EXPANDING THE CHRISTIAN MIND ...

For the next few weeks, while news is slack during the holiday season, we will look at how the teaching of the Church has developed through the great Councils of history. Between 325 and 1962-5, there have been 21 'ecumenical' Councils of the Church. Only the first seven took place before the split between East and West in 1054, and Eastern Christians do not therefore recognise the remainder. "Ecumenical" comes from a Greek word oikumene, meaning 'the whole inhabited world'. In other words, "ecumenical" means 'representative of the Church everywhere'.

Councils have met to decide matters of doctrine and of discipline, though the 2nd Vatican Council (1962-5) was more wide-ranging, issuing documents on a whole series of pastoral Issues as well. Although a Council may decide an Issue, that does not mean it is completely closed. The language and thought of one era Is not that of another, and theologians need to help the Church of any given age to re-express, maybe, the utterances of a previous age, without denying them. And nothing the Church teaches can be incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The very first Council of the Church was convened In Jerusalem by the Apostles to decide whether pagan converts to Christ should, or should not, have to conform to Jewish practices. They answered in the negative. This was not strictly an 'ecumenical' Council, though its decisions are contained in the New Testament and are read in our liturgy. A later gathering defined the system for deciding the date of Easter; again, this was not 'ecumenical', but it set a precedent: those summoned to Councils had to be bishops. There were also Important regional Councils, such as In North Africa, which debated another important question of early times: should baptised Christians who fell away under persecution, or who lapsed Into heresy, have to be baptised again if they were re-admitted to the Church? [Again, the answer was 'no'].

Early Christianity was particularly strong in North Africa. This may now seem surprising, seeing it is now reduced to small pockets, with a more tenacious (though harassed) survival in Egypt, the Coptic Christians. Islam was to sweep the board, largely, it must be confessed, because Christianity in North Africa became so doctrinally divided. Yet the port city of Alexandria was once a great cauldron of Christian thinking. Everybody, it seems, including the corner baker and the butcher’s boy, had a ‘view’ or a side to take on the latest controversy! It all seems very fetched by the standards of today.

It was here that the priest Arius, bugged by the suggestion that the Father and the Son being one meant that they were "the same as made no difference", declared in the opposite direction: that the Son was inferior to the Father, was a created being, and that there was a time when he was not. This was of immense significance; if true, it meant God did not really give his being to the Son who taught in Galilee. And we could not really receive that same Holy Spirit that dwells in God. Arianism was an ideal teaching for people with a low opinion of themselves. It spread like wildfire, and although not known as such, it still exists today.

In 324 the Emperor Constantine had become a Christian and was determined to settle this disarray in the faith. He summoned a ‘council of all bishops’ (actually of the East – 318 of them) to meet at Ankara, though the location was changed to Nicaea [pronounced ‘nice ear’] on the Asian side of the Bosphorus opposite the imperial city of Constantinople, so that he could more easily keep an eye on things. The Pope, St. Sylvester, did not attend, though he sent two of his priests. Nor did Arius, but the bishops sent him their arguments, filled with scriptural quotations, all of which he seemed to answer.

The council, with a little push from the Emperor, condemned Arius. However, there were difficulties in just saying, for example, that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were one. Taken in a certain sense, it was argued, that meant that when the Son was crucified the Father was crucified. The council took the novel step of using a word not in the Bible, but current in Greek thought, in order to make a definition. They said that the Son was "homo-ousios" (English translates "of the same substance as") the Father. In English it is none too simple to explain precisely what this ‘substance’ means, and in the Greek too there was some uncertainty, thus ensuring future disputes. But it was felt to be a revolutionary step which liberated Church thinkers of the 4th century AD from a purely Biblical mind-set (because they didn’t live in the Biblical ages) and allowed them to use the tools of their time.

1673 years later, some church thinkers say we need to express again the truths of our faith for the mind-set of our time (which language, for a start – presumably not Greek any longer?)

