The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (60 page)

Houses were burned down and all manner of fighting broke out. Priests were dragged naked to the forum by the bishop himself . . . he profaned the sacred Host of the Lord by hanging it openly and in public from the necks of priests, and with horrendous barbarity tore the vestments from holy virgins dedicated to God and Christ, and displayed them naked before the public in the forum, in the middle of the city.

18. See R. Hanson,
The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God
(Edinburgh, 1988); M. Wiles,
Archetypal Heresy: Arianism Through the Centuries
(Oxford, 1996); and D. Williams,
Ambrose of Milan and the End of Nicene-Arian Conflicts
(Oxford, 1995), for recent surveys of the issues and of traditional historiography. There is also an excellent survey of the controversy as it took place over the fourth century in R. Vaggione,
Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution
(Oxford, 2000). Eunomius was the most articulate defender of the extreme Arian position that the Father and the Son are to be seen as dissimilar to each other.

19. Quotation from Wiles,
Archetypal Heresy,
p. 9.

20. The examples come from ibid., chap. 1.

21. Ibid., p. 17.

22. R. Hanson, “The Achievement of the Orthodoxy in the Fourth Century A.D.,” in R. Williams, ed.,
The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry
Chadwick
(Cambridge, 1989), p. 153. J. Pelikan notes four different approaches to the Christ as God debate, all of which could draw on scriptural backing: (1) Christ was born a man but became divine either at his baptism or at his resurrection. (2) Christ was fully God from eternity and to be equated with the Yahweh of the Old Testament. (3) There were two distinct “Lords,” God and Jesus. (4) There was a Father who had a son, who is referred to in the scriptures as variously Son, Spirit, the
logos,
even an angel, but always in a context that suggested he was subordinate to the Father. (See Pelikan’s
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1:
The Emergence of the
Catholic Tradition (100–600)
[Chicago and London, 1971], p. 175.) This simply underlines one of the major problems in Christian doctrine. Everyone felt that scriptural backing was important, but the sheer diversity of texts meant that almost any formulation of doctrine could find support from one text or another. It is hardly surprising that the church had eventually to assume absolute authority over the interpretation of scripture, a development that had the effect, of course, of stifling debate.

23. See the article on Arianism by R. Williams in E. Ferguson, ed.,
Encyclopaedia of Early Christianity
(Chicago and London, 1990), p. 85.

24. Again see ibid. for some of the variations of Arianism.

25. Quoted in Drake,
Constantine and the Bishops,
p. 240.

26. Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Life of Constantine
3:10. See also Bowder,
The
Age of Constantine and Julian,
p. 70, and R. Hanson,
The Search for the Christian
Doctrine of God
(Edinburgh, 1988), chap. 6.

27. Drake,
Constantine and the Bishops,
p. 253, note 2.

28. Hanson,
The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God,
looks at the evidence on pp. 190–202. There is also an excellent account in C. Stead, Philosophy
in Christian Antiquity
(Cambridge, 1994), chap. 14, “Unity of Substance.”

29. See Stead,
Philosophy in Christian Antiquity,
p. 169, for this idea. As H. Chadwick notes in his “Orthodoxy and Heresy,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds.,
The Cambridge Ancient History,
vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 573, “the epithet
homoousios
was an ordinary term in Plotinus’ vocabulary.” The response of the Cappadocian Fathers to
homoousios
as a term is discussed by J. Pelikan,
Christianity and Classical Culture
(New Haven and London, 1993), p. 43.

30. Kee,
Constantine Versus Christ
(London, 1982), p. 15.

31. Hanson,
The Search for Christian Doctrine of God,
deals with Eusebius’ letter on pp. 163–66. Hanson’s analysis of the terminology is invaluable.

32. Pelikan,
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, p. 203.

33. Once again Hanson’s analysis of the twists and turns in the attempt to accommodate the council’s creed (
The Search for Christian Doctrine of God,
chap. 10) is masterly. See D. Williams,
Ambrose of Milan,
p. 16, for Ossius and Serdica. The full text of the western bishops’ statement at Serdica is given in Hanson at pp. 301–2. As Hanson makes clear (p. 303), Ossius was not at home with Greek philosophy and the statement is “confused.”

