While Irenaeus sought to clarify basic convictions about God and Jesus Christ in theological statements that would become the framework of the fourth-century creeds, Valentinian Christians accorded such theological propositions a much less important role. Instead of regarding these as the essential and certain basis for spiritual understanding—and instead of rejecting them—they treated them as elementary teachings and emphasized instead what Irenaeus mentions only in passing—how far God surpasses human comprehension.
The Secret Book of John, similarly, sets forth what theologians call the via negativa, recognizing what cannot be known and discarding misapprehensions about God. Nevertheless, the Secret Book says that human beings have an innate capacity to know God but one that offers only hints and glimpses of divine reality.57 The Secret Book suggests that the story of Eve’s birth from Adam’s side speaks of the awakening of this spiritual capacity. Instead of simply telling about the origin of woman, this story, symbolically read, shows how the “blessed one above, the Father” (or, in some versions of the text, the “Mother-Father”), feeling compassion for Adam, sent him a “helper”—luminous epinoia [“creative” or “inventive” consciousness] which comes out of him, who is called Life [Eve]; and she “helps” the whole creation, by working with him, and by restoring him to his full being, and by teaching him about the descent of his kind, and by showing the way to ascend, the way he came down.58
Thus Eve symbolizes the gift of spiritual understanding, which enables us to reflect—however imperfectly—upon divine reality. Another book discovered at Nag Hammadi, On the Origin of the World, says that when the first man and woman recognized their nakedness, “they saw that they were naked of spiritual understanding [gnosis].” But then the luminous epinoia “appeared to them shining with light, and awakened their consciousness.”59
The Secret Book intends this story to show that we have a latent capacity within our hearts and minds that links us to the divine—not in our ordinary state of mind but when this hidden capacity awakens. Because the term epinoia has no precise equivalent in English, I shall leave it in Greek. To speak of various modes of consciousness susceptible to revelation, the author of the Secret Book invokes a cluster of words related to the Greek verb noein, which means “perceive,” “think,” or “be aware.” The Secret Book explains that, although God is essentially incomprehensible, the powers that reveal God to humankind include pronoia (anticipatory awareness), ennoia (internal reflection), and prognosis (foreknowledge or intuition), all personified as feminine presences, presumably because of the gender of the Greek words. But according to the Secret Book it is, above all, the “luminous epinoia” that conveys genuine insight. We might translate this as “imagination,” but many people take this term as Irenaeus did, to refer to fantasy rather than conscious awareness. Yet as the Secret Book envisions it, epinoia (and related modes of awareness) remains an ambiguous, limited—but indispensable—gift. When John asks whether everyone receives the luminous epinoia, the savior answers yes—“The power will descend upon every person, for without it, no one can stand”—60 and adds that epinoia strengthens those who love her by enabling them to discriminate between good and evil, so that moral insight and ethical power are inseparable from spiritual understanding: “When the spirit of life increases, and the power comes and strengthens that soul, no one can any longer deceive it with works of evil.”61
The author of the Secret Book stresses that the insights this spiritual intuition conveys are neither complete nor certain; instead, epinoia conveys hints and glimpses, images and stories, that imperfectly point beyond themselves toward what we cannot now fully understand. Thus the author knows that these very stories—those told in the Secret Book—are to be taken neither literally nor too seriously; for these, too, are merely glimpses that, as Paul says, we now know only “in a mirror, darkly.”62 Yet, however incomplete, these glimpses suffice to reveal the presence of the divine, for the Secret Book says that, apart from spiritual intuition, “people grow old without joy . . . and die . . . without knowing God.”63
How is it, then, that many people remain oblivious to epinoia? To answer this question, the Secret Book tells a story intended to show that although the creator-god pictured in Genesis is himself only an anthropomorphic image of the divine Source that brought forth the universe, many people mistake this deficient image for God. This story tells how the creator-god himself, being unaware of the “blessed one, the Mother-Father, the blessed and compassionate One” above, boasted that he was the only God (“I am a jealous God; there is none other besides me”).64 Intent on maintaining sole power, he tried to control his human creatures by forbidding them to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But when Adam and Eve disobeyed him, and chose to seek knowledge of the divine Source above, he realized that they had listened to their inner resource, the luminous epinoia. As soon as the creator-god realized what they had done, he retaliated; first he punished them both, and even cursed the earth itself because of them;65 then he tried to force the woman to subject herself to the man, saying, “Your husband shall rule over you”;66 and, finally, “all his angels cast them out of Paradise,”67 burdening them with “bitter fate” and with daily cares to make them oblivious to the “luminous epinoia.”68
But this is a mythical explanation. Can we find a more practical reason for the suppression of the “luminous epinoia”? I suggest that the author of the Secret Book knew how Christians like Irenaeus challenged those who spoke of the “God beyond God,” and insisted that everyone worship only the creator. But while Valentinus’s followers often met such challenges with silence, the author of the Secret Book returns the challenge in stories such as this one that are meant to show how—and why—such leaders, in the name of the God they serve, consign spiritual Christians to hell. The Secret Book suggests that those who worship God only as creator—including most Christians—share his animosity toward spiritual awareness, and also toward those who speak for its presence in human experience. The story of the creator’s hostility to epinoia, then, is a parable, both comic and painful, of conflict between those who seek spiritual intuition and those who suppress it.
