The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (26 page)

The Arians also learned from those Platonists who had tried to link the eternal world of the Platonic Forms with the actual world of creation. As we have seen, the Platonists provided analogies that could be used to describe a supreme unchanging god, Plato’s highest Form, and a subordinate entity,
logos,
the eternal principle of reason or Word that provided a link with the lower created world. This was all part of the much wider debate within paganism over the distinction between the divine power of a supreme deity and the manifestations of that power. Jesus could be equated with
logos,
as John had done in the famous opening verses of his Gospel as early as the end of the first century. The vital point, Arius seemed to be arguing, was that the
logos
required a separate act of creation by God, God Himself being indivisible and self-sufficient, and hence if Jesus was
logos
he was subordinate to the Father, although, of course, high in the Platonic hierarchy compared to the mass of humanity below. Arius appears to have believed that in fact the
logos
was created at the beginning of time with the supreme and distinct role of mediator of his Father’s glory, a view that, if Christ was equated with Wisdom, received backing from the verse of Proverbs. In fact, it was this verse which became the centrepiece of the Arian argument and the most difficult for its opponents to refute. What clinched the matter for many Arians was the suffering of Christ so vividly portrayed in the Gospels. The key verse here was the agonized cry of Jesus recorded by Mark (15:34): “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Surely God the Father as a supreme unmoving force above all things (note here again the influence of Platonism) was unable to suffer or “feel” anything. The fact that Christ could and did suffer, and called on God to rescue him from his suffering, was “proof” that he was a lesser divinity.
²³

So when Arius challenged Alexander, he believed he was representing a theological position that could be cogently justified, with philosophy and tradition backing the scriptures. Jesus was divine (that was the only possible interpretation of John’s famous prologue, “And the Word was made flesh”—although some still argued that Jesus was merely human and had been “adopted” by God), but he was a distinct creation of God the Father, who became in fact “the Father” through the act of creation. There was no reason why God, as all-powerful, could not create a subordinate being, a “Son,” to act out his purposes in the material world, but Jesus’ exact status, in particular in his role as
logos,
the “Word” of John, and the ways in which he was similar to and different from his Father, were still disputed (which is why it is unwise to speak of a single coherent Arianism).
²⁴
It was particularly difficult for those brought up on Platonism to accept a Platonic Form that had appeared as a human being.

This was the controversy facing Constantine, threatening his dream of political stability. Used to the more fluid spiritual allegiances of the Roman world, he could not believe that such “idle and trivial” speculations could cause so much unrest. As he complained in a letter to Arius and Alexander:

The cause of your difference has not been any of the leadership doctrines or precepts of the Divine Law, nor has any new heresy respecting the worship of God arisen among you. You are in truth of one and the same judgement: you may therefore well join in communion and fellowship . . . the Divine commandment in all its parts enjoins on us all the duty of maintaining a spirit of concord.
²⁵

He went on to stress how much the squabbling Christians could learn from pagan philosophers about how to conduct their disputes. By this time, however, the controversy had spread as other bishops had associated themselves with one side or the other. Constantine had to act if he was to achieve any stable support from the Christians, and so he took the initiative in calling a council of bishops at which he could enforce an agreed definition of Christian doctrine to be backed by the state. So was initiated the process by which church doctrine was decided in councils of bishops called under the auspices of the emperor; all church councils up to the eighth century conformed to this model.

The bishops were to assemble at the imperial palace at Nicaea in Asia Minor. Constantine knew he had to create an impact, and he spared no effort in doing so. Eusebius, who was present, described the emperor as “like some heavenly angel of God, his bright mantle shedding lustre like beams of light, shining with the fiery radiance of a purple robe, and decorated with the dazzling brilliance of gold and precious stones.” Those who beheld him were said by Eusebius to be “stunned and amazed at the sight—like children who have seen a frightening apparition.”
²⁶
The setting was designed to support the image, with the emperor sitting in a prominent place on a chair of gold. Constantine opened the council himself with a formal speech in Latin (reinforcing his distance from the Greek-speaking participants). Later Byzantine mosaics and frescoes (that from the monastery of the Great Lavra on Mount Athos, for instance) show Constantine as the central figure of the council, larger than the bishops assembled around him. Later tradition asserted that there were 318 bishops present, but the actual number was probably smaller; 318 was the number in the “domestic army” which Abraham gathered to rescue Lot (Genesis 14:14), an analogy used by later commentators on the Nicene Council as the number of bishops who rescued “orthodoxy” from the clutches of “heresy.” With almost no exceptions they were easterners—such debates had largely bypassed the Latin-speaking Christians. The bishop of Rome was represented only by observers.

Accounts of the Council of Nicaea are fragmentary, but we can assume that Constantine’s determination to establish a consensus, his dominating presence and the growing dependency of the church on him for patronage combined to give him an overpowering position. In his analysis of Constantine’s opening speech, H. A. Drake shows how it was cleverly worded so as to stress the overriding need for harmony, fulsomely (if prematurely) praising the bishops for their own (assumed) desire to reach this end. If they settled this controversy, Constantine assured his listeners, they would be “at the same time acting in a manner most pleasing to the supreme God, and they would confer an exceeding favour” on their “fellow-servant” the emperor.
²⁷
It was, after all, peace which was his aim.

