COUNCIL, the general word for a convocation, meeting, assembly. The Latin word concilium (from cum, together and calare, to call) was frequently confused with consilium (from consulere, to deliberate, cf. consul), advice, i.e., counsel, and thus specifically an advisory assembly. In French the distinction be tween conseil (from consilium) , advice, and concile, council (i.e., ecclesiastical—its only meaning) has survived, but the two Eng lish derivatives are much confused. In the New Testament, "council" is a rendering of the Hebrew Sanhedrin, Gr. vvvEBptov. The word is generally used in English for all kinds of congrega tions or convocations assembled for administrative and deliber ative purposes, but here we confine ourselves to the development of the ecclesiastical council summoned to adjust matters in dispute with the civil authority or for the settlement of doctrinal and other internal disputes.
From a very early period in the history of the Church, councils or synods have been held to decide on matters of doctrine and discipline. They may be traced back to the second half of the 2nd century A.D., when sundry churches in Asia Minor held con sultations about the rise of Montanism. Their precise origin is disputed. The common Roman Catholic view is that they are apostolic though not prescribed by divine law, and the apostolic precedent usually cited is the "council" of Jerusalem (Acts xv.; Galatians ii.) . Waiving the consideration of vital critical ques tions and accepting Acts xv. at its face value, the assembly at Jerusalem would scarcely seem to have been a council in the technical sense of the word; it was in essence a meeting of the Jerusalem church at which delegates from Antioch were heard but apparently had no vote, the decision resting solely with the mother church. R. Sohm argues that synods grew from the custom of certain local churches which, when confronted with a serious problem of their own, augmented their numbers by re ceiving delegates from the churches of the neighbourhood. Hauck, however, holds that these augmented church meetings, which dealt with the affairs of but a single church, are to be distinguished from the synods, which took cognizance of matters of general interest. Older Protestant writers have contented themselves with saying either that synods were of apostolic origin, or that they were the inevitable outcome of the need of the leaders of churches to take counsel together, and that they were perhaps modelled on the secular provincial assemblies (concilia pro vincialia) .
Every important alteration in the constitution of the Church has affected the composition and function of synods; but the changes were neither simultaneous nor precisely alike throughout the Roman empire. The synods of the 2nd century were extraor dinary assemblies which met to deliberate upon pressing prob lems. They had no fixed geographical limits for membership, no ex-officio members, nor did they possess an authority which did away with the independence of the local church. In the course of the 3rd century came the decisive change, which increased the prestige of the councils ; the right to vote was limited to bishops. This was the logical outgrowth of the belief that each local church ought to have but one bishop (monarchical episcopate), and that these bishops were the sole legitimate successors of the apostles (apostolic succession), and therefore official organs of the Holy Spirit. Although as late as 250 the consensus of priests, deacons and people was still considered essential to the validity of a conciliar decision at Rome and in certain parts of the East, the development had already run its course in northern Africa. It was a further step in advance when synods began to meet at regular intervals. They were held annually in Cappadocia by the middle of the 3rd century, and the council of Nicaea commanded in 325 that semi-annual synods be held in every province, an arrangement which was not systematically enforced, and was altered in 692, when the Trullan Council reduced the number to one a year.