The Council produced a Creed, which is the first half of the Creed we use every Sunday (although called the Nicene Creed, it was greatly expanded 56 years later to include a full mention of the Holy Spirit and the works of the Spirit, compressed into only four words in the original)

The Arian issue did not immediately go away; Constantine died in 337, and his successor, Constantius, was an Arian, who sent the ‘orthodox’ bishops into exile. One of the heroes of these days was St. Athanasius of Alexandria, who had attended Nicaea as a bishop’s secretary. Sensing that the people were instinctively ‘orthodox’, whereas the hierarchy were veering back to Arianism, he stuck his neck out and earned for himself the motto ‘Athanasius contra mundum – Athanasius against the world’.

Should you visit the ancient Adriatic Imperial city of Ravenna, you can see the ‘Christian basilica’ and the ‘Arian basilica’, the ‘Christian baptistry’ and the ‘Arian baptistry’, the ‘Christian cemetery’ and the ‘Arian cemetery’, all of which were happily operating alongside each other some 200 years after the question was officially "solved".

So belief in the divinity of Christ was assured by the Council of Nicaea (and later refined at Constantinople, to produce the Creed which we know). But understanding of Christ still tended to veer this way and that, like a see-saw. One with a low view of humanity would tend to say that there was little humanity in Christ – ultimately that there was none at all. This is the erroneous doctrine of the ‘one nature’ of Christ, called – wait for it – ‘Monophysitism’: belief in one nature alone.

At the other end were those who saw so much humanity in Christ that the human Christ and the divine Christ become totally distinct persons. This is called ‘Nestorianism’, and is so named after Nestorius, a monk of Antioch appointed as Bishop of Constantinople on the grounds that a simple monk would be less meddlesome! An error! Nestorius began hitting out at targets left, right and centre, notably the teaching that Our Lady was ‘Theotokos’, meaning ‘God-bearer’, a title given to her from the earliest days. Nestorius said she could only be called ‘Christ-bearer’, which seemed to suggest that he was denying that Christ was God – or rather, only one "half" of Christ was God!

For the opposition came the formidable figure of Cyril of Alexandria, who said that as Christ was God, and as Mary was Christ’s mother, therefore Mary was ‘Mother of God’. Q.E.D. The Emperor, Theodosius, a weak man under the grip of his wife and his sister, called the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 to resolve the issue.

Part of the trouble was the rivalry between the centres of Antioch, which held a ‘low’ view of Christ, and Alexandria, which held a ‘high’ one. The Ephesus Council was a vindication of the claims of Alexandria. Poor Nestorius claimed he never got a look in. "I was summoned by Cyril, who assembled the council, by Cyril who presided. Who was judge? Cyril. Who was accuser? Cyril. Who acted as Bishop of Rome? Cyril. Cyril was everything."

As we saw last week, the Council of Ephesus declared that Mary was truly entitled to be called ‘Mother of God’, thus making it clear that Christ was not just a super-glorified human being. But it remained very difficult for many Christians – and not just ‘grass-roots’ Christians – to see how Christ was both human and divine. They were aided in this dilemma even by Scripture, for of the four Gospels, the first three [the ‘Synoptic’ Gospels] tend, all things being equal, to stress the humanity of Christ, while St. John stresses his divinity. Then, as we have seen, the school of Antioch highlighted his humanity, the school of Alexandria his divinity. In addition, the Emperor in Constantinople was concerned to preserve religious unity in the Empire, and believers tended to support (or not support) him out of political, rather than religious, convictions! It has to be admitted that some of the key statements of early Christian doctrine were formed in a context of rivalry, muddle and suspicion.

The result was the calling of another great Council of the Church, in 451, at Chalcedon opposite Constantinople. A monk called Eutyches popularised a teaching that Christ had only one nature – a kind of mixed divine-human. This would mean that Christ could not redeem humanity, because he was not fully human, and did not have the power to redeem, because he was not fully divine. The Chalcedon Council came up with the last of the great statements of early Christian belief, reaffirming that Christ "is God, of the Substance of the Father … and he is Man, of the Substance of his Mother. Although he be God and Man, yet he is not two, but one Christ."

