26.
NICAEA

AS HE LEARNED MORE about the dispute, Constantine seems to have decided that Antioch would be a bad place to meet. He therefore summoned a new council to a more neutral spot, choosing first Ancyra, and then Nicaea, which, being close to Nicomedia, would spare him a long trip into lands where supporters of the old regime might lurk. The reasons that he offered, however, were less sinister; he simply stated that the weather was nice, Nicaea was easier for western bishops to reach, and having the meeting there meant that “I may be present as a spectator and participator in those things which will be done.”¹ In saying this he reiterated his desire that the church find its own unity, but he was not above giving the assembled bishops some added help in their deliberations. The presence of the western bishops would act as a counterbalance and lend the council an aura of—unprecedented—universality. He would also try to defuse the quarrel by suggesting that the doctrinal issue was of little importance, compared to other, far weightier, decisions that had to be made; by this he hoped to create common ground between the two parties and soften the blow of a defeat for one side or the other. In his letter to Arius and Alexander before they all met, he said that the disagreement between them was not of great moment in light of the fact that there was “one faith between us”—indeed, he hoped that they could reconcile even before the meeting. Furthermore, he did not say these things so as to force them “to come to an agreement on every aspect of this very silly question, whatever it actually is.” It should be possible, he went on, for the dignity of the meeting to be preserved and “fellowship be kept generally, even though on detail some serious disagreement may arise between you over a tiny matter since we neither all agree among ourselves in wanting the same thing, nor does one single being and mind operate within us.”²

The bishops arriving at Nicaea would have known that the way to their new emperor’s heart was through compromise, and the meeting was evidently stage-managed to ensure that this point was made from the very start. It opened, probably under the presidency of Nicaea’s bishop, Theognis, in early June. In his opening address, delivered in Latin with a simultaneous Greek translation—a courteous nod to his audience of Greek-speakers—Constantine said:

It is the object of my prayers, my friends, to share in your company, and now that I have received this, I know I must express my gratitude to the King of all, because, in addition to everything else he has allowed me to see in this, which is better than any other good thing; I mean, to receive you all gathered together and to observe one unanimous opinion shared by all. Let no jealous enemy ruin our prosperity; now that the war of the tyrants against God has been swept away by the power of God the Savior, let no other malignant demon encompass the divine law with blasphemies by other means. For to me, internal division in the Church of God is graver than any war or fierce battle, and these things appear to cause more pain than secular affairs.³

When the opening formalities were completed, Eusebius of Caesarea opened the proceedings with a confession of faith that Constantine immediately declared to be in essential conformity with his own (it lacked only the word homoousios).⁴ This was no doubt a well-arranged piece of political theater—and precisely the sort of thing that had been missing in Constantine’s dealings with the Donatists. Eusebius had arrived under a ban of excommunication from the anti-Arian bishops, but Constantine’s first act was to make a public display of reconciliation, indicating unequivocally that it was this rather than the award of total victory to one side or the other that was the order of the day. Just in case anyone had missed the point, it was reinforced when Eustathius of Antioch read out some work of Eusebius of Nicomedia that was regarded as heretical.⁵ Then Constantine himself put forward his own version of what we now know as the Nicene Creed, composed, it is said, by a Cappadocian priest named Hermogenes and in terms that were very close to Eusebius of Caesarea’s confession of faith.⁶ This creed remains the best-known utterance by a Roman emperor in the modern world:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible—and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten of the Father, who is of the same substance of the Father; God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God; begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both which are in heaven and on earth; who for the sake of us men, and on account of our salvation, descended, became incarnate, was made man, suffered, and rose again on the third day; he ascended into the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead. We also believe in the Holy Ghost. But those who say “There was a time when he was not” and “Before his generation he was not,” and “he came to be from nothing,” or those who pretend that the Son of God is “Of other hypostasis or substance,” or “created” or “alterable” or “mutable,” the universal and apostolic Church anathematizes.⁷

It is hard at this distance to grasp the extraordinary originality of what Constantine proposed to do; there had never been a universal creed, and bishops who were used to working with their own baptismal creeds are unlikely to have seen the need for such a statement.⁸ The decision to issue a creed as a universal definition of the faith looks very much like the sort of thing that an experienced imperial administrator would have decided on. One of the many failures of the negotiations over the Donatist controversy was the absence of any statement that could provide a way forward. The Constantine who had so recently proclaimed his belief in the power of his god does not seem to have been remotely interested in watching the church tear itself apart arguing about the precise nature of the relationship between different elements of the Trinity. In Constantine’s world power flowed from the top and it would be in heaven as it was on earth. In its original conception, the Nicene creed does not emerge through a theological process; it comes through an imperial legislative one. In issuing edicts, emperors might take advice from experts before issuing their own decrees, and so it was in this case that the emperor took advice from experts and arrived at a formulation that he regarded as reasonable.