Irenaeus, shocked and distressed by such readings of Genesis, protests that his opponents place far too little confidence in traditional sources of revelation—and far too much in their own imagination:
To what distance above God do you lift up your imaginations, you rash and inflated people? . . . God cannot be measured in the heart, and in the mind he is incomprehensible—he who holds the earth in the hollow of his hand. Who knows the measure of his right hand? Who knows his finger? Or do you understand his hand—that hand which measures immensity? For his hand lays hold of all things, and illumines the heavens, and also the things below the heavens, and tests the reins and the hearts, and is present in mysteries and in our secret thoughts, and does openly nourish and sustain us. . . . Yet, as if now they had measured and thoroughly investigated him . . . they pretend that beyond [God] there is . . . another Father—certainly they are not looking up to heavenly things, as they claim, but really descending into a profound abyss of insanity.69
But it would take more than theological argument for Irenaeus’s viewpoint to prevail in churches throughout the world: it would take, in fact, the revolution initiated by the Roman emperor Constantine. In his famous History of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, a bishop in Palestine who survived years of persecution in which many of his friends and fellow Christians died, wrote how God miraculously intervened on October 28, 312, by revealing Christ’s sign in the heavens to the pagan emperor Constantine and gaining his allegiance.70 Eusebius then tells how, in the years that followed, Constantine declared amnesty for Christians and became their imperial patron. But this practical military leader chose to recognize only those who belonged to what may have become, by his time, the best-organized and largest group, which he called the “lawful and most holy catholic church.”71
Constantine’s recognition carried with it, o
f course, enormous benefits. In 313 the emperor ordered that anyone who had confiscated property from “the catholic church of the Christians in any city, or even in other places,” during the persecutions of the previous decades must return it immediately to “these same churches”72 and offer compensation for any damages. Eusebius of Caesarea marveled that in this astonishing new era “bishops constantly received even personal letters from the emperor, and honors, and gifts of money.”73 Eusebius includes in his history a letter Constantine wrote the same year to the proconsul of Africa to say that he was exempting Christian clergy from financial obligations incumbent on ordinary citizens; but, since he knew that the African churches were divided into rival factions, he specified that these privileges applied only to those he called the “ministers of the lawful and most holy catholic religion.”74 The emperor also offered tax relief and, later, tax exemptions to clergy who qualified—while threatening to increase taxes for anyone guilty of founding “heretical” churches. About ten years later, apparently responding to what he considered abuses of these privileges, he wrote a new order to specify that the privileges that have been granted in consideration of religion must benefit only the adherents of the catholic faith [or “law”]. It is Our will, furthermore, that heretics and schismatics shall not only be alien from these privileges but also shall be bound and subjected to various compulsory public services.75
Besides allocating money to repair damaged churches, Constantine ordered new ones to be built, including, tradition says, a magnificent Church of St. Peter on the Vatican hill in Rome76 and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. In 324 he wrote to the eastern bishops, urging them to “ask without hesitation whatever [funds] you find to be necessary”77 from the imperial treasury. He assured them that he had already ordered his finance minister to give them whatever they asked to build new churches and fit them with the splendor appropriate to honor the God of the universe. Constantine also delegated to certain bishops the distribution of the imperial grain supply and other necessities to support people in need, so that they might fulfill Jesus’ admonitions to care for the sick, the needy, and the destitute, as well as those who had suffered torture, imprisonment, or exile during the years of persecution.78 Furthermore, while transforming the status of Christians, Constantine’s revolution changed the status of Jews. As Timothy Barnes, one of the foremost contemporary historians of these events, writes, “Constantine translated Christian prejudice against Jews into legal disabilities.”79 He forbade Jews to enter Jerusalem, except on the one day a year they were to mourn for having lost it, and ordered them not to seek or accept converts to Judaism. Moreover, Constantine “prescribed that any Jew who attempted forcibly to prevent conversion from Judaism to Christianity should be burned alive.”80
To strengthen his own alliance with church leaders and to unify fractious Christian groups into one harmonious structure, Constantine charged bishops from churches throughout the empire to meet at his expense at Nicaea, an inland city, near a large lake, to work out a standard formulation of Christian faith. From that meeting and its aftermath, during the tumultuous decades that followed, emerged the Nicene Creed that would effectively clarify and elaborate the “canon of truth,” along with what we call the canon—the list of twenty-seven writings which would become the New Testament. Together these would help establish what Irenaeus had envisioned—a worldwide communion of “orthodox” Christians joined into one “catholic and apostolic” church.
