Excursus on the Number of the Nicene Canons.
There has come down to us a Latin letter purporting to
have been written by St. Athanasius to Pope Marcus. This letter
is found in the Benedictine edition of St. Athanasius’s works
(ed. Patav. ii. 599) but rejected as spurious by Montfaucon the learned
editor. In this letter is contained the marvellous assertion that
the Council of Nice at first adopted forty canons, which were in Greek, that it subsequently added twenty Latin canons, and that afterwards the council reassembled and set forth seventy altogether. A tradition that something of the kind had taken place was prevalent in parts of the East, and some collections did contain seventy canons.
In the Vatican Library is a
which was bought for it by the famous Asseman, from the Coptic
Patriarch, John, and which contains not only seventy, but eighty canons
attributed to the council of Nice. The is in Arabic, and was discovered by J. B. Romanus, S. J., who first made its contents known, and translated into Latin a copy he had made of it. Another Jesuit, Pisanus, was writing a history of the Nicene Council at the time and he received the eighty newly found canons into his book; but, out of respect to the pseudo-Athanasian letter, he at first cut down the number to seventy; but in later editions he followed the All this was in the latter half of the sixteenth century; and in 1578 Turrianus, who had had Father Romanus’s translation revised before it was first published, now issued an entirely new translation with a Proëmium containing a vast amount of information upon the whole subject, and setting up an attempted proof that the number of the Nicene Canons exceeded twenty. His argument for the time being carried the day.
Hefele says, “it is certain that the
Orientals believed the Council
of Nice to have promulgated more than twenty canons: the learned
Anglican, Beveridge, has proved this, reproducing an ancient Arabic paraphrase of the canons of the first four Ecumenical Councils. According to this Arabic paraphrase, found in a in the Bodleian Library, the Council of Nice must have put forth three books of canons.…The Arabic paraphrase of which we are speaking gives a paraphrase of all these canons, but Beveridge took only the part referring to the second book—that is to say, the paraphrase of the twenty genuine canons; for, according to his view, which was perfectly correct, it was only these twenty canons which were really the work of the Council of Nice, and all the others were falsely attributed to it.”
Hefele goes on to prove that the canons he rejects must
be of much later origin, some being laws of the times of Theodosius and
Justinian according to the opinion of Renaudot.
Before leaving this point I should notice the profound
research on these Arabic canons of the Maronite, Abraham
Echellensis. He gives eighty-four canons in his Latin translation
of 1645, and was of opinion that they had been collected from different
Oriental sources, and sects; but that originally they had all been
translated from the Greek, and were collected by James, the celebrated
bishop of Nisibis, who was present at Nice. But this last
supposition is utterly untenable.
Among the learned there have not been wanting some who
have held that the Council of Nice passed more canons than the twenty
we possess, and have arrived at the conclusion independently of the
Arabic discovery, such are Baronius and Card. d’Aguirre, but
their arguments have been sufficiently answered, and they cannot
present anything able to weaken the conclusion that flows from the
consideration of the following facts.
(Hefele: History of the Councils, Vol. I. pp. 355 et seqq. [2d ed.])
Let us see first what is the testimony of those Greek
and Latin authors who lived about the time of the Council, concerning
the number.
a. The first to be consulted among the Greek
authors is the learned Theodoret, who lived about a century after the
Council of Nicæa. He says, in his History of the
Church: “After the condemnation of the Arians, the bishops
assembled once more, and decreed twenty canons on ecclesiastical
discipline.”