The bishops adopted Constantine’s creed on June 19, then set about their other business: defining church practice—also at the emperor’s request—setting for the whole empire a standard date of Easter and attempting to reconcile the Meletians with the Alexandrian church. The reconciliation involved creating a structure within which they could reunite with their fellow Christians, something that had been lacking in the meetings held to sort out the North African situation—an especially telling point, as the issues were so similar to those that had divided the African Christians. According to the settlement, Meletius was confirmed as bishop of Lycopolis and his ordinations were accepted as valid, though he was forbidden to ordain any more priests, and his priests were to be subordinate to those ordained by Alexander. A Meletian priest who submitted to Alexander could have full clerical privileges; and if Alexander agreed to a congregation’s request for a priest who had been of the Meletian persuasion, that priest could replace one of Alexander’s priests when the former died.⁹ It was a generous settlement underlining the message that all those present should have taken away with them: Constantine wanted a peaceful reunification of the church and favored compromise as the way of achieving that end.

The Easter question was rather different. In his speech at Nicomedia, Constantine had made it clear that in his understanding of Christianity great stress was placed on the resurrection; this he appears to have seen as prefiguring his own experience with God. God’s willingness to forgive his earlier errors and show him the path to victory had become a critical fact of his life. So it was that the crucifixion and resurrection proved that God “has not availed himself of his great power to requite the insult, but has forgiven humans for their foolish thoughts, reckoning folly and error intrinsic to humanity, while himself abiding by his own decision and abating not a jot of his natural love of mankind.”¹⁰

The problem was that there were two ways of calculating Easter, both linked with the celebration of Passover, which was celebrated in the month of Nisan, then the first month of the Jewish calendar, usually corresponding to March/April in the modern Gregorian calendar. Passover began with a feast on the fourteenth of Nisan followed by a festival week. In Christian tradition the resurrection was inextricably linked with the beginning of Passover, and Christians expected to mark the day by fasting. The problem was determining each year what the anniversary should be since the Jewish lunisolar calendar was (and is) inconsistent with the solar calendar used by Christians. This meant that commemoration of the resurrection, if linked with Passover, could not fall on the actual day. To solve this problem, one group within the church held that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox; another held that it should be celebrated on the date in the Greco-Roman calendar that corresponded to Nisan 14. Most western churches, along with communities in what is now Turkey, had also adopted the closest Sunday to Nisan 14 as the appropriate day. Churches in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt used Nisan 14. The verdict of the council was that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday—which in effect meant that the side that had emerged victorious in the debate over the Trinity had lost in the one over the date of Easter.¹¹

The reasoning that underlay Constantine’s decision is, to modern sensibility, deeply troubling, for he said that “nothing should be held in common with that nation of liars and Christ-killers,” after having declared it was “in the first place unworthy to observe that most sacred festival in accordance with the practice of the Jews; having sullied their own hands with a heinous crime, such blood-stained men are, as one might expect, mentally blind.” The vehemence of this rhetoric did not, however, reflect actual behavior. Instead, it reflected the often bitter and inflated language of religious controversy as it had developed over the centuries. Pagans had accused Christians of incest and cannibalism (a reading of the Eucharist), of atheism and engaging in illicit secret meetings to the detriment of mankind. Jesus was a failed magician, and Christians were terminally foolish for following “undemonstrated truths.” The anti-Jewish diatribes of the pagan world were equally vicious and of far longer standing, as pagans stated that Jews were members of a race of lepers expelled from Egypt; people whose dietary laws were bizarre; whose prophet, Moses, was a magician. Pagan attacks on Jewish communities in cities like Alexandria could be exceptionally violent, and in Egypt at least, there was a strand of viciously anti-Semitic literature that associated the practice of Judaism with Roman oppression! Jews saw Christians as fools who had abandoned the true faith in pursuit of a false prophet and, on occasion, had encouraged local pogroms against them.¹²

Vicious as the rhetoric might be, and vicious as the conduct was on occasion, most people managed to get along most of the time. As the history of Diocletian’s persecution showed, most people preferred not to be drawn into violent quarrels with their neighbors; and if they felt their neighbors’ religious practices were offensive, they were more likely simply to ignore them or refuse to associate with these people unless there was some external spark that might turn latent prejudice into violence. Changing the date of Easter was not such a spark, and the council at Nicaea did not greatly impact Jewish communities throughout the empire: the Jews retained their privileges (which included some limited immunity from munera for important leaders).¹³ What the council did achieve, aside from standardizing the celebration of Easter, was to help bind the rival parties together in that each had given something up.

The outcome may have exceeded even Constantine’s hopes. All but two bishops, both Libyan, subscribed to the canons of the council, including the creed. The two recalcitrants were excommunicated, as were Arius and some priests who continued to support him.¹⁴ Shortly after, Constantine convicted Eusebius of Nicomedia of remaining in contact with Arius and removed him from his see. Both men were soon allowed back into communion when they publicly stated their accord with the Nicene creed.

Although Christological controversy would continue for centuries, for a while after the Council of Nicaea, a remarkable peace obtained. Constantine had shown that he had learned from earlier failures that compromise was the preferable path to peace. The Nicene creed did not depend upon any preexisting theological statement, which was perhaps one of its greatest strengths; it stated a view of God that would not be disagreeable to the majority present and made it clear that certain “errors” of Arius and his followers would not be acceptable. In so doing it had the coincidental effect of placing at the heart of subsequent Christian theology the notion that the Father was of the same essence as the Son—that they were indeed homousios.¹⁵ It was precisely this point that would often seem to be a matter of grave controversy in the years that followed, but it is also the basic clarity and simplicity of the doctrine that has, in the twentieth century, made the creed a valued statement of faith in mainstream Christian traditions.¹⁶ So it is that today the Nicene Creed is what Constantine intended it to be.