But the Council of Tyre wasn’t over. Athanasius still had to face charges of using violence and bribery to attain his position as archbishop of Alexandria; of sedition (plotting treason against Constantine); and of smashing a communion cup, wrecking a communion table, and laying waste to an entire Melitian church.
But then something entirely unexpected happened.
God must have taken pity on the beleaguered bishops in the Great Hall of the municipal palace at Tyre that day, for now an event intervened that would transport most of them, in a single day, from the suburbs of hell that the Council of Tyre had become to what would seem to them like the suburbs of heaven.
One of Constantine’s trusted emissaries, a shorthand secretary named Marianus, arrived early in the morning to read them a letter from the emperor. The imperial will as expressed in this letter sent the bishops scurrying back to their lodgings to pack a few belongings. Then they hurried to Tyre’s city square, not far from the palace, where a long line of blue-maned imperial post horses, each hitched to a chariot, pawed the paving stones impatiently in eager anticipation of galloping out of the courtyard.
The bishops had been told to hurry, but the charioteers, lounging beside the chariots, seemed not to have heard. They got to their feet, ambled over to the bishops, taunted them, refused to answer their questions, and then clutched at their purple robes and threatened to steal them. The bishops protested loudly; suddenly Marianus appeared, wielding a whip and screaming at the charioteers to obey the emperor’s orders. He threw himself into their midst, lashed two around the shoulders, then drew his sword and ran straight at a third.
The charioteers immediately obeyed. They bundled the bishops into the chariots. Whips cracked; the drivers shouted; with a clattering of wheels the procession of chariots rolled out of the city square. Barking dogs, shrieking children, and a left-behind bishop raced frantically beside it; beggars and peddlers tumbled out of the way. Marianus, on horseback, still brandishing the whip, galloped ahead, behind, beside. They still had not been told where they were going. The procession of chariots thundered through the fortified south gate of the city. At that moment, a lone seagull alighted on top of the round stone tower rising above the center of the gate; as it did so, a falcon, who had been watching it from on high, plummeted down quick as a lightning bolt, seized the gull in its talons, and bore it silently away into the shining sky.
The procession sped south down the coast of Phoenicia; on the right, the blue-green Mediterranean owned the view up to the wide horizon; near the shore, Roman triremes, Phoenician fishing boats, Libyan trading vessels—every sort of seacraft—jostled each other for possession of the beaches, the wharves, the mooring posts. The procession plunged farther down a coastline that grew straighter and more somber as the sun rose high up in the sky and passed the midpoint. Some afternoon mists drifted in; and then, as if the mood had become too oppressive, the line of chariots veered sharply from the main highway and, turning east, started up a wide, solid, slowly rising road.
Now Marianus told them where they were going. The bishops rejoiced, and in their joy some of them seemed to see unfolding around them the momentous events that had taken place along this highway: the slaves of King Hiram of Phoenicia dragging wooden carts packed with cedars of Lebanon to be used in the building of the Temple of Solomon; and then, a thousand years later, Roman legionnaires escorting back from Jerusalem, in wooden cages, shackled, naked, and bleeding Jewish princes who had tried and failed to save the Temple of Jerusalem from destruction.
Their destination was Jerusalem.
The procession arrived at the city as darkness was falling, and mounted by a winding route the wide, low hill called Mount Golgotha (“Skull”),*16 where Jesus Christ had been crucified.
Some of the bishops had been here before. But they recognized nothing. Everything had changed. Gone was the elegant temple of Diana whose pagan mass had dominated the top of the hill; in its place there rose up, from a base three times broader—stretching, it seemed in the semidarkness, almost to the sky—a massive, ornate, glittering basilica.
The bishops stared in astonishment. The basilica was all sparkling colonnade and dome and rotunda and foursquare pillars, with portico-lined courtyards threading walls and spaces together. This was the Church of the Great Martyrium, completed only a week before and constructed by Constantine on a schedule that would enable the emperor to consecrate it on the thirtieth anniversary of his reign, which was tomorrow.
