The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (30 page)

The Cappadocians went further, incorporating the Holy Spirit as a third person of a Trinity, as part of the single Godhead but with a distinct
hypostasis.
The earliest treatise that presents the Spirit as a distinct personality is that by Athanasius dating from 350. The inclusion of the Holy Spirit satisfied those who wished to believe that God was, in some form, still actively involved in the world. The three are, it was argued, equal in status but differ in their origins. God always was, the Son was “begotten” from God the Father, and the Spirit “proceeded” in some way from the Father.
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Thus Greek philosophical terms, in themselves complex, were adapted and adopted to produce a solution that allowed the Nicene formula to be reasserted and the Holy Spirit integrated into the Trinity without reverting to Sabellianism. The doctrine of the Trinity is embedded so deeply in the Christian tradition that it is easy to forget how precarious was its birth. To the Cappadocians, in fact, it seems to have been a compromise formula. Within Christianity they had to find a middle path between the condemned Arianism and Sabellianism. In a wider world, the doctrine of the Trinity stood between the Jewish conception of a monotheistic God, in whose worship Jesus and the Holy Spirit had no place, and Greek polytheism that had no difficulty in accepting Jesus and the Spirit as lesser divinities. Gregory of Nyssa suggested: “It is as if the number of the Three were remedy in the case of those who are in error as to the One [i.e., the Jews], and the assertion of the unity for those whose belief are dispersed among a number of divinities [i.e., Greek polytheists].”
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One can understand why the concept of the Trinity was so difficult for many to accept. There is comparatively little in scripture that can be used to support the idea in its final form. The terminology of Father and Son used in the Synoptic Gospels, in fact, suggests a Jesus who saw himself as genuinely distinct from his “Father.” This terminology could hardly be disregarded, and it needed some clever linguistic analysis by the Cappadocians to suggest that Father and Son could be equal and of the same substance as each other. It had, of course, to be accepted that Mary had carried the infant Jesus without providing any “substance” of her own. Although there was some scriptural backing for the concept of the Holy Spirit, it is not portrayed as enjoying a relationship with God the Father as powerful as that experienced by Jesus (as would have to be the case if the Spirit were to be accepted as an equal part of the Godhead). Basil had to fall back on “the unwritten tradition of the fathers” and “reason” to make his case. One particular challenge was that the only use in scripture of the term
hypostasis
in a context in which the Father was related to the Son refers to the Son as “a perfect copy of his [God the Father’s]
hypostasis
” (Hebrews 1:3), in other words
denying
the distinction between them which the Cappadocians had so painstakingly formulated.
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Then there was the issue of the eternal existence of the Son. The Nicenes had to deny that God could have “created” Jesus as his Son. Yet the only aspect of Jesus which gave him a distinct
hypostasis
from God the Father was the fact that he had been begotten as Son. Even if the terminology of “begetting” could be used instead of that of “creating,” “begetting” still involved some kind of action that had to be fitted in without undermining the “eternal” status of the one begotten. As Gregory of Nyssa admitted, the concept of time could not be allowed to enter the process at all. So what did “begetting” mean in this context if there could not be a time when Jesus was not begotten? Athanasius too had got himself tangled up in this one. Then again, if the Spirit proceeded from the Father only, did that not assume some pre-eminence of the Father that the Son did not share with him? If so, could they then be said to be equal parts of the Godhead? In due course this problem was to lead Augustine to suggest that the Holy Spirit must process from both Father and Son, the so-called double procession, although this idea never travelled to the east. Further problems arose over reconciling the One of the Godhead with the Three of the Trinity. The Cappadocians drew on complex arguments based on the natural world. If there is one world made up of many different natures, fire, water, air and earth, as Basil put it, then the Trinity is the opposite, a oneness of nature but not of number.
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Was it acceptable, however, simply to manipulate pagan philosophical concepts in this way to create Christian truth?
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Even Thomas Aquinas—himself highly ingenious in finding reasoned support for Christian doctrine—admitted that “it is impossible to arrive at a cognition of the Trinity of the Divine Persons by means of natural reason.” It must, Thomas continues, be taken as a revelation from God.
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When challenged themselves, the Cappadocians fell back on claims of the ultimate mystery of these things. As Gregory of Nazianzus retorted to one critic who had asked him to explain “proceeding”: “You explain how it was impossible for the Father to be generated and I will give you a biological account of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s proceeding—and let us go mad the pair of us for prying into God’s secrets!”
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Basil argued that ultimately faith must be given primacy. Just because the
hypostaseis
could be counted singly, it did not mean that “an ignorant arithmetic could carry us away to the idea of a plurality of gods . . . Count if you must, but you must not by counting do damage to the faith!”
⁴⁰
As Pelikan shrewdly remarks, the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity did not lead to any greater knowledge of God. It just increased the extent to which he was unknowable!
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The formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity did not mean, of course, that it was adopted as orthodoxy. Imperial support for the doctrine was essential, which made it necessary for the emperor to enforce the Nicene Creed. The Cappadocian Fathers developed their ideas in an imperial context that was still Homoean. Valens, emperor from 364 until his humiliating death at Adrianople in 378, was a keen supporter of Constantius’ settlement of 360, and he actively promoted bishops in the Homoean cause. It was in this climate that large numbers of Goths were converted to Christianity. Although “a bishop of Gotha” had attended the Council of Nicaea, the first widespread conversion of the Goths came at the hands of the missionary Ulfila, a descendant of a Roman taken prisoner by the Goths. Ulfila was a remarkable man, fluent in Latin, Greek and Gothic and clearly an inspired missionary. He was consecrated bishop in 341 and worked with the Goths beyond the borders through the 340s. However, persecution drove him back into the empire with many of his flock, and Constantius gave him shelter. Ulfila supported the Homoean creed and in particular had great reverence for the scriptures, which he himself translated into Gothic (probably creating “the Gothic alphabet” in the process). The Goths’ adherence to Homoean Christianity was consolidated when Valens insisted that Goths who entered the empire convert to his favoured formulation of Christianity; soon Homoean Christianity became inextricably associated with the ethnic identity of all the Gothic groups. They were to take it with them on their later migrations into the disintegrating empire.