With the multiplication of synods came naturally a differentia tion of type. In text-books we find clear lines drawn between diocesan, provincial, national, patriarchal and oecumenical synods ; but the first thousand years of church history do not justify the sharpness of the traditional distinction. The provincial synods, presided over by the metropolitan (archbishop), were usually held at the capital of the province, and attempted to legislate on all sorts of questions. The state had nothing to do with calling them, nor did their decrees require governmental sanction. Be fore its form had become absolutely fixed, there arose in the 4th century the oecumenical council. The Greek term ,vvohos oiKOV p.evu) (from 7) olicovAAvn 04 0, the inhabited world; Latin oecu menicus or universalis), used by Eusebius (Vita Constantin, iii. 6), is preferable to the Latin concilium universale or generale, which has been applied loosely to national and even to provincial synods. The oecumenical synods were not the logical outgrowth of the network of provincial synods; they were creations of the impe rial power. Constantine, who had not even been baptized, laid the foundations when, in response to a petition of the Donatists, he referred their case to a committee of bishops convened at Rome, which meeting Eusebius calls a synod. After that the emperor summoned the council of Arles to settle the matter. For both of these assemblies it was the emperor that decided who should be summoned, paid the travelling expenses of the bishops, determined where the council should be held and what topics should be discussed. He regarded them as temporary advisory bodies, to whose recommendations the imperial authority might give the force of law. In the same manner he appointed the time and place for the council of Nicaea, also used his influence to bring about the adoption of the creed, and punished those who refused to subscribe. The council of Nicaea, on which the subsequent oecumenical synods of the undivided Church were modelled, commanded great veneration, for it was the first attempt to assemble the entire episcopate; but no more than the synods of Rome and of Arles was it an organ of ecclesiastical self government—it was rather a means whereby the Church was ruled by the secular power. Most Protestant scholars maintain that the secular authorities decided whether or not they should be convened, and issued the summons; that imperial commission ers were always present, even if they did not always preside ; that on occasion emperors have confirmed or refused to confirm synodal decrees; and that the papal confirmation was neither customary nor requisite. Roman Catholic scholars to-day tend to recede from the high ground very generally taken several centur ies ago, and Funk even admits that the right to convoke oecu menical synods was vested in the emperor regardless of the wishes of the pope, and that it cannot be proved that the Roman see ever actually had a share in calling the oecumenical councils of antiquity. Others, however, assert that the emperor per formed these functions not of his own right but in his quality as protector of the Church, that this involved his acting at the request or at least with the permission and approval of the Church, and in particular of the pope, and that a special though not a stereotyped papal confirmation of conciliar decrees was necessary to their validity.
The papal synods came into the foreground with the success of the Cluniac reform of the Church, especially from the Lateran synod of 1059 on. They grew in importance until at length Calixtus II. summoned to the Lateran the synod of 1123 as generale concilium. The powers which the pope as bishop of the church in Rome had exercised over its synods he now extended to the oecumenical councils. They were more completely under his control than the ancient ones had been under the sway of the emperor. The Pseudo-Isidorean principle that all major synods need papal authorization was insisted on, and the decrees were formulated as papal edicts.
The absolutist principles cherished by the papal court in the I2th and 13th centuries did not pass unchallenged; but the protests of Marsilius of Padua and the less radical William of Occam remained barren until the Great Schism of 1378. As neither the pope in Rome nor his rival in Avignon would give way, recourse was had to the idea that the supreme power was vested not in the pope but in the oecumenical council. This "conciliar theory," propounded by Conrad of Gelnhausen and championed by the great Parisian teachers Pierre d'Ailly and Gerson, pro ceeded from the nominalistic axiom that the whole is greater than its part. The decisive revolutionary step was taken when the cardinals independently of both popes ventured to hold the council of Pisa (q.v.). The council of Constance asserted the supremacy of oecumenical synods, and ordered that these be convened at regular intervals. The last of the Reform councils, that of Basle, approved these principles, and at length passed a sentence of deposition against Pope Eugenius IV. Eugenius, however, succeeded in maintaining his power, and at the council of Florence (1439) secured the condemnation of the conciliar theory; and this was reiterated still more emphatically, on the eve of the Reformation, by the fifth Lateran council (1516). Thenceforward the absolutist theories of the 13th and 14th cen turies increasingly dominated the Roman Church. The popes so distrusted oecumenical councils that between 1517 and 1869 they called but one; at this (Trent, 1545-63), however, all treatment of the question of papal versus conciliar authority was purposely avoided. Although the Declaration of the French clergy of 1682 reaffirmed the conciliar doctrines of Constance, since the French Revolution this "Gallicanism" has shown itself to be but a pass ing phase of constitutional theory; and in the 19th century the ascendancy of Ultramontanism became so secure that Pius IX. could confidently summon to the Vatican a synod which set its seal on the doctrine of papal infallibility. Yet it would be a mis conception to suppose that the Vatican decrees mean the surrender of the ancient belief in the infallibility of oecumenical synods; their decisions may still be regarded as more solemn and more impressive than those of the pope alone; their authority is fuller, though not higher. At present it is agreed that the pope has the sole right of summoning oecumenical councils, of presiding or appointing presidents and of determining the order of business and the topics which shall come up. The papal confirmation is indispensable; it is conceived of as the stamp without which the expression of conciliar opinion lacks legal validity. In other words, the oecumenical council is now practically in the position of the senate of an absolute monarch. It is in fact an open question whether a council is to be ranked as really oecumenical until after its decrees have been approved by the pope. (See VATICAN