Sacred Mysteries: After 1700 years, Nicaea is still worth celebrating
Luckily the good fathers who gathered there in 325 were not so easily deterred. I suppose they travelled by horse, mule or foot from Constantinople, though a ship would have helped across the Sea of Marmara, or the Propontis as it was then known.
Worth celebrating now is that the bishops at the Council of Nicaea decided that Jesus Christ the Son of God is as much God as is God the Father. He wasn't just of a similar substance or being; he was of the same substance or being – 'God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made'.
That looks like the belief of the author of St John's Gospel, though the doctrine may not be easy to apply to a person who was also born and died, and, as Christians believed, rose again. The doctrine was important since, if Jesus was not fully human and fully divine, he would have been incapable of achieving atonement between God and humanity. We should have been left crushed by sin and death, unable to enter the gates of heaven. Since mankind has an unquenchable appetite for the infinite, we'd be in the most tragic of positions.
The religious party that wanted the bishops at Nicaea to regard the Son of God only as a creature like us were followers of Arius, an influential priest born in the 250s.
An anniversary issue on Nicaea has been printed by Communio (a learned theological journal founded in 1972 by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI). In it, David M Gwynn considers how much Arius taught the errors attributed to him and how much his opponent St Athanasius should be regarded as the champion of orthodoxy. Dr Gwynn is reader in Ancient and Late Antique History at Royal Holloway in the University of London.
Athanasius, he points out, was only a young priest of about 30 when he attended the council as assistant to Alexander, the patriarch of Alexandria. But he suggests that Athanasius might have drafted Alexander's circular letter denouncing Arius.
Dr Gwynn writes that the teaching of Arius could not be called heresy then, as 'there were no established orthodox answers to resolve the questions under discussion'. Perhaps not, but if it contradicted points of doctrine held by Christians, it could have been seen as false.
Dr Gwynn quotes a summary by Athanasius of the doctrines of the Arians. 'Not always was the Son, for he was not until he was begotten… He is not proper to the essence of the Father, for he is a creature and a thing made… The Son does not know the Father exactly… He is not unchangeable, like the Father, but is changeable by nature, like the creatures.'
Dr Gwynn finds all these assertions in Arius's writings except for the last, for Athanasius's opponents repeatedly insisted that the Son was 'unchangeable and set apart from all other creatures'.
I don't know that this got the associates of Arius out of trouble. To be sure, being created is not being changed, since there was nothing to be changed from. But creation adds a new thing to the world of creatures, all susceptible to change. And to class the Son as a creature, even if set apart, distinguishes him from God in a way fatal to human salvation.
Anyway Dr Gwynn argues that over-simplifying Athanasius's story 'understates the scale of his contribution in defining and securing the orthodox faith'. I certainly wouldn't want that either.
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an hour ago
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‘Chamber of horrors' being exhumed at Ireland mass baby grave
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Chamber of horrors' being exhumed at Ireland mass baby grave
TUAM, Ireland (AP) — Only one stone wall remains of the old mother and baby home in this town, but it has cast a shadow over all of Ireland. A mass grave that could hold up to nearly 800 infants and young children — some of it in a defunct septic tank — is being excavated on the grounds of the former home run by the Bon Secours Sisters, an order of nuns. The burial site has forced Ireland and the Catholic Church — long central to its identity — to reckon with a legacy of having shunned unmarried mothers and separated them from their children left at the mercy of a cruel system. The grave was accidentally discovered by two boys a half century ago. But the true horror of the place was not known until a local historian began digging into the home's history. Catherine Corless revealed that the site was atop a septic tank and that 796 deceased infants were unaccounted for. Her findings caused a scandal when the international news media wrote about her work in 2014. 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Corless said she was driven to expose the story 'the more I realized how those poor, unfortunate, vulnerable kids, through no fault of their own, had to go through this life.' Discovering deeply held secrets Corless' work brought together survivors of the homes and children who discovered their own mothers had given birth to long-lost relatives who died there. Annette McKay said there's still a level of denial about the abuse, rape and incest that led some women to the homes while fathers were not held accountable. 'They say things like the women were incarcerated and enslaved for being pregnant,' McKay said. 'Well, how did they get pregnant? Was it like an immaculate conception?' Her mother ended up in the home after being raped as a teenager by the caretaker of the industrial school where she had been sentenced for 'delinquency' after her mother died and father, a British soldier, abdicated responsibility. 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