A.D. 381

The Incarnation of Jesus is a symbol of God’s readiness ‘to assume our abject servile condition, our state under the slavery of sin, in order to act for us and on our behalf from within our actual existence’.¹ In this sense the Incarnation breaks down the barrier that Plato and the Neoplatonists maintain between the material and immaterial worlds (and Barth rejects Plato’s dualism as does Torrance). Unlike many theologians who write about science, Torrance is immensely respected by natural scientists, and in 1978 he was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

One of Torrance’s major academic interests has been the Trinity, particularly the final formulation of the doctrine in the fourth century. So it was fitting for him to be asked to give the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1981 on the sixteen hundredth anniversary of the Council of Constantinople of 381. Here was his chance in retirement to explore a subject close to his heart. The lectures were written up in an expanded form in The Trinitarian Faith, published in 1988.

Torrance’s thesis is that the relationship between Father and Son, as expounded at Nicaea, ‘is the supreme truth upon which everything else in the Gospel depends ... It is on the ground of what God has actually revealed of his own nature in him [Jesus Christ] as his only begotten Son that everything else to be known of God and of his relation to the world and to human beings is to be understood.’² The bishops meeting at Nicaea confirmed a doctrine that had always been inherent in the Church’s teaching. Torrance is therefore one of those theologians who sees the Nicene Trinity not as a new concept hammered out in the specific context of the fourth century, but as an eternally living truth that needed defending from those who tried to subvert it.

In the debates that raged during the fourth century, Torrance’s hero is Athanasius. While many scholars have tended to be more sympathetic to the intellectual Cappadocians, Torrance sees them as having taken a wrong path by implicitly given superiority to God the Father over Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit.³ For Torrance it is Athanasius who again and again gets things right, and Torrance accords him the accolade of ‘a scientific theologian’ who proceeds in theology in the same way that natural scientists would in their field. Even if Athanasius was let down by his successors, Torrance argues that enough of his teaching persisted, mediated in some of its aspects through Epiphanius, for it to triumph at the Council of Constantinople.⁴ Despite the attempts by Arians and others to destroy God’s revelation of himself through Christ, the bishops, meeting first at Nicaea and then, after much more thought on the Holy Spirit, at Constantinople, safeguard what God the Father has revealed through the Son and Holy Spirit.

Torrance’s argument is presented with coherence and eloquence and gains further strength from the personal faith that underpins it. Yet it leaves a serious question. What has happened to the historical events of the fourth century? In the 340 pages of a book centred on the council of 381, there is not a single reference to Theodosius, or even, in the discussions of Nicaea, to Constantine. Although Torrance decries dualism, there is a sense that the revelation of God through Jesus Christ hovers at a different level, above the actual nitty-gritty of the imperial politics that pervaded the councils and the arguments of the Church fathers. For the historian fortunate enough to have a great deal of evidence from the period, it is hard to see how the Council of Constantinople can be seen as providing a harmonious reassertion of the Nicene truth. Even its own leading participants saw it as a shambles.

The case of Torrance highlights how an alternative theological tradition has come to supplant the historical reality. Augustine, the founder of this tradition, did not write about the Council of Constantinople because he simply did not know about it. Nor does Augustine say much more about Theodosius. In his accolade of the emperor in The City of God, he only describes Theodosius’ victory over Eugenius at the Battle of the River Frigidus and his penance after the massacre at Thessalonika. By the time of Gregory the Great, 200 years later, Theodosius has disappeared completely from the Catholic Church’s records. Gregory had spent some years in Constantinople as a papal ambassador in the 580S, and he would certainly have known more than Augustine about the council of 381. He included it at the core of the western theological tradition. When he became pope, he proclaimed that ‘all the four holy synods of the holy universal church [i.e. Nicaea, 325, Constantinople, 381, Ephesus, 431, Chalcedon, 451] we receive as we do the four books of the holy Gospels’.⁵ He added to the authority of the councils his own as the successor of Peter. ‘Without the authority and consent of the apostolic see [Rome] none of the matters transacted [by a council] have any binding force.’ This imprinted in the western Church the belief that the bishops meeting in the councils had themselves resolved the doctrinal issues, although the papacy should have ultimate authority over what was to be believed. In short, the emperors had had nothing to do with the development of doctrine. With memories of imperial rule fading in the west, there was no reason for any theologian or historian to challenge Gregory’s version of events. Thus the ‘theological’ account of the fourth century became ever more remote from the historical reality. It affects the presentation of the subject in that histories of the Church still accord the Council of Constantinople responsibility for proclaiming the Nicene faith, rather than the imperial laws that accompanied it and that provided the framework without which it would never have been enforced.

