An essay read before the University Circle, of San José, California.
“There are four things,” says Hooker, “which concur to make complete the
whole state of our Lord: His Deity, Manhood, the conjunction of both, and
the distinction of one from the other.”
“Four principal heresies have withstood the truth: Arians, against the
deity of Christ (denying that he was co-eternal and co-essential with the
Father);
“Apollinarians, maiming his human nature (denying that he had a human
soul);
“Nestorians, rending Christ asunder, and dividing him into two persons
(one divine and the other human);
“The followers of Eutyches, by confounding in his person those natures
which they should distinguish (asserting that his human nature was
absorbed in the divine, and objecting to any distinction between the two).
“Against these there have been four most famous councils:
“1. Nice against the Arians, A. D. 325.
“2. Constantinople against the Apollinarians, A. D. 381.
“3. Ephesus against the Nestorians, A. D. 431.
“4. Chalcedon against the Eutychians, A. D. 451.”
Upon the theme of the first of these great Ecumenical Councils, the
present paper will be a compilation.
A momentous era has arrived in the history of the church and of the
world. For the first time a Christian ruler has come to the throne of the
Cæsars.
With his chosen standard of the cross, Constantine has subdued the
opposing factions—in the Roman empire, and over his vast realm there
goes the edict that sets the Christians free from Pagan tyranny and
persecution.
The church has grown through three centuries of stern conflict with the
error and darkness, the evils and wrongs of the world, to be a mighty
power in the earth.
Her course through suffering and toil, along a path tracked with the
blood of the martyrs, has been a march of victory and conquest. A
long list of eminent names is on her calendar. But now in the period
of emancipation and prosperity she is beset by a complication of new
dangers. Alliance with the state exposes her to a strain of corrupting
influences. In the removal of compacting pressure from without,
dissensions spring up within. Factions in the empire having been
overcome, Constantine finds himself compelled to deal with factions in
the church.
In Alexandria, the most learned see of Christendom, a difference of view
and a violent discussion had sprung up on the doctrine of the Trinity.
The schism extended until the whole church became agitated over the
question.
Arius, one of the prime movers in it, reasoning upon the relation of the
terms Father and Son, arrived at the conclusion that the Son, though
the first born of beings, did not exist from eternity. “The controversy
turned,” says Dean Stanley, in his “History of the Eastern Church,” “on
the relations of the divine persons in the Trinity, not only before
the incarnation, before creation, before time, but before the first
beginnings of time. ‘There was,’ the Arian doctrine did not venture to
say _a time_—but ‘there was _when_ he was not.’ It was the excess of
dogmatism upon the most abstract words in the most abstract region of
human thought.”
But subtle and abstract as the question was, there was thought to be
involved in it the root of a perilous departure from sound Christian
faith. It touched the most central and fundamental doctrine of the
Christian religion. Hence it engaged the profoundest thought and
solicitude of the most powerful minds of that age; and the first general
council was called, in order to bring the united wisdom of the church to
bear upon the settlement of the question.
The council met at Nice in the year 325.
The place selected was not far from Nicomedia, then the capital of the
East. The number of bishops from all parts of the empire is supposed
to have been about 318, with a retinue of presbyters and attendants
amounting to 2,000.
“There were present the learned and the illiterate, courtiers and
peasants, old and young, aged bishops on the verge of the grave, and
beardless deacons just entering on their office. It was an assembly in
which the difference between age and youth was of more than ordinary
significance, coinciding with a marked transition in the history of the
world. The new generation had been brought up in peace and quiet. They
could just remember the joy diffused through the Christian communities by
the edict of toleration published in their boyhood. They had themselves
suffered nothing. Not so the older and by far the larger part of the
assembly. They had lived through the last and worst of the persecutions,
and they now came, like a regiment out of some frightful siege or battle,
decimated and mutilated by the tortures or the hardships they had
undergone. Most of the older members had lost a friend or a brother. Some
bore on their backs and sides the wounds inflicted by the instruments
of torture. Some had suffered the searing of the sinews of the leg, to
prevent their escape from working in the mines, and several had lost the
right eye.”
It is said that their authority reposed on their character as an army of
confessors and martyrs, no less than on that of an ecumenical council.
“In this respect no other council could approach them, and in the
proceedings of the assembly the voice of an old confessor was received
almost as an oracle.” Even the emperor himself regarded them with homage.
They came in groups over the Mediterranean, and along the Roman roads
from the different parts of the vast empire, from Alexandria and far up
the Nile in Egypt; from Syria, Euphrates, and the distant East; from
Greece, and Cyprus and Rome; and from the west as far as Spain.
Of the characters present I will copy sketches of a very few:
“The aged Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, was the only one present known
by the title of pope. Papa was the special address given to the head of
the Alexandrian church long before the name of Patriarch or Archbishop.”
