A.D. 381

It is hard to know, with any religious movement, what gives it its impulse. For Christianity, the hope of salvation promised by Christ, the belief in a benevolent God who will care for all, the shared values of the Christian communities, which appeared to care well for their own, specific rituals that gave a meaning and purpose to life, all must have played their part. So must a common defensiveness against their prejudiced opponents. The growth in numbers of these communities is largely undocumented, but studies of third-century Anatolia, for instance, show a patchwork of Christian communities, strong in some cities, nonexistent in others.

Overseeing these developments were the bishops. These had emerged as early as the first century as leaders of Christian communities, and gradually grew in status. At the beginning of the second century, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, the city where the word ‘Christian’ is first recorded, told his congregation, ‘You are clearly obliged to look upon the bishop as the Lord himself’.² The authority of the bishop derived from his succession to the apostles, who had received theirs from Jesus Christ himself.³ A bishop of a city such as Antioch, where tradition recorded that Peter was the first bishop, had special significance. Peter was also credited with moving on to lead the Christian church in Rome, and the tradition of his martyrdom there gave that city a status above that of Antioch. The direct apostolic succession asserted by the bishops of Rome was boosted by the claim (in Matthew 16:18) that Jesus had proclaimed Peter to be the rock on which he would build his Church. A third major bishopric emerged in Alexandria where the first bishop, the evangelist Mark, was believed to have been a disciple of Peter. There was a sense of common purpose among the bishops, although the sheer size of the empire and the difficulties of communication across it meant inevitably that links between them were tenuous. ‘Separated from you by great stretches of land and the sea, yet I am bound to you in my heart’, wrote Gregory, Bishop of Rome, across the Mediterranean to his fellow bishops of Antioch and Alexandria in the late sixth century.⁴ There needed to be something more substantial to bind the bishops together if one was to talk with any meaning of a unified Church.

The earliest Christian traditions were oral ones. Jesus did not leave any written texts of his preachings - we are dependent on what memories were passed down to the gospel writers - and it seems clear that an oral tradition, passed on within the emerging Christian communities, was resilient at least until AD 130. The problem lay in the fragility of memories and the tendency for oral traditions to evolve with time. They could also be threatened by self-appointed Christian prophets. In the late second century a group known as the Montanists (after their leader, Montanus) caused a stir with their claims that they had direct contact with God and that the end of the world was at hand. A ‘New Jerusalem’ would descend from heaven to a small town, Pepuza, in Phrygia. It did not, but the fervour of the Montanists, who had women among their leaders, appears to have been the catalyst that turned the bishops back to a more secure footing of written texts. There never could be any stability in the emerging Church if its teachings could be subverted by those claiming to be in direct touch with God. Perhaps the most important figure in the tightening up of Christian authority was Irenaeus, bishop of the (Greek-speaking) community in Lyons, who insisted on defining the Church through its adherence to a canon of texts, approval of which could, he claimed, be traced back to the early Church. While, as we have seen, Christian doctrine was still fluid and intellectual debate lively and wide-ranging, Irenaeus set the trend towards establishing central authority.

The difficulty lay in formulating this canon of fundamental texts, partly because there was such a variety of early Christian writings.⁵ The oral traditions about Jesus’ life and teachings had been written down in several, perhaps as many as twenty, gospels, but gradually four of these, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, had emerged as the most authoritative, partly because they were the earliest to have been written. Then there were a few letters, survivors of probably many more now lost, from the apostle Paul to the early Christian communities. Manuscripts of the Acts of the Apostles, written by tradition by Luke, the author of the third gospel, which covers the mission of the Church from Jesus’ Ascension to Paul’s arrival in Rome (c. AD 62), were also in circulation. All these books had been composed in Greek, which explains why in the early centuries Christianity was essentially a Greek-speaking religion. The very earliest fragment of a Latin Christian text is dated to as late as 180. By AD 200 a selection of these writings can be found listed together as a canon, an agreed set of core texts, in what is now called the New Testament. Other texts such as the epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation were added later, and the first reference to the complete New Testament as we know it today dates from as late as 367.

