HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Council of Florence on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: 4 February 1442 (Session 11 of the Council of Basel–Ferrara–Florence, the seventeenth ecumenical council; the bull Cantate Domino, the Bull of Union with the Copts, promulgated by Pope Eugene IV) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — the first ecumenical council to enumerate the full canon, the entire deuterocanon listed among the Scriptures with no second tier, a century before Trent. In its profession of faith for the reunion of the Copts, the council declares "one and the same God" the author of both Testaments and lists the books it "accepts and venerates" — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees standing in one undifferentiated list beside Genesis, Isaiah, and the Gospels. It is the Augustinian, reception-based canon of the African councils and Innocent I, now raised for the first time to the level of an ecumenical decree.

Claims & evidence

The canon enumerated in Cantate Domino: the deuterocanon among the books

The Bull of Union with the Copts is a sweeping profession of the Catholic faith, drawn up for a reunion that in the event failed. In the course of professing what the Roman church holds, it sets out the canon of Scripture under a single heading — the one God who authored both Testaments — and then lists the books:

It professes that one and the same God is the author of the old and the new Testament — that is, the law and the prophets, and the gospel — since the saints of both testaments spoke under the inspiration of the same Spirit. It accepts and venerates their books, whose titles are as follows. Five books of Moses, namely Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy; Joshua, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings, two of Paralipomenon, Esdras, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Job, psalms of David, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Ezechiel, Daniel; the twelve minor prophets, namely Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi; two books of the Maccabees; the four gospels, of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John…

— Council of Florence, Cantate Domino (1442), trans. Norman P. Tanner.¹ Measured against the disputed books the verdict is plainly YES: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees are all named, threaded into the one list of books the council "accepts and venerates" with no mark of a lesser rank. Where the Hebrew-minded Fathers had ranked exactly these titles a step below the canon — "read" but "not in the canon" — Florence levels them up, as Hippo and Carthage, Augustine, and Innocent I had done in the West a millennium earlier.²

The same receptive grammar Trent would use

What makes Florence the hinge between the patristic reception and the Reformation-era definition is not a new ruling but the level at which the old one is now stated. The verb is the receptive one — the council suscipit ac veneratur, "accepts and venerates" — the very phrase the Council of Trent will repeat in 1546, when it decrees that it "receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety and reverence" all the books of the same list.³ The two acts stand 104 years apart and use the same grammar over the same books. This is why the Catholic side answers the charge that the deuterocanon was "added at Trent" by pointing to Florence: the Counter-Reformation council ratified, under anathema, a canon an ecumenical council had already professed before Luther was born.

Notes

• YES, with no second tier. Florence does not reproduce the graded schemes of Athanasius ("read" but "not in the Canon"), Rufinus ("Ecclesiastical," not "Canonical"), or Jerome (read "for the strengthening of the people, but not for confirming… dogmas"). The disputed books are simply listed among the rest. It is the reception-criterion of Augustine — weigh a book by the church's use, not the Hebrew reckoning — now carried to an ecumenical council.
• An ecumenical-level affirmation, in a reunion bull. The canon-list appears not as a stand-alone canon-decree but inside a profession of faith handed to the Copts (and, in parallel bulls, the Armenians and others) as the terms of reunion. The union itself collapsed; the doctrinal content of the profession, the canon among it, remained a conciliar act of the seventeenth ecumenical council. So Florence is rightly read as the first ecumenical reception of the full deuterocanon — a stronger witness than the regional African synods or the papal letter of Innocent I, though weaker in form than Trent's later dogmatic canon with its attached anathemas.
• Why Trent still mattered. Florence's list did not silence the medieval undercurrent that treated the deuterocanon as a lower grade of inspired Scripture — the tradition of the Glossa Ordinaria that Cardinal Cajetan would still voice on the eve of Trent, ranking these books for edification rather than for establishing doctrine, much as Jerome had. Trent's contribution in 1546 was to close that question dogmatically, with the binding force and the anathema that Florence's reunion profession had not carried.⁴
• Translation provenance. The English is Norman P. Tanner's, in his Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Sheed & Ward / Georgetown, 1990), the standard parallel-text edition of the conciliar acts; the full bull is reproduced online in that translation.

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