by Tom Bissell
During the 350s, a group of Christians called the Homoiousians (from their position that the Father and the Son were like [homoios] but not identical to each other) emerged to present Christianity with yet another way of thinking about Jesus Christ’s position within the Godhead. Unfortunately, the Father and the Son being “like” but not “identical” to each other was even vaguer than the Nicene Creed! By the end of the decade, Constantius pushed to resolve the issue. The result was utter confusion, with several creeds and councils succeeding primarily in sharpening the divide between eastern and western bishops. One of these synods, the Council of Rimini, resulted in an official creed of the church that endorsed a variety of Arian positions. It proved so influential that many Goth tribes in northern Europe would maintain their Arian faith until the seventh century. Constantius died of fever in 361, while on his way to meet his usurping cousin in battle, whereupon Christian theology went adrift for two decades. Had Constantius not perished, we might today be living in an Arian Christian world.
Constantius’s usurping cousin, Julian, was the last member of the Constantinian dynasty. Raised a Christian, he rejected the faith while still a young man, having come to regard the debates over the substance or essence of the Godhead as a calamitous waste of mental energy. When Julian attempted to re-paganize the empire, he became the last imperial champion of classical Roman culture.*11 During his two-year rule (he was killed in 363 during a military campaign in modern-day Iraq), Christian divisions deepened, much to Julian’s delight, if not exactly to his shock. The eastern emperor Valens, who ruled from 364 to 378, was convinced by Homoiousian logic and drove into exile several bishops who disagreed with him. Athanasius, who was now an old man, attempted to rally Christians by holding up the Nicene Creed as a starting point of philosophical agreement, having forgotten that the Nicene Creed was an ad hoc solution few Christians at the time admired. Eventually, Athanasius was moved to revive the now widely discredited word homoousios to describe the Godhead. By this time, Athanasius’s stature was such that Valens, who greatly disliked the old Nicene, allowed him to die in 373 while still holding his episcopal office. But Christian theology, literally and figuratively, was still very much up in the air.
Athanasius had trouble convincing those who disagreed with him because his keenest interest was in destroying his opponents, not winning them over. In this sense, a group of Christian thinkers known as the Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—became Athanasius’s most important theological inheritors. Hailing from an insignificant province of Roman Asia but born to a wealthy family, Gregory of Nazianzus quickly developed a reputation as having one of the strongest theological minds of his time. After the catastrophic battlefield death of the Arian eastern emperor Valens in 378, Gregory made his way to Constantinople just as a bishop named Eunomius began to preach an extreme form of subordinationism that denied that Jesus Christ and the Father had any substance or essence in common. Gregory responded to Eunomius, as well as to milder Arians, with a series of lectures today known as The Five Theological Orations.
Gregory helped change the tenor of the debate in Constantinople by refusing to discuss the Trinity via elaborate analogies to the physical world, which Latin-speaking Christians generally found to be persuasive but which left many Greek-speaking Christians cold. He readily admitted that the Trinity appeared to defeat logical explanation and thus appealed to the deeper, more mystical logic of the universe and often used pagan thinking to support his points. He explained the co-eternal nature of the Trinity by pointing out that “there never was a time when [God] was not. And the same is true of the Son and the Holy Ghost. Ask me again, and again I will answer you, When was the Son begotten? When the Father was not begotten.” Anything that is a part of God, Gregory argued, must necessarily be viewed as co-eternal with him: “The sun is not prior to its light….[T]he sources of time are not subject to time.” This was not know-nothing mysticism or angry invective but actual Christian philosophy. Gregory of Nazianzus helped make the logic behind the Nicene Creed—and full Trinitarian thinking—intellectually acceptable to Greek-speaking Christians.
VI.
