A.D. 381

There had to be a definition of the Nicene faith that the prefect could follow. The acceptance of an all-powerful God and Christ as the Son of God, ‘under one name’, was required, although there was no specific mention of the homoousion. Christ was to be recognised as ‘God from God’ and ‘light from light’. When it came to the Holy Spirit, it was clear that Theodosius had realised that its status was uncertain and hotly disputed among the theologians of the Greek east. The original Nicene Creed had expected no more than simple belief in the Holy Spirit, while Gregory, in contrast, had argued only a few months earlier that the Spirit should be seen as fully divine and consubstantial with the Father and Son. Theodosius wavered - the prefect was to insist on no more than that ‘the Holy Spirit should not be violated by being denied’.

Eutropius was instructed to deal harshly with the ‘insane and demented heretics’. Not only did they have to surrender their present churches to the Nicenes, but they were not allowed even to build their own places of worship within a city, let alone claim any tax exemptions. Any disturbance or display of sedition was to be treated by expelling them beyond the walls of the city. A few months later, a further law forbade ‘heretics’ even to build churches outside a city wall. The law closed with its declared aim: that ‘catholic churches in the whole world might be restored to all orthodox bishops who hold the Nicene faith’. This suppression of Christian worship was an outright rejection of everything that Constantine had promised in 313. Even though this specific letter is addressed only to the prefect of Illyricum, the mention of ‘the whole world’ suggests Theodosius’ wider ambition.

Theodosius had already decided, probably as far back as November 380, after Demophilus had turned down his invitation to convert, that he would have to use a church council to give greater legitimacy to his Nicene policy. Invitations to meet in Constantinople had been sent out to selected bishops, the most prominent of whom was Meletius of Antioch. Although there was some talk of simultaneous councils being held in west and east, this assembly involved participants only from the east. Theodosius had as yet no jurisdiction in the west, but as the western bishops tended to support Paulinus against Meletius, they would not have attended such an assembly in any case.

The council was essentially a reconvening of Meletius’ Nicene group from 379 (whose purpose then had been to settle the affairs of Antioch). This meant that there were no bishops from Egypt, Nicene or otherwise, nor from Illyricum. There were, of course, no subordinationists or other ‘heretics’. The Church historian Socrates, writing in the following century, simply noted that those assembled were ‘prelates of his [Theodosius’] own faith’. There was, however, a grouping of some thirty-six ‘Macedonian’ bishops whose endorsement of the Nicene Creed in its original form was considered orthodox enough to qualify them for membership. The Macedonians were especially influential in western Asia where the Nicene cause was weak, so it was hoped that their disagreements with their fellow Nicenes over the status of the Holy Spirit might be resolved. No one could call this a full council of the Church, nor did it see itself as such. In one message to the emperor, the participants referred to themselves as ‘the holy synod of bishops from various provinces meeting in Constantinople’. (A synod refers to a local rather than an ecumenical council.)

Although he was now ageing, Meletius commanded immense respect. ‘A most pious man, with a simple guileless manner: filled with God; a man of serene countenance and modesty’ was Gregory’s view,² and it was understandable that Theodosius would call on him to preside over the Council of Constantinople of 381, as it is known.³ Theodosius’ epistula enforcing the Nicene faith, and its hope that the whole world would now adopt Nicene orthodoxy, was noted and endorsed to the enthusiasm of the bishops, who realised how much patronage they, as Nicene supporters, would enjoy as they took over the churches of those who were now decreed to be heretics. Meletius acquiesced in the passing of a resolution from Theodosius that Gregory should be confirmed as Bishop of Constantinople, while the cause of Maximus was now formally rejected. A public rejection was needed because Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, had given Maximus his support through writing directly to Theodosius, and the matter had to be settled once and for all. As it was this group of bishops that, in Antioch in 379, had proposed Gregory to go to Constantinople in the first place, there was unlikely to be any opposition to the resolution. The bishops clearly shared Theodosius’ resentment at the attempts of Ambrose (whose story will be told in detail later) to interfere in the ecclesiastical affairs of the eastern empire.

