The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
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The breadth of these “Homoean” creeds offered the hope that a wider spectrum of opinion could accept them so that the Constantinian policy of consensus could be sustained. Yet for many this breadth was also their weakness. The use of the word “like” was to many simply blurring the issue. “The kingdom of God is ‘like’ a grain of mustard seed,” one witty bishop who knew his parables remarked, “but not much.”8 “Homoios,” said another, “was a . . . figure seeming to look in the direction of all who passed by, a boot fitting either foot, a winnowing with every wind.”9 A wide variety of alternative formulas were championed in these years. In 358 Bishop Basil of Ancyra and a small group of bishops proposed the formula homoiousios, “of similar substance,” rather than the Nicene homoousios, “of identical substance.” These shifts in terminology and the intense debates which they provoked earned ridicule from Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who wrote sarcastically of “furious contests over a single diphthong.” Others, following Arius, believed that the “unlikeness” of Father and Son should be stressed—the Son was a separate creation and totally distinct from the Father. Constantius eventually accepted the Fourth Creed of Sirmium, the so-called Dated Creed, of 359, as a rallying ground for consensus. The creed was awkwardly phrased. Jesus was declared:
one only begotten Son of God who before all ages and before all beginning and before all conceivable time and before all comprehensible substance was begotten impassibly from God, through whom the ages were set up and all things came into existence, begotten as only begotten, sole from the sole father, like to the Father who begot him, according to the Scriptures, whose generation nobody understands except the Father who begot him.
It ended:
. . . the word ousia because it was naively inserted by the Fathers, though not familiar to the masses, caused disturbance, and because the Scriptures do not contain it, we have decided that it should be removed and there should be absolutely no mention of ousia for the future . . . but we declare that the Son is like (homoios) the Father, as also the Holy Scriptures declare and teach.10
Constantius’ aim was to establish this cumbersome creed at two councils, one meeting in the western empire at Ariminum (modern Rimini) in the spring of 360 and the other planned for the autumn of the same year at Seleucia in the east.11 Things did not go smoothly. The Ariminum council met and proved highly suspicious of this “eastern” creed. Even though there had been virtually no western representation at Nicaea, the western bishops seemed happier with the straightforward monotheism of the Nicene formula. It was close to the idea, always strong in the west even if not formulated with any precision, that Father and Son shared a divinity. Having revived the Nicene Creed, a delegation of ten bishops, together with a group representing the minority anti-Nicene view, set off to Thrace to put their views to Constantius. The emperor was away on campaign, but after discussions with eastern bishops the delegates changed their minds and persuaded a reconvened Ariminum council that they should accept the Dated Creed, possibly also arguing that they would be out of step with the eastern bishops if they did not.12 There is some evidence that a consensus of the eastern bishops at Seleucia was then achieved by persuading them not to be out of step with what the western bishops had agreed!
The consensus that was achieved was hardly a stable one, but it was real enough for Constantius to call a joint council in 360 at Constantinople with delegations from each of the two earlier councils, at which he pushed through the Dated Creed (with additions that also proscribed the word hypostasis and declared all other earlier creeds heretical). It was promulgated through the empire in an imperial edict. Whatever the methods by which it had been achieved, the Dated Creed offered hope that the majority of Christian communities would accept it.