“Close beside Pope Alexander is a small, insignificant young man of
hardly twenty-five, of lively manners and speech, and of bright, serene
countenance. Though he is but the deacon or archdeacon of Alexandria (at
this time), he has closely riveted the attention of the assembly by the
vehemence of his arguments. That small, insignificant young man is the
great Athanasius,” the chief opposer of Arius, and defender of the Nicene
creed.
“Next to these was an important presbyter of Alexandria, the parish
priest of its principal church. In appearance he is the very opposite
of Athanasius. He is sixty years of age, tall, thin, and apparently
unable to support his stature. He would be handsome, but for the deadly
pallor of his face and a downcast look caused by weakness of eyesight. At
times his veins throb and swell, and his limbs tremble, as if suffering
from some violent internal complaint. There is a wild look about him
that is at times startling. His dress and demeanor are those of a rigid
ascetic. He wears a long coat with short sleeves, and a scarf of half
size, the mark of an austere life, and his hair hangs in a tangled mass
over his head. He is usually silent, but at times breaks out into fierce
excitement. Yet with all this there is a sweetness in his voice, and a
winning, earnest, fascinating manner. This strange, captivating giant
is the heretic Arius.” He is described as a man of peculiar loveliness
and purity of character from his childhood, of great personal power
and influence, and as exerting, at whatever cost of self-sacrifice, an
uncompromising resistance to the popular worldly policy which he believed
would degrade and enslave the church in its subordination to the temporal
power.
Two notable characters, Potammon and Paphnutius, came from the interior
of Egypt. They had lived a great part of their lives in the desert. Both
had lost the right eye, and suffered otherwise in the persecution. Bishop
Paul, from near the Euphrates, had had his hands paralyzed by the searing
of the muscles with a red-hot iron.
There was Jacob of Nisibis, who had lived for years as a hermit, on
the mountains, in forests and caves, browsing on roots and leaves, and
clothed in a rough goat-hair cloak. This dress and manner of life he
retained after he became a bishop.
From the distant east came John the Persian, Aristaces, son of Gregory
the illuminator, and founder of the Armenian church, and Eusebius
the Great, of Nicomedia, were of the number. Also Eusebius, bishop
of Cesarea, the interpreter, chaplain and confessor of Constantine,
and the father of ecclesiastical history. One of the most interesting
characters, of whom many remarkable stories are told, was Spyridion, from
the island of Cyprus, a shepherd both before and after his elevation to
the episcopate. Hosius, Bishop of Cordova in Spain, was one of the most
powerful and revered men in the council. He had been a confessor during
the persecutions of Maximin. The council was opened by the emperor in
person. It continued about twenty days.
A creed was first produced which all could sign—one which would doubtless
_now_ be pronounced full and orthodox by Christians generally. The part
relating to the Son reads as follows: “I believe in one Lord Jesus
Christ, the Word of God, God of God, Light of Light, Life of Life, the
only begotten Son, the first born of every creature, begotten of the
Father before all worlds, by whom also all things were made,” etc.
But full as this was it did not touch the test point in controversy. That
point turned upon two Greek words, signifying respectively, “_of the same
substance_,” and “_of like substance_.” The Arians admitted that Christ
in his divine nature was of _like substance_ with the Father, but denied
that he was of the _same substance_.
Athanasius and his party feared that this would lead, not to the denial
of the divinity of Christ, but to the belief in two Gods instead of one.
“Polytheism, Paganism, Hellenism was the enemy from which the church had
just been delivered by Constantine, and this was the error under whose
dominion it was feared the teaching of Arius might bring them back.”
These scarred and maimed veterans of Christianity had suffered because of
their steadfast testimony to the truth that _there is one God_; and here
in the first great council of the entire church the creed was formulated
which has stood through the centuries as a protest and guard against such
distinction of persons in the Trinity as shall make a plurality of Gods.
The Nicene creed as adopted had the additional clause inserted regarding
the Son—_of the substance of the Father_.
Arius was condemned as a heretic and sentenced to banishment with
some other leaders of his party, including Eusebius of Nicomedia. But
afterward at the entreaty of the Princess Constantia, sister of the
emperor, they were recalled. For 300 years after the date of its origin
Arianism was a considerable power, both political and religious, not only
in the East where it had its birth, but in western and Teutonic nations.
“The Gothic population that descended on the Roman empire, so far as it
was Christian at all, held to the faith of Arius. Our first Teutonic
version of the Scriptures was by an Arian missionary, Ulfilas. The first
conqueror of Rome, Alaric, the first conqueror of Africa, Genseric, were
Arians. Theodoric the Great, King of Italy, was an Arian. The Gothic
kingdoms of Spain and France were the stronghold of Arianism.”
But the orthodox doctrine established at Nice won its way and secured its
place in the heart of Christendom, which, as Dean Stanley says, “with
but few exceptions receives the confession of the first council, as the
earliest, the most solemn, and the most universal expression of Christian
theology.”