HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Council of Hippo's canon 36 under a "Nicaea" heading — does the Vallicellian codex prove the council drew its canon from Nicaea?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: unsupported — a single eighth/ninth-century codex (Vallicelliana B.58, fol. 77) prefaces the canon-list of the Council of Hippo (393) — "that besides the canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church" — with the rubric "Chapter XXIV of the Council of Nicaea," and then runs out a catalogue intermixing the proto- and deuterocanonical books. Rudolph Cornely concludes that the Fathers of Hippo drew their list from the decrees of Nicaea (carried to Africa by Caecilian of Carthage), so that Nicaea itself decreed the wider canon. The reading does not hold. The list is the genuine, well-attested African canon of Hippo, not a Nicene one; the "of Nicaea" heading survives in this one late manuscript alone and is a textbook case of the mislabelling Hefele documents — later conciliar material drifting under Nicaea's name because the true Nicene canons always headed the early corpus; and the very Nicene copy Cornely invokes, the one Caecilian brought to Carthage, is on record as having contained no such catalogue when the African church searched it · earliest form: heading in Vallicelliana B.58 (8th/9th c.), on Hippo's canon 36 (393)

Related arguments: the scholarly case for a Nicene canon-action — see also Jerome's Preface to Judith (Cornely's strongest prop) · Cassiodorus's Institutiones I.14 (his weakest). See also the popular Nicene-canon legend (decided-at-Nicaea; altar-ordeal miracle), both unsupported.

This argument isolates the remaining of the three props the Jesuit introduction-scholar Rudolph Cornely marshals for a real Nicene action on the canon — a rubric standing over Hippo's canon-list in a single late codex. (His strongest, Jerome's Preface to Judith, and his weakest, an obscure phrase in Cassiodorus, are weighed on their own pages.)

The claim

"There is added an ancient codex of the eighth or ninth century (Vallicell. B.58, fol. 77), which prefixes to canon 36 of the Council of Hippo, A.D. 393, this inscription: 'That besides the catholic (canonical) Scriptures nothing be read in the church. Chapter XXIV of the Nicene Council. Likewise, that besides the catholic Scriptures nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scriptures. Now the canonical Scriptures are…' etc., and there follows a catalogue exhibiting all the books of the first and second canon intermixed. Whence it is natural to conclude that the Fathers of Hippo drew their catalogue from the Nicene decrees, which Caecilian of Carthage had carried with him into Africa; nor may it be denied that the Nicene Fathers passed a decree that all the books of the wider canon be read in the church as Scriptures."

— Rudolph Cornely, S.J., Introductio specialis in historicos Veteris Testamenti libros (Paris, 1887), p. 24, in translation. Cornely advances this codex-heading as the third of three props for the thesis that the Council of Nicaea (325) itself took up the canon: a manuscript ascribes Hippo's scriptural canon to "Chapter XXIV of the Nicene Council," and Cornely reasons backward — Caecilian, bishop of Carthage, had been at Nicaea and brought its decrees home, so the African council's catalogue must descend from a Nicene one, and Nicaea must therefore have decreed the wider canon (deuterocanon included) be read in church.¹

Who advances it

The proponent. Rudolph Cornely (1830–1908), author of the standard nineteenth-century Catholic Introductio to Scripture, lists the Vallicellian heading last among his evidences that the synod of Nicaea enumerated the sacred books. He concedes the inference is a matter of what is "natural to conclude" (pronum est concludere) rather than direct testimony: the codex does not record a Nicene canon-list, it records Hippo's canon-list under a Nicene title, from which Cornely infers the title is no accident. Of his three props this is the most thinly attested — it rests on the rubric of a single manuscript copied four to five centuries after the council — though Breen reckons it carries more residual force than the obscure phrase in Cassiodorus; the first and strongest remains Jerome's remark about Judith.²

The adversaries. A. E. Breen, the Catholic introduction-scholar, grants the prop more residual respect than he allows the Cassiodorus phrase — "we are not disposed to detract from what force it may have" — but still refuses it: the canon "exists but in one sole codex in the Vallicellian library, in Rome," and "we do not feel warranted to refer the Council of Nice among the proofs of the Canon in the fourth century," adding that "Hefele accords no certain authority to the aforesaid Canon." Karl Joseph von Hefele, the conciliar historian, supplies the mechanism: because the genuine Nicene canons always stood at the head of the early conciliar collections, later canons and catalogues were repeatedly relabelled "of Nicaea" by copyists who dropped the intervening councils' names.³

The evidence for

What the claim has going for it. Steelmanned, the prop comes to this:

1. The heading is real, and it is specific. Unlike the vague "divisions" of Cassiodorus, this codex does not merely associate Nicaea with Scripture in passing; it puts a definite chapter-number — "Chapter XXIV of the Nicene Council" — over a definite, fully enumerated canon of the sacred books. Someone, at some point, took this catalogue to be Nicene and labelled it so.

2. There is a genuine historical thread to pull. Caecilian of Carthage really was present at Nicaea and really did carry a copy of its canons back to Africa — Hefele records the African church consulting that very copy a century later. So the premise that Nicene decrees reached the African councils is not invented; African conciliar legislation did look to Nicaea as its fountainhead, and Hippo's canons elsewhere echo Nicene discipline.

