In the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus of