The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (28 page)

However, the problem of how to present Jesus, the man of peace, in this new Christian world, persisted. The ultimate response was to transform him, quite explicitly, into a man of war. By the 370s Ambrose, bishop of Milan, is able to state in his
De Fide
that “the army is led not by military eagles or the flight of birds but by your name, Lord Jesus, and Your Worship.”
⁴⁸
In the Archiepiscopal Chapel in Ravenna (c. 500), Jesus is shown dressed as a Roman soldier trampling a lion and an adder beneath his feet. There is, of course, no New Testament source for the presentation of Christ as a soldier (other than one in the Book of Revelation, where a warrior for justice [often assumed to be Christ] appears from heaven on a white horse with “a sharp sword to strike the pagans with” [19:11–16]), and, as has already been suggested, a military image was particularly inappropriate when it is remembered that Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers as an enemy of the empire. The mosaicist had to draw on the more appropriate models offered in abundance by the Old Testament, as in Psalm 91:13, where the supplicant is promised that with the help of God he will survive battle and “tread on lion and adder, trample on savage lions and dragons.” This extraordinary transformation of Jesus’ role is a mark of the extent to which Constantine forced Christianity into new channels. (A step further is taken when, on the eleventh-century bronze doors of San Zeno Maggiore in Verona, Christ is shown being nailed to the cross by Jews rather than by soldiers.)

This chapter has viewed Constantine as an emperor who in traditional Roman terms was one of the most successful the empire had yet seen. The achievements of Diocletian in rallying and refocusing the empire after the catastrophes of the third century were remarkable enough, but under Constantine Diocletian’s reforms had been consolidated and the empire had been reunited under a single emperor who had survived in power longer than any since Augustus. Moreover, the empire’s borders had been successfully defended and even, in Dacia, extended. None of this could have been achieved if Constantine had not been supremely self-confident, able and brutal when he needed to be. This was not a man who felt any need to compromise or be diverted from his primary commitment to the maintenance of his own position as emperor and to the defence of the empire. Yet, remarkably, Constantine also sustained religious toleration to a degree unknown before him. The question was whether the newly enriched and privileged Christian communities would settle happily under state power or whether they would unsettle it by continued dissension.

12

“BUT WHAT I WISH, THAT MUST BE THE CANON”
¹
Emperors and the Making of Christian Doctrine

On the death of Constantine I in 337, Constantine’s three surviving sons, Constantine II, Constans and Constantius, eliminated other members of their family and divided the empire between them. Constantine II was killed in 340 when he tried to invade Constans’ territory. Constans was assassinated in a palace coup in 350 led by one Magnentius, who was in his turn defeated by Constantius in a debilitating battle at Mursa in Gaul in 351. Constantius was now the sole ruler of the whole empire and remained so until his death in 361. He is known as Constantius II, with his grandfather becoming Constantius I.
²

This was a particularly unsettled time for the church as it adapted itself to its new role as a religion sponsored by the empire. The immediate challenge for the new emperors, as it had been for Constantine, was to bring some form of order to the Christian communities, above all by establishing and, if necessary, imposing a doctrine that defined the natures of God and Jesus and the relationship between them. It was not only a matter of good order. Once Constantine had provided tax exemptions for Christian clergy, eventually including exemptions for church lands, it became imperative to tighten up the definition of “Christian.” As Constantine had put it in a law of 326, “The benefits that have been granted in consideration of religion must benefit only the adherents of the Catholic [e.g., ‘correct’] faith. It is our will, moreover, that heretics and schismatics shall not only be alien to those privileges but shall be bound and subjected to various compulsory public services.” The definition of “Catholicism” and heresy took on a new urgency for the state. This explains why the emperors came to play such a large part in the determining of doctrine, although their roles varied: some had personal convictions to impose, others were more concerned to find formulations of doctrine around which consensus could be built. By the end of the century emperors were imposing doctrinal solutions that were backed by imperial edicts.

The issue was a live one because Nicaea had solved nothing. The “startling innovations”
³
proclaimed by Constantine at the council, in particular the final declaration that Jesus was
homoousios
(of the same substance) as the Father, proved easy to attack on the grounds that they both offended the tradition of seeing Jesus in some way as subordinate to his Father and used terminology that was nowhere to be found in scripture. As we have seen, the council’s formula was largely ignored. Yet how was an alternative to be found around which the churches could be gathered? Given the variety of sources and influences on the making of Christian doctrine—scripture, Greek philosophy, tradition, the Nicene Creed and the works of the Church Fathers—any coherent solutions seemed impossible, and the debates now entered a period of confusion. Personal rivalries became so hopelessly entangled with theological wranglings that it is hard to separate them. Accusations of heresy, deceit and fraud flew across the empire.

