THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 070
The Victory at Nicaea
5-4. The Victory at Nicaea
Let us now look beyond the stormy controversies of the next half century to the broad issues of the council. The two fundamental doctrines of Christianity are the deity of Christ and the unity of God. Without the one, it merges in philosophy or Unitarianism; without the other, it sinks into polytheism. These two doctrines had never gone very well together; and now the council reconciled them by giving up the purely transcendental conception of God which brought them into collision with each other and with the historical facts of the Incarnation. The question was ripe for decision, as we see from the prevalence of such an unthinkable conception as that of a secondary God: and if the conservatives had been able to keep it unsettled, one of the two fundamental doctrines must before long have overcome the other. Had the unity of God prevailed, Christianity would have sunk into a very ordinary sort of Deism, or might possibly have become something like Islam, with Jesus for the prophet instead of Mahomet. But it is much more likely that the deity of Christ would have effaced the unity of God, and in effacing it have opened a wide door for polytheism, and itself sunk to the level of heathen hero-worship. As a matter of history, the churches did sink into polytheism for centuries, for common people made no practical difference between the worship of saints and that of the old gods. But because the Council of Nicaea had made it impossible to think of Christ simply as one of the saints, the Reformers were able to drop the saint-worship without falling into Deism.
Further, the recognition of eternal distinctions in the divine nature establishes within that nature a social element before which despotism or slavery in earth or heaven stands condemned. It makes illogical the conception of God as inscrutable Power in whose acts we must not presume to seek for reason — a conception common to Rome, Islam, and Geneva. Yet more, if God himself is not a despot, but a constitutional sovereign who rules by law and desires his subjects to see reason in his acts, this is an ideal which must profoundly influence political thought. True, there was little sign for centuries of any such influence. The Empire did not grow less despotic, and such ideas of freedom as the Teutons brought in did not come out of the Gospel and if Islam and the Papacy lean to despotism, the Unitarians have done honourable work in the cause of liberty. But thoughts which colour the whole of life may have to work for ages before they are clearly understood. The Latin Church of the Middle Ages was not a mere apotheosis of power like Islam; and when Teutonic Europe broke away from Latin tutelage, the way was prepared for the slow recognition of a higher ideal than power, and our own age is beginning to see better the profound and far-reaching significance of the Nicene decision, not for religion only, but for political, scientific, and social thought.
The victory won at Nicaea was decisive. Arianism started vigorously, and seemed for awhile the winning side; but the moment it faced the council, it collapsed before the all but unanimous reprobation of the Christian churches. Only two bishops from the edge of the African desert ventured to deny that it contradicts essentials of the Gospel. The decision was free, for Constantine would not risk another Donatist controversy by putting pressure on the bishops before he could safely crush the remnant; and it was permanent, for words deliberately put into a creed cannot be removed without admitting that the objection to them is valid on one ground or another. Thus Arianism was not only condemned, but condemned in the most impressive way by the assembly which comes nearer than any other in history to the stately dream of a concrete catholic church speaking words of divine authority. No later gathering could pretend to rival the august assembly where Christendom had once for all pronounced the condemnation of Arianism, and no later movements were able definitely to reverse its decision.
But if the conservatives (who were the mass of the Eastern bishops) had signed the creed with a good conscience, they had no idea of making it their working belief. They were not Arians — or they would not have torn up the Arianising creed at Nicaea; but if they had been hearty Nicenes, no influence of the Court could have kept up an Arianising reaction for half a century. Christendom as a whole was neither Arian nor Nicene, but conservative. If the East was not Nicene, neither was it Arian, but conservative: and if the West was not Arian, neither was it Nicene, but conservative also. But conservatism was not the same in East and West. Eastern conservatism inherited its doctrine from the age of subordination theories, and dreaded the Nicene definition as needless and dangerous. But the Westerns had no great interest in the question and could scarcely even translate its technical terms into Latin, and in any case their minds were much more legal than the Greek; so they simply fell back on the authority of the Great Council, Shortly, East and West were alike conservative ; but while conservatism in the East went behind the council, in the West it was content to start from it.
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