperial pressure, accepted a creed that set aside the Nicene confession; it was of those years that St Jerome wrote that the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian. In 449 a council at Ephesus, convened as ecumenical, deposed the Orthodox archbishop of the capital by violence and vindicated the error of Eutyches; the Church remembers it by the name Pope St Leo gave it, the robber council. In 754 the iconoclast assembly of Hiereia, three hundred and thirty eight bishops strong, styled itself the Seventh Ecumenical Council and condemned the holy icons. And in 1439, at Florence, the emperor, the patriarch, and nearly every Orthodox bishop present subscribed a union that betrayed the faith, one metropolitan refusing. Four assemblies, each wearing the council's form: lawful convocation, imperial honour, patriarchal presence or pretension, numbers that dwarfed Nicaea's. If the form were the credential, each would have bound the Church. None did. The question is why.

4. The first test: the deposit

The first answer the Church gave is doctrinal, and she gave it while the storms were still blowing. A council's first credential is that it confesses the faith already delivered; the measure stands outside and before the assembly, in the Scriptures and the Fathers and the councils already received, the everywhere, always, and by all that St Vincent made the golden rule. The Apostle had fixed that measure against every future authority at once, even an angel from heaven (Gal. 1:8); and St Athanasius, weighing the flood of Arian synods against the one council they were convened to bury, stated the principle with perfect calm:

Abides for ever: the true council, once given, becomes part of the very deposit by which every later assembly is weighed. This is why each Ecumenical Council opens by receiving its predecessors, and why the Seventh Council, when it examined the claim of Hiereia, judged the pretender by exactly this test. The refutation read into its acts denied that assembly the ecumenical name on two grounds together: the other ancient sees had no part in it, and its doctrine contradicted the tradition of the Church received from the beginning. A council against the deposit is not a stricter court overruling a laxer one. It is, in the language this library has used throughout, a pseudo council, as a bishop preaching condemned heresy is a pseudo bishop: the office real in form, the voice not the Church's.

5. The second test: reception by the whole Body

But the doctrinal test alone leaves a practical question: who applies it, when the assembly itself claims to be applying it? Here the tradition gives its second answer, and it is the one our age most needs to recover. The judgment of a council is proved in its reception by the whole Body of the Church, across her sees and her generations. Not a plebiscite after the fact, as though the faithful re voted the bishops' work; rather the slow, visible manifestation of whether the assembly spoke the faith the whole Church already lives. The Eastern Patriarchs, answering Rome in 1848, put the principle in one sentence:

And the record shows the guardian at work. The robber council of 449 held every outward advantage, and within two years Chalcedon had overturned it, the Church keeping the one and expelling the other from her memory. Hiereia's three hundred bishops were answered, a generation later, by the council the Church actually numbers seventh. Ariminum's creed, subscribed by a frightened majority, dissolved in the reception it never obtained, and the faith of the exiles became the faith of the empire at Constantinople in 381. Florence was signed by the hierarchs and refused by the Body: the people, the monks, the parish clergy would not receive it, the signers themselves fell away from it one by one, and the Church's councils in due course repudiated it formally. In every case the counterfeit had the paperwork and the true council had the reception; and the reception was not a second, rival authority above the episcopate, but the Body's recognition, in time, of which assembly had spoken with her own voice. The sheep, as the Lord said, know the Shepherd's voice; and a stranger will they not follow (John 10:4 to 5).

6. Neither a parliament nor a private veto

Two misreadings of all this must be closed off, for each has its partisans, and each destroys the thing it claims to honour. The first makes the council a parliament: truth by majority, the latest assembly trumping the ages, so that whatever a sufficient number of bishops signs becomes the faith. The record above is that reading's refutation; if it were true, the Church became Arian in 359 and iconoclast in 754, and the confessors she crowned were rebels. The second misreading is the mirror image, the private veto: since councils can err, each believer becomes a standing court over every council, receiving and rejecting by personal light. That road, as the study on unity in truth and the question on lay judgment have shown, ends with as many churches as there are judges. The tradition walks between. The believer's office is recognition, not legislation: he measures the new assembly by the recorded faith, the deposit and the councils already received, and where it contradicts them he may refuse it, as St Maximus refused the Monothelite settlements and St Mark refused Florence, without seizing the tribunal, without deposing anyone, and while awaiting the greater council to which his refusal is itself an appeal. The discernment is real, and it is bounded; it recognizes judgments already given, and legislates nothing new.

7. The pattern of the answer

Return, then, to the objection with which this study opened. If the court can be captured, what is the confessor waiting for? He is waiting for what has, in every single storm, actually come. The robber council was answered by Chalcedon within two years; Ariminum by Constantinople within a generation; Hiereia by Nicaea II; the deposition of the hesychast confessor by the council of 1351, whose confession the Church still proclaims each year in the Synodikon; Florence by the repudiation of the whole Orthodox Body. The diachronic study traced this wheel from the confessors' side; this one has traced it from the councils', and it is the same wheel. The false assembly has its hour, and the true council has the ages, because the Spirit of truth abides with the Church, as the study on indefectibility argued, and the gates of hell do not prevail. The confessor behind the wall is not waiting for a committee to get lucky. He is waiting for the Body to do what the Head has never once allowed her to fail to do; and the whole history of the councils, counterfeits included, is the record of that promise being kept.