The Council of Constance: Its Fame and its Failure

Abstract

Van Der Hardt significantly entitled his voluminous collection of documents bearing on the Council of Constance, Magnum œcumenicum Constantiense concilium —the Great Œcumenical Council of Constance. The recent Catholic historian Funk pronounced it to be “eine der grossartigsten Kirchenversammlungen welche die Geschichte kennt”—one of the most imposing church assemblies known to history. In my own judgment, the council which assembled in Constance (1414) was, upon the whole, not only one of the most imposing of church œcumenical councils but perhaps the most imposing assembly of any sort which has ever met on the soil of Western Europe. In its sessions the urgent questions were discussed which agitated to its foundations Western Christendom during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. The Council had on it the smell of the Middle Ages and at the same time it felt the breath of the age about to open. It was an ecclesiastical synod and yet it had much of the swing of a democratic assembly. It was the first approach to a free religious parliament in which the lay element had recognition at the side of the clerical element. The two elements, mediæval and modern, strictly clerical and lay, had representation in its two places of meeting, the Cathedral, the temple of religion, and the Kaufhaus, the board of trade. The assembly was an ecclesiastical body, called to settle ecclesiastical questions; Constance was an imperial city, one of the centers of the North Alpine traffic. The questions discussed were of church administration and doctrinal purity, but the voting was done by national groups, “nations,” a wide departure from the habit of restricting the voting to the bishops, as at the Council of Nice, 325 A.D., and later councils.