Having made these general observations, we must now consider the history of those texts and collections of canons which to-day form the ecclesiastical law of the Western Church: (1) up to the Decretum of Gratian, (2) up to the council of Trent, (3 and 4) up to the present day, including the codification ordered by Pius X.
1. From the Beginning to the Decretum of Gratian.—At no time, and least of all during the earliest centuries, was there any attempt to draw up a uniform system of legislation for the whole of the Christian Church. The various communities ruled themselves principally according to their customs and traditions, which, however, possessed a certain uniformity resulting from their close connexion with natural and divine law. Strangely enough, those documents which bear the greatest resemblance to a small collection of canonical regulations, such as the Didache, the Didascalia and the Canons of Hippolytus, have not been retained, and find no place in the collections of canons, doubtless for the reason that they were not official documents. Even the Apostolical Constitutions (q.v.), an expansion of the Didache and the Didascalia, after exercising a certain amount of influence, were rejected by the council in Trullo (692). Thus the only pseudo-epigraphic document preserved in the law of the Greek Church is the small collection of the eighty-five so-called “Apostolic Canons” (q.v.). The compilers, in their several collections, gathered only occasional decisions, the outcome of no pre-determined plan, given by councils or by certain great bishops.
These compilations began in the East. It appears that in several different districts canons made by the local assemblies[1] were added to those of the council of Nicaea which were everywhere accepted and observed. The first example seems Greek collection. to be that of the province of Pontus, where after the twenty canons of Nicaea were placed the twenty-five canons of the council of Ancyra (314), and the fifteen of that of Neocaesarea (315-320). These texts were adopted at Antioch, where there were further added the twenty-five canons of the so-called council in encaeniis of that city (341). Soon afterwards, Paphlagonia contributed twenty canons passed at the council of Gangra (held, according to the Synodicon orientale, in 343),[2] and Phrygia fifty-nine canons of the assembly of Laodicea (345-381?), or rather of the compilation known as the work of this council.[3] The collection was so well and so widely known that all these canons were numbered in sequence, and thus at the council of Chalcedon (451) several of the canons of Antioch were read out under the number assigned to them in the collection of the whole. It was further increased by the twenty-eight (thirty) canons of Chalcedon; about the same time were added the four canons of the council of Constantinople of 381, under the name of which also appeared three (or seven) other canons of a later date. Towards the same date, also, the so-called “Apostolic Canons” were placed at the head of the group. Such was the condition of the Greek collection when it was translated and introduced into the West.
In the course of the 6th century the collection was completed by the addition of documents already in existence, but which had hitherto remained isolated, notably the canonical letters of several great bishops, Dionysius of Alexandria, St Basil and others. It was at this time that the Latin collection of Dionysius Exiguus became known; and just as he had given the Greek councils a place in his collection, so from him were borrowed the canons of councils which did not appear in the Greek collection—the twenty canons of Sardica (343), in the Greek text, which differs considerably from the Latin; and the council of Carthage of 410, which itself included, more or less completely, in 105 canons, the decisions of the African councils. Soon after came the council in Trullo (692), also called the Quinisextum, because it was considered as complementary to the two councils (5th and 6th ecumenical) of Constantinople (553 and 680), which had not made any disciplinary canons. This assembly elaborated 102 canons, which did not become part of the Western law till much later, on the initiative of Pope John VIII. (872-881). Now, in the second of its canons, the council in Trullo recognized Its final form. and sanctioned the Greek collection above mentioned; it enumerates all its articles, insists on the recognition of these canons, and at the same time prohibits the addition of others. As thus defined, the collection contains the following documents: firstly, the eighty-five Apostolic Canons, the Constitutions having been put aside as having suffered heretical alterations; secondly, the canons of the councils of Nicaea, Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Constantinople (381), Ephesus (the disciplinary canons of this council deal with the reception of the Nestorians, and were not communicated to the West), Chalcedon, Sardica, Carthage (that of 419, according to Dionysius), Constantinople (394); thirdly, the series of canonical letters of the following great bishops—Dionysius of Alexandria, Peter of Alexandria (the Martyr), Gregory Thaumaturgus, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Amphilochus of Iconium, Timotheus of Alexandria, Theophilus of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, Gennadius of Constantinople; the canon of Cyprian of Carthage (the Martyr) is also mentioned, but with the note that it is only valid for Africa. With the addition of the twenty-two canons of the ecumenical council of Nicaea (787), this will give us the whole contents of the official collection of the Greek Church; since then it has remained unchanged. The law of the Greek Church was in reality rather the work of the Byzantine emperors.[4]
The collection has had several commentators; we need only mention the commentaries of Photius (883), Zonaras (1120) and Balsamon (1170). A collection in which the texts are simply reproduced in their chronological order is obviously inconvenient; towards 550, Johannes Scholasticus, patriarch of Constantinople, drew up a methodical classification of them under fifty heads. Finally should be mentioned yet another kind of compilation still in use in the Greek Church, bearing Nomocanon. the name of nomocanon, because in them are inserted, side by side with the ecclesiastical canons, the imperial laws on each subject: the chief of them are the one bearing the name of Johannes Scholasticus, which belongs, however, to a later date, and that of Photius (883).
