With this evidence before us, it is hard to deny that the history of
the generations which first experienced the “fatal gift” of Constantine
supplied only too good ground for St Gregory’s complaint of contentions
and strivings for dominion among Christian bishops. But though these
contentions disturbed the work of councils, councils did not create them
and Gregory was hardly fair if he laid on councils the responsibility for
them : rather, in this direction lay the remedy and counterpoise, seeing
that councils represented the parliamentary and democratic side of church
government — stood, that is to say, in idea at least, for free and open
discussion as against the untrammelled decrees of authority, and for the
equality of churches as against the preponderance of metropolitan or
patriarch or pope. No more grandiloquent utterance of these principles
could indeed possibly be found than the words with which the Council of
Ephesus concludes its examination of the Cypriot claim. “Let none of
the most reverend bishops annex a province which has not been from
the first under the jurisdiction of himself and his predecessors; and
so the canons of the fathers shall not be overstepped, nor pride of
worldly power creep in under the guise of priesthood, nor we lose little
by little, without knowing it, that freedom which our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Liberator of all men, purchased for us with his blood.”
And councils really were, at any rate in two main departments of their activity, the organ through which the mind of the federated Christian communities did arrive at some definite and lasting self-expression, namely in the Creed and in the Canon Law. In both directions, it is true. East and West moved only a certain part of the way together: in both too, white the impulse was given by councils, the influence of the great churches added something to the completeness of the work: in the case of the Creed, what became a universal usage in the liturgy was at first only a usage of Antioch and Constantinople; in the case of the Canon Law the collective decisions of councils were supplemented by the individual judgments of popes or doctors before the corpus of either Western or Eastern Law was complete. Nevertheless it remains the fact that it was from and out of the conciliar movement that Church Law, as such, came into being at all; that the canons of certain fourth and fifth century councils are the only part of this Law common to both East and West; and that again the only common formulation of Christian doctrine was also the joint work of councils, which for that very reason enjoy the name of oecumenical, Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon.
1. The origins of the Christian Creed or Symbolum are lost in the obscurity which hangs over the sub-apostolic age. We know it first in a completed form as used in the Roman church about the middle of the second century. From Rome it spread through the West, taking the shape ultimately of our Apostles’ Creed; and one view of its history would make this Roman Creed the source of all Eastern Creeds as well.