Once again the Pope did not attend this Council, but on this occasion he influenced it. Pope St. Leo the Great sent a document, known as the "Tome of Leo", which was read out and allegedly caused the delegates to exclaim "Peter has spoken through Leo!"

Belief in the doctrine of Chalcedon was declared to be necessary for salvation, but alas not all Christians believed it, mainly because of the political rivalries under the surface. It caused the breakaway of many of the early Churches of the East – Ethiopia, Egypt, Armenia, some of the churches of India – and formal reconciliation has only been partly achieved even today. Feeling was so strong that it even affected the sports arena. The chariot racing teams of the time were either the "blues" (meaning pro-Chalcedon) or the "greens" (against it). Imagine Gazza and Ronaldo battling it out at Wembley over the nature of Christ!

One result of these rivalries was to be the loss of much Christian heritage to the advance of Islam: the Arabs proved much more tolerant of religious divisions than the Emperor, and many gratefully accepted their rule, and their faith. By the year 800 much of the territory which had produced these ancient statements of Christian belief had been lost to Christ for ever.

We have seen that the early Councils of the Church established that Christ was truly human and truly divine, and that the one person, Son of God, had two natures: one human and one divine.

As a human, Christ had a physical appearance. This in due course led on to the question: if Christ had a human appearance, could an image be made of him as an aid to worship? The earliest Christians – apart, of course, from those who actually knew and saw Jesus in the flesh – did not know what he looked like, and did not seem to mind not knowing. They accepted in faith that Jesus was still truly alive. On the other hand, many of the early saints of the Church, the first martyrs, were people whom they had known day by day; their physical appearance was known to them, and they found it helpful to remember them (rather as we may keep photographs of people dear to us in our bag or wallet). Thus developed the use of images, pictures, as aids to worship. Increasingly stylised in form, they were known as icons, and the tradition of using them has continued in the East, though the West has branched off in a different direction. Their origin is probably in the portraits of the dead to be found on the outside of coffins in Egypt in the early centuries AD.

If, of course, one doubted that Christ was truly human, then an image of him was not helpful. Nothing can be more human than a portrait! In the 8th century a wave of "remote-God" feeling seems to have swept over parts of the East, simultaneous with a similar movement in Islam. In 726 soldiers tore town an image of Christ over the gate of the imperial palace at Constantinople, and a riot ensued. In general, the monks supported the use of icons and the army opposed it. The emperor, Leo III, had saved the city from the Arabs and, as a hater of idolatry, was very suspicious of icons. There were, inevitably, abuses: icons which wept, which bled, which spoke. The emperor decided to eliminate the whole practice. The ‘iconoclasts’ (icon-breakers) clashed with the ‘iconodules’ (icon-venerators) and a grave persecution ensued, especially under Leo III’s son, Constantine V, who died in 775. Already in 754 a Council had forbidden the use of icons, saying that Christ was seen only under the forms of bread and wine.

In 787, Constantine’s widow Irene, as regent, called a Council of the Church, at Nicaea (the 7th Ecumenical Council, held in the same place as the first). The council defended the use of images, for Christ in his humanity had had an image. It established rules for their use, however; they could not be three-dimensional, only flat (Western practice has moved away from this), so as to avoid excessive ‘life-likeness’ which might be seen to encourage idolatry.

One of the champions of the 2nd Council of Nicaea was St. John of Damascus, who had died in 749, but whose enthusiastic support of the use of icons was brought in ‘evidence’, along with the teaching of St. Basil, that "when we give honour to the image, we worship the prototype". Had the iconoclasts prevailed, then one aid to understanding the humanity of Christ would have been lost – and churches, East and West, would have looked very different.