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Beginning in the 13th century, the doctrine of God’s Church was progressively obscured in the West. Instead of being the mystical unity of the faithful in the Body of Christ, the Church was defined in purely external terms: to be in the Church one needed to be subject to the authority of the Bishop of Rome. The first official dogmatic statement to this effect came at the Fourth Lateran Council (1213-15) which claimed that the Roman church “through the Lord’s disposition has a primacy of ordinary power over all other churches inasmuch as it is the mother and mistress of all Christ’s faithful.”
In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued his famous bull Unam Sanctam which stated: “We declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” In 1327, Pope John XXII declared that anyone who rejected the divine primacy of the Pope was a heretic: “That blessed Peter the Apostle had no more authority than the other Apostles had nor was he the head of the other Apostles. Likewise that God did not send forth any head of the Church, nor did He make anyone His vicar...We declare by sentence the above mentioned articles...to be contrary to Sacred Scripture and enemies of the Catholic faith, heretics, or heretical and erroneous.”
During the same period, certain canonists and writers began advancing the idea that the Pope was infallible. This was only a natural development of the idea of papal primacy: after all, if the Church rests on the Pope and the Church is without error, then the Pope—by virtue of his office—must be without error also. Thus, it was no longer Apostolic Tradition, the Ecumenical Councils, or the Church Fathers who were the touchstone of truth, but the person of the Pope. According to Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona (d. 1328), a disciple of Thomas Aquinas, “the judgement of the Pope and the judgement of God is one and the same,” while according to the canonist Alvarus Pelagius (d. 1352), “the Pope is not simply a man but is like a god on Earth.”
Not surprisingly, the Roman innovations were not met without resistance. The influential canonists Huguccio (d. 1210) and Joannes Teutonicus (d. 1245) adhered to the traditional view that the Pope was subject to error and could be a heretic.
The 14th and 15th centuries also saw the emergence of the conciliarist movement. Conciliarist writers and theologians like John Quidort of Paris (d. 1306), William Durandus the Younger (d. 1328), Jean Gerson (d. 1429), Pierre D’Ailly (d. 1420), Francesco Zabarella (d. 1417), and Nicolas of Cusa (d. 1464) taught that only the Church was infallible; while they conceded that the papal office was of divine origin and needed to be respected, they believed that it was an office of oversight and stewardship and that a Pope could be deposed by a council of bishops if he erred. Other writers like Marsilius of Padua (d. 1342) and William of Ockham (d. 1347) went even further and denied that the papal office was divinely instituted or that the Pope was the head of the Church. Both of these writers proposed conciliarist systems of their own. From an Orthodox perspective, all of these approaches are flawed as they failed to restore the ancient criterion of truth: faithfulness to the apostolic tradition and the Ecumenical Councils. Subordinating the power of the Pope to a council of bishops simply relocates the problem: instead of one infallible bishop, it creates an infallible college of bishops. But according to Orthodoxy, truth is not a matter of numbers or consent. In fact, there have been many false councils in history that have taught heresy, just as there have been individual saints who preserved Orthodoxy when many churches had fallen into error, as in the case of Saint Maximus the Confessor.
Faithfulness to the apostolic deposit is what defines the Church. Conciliarism is subordinate to apostolicity, not the other way around. If such an approach had been followed by the Western church, the question of the papacy could have easily been resolved: Canon 6 of the First Ecumenical Council states that each church retains jurisdiction over its respective provinces (i.e. Rome’s jurisdiction is limited). Canon 8 of the Third Ecumenical Council states that it is forbidden for a bishop to assume control of a province that has not been under his authority or the authority of his predecessors from the very beginning (i.e. Rome’s universal pretensions are unlawful). Canon 28 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council states that the Pope was granted prerogatives by the Church because he presides over the capital of the Roman Empire (i.e. the papacy is not divinely ordained). Canon 28 of the Council of Carthage, which was ratified by the Fathers of the Quinisext Council, states that it is forbidden for clergy or bishops to bring canonical appeals to jurisdictions other than their own (i.e. it is unlawful for the Pope to interfere in other jurisdictions). Apostolic Canon 34 states that a metropolitan cannot act without the consent of the other bishops in his province (i.e. all bishops including the Pope are equal).
How many conflicts and scandals could have been avoided had these canons been respected!