These were not the only canonical texts. Jesus and his disciples had been Jews and were familiar with the Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures.⁶ For centuries Jews had been migrating from Israel into the Greek-speaking Mediterranean (the diaspora), and gradually they began losing touch with their language and culture. The moment came when if Judaism was to survive at all in the Greek world, the Tanakh would have to be translated from Hebrew into Greek, and this was done in the third century BC. Although there is a legend that the translation of the Tanakh from Hebrew to Greek was ordered by King Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt to fill a gap in the library at Alexandria, it is likely that the impetus for the translation came from within Judaism itself. The translation is always known as the Septuagint, following the legend that seventy-two Jewish scholars worked on it, being led by divine guidance to come up with identical versions.

In the middle of the second century AD, as Christians began to turn away from oral tradition towards a faith incorporated in written texts, they were faced with the momentous decision as to whether they should adopt the Septuagint, which was, after all, a purely Jewish text, as one of their own sacred writings. The issue was given focus by one Marcion, who was born on the shores of the Black Sea about AD 100 and who came to Rome in about 139.⁷ Marcion had read widely in Jewish and Christian literature and had become a champion of the letters of Paul. Taking on board Paul’s teaching that Christ had transcended the Jewish law, Marcion now argued that the Tanakh no longer had any relevance for Christians. He elaborated his argument by claiming that God as portrayed in the Tanakh was stern, vengeful and ‘lustful in war’, precisely because he had to enforce the law against its enemies. Jesus had brought with him a completely new God who had not made any previous appearance until the moment Jesus had come to earth. This new God of Jesus (Marcion called him ‘the Stranger God’) had come into the world to save people from the forbidding God of the Tanakh. Jesus himself, said Marcion, was fully divine and only appeared to be human - a view known as docetism, after the Greek dokeo, ‘I seem’. Marcion suggested a canon that would include the letters of Paul and Luke’s gospel, but that would definitely exclude the whole of the Tanakh. This idea of the two gods was, of course, revolutionary, and a council of Christians in Rome condemned it. Marcion was forced to leave Rome, but he was such an inspiring preacher that in parts of the eastern empire he attracted more followers than did the conventional Christian churches. Marcionites were still strong at the time of Augustine in the early fifth century.

With the rejection of Marcion’s theology, the Septuagint became part of the Christian canon of texts. Marcion’s argument remained unresolved, in that there was an obvious contrast between the God of the Old Testament (as the Septuagint became known among Christians in contrast to the New Testament of the gospels and epistles) and the more gentle God preached by Jesus in the New. However, the two sets of writings were given an overall coherence by the claim that the Old Testament provided a foretelling of the coming of Christ. Old Testament texts, such as ‘Behold a virgin will conceive’ (Isaiah 7:14), were interpreted as prophecies of Christ’s birth. Isaiah provided another important image. One of the difficulties in accepting Jesus as christos, the Greek for messiah, had been that in Judaism, messiahs were portrayed as wholly human, never divine, figures of power. Jesus had been shown to be powerless when confronted by the Roman and Jewish authorities, his death through crucifixion the most humiliating the empire could devise. The prophet Isaiah appeared to put forward an alternative tradition of a messiah who suffered (Isaiah 53), and this provided a much more appropriate model. Less happily, the adoption of the Septuagint meant that Christians had to justify their appropriation of the sacred texts of the Jewish religion, which they claimed to have superseded. Some Christians, such as the writer of the epistle of ‘Barnabas’ (Barnabas was the companion of Paul, but this work dates probably from the early second century), were virulent in their denunciation of the Jews. The author of the epistle even claimed that the Tanakh had never been a Jewish scripture in the first place. More moderate Christians argued that it had been but that the Jews had proved themselves unworthy of it through their complicity in the death of Jesus. The long and difficult relationship between Christianity and Judaism was rooted in these early tensions.

By the third century, a loosely organised Church, whose bishops based their authority on succession from the apostles and their faith on a large and varied collection of sacred writings (far wider than the present New Testament suggests), was in place. It was becoming increasingly visible. By 200 the fiery Christian writer Tertullian from Carthage was able to proclaim to the pagans that Christians ‘live together with you in this world, including the forum, including the meat market, baths, shops, workrooms, inns, fairs, and the rest of commercial intercourse, and we sail along with you and serve in the army and are active in agriculture and trade’, although his own version of Christianity was austere and deeply misogynist.⁸ The bishops were also enhancing their status. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (248—258), showed how fully integrated into Roman society the institution was when he described the authority of the bishop in very similar terms to that of a Roman provincial governor. ‘Does anyone who acts against the bishops of Christ think that he is with Christ ... he carries arms against the Church ... he fights against the will of God ... he is an enemy of the altar, a rebel against Christ’s sacrifice’, as Cyprian wrote in his On the Unity of the Church.⁹ Yet it was just this uncompromising position that brought the bishops into increasing danger in a society whose gods they openly rejected. Christians had always been vulnerable to persecution - the crucifixion of Christ by Roman soldiers provided, after all, a paradigm for the faith—and some seem to have seen martyrdom as a mark of their commitment. ‘Allow me to be bread for the wild beasts; through them I am able to attain to God. I am the wheat of God and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found to be the pure bread of Christ’ was how Ignatius of Antioch put it when he was taken off to Rome to his death in 107.¹⁰

