FUNDAMENTOS LEGALES

The present chapter explores the position and infl uence of the council of Nicaea at the beginning of the high conciliar age, and in particular the question of its con- tinuity with previous centuries of Christian thought. The common tendency to treat Nicaea as a new beginning, rather than a moment within an ongoing dialogue of anthropological/theological articulation, lies behind the enigmas that surround its place in history, and contributes to the problematic compartmentalization of ‘trinitarian theology’ as a fourth-century, post-Nicene phenomenon.

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When Tertullian died c. 225, the centrality of Africa to the coming century of theological discourse could not have been anticipated. The catechetical ‘school’ in Alexandria, whatever its precise constitution, would be the intellectual home of Clement and Origen in the decades immediately to follow, and the city would rise in prominence to one of the primary milieux for refi ning discussions on the being of God. While the linguistic divide between Roman north Africa, signifi cantly Latinized and Latinizing, on the one hand, and Alexandria as the Hellenic capital of learning since at least the fi rst century bc on the other, was already forging a division in theological approaches in Tertullian’s day, the basic themes of address transcended linguistic lines. Tertullian’s coining of trinitas to reify verbally the relationship of the Father to his Son and Spirit as ‘trinity’ may have been a notable fi rst, but it was hardly original. The Greek trias, while less novel than its Latin counterpart, was used in a similar manner earlier in Theophilus of Antioch, and it is a developed theme in the writings of Origen. By the end of the third century, the question was not whether an articulation of God was to be triadic, trinitarian, in nature, but how.

Precisely one century after Tertullian’s death, some 300 bishops assembled in the city of Nicaea to consider, among other things, the response to this question proffered by a fellow African, and one squarely on the Greek side of the emerging linguistic and intellectual divide: Arius of Alexandria. Were one to accept without qualifi cation the portrait of the council painted by Athanasius some 30 years after its convening, it would seem a monumental shift in the life of the Christian Church and the defi nition of its theology, summarized in ‘the council’s zeal for the truth

1 Athanasius, De Decr. 32; 3. The precise dating of the De decretis is diffi cult to determine, but

should be placed somewhere c. 350–56. See T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and

Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) 110–12.

2 Eusebius, Vita Const. 3.6.

3 A. Torrance, ‘Being of One Substance with the Father’, in C. R. Seitz (ed.), Nicene Christianity:

The Future for a New Ecumenism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001) 52.

4 Two recent (and almost simultaneously published) studies have engaged in such a project: L. Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Behr, Nicene Faith.

and the exactness of its sense’ against those who ‘stood out in their irreligion and attempted to fi ght against God’.1 _{Or, to follow the characterization of Eusebius:}

The place [. . .] selected for the synod, the city of Nicaea in Bithynia – named from ‘victory’ – was appropriate to the occasion. As soon as the imperial injunction was generally made known, all [the bishops] hastened there with the utmost willingness, as though they might outdo one another in a race; for they were impelled by the anticipation of a happy result to the conference, by the hope of enjoying a present peace and the desire of beholding something new and strange in the person of so admirable an emperor. When they were all assembled, it appeared evident that the proceeding was the work of God, inasmuch as men who had been most severely separated, not merely in senti- ment but also personally and by difference of country, place, and nation, were here brought together and comprised within the walls of a single city, forming as it were a vast garland of priests, composed of a variety of the choicest fl owers.2

Both Athanasius and Eusebius had specifi c goals they wished to advance through their reporting on the council. Even the most devoted reader will recognize a bias in these words, though clearly bias is not always negative, nor a thing to be shunned. Largely through the infl uence of these two men, at least in practical terms, Nicaea does become a fi gurehead council, and its creed a centre-point of doctrine, in the centuries to follow – ‘the cotter pin of Christian doctrine and the necessary ground of the very possibility of Christian God-talk’, as Alan Torrance has characterized it.3 _{The whys and hows of this centralization we shall explore}

to a degree in the present chapter, though a thoroughgoing study of the history of Nicaea is hardly our proper aim.4 _{What is, however, of bearing on the present}

study is the position of Nicaea at the beginning of ‘the conciliar age’, and the ques- tion of its continuity with past generations of theological discourse in the Church. However one reads the coming-to-centrality of the Nicene creed in the decades and centuries following the council, its eventual signifi cance is undeniable; and this makes all the more pertinent the matter of its placement within the broader trajectories of early Christian theological articulation.