Marianus directed the bishops inside, where the smoke of swaying censers caressed their nostrils with perfumes so exquisite that all memory of the stench of the dyeing factories of Tyre was expunged from their minds. Surrounded by “numerous ornaments and gifts” whose “costliness and magnificence is such that they cannot be looked upon without exciting wonder” (in the words of the historian Sozomenus),30 the bishops gazed in awe at the tomb of Jesus Christ.
Isaac Newton would have despised the Church of the Great Martyrium. Already on the day of its consecration it was on the way to becoming an emporium for idolaters. Along with Christ’s tomb (and Adam’s!), it could lay claim to a piece of the stone that was rolled away from the door of Christ’s tomb, a piece of the pillar Christ was tied to when he was whipped by the Romans, and the copper plate, inscribed with the words “This is the King of the Jews that Pontius Pilate had had nailed to Christ’s cross”—and more!*17
But these relics, still few in number, were pushed well into the background when, the next morning, the Church of the Great Martyrium was consecrated with ceremonies held around its gleaming altar. The towering atrium teemed with hundreds of bishops, some from places so far away (with names like Merv and Gundeshapur and Kashgar)†1 that local bishops had thought these cities were mythical places in fairy tales (of which they disapproved) that they knew mothers read to their children to help them fall asleep. Athanasius had chosen not to attend this gala event—and his instincts were sound. It was at this ceremony that Constantine, represented by his grave and decorous sister Constantia (some sources claim it was his sister Irene), received Arius back into the orthodox church and allowed him to take communion—a ceremony that might have provoked in Athanasius the same paroxysms of anger that had landed him in the docket at the Council of Tyre.
The historian Sozomenus writes that Constantine brought the bishops from the Council of Tyre to Jerusalem without prior notice because he “deemed it necessary that the disputes which prevailed among the bishops who had been convened at Tyre should be first adjusted, and that they should be purged of all discord and grief before going to the consecration of the temple.”31
But the bishops had still been brimming over with discord and grief when they left Tyre, so much so that even if the consecration ceremony in Jerusalem had been able to purge them of this discord and grief, it’s likely that, once they got back to Tyre and found themselves in the same quagmire of sin and folly they’d left behind, they would have immediately forgotten, as if they’d never experienced them, the exquisite scents of the Church of the Great Martyrium, the brilliance of that same light of Golgotha that had shone upon their Savior, and the matchless pleasure of being cosseted, spoiled, and loved by the sister of Constantine.
So the bishops returned, and the Council of Tyre reconvened to consider the charges of murder, mayhem, and sedition that had been laid against Athanasius. And Eusebius of Caesarea—as casually as if he were simply adjusting the exquisite white omophorion around his neck and shoulders—sent six bishops, all Melitians, back to the suburbs of Alexandria to interview all the witnesses a second time about the charges that the Melitians themselves had brought against Athanasius.
Not surprisingly, the members of the task force discovered they’d been right all along. They carried out their duties very thoroughly. Newton scholar Rob Iliffe quotes the seventeenth-century historian William Cave, who, relying on the (pro-Athanasius) historian Theodoret, informs his readers that these six bishops “carried themselves like men resolved to go t
hrough their Work, endeavoring to exert Confessions by drawn Swords, Whips, Clubs, and all methods of Cruelty and Severity, not sparing even the devoted Virgins, whom they suffered the very Gentiles to strip naked.”32
The task force returned. The council ruled against Athanasius. But at some point Athanasius had disappeared. He fled to Constantinople, surprised Constantine as he was galloping back from the hunt, and pleaded with the emperor to come to Tyre and try the case himself.
Constantine, first enraged, then amused, agreed to come. The anti-Athanasius factions at the council, hearing of this and thoroughly frightened, reversed their ruling and, out of the blue, convicted Athanasius of having prevented a fleet of corn ships from sailing from Alexandria to Constantinople.
