“The papacy adopted the doctrine [of papal infallibility] out of weakness.”

Source: “Conclusion” from Origins of Papal Infallibility 1150-1350, by Brian Tierney, Vol. VI of Studies in the History of Christian Thought (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972), pp. 273-281.

We have said that a historian cannot do the theologians’ work for them and we shall not attempt the task in this brief conclusion. Theologians must bear in mind, however, that there is a whole historical dimension to the problem of infallibility. Vatican Council I did not simply decree that the pope was infallible. It declared that the dogma of infallibility belonged to “the ancient and constant faith of the church” and that, in promulgating it, the council was “adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith.” Some theologians, moreover, are willing to acknowledge that theology itself is likely to “wither away in blind isolation” unless its conclusions can be endowed with some degree of historical credibility. [1] So far as the doctrine of papal infallibility is concerned, this desirable state of affairs has not yet been achieved.

All the standard Catholic discussions of infallibility emphasize continuity rather than change in the church’s teaching on this matter; at most the authors acknowledge that the doctrine is one that has “ripened” in the course of the ages. But it is very hard for a historian to see the emergence of the doctrine of papal infallibility as the slow unfolding of a truth that the church has always held. He sees instead the rather sudden creation—for reasons that are complex but historically intelligible—of a novel doctrine at the end of the thirteenth century. The slow process of growth that followed was a growth in the understanding of the papacy that, given the circumstances of the times, the advantages of the doctrine for polemical purposes on the whole slightly outweighed the disadvantages.

For a typical treatment of the problem of historicity by an eminent modern theologian we can turn to the work of Charles Journet. In The Church of the Word Incarnate he took as his starting point a presupposition that the doctrine of papal infallibility had always formed an intrinsic part of the faith of the church. Then he enquired how the doctrine had been taught by the church before the solemn definition of Vatican Council I. Journet suggested that Catholics could always have known this truth of their faith either from the universal consensus of theological opinion concerning it or from the teaching of the “ordinary magisterium.” Evidently neither suggestion has any relevance for the historical period we have considered. Between 1150 and 1350 the doctrine of papal infallibility was not taught by any considerable number of theologians; nor was it proclaimed by pope and bishops in the discharge of their ordinary teaching office. Journet, however, suggested a third possibility. “However it be, it is certain that the Church has always believed, with divine faith, in the pontifical infallibility, at least in an indirect and radical manner, by explicitly believing other truths in which this infallibility was implicitly contained.” Belief in papal infallibility, Journet explained, could be “unconscious” without losing its efficacity.

At this point again the historian must raise a question. He can see that the first protagonists of infallibility made use of earlier elements of Christian thought in constructing their thesis. The principal doctrines they relied on were the old ones regarding the primacy of the Roman see and the indefectibility of the universal church, both of which Journet naturally emphasized. To these old beliefs the thirteenth century theologians added a new concern with the authentication of “living Tradition,” a concern with “development of doctrine” we might say. What is not clear is that the doctrine of papal infallibility was in fact implicitly contained in any of these ideas, taken separately or in combination. Journet’s argument requires us to acknowledge that any believer would be led ineluctably to acknowledge the necessity of papal infallibility provided that he could understand all the implications of earlier generally accepted doctrines concerning the pope and the church. But the point that must strike a historian of papal infallibility most forcibly is the disconcerting absence of ineluctability in the whole historical process that led to the creation of the doctrine. The idea of infallibility did not emerge inevitably because it had always been pre-supposed. It was invented almost fortuitously because an unusual concatenation of historical circumstances arose that made such a doctrine useful to a particular group of controversialists—circumstances involving Joachimite radicalism, Franciscan spirituality and the whole peculiar, ambivalent relationship between the Franciscan Order and the papacy.

