Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (38 page)

Fortunately for Athanasius and his scheming, the semi-Arians included some of the most reflective and constructive theologians of their day. Chief among them was a trio who have come to be known as the Cappadocian Fathers. The monk-bishop Basil of Caesarea ('the Great') we have already met (see p. 209): he said sadly about the state of the controversy that it was like a naval battle fought at night in a storm, with crews and soldiers fighting among themselves, often in purely selfish power struggles, heedless of orders from above and fighting for mastery even while their ship foundered.
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Associated with him were his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and their lifelong friend, Gregory of Nazianzus. Athanasius and the remaining champions of the
homoousios
view now found them unexpected allies, and the Cappadocian Fathers provided a way of speaking about the Trinity which would create a balance between threeness and oneness.
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The problem for many Eastern leaders had been their uncertainty about the philosophical implications of the word
ousia
(essence, or substance). The eventual solution to their worries was to take a different Greek word,
hypostasis
, which previously had been used with little distinction in meaning from
ousia
, and assign to the two different words two different technical meanings.
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As a result of this verbal pact, the Trinity consists of three equal
hypostaseis
in one
ousia
: three equal Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) sharing one Essence or Substance (Trinity or Godhead). The arbitrariness of this decision, for all its practical convenience, will be realized by comparing the Greek word
hypostasis
, 'that which lies under', with its nearest equivalent in Latin,
substantia
. From now on, when used in reference to the new trinitarian formula, these synonyms in Greek and Latin were corralled in opposite theological categories, like families divided by a frontier in some political act of partition beyond their control. A more exact Greek equivalent than
hypostasis
for the Latin
persona
would have been
prosopon
, since both words mean in their respective languages 'theatrical mask'; and in fact theologians in the tradition of Antioch did indeed use
prosopon
in preference to
hypostasis
, further confusing the international theological tangle. It was not surprising that Western Latin-speaking Christians were inclined over the next few centuries to feel that the Greeks were too clever by half; but a great deal of this suspicion was the result of clumsy translation of intricate theological texts on both sides. We will meet other examples.

The disintegration of the Arian party in the East was completed by a political revolution in 378: the Eastern emperor, Valens, an upholder of the Homoean settlement of 359, was killed in a major Roman defeat on the frontier at Adrianople (to the west of Constantinople), and the Western emperor, Gratian, sent a retired Spanish general to sort out the resulting chaos as the Emperor Theodosius I. Theodosius had no sympathy for the Arians, reflecting the general Latin and Western impatience with Greek scruples about language; he convened a council at Constantinople in 381 at which Arian defeat was inevitable, and Nicaea's formulae would definitively be vindicated. In the same year, a Western 'council' at Aquileia in north-east Italy, actually little more than a rigged trial, condemned and deposed the remaining recalcitrant Western Homoean leaders.
⁷⁴
This first Council of Constantinople saw the formulation of the fully developed creed which is now misleadingly known as the Nicene, and has come to be liturgically recited at the Eucharist in Churches of both Eastern and Western tradition. The main imperial Churches in the Latin West and Greek East, but also the Armenians and Syrians on the imperial frontier, all agreed on the outcome: Jesus Christ the Son of God is not created and is equal to the Father in the Trinity. At much the same time, the creed which came to be known as the Apostles' Creed was evolved in the West, embodying the same theology in shorter form.

The Council of Constantinople not only outlawed Arianism from the imperial Church, but also blocked two other directions in which the doctrine of the Trinity might have been led. The first came to be known (for reasons still obscure) after an Eastern Church leader called Macedonius, but the 'Macedonians' are more accurately described by their nickname of Pneumatomachi ('fighters against the Spirit'), because their development of subordinationist ideas took them in a different direction from Arius. While accepting the Nicene proposition of the equality of Father and Son, they denied the equal status of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead, seeing the Spirit as the pinnacle of the created order. This was not a proposition without precedent or contemporary respectability. Origen had been vague on the exact status of the Holy Spirit (see pp. 152-3), and even the most respected contemporary Latin theologian from the Western Church, Hilary of Poitiers, was notably tight-lipped on the subject, observing that the Bible never actually called this Spirit 'God' and following suit by his own silence.
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The Council of Nicaea, preoccupied by Father and Son, had not extended its quarrels to the Spirit, and so it was not surprising that a large question remained for judgement in 381.