The council began with the production of a creed drawn up by Eusebius, who was probably the most learned of the bishops present. It was conciliatory and cleverly avoided all the issues raised by Arius, stating belief first in God, then in Jesus Christ and then in the Holy Spirit. Jesus was “first born of all creation and begotten from the Father before all ages.” This sidestepped the question of whether there was a time when Jesus was “not.” The word “begotten” became crucial here, because it is possible to beget something of oneself without creating something new, and thus the word could be used to deny that Jesus was a separate creation. There was no mention of the relationship between Father and Son. Yet the creed which emerged from the conference was markedly different. First it included a statement that Jesus Christ “is of the substance (
ousia
) of the Father . . . true God of true God . . . consubstantial (
homoousios
) with the Father.” It ended with a number of anathemas condemning specific Arian beliefs, notably that there was a time that Jesus had never existed and that Jesus was of a different substance from the Father. The creed even condemned the view that Jesus had a separate
hypostasis,
or personality, from the Father, taking the creed close to the extreme Sabellian position.

It is impossible to know from the surviving evidence how or why the word
homoousios,
“of identical substance,” was introduced, although Eusebius later told his congregations that it was at the specific command of Constantine. It had no basis in scripture (as its opponents were repeatedly to stress in the years to come) and had seldom been used in theological discussions. In fact, at a council of bishops held in Antioch in 268, the word had been condemned as heretical, apparently on the grounds that a term implying a material entity was inappropriate to use for referring to God.
²⁸
Plotinus had indeed used the word ousia, substance, to describe the common attributes of “the One,” the
nous,
and world-soul, but it seems only to have been later in the century, in the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers (see below, pp. 188–89), that Plotinus’ terminology entered Christian theology. One view is that the word may have been introduced at Nicaea because Arius himself had specifically condemned the use of
homoousios
as a term to describe the relationship between God and Jesus, and it was deliberately used to emphasize the rejection of Arius.
²⁹

It is also not known why the council rounded so emphatically on Arius. The most likely explanation, although this suggestion can only be tentative, is that an impatient Constantine simply forced the formula through in the hope of quelling the dispute. He may have sensed that a majority of the council opposed Arius and capitalized on its mood. There were also political advantages in having Christ within the Godhead rather than, as in the Arian formulations, a distinct figure outside it. Christ, a figure of peace rather than war, a representative of opposition to the empire who had actually been executed by a Roman governor, fitted nowhere in Constantine’s conception of Christianity—he may even have been an embarrassment. If he were kept apart as a distinct figure, what allegiances to the state might he not undermine? This may well explain why Christ plays such little part in Constantine’s theology; Alistair Kee goes so far as to argue that “Christ had no part in the religion of Constantine.”
³⁰
The homoousios formula allowed Christ’s identity to be subsumed in the Godhead. In doctrinal terms, of course, the formula had no precedent, and there is certainly some evidence that the bishops had to be pressured by Constantine into accepting it. In his
Life of Constantine
Eusebius has the emperor “urging all towards agreement, until he had brought them to be of one mind and one belief on all the matters in dispute.” A letter also survives in which Eusebius tries to explain to his flock in Caesarea why he signed a creed that differed in important ways from the one he had presented to the council. He pretends that the word “substance” is really of little importance, but he is clearly very uneasy about the creed.
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It was unlikely that the bishops, dependent as they were now on the patronage and support of Constantine, would have been able to resist him. The result was an enormous majority for the new creed, but Constantine used his own imperial powers to order the excommunication and exile from their sees of Arius and two of his closest supporters who refused to sign it. Nevertheless, wrote Eusebius, “the Faith prevailed in an unanimous form . . . ,” and he concludes, “When these things were finished, the Emperor said that this was the second victory he [
sic
] had won over the enemies of the Church, and held a victory-feast to God.” The churches had in fact succumbed to Constantine’s own conception of their role.

The Council of Nicaea has a hallowed place in Christian history as the first ecumenical council and as the moment of the first expression of the Nicene Creed, still used as the essential expression of orthodox Christian faith today. Yet this status was acquired only much later, when the creed, in an expanded form, was endorsed by another emperor, Theodosius I, at the Council of Constantinople in 381. In the short term, no one seems to have taken the council or its creed seriously. As Jaroslav Pelikan puts it in his study of the making of Christian doctrine, “[Other than Arius and the exiled bishops] all the rest saluted the emperor, signed the formula and went on teaching as they always had.” He continues: “In the case of most of them, this meant a doctrine of Christ somewhere between that of Arius and that of Alexander.”
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It is significant that within ten years of the Council of Nicaea all the leading supporters of the Nicene Creed had been deposed, exiled from their sees, or otherwise disgraced. Traditionally this has been seen as the retaliation of frustrated Arians, but this is much too simplistic a judgment. There was a variety of reasons for the depositions, but they can certainly be read as suggesting that no bishop gained any lasting status as a result of supporting the creed, and that many of them felt uneasy about the defeat of subordinationism. In 343 Bishop Ossius of Cordoba, who had been a leading figure at Nicaea, felt free to suggest a different creed at a conference of western bishops at Serdica. It did not include the word
ousia
and contained no reference to either the Nicene Council or its creed.
³³
The first mention of the council as ecumenical, and hence authoritative, comes only in the 350s, when Athanasius, Alexander’s successor as bishop of Alexandria, who had attended Nicaea, revived homoousios.
³⁴

It seems that Constantine himself realized that his enforced creed did nothing to maintain the allegiance of the majority of the Greek-speaking Christian communities, who remained Arian. His agenda required that consensus be maintained and that Christians should be brought so far as possible under the umbrella of the state.
³⁵
Freed from the immediate pressures of the council, Constantine actually began to move towards reconciliation with the Arians. The two exiled bishops were returned to their sees. Arius himself was welcomed personally by the emperor and his views (probably modified from those previously held) now declared to be orthodox. Bishop Alexander was ordered to reinstate Arius. He died without doing so, and his successor, Athanasius, also refused to carry out the order. Athanasius, who had shocked his fellow bishops by the violence with which he enforced his authority in Egypt, was the kind of hardline and intransigent bishop that Constantine knew would destroy his carefully balanced settlement, and he exiled him to Gaul, about as far from Alexandria as he could be sent.