Once the doctrine had been propounded, its defenders naturally tried to find support for it in earlier teachings. But the truth is that papal infallibility does not follow as a necessary logical or theological corollary of any previously accepted tenets of Catholic ecclesiology. Let us consider briefly the three most relevant doctrines—primacy, indefectibility and development of doctrine. Papal primacy does not necessarily imply papal infallibility. Indeed a sharp tension has always existed between the canonical conception of the pope as a sovereign ruler and the theological doctrine of the pope as an infallible teacher. Sovereignty frees the pope to innovate; infallibility, if it were taken seriously, would bind him to the decisions of the past. We have emphasized often enough that, in principle, to ascribe the quality of infallibility to all of a pope’s predecessors does not enhance the authority of a reigning pontiff. Let us finally add that, in actual day-to-day practice, the attribution of infallibility to the pope has had exactly the opposite effect to that intended by the nineteenth century sponsors of the doctrine. After a hundred years of papal infallibility the main practical result of the definition of Vatican Council I has been to weaken the authority of the pope’s “ordinary” pronouncements on faith and morals. Most theologians would not recognize as infallible any papal pronouncement that sought to settle a keenly disputed issue. (Infallibility, they commonly maintain, can come into play only when a doctrine has become so well-established that a consensus already exists). But the ordinary Catholic is left with a vague feeling that, if the pope were really certain of the truth of his own teaching, he would “make it infallible.” He also feels that, if the pope is not really certain of his own teaching, there is no need to take his views too seriously. Such an attitude is no doubt unsophisticated but it is not unintelligible.

Papal primacy then does not imply papal infallibility. Nor does the indefectibility of the church imply infallibility. The two conceptions are quite different from one another and they should be separated more sharply than has been usual in modern Catholic theology. (This point has recently been much emphasized by Hans Küng.) The doctrine of indefectibility assures Christians that, as long as the human race endures, a Christian community will exist, holding fast to the truths that Christ taught to his first followers. The doctrine does not state or imply that the church or its head is endowed with the gift of pronouncing infallibly on the divers moral and theological conundrums—most of them undreamed of in the days of Christ— which are posed by human ingenuity when men seek to build doctrinal edifices on Christian foundations. The message of the Gospels was surely a message about charity—about divine and human charity and the revelation of charity in the life and death of Jesus. A Christian can reasonably claim that his church shows itself to be indefectible so long as it proclaims this message.

In every age, of course, the church teaches far more than this and properly so. Christian doctrine does not exist in a vacuum. It lives only in the life of the church. Always the church has to embody its perception of Christian truth in the life-styles of changing human cultures—in liturgies, literature, art, philosophies, institutions, folkways, popular cults. All this is not to be deplored. It is not only inevitable; it is desirable. Human culture has been enormously enriched—morally, aesthetically, intellectually—by the influence of the church. But, inevitably, in this mingling of the divine and the human, possibilities of error arise. Above all there is a persistent tendency for theologians to confuse the moral or philosophical prejudices of their own particular civilization with the perennial truths of Christian revelation.

There are problems of language involved here too. Language is a human artefact. It reflects cultural pre-suppositions that change from age to age. The word trans-“substantiation” can have no precise connotation except for a person accustomed to thinking in the categories of scholastic philosophy. The medieval (and modern) definitions of papal sovereignty will yield their full meaning only to those familiar with the juridical categories of Roman law. The same verbal formulas may well convey different meanings at different times. And it may be that no human formulation can adequately express a truth of divine faith. Such considerations are interesting and important. But it is no part of our purpose here to add to the burgeoning literature on the semantics of religious propositions. We would suggest rather that too narrow a concentration on questions of language may lead to neglect of other, equally important problems. In discussing the past pronouncements of the church on matters of faith and morals a modern scholar is not concerned merely with conflicts of words. Conflicts of meaning are involved too. The most serious problem for a Catholic theologian is not that the church has always had to express divine truth in inadequate human language. The problem is rather that the church has sometimes embraced error and taught it as truth.

The church can err because it is, at least in part, a human institution, always immersed in human history. That the church has erred must seem self-evident if we acknowledge that self-contradiction is an indication of error. One example will suffice. Let us consider the morality of religious persecution. The Fourth Lateran Council enacted the following decree in 1215:

We excommunicate and anathematize every heresy that raises itself against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith .... Secular authorities, whatever office they may hold shall be admonished and induced and if necessary compelled by ecclesiastical censure, that as they wish to be esteemed and numbered among the faithful, so for the defense of the faith they ought publicly to take an oath that they will strive in good faith and to the best of their ability to exterminate in the territories subject to their jurisdiction all heretics pointed out by the church. [2]

The Second Vatican Council declared in 1965:

This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion ... in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs. [3]

