Sayers and Constantine: 4

In my previous post I referred to the bihelical structure of The Emperor Constantine; today I’m going to discuss one of those helices.

Since the Council of Nicaea was called to deal with the views of Arius and his followers, Sayers — who is drawing throughout on the many surviving records of the Council — rightly gives him a lengthy speech to introduce the debate:

Certainly, I say that the Son is “theos”, that is to say, “divine”, but not that He is “ho Theos”, that is to say, God himself. Our Latin friends who have no definite article in their woolly language may be excused for woolly thinking; but for those who speak Greek there is no excuse. For it is written: “The Lord your God is one God — there is none beside Him: He is God alone.” Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen? The Father alone is eternal, underived Being, that which is — as He Himself said to Moses, “ I AM THAT I AM”. And in His eternity, before all time, He begat the Son, whom St. Paul also calls, “the first-born of every creature” — not a part of Himself, since God cannot be divided, but called forth by Him out of nothing, as the Book of the Proverbs says: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way; when there were no depths, I was brought forth.” And this is His Logos, that is to say, His Wisdom or Word, by whose means He afterward made all things, and without whom, as St. John writes, “nothing was made that has been made”. And this Logos, being in the fullness of time joined to the body of a man, was — in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews — “faithful to Him that made Him” — so that, as it is written of Him in the Acts of the Apostles, “God hath made Jesus both Lord and Christ”.

We may pause here to note that Arius’s views are thoroughly grounded in Scripture, and that he does not deny, and does not mean to diminish, the Lordship of Christ — though he is making a distinction between Lord (which Christ, he thinks, is) and God (which Christ, he thinks, is not). And if Christ is not God, then he might be venerated but cannot be worshipped: “Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen?” That woolly language Latin allows a distinction between latria (which we owe to God) and dulia (which we owe to the saints); Arius effectively makes the same distinction, but between the Father and the Christ. It is not clear that he understands the full implications of his argument. 

(N.B.: If I were to go into all the ways that the verses Arius cites might be differently interpreted — for instance, I could point out that it’s not the Son who speaks in Proverbs 8, it’s Wisdom — we’d be here all day. I’m focusing on the main points of disagreement. By the way, Sayers typically renders the biblical quotations of all parties in the Authorized Version, so if you want to know where a passage comes from, just copy it and paste it into a search engine.)

Arius continues:

This doctrine I received, and the Bishop of Nicomedia also, from the venerable Lucian our teacher, and from the tradition of the Saints: One God and Father of all, and of Him One Son or Word, sole-begotten before all worlds. But that the Son had no beginning, or that He is equal and co-eternal with the Father, this we deny: for it is the nature of a son to be subsequent to his father, and of that which is derived to be inferior to that from which it derives. This stands to reason, and for this cause the Word when He was made flesh said plainly: “My Father is greater than I.”

That is the truth of Scripture, which every sincere mind must acknowledge.

That last note is an important one: Arius believes himself — certainly he wishes to be — faithful to the plain teaching of Scripture; and indeed, he finds his view so amply and obviously attested by Scripture that it’s impossible for him to believe that any “sincere mind” could see things otherwise. Therefore he treats his opponents as either mindless — he seems to think all Latin-speakers dim-witted — or insincere: he singles out for particular scorn his own bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, whom he suggests is trimming his sails to meet the prevailing political winds.

Alexander is rendered speechless by this personal attack, and allows his deacon, a young man named Athanasius, to respond to Arius. Athanasius is so superior to his bishop as a theologian and a debater than one suspects that Alexander would in any circumstances have found a way to be prostrated. Let’s pick up partway through Athanasius’s speech:

… the Son is God out of God, from the very substance and Being of God; therefore the blessed Apostle, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, calls Him: “the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person, upholding all things by the word of His power.” And the Apostle John, in the beginning of his Gospel which lies here open before you, declares very well both the distinct Person of the Son and His equal Godhead with the Father, saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

ARIUS: Why, then, does the Apostle call Him “the first-born of every creature“?