The second initiative to be crushed in 381 was ironically an effort to combat Arianism by a distinguished Lebanese theologian who became Bishop of Laodicea, Apollinaris, who was a great admirer of Athanasius, to the extent that some of his writings were subsequently attributed to the great Alexandrian, causing much confusion among the faithful.
⁷⁶

Apollinaris wanted to emphasize Christ's divinity and hence the truth of the
Homoousion
, Christ's consubstantiality with the Father, by saying that in Jesus Christ there had indeed been a human body and soul, but rather than possessing a human mind 'changeable and enslaved to filthy thoughts', the Divine Logos had simply assumed flesh. The danger of this anti-Arian enthusiasm was therefore that any real idea of Christ's humanity would be lost - an example of the difficulty of sustaining the balance between the two truths which most Christians passionately wished to affirm: that Jesus Christ was both divine and human.
⁷⁷

The Council of Constantinople thus radically narrowed the boundaries of acceptable belief in the Church, creating a single imperial Christianity backed up by military force. It was one half of a profound transformation in Christian status in the empire in the 380s. The declaration of Constantine and Licinius at Milan back in 313 had proclaimed general toleration. That had been a reaffirmation of traditional Roman practice, with the one great exception of Christianity, which had leapt from persecuted to favoured religion. Now 'Catholic' Christianity was given monopoly status, not just against its own Christian rivals but against all traditional religion: ancient priesthoods lost all privileges and temples were ordered to be closed even in the most remote districts. The process began with a decree in Constantinople in 380, but politics intervened to accelerate the new situation. In 392 a barbarian general of the Roman army named Arbogast backed a coup d'etat in which the legitimate Western emperor, Valentinian II, was murdered and replaced with a modest and competent academic of traditionalist sympathies named Eugenius.

Moves to restore honour and equal treatment to the old religions had not got very far when, in 394, Theodosius intervened from the East and destroyed the usurping regime. His conclusion, naturally enough, was that his policy, already launched in the East, should be extended throughout the empire. The Olympic Games were no longer celebrated after 393. Further decrees after his death banned non-Christians from service in the army, imperial administration or at Court.
⁷⁸
This was backed up by ruthless action: some of the most beautiful and famous sacred places of antiquity went up in flames, together with a host of lesser shrines. Monks were prominent agitators in the crowds which exulted in the destruction, and dire consequences are always likely to follow rampaging mobs. Perhaps the most repulsive case was the death in 415 of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia, so well respected for her learning that she had overcome the normal prejudices of men to win pre-eminence in the Alexandrian schools. Christian mobs were persuaded that she was instrumental in preventing the Prefect of Egypt from ending a quarrel with Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, so she was dragged from her carriage, publicly humiliated, tortured and murdered. The perpetrators went unpunished. It was a permanent stain on the episcopate of Cyril and few Christian historians have had the heart to excuse it.
⁷⁹
Nearly fifteen hundred years later, the breezy Anglican clerical novelist Charles Kingsley used Hypatia's story to annoy Roman Catholics, casting them in a none-too-veiled parallel in the role of the intolerant Alexandrian killers.

Although Arian Christianity was now harried to extinction in the imperial Church, significantly where imperial repression could not follow, across the northern frontier, it flourished - among the 'barbarian' tribes known as the Goths and their relatives the Vandals. Eusebius of Nicomedia had proved that he was not merely a politician with short-term goals when he had encouraged a mission to the Goths, led by one of their own called Ulfila. Ulfila translated the Bible into his native language, though he omitted to translate the Books of Kings on the grounds that their content was too warlike and might give the Goths ideas.
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It was not a stratagem crowned with success: the Goths remained enthusiastic for war, as the Roman Empire was to find out to its cost, and they came to see their theological difference from the imperial Church as an expression of their racial and cultural difference. When they eventually occupied large sections of the former Western Empire, they kept their faith intact and unsullied by Nicene Christianity for a long time (see pp. 323-4). Arianism might well have formed the future of Western Christianity.

