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Edited from a variety of translations (mentioned in the preface) by H. R. Percival
THE ECUMENICAL COUNCILS Resources Online and in Print
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82 Pages
Page 4
Nor have all Protestants allowed their judgment to be warped in this matter. As a sample I may quote from that stanch Protestant whom Queen Elizabeth appointed a chaplain in ordinary in 1598, and who in 1610 was made Dean of Gloucester, the profoundly learned Richard Field. In his famous "Book of the Church" (Book V. chap. lj.), he says: "These" [six, which he had just described] "were all the lawful General Councils (lawful, I say, both in their beginning and proceeding and continuance) that ever were holden in the Christian Church, touching matters of faith. For the Seventh, which is the Second of Nice, was not called about any question of faith but of manners. So that there are but Seven General Councils that the whole Church acknowledgeth, called to determine matters of faith and manners. For the rest that were holden afterwards, which our adversaries [the Roman Catholics] would have to be acknowledged general, they are not only rejected by us but by the Grecians also, as not general, but patriarchal only, etc."
Of course there are a number of writers (principally of the Anglican Communion), who have argued thus: "The doctrine taught by the Second Council of Nice we reject, ergo it cannot have been an Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church." And they have then gone on to prove their conclusion. With such writers I have no concern. My simple contention is that the Council is admitted by all to have been representative of East and West, and to have been accepted for a thousand years as such, and to be to-day accepted as Ecumenical by the Latin and Greek Churches. If its doctrines are false, then one of the Ecumenical Synods set forth false doctrine, a statement which should give no trouble, so far as I can understand, to anyone who does not hold the necessary infallibility of Ecumenical Synods. [511]
Among those who have argued against the ecumenical character of the Seventh Council there are, however, two whose eminent learning and high standing demand a consideration of anything they may advance on any subject they treat of, these are the Rev. John Mason Neale and the Rev. Sir William Palmer.
Dr. Neale considers the matter at some length in a foot-note to his History of the Eastern Church (Vol. II., pp. 132-135), but I think it not improper to remark that the author ingenuously confesses in this very note that if he came to the conclusion that the council was ecumenical, "it would be difficult to clear our own Church from the charge of heresy." Entertaining such an opinion at the start, his conclusion could hardly be unbiassed.
The only argument which is advanced in this note which is different from those of other opponents of the Council, is that it had not the authentication of a subsequent Ecumenical Synod. The argument seems to me so extraordinary that I think Dr. Neale's exact words should be cited: "In the first place, we may remark that the Second Council of Nicaea wants one mark of authority, shared according to the more general belief by the six--according to the opinions which an English Churchman must necessarily embrace by the first five Councils--its recognition as Ecumenical by a later Council undoubtedly so." But surely this involves an absurdity, for if it is not known whether the last one is ecumenical or no, how will its approval of the next to the last give that council any certainty? If III. Constantinople is doubtful being the sixth, because there is no seventh to have confirmed it; then II. Constantinople, the fifth, is doubtful because it has only been confirmed by a synod itself doubtful and so on, which is absurd. The test of the ecumenicity of a council is not its acceptance by a subsequent synod, but its acceptance by the whole Church, and this Dr. Neale frankly confesses is the case with regard to II. Nice: "It cannot be denied," he admits, "that at the present day both the Eastern and the Latin Churches receive it as Ecumenical" (p. 132). He might have added, "and have done so without any controversy on the subject for nearly a thousand years."
[511] As a sample of all that bigotry and dishonesty can do when writing on such a subject, the reader is referred to a little book by the Rev. F. Meyrick (a canon of the Church of England) published in Paris for the Anglo-Continental Society, 1877, entitled, Du Schisme d'Orient et de l'authorité du prétendu septième concile.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/ecumenical-councils/seventh.asp?pg=4