The canon law of the other Eastern Churches had no marked influence on the collections of the Western Church, so we need not speak of it here. While, from the 5th century onwards a certain unification in the ecclesiastical law began to take place within the sphere of the see of Constantinople, it was not till later that a similar result was arrived at in the West. For In the West. several centuries there is no mention of any but local collections of canons, and even these are not found till the 5th century; we have to come down to the 8th or even the 9th century before we find any trace of unification. This process was uniformly the result of the passing on of the various collections from one region to another.
The most remarkable, and the most homogeneous, as well as without doubt the most ancient of these local collections is that of the Church of Africa. It was formed, so to speak, automatically, owing to the plenary assemblies of the Africa. African episcopate held practically every year, at which it was customary first of all to read out the canons of the previous councils. This gave to the collection an official character. At the time of the Vandal invasion this collection comprised the canons of the council of Carthage under Gratus (about 348) and under Genethlius (390), the whole series of the twenty or twenty-two plenary councils held during the episcopate of Aurelius, and finally, those of the councils held at Byzacene. Of the last-named we have only fragments, and the series of the councils under Aurelius is very incomplete. The African collection has not come to us directly: we have two incomplete and confused arrangements of it, in two collections, that of the Hispana and that of Dionysius Exiguus. Dionysius knows only the council of 419, in connexion with the affair of Apiarius; but in this single text are reproduced, more or less fully, almost all the synods of the collection; this was the celebrated Concilium Africanum, so often quoted in the middle ages, which was also recognized by the Greeks. The Spanish collection divides the African canons among seven councils of Carthage and one of Mileve; but in many cases it ascribes them to the wrong source; for example, it gives under the title of the fourth council of Carthage, the Statuta Ecclesiae antiqua, an Arlesian compilation of Saint Caesarius, which has led to a number of incorrect references. Towards the middle of the 6th century a Carthaginian deacon, Fulgentius Ferrandus, drew up a Breviatio canonum,[5] a methodical arrangement of the African collection, in the order of the subjects. From it we learn that the canons of Nicaea and the other Greek councils, up to that of Chalcedon, were also known in Africa.
The Roman Church, even more than the rest, governed itself according to its own customs and traditions. Up to the end of the 5th century the only canonical document of non-Roman origin which it officially recognized was Rome. the group of canons of Nicaea, under which name were also included those of Sardica. A Latin version of the other Greek councils (the one referred to by Dionysius as prisca) was known, but no canonical use was made of it. The local law was founded on usage and on the papal letters called decretals. The latter were of two kinds: some were addressed to the bishops of the ecclesiastical province immediately subject to the pope; the others were issued in answer to questions submitted from various quarters; but in both cases the doctrine is the same. At the beginning of the 6th century the Roman Church adopted the double collection, though of private origin, which was drawn Dionysius Exiguus and his collection. up at that time by the monk Dionysius, known by the name of Dionysius Exiguus, which he himself had assumed as a sign of humility. He was a Scythian by birth, and did not come to Rome till after 496, his learning was considerable for his times, and to him we owe the employment of the Christian era and a new way of reckoning Easter. At the desire of Stephen, bishop of Salona, he undertook the task of making a new translation, from the original Greek text, of the canons of the Greek collection. The manuscript which he used contained only the first fifty of the Apostolic Canons; these he translated, and they thus became part of the law of the West. This part of the work of Dionysius was not added to later; it was otherwise with the second part. This embodied the documents containing the local law, namely 39 decretals of the popes from Siricius (384-398) to Anastasius II. (496-498). As was natural this collection received successive additions as further decretals appeared. The collection formed by combining these two parts remained the only official code of the Roman Church until the labours undertaken in consequence of the reforming movement in the 11th century. In 774 Pope Adrian I. gave the twofold collection of the Scythian monk to the future emperor Charlemagne as the canonical book of the Roman Church; this is what is called the Dionysio-Hadriana. This was an important stage in the history of the centralization Dionysio-Hadriana. of canon law; the collection was officially received by the Frankish Church, imposed by the council of Aix-la-Chapelle of 802, and from that time on was recognized and quoted as the liber canonum. If we consider that the Church of Africa, which had already suffered considerably from the Vandal invasion, was at this period almost entirely destroyed by the Arabs, while the fate of Spain was but little better, it is easy to see why the collection of Dionysius became the code of almost the whole of the Western Church, with the exception of the Anglo-Saxon countries; though here too it was known.
The other collections of canons, of Italian origin, compiled before the 10th century, are of importance on account of the documents which they have preserved for us, but as they have not exercised any great influence on the development of canon law, we may pass them over.
The Dionysio-Hadriana did not, when introduced into Gaul, take the place of any other generally received collection of canons. In this country the Church had not been centralized round a principal see which would have In Gaul. produced unity in canon law as in other things; even the political territorial divisions had been very unstable. The only canonical centre of much activity was the Church of Arles, which exercised considerable influence over the surrounding region in the 5th and 6th centuries. The chief collection known throughout Gaul before the Dionysio-Hadriana Quesnel collection. was the so-called collection of Quesnel, named after its first editor.[6] It is a rich collection, though badly arranged, and contains 98 documents—Eastern and African canons and papal letters, but no Gallic councils; so that it is not a collection of local law. We might expect to find such a collection, in view of the numerous and important councils held in Gaul, but their decisions remained scattered among a great number of collections none of which had ever a wide circulation or an official character.