Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (37 page)

Constantine's first summons of a council was to Rome, in 313. The Donatists ignored the result, since it went against them; so Constantine tried again the following year, this time summoning an even more widely recruited council to the city of Arles in what is now southern France. The bishops, travelling on imperial passes, even included three from the remote province of Britannia, one of the first indications of Christian activity in that island. Once more the council did not succeed in appeasing the Donatists, and in the course of much muddled negotiation with Donatist leaders, the Emperor was provoked into ordering troops to enforce their return to the mainstream Church. The first official persecution of Christians by Christians thus came within a year or two of the Church's first official recognition, and its results were as divisive as previous persecutions by non-Christian emperors. Most Donatists stayed out and stayed loyal to their own independent hierarchy, nursing new grudges against the North African Church, which remained in communion with the rest of the Christian Mediterranean Churches and which thus arrogated to itself the title of Catholic. The split was never healed, and it remained a source of weakness in North African Christianity for centuries until the Church there faded away (see p. 277).

The councils of Rome and Arles were thus not a promising precedent, but over the next century the use of councils to resolve Church disputes became firmly established as a mechanism of Church life. It represented a notable concession by the commander of Rome's army to the officers of God's army, and it meant that throughout the rest of the long history of the Catholic Church and beyond, the principle persisted that its bishops had a power and jurisdiction independent of the emperors. Rulers and Church leaders continued to work out this complicated and conflicted relationship. What was nevertheless now apparent was that the Catholic Church had become an imperial Church, its fortunes linked to those of emperors who commanded armies, to sustain or extend their power in the ways that armies do. That had implications for Christians who lived beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire in territories where they or their ruler might regard the empire as an enemy. They might well also feel that about the imperial Church.

Constantine next sponsored a council in an attempt (again not blessed with short-term success) to solve a dispute sparked in the Church of Alexandria. This was yet another episode, and in many ways one of the most decisive, in the long debates about Christology (that is, discussion of the nature and significance of Jesus Christ), and the relationship between Father and Son. An austere and talented priest there called Arius was concerned to make his presentation of the Christian faith intellectually respectable to his contemporaries. To achieve this, he would have to wrestle with the old Platonic problem of the nature of God. If God is eternal and unknowable as Plato pictured him, Jesus Christ cannot be in the same sense God, since we know of him and of his deeds through the Gospels. This means, since the supreme God is one, that Christ must in some respect come after and be other than the Father, even if we accept that he was created or begotten before all worlds. Arius's opponents accused him of using as a slogan 'There was when he was not'.
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Moreover, since the Father is indivisible, he cannot have created the Son out of himself; if the Son was created before all things, it would therefore logically follow that he was created out of nothing.

