The Great Councils

Arius (256 — 336) was a presbyter in Alexandria. The Church in Alexandria, after the Diocletan persecution, was split between rigorist (Meletans) and less-rigorist factions. Arius was writer of song lyrics and his doctrine was mainly contained in a work called the Thallia. The influence of Origen remained strong in the city, particularly Logos theology — Jesus is the Logos, made flesh, for our salvation. Arius based his theology upon the Logos theology to make a key distinction between Jesus and the Father: the Father created the Logos albeit before the Logos then went on to create other things. The implicaton of this is that there was a time when there was only the Father, and when the Logos did not exist. This was the core distinction Arius wanted to make between the Son and the Father, but essentially this meant that Jesus, though Son of God, is not 'God' in the sense that the Father is. (This is broadly the same view as later sects, for example, the Jehovah’s Witnesses)

Constantine, like all emperors, wanted his empire to be united in order to be strong, however it became clear early on after his accession that his 'preferred' faith — Christianity — was riven with disagreements over doctrine and church practice. Bishops, in particular, were prone to get involved with the intrigues and politics of power, which could sometimes lead to violence and lynching if not by them, then on the part of their followers. Once persecution had ceased, these problems rose to the surface.

It was therefore in Constantine’s interest to use his power and influence to help solve disputes in the Church. Although the Church had held councils since Acts 15, the idea of a single central council, bringing bishops together to solve a dispute, is the idea of Constantine and reflected his hope that Christianity would unite, not divide his Empire. The role of the Emperor, in calling together a council, remained a feature for centuries (It’s a bit like the emperor 'knocking heads together').

This was called by Constantine in order to get an agreed statement about the relationship between Son and Father: was the Son created, or not? Was the Son equal to the Father, and if so, in what way? In what way were the Son and Father different?

Over 300 bishops attended, mainly from the Eastern Church (which had been most affected by Arianism at that time) but also from the West. The approach taken by the Council was to approve a version of the Creed (originally a statement of faith in the Baptism service) which dealt with the issue at stake.

The text agreed was as follows:

This was a total defeat for Arius and his supporters. However, the creed had to use an unscriptural

phrase, *homousious*, to describe the uniting divine principle which made both Son and Father

God. This made a number of bishops unhappy and caused support for the Creed to wane after the death of Constantine (in 333).

Of those who rejected *homoousios*, there were a set of various reasons why:

a) Those who were really supporters of Arius and did not believe the Son was divine in the same way that the Father was;

b) Those who were unhappy that an unscriptural term was used in the Creed;

c) Those who felt it was too close to Sabellianism (modalism) and was capable of supporting a confusion between Son and Father. These lent their support to a compromise phrase, homoiouios - of similar substance to the Father. These included a number of bishops who were at the original Council of Nicea.

But if *ousia* is that which 'makes something what it is', by saying Christ was 'similar' to the Father isn’t the same thing. There was a confusion implicit in the Creed of Nicea as to whether ousia was referring to 'godness' or 'fatherness'.

This was both a political and a theological struggle. Politically, after the death of Constantine, the lack of convinced support for Nicea’s homoousios became more open. Many bishops favoured the compromise homoiousios, whereas others started to side more with Arius and accused the supporters of Nicea as being Sabellians. Rule of the Empire had been divided between Constantine’s sons: Constantius ruled the Eastern part of the Empire, the Balkans were given to Constans and the rest of the West were ruled by a third brother, Constantine II. The Nicene position was supported throughout the Latin-speaking Western church, whereas Arians and supporters of 'homoiousios' gained the upper hand in the East. The primary supporter of homoousios in the East was Athanasius of Alexandria, but he was exiled by Constantine for falling out with a neighbouring bishop. He returned to Alexandria just before Constantine died, only to be exiled again, this time to Rome in the West, where his influence was felt strongly and he was wellreceived.

