by Harvey Cox
In order to learn something from the fateful events of the fourth century, it will be necessary to move beyond either bashing Constantine or deriding submissive bishops. Constantine knew what he was doing. As for the Christian leaders, obviously they had their motives as well. It must have been a relief to have an emperor who—if only for his own reasons—colluded with them instead of feeding them to the lions. But there were other factors at work as well. Many today are unaware that Constantine not only pronounced himself to be a convert to Christianity; he also made himself its principal patron and chief administrator. Further, he let it be known that, according to his personal theology, God had given him a special place in history—he was not just to rule the empire, but to govern the church as well. At least one part of Constantine’s logic is clear. Rulers, whether religious or secular, always want to find or concoct an ideology that will unite their realm. Constantine was no different, and many Christian bishops at the time were all too happy to cooperate. This was where the influence of money and power as principal factors in promoting creed making and in congealing faith into belief came in.
As patron-in-chief of Christianity, Constantine had vast sums of cash to disperse in order to sustain the church’s charitable work, maintain its buildings, and—not incidentally—support its clergy. But to whom, exactly, should this money go, and in what amounts? Christians, who had formerly scratched for contributions from their members and an occasional wealthy patron, now found to their gratification that the trough was brimming over. The elbowing and shoving to belly up to it may have been unsightly, but it was understandable, and it was always tempting to push closer by casting aspersions on a rival bishop’s credentials or character or the soundness of his views. The situation proved ripe for internal wrangles when another concern of Constantine, now the emperor-patron, soon caused these quarrels to break out in a particularly ugly fashion.
The second of the emperor’s worries was this: his fond hope that Christianity as a religious ideology would unify the empire was just not working out. Pagans, who still constituted a great majority of his empire and were often his most loyal subjects, complained furiously against his policies. Furthermore, disputes among Christian bishops and theologians, often based on jealousy, pique, and ambition or sometimes on theological differences that might once have seemed less urgent, now popped up everywhere. One such squabble, about the exact nature of the relationship between Jesus and God, involved Arius (d. ca. 335), a brilliant parish priest in Alexandria. An admirer of the theology of Origen (see Chapter 6), Arius taught that, although Jesus was indeed the Son of God and the incarnation of the divine logos and God’s agent in the creation of the world, he was not coeternal with God. “There was a time,” he said, “when Christ was not.”
The theological views of Arius found considerable support among bishops in some parts of the empire, but others harshly condemned them. Constantine, fearful that this sectional rivalry within the church might threaten the unity of the empire itself, desperately wanted to do something to end the bickering. But although a bold soldier and a skilled administrator, he did not understand the theological argument and probably did not care who was right. He just wanted it ended, and as quickly as possible. He wrote to the disputants that their disagreement was “small and very insignificant” and “too sublime and abstruse to be settled with any certainty.” He also thought it was a matter that was over the heads of most people and, throwing in a lightly veiled warning, he suggested that perhaps the bishops and theologians were debating it because they had too much free time on their hands. He urged them, in short, to cool it, to lower their voices, and to treat each other with “an equal degree of forbearance.”1
But Constantine’s plea for restraint went unheeded, and the controversy continued to boil. Frustrated by what threatened to be the failure of his ambitious unity plan, the emperor acted. He summoned an “ecumenical council,” the first assembly of all the bishops in the whole world. It should be noted that it was an emperor, not the bishops, the congregations, or the bishop of Rome, who convened this first council in 325 CE. Also, the 220 bishops were not to gather in a church building, but—in keeping with the emperor’s self-designated new role as a kind of high priest–administrator—in his sumptuous palace in Nicaea, on the lovely western coast of what is now Turkey.