Here, then, was Arius's Christ: inferior or subordinate to the Father (as indeed Origen and other earlier writers had been inclined to say), and created by the Father out of nothing. In many respects, Arius was the heir of Origen and should be thought of as among theologians of Alexandrian outlook. It has been argued that Arius was not merely preoccupied by logic and that he had a warm concern to present Christians with a picture of a Saviour who was like them and participated in human struggles towards virtue; his Christ was part of the created order, not simply an image of God.
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Arius certainly found an affectionate following among ordinary Alexandrians, whom he taught simple songs about his ideas. Whatever his motives, by around 318 he had provoked an infuriated opposition in Alexandria, including his bishop, Alexander. Alexander would not be the last bishop to turn the fact that one of his clergy was a rather more acute thinker than himself into a matter of ecclesiastical discipline. His feelings cannot have been eased by the fact that Arius seems to have been previously associated with the rigorist schism of Melitius of Lycopolis.
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Finding himself condemned by a synod (local council) of Egyptian bishops, Arius appealed to a significantly large number of friends further afield, not least the wily and politically minded Bishop of Nicomedia, a city which, until the founding of Constantinople, had been the Eastern imperial capital. The bishop was called Eusebius, not to be confused with his contemporary the historian who was Bishop of Caesarea -
Eusebios
('pious') was then a common name among Christians. The Bishop of Nicomedia was in a powerful position to rally support for Arius, so the dispute began overtaking the entire Church in the eastern Mediterranean. Constantine was now consolidating his power in the East after eliminating his last imperial rival, Licinius, and he was determined to reunite the warring churchmen. His instinct was to try the tactics of a decade earlier as at Arles, summoning a council of bishops to solve the dispute, but his first plans in 324 to summon a council to the city of Ancyra were pre-empted by Arius's enemies, who seized the chance of the death of the Bishop of Antioch to gather there, both to choose one of their supporters as the new bishop for that key diocese and once more to condemn Arius's views. They also issued what they claimed was a definitive creed: a precedent for many more official statements which would make the same claim.
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Furious, Constantine now summoned a council at which nothing could go amiss.
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He chose the city of Nicaea (now the pleasant lakeside town of Iznik, still contained in its grand imperial walls), conveniently near his headquarters at Nicomedia. He told the delegates that they would enjoy the climate and also, with a hint of menace, that he intended to 'be present as a spectator and participator in those things which will be done': the first time in Christian history that this had happened. Some think that he actually presided at the council. It was he, probably on the recommendation of his ecclesiastical adviser, a Spanish bishop, Hosius or Ossius of Cordova, who proposed a most significant clause in the creed which emerged as the council's agreed pronouncement: the statement that the Son was 'of one substance' (
homoousios
) with the Father. Faced with the awe-inspiring presence of the emperor of the known world, there could be little opposition to this: only two bishops are recorded as standing out against it. A large accumulation of other matters controversial in the life of the Church were discussed at this council. They included precedence among the leading bishops, a prohibition on moneylending among the clergy and over-hasty promotion of recent converts to the episcopate, the reconciliation of schismatics, even a ban on voluntary eunuchs being ordained as clergy. There was much for subsequent ecclesiastical lawyers to pore over and argue about. Thanks to the Emperor's forceful role as travel agent, the council had attracted unprecedented attendance and geographical coverage among its participants; the traditional but mystically inspired number of 318 delegates is probably not far wrong. Nicaea has always been regarded as one of the milestones in the history of the Church, and reckoned as the first council to be styled 'general' or 'oecumenical'.
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As we will see, that status did not win ready consent, and twelve hundred years later there once more emerged Christian Churches which looked askance at the work and consequences of Nicaea (see p. 624).

