A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Historically, most Christian monks and nuns have lived in community, ever since the time of Pachomius, rather than becoming hermits.

anything bonded monasticism into the episcopally ordered Church, it was this pioneering hagiography (‘saint-writing’) from one of the most powerful bishops of the fourth century.

One Syrian word for monk is abila, ‘mourner’.

the tradition of the Holy Fool.

Diogenes of Sinope (see pp. 29–30). The first well-known reviver of Diogenes’s deliberate attempt to flout all convention was Simeon, who came to be known in Syrian as Salus (‘foolish’). Simeon outdid Diogenes in active rudeness:

His affectionate chronicler a century later was Leontius, a Cypriot bishop. Bishops are not normally associated with antisocial behaviour; perhaps Leontius was writing in the same satirical spirit as Dean Swift.

interesting counterpoint or safety valve to the ethos of prayerful silence and traditional solemnity which is so much part of Orthodox identity. Not all Orthodox theologians have been very comfortable with that contrast.

important symbols of Islam, the minaret, was inspired by the sight of the later representatives of these Syrian Christian holy men summoning the faithful to worship God from their pillars.

has come to be called ‘the Great’, and he was one of the first to set a pattern which became a norm in the Eastern Churches (see p. 437): he was first a monk, but was then chosen as bishop of his native Caesarea in Cappadocia, the modern

fact 150 years after Origen was first posthumously condemned by a Church council in 400, the same fate befell Evagrius, accused of ‘Origenism’ alongside Origen himself and condemned by the fifth Council of Constantinople in 553

to recover much of his work from Armenian or Syriac manuscripts and reassess him as one of the greatest founding fathers of Christian spiritual writing. His

In an echo of Origen’s universalism, he repeatedly asserted that even those suffering in Hell kept those imperishable seeds of virtue. No wonder his Church decided that he was dangerous.

Very quickly the Emperor Constantine I learned to his cost that Christians were inclined to imperil the unity which their religion proclaimed.

the North African Church, where equally issues of forgiveness were combined with the problem of who had legitimate authority to forgive.

So he adapted the North African Church’s well-established practice of submitting disputes to councils of bishops, with the difference that now for the first time they were gathered from right across the Mediterranean. Constantine’s first summons of a

Arles in what is now southern France. The bishops,

Once more the council did not succeed in appeasing the Donatists, and in the course of much muddled negotiation with Donatist leaders, the Emperor was provoked into ordering troops to enforce their return to the mainstream Church. The first official persecution of Christians

The councils of Rome and Arles were thus not a promising precedent, but over the next century the use of councils to resolve Church disputes became firmly established as a mechanism of Church life. It

was that the Catholic Church had become an imperial Church,

Alexander would not be the last bishop to turn the fact that one of his clergy was a rather more acute thinker than himself into a matter of ecclesiastical discipline.

of friends further afield, not least the wily and politically minded Bishop of Nicomedia, a city which, until the founding of Constantinople, had been the Eastern imperial capital.

Ancyra were pre-empted by Arius’s enemies, who seized the chance of the death of the Bishop of Antioch to gather there, both to choose one of their supporters as the new bishop for that key diocese and once more to condemn Arius’s views. They also issued what they claimed was a definitive creed: a precedent for many more official statements which would make the same claim.

He told the delegates that they would enjoy the climate and also, with a hint of menace, that he intended to ‘be present as a spectator and participator in those things which will be done’: the first time in Christian history that this had happened. Some think that he actually presided at the council.

significant clause in the creed which emerged as the council’s agreed pronouncement: the statement that the Son was ‘of one substance’

large accumulation of other matters controversial in the life of the Church were discussed at this council. They included precedence among the leading bishops, a prohibition on moneylending among the clergy and over-hasty promotion of recent converts to the episcopate, the reconciliation of schismatics, even a ban on voluntary eunuchs being ordained as clergy.

