Introduction
In 312, Constantine confirmed his election as Roman Emperor in battle, fighting under the banner of the Cross. Among his first acts as Emperor was to declare religious liberty across the Roman world, but almost immediately a learned priest from Alexandria in Egypt named Arius threw everything into chaos.
ONE of the best-known documents of the Christian Church is the Nicene Creed, read out to this day at every communion service. This statement of faith, dating back to 381, expanded on an earlier creed released by a Council of bishops held in the city of Nicaea in 325,* which declared that according to Scripture Jesus Christ was neither just a man nor merely one of God’s creatures, but God incarnate, a divine Son begotten timelessly from his Father, and not made.
It was a riposte to the teachings of Arius, an Alexandrian priest. Like other progressive thinkers of his day, Arius found the idea of God begetting a son, and of that son later being messily born of a virgin to become man, both absurd and irreverent.* He felt more comfortable if this Son of God was merely the first and best of God’s creatures. Skilfully crafted hymns spread these ideas rapidly, but stubborn resistance came from Alexandria’s bishop, Alexander, and his chaplain Athanasius.
For the text of both, see The Creed. The Council opened on May 20th, 325 and the Creed was read out on June 19th. Other matters, including an agreement to keep Easter on a Sunday at Passover, kept the Council in session until August 25th. See Bede and the Paschal Controversy.
The fashionable Platonist philosophy of the Academies imagined God as a remote Supreme Being, and to such modern minds the virgin’s womb was an insurmountable problem. The Orthodox, however, revelled in its paradoxes. See the Orthodox hymn Te Deum Laudamus, which states: ‘When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man thou didst not abhor the Virgins Womb’ — a line picked up in the Christmas carol ‘O come all ye faithful’.