In many ways, the best thing to happen to Christianity was imperial backing; the faith might not have risen so meteorically to prominence without it. The worst thing to happen to Christianity was also imperial backing, for rarely has any clergy deeply entangled with power politics made wise decisions. This is why the various councils that had convened in the fourth century saw so little lasting consensus. As the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, once Christians had “absorbed one set of explanations about what the divine was, anything from outside which disrupted those explanations threatened their access to divine power.” Yet Christianity was no longer about access to divine power through table fellowship and baptism and carefully reasoned epistles; it was about access to divine power through bizarrely complex doctrinal adjustments and naked appeals to earthly authority—and every bishop knew it. This explains the great derangement that affected Christian thinking throughout the fourth century and that came to a head in Constantinople in the 370s. The Cappadocian father Gregory of Nyssa, who was visiting at the time, famously noted, “If in this city you ask anyone for change, he will discuss with you whether the son is begotten or unbegotten. If you ask about the quality of bread, you will receive the answer that ‘the Father is greater, the Son is less.’ If you suggest that a bath is desirable, you will be told that, ‘there was nothing before the Son was created.’ ” What few realized was that this atmosphere of open Christian debate was about to vanish off the face of the earth.
No one could agree on what early Christian writings said about Jesus Christ because, on this issue and others, Christian writings were either unclear or contradicted themselves. Many Christians used the same books—in some cases, the same scenes—to come to radically different theological conclusions. A Roman emperor was incapable of making that problem go away. When the western ruler Theodosius I assumed power in 379, the empire was in conceivable danger of military collapse. On the issue of Christian discord, however, Theodosius had a novel idea: rather than find authority for his views within Christian scripture, he would wield his authority over Christian scripture. A fervent believer in the Nicene Creed, which in his native Spain went largely unquestioned, Theodosius entered Constantinople, long an Arian power base, with the purpose of uniting all Christianity under the Latin-speaking world’s understanding of God. One of his first decrees was that the Father and the Son had to be referred to jointly; any belief that fell short of proper Nicene thinking was condemned as “insane.” Theodosius sacked the local Arian bishop and replaced him with Gregory of Nazianzus. He stationed soldiers outside churches so newly appointed Nicene priests could preach without being torn apart by Arian parishioners. Finally, he called for yet another synod, the First Council of Constantinople, which convened in 381 and whose attendees Theodosius himself selected.
While many matters were discussed during the council, its importance to church history derives from its renewal of the Nicene Creed, which now came backed by the full force of a hard-nosed emperor and a battery of theological quislings. (Gregory of Nazianzus was a noble exception to this. Disgusted by the council’s strong-arm political tactics, he left and resigned his bishopric.) Once again, Jesus Christ was said to be “consubstantial with the Father,” and, once again, there was no explicit mention of the Trinity. In exchange for support of his neo-Nicene Creed, Theodosius did not blink at offering wavering bishops various emoluments. (He had already made it illegal for any non-Nicene Christian to be appointed bishop.)
The historian Charles Freeman argues there were “ideological reasons” for why Theodosius and the Nicene faction were so eager to argue on behalf of a Son who was co-eternal to, and as powerful as, the Father. The Jesus of the gospels was in no position to justify the hierarchy of the imperial church. He had been executed by the Roman authorities and preached a coming kingdom in
which the poor had an honored part. An indisputably divine and kingly Jesus served as a different sort of lodestar. Freeman calls this latter Jesus “a bizarre distortion of the historical reality but one that reflects the imperial ideology within which the church now operated.” The Nicene Creed and the relationship between Jesus Christ and God it put forth thus became a “mystery of the faith,” but only because the Nicene Creed was, and remains, such a theologically frustrating explanation for who and what Jesus Christ was. Unlike the original Nicene Creed, which was never intended for liturgical use, the neo-Nicene Creed began to be used during baptisms and later crept into the liturgy itself. The strange words it contained imprinted on the minds of Christians, who learned to recite them without fully thinking about what they said. (As an erstwhile altar boy, I can personally attest to this phenomenon.)
