How Correct Belief Was Produced by Vote, Exile, and Fire
In the year 325 a council of bishops at Nicaea condemned the priest Arius, who taught that the Son was created by the Father and therefore lesser, and declared instead that the Son was of one substance with the Father, coequal and coeternal. Arius and two bishops who would not sign were exiled. The emperor Constantine, who had summoned the council and paid for it, ordered every copy of Arius’s book, the Thalia, to be burned, and made possession of it a capital crime, so that, in the words recorded of the decree, nothing would be left even to remind anyone of him. This is how a doctrine became orthodox: not by demonstration, but by a vote taken under an emperor’s eye, followed by the exile of the losers and the burning of their books.
CHARGE: the beliefs later presented as the timeless, unanimous faith of the church were produced by councils that argued and voted, enforced by imperial exile and the burning of books, and reversed and restored as emperors changed — a record not of truth recognized but of power exercised.
What happened next is the part the tradition prefers to forget, because it shows the manufactured thing being unmade and remade at the will of the throne. Within a few years Constantine reversed himself. Persuaded by Arius’s allies, chief among them Eusebius of Nicomedia, that the condemned teaching was not so far from orthodoxy after all, the same emperor who had exiled Arius recalled him, and ordered the church to receive him back into communion. A synod at Jerusalem readmitted him. The great champion of the Nicene position, Athanasius of Alexandria, who as a young deacon had helped defeat Arius at the council, now found himself on the losing side of imperial favor and was exiled in 335. Arius was to be formally restored at Constantinople in 336, and died the night before it was to happen. The doctrine that Nicaea had declared eternal truth had, within eleven years, been condemned, then quietly rehabilitated, by the same emperor, according to who had his ear.
Athanasius is the clearest measure of how little the settled truth stayed settled. Over the course of his career as bishop of Alexandria he was driven from his see and exiled five separate times, as the imperial position swung between the Nicene party and its opponents. When the emperor favored Nicaea, Athanasius was the pillar of orthodoxy; when the emperor favored the Arians, Athanasius was a criminal in flight. His theology never changed. Only the man on the throne changed, and orthodoxy changed with him. In 359 a double council of eastern and western bishops, meeting under imperial pressure, adopted a formula stating that the Son was only similar to the Father, which was the Arian position in all but name and the high-water mark of the movement Nicaea had supposedly destroyed thirty-four years earlier. The church historian Jerome would later write that the world groaned to find itself Arian.
Final settlement came, as the first had, from an emperor. When Theodosius established Nicene Christianity as the state religion in 380 and convened the Council of Constantinople in 381, the Arian question was closed for one reason only: the throne had decided which side would hold the churches, the offices, and the protection of the law. The Nicene Creed that most of Christianity still recites was ratified as imperial policy, and the alternative was not refuted so much as dispossessed. Arianism survived for a time among the Germanic peoples beyond the empire’s reach, and disappeared only as they too were absorbed, which tells its own story about how this kind of truth spreads and dies.
More than any single doctrine, the mechanism on display here matters, because it is the mechanism by which the whole structure of orthodox belief was produced. A question would arise on which sincere Christians disagreed. A council would be summoned, usually by an emperor with a political interest in unity. The bishops would argue, and then they would vote, and the majority position would be declared not the opinion of a majority but the truth delivered by the Holy Spirit. The losers would be named heretics, their writings condemned and often burned, their congregations seized, and their leaders exiled or worse. The winning position would then be presented to later generations as what the church had always believed, its manufacture forgotten, the votes and exiles and burnings edited out of the memory, until it stood in the creed as though it had descended from heaven with the book.
An objection here is serious and must be met at full strength. A believer will say that the messiness of the process proves nothing against the result, that God works through flawed human instruments as through everything else, and that the church under the guidance of the Spirit recognized the truth that had always been implicit in the faith rather than inventing it. The long argument, on this view, was the ordinary way that divine truth clarifies itself through fallible people, and the councils discerned what was true rather than deciding it. This cannot be disproved, and it is offered honestly. But notice what it requires. It requires believing that the Spirit guided the council of 325 to condemn Arius, then permitted the same truth to be reversed for half a century, then guided the council of 381 to condemn him again, with the swings tracking the deaths and accessions of emperors with uncanny precision. The guidance of the Spirit and the politics of the imperial succession produced, on this account, exactly the same timeline. When a doctrine advances and retreats in step with which emperor holds power, the simpler explanation is that power, not the Spirit, was moving it. The claim of divine guidance is asserted. The imperial politics are documented, dated, and impossible to miss.
Whether Arius was right and Athanasius wrong is a question of theology, and it lies beyond the reach of any historian, this one included. The record settles something else, and settles it hard. The beliefs the church would present forever after as its timeless and unanimous faith were produced by a human process of argument, vote, exile, and fire, contested at every stage, reversed when the politics reversed, and fixed at last by imperial decree rather than by any agreement among Christians. The bishops who cast these votes believed they were discerning the will of God, and their belief is not in doubt. It is also beside the point, because sincere men voting under an emperor’s eye still produce a vote, and a vote is not a revelation. Correct belief was not discovered. It was manufactured, ratified by the state, and backdated to eternity, and the manufacture is written in the records the councils kept in their own hands.
Sources for this part appear in the Evidence Docket at the close of this volume.
Forensic Plates
A full evidence docket for this volume, with every source verified against publisher and archival records, is compiled at the close.
