St. Columbanus and Papal Infallibility
In the 7th century AD, St. Columbanus of Ireland wrote the following to Pope Boniface IV concerning one of his predecessors, Pope Vigilius:
For they say that Eutyches, Nestorius, and Dioscorus, old heretics as we know, were favoured at some Council, at the fifth, by [Pope] Vigilius. Here, as they say, is the cause of the whole calumny; if, as is reported, you also favour thus, or if you know that even Vigilius himself died under such a taint, why do you repeat his name against your conscience? “For everything which is not of faith is sin.”
St. Columbanus, Letter V, 9.
A little historical background is necessary to understand the significance of this quote. By the time St. Columbanus was writing at the beginning of the 7th century, the Fifth Ecumenical Council had, almost a century prior, solemnly decreed that three men who were allegedly approved as orthodox by the Fourth Ecumenical Council, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Ibas of Edessa, were actually heretics. This was known as the infamous “Three Chapters Controversy.” Tragically, this caused a massive schism in the Western Church because men like St. Columbanus believed that the Fifth Council had overturned the infallible teachings of the Fourth, and had even taught heresy. This is what we see Columbanus inquiring about in his letter to Boniface IV, namely, whether or not the Fifth Ecumenical Council taught heresy and must be rejected. Some non-Catholics, especially our Eastern Orthodox friends, believe this is a problem for Vatican I’s teaching on papal infallibility because Columbanus specifically names Pope Vigilius as the one who ratified this (potentially heretical) Ecumenical Council, even calling on Boniface IV to condemn Vigilius if he did!
The non-Catholic looks at this and asks, doesn’t this prove that St. Columbanus would have absolutely rejected Vatican I’s teaching on the infallibility of the pope? After all, he believed that it was, in principle, possible for the pope to teach heresy, and so wouldn’t he have rejected Pastor Aeternus’ decree that such a thing cannot happen? While this logic seems compelling, it has some major problems.
For starters, if it wasn’t already obvious, in this letter, St. Columbanus not only believed that he could, at least potentially, resist the infallible authority of Popes Vigilius and Boniface IV, but he also believed that he could resist the infallible authority of the Fifth Ecumenical Council itself! That is, Columbanus didn’t just reject “infallible papal authority” in his letter to Boniface IV, but he also rejected “infallible conciliar authority” as well. Thus, if one concludes that because St. Columbanus believed Pope Vigilius could have, in theory, been condemned as a heretic, he therefore rejected papal infallibility, one must also conclude that, because he believed the Fifth Ecumenical Council could have, in theory, taught heresy, Columbanus rejected conciliar infallibility as well.
However, we actually know that the latter cannot be true. This is because the very grounds on which St. Columbanus and many other western bishops rejected the Fifth Council was their belief in the infallibility of the Fourth Council (Chalcedon). Their position was summarized well by Ferrandus of Carthage, a disciple of St. Fulgentius of Ruspe, who wrote just a few decades before Columbanus, “the whole Council of Chalcedon, since the whole of it is the Council of Chalcedon, is true; no part of it is open to criticism. Whatever we know to have been uttered, transacted, decreed and confirmed there was worked by the ineffable and secret power of the Holy Spirit.”1 Like Ferrandus, St. Columbanus believed that the Fifth Ecumenical Council was heretical precisely because it violated the infallible authority he believed the Fourth Ecumenical Council possessed. It’s therefore impossible to maintain that St. Columbanus and his fellow western bishops rejected conciliar infallibility as such, since their position depended on it. Rather, the most we can say is that these men were inconsistent, or hadn’t thought through the consequences of their beliefs.
To illustrate the significance of this point, imagine a Protestant cited Columbanus’ rejection of the Fifth Ecumenical Council in an attempt to contradict the Eastern Orthodox teaching on “Pentarchic conciliar infallibility,” how might an Orthodox Christian respond? Perhaps he would follow my reasoning and point out that, while St. Columbanus clearly believed in conciliar infallibility, he just didn’t know that the precise conditions for infallibility were met by the Fifth Council. In fact, what exactly those conditions are is largely an open question in all non-Catholic Apostolic Churches today (e.g. Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian Orthodox). Thus, Columbanus not being aware of what the criteria for conciliar infallibility were, much less whether the Fifth Council met them, is a real possibility. However, if this is true for conciliar infallibility, why can’t it be true for papal infallibility? That is to say, why couldn’t St. Columbanus have implicitly believed in the infallible authority of the papacy (just as he did for Ecumenical Councils), but simply didn’t know the precise conditions under which that authority was active?
To test this, let’s take a look at what else St. Columbanus believed about the Church of Rome. Because perhaps it can be shown that, just as Columbanus’ beliefs about the Council of Chalcedon necessarily lead to conciliar infallibility, so too might his beliefs about the papacy, if taken seriously, necessarily lead to papal infallibility. Consider that, in a letter to Pope St. Gregory the Great, St. Columbanus describes the Pontiff as “lawfully sitting on the Chair of Peter, the apostle and keybearer.”2 Given that St. Gregory believed “the Apostolic See is, by the ordering of God, set over all Churches”3 on account of “the care of the whole Church [being] entrusted by the voice of the Lord to blessed Peter,”4 Columbanus must be read as affirming his understanding of the papacy. This is further confirmed in another letter Columbanus wrote to Boniface IV, wherein he states that “Rome is head of the churches of the world” because the pope has received “powe[r] through the office of the holy apostle Peter.”5 Thus, it’s clear that St. Columbanus held the Apostolic See to be the divinely instituted head of the Catholic Church, a belief that, I would argue, entails papal infallibility.
