The Konstanz Confusion: A Re-Examination of a Lost Conciliar Episode

Friedrich Reichmann · Universität Heidelberg

Abstract

The episode known to historians as “the Konstanz Confusion” refers to the failed effort by a council of seven brethren, gathered at Konstanz in 1487, to resolve the long-standing question of whether A. (in the parlance of the field, vas patens) was a singular object or a class of phenomena. The minutes of the council are lost; the seven attendees declined to speak of what was discussed; three of the seven subsequently founded the so-called Beet Order. The present paper argues that the Confusion is not, as previously thought, a failure of theological method, but a deliberate strategy — the conciliar tradition’s only known instance of a council convened expressly to not arrive at a conclusion.

1. The Standard Account

The standard account, owed principally to Brunhauer (1939) and reified by every subsequent textbook of late medieval ecclesiastical history, holds that the council was convened with the intention of producing a binding answer; that the answer was not forthcoming; and that the resulting record (lost) was suppressed by mutual agreement among the attendees. This is the account given by every survey of the period from Wilkins (1944) to Pelikan (1959).

2. Toward a Revisionist Reading

The present paper proposes, on the basis of two newly-discovered marginal annotations in the so-called “Heidelberg Copy” of the council’s preparatory correspondence (cod. Pal. lat. 1814, ff. 17v & 18r), that the standard account inverts the chronology. The annotations — in a hand contemporary with the council and not, in this editor’s judgement, retrospective — read, in part:

“...the brethren have agreed, before convening, that the question shall be put and shall not be answered, and that none shall speak of the manner in which the not-answering was conducted...”

If the annotations are authentic — and the present paper accepts that they are — the council was convened with the prior agreement that no conclusion would be reached. The Confusion is therefore not the product of theological failure, but the council’s declared and only purpose.

3. The Beet Order as Evidence

Further evidence for the revisionist reading is provided by the subsequent founding of the Beet Order (q.v., Charter of 1487, MS Vat. lat. 7741bis). The Order’s monastic constitution, in §IV, requires its members to “refrain from the speaking of any matter on which the Council has lately failed to speak.” The clause is otherwise inexplicable. The Beet Order’s subsequent insistence on a vegetable diet, and its peculiar prohibition on vegetables “smaller than a fist,” is read here as an elaborate metaphor for the Council’s topic — the smaller members of which class the Order took particular care to repudiate.

4. Conclusions

The Confusion is not a failure but an achievement; the Council’s only achievement; and the only achievement of its kind. The present paper does not argue that the achievement was wise, useful, or even intelligible. It argues only that it was deliberate.

Acknowledgements. The author thanks the Vatican Apostolic Library for access to MS Pal. lat. 1814; the Stadtarchiv Konstanz for confirmation that no further fragments are available; and the present membership of the Beet Order, which declined comment but provided lunch.

Submitted 14 March 1961; accepted (with regret) 7 December 1961.