But then disaster struck: Meletius died. The council was left without a leader and Antioch without a bishop. The agreement had been that Paulinus would succeed Meletius in the important see of Antioch, but the bishops assembled in Constantinople had always been uneasy about this plan and it soon became clear that Paulinus had little popularity. He was an ascetic man who had simply failed to create a network of local supporters. He did, however, have some backing from the western bishops, but this did not help him, as the easterners were determined to stand up to any intrusion, real or apparent, from the western Church into their affairs. It was now proposed that the matter be solved by electing a younger clergyman from Antioch, one Flavianus, to the vacant bishopric.

In his position as Bishop of Constantinople, Gregory now took over the chairmanship of the council. He suddenly found himself cast in a role for which he was totally unsuited, and it was his intransigence that proved his immediate undoing. Instead of letting the situation over Antioch resolve itself, he entered the fray with his own proposal that Paulinus should be supported as Bishop of Antioch. No doubt he felt he ought to honour Meletius’ agreement, but he may also have been under pressure from Theodosius to support a pro-western policy to keep harmony within the empire. He found little enthusiasm for his proposal but refused to compromise. The leader of Flavianus’ supporters, Diodore, the bishop of the apostle Paul’s home town, Tarsus, approached Gregory with his candidate, but Gregory simply refused to listen. When Gregory made a speech to the assembled bishops in support of Paulinus’ candidature, he made the fatal mistake of saying that he would resign his bishopric if his own proposal was not followed. The result was chaos. In his autobiographical poem, De Sua Vita, written when he had returned to Cappadocia, a bitter Gregory denounced the bishops: ‘They screeched on every side, a flock of jackdaws all intent on one thing, a mob of wild young men, a new kind of gang, a whirlwind causing the dust to swirl as the winds went out of control, men with whom not even a ruler with the authority of fear or age would think it proper to reason, buzzing around as if they were in complete disorder, like a swarm of wasps suddenly flying in your face.’⁴ Yet he had only himself to blame for the mayhem.

There followed a walkout. Virtually nothing is known of the theological debates of the council of 381, but Gregory was certainly hoping to get some acceptance of his belief that the Spirit was consubstantial with the Father. Whether he dealt with the matter clumsily or whether there was simply no chance of consensus, the ‘Macedonians’, bishops who refused to accept the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, left the council. (Some accounts suggest that the Macedonians may have left even before formal proceedings had begun.) Typically, Gregory berated the bishops for preferring to have a majority rather than simply accepting ‘the Divine Word’ of the Trinity on his authority. ‘I stood and watched as the sweet and pristine spring of our ancient faith, which had joined that sacred and adorable nature of the Trinity in one, as formerly professed at Nicaea, was now wretchedly polluted by the flooding in of the brine of men of dubious faith.’ He hinted vaguely that ‘Authority’, which can only mean the emperor, was putting pressure on the waverers so that they could combine against him.⁵ Even taking this pressure into account, Gregory simply could not see that this was an issue on which it was perfectly reasonable for educated men to hold a variety of views. He now announced that he was ill and withdrew from the council chamber.

By now Theodosius was in despair. The emperor had the coercive power to pass what laws he liked, but imposing any kind of order on the Church was a completely different matter. Even a small council of bishops supposedly already adherent to the Nicene faith had dissolved into chaos, while the bishop of ‘the second Rome’ had shown himself to be a hopelessly inadequate leader. Theodosius decided to act firmly by summoning the bishops of Egypt and Illyricum, whom he hoped would give more ballast to the proceedings. They arrived in Constantinople by the middle of June to find Gregory still absent.