Of course, both conciliar statements can be dismissed as “not infallible”. But the point we are making here is that, whatever divine guidance the church may have enjoyed through the course of the centuries, that guidance has not been such as to prevent the church as a whole from falling into grievous errors. To present the second statement as a “development” of a single unchanging Catholic truth that was implicit in the first one is surely to strain human credulity too far. A man who believes that will believe anything. If the morality of the Fourth Lateran Council is true the morality of the Second Vatican Council is false; and vice-versa. There is, to be sure, no great difficulty in explaining on historical grounds how the church came to adopt such sharply opposed attitudes in two such widely separated epochs. But some scholars seem to imagine that to explain by historical analysis why the church has contradicted itself is to demonstrate that the contradictions are non-existent. And this is nonsense of course. The church can err; but this same erring church has never ceased to preserve and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. It has always been indefectible. It has never been infallible. Indefectibility does not imply infallibility.

If the church can err—and if it is nevertheless to persist as a true church—it must retain a capacity to correct its errors before they eat away the heart of the Christian message itself. This consideration leads to the third strand of thought that influenced the emergence of the doctrine of papal infallibility in the years around 1300—the idea of “living Tradition” or “development of doctrine.” Papal primacy, we have seen, does not imply papal infallibility; the indefectibility of the church does not imply the infallibility of the church; and, most clearly of all, the concept of doctrinal development does not imply the infallibility of either pope or church. Even if, in the last resort, the two concepts—development and infallibility—are not formally incompatible with one another, it is certainly easier to discern a persistent tension between them than to present them as logically interdependent. The process of development calls for an attitude that is not only willing to abandon error but that looks forward to the achievement of new, better, understandings of Christian truth in the future. The doctrine of infallibility tends to consecrate for all time the understandings (or misunderstandings) of the past.

Any consideration of development in the church involves the area of thought where the theologian’s discipline and the historian’s most obviously overlap. The problem here is to understand the relationship between the whole past life and teaching of the church and its mode of existence in the present. The concept of development in some form seems indispensable for any fruitful approach to this problem. (Every man must know that our knowledge of divine truth is imperfect; every Christian may hope that it will grow more perfect.) Development implies change; but, if we are to acknowledge the existence of “one holy Catholic church” in time as well as in space, there must also be something that endures, a core of truth that has persisted from the beginning through all the ages. The theologian’s task is surely to ascertain this truth, to strive to understand its implications more deeply, and to express it in language meaningful to his own generation. It is a great task and a hard one. The theologian needs all the help he can obtain from other disciplines. And there is one sense in which history can properly be called a handmaid of theology.

All definitions of Christian faith are expressions of the life of the church as it existed at some particular time and place. (We do not detract from the unique authority of Scripture when we acknowledge that this is true also of the Gospels.) The expression of Christian truth through the necessary medium of the changing human cultures that have succeeded one another in time gives rise to possibilities of error.  as we have observed. But it is precisely this historical process—if the theologian will make himself aware of it—that also makes possible a deepening understanding of the truth. Every Christian civilization will make its own errors; but also, characteristically, its particular emphases will illuminate new facets of divine truth. Each fresh generation succeeds to a richer heritage of Christian insights, perceptions, intuitions, which it can use—if it so chooses—to inform its own understanding of the faith. It also acquires a new perspective from which to judge what is ephemeral in the church’s attempts to explicate its faith and what is enduring. (To many contemporary Catholics it seems that the various nineteenth century papal pronouncements condemning the principle of religious toleration can be dismissed as ephemeral products of a particular historical situation; at the time of their promulgation they were widely accepted as enduring statements of Catholic truth.) It is good then for a scholar who would expound the faith of the church to know something of the church’s history. Any meaningful theory of development of doctrine must be based on a consideration of the whole experience of the church in time. This is most especially true when a theologian turns to ecclesiology, when he seeks to theologize about the intrinsic nature of the church itself. He cannot know the whole truth unless he knows the whole church.