This accusation and ruling weren’t as bizarre as they might seem. Bishops were known to threaten to bottle up fleets of corn ships in the port of Alexandria. Will Durant writes: “Egypt’s imperial function was to be the granary of Rome. Large tracts of land were taken from the priests and turned over to Roman and Alexandrian capitalists. . . . Every step in the agricultural process was planned and controlled by the state [for the ultimate benefit of the empire].”33 And, adds Paul Johnson, “to overturn an imperial decision which impinged on Church affairs . . . the bishops of Alexandria, who controlled the seamen’s union of the port, threatened from time to time to starve the imperial capital, Constantinople, of its Egyptian grain supplies.”34
No evidence was produced to support this ruling against Athanasius. But none was needed, since the bishops knew Constantine was looking for an opportunity to rid himself of his troublesome archbishop Athanasius. The emperor exiled the archbishop to the provincial capital of Triers, in Gaul (close to modern-day Luxembourg), where Athanasius would cool his heels for two years in the company of some of the empire’s most brilliant, if banished, intellectuals.
Let’s leave Athanasius in Triers and return to three questions Isaac Newton has posed in “Paradoxical Questions” and that it is now time to answer (question 4 has two parts).
Question 4a: “Whether it was a dead man’s hand in a bag or the dead body of Arsenius which was laid before the Council of Tyre to prove that Arsenius was dead”;
Question 4b: “Whether it was Arsenius alive or only his letter which Athanasius produced in the Council of Tyre to prove that he was not dead”; and
Question 5: “Whether the story of the dead man’s hand & the living Arsenius was not feigned by Athanasius about 25 years after the time of the Council of Tyre.”
Newton believed Athanasius had written all three letters himself. He had written the first two prior to the Council of Tyre, and the third before the Council of Sardica, convened in 343 in Saint Sophia Church in Serdica or Sardica (now Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria).
We’ll shortly see why Newton believed this.
The great mathematician and hounder of Athanasius never ceased to believe the archbishop was guilty of all the crimes for which he was charged at the Council of Tyre (except for the crime for which he was actually convicted: holding up the corn ships at the port of Alexandria).
Why was Newton so sure Athanasius was guilty? Sir Isaac never found a smoking gun. He never found a confession by Athanasius.
What he did find was a series of omissions on the part of Athanasius.
Let us explain.
The charges leveled against Athanasius at Tyre dogged him all his life. He could never shake them off. Nobody could either prove them or disprove them. At all the ecumenical councils the archbishop of Alexandria attended for the rest of his life, there was scarcely one at which he did not have to defend himself against one or another of these charges.
In general the councils were called to debate doctrinal issues. At many, the Arians fought to assert the truth of Arius’s views over those of Athanasius. In accusing Athanasius of these crimes, they were attacking the doctrine of the Trinity.
But there was a powerful personal element: Athanasius was despised by many.
Newton tells us that, however passionately Athanasius defended himself against the accusation that he had murdered Arsenius, never once, at any of the councils, did he defend himself by providing documentation that, at the Council of Tyre in 335, he conducted the living Arsenius into the Great Hall and presented him to Dionysius and Eusebius. Usually, Athanasius simply cited the letter from Pinnes he had read at the council.
This was true even for the Council of Alexandria, which Athanasius himself convened in 340. This was a fairly small council. There were fewer than a hundred bishops present, most all of them handpicked by Athanasius, and almost all of them from Egypt. In the broad, crowded streets of Alexandria, it’s likely that the bright purple robes of the bishops went relatively unnoticed this time. It’s possible that not a single one-eyed, one-thumbed, hobbling bishop attended.
Athanasius had convened the council largely to persuade the bishops to rubber-stamp a defense of himself he had written relative to the crimes he was still being accused of committing. Nowhere in that defense—copies of which exist today, and which at the time were received by bishops across the land—does Athanasius ever mention having escorted the live Arsenius into the Great Hall of the Council of Nicaea.
Newton writes: “Athanasius and the Bishops of Egypt when collected in a Council at Alexandria five years after the Council of Tyre knew nothing of it [presenting Arsenius at Tyre], as you may perceive by that letter which that Council wrote in defence of Athanasius against Arius & the Council of Tyre.”35
Newton cites two occasions, in the period between the mythical death of Arius and the fourth exile of Athanasius, when it would have been greatly to the advantage of the beleaguered archbishop to make the story of the appearance of Arsenius at the Council of Tyre known. Rob Iliffe notes that “Pope Julius was ignorant of this account when he defended Athanasius in 341 nor did the Council of Sardica mention it in 343.”36 The only piece of exculpatory evidence he ever presented was the ostensible letter from Pinnes.
