JANUS ON THE COUNCIL.* EsEcoND NOTICE.] " IN this volume, for
the first time, it has been attempted to furnish a history of the Hypothesis of Papal Infallibility, from the first * Der Papst end das Canal. Von Janus. Leipzig E. F. &attacker. 1869.
The Pope and the Conseil. By Janus. Authorized Translation from the German. London: Itivington. 1869. beginnings until its completion at the end of the sixteenth century." The pretension thus advanced in the preface is, of course, from the writers' onesided point of view, well sustained. Much as was previously written about the Popes, and much as has been uttered in protest against the peculiar authority usurped by them, never before has that part of the process through which the natural development of the Roman authority was artificially hastened been so well exposed as it has been by the authors of Janus. That frauds were practised, that fabrications were put in circula- tion, that falsifications were perpetrated, has long been recognized even by Catholic students ; but what never before has been brought out is the elaborate concatenation of fraudulent title-deeds on which so much of the canonical structure of Papal supremacy has been built up, not merely as regards its assumption over powers outside, but also its generally recognized prerogatives within the pale of the ecclesiastical order. Everybody knows that about the middle of the ninth century there was perpetrated a forgery of some hundred pretended Decretals, that go commonly by the name of Isidore. They are believed to have been fabricated by a Frank cleric with the view of securing to his order a title for immunity from the civil power. Pope Nicolas I. immediately accepted them as genuine, and converted what may have been competed merely to erect a local order into a weapon for aggrandizement of the Papacy. Janus puts in a plea that Nicolas was probably himself a believer in the authenticity of the Decretals. We would merely remark that Nicolas met doubts as to their authenticity by the statement that the Papal archives for ages had possessed these deeds, and that he had no scruple about deliberately falsifying by a most wanton change of termination the seventeenth Canon of the Council of Chalcedon so as to make it sanction that appeal to Rome it had really prohibited. Also, previous to the Isidorian forgery, there had been committed others in Rome which were already detected as such by the Greeks, but which Nicolas nevertheless did not scruple to enrol. It took three centuries before the political confusion of the Western world allowed the Ltidorian seed to sprout into full blossom. This was the work of Gregory VII., in the whole series of Popes the only one who with full and clear consciousness was bent on carry- ing out a new condition of the Church by new means ! He deliberately aimed at a theocracy, to be wielded by an absolute Pope, and to this end he countenanced everything that promised to be of advantage. In his own words, spoken at the Synod of 1080, he claimed "the power to grant and to withdraw, according to deserts, all empire and all worldly possessions, even as he had the power to bind and loosen in heaven"! The spirit of these preten- sions is embodied in "that mightiest of instruments for the new Papal system, the great handbook of canon law by Gratian, in which the series of foregoing appropriate forgeries was added to by new ones, and the whole tissue of fabrication sent forth with the most solemn confirmation by superior authority ;" for Popes made quotations from Gratian as ex sacris canonibus. It is true that Gratian is not answerable for having himself invented all the falsehoods in his collection. It is one of Janus's merits to have pointed out the various preceding forgeries. One of these is sufficiently curious to call for special notice. St. Cyprian, in the treatise on Unity of the Church, affirmed all the Apostles to have been upon the same footing with Peter. In spite of this unpalatable opinion, he had got to be a martyr of high repute in the Western Church. To counteract therefore the authority of this great saint, Pope Gelatins proclaimed his works apocryphal, and when this was found not sufficient, Pope Pelagius II. had no compunction about forging a text which absolutely made Cyprian say the very contrary to what he really had expressed. This forgery, incorporated in a Pontifical rescript, naturally was wanting in the manuscripts ; so that when, on the revival of criti- cism, Cyprian's works were edited the fraud became patent. Nevertheless, both Manutius, by order of the Roman censors, and in the last century, Baluze, by order of Cardinal Fleury, were com- pelled to give these clearly proven interpolations to their editions. That Gratian's conscience, however, did not shrink from similar fabrications is fully demonstrated by his equally audacious altera- tion of the 36th Canon of the Synod of 682. Janus is careful to point out the great and disastrous influence of Gratian in having provided the standard authorities for those principles of persecution and coercion which have so deeply stained the Church of Rome, and the direct result of which was the institution of the Inquisition.