The modern doctrine of infallibility is singularly unhelpful in the incessant, never-ending struggle to deepen our understanding of Christian truth that is, or should be, at the heart of the theological enterprise. It encourages Catholic scholars to suppose that their proper task is to reconcile all the more solemn past pronouncements of the church with one another by ever more ingenious displays of hermeneutical dexterity; whereas the real task is to distinguish between the unfailing faith of the church—the heritage of truth it has preserved— and the human errors which, in every age, the church has associated and does associate with the proclamation of that truth. This applies not least to the dogma of papal infallibility itself. Recently, several scholars have pointed out that it is very hard to reconcile the decrees of Vatican Council I with those of the Council of Constance and that the decrees of Constance cannot be lightly dismissed as lacking in authority. So too, we have observed, it is hardly possible to reconcile the decrees of Vatican Council II with those of the Fourth Lateran Council. But it is surely a misconceived enterprise to attempt any sophistical reconciliation of such starkly opposed texts. The task for Catholic scholars and pastors is rather to distinguish between what was true and what was false in the pronouncements of Vatican Council I concerning papal authority, guided by the experience of a further century of the life of the church in the world. (So too we need to distinguish between what was true—if anything—and what was false in the Fourth Lateran Council’s pronouncements on religious persecution, with here the experience of seven and a half centuries to guide us.) The purpose of such enquiries is not to undermine all the doctrines of the past. The purpose is just the opposite—to seek out and cherish all that is true and life-giving in the teachings of the church. Theologians need to persist in such work if the term “development of doctrine” is to mean anything other than mere license to indulge in subjective fantasy.

The conservative defender of infallibility imagines that, in insisting on the irreformability of the definitions of the past, he is providing rocks of certainty to stand against an all-engulfing flood of relativism. But in fact, his doctrine—principally because it engenders corrupt principles of hermeneutics—makes it almost impossible for a Catholic theologian to carry out his work convincingly. If the modern Catholic church is to claim, with any appearance of credibility, to be the church that Christ founded, the most urgent problems that face its theologians are problems of historicity—the problem of distinguishing what is permanent from what is transitory in the expressions of the church’s faith; the problem of explaining more sensitively the nature of a church that, down the centuries, has always been prone to error and always “unfailing in faith”; the problem of identity in change. The deepest objection that a Catholic can offer to the doctrine of papal infallibility is, not that it exalts unduly the power of the pope, but that it grievously distorts the thinking of the most able Catholic scholars who have addressed themselves to these problems in modern times.

Nowadays, ecumenically-minded Catholics often seem to assume that the doctrine of papal infallibility defined in 1870 can be qualified almost out of existence and then conveniently forgotten. But this is only another way of falsifying history. The doctrine of 1870 exists. It ought not to be forgotten. Conceivably, however, it ought to be reconsidered. Of course the ultimate value of a doctrinal proposition cannot be established purely and simply by historical analysis of the kind that has been presented in this book. In principle we cannot determine whether a doctrine is true or false merely by explaining how it first came to be formulated. But, in a rather unusual fashion, our particular doctrine of papal infallibility raises specifically historical problems that not all theologians have been content to ignore. This is so for two reasons. In the first place, the dogma of Vatican Council I does not simply affirm an eternal truth about a transcendent godhead; it ascribes a particular characteristic to a succession of historical personages who, in our temporal world, have occupied the chair of St Peter for more than nineteen hundred years. In the second place, as we have already observed, a theologian who seeks seriously to uphold the doctrine of 1870 needs to argue, not only that the pope is infallible (and infallible in some meaningful sense of the word), but also that a belief in papal infallibility has inhered in “the ancient and constant faith of the church” throughout the whole history of the Christian era, “from the beginning of the Christian faith.” Hence, although this book is addressed primarily to historians, its conclusions may possibly be of interest to other scholars who are interested in the problems of infallibility. The main points can be summarized very briefly. There is no convincing evidence, that papal infallibility formed any part of the theological or canonical tradition of the church before the thirteenth century; the doctrine was invented in the first place by a few dissident Franciscans because it suited their convenience to invent it; eventually, but only after much initial reluctance, it was accepted by the papacy because it suited the convenience of the popes to accept it.

The doctrine of papal infallibility no longer serves anyone’s convenience—least of all the pope’s. The papacy adopted the doctrine out of weakness. Perhaps one day the church will feel strong enough to renounce it.

NOTES

1. H. Riedlinger, “Hermeneutische Ueberlegungen zu den konstanzer Dekreten” in Das Konzil von Konstanz, ed. A. Franzen and W. Muller (Freiburg-Basle-Vienna, 1964), pp. 214-238 at p. 222.

2. H. J. Schroeder, The Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (St. Louis, 1937), p. 242. 

3. W. M. Abbott, The Documents of Vatican II (New York, 1966), p. 678.