THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA, a watershed event in the history of Christianity, took place at a moment when Constantine was particularly concerned with reconciling eastern and western ways of doing business. It followed on his wide-reaching discussion of his own faith contained in his Oration to the Saints, which was probably written for a meeting of the clergy of Bithynia sometime around Easter of 325. It was an important moment for Constantine—there would have been some in the audience who would have remembered him as the young courtier of Diocletian many years earlier. He needed to set the record straight and show people who he had become.1
The Oration is known in English from the title it acquired in the manuscripts of Eusebius’ Life of Constantine. Read out loud, the discussion would take about two hours, and it would appear to have been composed with a view to proving Constantine’s intellectual credentials to his co-religionists.
His speech opens with an acclamation of Easter, an event seen as establishing the church and revealing the one true God to mortals—the God who was the creator of all, but who remained unworshipped despite all the indications given by the Holy Spirit. And it was unrighteousness that had prevented people from perceiving the truth. Christ had established the church, but the wickedness of nations had conspired to oust his works and reestablish their own superstition. Virtue, though, had now subdued that wickedness. Constantine declares that he will venture great things through the love of the divine, which has been implanted in him—he says later in the speech that he wishes that he had received the revelation of the true God long ago—and that God’s help has enhanced his skills as a speaker. God, as Constantine understands him, in a discussion heavily influenced by Plato, is above all things, with no beginning and no birth. He also understands that it was not through any lesion of God’s bowels that the Son had come into being, but it was through Providence that the Son became the governor of the sensible world and its inhabitants.
Constantine next describes the nature of creation at some length, then the folly of philosophers who have not understood the truth. At this point the emperor finds himself in deep water, seeming pretty clearly to contradict the understanding of God and his relationship with Christ that he expounded just minutes earlier.2 The problem is Plato, the great Greek philosopher of the fourth century BC whose thought exercised enormous influence over intellectual life in the fourth century AD. In Constantine’s view he
excelled all others in gentleness and first accustomed human intellects to revert from the sensible to the intelligible and the things that are always thus, the one who taught us to look up to things above, did well when he postulated the god above being, then made a second subordinate to this one, dividing the two essences numerically, while both shared one perfection and the essence of the second god received its concrete existence from the first.3
The question of the precise relationship between God and Christ—whether they were identical, as Constantine suggests at the beginning of his speech, or of two essences—was at the heart of the debate between the church’s two warring factions. Is it plausible that Constantine, who doesn’t reveal himself in this document to be a profound philosophic thinker, did not grasp the problem? Extending this line of reasoning further, we might also presume that whoever helped him with the speech—emperors might write their own material, but it’s unlikely that they issued major statements without checking with others first—was blind to the problem too. Neither view is especially plausible. If, as seems likely, the speech was delivered in the months preceding the council that was intended to resolve the issue, we might expect Constantine to have left clues that would encourage people from both camps to show up thinking that the matter had not been predetermined.
He had also written at about this time to the major protagonists in the quarrel over the nature of the Trinity, telling them that with the help of the Supreme Being he would be able to entrust the discussion to his devout listeners and shift them to a more reasonable position: there was no reason when the discord concerned a matter of importance why the same approach would not work that succeeded “when the issue constituting a general obstacle is small and utterly trivial.”4 Constantine may have been no great philosopher, but he was a very experienced administrator and only too aware from his experience with Donatus and his North African colleagues that appearing to have decided a question in advance was potentially catastrophic. Furthermore, the suggestion that Plato (whose doctrines he quotes as interpreted by an influential second-century AD disciple) understood the divine, albeit imperfectly, could be seen as a signal to the leading intellectuals of the east that he was willing to enter into a dialogue with them as well.
Constantine now moves on to the subject of his conversion, and the victories he says stem from his faith. He then returns to the marvel of creation, the inadvisability of sin, the incarnation, and the wisdom of living “according to God’s command” so as to ensure that we “pass our lives in immortal and unchanging abodes, superior to all fate.” The teachings of Christ figure next, then the prophecies of his coming; he recalls his own visits to Memphis and Babylon in earlier years. Then comes an idiosyncratic reading of the Book of Daniel, followed by comments from the Erythraean Sibyl, whose wisdom figured prominently in Lactantius’ thinking, and Constantine adopts Lactantius’ view that Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, a poem that might in fact have been influenced by Sibylline verses circulating in the first century BC, derived from a prophecy by the Cumaean Sibyl (a mythic being who lived near the Bay of Naples).5
In the last section of the speech Constantine attributes his victories to his piety:
I ascribe to your goodwill all my good fortune and that of those who are mine. And the evidence is that everything has turned out according to my prayers—acts of courage, victories, trophies over my enemies. Even the great city is conscious of it and gives praise with reverence, while the people of the most dear city approve, even if it was deceived by unsafe hopes into choosing a champion, who was suddenly overtaken in a fitting manner worthy of his atrocities.6
The “great city” is plainly Rome; the “dear city” is Nicomedia, and the champion is Licinius. As if addressing Licinius in person, he remonstrates with him about his poor religious choices. He comments on the deaths of Decius, Valerian, and Aurelian (falsely enshrined by Lactantius as an aspirant persecutor). And for Diocletian he reserves considerable venom—he who “after the murder-lust of the persecution, having voted himself down, unwittingly renounced himself as one unworthy of power, and confessed the harmfulness of his folly.” Constantine recognizes Diocletian’s failures and those of his immediate predecessors on whom the judgment of God has fallen. This same God has awarded him his glorious victories. He, the best judge, the best guide to immortality and bestower of eternal life, “is an unconquerable ally and defender of the righteous.”7
In this speech we see Constantine as he wished to be seen and heard. His God was both the God of creation and the God of battles. Although a soldier, he displays learning, both traditional and Christian, when announcing that posterity would not see him as yet another emperor in the tradition of Diocletian, and he gives promise of the necessary skill to deal with the problem that awaited him at Nicaea. In setting his own record straight he has made it clear that he will be no Diocletian, he will be no persecutor—that was an important message to get out just before a contentious meeting about the nature of God and in light of what people might have heard about the state of affairs in Africa. Eusebius’ History of the Church is the source for a number of the surviving documents about the early years of the Donatist controversy. These were clearly circulating in the east by 324. Eusebius cites them as a sign of his new emperor’s devotion to the church. Others who read them may have been less sanguine and would have wondered which emperor would show up at the meeting he had summoned. Would it be the man who had foresworn persecution, or would it be the man whose handling of the Donatist affairs could be seen as having been less than even-handed?