The Alexandrians saw their chance. Peter had recently died and his successor, his brother Timothy, was determined to exercise Alexandria’s control over Constantinople and get rid of Gregory. They still had Maximus in the wings waiting to take over, and they now resurrected a canon from the Council of Nicaea that had laid down that no bishop could be translated from one see to another. As Gregory was still technically Bishop of Sasima, the see he had never occupied, it could be argued that his consecration as Bishop of Constantinople was invalid. This was the final straw for Gregory and he capitulated, returning to the council for the last time to make a resignation speech. The only thing that mattered, he told the bishops, was the Trinity, and with his usual lack of tact, he doubted whether anyone there other than himself had the skill or courage to expound it successfully. When he finished speaking there was silence, but he recounted later how many bishops then came up to him to express their sympathy - although no one begged him to stay.

Later the emperor himself received Gregory with considerable courtesy, applauding at the end of his speech, but again his resignation was accepted without debate; Theodosius knew he could not risk losing the support of the majority of the Nicene bishops by backing Gregory. There was some wider sympathy for Gregory in the city itself, where the intrusions of foreign bishops were always resented, but after a final oration on the Trinity in the Church of the Holy Apostles, which the emperor himself attended, Gregory left the city in June for his native Cappadocia. He later wrote that he had ‘never seen a good outcome to any synod, or a synod which produced deliverance from evils rather than the addition to them... rivalries and manoeuvres always prevail over reason’.⁶ Gregory died in 391.

The combination of a Nicene emperor who had already put in place a Nicene Church and a council that in genesis was Nicene in temperament should have led to a Nicene appointee as Gregory’s successor to this prestigious see. In the event, this could not be risked. As yet Constantinople’s population had shown no enthusiasm for the Nicene cause, and it made more political sense to appoint a man who was well known within the city and who had not compromised himself through support for any one faction. So it was that one Nectarius, an elderly city senator who had been a popular prefect in the city as a result of his patronage of the games, but who was still not a baptised Christian, was selected. One historian, Sozomen, perhaps the better source, claims he was chosen by the emperor himself; another, Socrates, says it was by the acclaim of the population.⁷ Technically, his appointment before baptism was contrary to a rule passed at Nicaea, but this had not prevented a similar elevation for Ambrose in Milan a few years earlier. Nectarius appeared to know no theology, and he had to be initiated into the required faith before being baptised and consecrated. It was clear that he was being used to defuse potential unrest among the mass of the city’s population in response to the imposition of the Nicene faith, but doubtless the bishops also saw him as an effective way of binding together the secular and ecclesiastical elites of the eastern empire, and he was given their unanimous approval.

There is another indication of the assembly’s relative impotence within the city. Its proceedings went on into July and it must at some point have agreed on a revised Nicene Creed, perhaps even before the resignation of Gregory. Yet there is no record that the creed was ever promulgated, and presumably this is because it would have been deeply unpopular among the Homoians, who still appear to have made up the majority of the local population. In fact there is no mention of it anywhere until it was read out at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, seventy years later where it was accredited to the council of 381. The creed was based on that of Nicaea, with some differences (see Appendix). The final version showed something of the struggle that had gone on over the divinity of the Holy Spirit: ‘[We believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-Giver, who proceeds from the Father, who is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son, who spoke through the prophets.’ Here the Holy Spirit has been elevated to a higher status than in Nicaea, but there is no mention of it being God and none of consubstantiality. Gregory’s formula had been rejected.

The sources of the changes in the creed apparently agreed at Constantinople from that of Nicaea are obscure. Some have argued that they originated with Epiphanius, the Bishop of Salamis, in Cyprus, who seems to have had a similar creed in his writings of the 370s, but there is no record of Epiphanius attending Constantinople, and many scholars believe that his text may have been rewritten later to fit the new orthodoxy. However, the clauses on the Spirit do bear some resemblance to ideas on its status put forward in the 370s by Basil of Caesarea. As with most statements hammered out in large assemblies, the final text was probably a compromise of the views of different contributors and traditions. Whatever its source, the Nicene Creed as developed at Constantinople, the form in which it is now used, does not contain any statement endorsing a Trinity of three consubstantial persons. There was certainly no consensus on the nature of the Holy Spirit.

