ALEXANDRIA OCCUPIED A MATCHLESS SITE ON ITS MAN-MADE harbor facing the Mediterranean at one of the mouths of the Nile. Easily the most cultured, sophisticated, and continuously wealthy city in the Mediterranean world, Alexandria was a home to many cultures, each newcomer enriching rather than displacing the others. Even while the old temple stood at Jerusalem, Alexandria had been a capital of Judaism. The earliest significant Christian writers and thinkers studied and worked there. By Constantine’s time, Alexandria was a hotbed of Christianity, and Christian doctrine had been established for more than a century when controversy erupted over the head of a priest named Arius.1
The church of Alexandria had been divided during the years of persecution between those who faced persecution without wavering and those who were more accommodating to the emperors’ norms. Peter, the bishop of Alexandria, felt some Christians had compromised their faith by participating in sacrifice. If they avoided sacrifice, he was prepared to be forgiving. If Christians, acceding to the authorities, had merely handed over Christian property—and particularly the books of scripture they cherished—Peter let them be. If they fled to avoid persecution—as he apparently did himself—there were no repercussions. Others, particularly the bishop Melitius of nearby Lycopolis, held out for excluding or disciplining those who had lapsed. These different approaches to the common oppressor became grounds for mutual hostility and recrimination within the community of Christians, in Alexandria as elsewhere.
The forgiving Peter was martyred in November 311. A new bishop was elected, but died himself of natural causes within a few months. The third bishop in a year, Alexander, inherited an unstable situation, in which external persecution had ceased but internal recrimination had not. Into this tense environment came Arius, probably from what is now Libya, preaching a controversial doctrine.
What Arius was thought to have said, in simplest terms, was that there was a difference and a distance between “Christ” and “God.” Diverse opinions had been ventured in many places over the last century. At one end of this spectrum, Jesus was Christ was God—from the beginning of all time and forever. At the other end, Jesus was a carpenter’s son from Nazareth with whom God was well pleased and who was thus exalted in stages to high esteem and standing. This Jesus remained a creature not creator, a divinized human being, not god from all eternity. Had he been “adopted” as a son by God? There was biblical language to support that view, as there was for every view on the spectrum.2 In a world where godhead had been growing in prestige and uniqueness in the hands of philosophers and theologians alike, subordination of Jesus to the mighty Father respected the feelings of many.
Challenged as unorthodox, Arius reacted cannily and candidly, proclaiming his views in a way that most found entirely orthodox. If you suspected him already, you thought this was cunning; if you supported him, you thought him well intentioned, seeking harmony within the church. Whatever he said only fueled the flames already burning. The controversy, flaring in the most populous and wealthy city in the world and the most Christian city in the empire, would take on a life of its own well beyond the city. The fires arguably still burn today wherever doctrinal clarity is made the dominant issue in a Christian community.
Over time, Arius’s position was narrowed and sharpened and clarified further until the substantive distance between the two sides was small. But the significance of the disagreement thus erected on Arius’s unwilling good intentions was, for doctrinal purposes, great; and the fact of both sides persisting was a greater fact still. The further the debate moved away from Arius himself, the more “Arianism” became a clear target.
Arius himself was a cradle Christian, long trained in Christian schools, well traveled among his coreligionists. A little older than Constantine, he had lived to see Christianity emerge as something fashionable and normal at the same time. His seniority drove him to hew close to scriptural meaning and to be as conservative as possible amid the new buzz about his faith. But what he said with every intention of orthodoxy had the effect of opening a window into the world of traditional religion.
The exaltation of a human being would have been familiar to traditional religions. Many people could recognize, accept, and respect a very wise teacher endowed with divinity, who coexisted comfortably with an ineffable, distant, immaterial, all-powerful god who stood behind him. There’s nothing remarkable about people in that age wanting to preserve the distance between man and the ultimate godhead.
To insist on the alternative, however, was controversial. The anti-Arian position that emerged insisted on seeing Christ as fundamentally and essentially divine. The Greek philosophical concept of “substance” was invoked in due time to provide a way of saying what Arius’s attackers felt was important: that in Jesus, the fullness of godhead was present in a unique, distinctive, irreproducible, and irrepeatable way. That view posed many logical and exegetical challenges, but it had the merit of many of making Christianity unique and—most importantly—Christian salvation uniquely powerful.
And so, inadvertently and no doubt to his great unhappiness, Arius came to represent a set of views increasingly under attack by people whose zealotry he mistrusted and thought superfluous. They were, in his view, the heterodox innovators, not he.
His view nearly succeeded. If we turn our attention back to the emperor Constantine in the period before 325, when the controversies around Arius’s teaching grew more intense, we see a man exasperated by the unreconciled quarrels around Arianism. Absent formal church governance structures above the local level, Constantine, who was the church’s patron, decided—or was persuaded—to offer Christianity the unifying structure it lacked.
So in 325, he brought together in the city of Nicea (modern Iznik, a little south of Istanbul) all the bishops of the world. The 318 who came were those who could receive his invitation and make the journey, at state expense, to a place more accessible to the populous Greek east than to the Latins from the west. There were a few strays from beyond Roman territory, a “Goth” from modern Romania, for example, and two bishops from what are now Abhkazia and Iraq. Arius’s views were not the only object of attention, but they held the floor when issues of practice and procedure were resolved. (There was still the question, for example, of how to treat those who had lapsed in time of persecution. In some parts of the Roman world, notably Africa, fierce disagreement and even schism would continue for almost a century on those points.)
The event was unprecedented. Constantine himself appeared in his full regalia of purple robes and gold and gem-encrusted insignia and chose to sit among the bishops. Bishop Ossius of Cordoba in Spain, one of the few Latins present but Constantine’s close adviser, presided, with lively debate and interventions by Constantine himself. Within a month, the fundamental issues had been resolved well enough to evoke consensus from the bishops present. The emperor’s presence doubtless encouraged consensus, while the leadership and doctrinal commitment of Ossius could find and drive through the specific resolutions agreed upon.
The debates focused on very precise expressions. On the attack, Arius’s opponents had a word they wanted enshrined in the council’s decrees: homoousios, “same in being.” Jesus was “same in being” with God—“one in Being with the Father,” in the translation until recently current in the Roman church.3 This word in the Greek was the simplest and most direct way to affirm the divinity of Jesus. Whatever was divine about the “Father” was divine about Jesus. This being was unique and he was radically unlike, say, a Hercules.
Resistant but assured of their own orthodoxy, the opposition fell into two camps. There were those who simply opposed the word of the day as a dangerous novelty—not used in the scriptures at all and, we know today, in some use among communities of dubious orthodoxy in Alexandria in the century before. Between outright resistance and agreement, a middle ground emerged. What about using the word homoiousios? If you are not familiar with these quarrels, you should rub your eyes now and look closely at the tiny difference, the insertion of a single letter, the “iota” that was proverbially the least of letters, in the middle of the word. The meaning was unmistakably different from the other word: not “one in Being” but “similar in Being,” “similar in substance.” For those seeking to preserve the exaltation of the divine, the notion of similarity and resemblance introduced just the tiny window of difference and distance they needed. For those fearing any deviation, the single letter was itself the introduction of all the poison of heresy.
Historians would dearly love to have the protocols and transcript of the Council of Nicea, as we do for some later church councils of the period.4 What we have is only the formal statement of faith that the council published, the so-called Nicene creed. New baptismal candidates recited a short statement of the main Christian doctrines in order to demonstrate their faith as they approached the baptismal font. The Nicene version of such a statement was meant to emphasize tradition—with the careful addition of the critical word. The new text was prescribed for use and was to be memorized and recited as a testimony to orthodoxy, fidelity, and support for emperor and council.
No one stood in that hall in Nicea and proclaimed this moment of doctrinal affirmation as the birth of paganism. All present would have been united and wholehearted in their rejection of false gods and the old ways. There came out of that place one form of Christianity that was easier for traditionalists to understand and accept. That momentarily dominant form of Christianity would pursue the exclusion of all error, inside the church and out, as fundamentally polytheistic and wrong by comparison to the unique truth of the one godhead present in Jesus, the Christ. The fathers of Nicea thought they were stating a correct doctrine. They were in fact establishing a new way of thinking about the world and religion’s place in the world.
A long history of controversy lay before them on the day they proclaimed that doctrine, some of it coming very soon. The young priest Athanasius of Alexandria, who attended Nicea as a member of the party of Alexandria’s bishop Alexander, would receive and defend the new teaching contra mundum, “against the world,” for it would turn out that the more moderate, as one could say, position of those who resisted the Nicene doctrine would have a powerful appeal in many parts of the Roman world and beyond. The unscriptural nature of the shibboleth word would work against its acceptance as well.
Constantine would not especially help. For as long as he lived, having called, sponsored, and approved the council held at Nicea, he did very little to ensure that its creed would be accepted. We have no window into Constantine’s mind at this time, but he always expressed his support for orthodoxy without much caring what orthodoxy was. In the months before his council he had written a letter to Alexander and Arius, exhorting them to mend their thoughts and ways.5 His first and last thought was for peace and harmony among Christians. He was distressed that they had taken to public disputation over issues that he thought “unprofitable.” Arius had insisted on ideas that should never have been thought and, if thought, should have been quickly buried in silence. People who cared about these things had too much time on their hands, giving scandal to the faithful when they ought to be offering unified leadership. Give me back, he pleads with them in this letter, quiet days and peaceful nights; spare me the tears I must shed at the sight of God’s people divided among themselves over matters such as this.
