§ 65. THE ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 333
faith tliose couTicils, especially of ISTice and of Chalcedoii, still live in the Western cliurch, both Roman Catholic and Evangelical Protestant.
Strictly speaking, none of these councils properly represented the entire Christian world. Apart from the fact that tlie laity, and even the lower clerg}', were excluded from them, the assembled bishops themselves formed but a small part of the Catholic episcopate. The province of North Africa alono numbered many more bishops than were present at cither tlie second, the third, or the fiftli general council.' Tlie councils bore a prevailingly oriental character, were occupied with Greek controversies, used the Greek language, sat in Constantinople or in its vicinity, and consisted almost wholly of Greek members. The Latin church was usually represented only by a couple of delegates of the Roman bishop ; though these delegates, it is true, acted more or less in the name of the entire West. Even the five hundred and twenty, or the six hundred and thirty members of the council of Chalcedon, excepting the two representatives of Leo I., and two African fugitives accidentally present, were all from the East. The council of Constantinople in 381 contained not a single Latin bishop, and only a hundred and fifty Greek, and was raised to the ecumenical rank by the consent of the Latin church toward the middle of the following century. On the other hand, the council of Ephesus, in 449, was designed by emperor and pope to be an ecumenical council ; but instead of this it has been branded in history as the synod of robbers, for its violent sanction of the Eutychian heresy. The council of Sardica, in 343, was likewise intended to be a general council, but immediately after its assembling assumed a sectional character, through the secession and counter-organization of the Eastern bishops.
It is, therefore, not the number of bishops present, nor even
' The schismatical Donatista alone held a council at Carthage in 308, of two hundred and seventy bishops (eomp. Wiltsch, Kirchl. Geogr. u. Statistik, i. p. 58 and 54) ; while the second ecumenical council numbered only a hundred and fifty, the third a hundred and sixty (a hundred and ninety-eight), and the fifth a hundred and sixtv-four.
334 TIIIBD PEKIOD, A.D. 311-590.
the regularity of" the summons alone, which determiiies the ecumenical character of a council, but the result, the importance and correctness of the decisions, and, above all, the con sent of the orthodox Cliristian world.'
The number of the councils thus raised by the public opinion of the Greek and Latin churches to the ecumenical dignity is seven. The succession begins with the first council of Nicaea, in the year 325, which .settled the doctrine of the divinity oi Christ, and condemned the Arian heresy. It closes with the second council of Nictea, in 787, which sanctioned the use of images in the church. The first four of these councils command high theological regard in the orthodox Evangelical churches, while the last three are less important and far more rarely mentioned.
The ecumenical councils have not only an ecclesiastical significance, but bear also ^^jpoUtical or state-church character. The very name refers to the oiKovyikvr]^ the orbis Romanus^ the empire. Such synods were rendered possible only by that great transformation, which is marked by the accession of Constantino. That emperor caused the assembling of the first ecumenical council, though the idea was probably suggested to him by friends among the bishops ; at least Eufinus says, he summoned the council "ex sacerdotum sententia." At all events the Christian Greeco- Roman emjperor is indispensable to an ecumenical council in the ancient sense of the term ; its temporal head and its legislative strength.
According to the rigid hierai'chical or papistic theory, as carried out in the middle ages, and still asserted by Roman divines, the pope alone, as universal head of the church, can summon, conduct, and confirm a universal council. But the history of the first seven, or, as the Roman reckoning is, eight, ecumenical councils, from 325 to 8G7, assigns this threefold power to the Byzantine emperors. This is placed beyond all contradiction, by the still extant edicts of the emperors, the acts of the councils, the accounts of all the Greek historians,
' Schrockh says (vol. viii. p. 201), urjustly, that this general consent belongs among the " empty conceita" Of course the unanimity must be limited to orthodox Christendom.