With Nectarius now in charge,⁸ the assembly was able to quash Alexandria’s pretensions to control Constantinople and a number of canons were passed ensuring that this could not reoccur. One forbade a bishop to interfere outside his own see and, specifically, the bishops of Alexandria were restricted to administering the affairs of Egypt. From now on the authority of a bishop would run alongside the authority of the secular officials, the vicarii. With the bishops emerging as such powerful figures this made good administrative sense. However, Theodosius must also have been responding to the intrusive way in which bishops from both east and west meddled in each other’s affairs and have hoped that the reform would help bring the squabbles to an end. Most significant of all, the council decreed that ‘the bishop of Constantinople should have the next prerogative of honour after the bishop of Rome, because the city was the New Rome’. This was an astonishing development, not least in that it placed a city’s political importance above that of its Christian heritage. It was a further reflection of Theodosius’ determination that the Church should be bound within the secular political establishment. It was also a shrewd political move. With Nectarius in such a strong position, and new bishops in Antioch (Flavianus was not yet consecrated) and Alexandria (Timothy, the brother of the discredited Peter), it was the right moment to effect the change. In the long term, of course, the ancient bishoprics of Rome and Alexandria were deeply offended and the canon had the effect of intensifying their hostility against any future bishops of Constantinople, at least two of whom were to fall victim to their plotting (John Chrysostom was ejected in 404, and Nestorius deposed in 435). In short, under Nectarius, the council had been used to mount a coup that had reinforced the emperor’s role as head of a politicised Church and arbiter of religious affairs in general.

The assembled bishops also took the chance to name as many heresies as possible, presumably to ensure that the churches and the patronage they attracted would be restricted to the Nicene faith alone. Eunomians, ‘Arians’, Macedonians and the Sabellians/Photinians were all excluded, as well as a sect known as the Apollinarians, named after Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea, who claimed that Jesus did not have a human mind or soul. This perhaps went further than Theodosius himself wanted, as in a new law of 383 against heresy he did not include either Macedonians or Apollinarians, and there is nothing in the creed of 381 specifically excluding them.

With the conclusion of the assembly in 381, Theodosius issued further instructions to his civil servants. One surviving example is an epistula addressed to the proconsul of Asia, Auxonius - a proconsul was an official subordinate to the prefect. Asia was an important area to control because the three provinces for which the proconsul was responsible had not provided a single bishop for the Council of Constantinople. (This had been where the departed Macedonian bishops held sway.) The letter’s definition of orthodoxy contains no reference to the creed just passed in the council. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are simply declared to be one in majesty, power, glory, splendour and divinity, and it is stressed that there are three personae (the Latin term for the Greek hypostaseis) within the Godhead. Interestingly, here again there is no mention of the three being ‘of one substance’, presumably a recognition that even many Nicenes still did not accept this status for the Holy Spirit. Whatever the council had decided, Theodosius continued to use language that was reminiscent of the western approaches to the Trinity, which confirms that he viewed the council’s proceedings as subsidiary to his own lawmaking. The imposition of the Trinity was an imperial matter, and the Church had little option but to acquiesce in Theodosius’ law. Here, it helped, of course, that the vast resources and estates of each diocese were distributed to those bishops who moved within the boundaries of the imposed theological formula.