Because this was the beginning and not the end of conciliar disputes and flamboyant public controversies over doctrine among the most senior leaders of a state-sponsored Christianity, it is easy for moderns to be hard on Constantine here. There has long been a kind of sly gloating over the ignorant lout who could not understand just how important these metaphysical subtleties were, or a different kind of silent reproach to the Christian emperor so poorly taught that he could not appreciate what was at stake. He deserves more credit than that.
First, he could hardly have imagined that the terms of engagement he was laying down would remain in force for seventeen hundred years among the Catholic and Orthodox successors of his contemporaries. Second, in a world that had recently condemned Christians of every stripe and that was only just achieving civil order after two decades of intermittent civil war (the seemingly obtuse letter was written when Constantine’s last opponent, Licinius, had just been defeated and captured, to be hanged a few months later), peace and harmony were of more importance than any disputation on a point of undoubted theological interest. The fact that serious people could disagree about such a point was good evidence that fighting it out to a single resolution would be pointless. (If we look forward, say, fifty years from the time at which he wrote, he was absolutely right: the points at issue were not resolved in that time.)
When Ossius of Cordoba left Constantine’s court not long after, he was replaced by the Greek bishop of Nicomedia, one of the regular residences of the emperor. He is called “Eusebius of Nicomedia” to distinguish him from “Eusebius of Caesarea,” the church historian on whom we rely for much of what we know of this period. Eusebius of Nicomedia was a partisan of moderate views, ready to help Constantine interpret the events that followed the council.
The decrees were not well received. There was widespread resistance, particularly in the populous, prosperous, and increasingly Christian eastern provinces. Astute maneuvering carried the day. Within two years, Arius himself had appeared before Constantine, persuaded him of his orthodoxy (without using the word homoousios), and Constantine called a further council at Nicomedia in late 327 that absolved Arius firmly and, probably, justly. Alexander of Alexandria held out against Arius, however, and when he died a few months later, his colleague Athanasius was railroaded to election to replace him. There began with this election a half century of dispute, when Athanasius was repeatedly exiled from his city and bishopric and repeatedly returned.6 The religious struggle that mattered in the decades that followed was the one to control Christianity rather than that between Christianity and traditional religion. Athanasius’s party eventually prevailed at a council held in Constantinople in 381 with the support of imperial dictate and not as a result of astute theological argument.
Constantine for now had succeeded in his goal of enforcing orthodoxy and in establishing “the church” in Roman society. His personal religious views need never have advanced beyond what we have seen. When in 324, just winning his last critical battles, he planned the glorious new city on the Bosphorus that would bear his name, no one would criticize him if the city’s layout followed the model of the old capital on the Tiber. Were there, as later reported on good scholarly evidence, temples built for the new city? The evidence is slender but cannot be dismissed out of hand.
There is also the case of the small town of Hispellum on the main highway north out of Rome. Applying to the emperor to build a temple in honor of Constantine’s family, so that their priests (sacerdotes) could manage the games and gladiatorial contests that went with such a place, they were given “easy” (facilis) permission. Constantine’s only reservation was that in the building dedicated to him there should be no stain of any of the “deceits of contagious superstition.” Modern readers divide fiercely on whether to interpret this as forbidding sacrifice in his temple.7 More striking is the easy permission that allowed as much of the old ways as possible and looked only to respect the emperor’s own personal beliefs. No traditionalist in Hispellum should have been put out about this provision, and certainly none would have felt threatened.
The city of Constantinople was dedicated in 330 on the anniversary of the death of a recent martyr, Saint Mocius—a man Constantine himself may have known. The crowning image of Constantine in his city was a statue taken from nearby Phrygia that had originally been created as an image of Apollo and was then reworked to represent the great emperor. Was this a devout Christianization, or was it a subtler statement that Christ, Apollo, and Constantine had an intimate relationship, or that Constantine was now the more astute devotee of a truer Apollo? There was surely no one reaction to such an image. The world was less harshly delineated than it would become.8
But what did emerge from Constantine’s reign, and through little choice of his own, was the idea of Christian hegemony, the idea that Christianity could try to define itself against a pagan world from which it was fundamentally different. Working out the implications of this ambitious exercise in self-image-making would take decades, but the foundations were now laid. This was the birth of paganism.