When I was in seminary we spent several class sessions on the Council of Nicaea. It was, we were assured, perhaps the most important gathering ever to take place in Christian history. We heard fascinating lectures about it, and we tried to trace the logic of the various views on the relationship between God and Jesus held by the different factions. One of my professors imaginatively divided the class into Arians, followers of Arius, and Athanasians, those who followed Athanasius (295–373), Arius’s chief opponent, so we could get a feel for the debate. I was assigned to the Athanasian camp. The Arians in the class really had little chance of winning. Our lecturers had already suggested that the Council of Nicaea had succeeded in keeping the peace in the church by quashing the incipient heresy of “Arianism” (even though it persisted for centuries and has returned in one form or another ever since). Some of the more pious church historians even declared that the Holy Spirit had surely guided the bishops in their deliberations.
I have no idea whether the Holy Spirit hovered over the royal palace in Nicaea, but there is little doubt that Constantine hovered there, and that it was he who exerted the most formidable earthly influence on the proceedings. He hosted the entire affair, arranged elaborate ritual processions, and, although he was not a baptized Christian and had no training and little real interest in theology, presided over the sessions. His own theological adviser, Osiosus of Cordoba, had suggested that the Greek word homoousios, meaning “same substance,” should be used to describe the relationship of God to Jesus, so this was the solution Constantine urged the bishops to adopt. A few balked. The word was not found in the Bible, and some were inclined not to pretend they could define this mysterious relationship so precisely. They would have preferred to live and let live and to settle for the emperor’s earlier suggestion that the matter was small and insignificant. But by this time Constantine was firmly wedded to his own adviser’s plan, and he deployed his considerable influence—power and money again—to prod the bishops into supporting it. He also wined and dined them in sumptuous imperial style. A well-known description of one of the lavish banquets the bishops enjoyed appears in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine:
Detachments of the body-guard and troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of them the men of god proceeded with without fear into the innermost of the imperial apartments, in which some were the Emperor’s companions at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ’s kingdom was thus shadowed forth, and as dream rather than reality.2
It is unfortunate that Leonardo da Vinci never painted a portrait of this sybaritic scene. It would contrast nicely with his The Last Supper, in which a hunted Jesus and the disciples take cover in a rented second-floor room and serve each other a modest meal, while the imperial swords are already being drawn not to protect this trouble-making rabbi, but to arrest and crucify him.
Constantine, not Jesus, was the dominant figure at Nicaea, and it is hardly surprising that almost all the bishops, to the emperor’s satisfaction, arrived at a nearly unanimous decision in his favor. Only Arius himself and three other stubbornly independent bishops withheld their approval. Constantine promptly exiled Arius to the remote province of Illyricum. Then, in a statement that suggests he had forgotten his previous view both that this was all a matter of small significance and that all the parties should show forbearance to one another, he decreed:
If any treatise composed by Arius be discovered, let it be consigned to the flames…and if anyone shall be caught concealing a book by Arius, and does not instantly bring it out and burn it, the penalty shall be death; the criminal shall su
ffer punishment immediately after conviction.3
But the emperor’s draconian measures did not succeed. The historic Council of Nicaea, as an effort to unify the church and the empire by imposing a creed, proved a dismal failure. Within months arguments flared up again. One of the bishops who had attended the Nicaea council and had not supported the final decision, Hilary of Poitiers (d. ca. 367), found himself banished to Asia. No doubt his experience tinctured his opinion of councils and creeds, but a letter he wrote from his place of exile at the time pinpoints how little the Council of Nicaea had accomplished and what a debacle it had been. Hilary says:
It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous that there are as many creeds as opinions among men, as many doctrines because we make creeds arbitrarily and explain their inclinations…arbitrarily…every year, nay every moon we make a new creed and describe invisible mysteries. We repent what we have done. We defend those who repent. We anathematize those whom we defended. We condemn either the doctrine of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and reciprocally tearing one another to pieces, we have been the cause of each other’s ruin.4
The history of Christianity during the decades after Constantine makes for dreary reading. The subversion of the church into a religious empire widened. The bishops continued to bicker among themselves and deployed the power of the state against their theological enemies. Corruption increased. One can almost become sympathetic with the emperor Julian, who ruled from 360 to 363. Schooled as a Christian in his youth in the midst of the conniving and argumentative church factions of the time, he soon became disgusted and decided that what Rome needed was a return to its classical values, including its traditional religion. Unlike what some of his detractors have claimed, Julian never tried to abolish Christianity, only to remove the privileged status Constantine and his immediate successors had given it. He wanted to create a level playing field for all the gods. But he only reigned for a short time, died leading his troops against the Persians, and has borne the stigma of being labeled “Julian the Apostate” ever since.