This was, however, to prove far from the end of the story. The acceptance of the Dated Creed clearly depended on consistent support from the emperors, but this could be achieved only if they were Christian and ready to enforce the Homoean formula that the Council of Constantinople had endorsed. Constantius’ successor was his cousin Julian, the son of one of his father’s half-brothers, who was not even Christian. Julian’s survival to manhood was in itself remarkable, in that most of his family had been eliminated by Constantine’s three sons. His father and seven immediate members of his family were executed in 337, when Julian was only six. His teenage years had been spent with his half-brother Gallus on a remote estate in Asia Minor, but Gallus himself was executed by Constantius in 354. Then Constantius, isolated and desperate to strengthen his legitimacy, appointed Julian as a Caesar with responsibility for the imperial troops in northern Gaul. Julian proved to be a fine general and had soon restored order to the borders. In 360 his troops acclaimed him as Augustus, to the fury of Constantius, who hurried back from the Persian border to confront him. When Constantius died unexpectedly in 361, Julian found himself sole emperor.13
Julian knew Christianity well—he had been brought up as a Christian and served as a lector—but he had been dismayed by the vicious infighting he saw around him. “Experience had taught him that no wild beasts are so dangerous to man as Christians are to one another,” wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, who went on to suggest that Julian believed that the Christians left to themselves would simply tear each other apart.14 The roots of Julian’s distaste for Christianity may well lie in the brutal treatment of his close relations by Christian emperors. In any case, once he had buried Constantius with suitable Christian piety, Julian adopted “paganism,” proclaiming that the very fact that he had come to power showed that the traditional gods were on his side. 15 Summoning the bishops, he ordered them “to allow every man to practise his belief boldly without hindrance.” The clergy lost all their exemptions, and in 362 they were forbidden to teach rhetoric or grammar. It was absurd, declared Julian, for Christians to teach classical culture while at the same time pouring scorn on classical religion—if they wished to teach, they should confine themselves to teaching the Gospels in their churches.
Julian was a throwback, a philosopher emperor. For Julian, philosophy did not involve a withdrawal from the world (though he had spent most of the 350s as a student in Athens and other cities) but provided the underpinning for wise and moderate rule. His inspiration was the emperor Marcus Aurelius. However, although Julian left more writings than any other emperor, untangling his religious and philosophical beliefs from them has proved enormously difficult. Like many educated pagans, he drew on a variety of beliefs and movements (although Neoplatonism was probably the most significant) and combined mysticism with rationalism, particularly in his defence of traditional Greek secular learning.16 In his Contra Galilaeos (Against the Galileans), written in 362–63, Julian challenges what he sees as the irrational nature of Christian belief. The work draws heavily on conventional pagan criticisms of Christianity, but it is enhanced by Julian’s own knowledge of the scriptures, which enabled him to highlight their apparent contradictions. Only John among the Gospel writers accepts the divinity of Jesus; why did not all do so if he was truly a god? The so-called prophecies of Christ’s coming in the Old Testament are based on misinterpretations of the texts—there is, for instance, no unequivocal prophecy of the virgin birth. Christian teachings about God, especially those which draw on the all-too-“human” Old Testament God with his sole commitment to the Jews, lack the sophistication of pagan conceptions of the divine. Why did God create Eve if she was going to thwart his plans for creation? Why did he deprive Adam and Eve of the knowledge of good and evil? Turning to Paul, Julian questions why God neglected most of humanity for thousands of years but then arrived to preach to a small tribe in Galilee. Why were the Greeks not also favoured by his presence if he was, as Paul argues, a universal God? Do not the latest bitter arguments over Christian doctrine deprive Christians of their claim to have found the truth? In contrast, Julian argues, the Greeks have achieved superiority in every area of knowledge; in Contra Galilaeos he gives examples from law, mathematics, medicine, astron
omy and philosophy as well as theology.
Contra Galilaeos also includes a sophisticated defence of the traditional deities. While Julian was happy to accept, along, as we have seen, with many pagans, that there was a supreme god, he saw no reason why that god should not preside over lesser deities. He proposed an argument, implicit in the nature of Roman government but rarely stated (note, however, Constantine’s Edict of Toleration of 313), that an acceptance of different manifestations of God was essential to a flourishing empire.