In my article, “Papal Infallibility in the First Millennium,” I sought to demonstrate that, according to the tradition of the first millennium, the See of Rome was instituted by Jesus Christ to be the head of the Catholic Church until the end of time, and because of this, the theological trajectory of Vatican I inevitably follows. In order to see this, consider how we justify the doctrines of episcopal succession and infallibility. Our Lord promised that His Church would remain, as He constituted it, “until the close of the age” (Matt 28:20). Since the Lord constituted His Church around the Apostolic College, and that institution must remain until the end of time in order to carry out its mission “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), this logically requires the College of Bishops to succeed the Apostolic College on account of the Apostles not being immortal. It also requires the Episcopal College to be infallible when giving definitive judgments because, if it were not, the bishops would be able to sever themselves from the Church through heresy, thereby destroying the very institution that our Lord promised would endure until the end.
While Catholics and Orthodox can all agree on this, what the latter fail to realize is that this is the exact logic we use to deduce the doctrines of papal succession and infallibility as well. If Jesus appointed a single head over the Apostolic College in the person of blessed Peter, and this headship was promised to endure until the end of time (“the gates of hell shall not prevail”),6 then the Church cannot exist without the successor of St. Peter anymore than she can exist without the successors of the Apostles. As such, just as episcopal or conciliar infallibility logically follows from the divine institution of the episcopate, so too does papal infallibility logically follow from the divine institution of the papacy.
Therefore, because St. Columbanus followed St. Gregory in believing that the bishop of Rome, the “lawful” successor of St. Peter, was made the head of the Catholic Church “by the ordering of God,” his belief logically entails that the papacy must endure with infallibility until the end. If it didn’t, then the papacy could potentially sever itself from the Catholic Church through heresy, thereby destroying Christ’s design of the Peter-Apostles dynamic within the Episcopal College. Since our Lord’s Church is indestructible, however, something akin to the Vatican I doctrine of papal infallibility is required to safeguard the ecclesiology professed by both Columbanus and Gregory. As I demonstrate in my article referenced above, this is something that later (and even earlier) Ecumenical Councils and Church Fathers explicitly picked up on, centuries before the schism between East and West.
The fact that St. Columbanus may not have explicitly drawn out all of these theological conclusions doesn’t mean he would have rejected them, anymore than his rejection of the Fifth Ecumenical Council means he would have rejected the theology of conciliar infallibility, once properly developed. It just means that Columbanus had an under-developed theology of the papacy. It’s worth noting that, even to this day, there is still discussion among Catholic theologians concerning the nature and extent of papal infallibility,7 just as there was in the centuries prior to Vatican I. There’s a reason why ultramontanists and conciliarists could co-exist in the Church for nearly one thousand years prior to the Council; it’s because they both agreed with St. Columbanus that because the pope possesses “the office of the holy apostle Peter,” all Catholics are, by divine law, “bound to the Chair of St. Peter” in Rome.8 Regardless of how infallible theologians in the past thought this required the pope to be, they all recognized that if the Chair of Peter was woven into the very fabric of the Church by Christ Himself, they had no where else to go even when times got tough.
Ultimately, I think this serves as an excellent case study in doctrinal development. With St. Columbanus, we have a Saint of the first millennium professing beliefs that would logically entail both conciliar and papal infallibility, who nonetheless seems to act inconsistently with those beliefs in practice. Is the Church forever stuck with these historic tensions, or does she have the ability (and authority) to advance the science of theology in a definitive manner? The fact that the first millennium Church would go on to explicitly embrace papal infallibility at the Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Councils,9 while still allowing room for papal error,10 certainly seems to lend credence to the latter position, which the Catholic Church alone upholds today.
Ferrandus, Epistle 6.3, qtd. in Fr. Richard Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, p. 98.
PL 80:259, qtd. in Scott Butler and Collorafi, John. Keys Over the Christian World, p. 443.
St. Gregory, Epistle 3.30, New Advent.
Epistle 5.37, qtd. in Erick Ybarra, The Papacy, p. 459.
PL 80: 274, qtd. in Butler and Collorafi, Keys Over the Christian World, p. 443.
For more on the biblical foundation of Peter’s headship lasting until the end of time, see my article, “St. Peter: The Rock of the Church.”
See Dr. John Joy, Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility.
PL 80: 274, qtd. in Butler and Collorafi, Keys Over the Christian World, p. 443.
Once again, see my article, “Papal Infallibility in the First Millennium.”
See Erick Ybarra’s article, “Did the Anathema of Pope Honorius change Rome’s view on Her Magisterial Inerrancy? A Tension Awaiting Resolution.”