The Gospels, especially those of Matthew, Mark and Luke, seemed to support a subordinationist interpretation, but none of them treated the issue unambiguously (because no one perceived it as an issue when they were written), and in the Latin-speaking west there were as yet no reliable texts of the scriptures in any case. For the Old Testament, western theologians relied on weak Latin translations, themselves taken from the uneven Greek translations of the original Hebrew and Aramaic on which the eastern churches relied. (Very few Christians could read Hebrew, rendering the original scriptures beyond their grasp.) There were also immense problems in making use of Greek philosophy, the only language sophisticated enough for such debates, as the key terms— such as
ousia, homoousios, hypostasis
and
logos—
had all been developed in non-Christian contexts (and even in them had unstable meanings). They could not easily be reformulated to deal with specific Christian issues such as the precise nature of Jesus and his relationship with God the Father.
⁴
Formulating these concepts in two languages, Latin and Greek, when there was no strict equivalence between them further complicated the situation. Latin theologians translated the Greek
ousia
as
substantia,
but the Greeks translated
substantia
as
hypostasis,
“personality.” So when the Latins talked of
una substantia,
in the sense of one divine substance (within which might be found the distinct personalities of the Trinity), it appeared in Greek as if they were affirming that there was only one
hypostasis
for the three persons of the Trinity, in effect preaching what was to become heresy.
⁵

Constantius was nevertheless determined to find a workable formula; he appreciated that it would need to include some element of subordinationism and thus implicitly a rejection of Nicaea. A number of meetings of small groups of eastern bishops who were sympathetic to this approach hammered out some possible creeds (most originated in the imperial city of Sirmium in the Balkans and are known as the Sirmium Creeds—there are four in all). They were prepared to accept Jesus the Son as divine (as was Arius himself), but they all agreed that there could be no mention of the Nicene
homoousios—
given that the word was never found in scripture, it should be abandoned. One attack captures the flavour of the debate in describing the term
homoousios
as “hated and detestable, a distorted and perverse profession which is scorned and rejected as a diabolical instrument and doctrine of demons.”
⁶
The word substituted for
homoousios
was much less charged,
homoios,
“like.” The Son was thus declared to be “God from God; like [
homoios
] the Father who begat him” and “like the Father in all things,” to which was later added “just as the Holy Scriptures say and teach,” thus reaffirming the importance of the scriptures, seemingly bypassed by Constantine at Nicaea, to the debate. The vexed question of how the Son came into being was sidestepped by a declaration of ignorance. “The Father alone knows how he begot his Son, and the Son how he was begotten by the Father,” as the First Creed of Sirmium tactfully put it.
⁷

The breadth of these “Homoean” creeds offered the hope that a wider spectrum of opinion could accept them so that the Constantinian policy of consensus could be sustained. Yet for many this breadth was also their weakness. The use of the word “like” was to many simply blurring the issue. “The kingdom of God is ‘like’ a grain of mustard seed,” one witty bishop who knew his parables remarked, “but not much.”
⁸
“Homoios,” said another, “was a . . . figure seeming to look in the direction of all who passed by, a boot fitting either foot, a winnowing with every wind.”
⁹
A wide variety of alternative formulas were championed in these years. In 358 Bishop Basil of Ancyra and a small group of bishops proposed the formula
homoiousios,
“of similar substance,” rather than the Nicene
homoousios,
“of identical substance.” These shifts in terminology and the intense debates which they provoked earned ridicule from Edward Gibbon in his
Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire,
who wrote sarcastically of “furious contests over a single diphthong.” Others, following Arius, believed that the “unlikeness” of Father and Son should be stressed—the Son was a separate creation and totally distinct from the Father. Constantius eventually accepted the Fourth Creed of Sirmium, the so-called Dated Creed, of 359, as a rallying ground for consensus. The creed was awkwardly phrased. Jesus was declared:

one only begotten Son of God who before all ages and before all beginning and before all conceivable time and before all comprehensible substance was begotten impassibly from God, through whom the ages were set up and all things came into existence, begotten as only begotten, sole from the sole father, like to the Father who begot him, according to the Scriptures, whose generation nobody understands except the Father who begot him.

It ended:

. . . the word
ousia
because it was naively inserted by the Fathers, though not familiar to the masses, caused disturbance, and because the Scriptures do not contain it, we have decided that it should be removed and there should be absolutely no mention of
ousia
for the future . . . but we declare that the Son is like (
homoios
) the Father, as also the Holy Scriptures declare and teach.
¹⁰

Constantius’ aim was to establish this cumbersome creed at two councils, one meeting in the western empire at Ariminum (modern Rimini) in the spring of 360 and the other planned for the autumn of the same year at Seleucia in the east.
¹¹
Things did not go smoothly. The Ariminum council met and proved highly suspicious of this “eastern” creed. Even though there had been virtually no western representation at Nicaea, the western bishops seemed happier with the straightforward monotheism of the Nicene formula. It was close to the idea, always strong in the west even if not formulated with any precision, that Father and Son shared a divinity. Having revived the Nicene Creed, a delegation of ten bishops, together with a group representing the minority anti-Nicene view, set off to Thrace to put their views to Constantius. The emperor was away on campaign, but after discussions with eastern bishops the delegates changed their minds and persuaded a reconvened Ariminum council that they should accept the Dated Creed, possibly also arguing that they would be out of step with the eastern bishops if they did not.
¹²
There is some evidence that a consensus of the eastern bishops at Seleucia was then achieved by persuading them not to be out of step with what the western bishops had agreed!