Meanwhile the Christian bishops went on debating the fine points of theology. Now they argued over what homoousios really meant and the nature of Mary’s relationship to God and Christ. They composed more creeds and excommunicated more people. After the fall of Rome in 476 CE, the ensuing centuries toll a dismal story of the repeated failure of using creeds and excommunications to achieve any result, except for further rancor. If, as some psychologists claim, at least one form of mental illness can be defined as doggedly repeating the same tactic over and over again even when it has always failed, creeds could be thought of as symptoms of a long psychological disorder.
History teems with movements that considered themselves Christian, but that some bishop or council found heretical. In seminary we learned the names of many of them, for example, the Sabellians, Socinians, Ebionates, Erastians, Anabaptists, and Antinomians. The list goes on. Sometimes we were supposed to remember what their teachings were and how they deviated from some alleged norm. Many have long since disappeared. Those that survived have often gradually been recognized as different, but legitimate variants of Christianity. The same is true for individuals. In 1431 Joan of Arc was burned as a heretic. In the twentieth century she became a saint.
Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) once said, “The religions we call false were once true,” but it could also be said that, within Christianity, movements once considered heretical are now often welcomed into the ecumenical household. All Protestant churches fall into this category, even though in 2007 the Vatican repeated its insistence that they cannot properly be called “churches.” At the same time the Vatican affirmed that the Eastern Orthodox Church can properly be called a “church,” although “a wounded one.” This judgment comes even though the Roman Catholic pope and the Eastern Orthodox patriarch once excommunicated each other. It was the lifelong goal of Pope John Paul II, one at which he did not, however, succeed, to reunite what he called the “two lungs” of the church. Yesterday’s heretics and schismatics become today’s “separated brethren.”
My own favorite example of a “heretical” group that survived centuries of excommunication, persecution, and exile to become a small but significant part of the Christian family is the Waldensians. First organized by Peter Waldo as the “Poor Men of Lyon” around 1176, they emphasized living with simplicity. Waldo himself, a rich merchant, gave all his money away and suggested that the church could more credibly preach the message of Jesus if it did the same. The Waldensians taught that the Bible should be the sole authority and therefore eventually questioned the authority of the papacy and rejected the idea of purgatory and the practice of granting indulgences. Like the Franciscans, who came to birth at about the same time, the Waldensians, although they were laypeople (as St. Francis was), preached in the streets and the markets. But unlike the Franciscans they allowed women to preach and did not try to seek approval from the pope. The papacy responded by branding them heretics and directing the Dominicans to use the Inquisition to root them out. But the repression did not succeed. The Waldensians fled to remote mountain regions in Italy and France until the late nineteenth century when religious toleration finally arrived in Italy.
For many years now the Waldensians have maintained a church, a bookstore, and a seminary just off the Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome, a short walk from the Vatican. I happened to be staying at that seminary in the summer of 1996 when Pope John Paul II issued an unexpected invitation to the “Valdese,” as he called them, to meet him for a special gathering in St. Peter’s Basilica. The pontiff had just returned from a trip to Slovakia, where he had apparently been touched by the sight of a monument honoring some early Protestants who had been martyred there during one of the region’s many eruptions of religious strife. Unable to ignore such an unusual invitation, I joined the “Valdese” to walk along the Tiber to St. Peter’s square.
