What you want to do and what you do, if you'll forgive my saying so, do seem to be two different things. For there is no doubt that you are in the polemic, and on an opposite side from mine. And as long as we understand that neither of us will settle a quarrel that was rooted in the very earth long before we were born, and we do not risk each other's friendship with needless rudeness (that is a memo to myself; I would never suspect you of rudeness), all will be well.
I have effectively been guilty of loose talk in the matter of Montanus. That he appealed to Rome is a modern theory, quoted by Robin Lane Fox in his Pagan and Christians, 408, and apparently first proposed by the Rev. George Salmon, Dictionary of Christian Biography, 1882. Both are hardly friends of the Church: Lane Fox is an avowed follower of Gibbon, and Salmon was an Irish Protestant and a collaborator of the infamous Whateley, the Protestant archbishop of Dublin who, during the great famine, had the cheek to preach to starving Irishmen about the virture of thrift. But both are sound scholars, who propose and adopt the theory because it makes sense.
IN the matter of Paul of Samosata, you make a distinction without a difference. Everyone knows that the dethroning of Paul was a complicated issue, involving theological deviation, ritual outrages, personality cult, and abuse of money; it may also have involved an attempt to become a local "big man" in the third city of the Empire by using the Church's already huge resources to promote himself. The Emperor (you are right, it was Aurelian, but don't expect me to get every name of that fifty-year chaos right the first time) may have been asked to rule on the ownership of a building, but the issue was who was the legitimate Bishop of Antioch, since only the legitimate Bishop had a right to the building. What is more, the sentence was passed in unmistakeably Catholic terms, barely disguised by the Roman legal language: the legitimate Bishop was the one recognized by the Bishops of Italy - that is, in Christian terms, the one who was in communion with them.
By the time the Council of Sardica took place, Rome had not been the imperial capital for close to two centuries. The Imperial seat had been, at various times, at Milan, Ravenna, Trier and Nicomedia (Diocletian's capital, from where, infamously, the Great Persecution had been planned and enacted), before settling on Byzantium. All these seats had been chosen for military convenience, and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them had ever claimed a special rank. The ascription of special rank to Constantinople was not only an uncanonical innovation, it tended to subordinate the Church to the State - which became a permanent feature in Orthodox history, and from which they are only now beginning to free themselves. And like all uncanonical innovations, it failed in the long term. I have a life-sized picture of the Patriarch of all the Russias deferring to poor Bartholomew II even to the reduced extent that you would regard as canonical! And in Catholic doctrine, of course, a Pope's approval is indispensable to the validity of a Council's decisions. There have been plenty of councils and synods that the Church does not recognize, or recognize only partly, because they held themselves to be above the Pope.
Re: The beliefs and actions of (a) character(s) are not automatically those of the author.
I have effectively been guilty of loose talk in the matter of Montanus. That he appealed to Rome is a modern theory, quoted by Robin Lane Fox in his Pagan and Christians, 408, and apparently first proposed by the Rev. George Salmon, Dictionary of Christian Biography, 1882. Both are hardly friends of the Church: Lane Fox is an avowed follower of Gibbon, and Salmon was an Irish Protestant and a collaborator of the infamous Whateley, the Protestant archbishop of Dublin who, during the great famine, had the cheek to preach to starving Irishmen about the virture of thrift. But both are sound scholars, who propose and adopt the theory because it makes sense.
IN the matter of Paul of Samosata, you make a distinction without a difference. Everyone knows that the dethroning of Paul was a complicated issue, involving theological deviation, ritual outrages, personality cult, and abuse of money; it may also have involved an attempt to become a local "big man" in the third city of the Empire by using the Church's already huge resources to promote himself. The Emperor (you are right, it was Aurelian, but don't expect me to get every name of that fifty-year chaos right the first time) may have been asked to rule on the ownership of a building, but the issue was who was the legitimate Bishop of Antioch, since only the legitimate Bishop had a right to the building. What is more, the sentence was passed in unmistakeably Catholic terms, barely disguised by the Roman legal language: the legitimate Bishop was the one recognized by the Bishops of Italy - that is, in Christian terms, the one who was in communion with them.
By the time the Council of Sardica took place, Rome had not been the imperial capital for close to two centuries. The Imperial seat had been, at various times, at Milan, Ravenna, Trier and Nicomedia (Diocletian's capital, from where, infamously, the Great Persecution had been planned and enacted), before settling on Byzantium. All these seats had been chosen for military convenience, and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them had ever claimed a special rank. The ascription of special rank to Constantinople was not only an uncanonical innovation, it tended to subordinate the Church to the State - which became a permanent feature in Orthodox history, and from which they are only now beginning to free themselves. And like all uncanonical innovations, it failed in the long term. I have a life-sized picture of the Patriarch of all the Russias deferring to poor Bartholomew II even to the reduced extent that you would regard as canonical! And in Catholic doctrine, of course, a Pope's approval is indispensable to the validity of a Council's decisions. There have been plenty of councils and synods that the Church does not recognize, or recognize only partly, because they held themselves to be above the Pope.