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When Valens died, however, Homoean Christianity lost its main supporter. His successor, Theodosius, was pro-Nicene. Why is not clear. The traditional view is that his beliefs derived from his aristocratic Spanish background. In February 380, while in Thessalonika, which he was using as a base for his campaigns, he announced that the Nicene faith as supported by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria would be the orthodoxy and the alternatives would be punished as heresies. He was still not a baptized Christian, but his views and his determination to impose them appear to have been consolidated when he suffered a severe illness and was baptized by the staunchly pro-Nicene bishop of Thessalonika, Acholius.
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Theodosius then made for Constantinople. His arrival in late 380 was greeted with anger in a city where, in so far as tax exemption would be linked to the new orthodoxy, the majority of Christian communities stood to lose heavily through the imposition of a Nicene solution. Gregory of Nazianzus, who accompanied him, described his entry into Constantinople as being like that of a conqueror into a defeated city. In January 381 Theodosius issued an imperial decree declaring the doctrine of the Trinity orthodox and expelling Homoeans and Arians from their churches: “We now order that all churches are to be handed over to the bishops who profess Father, Son and Holy Spirit of a single majesty, of the same glory, of one splendour, who establish no difference by sacrilegious separation, but the order of the Trinity by recognizing the Persons and uniting the Godhead.”
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The Homoean bishop Demophilus was removed, and the emperor then called a council of pro-Nicene bishops (there were some 150 of them, “prelates of his own faith,” as the fifthcentury church historian Socrates put it, all of them from the east), whose first act was to install Gregory of Nazianzus as the new bishop of the city. The council appears to have been chaotic—at least according to Gregory, who spoke at one of its later sessions. However, it appears to have proceeded to affirm a creed based on Nicene principles. This affirmation remains one of the mysteries of the period. No record of it survives, and the first reference to a creed from this council comes only in 451, when it was read out twice at the Council of Chalcedon. It emerged then as an expanded form of the Nicene Creed, with the
homoousios
intact and the Holy Spirit referred to as “Lord and Life-giver who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified together.” At Nicaea the Holy Spirit had been mentioned, but with no elaboration of “his” status. This is, of course, consistent with the Trinitarian formulation that had already been decreed by Theodosius in his edict, and in this sense the Council of Constantinople must have bowed to his influence, although the details of the wording suggest that earlier creeds were drawn on and that some parts of the creed were added at the council itself. At the end of the council a new imperial edict vigorously enforced the creed as orthodoxy.

We authorise the followers of this law to assume the title of orthodox Christians; but as for the others, since in our judgment, they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious names of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the names of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of divine condemnation, and in the second the punishment which our authority, in accordance with the will of heaven, shall decide to inflict.
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This council, together with the imperial edicts that accompanied it, was the moment when the Nicene formula became part of the official state religion (if only for the moment in the eastern empire). All those Christians who differed from it—Homoeans, Homoiousians, Arians and a host of other minor groups—were declared to be heretics facing not only the vengeance of God but also that of the state. The decision of Constantine to privilege one Christian community over another was consolidated in that a “truth” was now defined and enforced by law, with those declared heretical to be punished on earth as well as by God. It was unclear on what basis this “truth” rested, certainly not one of exclusively rational argument, so it either had to be presented as “the revelation of God,” as it was by Thomas Aquinas, or accepted that “truth” was as defined by the emperor. Bearing in mind the degree to which the emperors either handpicked councils in advance or manipulated them, one must hesitate in claiming that the church as a whole had freely come to a consensus on the matter. The Nicenes spoke of their beliefs as traditional but they were countered by Palladius, bishop of Ratiaria, the most sophisticated of the Homoean bishops of the day, who claimed that it was the Homoean view that was the tradition and the Nicenes who were the innovators. After the edicts of February 380 and January 381, the council of 381 had been left with relatively little room for theological manoeuvre.
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In effect, the edict finally confirmed the emperor as the definer and enforcer of orthodoxy. In the future, when debates within the church began to get out of hand and threaten the stability of the empire, it would be the emperor who would intervene to establish the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy. This was not simply a theological issue. “Orthodoxy” was now associated with tax exemptions for clergy as well as access to wealth and patronage and the high status enjoyed by the state church, while “heretics” lost all these. The commanding position exercised by the emperor in the definition of orthodox doctrine may well have rested on the need to control the numbers of those able to claim exemptions and patronage, but the language in which the heretics were condemned suggests that there was something more powerful behind the development. This was an empire under desperate threat from outside, and the activities of Theodosius in his first years as emperor were dominated by the need to regroup and inspire the Roman forces that had been so demoralized at Adrianople—it is certainly arguable that his religious policy should be seen in terms of the need to find symbols around which to define the unity of the empire and consolidate its counter-attack. Theodosius used orthodoxy as a focus for loyalty to the empire, so, for instance, the devastating defeat of Valens was reinterpreted as the judgment of God effected through the hand of those, the Goths, “whom he [Valens] had perfidiously led astray when they had sought the true faith, turning them aside from the flame of love into the fire of hell,” that is, by initiating them into the Homoean Christianity they sustained after 381.
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Every subsequent attack by the Goths on the empire could be characterized as the assault of evil on the true faith. It is possible to see the rise of Christian intolerance as essentially a defensive response to these threats.