Even with Theodosius’s backing, many Greek-speaking Christians remained unsatisfied with the results of the first Council of Constantinople. The following year, a second, smaller council was convened in the city, which approved the Greek use of hypostasis to describe the three substances of the Trinity (long a point of contention between East and West) and officially codified the Holy Spirit’s inclusion within that Trinity. These became, and remain, the tent-pole postulations of orthodox Christianity, which now came into formal existence. Arianism, in all its guises, real or perceived, was outlawed. By the late fourth century, the agents of Theodosius wielded largely unchallenged power. In the next century and beyond, that power would be used to dismantle the classical world: the Olympic games were shut down, non-Christians were forbidden to hold office or serve in the military, and many important pagan temples were destroyed.
The hard, strange work of Christology was not yet complete, of course. Augustine’s thoughts on the Trinity yielded the beautiful insight that the Holy Spirit was, among other things, the conduit through which the Father and the Son expressed their love for each other. Nestorianism, and the questions it raised about the nature of Jesus’s humanity, were addressed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and divisively settled at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The answer was yet another adjusted restatement of the Nicene formula: his divinity was consubstantial with the Father, and his humanity was consubstantial with ours—two natures (or substances) united in one divine man, whose essential being remained unchanged throughout his spiritually eventful life. Finally, at the Third Council of Constantinople in 681, Christian theologians put to rest questions about the nature of Jesus Christ’s will. He had not one will but two, and his two wills—one divine, one human—did not and could not conflict but were perfectly (if paradoxically) complementary. It was the last important theological ruling issued by an imperial council. The best of Christianity’s many, varied minds finally knew who and what Jesus Christ was, right down to the God-sparked molecules of his hypostasis, and it had taken them only 650 years to work it all out.
* * *
*1 These similarities gave Edward Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the occasion for a footnote daring in its asperity: “Apollonius of Tyana was born about the same time as Jesus Christ. His life (that of the former) is related in so fabulous a manner by his disciples that we are at a loss to discover whether he was a sage, an imposter, or a fanatic.”
*2 Jesus’s resemblance to mythological figures such as Osiris, Hercules, and Mithra, which is sometimes argued as evidence that he, too, is a purely mythological figure, is both vastly overstated and not nearly as interesting as the Christ-as-myth theory’s proponents appear to believe.
*3 Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of Jesus’s birth and descent from David pose a number of problems. Not only are their genealogies in disagreement, but Jesus’s Davidic descent is traced through Joseph, his supposed stepfather, though it may be that both Matthew and Luke were interested primarily in the potent symbolism of Davidic descent rather than literal bloodlines. (That Paul was familiar with the tradition of Jesus’s descent through David suggests it was a hugely important part of the earliest ideations of him. Most likely, it gave Jesus’s salvific purpose on earth historical context.) In Luke, though, we are told that Jesus “was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli.” That “as was thought” is almost certainly the insertion of an alarmed early copyist who worried that any ambiguity on the matter of Jesus’s patrimony would be exploitable by Adoptionist Christians.
*4 Luke uses the phrase again, in Acts 13:33, but frames it as pertaining to Jesus’s resurrection (much as Paul did before him) rather than to his baptism. The idea that Jesus was elevated to a new stratum of divinity at the moment of his resurrection was never as controversial within the early church, even though it is far from the eventual position reached by Christian orthodoxy.