It will be immediately obvious, even from this brief summary of the Arian entanglement, how much imperial politics now affected Church affairs; but the emperors were deeply involved not so much because of their own religious convictions (though these might play a significant part), but because so many other people cared so much about the issues. Naturally clergy were passionately involved, and it is difficult to disentangle their righteous longing to assert the truth from their consciousness that the clerical immunities and privileges granted Christian clergy by Constantine and his successors were only available to those who had succeeded in convincing the emperors that they were the authentic voice of imperial Christianity. The play of forces was in more than one direction: emperors had no choice but to steer the Church to preserve their own rule, while few in the Church seem to have perceived the moral dangers involved when mobs took up theology and armies marched in the name of the Christian God. It may seem baffling now that such apparently rarefied disputes could have aroused the sort of passion now largely confined to the aftermath of a football match. Yet quite apart from the propensity of human beings to become irrationally tribal about the most obscure matters, we need to remember that ordinary Christians experienced their God through the Church's liturgy and in a devotional intensity which seized them in holy places. Once they had experienced the divine in such particular settings, having absorbed one set of explanations about what the divine was, anything from outside which disrupted those explanations threatened their access to divine power. That would provide ample reason for the stirring of rage and fear.

MIAPHYSITES AND NESTORIUS

The entanglement of politics, popular passion and theology is even more painfully apparent in a new set of disputes which go under the name of the Miaphysite or Monophysite controversy. In these, the focus of theological debate shifted away from the relationship of Son to Father, as in Arianism, or of Spirit to the Trinity as a whole, as in the views of the Pneumatomachi. Now the argument was about the way in which Christ combined both human and divine natures - that issue which the ultra-Athanasian Apollinaris had already raised, to his eventual misfortune. Behind the theological debate lay several hidden agendas which were as much to do with power politics as with theology. Once Jerusalem had been eliminated, the Church in the eastern Mediterranean had looked to two great cities, Antioch in Syria and Alexandria, the seats of major 'metropolitan' bishops or patriarchs with jurisdiction over other bishops. Now added to this was the new power of the Bishop of Constantinople, which the bishops in more long-standing Churches resented, particularly as Constantinople preened itself on the title 'the new Rome', and had made sure that this was officially affirmed at the council in 381, to general annoyance. Three times in seventy years after the Council of Constantinople, successive Bishops of Alexandria contributed to the downfall of successive Bishops of Constantinople.
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Since the Bishopric of Jerusalem had also greatly benefited from its promotion under Constantine and his mother as a centre of pilgrimage (see pp. 193-5), the Bishops of Jerusalem had ambitions to match their guardianship of the greatest shrine of the Saviour. All these four cities would therefore be jostling for power at the same time as they fought to establish what the most adequate view of Christ's humanity and divinity might be. Alongside them was the Bishop of Rome, increasingly assertive of his charismatic position as successor of Peter (see pp. 290-94), yet also generally slightly marginal to the cut and thrust of Greek theological debate in the eastern Mediterranean.

The basic theological differences lay between Alexandrian and Antiochene viewpoints. Theologians do not always behave like successfully trained sports teams, but there were clear differences in approach between Christian scholars in the two cities; we have already noted the greater literalism of Antiochene comment on the text of the Bible (see p. 152). At issue once more was the question of Christology: that three-centuries-old puzzle of how a human life in Palestine could relate to a cosmic saviour, or more exactly be a single person who was both human and cosmic saviour. Now the Arian controversy had been settled by asserting that Christ was of one substance with the Father, what did that say about his human substance - as seen in his tears, his anger, his jokes, his breaking of ordinary bread and wine in an upper room? How far should one distinguish the human Christ from the divine Christ? Successive theologians associated with Antioch offered their own answer, first Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus, and then his student Theodore, a forceful and subtle theologian, and a native Antiochene, who became Bishop of Mopsuestia (now dwindled to a small Turkish village called Yacapinar).