Since in the father all things are complete and all things are one, while in the separate deities one quality or another predominates, therefore Ares rules over the warlike nations, Athene over those that are wise as well as warlike, Hermes over those who are more shrewd than adventurous; and in short the nations over which the gods preside follow each the essential character of their proper god.17
Surely, Julian continues, a caring “supreme god” would want to encourage diversity and be happy to allow lesser gods to oversee a variety of nations and cultures. He even managed to find some biblical texts to support his argument. While Julian had no particular love of Judaism, being alienated by the exclusivity of its God, he accepted the logic of his position to put in hand the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. His motives, however, may primarily have been to reclaim Jerusalem from the Christians while contradicting Jesus’ assertion that the destruction of the Temple would be permanent.
Julian’s was a pointed challenge and is evidence of the extent to which Christians, despite their adoption of elements of Platonism, still failed to convince the pagan philosophers. However, Julian’s own eclectic beliefs did not arouse enthusiasm either. In many ways he was traditional, a fervent believer in prophecy who regularly consulted oracles. He reintroduced blood sacrifices as part of his enthusiasm for the old gods but by doing so offended the more sophisticated pagans. He thus missed the opportunity to build an anti-Christian power base, although by this stage Christians had somehow to be accommodated. Naturally, the Christians themselves were furious with his policies, especially as these involved the withdrawal of their lucrative tax exemptions. There was great rejoicing when a fire brought the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to a halt (“proving” to Christians that Jesus had indeed been right in saying the destruction of the Temple would be permanent).18 Nor did Julian’s military success, so vital to the maintenance of imperial power, last. A campaign against Sassanid Persia ran into difficulties, and Julian himself was killed, by a spear throw by an unknown assailant, in 363. His reign had lasted only eighteen months.
With Julian’s death the house of Constantine came to an end. The army in the east acclaimed a staff officer, Jovian, as emperor, but he died eight months later, shortly after ceding large areas of the eastern empire to the Sassanids. The next emperor, Valentinian (364–75), a tough if tempestuous army officer, was more successful.19 Indeed, Valentinian has been seen as the last of the great Roman emperors; it was during his reign that the northern borders were effectively defended for the last time. He attempted to establish a dynasty. His brother Valens was appointed co-emperor in the east and his son Gratian, only eight at the time, became a co-emperor in 367. When Valentinian died in 375, Valens and Gratian remained as co-emperors, but the army also proclaimed Valentinian II, Valentinian’s son by his second marriage, as Augustus.
Then, in 378, came disaster. The pressures on Rome’s borders had been unremitting for decades, but following the reconstruction of the armies under Diocletian and Constantine they had been contained. Now a new people, the Huns, were on the move westwards. The Goths were driven before them, and in 378 a mass of refugees poured across the Danube. Valens hoped to recruit them as mercenaries for the over-stretched Roman armies, but the situation was hopelessly mishandled by unscrupulous Roman officers, and the Goths began rampaging across Thrace.20 Confronted by Valens and the elite of the Roman army at Adrianople in August, the Goths stunned the empire by achieving a crushing victory. Valens and some 10,000 of his men were killed. The battle of Adrianople has often been seen as the moment when the Roman empire finally lost the initiative against the “barbarians.” Gratian hastily called on an experienced general, Theodosius, to become his fellow Augustus, but Theodosius was unable to avoid permitting the Goths to settle within the empire, ostensibly as allies to the Romans, but in reality, as it turned out, as a very substantial body of armed men with no real allegiance to Rome. In 383 the young Gratian was murdered by his own troops, forcing Valentinian II, aged twelve and still in the shadow of his formidable mother, Justina, to emerge as emperor in the west in his own right.
All these emperors were Christian, but their policies towards the churches differed. In the west Valentinian I chose to stand back from the debates. What mattered above all in a troubled empire was good order, and, following Constantine’s lead, Valentinian was tolerant of diversity, both within Christianity and of paganism. “He took a neutral position between opposing faiths, and never troubled anyone by ordering him to adopt this or that mode of ‘worship,’ ” according to Ammianus Marcellinus. 21 It was within this atmosphere of tolerance that the debate over Father and Son revived. As we have seen, the west had always been more sympathetic to a monotheistic formula in which they were of equal divinity, and there remained considerable resentment of Constantius’ tactics at Ariminum. In the east, by contrast, there had been much less sympathy for Nicaea, but in the 350s for the first time an eastern bishop, Athanasius of Alexandria, attempted to provide a defence of the Nicene formula.
