The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade Read Free

beginning, alone true, alone possessing immortality, alone wise, alone good, alone sovereign,” the Son of God must be a created being. He was different from other created beings, perhaps, but he did not share the essence of God. 12
    Arius, who served in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, had been gathering followers and vexing his bishop, * who had finally excommunicated him. This created a potentially serious and major breach, one that might well separate a large group of Christians from the main body of the Christian believers. Constantine, learning of the split, sent a letter to Egypt strongly suggesting that the two men sit down and work out their differences: “Restore me then my quiet days, and untroubled nights, that the joy of…a tranquil life may henceforth be my portion,” he wrote. 13
    But neither the bishop nor Arius was willing to yield, and in desperation Constantine called together a council of church leaders to settle the question. He first intended to have the council at the city of Nicomedia, but a severe earthquake unsettled the city while the bishops were on their way to the meeting; buildings collapsed, hundreds died where they stood, and flames from hearths and braziers were flung into the dry frames of the houses, where the blaze spread so rapidly that the city became, in the words of Sozomen, “one mass of fire.” 14
    Such a sudden and disastrous event suggested to many that God was not pleased with the coming council, and the travelling bishops halted in their tracks and sent urgent inquiries to the emperor. Would he call off the council? Should they proceed?
    Reassured by the churchman Basil that the earthquake had been sent not as judgment but as a demonic attempt to keep the church from meeting and settling its questions, Constantine replied that the bishops should travel instead to Nicaea, where they arrived in late spring of 325, ready to parley.
    Settling theological questions by way of council was not a new development for Christianity; since the time of the apostles, the Christian churches had considered themselves smaller parts of a whole, not individual congregations. But never before had an emperor, even a tolerant one, taken the step of summoning a church council on his own authority. 15 In 325, at Nicaea, the Christian church and the government of the west clasped hands.
    One might wonder why Constantine, who didn’t have any trouble reconciling his belief in Apollo with his professed Christianity, cared about the exact definition of Christ’s Godness. In all likelihood, his interest in this case wasn’t theological but practical: to keep the church from splitting apart. A major breach would threaten Constantine’s vision of Christianity as a possible model for holding together a disparate group of people in loyalty to an overarching structure. If the overarching structure cracked, the model would be useless.
    Which probably explains his decision to be anti-Arian; taking the temper of the most influential leaders, he realized that the most powerful bishops disagreed with Arius’s theology. Arianism essentially created a pantheon of divinities, with God the Father at the top and God the Son as a sort of demiurge, a little lower in the heavenly hierarchy. This was anathema to both the Jewish roots of Christianity and the Greek Platonism which flourished in most of the eastern empire. *
    Directed by their leading bishops and by the emperor himself to be anti-Arian, the assembled priests at Nicaea came up with a formulation still used in Christian churches today: the Nicene Creed, which asserts the Christian belief in “one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible”:
    And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only-begotten Son of God,
begotten of the Father before all worlds,
God of God,
Light of Light,
Very God of Very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father
by whom all things were made.
     
    It was a formulation that, in its emphasis on