How that happened is far more complex than can be related here. I hesitate even to mention the extraordinary events of the fourth century, since no short sketch can adequately describe them; yet I offer one, since these events no doubt are linked to the history we have been exploring. Fortunately, several outstanding historians have written accounts available for the interested reader.81 For our purposes here, even the briefest summary would have to note how, during the transitional decades after 312, Constantine subjected the Roman empire to a massive restructuring and shifted the underpinnings of imperial power. What he did—and did gradually, in order to minimize opposition from powerful senators—was transfer the empire’s basic allegiance from the traditional guardians of its welfare, the gods of Rome, to the foreign god worshiped by those whom his predecessors had persecuted for atheism.82 It was at this critical time that Constantine convened the international council of bishops to meet at Nicaea, “because of the excellent temperature of the air,”83 in the early days of June 325. The emperor himself attended the council and participated in it, telling his guests at one of the lavish state dinners that he believed God had appointed him “bishop [the Greek term means “supervisor”] of those outside the church.”84 Although in the past many historians assumed that Constantine directed—even dictated—the entire proceedings, more careful historical investigation has shown that he not only allowed but expected the bishops themselves to arbitrate disputes and to forge a working consensus among rival parties. When he addressed those who gathered at Nicaea, he urged them to resolve their differences “lest private animosities interfere with God’s business.”85
One of the conflicts he hoped to resolve had been troubling churches throughout the empire for several years. As rival Christian groups vied to gain ascendancy in a changed world, the question was no longer whether the “catholic church” would prevail against “heretics and schismatics” but who would succeed in claiming to embody that catholic church. In Egypt, a group of bishops headed by Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, and later by his successor Athanasius, took up and extended Irenaeus’s agenda. It was he, in fact, who would interpret and update for his contemporaries the “orthodox” side of the controversy earlier engaged in the gospels of Thomas and John. An intense, combative, and single-minded young man, Athanasius, who served as the bishop’s secretary, was about eighteen when Alexander engaged in—some would say he started—a conflict that soon divided churches from Egypt to Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. Around 318, Alexander had heard that a member of his clergy in Alexandria, a popular Libyan priest named Arius, was preaching that the Word of God, while divine, was not divine in the same way as God the Father. Soon afterward Alexander convened a council of Egyptian bishops to declare Arius’s views heretical and excommunicate him, along with all priests and bishops who sided with him, from the church in Alexandria.
This action ignited new controversy. Hearing of Arius’s expulsion, bishops in Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor convened their own councils, several of which declared Arius’s teaching not only faithful to catholic tradition but entirely orthodox. Although many bishops urged Alexander to accept Arius back into his church, he adamantly refused. When Alexander and Athanasius received Constantine’s summons to Nicaea, to formulate a creed for the “universal” church, they arrived determined to make sure that the carefully chosen—and hotly contested—theological phrases placed there would confess Christ, the Word, as God. They must have been pleased with the result: the formula upon which the majority finally voted, after intense argument, proclaimed that Jesus Christ was “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”; that he was “begotten, not made,” that is, borrowing John’s term, God’s “only begotten” offspring (not “made,” as were all beings whom God created, angels and humans alike).86
The next phrase, upon which Alexander and his allies had agreed in advance, proved explosively controversial. To exclude Arius’s view that Christ was divine but not in the same sense as God, they insisted on adding that Christ was “of one being with”—essentially no different from—God the Father. While the great majority of bishops “were prepared to accept almost any formula that would secure harmony within the church,”87 those who opposed this phrase pointed out that it occurs neither in the Scriptures nor in Christian tradition. Is it not extreme, they asked, and contrary to the gospels, to say that Jesus Christ is essentially “the same” as God the Father? But those who insisted that he was carried the day; and no doubt it mattered that Constantine, perhaps frustrated by so
much time spent wrangling over a phrase, urged the bishops to include it and end the argument. Now that Constantine had endorsed the term, anyone who challenged it might seem to be questioning the orthodoxy of the emperor himself. In any case, all those present signed the document except the few who chose instead to leave: Arius himself, along with some priests and two bishops from Libya who remained loyal to him. Later, however, the inclusion of this phrase intensified controversy among Christians that continued for decades—indeed, for generations (and, some would say, for centuries).
Eventually the Nicene Creed, approved by the bishops and endorsed by Constantine himself, would become the official doctrine that all Christians henceforth must accept in order to participate in the only church recognized by the emperor—the “catholic church.” A year before the bishops met at Nicaea, Constantine had tried to legislate an end to “heretical sects,” which, by one estimate, may have included about half the Christians in the empire.88 The emperor ordered all “heretics and schismatics” to stop meeting, even in private houses, and to surrender their churches and whatever property they owned to the catholic church. Although many Christians associated with teachers such as Valentinus, Marcion, and the prophet Montanus ignored the law,89 and magistrates often failed to enforce it, such legislation lent enormous support to the network of catholic churches.
When Alexander died and Athanasius succeeded him as bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius campaigned tirelessly to induce Christians all over Egypt to unite under this creed, as Irenaeus had envisioned. Constantine’s own hopes were more modest; he hoped that the Nicene Creed would offer the basic framework upon which Christians could agree, while allowing room for discussion and disagreement, so long as these did not destroy the fabric of the “universal” church, for, as Barnes observes, Constantine believed that all people should be Christian, but that Christians might legitimately hold divergent opinions on theological questions, and that sensible Christians could disagree about doctrine in a spirit of brotherly love.90
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