In the third century, when the pressures on the empire were immense, there was increasing concern by the imperial authorities that the support of the pagan gods of Rome was being lost through the refusal of the growing number of Christians to sacrifice to them. In the 250s, all were required to participate in public acts of sacrifice, which would be acknowledged by a signed certificate from a state official. Many Christians acquiesced - in Carthage, Cyprian was shocked by the way in which his congregation capitulated - but others held out and Cyprian himself was martyred in 258. Another major persecution took place fifty years later, in the reign of Diocletian. Diocletian himself appears to have been reluctant to waste resources on rounding up Christians, but Galerius, his Caesar in the east, was more vindictive. At first, only Christian property was affected, and many bishops surrendered this without feeling they had compromised on their faith. Then the imprisonment of clergy was ordered, and finally, in April 304, all Christians were condemned to die if they failed to sacrifice. As with all such proclaimed laws, local officials differed considerably in the vigour with which they enforced them. In some areas Christians were rounded up en masse; in others governors continued to turn a blind eye to Christian worship. Constantius, the father of Constantine and another of Diocletian’s Caesars, based on the Rhine frontier at Trier, was said to have actually favoured the Christians of his household who refused to betray their faith, on the grounds that this showed an admirable strength of character.

In 305, Diocletian did something hitherto unprecedented for a Roman emperor: he abdicated, together with his fellow Augustus Maximian. The system of government that Diocletian had introduced required that the Caesars be promoted to Augusti to fill the vacancies, and Constantius became emperor of the west, with one Severus appointed as the new Caesar. When Constantius died the very next year in York, he should have been succeeded by Severus, but instead, in a gesture that had become common in the previous century, Constantius’ troops proclaimed his son, Constantine, emperor. Diocletian’s system had broken down and Galerius, who had been promoted legitimately from Caesar to Augustus of the eastern empire on Diocletian’s abdication, had no option but to acquiesce in Constantine’s promotion. Things were made more complicated when Maxentius, the son of Diocletian’s co-emperor Maximian, seized power in Italy and in 307 was proclaimed Augustus by the Senate in Rome.

Galerius remained Augustus in the eastern empire, delegating power over the important provinces of Egypt and Syria to his Caesar, Maximinus, and over Pannonia, the vital Balkans area, to Licinius. When Galerius died in agony from bowel cancer in May 311—Lactantius is recorded as saying that it was the retribution of God for his persecutions - Maximinus emerged as Augustus in the far eastern provinces of the empire but claimed that he should be emperor of the whole east. Licinius, however, hung on to the European provinces of the eastern empire, notably those in the Balkans. Far from the ordered transferral of power that Diocletian had hoped and planned for, each part of the empire was now in contention, between Constantine and Maxentius in the west and between Licinius and Maximinus in the east.

Constantine was ambitious and ruthless: he was after absolute power in the empire. There was no pretence that he owed his position to Diocletian’s system. Rather he proclaimed that his father Constantius was the descendant of an earlier emperor, Claudius Gothicus (268-270), so he, Constantine, was emperor through legitimate descent. The court panegyrists were ordered to embellish the myth that the heavens were opened to Constantius on his death and Jupiter, father of the gods, stood there holding out his right hand to the ascending emperor. The support of the gods was always essential, and Constantine himself told of a vision of Apollo who, accompanied by the goddess Victoria, promised him a reign of thirty years. Apollo was represented by images of the sun, and this underpinned Constantine’s association with the cult of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. On a coin minted in 313, Constantine is shown alongside Apollo with the latter wearing a solar wreath.