The consensus that was achieved was hardly a stable one, but it was real enough for Constantius to call a joint council in 360 at Constantinople with delegations from each of the two earlier councils, at which he pushed through the Dated Creed (with additions that also proscribed the word
hypostasis
and declared all other earlier creeds heretical). It was promulgated through the empire in an imperial edict. Whatever the methods by which it had been achieved, the Dated Creed offered hope that the majority of Christian communities would accept it.

This was, however, to prove far from the end of the story. The acceptance of the Dated Creed clearly depended on consistent support from the emperors, but this could be achieved only if they were Christian and ready to enforce the Homoean formula that the Council of Constantinople had endorsed. Constantius’ successor was his cousin Julian, the son of one of his father’s half-brothers, who was not even Christian. Julian’s survival to manhood was in itself remarkable, in that most of his family had been eliminated by Constantine’s three sons. His father and seven immediate members of his family were executed in 337, when Julian was only six. His teenage years had been spent with his half-brother Gallus on a remote estate in Asia Minor, but Gallus himself was executed by Constantius in 354. Then Constantius, isolated and desperate to strengthen his legitimacy, appointed Julian as a Caesar with responsibility for the imperial troops in northern Gaul. Julian proved to be a fine general and had soon restored order to the borders. In 360 his troops acclaimed him as Augustus, to the fury of Constantius, who hurried back from the Persian border to confront him. When Constantius died unexpectedly in 361, Julian found himself sole emperor.
¹³

Julian knew Christianity well—he had been brought up as a Christian and served as a lector—but he had been dismayed by the vicious infighting he saw around him. “Experience had taught him that no wild beasts are so dangerous to man as Christians are to one another,” wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, who went on to suggest that Julian believed that the Christians left to themselves would simply tear each other apart.
¹⁴
The roots of Julian’s distaste for Christianity may well lie in the brutal treatment of his close relations by Christian emperors. In any case, once he had buried Constantius with suitable Christian piety, Julian adopted “paganism,” proclaiming that the very fact that he had come to power showed that the traditional gods were on his side.
¹⁵
Summoning the bishops, he ordered them “to allow every man to practise his belief boldly without hindrance.” The clergy lost all their exemptions, and in 362 they were forbidden to teach rhetoric or grammar. It was absurd, declared Julian, for Christians to teach classical culture while at the same time pouring scorn on classical religion—if they wished to teach, they should confine themselves to teaching the Gospels in their churches.

Julian was a throwback, a philosopher emperor. For Julian, philosophy did not involve a withdrawal from the world (though he had spent most of the 350s as a student in Athens and other cities) but provided the underpinning for wise and moderate rule. His inspiration was the emperor Marcus Aurelius. However, although Julian left more writings than any other emperor, untangling his religious and philosophical beliefs from them has proved enormously difficult. Like many educated pagans, he drew on a variety of beliefs and movements (although Neoplatonism was probably the most significant) and combined mysticism with rationalism, particularly in his defence of traditional Greek secular learning.
¹⁶
In his Contra Galilaeos (Against the Galileans), written in 362–63, Julian challenges what he sees as the irrational nature of Christian belief. The work draws heavily on conventional pagan criticisms of Christianity, but it is enhanced by Julian’s own knowledge of the scriptures, which enabled him to highlight their apparent contradictions. Only John among the Gospel writers accepts the divinity of Jesus; why did not all do so if he was truly a god? The so-called prophecies of Christ’s coming in the Old Testament are based on misinterpretations of the texts—there is, for instance, no unequivocal prophecy of the virgin birth. Christian teachings about God, especially those which draw on the all-too-“human” Old Testament God with his sole commitment to the Jews, lack the sophistication of pagan conceptions of the divine. Why did God create Eve if she was going to thwart his plans for creation? Why did he deprive Adam and Eve of the knowledge of good and evil? Turning to Paul, Julian questions why God neglected most of humanity for thousands of years but then arrived to preach to a small tribe in Galilee. Why were the Greeks not also favoured by his presence if he was, as Paul argues, a universal God? Do not the latest bitter arguments over Christian doctrine deprive Christians of their claim to have found the truth? In contrast, Julian argues, the Greeks have achieved superiority in every area of knowledge; in
Contra Galilaeos
he gives examples from law, mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy as well as theology.