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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