If Constantine was to fulfil the destiny that he claimed the gods had predicted for him, a showdown with Maxentius was inevitable. It came in 312 after Constantine had marched into Italy. Maxentius left Rome and met him where the Via Flaminia, the ancient road that led north from the city, crossed the Tiber. The Milvian Bridge there had been cut and replaced by a bridge of boats that Maxentius and his men crossed to meet Constantine. The battle was nasty and decisive. When Maxentius’ men were forced to retreat back over the provisional bridge, it broke up and thousands, including Maxentius, were drowned. Later Constantine told of the cross he had seen in the sky and claimed the support of the Christian God for his success. A separate account told how he had had a dream in which he was commanded to put a sign of Christ on his soldiers’ shields. The next year, after a meeting with Licinius in Milan at which Licinius married one of Constantine’s half-sisters, Constantia, the two emperors issued the so-called Edict of Milan, or Edict of Toleration, in which Christians were given freedom to worship and the right to have their property returned. As we have already seen, the Edict also reaffirmed the right of all to follow their own religion.

Few moments in history have been more endlessly discussed. There is no evidence that Constantine became any more pious or less brutal in either his public or private life after his victory, so was this a genuine conversion, and if so what did Constantine mean by it? How did his adoption of Christianity affect his relationship with the other gods he had shown allegiance to? The ambiguity became clear when a new triumphal arch decreed by the Roman Senate in Constantine’s honour was unveiled in 315; in its surmounting inscription, it attributed the victory of the Milvian Bridge to ‘divine inspiration’ and to Constantine’s ‘own great spirit’. Alongside a relief of Constantine entering Rome in triumph after his victory is a roundel showing the sun god Sol ascending to heaven in a four-horse chariot. In public monuments in such a sensitive arena as the ancient ceremonial centre of Rome, Constantine had little option but to sustain pagan symbols; it may even be that he was unaware that his commitment to Christianity required that he reject other gods. It was quite acceptable in the pagan world to hold a variety of spiritual allegiances simultaneously or in succession, so it is difficult to know the extent to which, behind this façade, he was personally committed to his new faith.

The one consistent theme in Constantine’s policy towards Christians is that he, rather than the Church, defined the relationship. He was, after all, offering a persecuted minority full membership of Roman society and he knew it would be dependent on him. More than this, he proclaimed that the clergy would now be exempt from taxation and civic duties so that ‘they shall not be drawn away by any deviation and sacrifice from worship due to the divinity ... for it seems that, rendering the greatest possible service to the deity, they most benefit the state’. This is Constantine not so much humbling himself before God, as using the power of the Church to sustain his own rule. ‘The primary duty of the [Christian] clergy’, noted the scholar J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, ‘always was to maintain the divine cult [of the emperor], and by their prayers to ensure that God would support the emperor and his subjects.’¹¹ Constantine fostered the process by granting immense patronage to the Church in the shape of buildings, in Rome with the church of Christ the Redeemer (later St John Lateran), Santa Croce delle Gerusaleme (named after the titulus, name board, of Christ’s cross brought from Jerusalem by Constantine’s mother Helena) and the first basilica of St Peter’s over the supposed burial place of the martyred apostle on the Vatican Hill. These buildings were plain on the exterior (presumably so as not to offend pagans) but glittering with gold and mosaic inside. In this way a pagan custom, the worship of gods through impressive buildings, was transferred successfully into Christianity. Such display was completely alien to the Christian tradition, and the ascetic scholar Jerome must have spoken for many traditionalists when he complained that ‘parchments are dyed purple, gold is melted into lettering, manuscripts are dressed up in jewels, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying’. Now opulence became central to Christianity’s public identity. It was one of the most important architectural and economic revolutions in European history. Walk through any city with a medieval past and note the extensive space and resources given to churches. In the early fourteenth century the poet Dante himself lamented:

Ah, Constantine, that was indeed a curse,
not thy conversion, but thy dower which
first filled the Holy Father’s purse!¹²