But there remained the problem of how a law such as this was to be administered. Theodosius must have been aware that the imposition of a specific text would arouse dissension from one faction or another and so lead to further theological wrangling that would upset his whole settlement. He thus hit on a different strategy, which was a good indication of his developing political skills. Instead of having to adhere to a creed, applicants for bishoprics simply had to be acceptable to a bishop named for the purpose by the emperor. The historian Sozomen says that the emperor had become personally acquainted with all his nominees before they left Constantinople. Nectarius was listed first, as befitted the new status of Constantinople, followed by Timothy as the arbiter of orthodoxy in Egypt. No name was given for Antioch as the dispute over Paulinus rumbled on.⁹ In general the listing of the accepted bishops must have made the administration of the law much easier, in that any proconsul or prefect not sure whether an appointment was theologically acceptable could have it confirmed by the bishop named for that area and without further argument over the wording of correct belief. It even appears that an ambitious cleric could obtain a certificate of orthodoxy to show the secular officials. In the case of Ausonius’ provinces in Asia, for example, there was no accredited Nicene bishop and he would have had to appoint outsiders to replace those bishops who were now declared heretical.

The imposition of such a wide-ranging and restrictive law was bound to be unpopular. All the contemporary historians of the period, even those supportive of Nicaea, speak of ‘great disturbances as the Arians were ejected from the churches’.¹⁰ Theodoret quotes a letter sent to Rome by the eastern bishops in which the Arians are described as ‘wolves harrying the flocks up and down the glades, daring to hold rival assemblies, stirring sedition among the people and shrinking from nothing which can do damage to the churches’.¹¹ Things got so bad that Theodosius was forced to backtrack. In 383 he called a further council in Constantinople, and this time he invited the leaders of all the ‘heretical’ sects, including Demophilus and Eunomius. His hope, says Sozomen, was that ‘they might either bring others to their own state of conviction or be convinced themselves; for he imagined that all would be brought to oneness of opinion if a free discussion was entered into concerning ambiguous points of doctrine’.¹² This was a remarkable volte-face. It suggested that Theodosius now realised the importance of getting a compromise even if this meant overthrowing the creed of 381 and allowing the Church as a whole to create a consensus.

Only a few months earlier, Theodosius had made his treaty with the Goths allowing them to stay as allies within the empire, but the emperor was certainly naive if he expected that he could get any similar agreement on theological issues. He first suggested that earlier authorities should be consulted to see if they could offer some common basis for peace. This got nowhere: everyone was happy to accept the authority of these writers but then disagreed over what they had actually taught. Theodosius now asked for each sect to produce a creed of their own beliefs, and texts were handed in by Nectarius, Demophilus, Eunomius, and Eleusius, Bishop of Cyzicus, who represented the Macedonians. The emperor then announced that he would only accept Nectarius’ creed, which, according to Sozomen, in contrast to the creed of Constantinople, did apparently recognise ‘the consubstantiality of the Trinity’, and destroyed the rest. He may well have realised that the ‘heretics’, with their very different views, could not unite against him. ‘The members of the other sects’, Sozomen reported, ‘were indignant with the priests for having entered into unwise disputations in front of the emperor.’ Their arguments had exposed their lack of unity and allowed the emperor to move in to condemn them. Theodosius now passed new laws against heresies, although he appears to have been restrained in his enforcement of them. According to Sozomen: ‘Some of the heterodox were expelled from the cities and deprived of the privileges enjoyed by other subjects of the empire. Great as were the punishments adjudged by the law against heretics, they were not always carried into execution, for the emperor had no desire to persecute his subjects; he only desired to enforce uniformity of view about God through the medium of intimidation.’¹³ That the new settlement was seen as an expression of the emperor’s imperial power was revealed as late as 388, when news reached Constantinople that the emperor might have been defeated and killed in a campaign against the usurper Maximus. There was a riot by the city’s ‘Arians’ during which the house of the Nicene Nectarius was sacked. This suggests continuing resentment against Theodosius’ settlement - which could only be expressed if he was believed to be dead - and perhaps explains why the creed agreed at the 381 council was never publicly announced in the city.