In the meantime, Constantine had waged war against his brother Constans and had lost, so the Western Empire was solely ruled by Constans, who remained a supporter of the homoousios of Nicea. Constantius initially vacillated and was primarily interested in church unity than the niceties of doctrine. With time, however, he needed the political support of Arians and semi-Arian bishops, so his policy increasingly became anti-Nicene.

Athanasius eventually took up the See of Alexandria again in 346 and for ten years ensured that Egypt, at least, was cleared of Arian infuence. However, war broke out between East and West and Constantius successfully won control of the whole Empire. He tried to get the Western church to reject Nicea, which it obstinately refused to do.

His policy never included persecution, although he did actively encourage the restoration and rebuilding of pagan temples. In regard to Christianity, his policy was to stop trying to control the Church, to release from exile all the competing factions (either orthodox, Arian or homoiousian) in the hope that Christianity would 'eat itself'. It didn’t. In a chastened situation, they managed to avoid a split and the hand of the orthodox was gradually strengthened without the interference of homoiousian emperors.

Besides the influence of Athanasius, the main supporter of Nicea in the East, his position was gradually strengthened by the writngs of three brilliant scholars: Gregory of Nazianzus (329 — 390), Basil of Caesarea (329 — 379) and Gregory of Nyssa (335 — 395). Together, these three are known as the Cappadocian Fathers.

Basil argued for the divinity of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity against the so-called Pneumotomachi (Greek for 'fighters against the Spirit'). These were Arians who were trying to fight a rear-guard action by denying the divinity of the Spirit (and so making nonsense of a Trinity where two persons were divine but the third was not). Basil and G of Nazianzus were good friends and effective debaters against Arianism. Basil and G of Nyssa were brothers. G of Nyssa greatly helped define how the three persons of the Godhead can be distinct yet be one God. The distinction lies in the roles and relationships with respect to each other and their work, although they remain united in will and therefore any action of one is the action of the Three (and therefore the One).

Called by Emperor Theodosius I (ruled 339 — 395), who was a supporter of Nicea. The council of Constantinople marks the final triumph of Nicene faith and also incorporates addition developments, especially that of the Cappadocian fathers. Like Nicea, it produced a creed (which most people today refer to — inaccurately — as the Nicene Creed):

It is instructive to go through the text of the above creed and identify what has been changed (added, mainly) from that of Nicea and to identify the sources of these changes.

Once Constantinople had clarified that the Son is homoousios with the Father, a second debate came to the fore based on the relationship between the Son of God and the Man Jesus. In some ways, this reflected the classic tension in the Greek mindset between the qualities of divinity and the qualities of creation. Although Gnosticism and early docetism was in the past, there was still a tension in classic philosophy (and theology) between uniting God’s being with the created order. The controversy also reflected two approaches to biblical hermeneutics: the allegorical approach (associated with the Catechetical school of Alexandria — with its hero, Origen) and a more literal approach (associated with the Church of Antioch — which retained an essentially Rabbinic approach to biblical exegesis).

The Gospels paint a picture of a very human Jesus: he weeps, he is deeply moved, he suffers and he dies. The Greek philosophy which guided the thought of early Christian writers believed that any God would be:

The Jesus of the Gospels does not conform to these principles! This was why the initial docetist heresies tended to say that Jesus' humanity was only an appearance.

Once Jesus' sonship is truly divine, how could the circle be squared with the philosophical understanding of divinity? The answer was to talk about Jesus having two natures: a divine nature and a human nature. The problem was how to explain how this could be possible without either implying two separate beings (a divine being and a human being — which is really a denial of the incarnation) or a confusion in which a third hybrid being, neither really divine nor really human, resulted.

Although Nestorius had an opportunity to defend his position at the Council, a majority of the bishops were in disagreement at the end of the debate and condemned Nestorius, affirmed Theotokos.