These developments were extraordinary in themselves but masked something just as fundamental. When Christianity became Constantine’s religion as the result of the apparent support shown for him by the Christian God at the Milvian Bridge, it meant accepting that God willed the rise to power of the emperor by means of bloody warfare. Constantine’s biographer, Eusebius of Caesarea, had no difficulty in finding relevant texts from the Old Testament to explain the victory. Exodus 15:4, ‘Pharaoh’s chariots and his force he [God] cast into the sea, and picked rider-captains he overwhelmed in the Red Sea’, clearly referred to the similar fate suffered by Maxentius and his men in the waters of the Tiber. According to Eusebius, Psalm 7:15-16, ‘he dug a hole and excavated it, and will fall into the pit he made’, certainly told of the consequences for Maxentius of having broken down the original Milvian Bridge!¹³ Thus the Hebrew scriptures, which had been adopted by Christians as foretelling the coming of Christ, were now used to foretell the victory of a Roman emperor over his adversaries. But not everyone felt so comfortable about this use of the Old Testament. When the Christian missionary Ulfilas, working among the Goths, translated the Bible into Gothic, he deliberately left out the two books of Kings on the grounds that the Goths were warlike enough already and did not need any further encouragement. On the other hand, as we will see, bishops such as the formidable Ambrose of Milan followed Constantine’s precedent by equating God’s support with the coming of imperial victory. The consequences of this relationship between Christianity, war and imperial conquest still resonate today.

The Church centred on the bishops, and it was essential for Constantine to forge some kind of stable relationship with them. Bishops had not supplanted the secular authorities, the local governors and prefects, in the cities, but they had often built up impressive networks through their congregations. While a provincial governor might stay in post for three or four years, bishops could be in office for twenty, even thirty, years. They met their congregations on a weekly basis, and many were talented orators. Congregations were growing as persecution ceased and resources were targeted to the Church. (Eusebius bemoaned the hypocrisy of these new ‘Christians’ who joined the faith only now that the going was good.) A bishop with popular support could be a formidable figure, even able to challenge the will of an emperor. It has been argued that Constantine’s prime motive for his conversion was the desire to integrate these important figures into the Roman state.¹⁴ It is certainly true that he used them for public purposes: from Constantine onwards emperors encouraged bishops to use their courts for solving local disputes and for overseeing poor relief. We know of Constantine channelling corn and oil to the poor of Alexandria through the city’s bishop and so effectively merging the Christian duty to help the poor with the political need to prevent unrest by feeding the volatile population. In Constantinople, the Church was ordered to organise free funerals for the poor. Bishops were given the same rights as secular magistrates to free slaves. So the status of the bishop rose steadily.

Within this framework, however, tensions between and within local Christian communities suddenly became important in a different way. There had been local meetings of bishops in the past to sort out disputes, but the Church as a whole had no means of coming to any coherent conclusions on its organisation or doctrine. In a sense this was its strength, as local communities could create their own interpretation of Christianity and elect a bishop who suited their own needs. But now there might be two or more rival Christian communities in a city, each claiming the tax exemptions and patronage of the emperor. Who were the ‘real’ Christians, and who decided this in any case?

This issue first arose in North Africa, where the aftermath of Diocletian’s persecutions had caused divisions within the Christian communities. Clergy who surrendered precious vessels and sacred texts were now called traditores, ‘the traitors’, by those who had stood firm, and the question arose whether consecrations of clergy or sacraments administered by the traditores had any legitimacy. Rigorous Christians insisted that anyone baptised by a traditor after his ‘betrayal’ would have to be baptised again; the retort was that baptism as a sacrament was valid in itself irrespective of the cleric who administered the rite. The dispute became so intractable that it caused a schism in North Africa. The hardliners, known as the Donatists, followed their charismatic bishop Donatus, while the rival group elected one Caecilian as their bishop.

At first Constantine appears to have been happy to let the Church deal with the problem, and he asked the Bishop of Rome, Miltiades, to preside over a small gathering of bishops, mostly from Italy, to decide the issue. But after appeals and counter-appeals from both parties - Constantine was always ready to listen to petitioners, often giving them personal audiences - he gradually, over three or four years, tended towards the Caecilianists. Donatus’ refusal to compromise with the imperial authorities led to the isolation of himself and his followers from state patronage, which was now channelled towards the Caecilianists. It was a moment of immense symbolic importance, because Constantine was in fact shaping the form and structure of what became the Roman Catholic Church. By supporting those bishops who were prepared to acquiesce in his rule, he created an alliance between Church and state that was to persist, if often uneasily, in western Europe for centuries to come. The precedent had now been set that the emperor might intervene not only to strengthen the Church but to influence doctrine. (There does seem to have been some initial state persecution of the Donatists, but in 321 Constantine ordered the vicarius of Africa to relent, and despite their lack of patronage, the Donatists flourished and became the largest Christian community in Africa.)

