To Sanctify the World

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Crisis? What Crisis?

AS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH RECKONS THESE THINGS, THERE have been twenty-one ecumenical councils in two millennia of Christian history. Few were placid affairs. Little wonder, then, that St. Gregory of Nazianzus (a man later honored with the title “Doctor of the Church”) should have declined an invitation to a meeting of bishops in 382 aimed at sorting out the work of the First Council of Constantinople: “To tell the truth, I am convinced that every assembly of bishops is to be avoided, for I have never experienced a happy ending to any such council; not even the abolition of abuses… but only ambition or wrangling about what was taking place.”¹

The first assembly of Church authorities to settle disputed questions dividing the Christian community was the apostolic council in Jerusalem described in Acts 15.1–30, thought to have been held c. AD 48. Although not numbered among the twenty-one ecumenical councils, that meeting, called to resolve the question of whether Gentile converts to Christianity would be required to undergo circumcision in order to enjoy the salvation won by Jesus Christ, set the pattern for the councils to follow: a dispute, often sharp-edged; debates over resolving the dispute; a resolution that could command an overwhelming consensus, even if some refused to join the consensus and continued straining the Church’s unity afterward.

The first ecumenical council, strictly speaking, was the First Council of Nicaea, in 325. Nicaea I was summoned by the emperor Constantine to end the bitter, Church-dividing quarrel associated with the teaching of the Alexandrian theologian Arius, which was roiling both the Church and the Roman Empire. According to Arius, there was a time when “the Son was not”; that is, he whom Christian orthodoxy believed to be the Second Person of the Trinity—the Son who was “begotten” by the Father and who became incarnate in history as Jesus of Nazareth—was not God, but a divinized creation of God. The occasional bitterness of the debate at Nicaea I is illustrated by the story that the bishop Nicholas of Myra, who had been tortured during the pre-Constantinian persecution of the Church, and whose reputation for charity later became the inspiration for “jolly old St. Nicholas,” took a most un-Santa-Claus-like punch at Arius during the Council’s deliberations; the tale is almost certainly apocryphal, but nonetheless instructive as to the temper of the times. The orthodox view prevailed at Nicaea, and the Nicene Creed (still recited today) was written to confirm that Jesus Christ was “Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.” Yet Arianism and related heresies continued to disrupt the Church for decades, even centuries, and variants of Arianism have reappeared in different guises until the present.

With the question of Jesus’s relationship to God the Father seemingly resolved, Church controversy focused on the question of the relationship between Christ’s humanity and divinity. Was Jesus truly God and truly man, or was he God in a kind of human disguise, as the theologians known as “Monophysites” taught? Was it legitimate for the Church to honor Mary, Jesus’s mother, with the title “Mother of God,” or was that formula unacceptable? Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, took the latter position, which was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, where Mary’s title as Theotokos, or “God-bearer,” was affirmed, and Christ’s divinity thereby reaffirmed. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon (influenced by an epistolary intervention from Pope Leo I) declared that there was both a divine nature and a fully human nature in the one person of Jesus Christ. As at Nicaea, the bishops of those councils, held under imperial authority, may have imagined that they had settled the questions at issue. Yet contrary to the decisions of Ephesus and Chalcedon, “Nestorianism” and “Monophysitism” continue today, to one degree or another, in several Eastern Christian Churches.

Such delicately calibrated theological arguments, conducted via metaphysical concepts and a technical vocabulary unfamiliar today, may seem arcane. Yet they were in fact Church-dividing in an era when “orthodoxy” was thought to be something worth fighting about, even dying for. Perhaps easier to grasp was the Church-dividing controversy over those masterpieces of Byzantine art—icons—that drove Eastern Christianity into warring camps for the better part of a century and a quarter. At issue was whether the veneration of icons violated the Second Commandment’s proscription on making “images” of God (Exodus 20.4), and whether their use violated the Church’s understanding of Christ’s divine nature. In 726, the Byzantine emperor Leo III banned the use of icons, ordered their destruction, and persecuted those who refused to obey his decree; monks were eventually martyred in defense of their icons. Subsequent emperors got involved and the controversy raged on until, under the influence of the icon-revering dowager empress Irene, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 affirmed the veneration of icons and allowed them to be publicly displayed. The controversy did not end there, however; imperial politics exacerbated it further, until the Iconoclast Controversy eventually burned itself out in the Christian East with the death in 842 of the iconoclast emperor Theophilus. Even then, bishops elsewhere in the world Church refused to accept Nicaea II, such that the Iconoclast Controversy in Western Christianity finally ended in the tenth century—only to be revived by the radical Reformations of the sixteenth century in their destruction of representational Christian artworks.²