The key term to refer to the Person of Christ was the Greek word hypostasis. By condemning Nestorius, and including two Epistles and 12 Anathemas which Cyril of Alexandria sent to Nestorius, the Council, allied itself to Cyril of Alexandria’s theology. This clarified that after the Incarnation, there can only be one hypostasis (person), not two. Theology has since called this doctrine the Hypostatic Union.

However, a group of late-arrivals from the Church of the East did not agree with the result (which had predated their arrival) and went into formal schism with the rest of the Church. This position was rectified about a century later, but there has always been a reputation, which is unfair, that the Church of Persia and East Syria is somehow 'Nestorian'.

The question which theology asks of the Council of Ephesus was 'is this Incarnate Christ human, in the sense that we are human, and divine, in the sense that the Word is divine — or has some change occurred to God the Son (which is impossible), or some change occurred to the human nature Christ took on (which would make it different from our human nature)?' This issue of whether the hypostatic union implies a change in either (or both) of the human and divine natures needed to be clarified twenty years later.

With Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, theological disputes were also political. The confusion of politics with theology tends to bring out the worst in Christians, and in this respect the 5^th century is no different from the 21^st century. Eutyches was an Egyptian monk and ardent supporter of his former bishop, Cyril, who had died in 444. Eutyches began to teach a kind of fundamentalist and derived version of the teaching of Cyril. In Eutyches' terms, following the Incarnation of the Son of God, there was both one hypostasis and one physis (nature) which was both human and divine. The problem lay in Cyril’s earlier use of the Greek word physis to imply what the Latin word persona meant, whereas normally 'persona' is the Latin translation for hypostasis. A better translation of physis (Gk) is natura (Lat). Interestingly, here the use of Latin helps clarify the distinction of persona and natura, whereas their Greek equivalents, hypostasis and physis have overlapping meanings. (Sometimes the best way of working out theology is to try to translate it into another language! - which is what anyone involved in cross-cultural mission has to do.)

Eutyches was influential because of his renoun as a holy man. As a result, his teaching was widely taken up in the East. The Western Church’s most influential voice in the controversy was that of Pope Leo I. Leo, while contradicting Eutyches' position that there was one nature in Christ after the Incarnation, stated that it was due to misunderstanding rather than deliberate perversity.

The Controversy rumbled on from 448 to 451, with Constantinople being a centre of opposition to Eutyches' teaching, and Alexandria being a centre of support. A series of local synods were held, with each coming to competing conclusion and once again the spectre of Christianity causing political division emerged. This, again, forced the Emperor, Marcian, to convene the Council in 451. Pope Leo, who could not attend because of the problem with invasions from Attila the Hun, sent his legates together with a doctrinal letter, which he had written, which has subsquently been called Leo’s Tome. This proved very influential upon the Council and showed, again, how the West —and in particular Rome — had proven its influence by holding to a doctrinal position which subsequent history had proved to be orthodox (such as on the homoousios). Rome was also able to stand aside from the political rivalry of Constantinople and Alexandria.

The Council concluded:

This managed to mediate, and clarify the 'thin line' of orthodoxy between two opposite errors: * confusing the human and divine natures into some third thing (point against Eutyches) * changing the human and divine natures by the union so that they were no longer what we normally would understand by these terms (point against Eutyches) * dividing the one Person of the Incarnate Christ into two Persons, hence undoing the Incarnation (point against Nestorianism) * separating the one Person of the Incarnate Christ into two separate Persons — like one riding on the shoulders of the other (point against Nestorianism)

With Chalcedon, a set of specific uses of words in Latin and Greek became the established language of orthodox Christian teaching:

Christ is a union of two natures (Greek: physes, Latin: naturae) — human and divine, in one person (Greek: prosopon, hypostasis, Latin: persona).

Trying to work out what we mean by nature and person is to go beyond the remit of this module, and is really quite complicated. However, behind this is the need to maintain the integrity of both divine and human in the one, united Person of Christ.