In short, there are two different approaches to AD 381. The first is theological, rooted in the fifth and sixth centuries, articulated in the works of Augustine and preserved in the theology of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions: that what happened at Nicaea and Constantinople was no less than a revelation of God and as such totally independent of any historical process. This approach is strengthened by the assertions that the bishops were in consensus and that there was no possible theological alternative to Nicaea as it was developed in 381. It is to be found in most standard introductions to theology and omits any reference to the role of Theodosius.

The second is that this is a historical issue like any other, in which the evidence, from the contemporary accounts of the council and the lawmaking of the emperor, and its interpretation must take central place. It is not clear from Torrance’s approach how one should actually deal with this evidence: The Trinitarian Faith seems to suggest that it should be ignored altogether. Yet can one obliterate the historical factors that shaped the making of Christian doctrine, in favour of doctrine being ‘revealed’ by God? Torrance’s approach appears to create a philosophical impasse.

It is the central argument of this book that the events of 381 cannot be airbrushed from the narrative. It is time to sum up, for a historical perspective, the consequences of Theodosius’ imposition of the Nicene Trinity in 381.

It is impossible to believe that the Church would itself have come to an enforceable consensus on the Trinity if an emperor had not provided the legal framework within which the Nicenes could be privileged over the various groups of ‘heretics’ who opposed them. Theodosius’ role was crucial. His powers and status as a quasi-divine figure transcended those of his rivals in any case, but the Church was beset by its own internal tensions, which would have precluded consensus. What Theodosius achieved was the championing of one Christian faction over another and the strengthening of its position by ostracising its rivals, both Christian and pagan. He was helped by the disunity of those who opposed the resurgent Nicenes and the immense patronage he could divert to those Nicenes who took over the bishoprics after the expulsion of the ‘Arians’.

The theocracy of the emperor, initiated, of course, by Constantine some seventy years before Theodosius’ edict, was sustained by the imperial intervention in the council of 451 at Chalcedon, which led to the Chalcedonian doctrine of the human and divine nature of Christ. Here the emperor Marcian’s officials were instrumental in devising a formula that could then be imposed by the emperor independently of the corrosive debate of the bishops. When, in the west, some 150 years later, Pope Gregory claimed that the bishops themselves had achieved consensus at these councils, he was ignoring the historical record and the well-documented role of the emperors. This was understandable in view of his desperate need to assert his own papal authority at a time of social and economic breakdown, but his initiative allowed the essentially political aspects of the matter and the historical context to be submerged.

The fact that the emperors provided the framework within which a solution could be enforced did not mean that the theological debates of the fourth century were not highly sophisticated. One of the aims of this book is to show that theological thought operated at as high an intellectual level as other fields of enquiry for which Greek philosophy was famous. The problem - and here I would part company with many theologians - is that these issues did not seem capable of philosophical resolution (and those philosophers outside the tradition of Platonism would certainly have recognised this). The finding of certainty depends on incontrovertible axioms or empirical evidence from which an argument can begin. When the historian Socrates said that the Nicene debates were ‘like a battle fought at night, for neither party appeared to understand distinctly the grounds on which they calumniated one another’, he was describing a debate that lacked any agreed foundations. Although there were defined areas of conflict - over the interpretation of specific verses from the scriptures, for instance - the ground was always shifting as scripture and philosophy were used to achieve different ends. There was never a moment when the antagonists sat down and tried to set out the assumptions they shared and their ultimate objectives. Personal and political antagonisms intruded all too easily. Inevitably there were some, such as Athanasius and Ambrose, who used bullying tactics, which included the denigration of their opponents. The bitter nature of the debate overshadows the intellectual qualities of many of the participants, such as the Cappadocian Fathers and the Eunomians. In short, the consensus over the Trinity assumed by most Church historians to have been achieved would have been impossible.