Ecumenical councils in the first half of the second Christian millennium attempted to resolve a wide variety of Church-dividing disputes, with varying degrees of success. One of the more successful was the Council of Constance (1414–1417), which ended the scandalous “Great Schism” in the West, during which three rival claimants to the papacy split the Church asunder; yet Constance also created a centuries-long controversy over the relationship between councils and popes. Far less successful was the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517), so called because it met in the Papal Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome: a failed attempt at identifying and then implementing essential reforms in the late medieval Church.³

Historians dispute whether Lateran V’s failures of analysis and prescription were primary causes of the various sixteenth-century Reformations; whatever the outcome of that debate, Lateran V certainly failed to resolve the grave questions of ecclesiastical corruption that were one reason for the Protestants’ break with Rome.⁴ The Council of Trent, held over eighteen years in three stages (1545–1547, 1551–1552, and 1562–1563), thus had to deal with the ecclesiastical results of the splintering of Western Christendom. One might have thought that the greatest Christian crisis since the Muslim destruction of much of North African Christianity in the seventh and eighth centuries would have tempered controversies within the Council of Trent. But like so many of its predecessors, Trent was a difficult affair, given both theological controversies and the resistance of some clergy and political leaders to essential reforms. Trent eventually gave Catholicism a well-articulated doctrine and a solid basis for spiritual reform and growth. But it took decades for those “Tridentine” reforms to be implemented, and at least a century for the teachings of Trent to become the common self-understanding of the Catholic Church.

As these examples illustrate, ecumenical councils typically sought to address, and, if possible, to heal, divisions within the Church caused by doctrinal disputes and contradictory practices that led to the breakdown of ecclesial unity, or, in the technical term, ecclesial communion. Ecumenical councils, in short, were last-resort responses to Church-dividing crises when no other remedies had been found. It might be argued that the First Vatican Council, held in 1869–1870, was not such a last resort. But Vatican I certainly dealt with two Church-threatening crises: the profound challenge to Christian faith posed by Enlightenment rationalism, and the (not unrelated) attempts by various forms of political modernity to bring the Church to heel by fostering national Churches subordinate to the state. By affirming the reality of the supernatural order and the possibility of knowing the existence of God through reason, and by defining the pope’s universal jurisdiction within the Catholic Church, Vatican I met at least some aspects of the crisis that had disturbed the Church since the French Revolution—indeed, since the revolution’s intellectual antecedents in Voltaire and those other Enlightenment thinkers and publicists determined to, as Voltaire put it, écrasez l’infâme: “crush the infamy,” the Catholic Church.

If ecumenical councils are responses to profound threats to the Church’s unity or its very life, what was the crisis that necessitated the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican?

That question was asked immediately after John XXIII announced his intention to summon Vatican II. It was asked during the Council itself, especially by those dismayed by the Council’s theological direction. And it continues to be asked today. So persistent a question deserves an answer.

The answer was given a century and a half ago by one of Catholicism’s greatest modern minds and spirits, the nineteenth-century theologian John Henry Newman, whom the Catholic Church now recognizes as a saint.

On October 2, 1873, Newman, a founder of the reforming Oxford Movement within the Church of England whose historical studies eventually led him into full communion with the Catholic Church, was asked to preach the sermon at the opening of a new English seminary, St. Bernard’s in Olton. It was a moment of great satisfaction for those who had long suffered under Great Britain’s anti-Catholic penal laws. Newman, however, chose to describe in the sharpest terms the challenges that would be faced by the future priests being trained at St. Bernard’s:

For almost 1,900 years, Catholicism had contended with false gods, superstitions, and heresies. Now, Newman claimed, it was challenged by something new, different, and ominous—a world closed in upon itself, yet confident of its own powers to facilitate personal happiness and a just society; a world of spiritual emptiness that, as another English Catholic would later protest, had “no end beyond its own satisfaction.”⁶ This “epidemic,” as Newman called it, was widespread in “the educated world, scientific, literary, political, professional, artistic.” It had infected those who defined society’s mores and aspirations: the “thinking, speaking and acting England.” That it would spill out into all of society from the cultural elite, Newman did not doubt.⁷

In such a claustrophobic world, what would happen to modernity’s quest for a mature, liberated humanity, living freedom in justice and prosperity? If a society can only be as great as its spiritual aspirations, what would happen if there were no such aspirations—if the world should become, so to speak, ultramundane?

Eighty-six years before Pope John XXIII announced his intention to summon the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, John Henry Newman identified the crisis that such an assembly of Catholic leaders would have to address: the challenge of proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ amid the civilizational crisis of a modernity that had cut itself loose from some of its deepest cultural roots.

Understanding that crisis and its impacts on the course of history between Newman’s prescient diagnosis and John XXIII’s bold initiative is thus essential to understanding the necessity of Vatican II.

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