To the malignant ingenuity of this doctor of Bologna was due the manufacture of a complete arsenal of poisoned weapons ready to the hands of subsequent Popes. Fifty years after Gratian, Innocent III., the first Pope who arrogated to himself the title of Vicar of Christ, promulgated the Decretal Novit, affirming his
inherent authority to override all civil jurisdiction—a claim sup- ported by the falsification of a passage in Deuteronomy, which Leo X. did not blush to repeat in his great bull Pastor Eternus. If Gratian must bear the guilt of having first invented a canonical authority to be used in furtherance of compulsory powers, Janus distinctly ascribes to the Popes alone the initiative in pushing their premisses to their last consequences. "The literature of the age had not laboured in preparation. It was only when the pro- cedure had been regulated and even carried through in various places that Scholasticism strove to find authorities and to defend the same." Probably no portion of Janus will excite more popular interest than where he shows how it was the Popes, forced on the Christian world the sanguinary Inquisition. When in German dioceses an attempt was made to shelter some unhappy individual charged with witchcraft from the relentlessness of the Inquisition, Innocent VIII. came to the assistance of his officials in a bull solemnly expressive of the reality of such wickedness, and the bull was confirmed by a whole string of Popes, so that the Ponti- fical preacher, Bartholomew Spina, declared the positive existence of the witches' Sabbath to be a fact no Catholic could hesitate to believe in, for it rested on Papal utterance, which was of authority higher than that of a Council. And here we come to what is the kernel of Janus's argumentation—the real pith of the book—the question of what constitutes a genuine Council. Of course, it is admitted, even by the most extreme Ultramontanes, that a specific virtue does reside in a Council, for, otherwise, what would have been the need for convoking a Council? But for the virtue believed to be resident for certain supreme purposes in a Council, Pius IX. might have resolved of himself whatever points he has in his mind, and so disposed of Bossuet's celebrated dilemma why the Church should have all along indulged in the redundant machinery of Councils, if it already possessed an in- fallible Pope. It is a fact admitted on all hands that the great (Ecumenical Councils which gave the Church its constitution, and whose decrees are universally recognized, were none of them convened by the Pope nor sat under his presidency. It was only in the twelfth century, that is, simultaneously with this successful usurpation of that absolute authority at which Gregory VII. aimed, that the Popes began to hold themselves also empowered to gather at will around them an assembly of Bishops in conference on sub- jects graciously submitted to them by the Pope's favour, and to call this a Council. Nor can we conceive how the liberal Catholics can deny to these assemblies the authority of Councils, while they concede it to assemblies convened and held under the pressure of external force a great deal more powerful,—as, for instance, the first Council of Ephesus, though in that case the pressure exercised was not exercised by Popes. There is, however, no doubt a series of assemblies convened by the Popes between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, whose utter inanity is attested by the blank of their proceedings, beyond that of endorsing some act of Papal injustice, as the deposition of the Emperor Frederick II. But when, in consequenceof the shock given not merely to thehierarchy, but to the religioussentiment of the whole Western world, by the great schism, that sentiment was touched to the quick, and instinctively rejected, as wholly inadequate to the needs of the crisis, the hollow shams put forth by previous Popes, then again more real Councils came about, one might almost say spontaneously, in the memorable assemblies of Pisa, Constance, and Basle, where Western Christendom was represented not by a junta of picked clerics, but by all orders of the faithful—the Sovereigns and the Hierarchy, the Laity and the Clergy—and so was enabled to deal with the emergencies of a tremendous crisis in a spirit equal to its demands. The schism was healed, the rival Popes were made to withdraw, a new Pope was chosen by a constituency called into existence by the Council, and the supreme authority over all, "even the Pope,—of every legitimate (Ecumenical Council," was declared and confirmed. Subsequently, Eugene IV., availing himself of political combina- tions, succeeded in effecting a reaction in favour of the impaired autocracy of his dignity. The hateful decree, however, never was annulled by any Pontifical utterance. But by gaining over the countenance of the civil authorities through corrupt graces, and still more, through the natural tendency to centralization in Rome, which the authors of Janus so unwisely ignore, the Pope gradually gained power anew over the independent organization of the Church. It was not till the Council of Trent that the world at large had its attention drawn again to an eccle- siastical assembly, for those held in the interval passed quite unobserved, though one of them graced with its sanction a very strong Pontifical utterance. Now, the Council of Trent, though convened with pomp and surrounded with circumstances calculated to excite attention, practically proved a failure, and the reason why this was so can be found only, according to the testimony of Catholic con- temporaries, in its deferential constitution, its want of liberty, —in a word, in the very sort of circumstances which, when they enforce any but Papal interference, the Liberal Catholics ignore. There was no freedom of deliberation. It was enough for the Bishop of Cadiz to have merely affirmed the inherent right of metropolitans to consecrate the bishops of the dioceses ; for Cardinal Simonetta, in his anxiety that the Pope's supremacy should suffer, to forbid the Bishop proceeding in his argument. Similar facts made Leibnitz pronounce the Council of Trent to have been a sham. And yet it is positive that the conditions under which it met were far less unfavourable to some degree of inde- pendent deliberation than those attending the first Council of Ephesus. At Trent, though already the olden dignity of the Episcopate had been greatly broken by the acts of an encroaching police which, operating through the agency of the Order of Jesus, was bent on making the Catholic Church a community of mutes, still a fair leaven of the primitive self- respect survived amongst the Bishops. But since then the Epis- copate has greatly changed for the worse in this respect. "Jura, honores, privilegia, at auctoritatem Domini nostri Paine conservare, defendere, augers, et promovere curabo,"—swears now every bishop, and the spirit of the oath is visible in the subser- vient—it is not too much to call it—the menial temper with which they bear themselves before the Pope.
It is plain that the reasoning of Janus tends to deal a blow at the very root of the existing Papal structure of the Council, and at the assumptions of infallibility made by the Catholic Church of all ages as well. Wherever his arguments make impression, they cannot fail to sap the actual foundations of the prevailing belief in regard to the Pope's peculiar authority ; for whatever some fey, individuals may have long ago thought out for themselves, it is certain that the common run of Catholics have understood the Pope's spiritual supremacy as established over the Church in an autocratic form by virtue of some well-founded titles. This general belief Janus strikes at, not with abstract argument, but the kind of reasoning most calculated to impress a Catholic mind, —authorities drawn from fact, which go, however, as we have said, a good deal beyond the scope of his conclusions. It will be curious to watch how Janus will be received. There are very many Catholics who have never felt easy about the kind of in- fallibility often of late ascribed to the Pope ; there are also not a few who have for some time found themselves squeezed in most uncomfortably between individual sympathies for a generous and liberal policy, and their duty towards a sacrosanct institution that keeps using in arrest of these the weight of its assumedly inspired authority. But we apprehend that Janus will not succeed in striking at the Papal power except by striking altogether at all the assumptions of infallibility made by the Catholic Church. If the facts brought out by Janus are good for the purposes for which he quotes them, they are certainly good for a great deal besides which our authors are very illogically unwilling to deduce from them.
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