*5 In the gospels, Jesus refers to himself as the “Son of God” only in John. In Mark and Matthew, the phrase Jesus uses to refer to himself is “the Son of Man.” (Luke, later than both, avoids the term, probably due to its strong apocalyptic insinuation.) A version of the phrase appears in the book of Daniel, one of the youngest works of Hebrew scripture and a crucially important text for early Christianity. (It was so important to early Christianity that the rabbis at the forefront of second-century Judaism effectively downgraded Daniel from its position among the “prophetic” books to a less exalted category: “writings.”) Within Daniel, we find an early mention of the “Kingdom of God,” along with a vision of “one like a son of man coming with the clouds of Heaven.” Daniel’s “son of man” is bracketed by much odder visions of a horn with human eyes and a lion with eagle’s wings, and it is possible that much of Daniel’s vision, including the “son of man” language, was borrowed from Canaanite mythology. No one knows if anyone in Jesus’s time would have even recognized “Son of Man” as a special title with special meaning. Nothing in Daniel underlines the phrase as prophetic of a cosmic redeemer. The noncanonical 1 Enoch, however, in which the term also appears, anticipates something closer to a redeeming Messiah, with mentions of his sitting on a “throne of glory” and being referred to by God literally as “little Yahweh.” The difficulty posed by early Christian use of “Son of Man” is exemplified by a simple fact: but for one mention in Acts and two in Revelation, the title does not appear outside the gospels.
*6 Paul closes his first letter to the Corinthians with an Aramaic saying: “Marana atha!” (Our Lord, come!). With the exception of his two uses of Abba (father) in his letters to the Galatians and Romans, this is the only time Paul cites Aramaic language in his surviving letters. Quite clearly he is quoting a then-familiar Christian saying, possibly one derived from the Jerusalem or Palestinian church. The phrase was also used during reenactments of the Lord’s Supper (as The Didache, at least, has it). What this suggests is that “Lord,” when used for Jesus, had a clear eschatological inference—that Jesus, when he returned, would somehow govern on God’s behalf how the present reality gave way to the next.
*7 Usually rendered in the gospels as didaskalos, Greek for “teacher.” It does not refer to “rabbi” in any modern sense of the word. The foundations of rabbinic Judaism did not begin to cohere until a century after Jesus’s death.
*8 Clement believed Paul was the author of the Letter to the Hebrews and suggested that Paul left the letter unsigned out of recognition of having been divinely commissioned as the apostle to the Gentiles. Jerome followed Clement in this belief, and for more than a thousand years the Vulgate Bible that Jerome was central to translating and compiling listed the work as “The Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews.” This view did not prevail among all, as Hebrews has almost nothing linguistically or conceptually in common with the authentic Pauline writings. The author was a highly educated Jewish Christian, knowledgeable about Jewish scripture, and conversant with Hellenistic philosophy. Some (including, apparently, Tertullian) identified the author of Hebrews as Paul’s friend Barnabas, but several modern scholars have pointed to Apollos, “an eloquent man, well-versed in the scriptures,” whom Paul, along with Aqui
la and Priscilla, meets in Ephesus in Acts of the Apostles; Paul refers to Apollos several times in 1 Corinthians, sometimes tensely.
*9 The creed we typically refer to as the Nicene Creed was actually formulated in Constantinople several decades later.
*10 Athanasius’s influence on Christianity goes beyond theology. A festal letter he wrote in the late 360s—one of Christianity’s most difficult decades—is one of the first attempts to define the canon of the New Testament. Apparently, the letter was successful, for the books Athanasius listed are, by and large, the accepted New Testament canon. Amazingly, Athanasius’s letter is one of the only glimpses we have into the formation of the New Testament. As one scholar writes, “Nothing is more amazing in the annals of the Christian Church than the absence of detailed accounts of so significant a process.”
*11 Julian’s most diabolical plan? To rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, in defiance of Christian claims to have made its mother faith obsolete. In Julian’s mind, Jewish beliefs were marginally more acceptable by virtue of being ancient.
SIMON THE CANANAEAN & THADDAEUS
* * *
Saint Sernin’s Basilica: Toulouse, France
PINK CITY • SATURNINUS • IDENTITY PROBLEMS • ZAROËS & ARFAXAT • SUNDAY MARKET • THE ZEALOTS • BANDITS • BROTHERS OF THE LORD • THE GREATEST RIDDLE • 1 ENOCH • APOSTLES NOT OF THE TWELVE