When we arrived, to our astonishment the Vatican staff gathered our small group not in some little reception room as we had expected, but around the high altar in St. Peter’s itself. There we stood for a few minutes, some of us gazing up at the biblical text emblazoned around the inside of the dome: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock will I establish my church.” After a few minutes the Successor of Peter entered in glistening white papal regalia, walked slowly to the altar, and then told us, in deeply sincere tones, that it was now time to leave our differences behind and search out what we all have in common. He then strolled around and shook hands with everyone, blessed the entire delegation, and left. I am sure this was the first time any pope had ever received and blessed a group of Waldensians. It had taken eight hundred years.
It sometimes surprises me to notice how lightly some Christian leaders, Catholic and Protestant, seem to take creedal articles for which their predecessors were willing to burn people or even to be burned themselves. During the reign of Charlemagne, the Western church arbitrarily inserted a short phrase, called the filioque (“and the Son”) into the Apostles’ Creed. It stated that the Holy Spirit derives (the word they used was “processes”) not just from the Father, but also from the Son. Eastern Orthodox Church leaders were outraged. The point may seem trivial today, but to them it clearly meant that the Western church had subordinated the Spirit to Christ, and this threatened the equality of the three Persons of the Trinity. Arguments raged over this insertion for a thousand years, especially since the creed is recited during Mass, and some theologians considered the filioque a major obstacle to the reunion of the “two lungs.” Then, however, when Pope John Paul II hosted the Eastern Orthodox patriarch in Rome and they conducted an ecumenical Mass together, the pope simply left out the troublesome phrase. Few people even noticed.
Still, in its own way, John Paul II’s welcoming of heretics and schismatics is a hopeful sign. It suggests that even within the heart of the Catholic Church the Age of Belief, with its insistence on creedal conformity and doctrinal correctness, is passing,
and an Age of the Spirit is stirring. The transition will not be a smooth one, as I learned during a highly informative conversation I had with the man who was to become John Paul II’s successor on the throne of St. Peter.
CHAPTER 8
No Lunch with the Prefect
How to Fix the Papacy
The one conversation I have ever had with Joseph Ratzinger, the man who later became Pope Benedict XVI, taught me a useful lesson. I learned that, although the invaluable new knowledge recently gained about early Christianity could have enormous implications for the future, it might not. A change in how we understand the past can often generate a change in how we view the future. But I got a particularly vivid lesson in how it might not happen one crisp January day in Rome in 1988.
Since I was planning to visit the Eternal City anyway, I dashed off a letter to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the principal guardian of orthodoxy in the Catholic Church. I wrote that, as I hoped to be in Rome, I would be honored to have the opportunity to meet him for an informal conversation. To my mild surprise, there arrived by return mail a large light blue envelope from Vatican City bearing the papal coat-of-arms, containing a letter on embossed, textured stationery informing me that the prefect would be pleased to meet me at 1:00 P.M. I immediately accepted, then hurriedly asked some of my friends who are acquainted with the folkways of Rome if that designated hour meant that the prefect was inviting me to lunch.
“No, not lunch, not in Rome,” one of my informants told me. “One o’clock means that if he is enjoying the conversation and wants to invite you to lunch, he will. Otherwise, not.”
Having arrived the day before my appointment, I stayed overnight at a residence in Rome run by the Dominicans. But I hardly slept at all on the night before my rendezvous with the prefect. As it happened, some thirty sisters from third-world countries were there at the same time for a brushup theology course. We all ate supper together, and they laughed and looked doubtful when I told them that I had a date to meet Cardinal Ratzinger. The misgivings they voiced about the prefect surprised me. They obviously considered a meeting with him a waste of my time. “Why would you want to see him?” one head of a community of sisters in Latin America asked. I told them I thought I would enjoy the exchange, but they seemed skeptical. Inwardly I wondered myself how it would go and lost a lot sleep worrying about.