We have already met Athanasius as a determined anti-Arian. “He could,” writes John Rist, “scent Arianism like a police dog sniffing out drugs.”22 His professional career was one of some turmoil. Appointed bishop in 428, he is known, from Egyptian papyri, to have enforced his authority with violence and to have been challenged on his right to hold his see.23 On no less than five occasions, and for a total of fifteen of the forty-five years he was bishop, he was in exile, sent there by emperors (including, as we have seen, Constantine, who took exception to his anti-Arian intransigence) and his fellow bishops. It is impossible to establish the extent to which, in such troubled times, he was personally responsible, but the sources do suggest that his tendency towards violence and intimidation of opponents was partly to blame for his troubled career. On the other hand, it is hard to deny the courage and resolution with which he faced his ordeals.
It is as the champion of the shared and equal divinity of the Father and Son that Athanasius’ theological reputation rests. In other words, he denied any separate creation of the Son: Jesus was part of the Godhead from all eternity. However, for many years Athanasius, like his fellow theologians, avoided using the charged word homoousios to describe the relationship, and it does not appear in his work until about 356 (in what appears to have been the first favourable use of the term for two decades).24
Given the term’s association with Nicaea, its very use was enough to connect Athanasius with the Nicene Creed and thus to elevate his status into that of a revered theologian when the creed was eventually declared orthodox. (He also wrote the first full treatise on the Holy Spirit.) Christ as logos is incarnated because the human race is sunk in sin and cannot be left to suffer without redemption. So the logos becomes actively interventionist, appearing on earth as Jesus.25 However, Athanasius got into enormous difficulties (as, it should be stressed, did most theologians) when he tried to make sense of a Jesus who is divine yet human. He created an elaborate distinction between the human body of Jesus, which appears to suffer, as when on the cross, and the divine logos, which is somehow inside the human body but does not suffer. So, for instance, the mind of Jesus, which he allocated to the logos rather than to his body, could not feel anything and was not even subject to moral dilemmas. “He was not subject to moral law, he did not weigh two choices, preferring one, rejecting another,” as Athanasius put it. This goes as far as suggesting that Jesus lacked free will.26
Secure in his own beliefs, Athanasius
let loose his invective on the Arians. His tactics were unscrupulous, and he brought a new level of intolerance into church politics. It is, Athanasius argued, the devil who inspires the “Arian” use of scripture in their cause, while any attempt by “Arians” to quote earlier theologians in their support is a slander on those theologians. Sometimes the Arians are described as no better than Jews; at others they are indistinguishable from pagans. This was clearly caricature, but unfortunately it was caricature that became embedded in the Christian tradition when the anti-Arian Nicene Creed became orthodox. Athanasius’ elevation as a champion of orthodoxy had the unfortunate effect of legitimizing such intolerant invective.
Furthermore, in order to justify the incarnation, Athanasius provided a definition of man as inherently sinful. While a hundred years before Origen had looked optimistically at the human condition—“the universe is cared for by God in accordance with the conditions of the free will of each man, and . . . as far as possible it is always being led on to be better”; in other words, man is free to improve himself in a world which is itself getting “better,” with, as we have seen, a final state of forgiveness of all—Athanasius was much more pessimistic. Men were inherently disobedient and “the cause of their own corruption in death.” Things were not getting better but worse. Not satisfied with the sin of Adam, men “again filled themselves with other evils, progressing still further in shamefulness and outdoing themselves in impiety.” These were important and enduring shifts in perspective, and they contrast strongly with the earlier optimism of Greek thinking.27