In the fifth century the Arians, oppressed and persecuted by the imperial edicts, took refuge among those barbarous nations who gradually overturned the Roman Empire in the West.
Continuing Arianism and the First Nicene Council,
Today is our final installment from Johann L. Von Mosheim and then we begin the second part of the series with Arthur P. Stanley.
Previously in Arianism and the First Nicene Council.
Time: 325
Place: Nicaea (now Iznik in Turkey)
In the fifth century the Arians, oppressed and persecuted by the imperial edicts, took refuge among those barbarous nations who gradually overturned the Roman Empire in the West; and found among the Goths, Heruli, Suevi, Vandals and Burgundians a fixed residence and a quiet retreat. Being now safe, they treated the orthodox with the same violence which the orthodox had employed against them and other heretics and had no hesitation about persecuting the adherents to the Nicene doctrines in a variety of ways. The Vandals, who had established their kingdom in Africa, surpassed all the rest in cruelty and injustice. At first Genseric, their king and then Huneric, his son, demolished the temples of such Christians as maintained the divinity of the Saviour, sent their bishops into exile, mutilated many of the more firm and decided and tortured them in various ways; and they expressly stated that they were authorized to do so by the example of the emperors, who had enacted similar laws against the Donatists in Africa, the Arians and others who dissented from them in religion.
At the beginning of the sixth century the Arians were triumphant in some parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. Not a few of the Asiatic bishops favored them. The Vandals in Africa, the Goths in Italy, many of the Gauls, the Suevi, the Burgundians and the Spaniards openly espoused their interests. The Greeks indeed, who approved of the Nicene Council, oppressed and also punished them wherever they were able; but the Arians returned the like treatment, especially in Africa and Italy. Yet this prosperity of the Arians wholly terminated when, under the auspices of Justinian, the Vandals were driven from Africa and the Goths from Italy. For the other Arian kings, Sigismund, king of the Burgundians, Theodimir, king of the Suevi in Lusitania and Receared, king of Spain, without violence and war, suffered themselves to be led to a renunciation of the Arian doctrine and to efforts for its extirpation among their subjects by means of legal enactments and councils. Whether reason and arguments or hope and fear had the greater influence in the conversion of these kings, it is difficult to say; but it is certain that the Arian sect was from this time dispersed and could never after recover any strength.
The delegates to the council assembled in the first instance in one of the chief buildings of Nicæa, apparently for the purpose of a thanksgiving and a religious reunion. Whether it was an actual church may be questioned. Christians, no doubt, there had been in Bithynia for some generations. Already in the second century Pliny had found them in such numbers that the temples were deserted and the sacrifices neglected. But it would seem that on this occasion a secular building was fitted up as a temporary house of prayer. At least the traditional account of the place where their concluding prayers were held exactly agrees with Strabo’s account of the ancient gymnasium of Nicæa.
It was a large building, shaped like a basilica, with an apsis at one end, planted in the centre of the town and thus commanding down each of the four streets a view of the four gates and therefore called Mesomphalos, the “Navel” of the city. Whether, however, this edifice actually was a church or not, its use as such on this occasion served as a precedent for most of the later councils. From the time of the Council of Chalcedon, they have usually been held within the walls of churches. But for this the first council, the church, so far as it was a church, was only used as the beginning and the end. After these thanksgivings were over, the members of the assembly must have been collected according to the divisions which shall now be described.
The group which, above the rest, attracts our attention, is the deputation from the Church of Egypt. Shrill above all other voices, vehement above all other disputants, “brandishing their arguments,” as it was described by one who knew them well, “like spears, against those who sate under the same roof and ate off the same table as themselves,” were the combatants from Alexandria, who had brought to its present pass the question which the council was called to decide. Foremost in the group in dignity, though not in importance or in energy, was the aged Alexander, whose imprudent sermon had provoked the quarrel and whose subsequent vacillation had encouraged it. He was the bishop, not indeed of the first but of the most learned, see of Christendom. He was known by a title which he alone officially bore in that assembly. He was “the Pope.” “The Pope of Rome” was a phrase which had not yet emerged in history. But “Pope of Alexandria” was a well-known dignity. Papa, that strange and universal mixture of familiar endearment and of reverential awe, extended in a general sense to all Greek presbyters and all Latin bishops, was the special address which, long before the name of patriarch or of archbishop, was given to the head of the Alexandrian Church.
In the Patriarchal Treasury at Moscow is a very ancient scarf or omophorion, said to have been given by the bishop of Nicæa in the seventeenth century to the czar Alexis and to have been left to the Church of Nicæa by Alexander of Alexandria. It is white and is rudely worked with a representation of the Ascension; possibly an allusion to the first Sunday of their meeting. This relic, true or false, is the nearest approach we can now make to the bodily presence of the old theologian. The shadow of death is already upon him; in a few months he will be beyond the reach of controversy.
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