Most directly for our current purposes, the seemingly non-anthropological char- acter of the creed – which speaks explicitly to no anthropological themes at all, and mentions humanity only implicitly in stating that the Son ‘became man’ – stands out.5 _{This is especially so when Nicaea is seen in succession to the great}

theological writings of the second and third centuries, which as our two examples have shown, are signifi cantly anthropological, not simply in their desire to explore the human, but in the anthropological framing-in of their exploration of God.

Further, the creed lacks any substantive discourse on the Holy Spirit, which we have seen ground the whole address of Christian anthropology in the preceding centuries. Our observation of the centrality of the Holy Spirit to this earlier anthro- pological and soteriological discourse, demands some manner of explanation of the near absence of any pneumatological discussion in the Nicene symbol. Thomas Smail’s comments on attention to the Spirit in the Constantinopolitan revision of Nicaea seem even more pertinent as to the Nicene original:

Attention is so concentrated on the binitarian question of the right relationship of the Father to the Son that the properly trinitarian question that deals with the relating of the Spirit to both the Father and the Son is dealt with in a way that lacks focus and specifi city and that, on any reckoning, is quite inadequate to the rich biblical and especially New Testament material that deals with the pre- and post-Pentecostal activity of the Spirit among God’s people.6

And this of the creed of 381, which contains a whole article on the Spirit. One wonders how Smail might characterize Nicaea’s mere ‘and in the Holy Spirit’. How does it come about that the creed that will become the bedrock of dogmatic defi nition for centuries following 325 (indeed, in some sense, ever after) seems to abandon so thoroughly the pneumatological focus of previous generations of Christian theology? Certainly much of the response is situational: Nicaea responds to specifi c concerns, which are essentially Christological; but this does not wholly eliminate the question.

In the present chapter, I suggest a somewhat revised, though not radically new, reading of the history of Nicaea and the content of its creed, drawn from the

5 For an interesting reading of the phrase ‘for us [. . .] was made man’ in the creed’s later Constanti- nopolitan rendition, see R. W. Jenson, ‘For Us . . . He Was Made Man’, in C. R. Seitz (ed.), Nicene

Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001) 78, where he

describes it as ‘simply a narrative explication’ of the creed’s starting point, of ‘the fact of the incarnate Logos, of the man Jesus who is the Son’. Needless to say, given my treatment in the present text, I fi nd Jenson’s words in this article compelling. Later in the same contribution he writes, ‘The soteriological and metaphysical – not chronological – outcome of this passage is “and was made man.” There is one who is simultaneously one of us and unus ex trinitate. He is either only inasmuch as he is both; he does the things of his divine reality through his life as a man and does the things of his human reality through his life as one of the Trinity’ (pp. 84–85). Cf. my comments in the introduction, pp. 2–7. 6 T. Smail, ‘The Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity’, in C. R. Seitz, ibid. 149.

anthropological-theological focus of the fi rst three centuries and set in the context, too, of later theologians such as Cyril of Jerusalem, whom I will examine in subsequent chapters for signs of continuity with those earlier writers. What the fathers at Nicaea were really doing, and what they were not doing, is a popular scholarly topic at the present moment, and I am convinced that a more authentic understanding of the anthropological focus of early patristic thought sheds light on what is an interesting and curious discussion. To see how Nicaea does in fact bear the marks of continuity with the anthropological-theological discourse of those earlier centuries, and to appreciate more authentically the character of its infl uence on the continuation of that discourse into the fourth, we must fi rst of all attempt to read accurately the history and output of the council proper, still very much a mystery despite its centrality in so much modern study.