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Edited from a variety of translations (mentioned in the preface) by H. R. Percival
THE ECUMENICAL COUNCILS Resources Online and in Print
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78 Pages
Page 29
Lambert.
The usual position of the hearers was just inside the church door. But Zonaras (and Balsamon agrees with him), in his comment on this canon, says, "they are ordered for three years to be hearers, or to stand without the church in the narthex."
I have read "as many as were communicants" (hoi pistoi) thus following Dr. Routh. Vide his Opuscula. Caranza translates in his Summary of the Councils "if they were faithful" and seems to have read ei pistoi, which is much simpler and makes better sense.
Zonaras.
The prostrators stood within the body of the church behind the ambo [i.e. the reading desk] and went out with the catechumens.
Excursus on the Public Discipline or Exomologesis of the Early Church.
(Taken chiefly from Morinus, De Disciplina in Administratione Sacramenti Poenitentiae; Bingham, Antiquities; and Hammond, The Definitions of Faith, etc. Note to Canon XI. of Nice.)
"In the Primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend."
The foregoing words from the Commination Service of the Church of England may serve well to introduce this subject. In the history of the public administration of discipline in the Church, there are three periods sufficiently distinctly marked. The first of these ends at the rise of Novatianism in the middle of the second century; the second stretches down to about the eighth century; and the third period shews its gradual decline to its practical abandonment in the eleventh century. The period with which we are concerned is the second, when it was in full force.
In the first period it would seem that public penance was required only of those convicted of what then were called by pre-eminence "mortal sins" (crimena mortalia [75] ), viz: idolatry, murder, and adultery. But in the second period the list of mortal sins was greatly enlarged, and Morinus says that "Many Fathers who wrote after Augustine's time, extended the necessity of public penance to all crimes which the civil law punished with death, exile, or other grave corporal penalty." [76] In the penitential canons ascribed to St. Basil and those which pass by the name of St. Gregory Nyssen, this increase of offences requiring public penance will be found intimated.
[75] Cyprian. De Bono Patient., cap. xiv.
[76] Morinus, De Poenitent., lib. v., cap. 5.
Reference address : https://elpenor.org/ecumenical-councils/first.asp?pg=29