The elimination of the different perspectives, above all those of the subordinationists, from the Christian tradition is a major loss. For centuries they were subject to routine denigrations by orthodox theologians. ‘On the one side their doctrine was a mass of presumptuous theorising supported by alternate scraps of obsolete traditionalism and uncritical textmongering, on the other it was a lifeless system of unspiritual pride and hard unlovingness’ runs one tirade against the ‘Arians’ from a work regarded as the authoritative English study of the issue for fifty years.⁶ It is time that such narrow and prejudiced assessments of the debates of the fourth century were rejected and the intellectual achievements of the subordinationists accorded greater respect. It is only then that the theological sophistication of the debate can be appreciated.

Perhaps the most extraordinary legacy of AD 381 lies in the definition of God it bequeathed to European thought, a definition that has had an enormous impact on the way in which the philosophy of religion is approached even today. On my desk as I write is a well-received volume, Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology.⁷ Part One is simply entitled ‘God’. Why not ‘The Possibility of the Supernatural’? It is quite acceptable to conceive, as the Greeks did, of other ways of conceptualising an immaterial world that does not include a supreme creator who maintains a continuing interest in one species in one tiny part of the universe. The primary question in the philosophy of religion should be, one might argue, that of how to define the supernatural and develop methods to discover whether such a dimension exists at all. Instead, after AD 381, all the preliminary problems were ignored and the issue was discussed solely in terms of the existence or non-existence of a much more narrowly defined entity, ‘God’. As Richard Hanson recognised (see p. 102), AD 381, followed by the suppression of pagan alternatives, was a decisive moment that led to the narrowing of perspectives on the supernatural.

Another result of the closing of the debate was the creation of the confrontation between science and Christianity. There is no attempt here to argue that science and religion (which covers an enormous variety of ‘spiritual’ activities) are necessarily in conflict. The problem only arises when religions begin proclaiming certainties. The Greeks had no trouble in differentiating between logos - a reasoned account, such as one might find in mathematics, the sciences or even history - and mythos, an imagined narrative as in a religious myth or a work of art. Any healthy mind needed mythoi: we cannot live without imagination and speculation, not least because speculation often provides the inspiration for reasoned thought. It was accepted that the truth of a myth could not be proved; its power operated at a different level and one could never assume any kind of certainty in its content. When the Church acquiesced in Theodosius’ legislative programme, it replaced sophisticated speculation about the ways in which the relationships between God the Father and Jesus the Son might be expressed - this speculation was certainly in the realm of mythos—with the acceptance of a single dogmatic formula. There had always been debate over where the boundaries between mythoi and logoi lay,⁸ but a philosophically coherent distinction between the two could be maintained. Now the Christians, by insisting that elements of what had always been accepted as unprovable speculation (mythoi) could be accorded the status of eternal truths, the ‘leap of faith’ replacing the long hard slog of reason, had destroyed that distinction.