The initiatives taken by Theodosius in 381, even if uneven in their immediate application, irrevocably changed the spiritual lives of its Christian population. Richard Hanson, author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the Nicene debate, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, notes that the result of the Council of Constantinople was ‘to reduce the meanings of the word “God” from a very large selection of alternatives to one only’ with the result that ‘when Western man today says “God” he means the one, sole exclusive [Trinitarian] God and nothing else’.¹⁴ If Hanson is right, then there can have been few more important moments in the history of European thought. The freedom to speculate on what might or might not exist beyond this material world had been an intrinsic part of philosophical debate for centuries, and God, ‘the gods’, Aristotle’s ‘the Unmoved Mover’ and Plato’s ‘the Good’ had been among the many alternative ways of describing this ultimate reality. These alternatives were now being erased or subsumed into a composite ‘Christian’ God embedded in the Nicaea formula. Even today, studies of the philosophy of religion all too often start with definitions of ‘God’ as if there were no other way of conceiving the supernatural. This is surely the result of the narrowing of perspectives after 381.

It is not difficult to understand why Theodosius himself supported Nicaea. The formula of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit being of equal majesty appears to have represented the majority belief in Spain at this period and it was accepted by the conservative emperor. His court had been filled with officials from Spain and Gaul who would have held similar views and who had already shown that they were prepared to enforce them with violence. His beliefs would have been reinforced by Bishop Acholius of Thessalonika and possibly strengthened by Nicene bishops who had come to his court after the death of Valens. As a Latin-speaking Roman suddenly thrust into the Greek world, there is no reason why Theodosius should have known of the continuing debate within the eastern Church.

But there are two other reasons why he may have been drawn to the Nicene cause. The first is that the elevation of Jesus into full divinity fitted better with the current authoritarian zeitgeist. There were immense difficulties in finding a place within the ideology of the empire for a Jesus who was executed as a rebel against Rome. Second, the Goths and other tribes that Theodosius was fighting had been converted to Christianity at a time when the Homoian faith of Constantius had been in the ascendant, and they were to cling to this faith for decades to come. By creating a religious barrier between Homoian Goth and Nicene Roman, Theodosius could define a fault line along which he could rally his own troops against ‘the barbarians’. In the west, in these same years, Ambrose of Milan was stressing the relationship between support for the Nicene faith and the success of the empire in war.

It is important to remember that Theodosius had no theological background of his own and that he put in place as dogma a formula containing intractable philosophical problems of which he would have been unaware. In effect, the emperor’s laws had silenced the debate when it was still unresolved. If discussion had been allowed to continue within the Church, a broader consensus might have been established over time, one that could have preserved freedom of debate as well as a reasoned basis for any agreed formula (if, indeed, one was possible).

So what impelled Theodosius to suppress all alternative Christians beliefs so vigorously? It was here that he made an abrupt break with the policy of toleration upheld as recently as the 370s by Valentinian. It is likely that he was simply frustrated by the pressures he found himself under and genuinely believed that an authoritarian solution would bring unity to the embattled empire. At the same time control of dogma went hand in hand with greater control of the administrative structure of the Church. In this sense Theodosius could be seen as the heir of Diocletian and Constantine, bringing to fruition their attempts to create a more tightly structured empire that religious institutions were expected to serve. However, by defining and outlawing specific heresies, he had crossed a watershed. It soon became clear that once the principle of toleration was successfully challenged, as it had been by his new laws, the temptation to extend the campaign against dissidents would be irrestistible.

The first non-Christian sect to be attacked was the Manicheans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, who believed in a universe in which good and evil struggled perpetually against each other. The sect had always been unpopular because of its Persian origins, and in 381 Theodosius ordered that no Manichean of either sex should be able to bequeath or inherit any property. This excluded Manicheans passing on family wealth from generation to generation, a basic right for Roman citizens. Then in 382, the emperor decreed the death penalty for membership of certain Manichean sects and put in place an informer system. It was to be the first step to the sect’s elimination and to a wider campaign against non-Christian beliefs. While the emperor himself proved comparatively restrained in his own use of persecution, he had set up a framework that his more fanatical officials were able to exploit.