Notice that Arius is ignoring the passages from Hebrews and John’s Gospel that Athanasius has just cited.

ATHANASIUS: Because so He is. For when He became Man, He made Himself as one of the creatures; and therefore He said of himself when He was in the body, “My Father is greater than I”, because He had assumed our nature, being made a little lower than the angels. As it is written, “The first man was of the earth, earthy: the second Man is the Lord from Heaven”. Yet He Himself created the nature that He put on; and this was ordained by Him from eternity when time was not, so that He that is second on earth is first in Heaven. Who also went up thither, the first-born from the dead of all that He had created. Him likewise did John behold in his Apocalypse, in form like unto the Son of Man, and saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty”.

ARIUS: Spoken like a giant, little mannikin. You are so learned in the Scripture you know more about it than Christ Himself, who said to the rich young ruler: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

ATHANASIUS: So he did — and the fool stood gaping. But what if he had answered, like Peter: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God“?

Athanasius’s point is that Jesus did not say, “Why do you call me good, since I am not God?” Arius thinks that’s what Jesus means, but, as Athanasius suggests, instead Jesus is suggesting that he should be called good only if he is God — which he may be. He is pressing his interlocutor to make a decision on that point. But Arius doesn’t get the point: he reads as a denial what is in fact a genuine question.  

ARIUS: He would have earned a blessing — and perhaps have been commended for knowing better than to confuse the Son with the Father.

ATHANASIUS: Was Thomas, then, rebuked when, looking upon the wounds of the Redeemer, he cried: “My Lord and my God!“? Rebuked he was, not for belief, but because he was so slow in believing…. And do not forget to remind your Latin friends, with your customary politeness, that he said, not “theos” but “ho theos mou“ — ” the Lord of me and the God of me” — with the definite article, Arius.

A hit, a palpable hit! That young Alexandrian deacon is pretty skilled in disputation.  

He is also following one of the cardinal principles of biblical interpretation: passages that are unclear or ambiguous must be interpreted in light of those that are clear and unambiguous. Arius, by contrast, because he assumes that Christian monotheism is a simple thing, has simply ignored the passages (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3) that in their (terrifying!) straightforwardness complicate what Arius would prefer to keep simple.

And now, by citing the words of Thomas (John 20:28), Athanasius has exploded the distinction that is most essential to Arius’s theology: that between God the Father and Jesus the Lord. Thomas confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, and this, Athanasius reminds us, is indeed the confession of the Church — however distressing that confession might be for the familiar theological categories. 

Later in the debate they raise an issue that does not get fully resolved for another 125 years, at the Council of Chalcedon, but the passage points to the incoherence of Arius’s position: 

ATHANASIUS: You say that Christ had no human soul?

ARIUS: In Christ, the Logos took the place of the human soul.

ATHANASIUS: Then was He not true man, for man’s nature consists in a fleshly body and a rational soul. There are heretics who deny Christ’s Godhead and others who deny His Manhood — it was left for Arius to deny both at once…. Tell me, how did this compound of half-man and demi-god do the will of the Father? Freely, or of necessity?

ARIUS (hesitating — he sees the trap but cannot avoid it): Freely.

ATHANASIUS: That which is created free to stand is created free to fall. Was the Son, then, made fallible by nature, needing God’s grace to keep Him from sin? If so, the second Adam is no more than the first. Christ is but man or at most an angel — and to worship Him is idolatry. 

(The language Sayers gives Athanasius here echoes that of Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, Book 3: “I made [Adam] just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”) As noted above, I am not certain that Arius has fully grasped that, if the Son is not God, then the Son cannot be worshipped — it would indeed be idolatry to do so. But Christians do worship the Son along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God. This is why Athanasius says, near the beginning of his first Oration Against the Arians, “Those who consider the Arians Christians are in great error.” 

But — you may well be asking — where in all this is Constantine, the Emperor who called this Council? We’ll get to him in the next post.