34. D. Williams,
Ambrose of Milan,
p. 15. Vaggione,
Eunomius of Cyzicus,
notes on p. 151: “Over the next fifteen years [from the death of Constantine in 337] the Creed of Nicaea was more ignored than opposed, even by those who were later considered ‘Nicene.’ During this period, public ecclesiastical loyalty tended to be expressed in terms of political and theological loyalty to specific bishops.” Vaggione goes on to argue that accounts of the controversy written from hindsight in the following century, by which time the Nicene Creed was enshrined as orthodoxy, tended to describe the leading figures of the period in terms of their allegiance, or otherwise, to the Nicene Creed even though no defined parties emerged until the 350s.

35. See Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, chap. 8, “Controlling the Message.” Drake shows how Constantine used texts from the Bible to isolate the more intransigent of the Christians from the majority, whom he wished to keep on his side.

36. Liebeschuetz,
Continuity and Change,
p. 281.

37. In Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Eusebius,
the editors state that the sources for the assertion that he did “are tendentious: the extent to which Constantine did attempt to suppress pagan worship [including sacrifice] is therefore disputed.” They go on to provide references to recent articles on the issue (pp. 319–20). If Drake’s thesis is accepted, it is unlikely that Constantine felt strongly about the issue, but it should be noted that by now many sophisticated pagans had themselves rejected sacrifices.

38. D. Bowder,
The Age of Constantine and Julian,
p. 33. For Constantine’s legislation see A. Cameron,
The Later Roman Empire
(London, 1993), p. 58. The influential legend that Helena found “the True Cross” in the Holy Land appears only much later, for the first time in 395, when it was mentioned in an oration by Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It is not mentioned in Eusebius’ biography, an omission which suggests that it is a later development in Christian mythology. Despite this later date, Helena’s “finding of the True Cross” has proved to be one of the most influential of Christian legends, and even recently it has been argued that the
titulus,
the board bearing the inscription “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” from the cross survives in the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome (Matthew D’Ancona and Carsten Peter Thiede,
The Quest for the True Cross
[London, 2000]). In view of the embarrassment and shame Christ’s crucifixion caused to his followers, it seems highly unlikely that they would have preserved the cross. It is also worth mentioning that another complete “True Cross” is recorded in Jerusalem in the seventh century. It was looted from there by the Persians but returned to the city by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius in 630.

39. For Constantinople, see the relevant chapters in R. Krautheimer,
Three
Christian Capitals
(Berkeley, 1983), and Christopher Kelly, “Empire Building,” in G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown and O. Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the
Postclassical World
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1999).

40. Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Life of Constantine
3:48 for Constantinople as a Christian capital. For the pagan statues, see ibid., 3:54, and the comments on the passage made by the editors on pp. 301–3. Later (tolerant) attitudes to pagan art in Constantinople are discussed in C. Mango, “Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder,”
Dumbarton Oaks Papers,
no. 17 (1963): 55–75. The same point could be made of Constantine’s activities in Rome, as it was by the anti-clerical Italian aristocrat Count Leopoldo Cicognera in his history of sculpture (Venice, 1813–18):

The same hand that raised so many basilicas to the true God was also generous in beautifying and restoring the temples of the gods in Rome; and the medals that were issued in his imperial mint carried the images and attributes of Jupiter, Apollo, Mars and Hercules, while through the apotheosis of his father Constantius he added a new deity to Mount Olympus.

41. See C. Kelly, in Bowersock, Brown and Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity, for details of the ceremony of dedication and the building of the city. A story was told by later Byzantine writers that hidden underneath the column was an ancient statue of Pallas Athene, which had been taken to Rome by Aeneas after the sack of Troy and then secretly brought on by Constantine for his new city.

42. See my
The Horses of St. Mark’s in European History
(forthcoming, London, 2004), where it is argued that it was the set of horses associated in later sources with Constantine’s golden chariot that were the ones selected by the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo for Venice after the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians in 1204.

43. Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Life of Constantine
3:49. In her book
Divine
Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople
(London and New York, 1994), Vasiliki Limberis argues that Constantine was deliberately setting out “to make Christianity a Greco-Roman civic religion” (p. 27). He could do this because his new foundation had no pre-existing Christian community with which he had to compromise, so he was able to create his own ceremonies without opposition.

44. Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Life of Constantine
4:24.

45. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony, p. 122, with her illustrations nos. 33 and 34.

46. Cameron and Hall, eds.,
Life of Constantine
1:6.

47. New Catholic Encyclopaedia (Washington D.C., 1967), entry on “Conscientious Objection.” The comparison with the pre-Constantine period makes the point. There were those such as Marcellus the Centurion who refused to fight for the state. He threw off his arms and proclaimed to his superiors that “a Christian who is in the service of the Lord Christ should not serve the affairs of this world.” As a result he was made a saint (see entry for Marcellus in D. Farmer,
The Oxford
Dictionary of the Saints,
4th ed. [Oxford, 1997]). The adoption of Christianity by the state made this approach impossible. For the Sala di Constantino, see the description in Loren Partridge,
The Renaissance in Rome
(London, 1996), p. 152.

48. The quotation comes from
De Fide
2:16. It appears to have been written about the time of the devastating Roman defeat at Adrianople in 378. A common Christian symbol from the fourth century onward was a chi-ro placed above a cross, a composition adapted from a Roman cavalry standard. In later centuries, there was a relative lack of inhibition as regards Christians fighting wars (despite a doctrine of the conditions for “a just war” elaborated by Thomas Aquinas). Augustine had argued that a soldier who killed in war was not guilty of sin so long as he acted under the orders of a recognized authority, even if that authority or the war itself was unjust (see C. Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity [Oxford, 2000], p. 291), and in practice the doctrine of “a just war” proved elastic as the number of cases where both Christian sides to a conflict have relied on it shows. As an example of the lack of inhibition, one can take the outspoken remarks of A. F. Winnington-Ingram, bishop of London, during the First World War, a war fought between Christian nations. The war was, he proclaimed, “a great crusade to kill Germans, to kill them not for the sake of killing but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young as well as the old . . . ,” and on a later occasion he called the war “. . . a war for purity, for freedom, for international honour and for the principles of Christianity . . . everyone who dies in it is a martyr.” Quoted in N. Ferguson,
The Pity of War
(London, 1998), pp. 208–9. There is, of course, a deep-rooted Christian pacifist tradition, but the point made here can be underlined by realizing how impossible it would be for an Anglican bishop of the period to have argued, for instance, for a less rigorous approach to the ethics of sexuality. There is much to reflect on here, but a knowledge of why Christianity and war became so closely linked in Constantine’s reign and those of his successors does help clarify matters. Christianity is not easily separated from the specific historical circumstances in which it developed, but at least these circumstances can be recognized.

12

1. Statement to a church council of 355 attributed to Constantius II, quoted in R. Hanson,
The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God
(Edinburgh, 1988), p. 849.

2. For the background to the politics of this period, see D. Hunt, “The Successors of Constantine,” chap. 1 in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds.,
The
Cambridge Ancient History,
vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998).

3. See Hanson,
The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God,
p. 166. I have drawn heavily on Hanson’s book for this chapter, as it provides the fullest account of the tortuous process by which an orthodoxy was eventually established. This again is an area where there has been some major rethinking in recent years. The traditional account is, as already mentioned in the previous chapter, that Nicaea affirmed traditional teaching, then “evil-minded” Arians (the term was often extended to include the Homoeans, who were termed “semi-Arians”) attempted to subvert orthodoxy until Theodosius triumphantly saw off the “heretics” at the end of the century. Discovering what really happened is particularly difficult for two reasons: (a) Christian history was effectively rewritten from the Nicene point of view, so that many texts supporting the alternative positions have been lost, and (b) there is very little evidence to show how the western view of the single Godhead evolved. See D. Williams,
Ambrose of Milan and the End of Nicene–Arian Conflicts
(Oxford, 1995), for the problems. As Williams suggests, it is very difficult to trace the revival or adoption of Nicene thought in the west, especially as there was virtually no western representation at Nicaea itself. Certainly the fight over the issue was as much a political as a theological one, and, in different circumstances, the question might have been left open or an alternative formulation adopted.