Lost Innocence
In the fourth century, Britain’s Christians acquired a taste for watering down the mystery of their message.
720-735
In the fourth century, Britain’s Christians acquired a taste for watering down the mystery of their message.
720-735
When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended decades of persecution for Christians in February 313, those in Britain returned to their churches with simple joy. Yet missionaries to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 found a church scattered and plagued by alien beliefs. St Bede blamed a priest from Egypt, Arius, for the startling change.
translated and abridged
WHERE the uproar of persecution subsided, Christ’s faithful, who during the crisis had buried themselves in woods and remote, lonely caves, went out in public. They renovated ruined churches, founded, built and finished off churches dedicated to the holy martyrs, unfurling them everywhere like victory banners, and celebrated feast days, doing everything with clean and holy hearts and lips.
This peace reigned among the churches of Christ right up to the Arian madness which, after corrupting the whole world, infected even this island beyond it.* With this high-road of pestilence, so to speak, cleared across the sea, all the pus of every heresy flooded the island instantly, which delighted to hear of anything new, and never held firm to anything.
It was in the time of Constantine, who had been proclaimed Emperor in Britain,* that Arius’s error surfaced, and was named and condemned at the Council of Nicaea;* yet still the deadly virus spread to the churches of the whole world, and even of these islands.*
translated and abridged
Arius, a clergyman from Alexandria in Egypt, watered down Christian teaching to the point where the Son or Word of God was no longer God himself, but just the first of all God’s creatures. See The First Council of Nicaea. Arius brought various Scriptural passages as evidence, but failed to grasp that as Jesus Christ is both God’s Son and also Mary’s child, the Scriptures speak of him as God and also as a creature. See: John 1:1-4, John 20:28 and 1 John 5:7; also Colossians 1:14-17 and Philippians 2:5-11. Others make the point implicitly. Compare Mark 4:36-41 with Psalms 107:25-30.
At York in 306, on the death of his father Emperor Constantius. Constantius was one of four co-Emperors, but by 324 Constantine had cemented himself as the sole ruler of the Roman Empire.
The Council began on May 20th, 325. On the background, see The First Council of Nicaea. Whether British bishops were present is not known for certain. If they were, they did not support Arius; only two delegates, both from north Africa, did. Nicaea was chosen as it was near the Emperor’s palace a few miles from Constantinople, his brand new capital, consecrated in 330.
Support for Arius remained strong until the Council of Constantinople in 381. The creed issued at that Council, an expansion of the creed of Nicaea, is read out at services of Holy Communion to this day, under the name of the Nicene Creed: for the full text, see The Creed. The Creed was subsequently changed by the Western churches in a controversy that eventually brought the Roman Empire down. See Filioque.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
How did Christians in fourth century Britain escape persecution by the authorities?
By fleeing to remote woodland and caves.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
British Christians lived in caves. The Roman Empire stopped persecuting them in 314. The Christians lived in towns again.