This was hardly recognised at the time, but by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the certainties of ‘faith’ were challenged as rational thought reasserted the status it had enjoyed in the ancient Greek world as a means of achieving knowledge.⁹ A confrontation was inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, articles of faith have been continually eroded by the growth of scientific knowledge and Christianity has been split between those who cling to ancient beliefs, however impossible to defend rationally (creationism, for instance), and those who reinterpret their faith to fill the shrinking spaces where science cannot reach (and, in many cases, will never reach). Moreover, it is possible to argue that the remaining articles of faith that fill these spaces are not there because there is any rational support for them but often as a result of historical accident. This was certainly the case with Theodosius’ programme of the 380S and 390S. This does not prevent the articles of faith being proclaimed as truths, but they can only be defended by ‘revelation’ or ‘the authority of the Church’. It is a position that, of course, many scientists and philosophers cannot accept. While the scientific tradition relies on speculation and imaginative responses to problems, it also acknowledges just how hard certainty is to achieve and so is rightly suspicious of those who claim to know the answers to the major questions of existence.

The acceptance of Theodosius’ law by the Church also consolidated a new approach to reward and punishment in the hereafter. Christian ethics can be derived from the teachings of Jesus in the gospels. Early Christian communities placed a strong emphasis on caring for their own, and this tradition was continued even in the opulent days of the fourth century by such impressive monk-bishops as Basil of Caesarea, who combined intellectual brilliance with a programme of building leper colonies. But increasingly access to heaven or hell seemed to depend on holding correct belief, so that the self-glorifying Nicene Ambrose of Milan is assumed to be destined for heaven while the ‘Arian’ missionary Ulfilas and the brilliant Origen are assumed not to be. In essence, sainthood had become politicised. The culmination of this approach is to be found in Augustine’s belief as expressed in The City of God that good works cannot guarantee you a place in heaven. (Of course, as so often in Augustine’s work, the influence of Paul is to be found here.) Hand in hand with this questionable development goes the elaboration of the horror of hell fire used by the religious authorities in their fight against potential dissidents.

The tragedy of Thoedosius’ imposition and its aftermath lay in the elimination of discussion, not only of spiritual matters but across the whole spectrum of human knowledge. ‘Pagan’ thinkers shared with many Christians a belief that freedom of debate was an essential part of a healthy society. The Nicene debates themselves show that intellectual progress was being made, because the participants were continually revising their positions in response to each other. From 381 onwards, Theodosius and his successors eliminated the tradition of free speech. By deriding the opponents of Nicaea as ‘demented heretics’ and threatening them with the weight of the law and eternal punishment, they destroyed the possibilities of continuing the debate. The legal process was adapted to deal with those defined as ‘heretics’. It was a precedent from which there was to be no turning back. In the east, by the time of Justinian, the law code of the empire was promulgated jointly in the name of the emperor and a Nicene Jesus Christ: paganism, including the activities of the philosophers, was outlawed. In the west, Augustine developed a rationale for the persecution of those who opposed what was now established as ‘truth’. He went even further by denigrating intellectual curiosity and so casting a pall over the joy of learning. The Armenian bishop who noted, as early as the fifth century, that ‘clever theologians soon become heretics’ was proved right.

The conclusion that can be put forward is a radical one, but it seems to best fit the historical evidence. Through the intervention of the state, Theodosius brought to a premature end a debate that was still vital and full of possibilities. The Church was forced by the sheer weight of imperial power to acquiesce in a doctrine that had not come to fruition and that, if debate had been allowed to continue, might never have. No one can say whether the Greek tradition of free thought would have continued in either east or west, or how intellectual life would have evolved without Theodosius’ intervention. There were many other pressures and events that led to the evolution of Byzantine autocracy and the emergence of an effective papacy (Gregory VII, Innocent III) centuries after the collapse of imperial authority in the west. What is certain is that, in the west, the historical reality, that the Nicene Trinity was imposed from above on the Church by an emperor, disappeared from the record. A harmonised version of what happened at the Council of Constantinople, highlighting a consensus for which there is little historical evidence, concealed the enforcement of the doctrine of the Nicene Trinity through the medium of imperial legislation. The aim of this book has been to reveal what has been concealed. Arguably, the year AD 381 deserves to be seen as one of the most important moments in the history of European thought.