COUNCILS AND DISSIDENTS FROM NICAEA TO CHALCEDON

Arius himself faded from public life and, although pardoned by Constantine, eventually died obscurely, reputedly as the result of an acute attack of dysentery in a latrine in Constantinople, which circumstance afforded his enemies some unchristian pleasure, and was eventually commemorated with exemplary lack of charity in the Orthodox liturgy.
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He had tried to exercise the sort of independence of mind and as a teacher which had been possible in the Alexandria of Origen's day, but which was becoming dangerous in an age when bishops were seeking to monopolize control of instruction; nevertheless, he had raised questions which would not go away. There were problems with the word
homoousios
(the
Homoousion
). To begin with, and most troublingly, it was not a word used in the Bible. Second, it had a history, which we have already touched on when discussing the Monarchian disputes (see pp. 146-7). Arius had asserted to his bishop that it expressed the views of the hated Manichaeans about Christ's nature, and it is likely that his known detestation of the term was a major factor in dragging it into the new creed. Likewise for Eusebius of Nicomedia, it was a word tainted by the likes of Paul of Samosata, and he spared no effort to place like-minded bishops in positions of power over the next decades. The campaign to get rid of the
Homoousion
from Christian credal statements split the Church in the empire for another half-century and more.
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Constantine was initially furious with Eusebius of Nicomedia for his obstructiveness, but he may have come to realize that the
Homoousion
which he had effectively imposed at Nicaea was an obstacle to his aim of unity in the Church. He may also have been galvanized by accusations of misconduct, substantiated or trumped up by the Eusebians, against Eustathius, Bishop of Antioch, a key figure among the voting majority at Nicaea.
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So Eusebius and his sympathizers were remarkably successful in building up influence with the Emperor in his last years - the most remarkable feature having been the pardon granted to Arius - and they also gained support from a succession of emperors who came after him in the East when the imperial power was divided once more. At the height of their success they managed to harry and make fugitives out of most of their opponents in the Church's leadership. Chief among these was Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who allied ruthlessness to an acute theological mind. Athanasius was fixedly determined to defend the doctrinal consensus on the nature of divinity achieved at Nicaea (although it is noticeable that even he was very cautious about using the term
homoousios
until around 350). He had an ear for a memorable phrase which would stick in the mind: the equality of Son and Father was 'like the sight of two eyes'.
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At the heart of his thinking was a potent and paradoxical idea which he inherited from Irenaeus, one that has been much echoed since, particularly in the Orthodox world, and sums up the fascination of Christianity's idea of an incarnate God: the Son of God 'has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming himself man'.
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Athanasius was also a genius at categorizing in order to damn: he styled all those who disagreed with him 'Arians', and the term has stuck. In the end, many of his opponents in the next generation were prepared to wear the label with pride.
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In the course of the struggle, some Arians became ever more extreme, saying that the Son was actually
unlike
the Father (hence their being called 'Anomoeans' in Greek, or 'Dissimilarians' in Latin). In reaction, a middle party was concerned to unite as much of the Church as it could, and backed the formulation of creeds which said merely that the Son is 'like' the Father (from which comes the party's name 'Homoean', from the Greek word
homoios
for 'like'). Its greatest triumph was to win the backing of the Emperor Constantius II, who through his military victories reunited the whole empire, and who was therefore able in 359, after much negotiation and previous drafting, to dictate a Homoean formula to two councils representing East and West. This statement, an effort to settle the dispute once and for all, was named the Creed of Ariminum after the Western council which was steamrollered into accepting it. In the end it failed to stick, and survived only as a rallying statement of those who came to think of themselves as Arians.
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Maybe the Homoean formula of Ariminum would have succeeded in uniting the Church if Constantius had not unexpectedly died in his mid-forties in 361. He had been leading an army to defend himself against his cousin, the Caesar Julian, who was propelled by Constantius's death as sole emperor on to the imperial throne. Christianity was now thrown into confusion as Julian, whom Christians subsequently angrily labelled 'the Apostate', startlingly abandoned the Christian faith. He had been brought up a Christian under the tutelage of Eusebius of Nicomedia, but had come to be sickened by what he regarded as Christianity's absurd claims, and he discreetly developed a deep fascination for Neoplatonism and the worship of the sun; he may have been initiated into the worship of Mithras.
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He was a subtle and reflective man, perhaps too much of a philosopher for his own good, and he employed the devastatingly effective strategy against Christianity of standing back from its disputes to let it fight its internal battles without a referee, a mark of how quickly the emperor had become a crucial player in the Church's disputes. There was widespread support for his reversing the humiliation of traditional cults, and some violence against Christians, which seems to have included the lynching of George, the recently arrived Bishop of Alexandria, although it is not clear whether partisans of the previous bishop, Athanasius, were in fact the main perpetrators of this outrage.
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Only Julian's early death on campaign on the empire's eastern borders in 363 restored the alliance of imperial throne and imperial Church. Not everyone said that the spear that killed him had been wielded by enemy forces, and there was indiscreet rejoicing in the city of Antioch, whose Christian majority had been a particular source of distress to him.
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This was Athanasius's moment of opportunity, particularly since his rival George was now dead. The Homoeans were in disarray; the theological radicalism of the Anomoeans concentrated the minds of their opponents, while Julian's exposure of Christian insecurity made the more statesmanlike leaders of the Eastern Churches realize that they must find a new middle way. Among them was a group whom the Cypriot Bishop Epiphanius, an even more assiduous labeller of undesirables than Athanasius, christened the 'semi-Arians'. They shifted the language at issue, trying to avoid further argument by rallying the Church to a word which differed from
homoousios
by one
iota
: so they declared that the Son and the Father are not 'the same in essence' but
similar
in essence (
homoiousios
).
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