These pragmatic moves went hand in hand with Constantine’s rise to domination over the empire. Licinius had eliminated his rival Maximinus in 313 and became Constantine’s sole rival for power. Over the coming years the relationship corroded, and the records suggest that Constantine gradually took more decisions without reference to Licinius. In 323 Constantine crossed into Licinius’ half of the empire, establishing a cause for war that his rival could not ignore. In two major battles in 324, one near the city of Adrianople, Licinius was defeated. Constantine now ruled the entire Roman empire, east and west, and to celebrate he set in hand a new imperial capital, strategically placed on the site of ancient Byzantium between Europe and Asia. The ‘new Rome’, Constantinople, was to be capital first of the eastern empire, and later of the Byzantine empire until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

In the eastern empire Constantine encountered a Christian church that was much more deeply rooted than anything he had found in the west. While only sixteen bishops are known for the whole of Gaul for 314, there were perhaps seven or eight hundred in the eastern empire. Furthermore, it was a culture that buzzed with speculation on theological issues. At first, like many Roman leaders before him, Constantine could not grasp the importance of debate to the Greek mind and how seriously doctrinal issues were taken. With the Donatists there had been a separate group of bishops who were alienated from their fellows by a distinctive policy over the admittance of those who had given in during the persecutions. However difficult it was to resolve, it was a relatively cut-and-dried issue. In the Greek world there was, as there had been for centuries, a mass of different interpretations of Christianity. Did it matter? At one level for Constantine it did not, simply because he could not see how anyone could take seriously all the hours spent nit-picking over words. He seems to have envisaged God as the heavenly equivalent of a Roman emperor who like him had to manage different power groups and interests in the higher cause of unity. To his annoyance, however, he soon discovered that some disputes were getting so fierce and so entangled in issues of authority and personality that they actually threatened the peace of the territories he had just won.

The greatest turbulence centred on a confrontation between Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, the richest and most prestigious city of the Greek east and the setting of some of the finest achievements of the Greek mind in science and mathematics, and one of his priests by the name of Arius.¹⁵ There were a number of undercurrents to the dispute - how far did a priest, however learned, have the right to develop ideas different from those of his bishop, for instance - but the particular debate focused on defining the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son. This had become one of the most challenging issues in Christian theology. If Jesus was divine, how could that divinity relate to that of God? Had Jesus always been in existence alongside God in some way, or had he been a later creation? The debates took on an extraordinary emotional intensity, as most of the participants believed that their salvation depended on finding the correct answer. Alexander and Arius took opposing positions along this fault line; Alexander arguing for the eternal co-existence of Father and Son, Arius for Jesus as a separate creation, albeit at the beginning of time.

This debate and those on the nature of Christ that followed in the eastern Church in the next two hundred years were bound to be intractable. Inevitably the scriptures, both the Old and New Testament, would be combed for support by both sides. Yet the Bible as it was being formed in these years (there was still debate in different parts of the empire over which texts should or should not be included) is a collection of a very wide variety of different types of literature - poems, stories, letters, histories, biographies, lists of ritual requirements, meditations on the meaning of life, and so on. Any writing that had been incorporated into the canon was seen by Christians as the inspired word of God, but there was no systematic theology that could easily be drawn from the texts. If one took the gospels, it was quite clear that Jesus abhorred violence, yet the God of the Old Testament often seemed to revel in it. As seen above, it was verses from the Old Testament that were produced to justify the Christian emperors’ assault on their enemies. So where did this leave those who wished to focus their beliefs on the teachings of Jesus?

Many Christians were learned in Greek philosophy, and inevitably they used it as a tool for achieving systematic statements about Christian theology. In any debate, however, there proved to be little stable ground on which any argument could be based. Quite apart from the difficulties in interpreting the broad spectrum of scripture, there were too many varied sources and too many philosophical traditions, some very sophisticated and always in a state of development. This was the nature of the Greek intellectual world. It proved extraordinarily difficult to define the parameters of a theological issue and find ways of resolving it. Consensus was always unlikely. The bitterness, mutual recriminations and nit-picking that was so often a feature of fourth- and fifth-century theology arose not because Christians were any less intelligent or more disputatious than their pagan counterparts but because the central debate over the divinity of Christ was, as one contemporary historian, Socrates, noted, ‘a battle fought at night, for neither party appeared to understand distinctly the grounds on which they calumniated one another’.¹⁶

