Figgis again, speaking of the theory of the conciliarist movement: “Speculation on the possible power of the Council, as the true depositary of sovereignty within the Church, drove the thinkers to treat the Church definitely as one of a class, political societies. If it cannot be said that the thought was new, that the Church was a political society, it was certainly developed by a situation which compelled men to consider its constitution. Moreover since the constitution of the Church, whatever it may be, is undeniably Divine, universal principles of politics could be discovered by a mere generalisation from ecclesiastical government.”
Specifically, if the church was a political society, and a perfect one, it cannot “be without the means of purging itself, and may consequently remove even a Pope, if his administration be merely in destructionem instead of inaedificationem, and thus opposed to the end of the Church, the salvation of souls.”
The entire section in Figgis aims to show that “dangerous theories of the rights of the people first became prevalent with the Conciliar movement,” which in Figgis’s view makes “the decree of the Council of Constance asserting its superiority to the Pope” simply “the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world.” In the end, though, the failure of Conciliarism had the opposite effect: It was one of the conditions for the possibility of the Reformation that split the church and “the triumph of the Pope over the Council is the beginning of the triumph of centralised bureaucracy throughout the civilised world.”
In the end, this combination of ideas had evil consequences: If the church is the perfect divine society and a model of all others, and if the Pope is the absolute supreme head of the perfect society, well, then, Louis XIV.
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