Season 2 · Episode 30
Full episode description
In 325 CE, the emperor Constantine summoned the bishops of the Roman empire to a small town in Asia Minor named Nicaea and asked them to settle a quarrel that had been tearing the eastern church apart for years. The quarrel was about Arius, a priest of Alexandria who taught that the Son of God was not equal to the Father, but a created being. Constantine wanted unity. The bishops produced a creed.
This episode walks:
- Constantine, the emperor whose conversion remains historically contested, who saw in the Christian movement an instrument of imperial cohesion
- the Arian controversy, where Arius’s teaching that the Son was begotten and therefore had a beginning forced the proto-orthodox to articulate the eternal divinity of Christ in formal language for the first time
- the assembly of bishops at Nicaea, around 300 of them, who travelled at imperial expense and met under imperial supervision
- the homoousios formula, the Greek word meaning "of the same substance," which the council adopted to describe the relationship of the Son to the Father. The word was new. The argument was older
- the Nicene Creed, the first universally binding statement of Christian belief, which became the foundation of orthodox Christianity in both Latin and Greek traditions
- the formal date of Easter, separated definitively from the Jewish Passover, completing a process that had begun in the Quartodeciman controversy a century earlier
- the immediate aftermath, where the Arian position was not actually defeated and would dominate large parts of the empire for most of the fourth century
Nicaea is the moment Christianity becomes a state-supported institution with imperially endorsed doctrine. The argument it tried to settle did not stay settled.
Not from tradition. From evidence.