Such was the background to the ‘Arian’ debate. Although he was about sixty in 325, Arius had proved himself a determined man. Summoned before Alexander, he had stood up for himself in person and continued to recruit supporters in the city even after he had been excommunicated by his bishop. He was adept at suggesting that he was only drawing on the wisdom of his predecessors and was prepared to suffer in its defence ‘for the glory of God’. More ominously for Alexander, Arius had then gone off to seek support, notably from the bishop of the important imperial city of Nicomedia, Eusebius, a well-respected scholar and supporter of similar ideas to those of Arius. Eusebius sensibly advised Arius to clarify his views and then arranged to have them endorsed by a council of local bishops. Arius found further support from another Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, the future biographer of Constantine. Alexander counterattacked by getting signatures of support from some two hundred bishops, many of them from his own diocese of Egypt. It was in this atmosphere of escalating tension that Constantine sent his closest adviser, the Spanish Ossius, Bishop of Cordova, to carry out an investigation of the unrest. Ossius’ own sympathies were clearly with Alexander (and the episcopal authority of this ancient see), but he realised that the only way to solve the issue was to call a larger council under the auspices of the emperor himself.

So a debate that might well have been smoothed over by a compromise now drew in bishops from across the eastern Mediterranean. Attention turned to the coming council. Never had there been such a chance for so many bishops to meet together to decide on an issue. Constantine chose his palace at Nicaea as the venue, and some 250 bishops, most of them from the east, began assembling there for the first session. It was an extraordinary moment. Many of the bishops still carried the marks of the persecution the imperial officials had inflicted on their bodies—now they were meeting face to face with the emperor himself. Constantine flaunted his own status by wearing a purple robe studded with gold and diamonds. Eusebius of Caesarea describes how the bishops reacted to the dazzling sight with the incredulity of children.¹⁷

Constantine had already met Eusebius of Caesarea, his biographer-to-be, and had been impressed by him. Even though Eusebius had recently been condemned as heretical by a council of ‘Alexandrian’ bishops meeting in Antioch, the emperor was not going to deprive him of the privilege of making a speech. The bishop put forward a formula that might be acceptable to both sides. Jesus Christ was ‘the Word of God, God from God, light from light, Son only begotten, first-begotten of all creation, begotten before all ages from the Father ...’ This was a sensible compromise because it accepted the full divinity of Christ, which Arius’ supporters were prepared to do, but it said nothing that implied Jesus was subordinate to the Father. Its success was probably the cause of its own weakness. Alexander and his supporters realised that Arius (who was actually in attendance, although, not being a bishop, he was unable to speak) could endorse the statement and return to Alexandria to go on preaching as he always had done. It seems to have been Ossius, probably with Constantine’s support, who suggested that there needed to be something added to the statement. The word suggested was homoousios, ‘of the same substance’ - Jesus was to be proclaimed ‘of the same substance’ as the Father, a formulation that would place him unequivocally on Alexander’s side of the argument. The bishops must have been taken aback. Homoousios was a term taken from Greek philosophy, not from scripture. It had been used by pagan writers such as Plotinus to describe the relationship between the soul and the divine. Even the most ingenious biblical scholars combing their way through the Old and New Testaments could find no Christian equivalent. Quite apart from this the word had actually been condemned by a council of bishops meeting in Antioch in 268 on the grounds that it failed to provide sufficient distinction between Father and Son, and users of the term risked being associated with a view that had already been condemned in the third century, Sabellianism. Sabellius, who had taught in Rome, had argued that Jesus appeared on earth simply as a temporary manifestation of God. The word ‘substance’ also suggested some kind of physical material, yet could one talk of God as in any way material? Furthermore, how had Jesus become distinct from his Father - had there been, for instance, an original ousios that was somehow split into two? One of the arguments against the term put by Arius and Eusebius was that if Jesus came from the same substance as God, then his creation, by detracting from the ‘substance’ of God, must have diminished the deity. Cumulatively these arguments made it formidably difficult for the homoousion to be accepted in the wider Church.