3. It coheres with the other props. Taken with Jerome's report that Nicaea "counted" Judith and Cassiodorus's grouping of Nicaea among the arrangers of Scripture, a manuscript that flatly heads a scriptural canon "of Nicaea" looks, to Cornely, like a third independent trace of one real fact: that the council said something about the books.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Two bare facts, and only two. A late codex really does carry the rubric, and Caecilian really did bring Nicene canons to Africa. Both tell us something about how Nicaea was remembered and how its canons travelled; neither tells us that the council enumerated the books of Scripture.

What fails — the leap from "a ninth-century codex heads Hippo's canon 'of Nicaea'" to "Nicaea decreed the canon."

1. The catalogue is Hippo's own, not a Nicene one. The list under the rubric is the well-known African canon — Hippo's canon 36 (Ut praeter scripturas canonicas nihil in ecclesia legatur…), reaffirmed verbatim at Carthage in 397 and 419, transmitted in the Breviarium Hipponense and the African conciliar collections, and nowhere in doubt as a work of 393. Its booklist — the deuterocanonical Tobit, Judith, the two books of Maccabees "intermixed" with the protocanonical books — is the distinctively African canon that Augustine championed, not anything the Greek East ever ascribed to Nicaea. The manuscript thus does not preserve a lost Nicene catalogue; it preserves a securely-dated African one with a wrong title pasted over it. What needs explaining is only the title.

2. And the title is the mislabelling Hefele documents. The "of Nicaea" rubric is not mysterious. Hefele shows in detail how it happened: the canons of the various councils were gathered early into one corpus, and "in this corpus the canons of Nicaea always had the first place, on account of their importance"; later copyists "neglected to give the names of the councils to those canons which followed the Nicene," so that "all the later canons which followed after the true canons were attributed to the Council of Nicaea." The famous instances are the Rome copy combining Nicaea and Sardica sub uno titulo, and Pope Zosimus quoting a canon of Sardica as Nicene in the Apiarius affair — "an error which he shared with many Greek authors." A ninth-century codex heading an African scriptural canon "Chapter XXIV of the Nicene Council" is one more specimen of exactly this drift, not a survival from 325.⁴

3. The very copy Cornely invokes is on record as containing no such canon. Cornely rests the descent on the Nicene canons Caecilian carried to Carthage. But that copy is precisely the one the African bishops searched in the Apiarius dispute (417–419) — and Hefele reports that, like their other Greek and Latin copies, "the copy which Bishop Caecilian, who had himself been present at the Council of Nicaea, had brought to Carthage" did not contain the canon Rome claimed for Nicaea, forcing the Africans to send to Alexandria and Constantinople for authentic texts. The African church's own authentic Nicene exemplar, in other words, held only the genuine canons and was used to refute a false ascription to Nicaea — the opposite of a vehicle by which a Nicene canon of Scripture reached Hippo. The prop's own historical thread, followed out, cuts against it.

4. One late manuscript is no foundation. Breen's decisive observation is bibliographical: the heading "exists but in one sole codex in the Vallicellian library, in Rome." A reading attested in a single manuscript four or five hundred years after the event, contradicted by the entire remaining transmission of both the Nicene and the African canons, carries no weight as testimony to 325. Cornely's own phrase — it is "natural to conclude" — concedes that the conclusion is an inference from a title, not a datum; and the inference is natural only if one does not yet know how such titles arise.

5. The council's own acts remain silent. As on every prop for a Nicene canon-action, the decisive fact is negative. The twenty surviving canons of Nicaea and its synodal letter concern the Arian and Melitian schisms, the lapsed, the date of Easter, and clerical discipline — not the canon of Scripture, still less an enumeration of the deuterocanon. Eusebius and Athanasius, both present at Nicaea, go on treating the canon as unsettled (Athanasius first listing the books, as his own undertaking, only in 367). A Nicene decree "that all the books of the wider canon be read in church" would have left a trace in the council's own record and in its leading men's later practice; it left none.

Assessment

Unsupported. As a prop for the thesis that the Council of Nicaea took up or enumerated the canon, the Vallicellian heading carries no real weight. The catalogue beneath it is the securely-dated African canon of Hippo (393), not a Nicene one; the "of Nicaea" rubric survives in a single eighth/ninth-century codex and is a clear instance of the mislabelling Hefele documents — later conciliar material drifting under Nicaea's name because the true Nicene canons headed the early corpus — and the one Nicene exemplar Cornely's argument depends on, Caecilian's copy at Carthage, is on record as having held no such canon when the African church searched it. Cornely himself claims only that the descent is "natural to conclude," and that inference dissolves once the mechanism of the title is known. Breen's refusal — the canon "exists but in one sole codex," and Nicaea cannot be "refer[red]… among the proofs of the Canon in the fourth century" — stands; the council's own twenty canons are silent. The interpretation's best case rests not here but on Jerome's Preface to Judith, and even there it is only weak; on this prop alone it has no basis. (The popular form of the broader claim — that Nicaea fixed the whole Bible — is likewise unsupported.)

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