So Eusebius and his sympathizers were remarkably successful in building up influence with the Emperor in his last years

Christianity’s idea of an incarnate God: the Son of God ‘has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming himself man’.64

Constantius II, who through his military victories reunited the whole empire, and who was therefore able in 359, after much negotiation and previous drafting, to dictate a Homoean formula to two councils representing East and West. This statement, an effort to settle the dispute once and for all, was named the Creed of Ariminum after the Western council which was steamrollered into accepting it. In the end it failed to stick, and survived only

Christianity was now thrown into confusion as Julian, whom Christians subsequently angrily labelled ‘the Apostate’, startlingly abandoned the Christian faith.

he employed the devastatingly effective strategy against Christianity of standing back from its disputes to let it fight its internal battles without a referee, a mark of how quickly the emperor had become a crucial player in the Church’s disputes.

and the Cappadocian Fathers provided a way of speaking about the Trinity which would create a balance between threeness and oneness.

As a result of this verbal pact, the Trinity consists of three equal hypostaseis in one ousia: three equal Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) sharing one Essence or Substance (Trinity or Godhead). The arbitrariness of this decision, for

This first Council of Constantinople saw the formulation of the fully developed creed which is now misleadingly known as the Nicene, and has come to be liturgically recited at the Eucharist in Churches of both Eastern and Western tradition.

all agreed on the outcome: Jesus Christ the Son of God is not created and is equal to the Father in the Trinity.

The Council of Nicaea, preoccupied by Father and Son, had not extended its quarrels to the Spirit, and so it was not surprising that a large question remained for judgement in 381.

Christ was both divine and human.77 The Council of Constantinople thus radically narrowed the boundaries of acceptable belief in the Church, creating a single imperial Christianity backed up by military force. It was one half of a profound transformation

known as the Goths and their relatives the Vandals. Eusebius of Nicomedia had proved that he was not merely a politician with short-term goals when he had encouraged a mission to the Goths, led by one of their own called Ulfila. Ulfila translated the Bible into his native language, though he omitted to translate the Books of Kings on the grounds that their content was too warlike and might give the Goths ideas.

Miaphysite or Monophysite

Now the argument was about the way in which Christ combined both human and divine natures

Behind the theological debate lay several hidden agendas which were as much to do with power politics as with theology.

Three times in seventy years after the Council of Constantinople, successive Bishops of Alexandria contributed to the downfall of successive Bishops of Constantinople.

All these four cities would therefore be jostling for power at the same time as they fought to establish what the most adequate view of Christ’s humanity and divinity might be. Alongside them was the Bishop of Rome, increasingly assertive of his charismatic position as successor of Peter

At issue once more was the question of Christology: that three-centuries-old puzzle of how a human life in Palestine could relate to a cosmic saviour, or more exactly be a single person who was both human and cosmic

Now the Arian controversy had been settled by asserting that Christ was of one substance with the Father, what did that say about his human substance – as seen in his tears, his anger, his jokes, his breaking of ordinary bread and wine in an upper room?

ready to emphasize the real humanity of Christ;

vessel of Christ’s person could be said to contain two natures as it might oil and water, mingling but not mixing.

Devotion to Mary was now becoming prominent throughout the Roman Empire: enthusiasts for the Nicene settlement of doctrine encouraged it, as a way of safeguarding Christ’s divinity against Arianism, since it emphasized the unique favour granted his earthly mother.

rival bishop.87 The ensuing row once more plunged the entire Eastern Church into a bewildering welter of intrigue and complication which drew in the Eastern emperor, in sheer self-defence, to stop his empire being ripped apart. After a council at Ephesus in 431 and negotiations over the next two years, Theodosius II forced a compromise on the opposing sides. It vindicated the title Theotokos, ruined Nestorius’s career for good and left ‘Nestorian’ theology permanently condemned, but it also left many supporters of Cyril’s theology outraged that their own theology had not been fully vindicated with the full triumphalism that they would have wished.

Bishop Dioscorus, which culminated in a second Council of Ephesus (449), humiliating all opponents of Alexandrian claims and outlawing all talk of two natures in Christ.

Leo and indeed the later Roman Church always maintained the absolute authority of his statement,