Newton tells us Arsenius was never seen or heard of again after the Council of Tyre. And we should remember, he says, that Athanasius was actually convicted at the end of the council of the murder of Arsenius (though the bishops subsequently rescinded this conviction out of fear of Constantine). Newton writes: “as if the accusers produced before the Council not a dead man’s hand but a dead body & Athanasius produced against them not Arsenius alive but his letter only & the accusers were so far from being shamed that the Council notwithstanding the Letters proceeded to condemn Athanasius for the murder.”37
If it never happened—if Athanasius never presented the living Arsenius at the Council of Tyre—where did the story come from? From the pen of Athanasius, says Newton.
Newton asks us to revisit the year, when Athanasius found himself banished to the Egyptian desert for the fourth time, when the desperate ex-archbishop engaged in the frenzy of letter writing that included the fraudulent account of the death of Arius in a boghouse. It was then, says Newton—in 360—in letters he wrote the monks and in the Letters to Serapion that he wrote at roughly the same time, that Athanasius first told the story of the arrival of Arsenius at the Council of Tyre.
The story of the severed hand and the live Arsenius was just another fiction from the pen of Athanasius—fiction Athanasius had convinced himself was fact, or fiction he had convinced himself God gave him the right to create because it would protect Athanasius as he went about his task of persuading the world of the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Newton makes a final point: “He [Arsenius, had he been alive] would not have suffered the whole Roman world for many years to continue in war & confusion about his death, but have speedily shewn himself to the Emperor & to the world to the confusion of all the enemies of his dear friend Athanasius.”38
It is impossible, in this short space, to deal with all of the paradoxical questions Newton raises about the actions of Athanasius. Let’s complete the chapter by dealing with those questions that, because o
f their wider focus, have the best chance of holding the interest of the modern reader.
In 355, the drama of Athanasius single-handedly at war with the Roman Empire over the doctrine of the Trinity reached another climactic point. Constantine’s son Constantius II was emperor (337–361). He was an avowed Arian, which made him and Athanasius mortal enemies. Constantine had usually held himself apart from theological discussions; his son Constantius, though a poor student, nonetheless developed a sincere interest in theology and loved debating the subject. In his novel Julian (1962), Gore Vidal gives us a sympathetic portrait of Constantius, seeing him through the eyes of his nephew, Julian the Apostate (who would succeed his uncle in 361). Constantius was, writes Julian/Vidal, “a man of overwhelming dignity [whose] . . . suspicious nature was obviously made worse by the fact that he was somewhat less intelligent than those he had to deal with. This added to his unease and made him humanly inaccessible.” Constantius’s most attractive feature, writes the narrator, was his “curiously mournful eyes. . . . They were the eyes of a poet who had seen all the tragedy in this world and knows what is to come in the next. Yet the good effect of those eyes was entirely undone by a peevish mouth.”39
Thus Vidal, in his wonderful novel (which was deeply researched) presents Constantius II as a man of some complexity and subtlety. Edward Gibbon—who, we’ll recall, never read Newton’s “Paradoxical Questions”—wrote of the emperor that “the reign of Constantius was disgraced by the unjust and ineffectual persecution of the great Athanasius.”40 Most historians share Gibbon’s view, though we should be aware that Constantius was a man not without nuance.
It goes without saying that Newton would have completely disagreed with Gibbon. The mathematician-historian presents Constantius as a man incapable of injustice. Newton writes:
the virtues of this Emperor were so illustrious that I do not find a better character given of any Prince for clemency, temperance, chastity, contempt of popular fame, affection to Christianity, justice, prudence, princely carriage & good government, then is given to him even by his very enemies. . . . [He] reigned in the hearts of his people, & swayed the world by their love for him, so that no Prince could be farther from deserving the name of a persecutor.41
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 12