It is always hard for historians to recreate the mood of a meeting in which high drama, the grand surroundings and the sheer unfamiliarity of the occasion must have swept events along. The emperor issued his own warning of the perils of continuing disagreement. ‘For to me,’ the emperor told his audience, ‘internal division in the Church of God is graver than any war or secular battle, and these things appear to cause more pain than secular affairs.’ This must have had its own effect in achieving a consensus. One catalyst for the change in mood may have been a document mentioned in one account of the council as having been put forward by Eusebius of Nicomedia, the supporter of Arius, which was considered so blasphemous as to evoke a reaction against its author and his views. There was now a groundswell of opinion against Arius, and the Nicene statement specifically condemned some of his beliefs, notably that there had been a time when Christ had not existed. Arius and two of his closest supporters were excommunicated by Constantine himself when they refused to sign the document. Later, Eusebius of Nicomedia, who had refused to endorse the specific condemnations of Arius, was also banished from his see. While it is clear that many of the bishops were uneasy about the use of homoousios, a consensus of sorts appeared to have been achieved. The council ended with the remaining bishops summoned to a great victory feast by the emperor.

The Nicene statement was to form the core of the Nicene Creed, which forms the basis of faith in the Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant Churches today. Yet no one at the time would have expected it to fulfil this function. It was shaped by the concern to deal with the immediate issue of the relationship between Son and Father; it said nothing about the Trinity, for instance - the only reference to the Holy Spirit was ‘And I believe in the Holy Spirit’. The word homoousios was clearly an embarrassment and was to be condemned in the years to come. As Richard Hanson, whose The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God is one of the fullest and most balanced studies of the issue, comments, ‘the Creed was a mine of potential confusion and consequently most unlikely to be a means of ending the Arian controversy’. ¹⁸ No positive mention of it is found in any text until the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, who had attended the council as Alexander’s deacon, revived it in the 350s. Yet Nicaea had produced a written text that could become a talisman in a debate with few clear boundaries. This was to prove its abiding strength.

It is to Constantine’s credit that once he realised how little support the homoousios formula and the condemnation of Arius had in the wider Greek world, he backtracked in the hope of finding a broader consensus. He actually received the elderly Arius personally and ordered that he be reinstated to his position in Alexandria. (It appears that Arius made some sort of recantation of his ideas, which Constantine was prepared to accept.) Alexander refused to admit him - it would have been too humiliating for the bishop to give way on the issue - and when Alexander died in 328, his successor as bishop, Athanasius, also refused. Athanasius soon found himself in more trouble with the emperor after a flurry of accusations that he had asserted his authority in Alexandria with violence and intimidation. Constantine, who put good order and the reconciliation of factions above everything, exiled this intransigent man from his see to Gaul and now asked the Bishop of Constantinople to admit Arius back into the Church. However, in the procession to the ceremony Arius was taken ill. He struggled off to a nearby latrine and was found there dead. His enemies spoke of the will of God destroying a heretic; his supporters suspected poison. It may simply have been the impact of the drama of the moment on an elderly man. (Later, after the Nicene cause triumphed, the latrine was shown to visitors as evidence of God’s punishment of heretics.) The death did not deflect Constantine from his policy of maintaining an open mind to the debate. When he was eventually baptised, in the closing months of his life in 337, the emperor called on Arius’ old supporter, the ‘blasphemous’ Eusebius of Nicomedia, whom he had reinstated in his bishopric in 327, to administer the sacrament.

In his Life of Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea openly acknowledges the independence of the emperor from the Church. He even quotes Constantine as saying he was the bishop for those outside the Church and portrays him as the direct representative of God. Constantine thrived in this role, but he clearly found the bishops more troublesome than he had hoped. ‘You, the bishops, do nothing but that which encourages discord and hatred and, to speak frankly, which leads to the destruction of the human race,’ he exploded at one point.¹⁹ This was unfair, as Constantine was trying to mould a Church of his own making and in doing so he had broken with much of Christian tradition. He bequeathed lasting tensions to the Church in the form of debates over the correct use of wealth (how much, for instance, should be diverted into showcase buildings), the relationship of Christians to war and imperial authority, and the nature of the Godhead itself. There is no significant evidence that Constantine was prepared to compromise with what had already been established as Christian teaching, and he kept himself clear of the institution of the Church itself. It has even been argued that the founding of Constantinople, an expansion of Byzantium, a city with no Christian heritage, was a means of distancing himself from those cities where Christianity was deeply rooted. He had been, after all, the chosen of God, and blasphemous though it might appear, his mausoleum in Constantinople was dedicated to the Holy Apostles of whom he considered himself number thirteen! The context within which the Church operated had been changed for ever. ‘The master narrative of Christianity would become so deeply implicated in the narrative of imperial power that Christianity and government would become inextricably linked.’²⁰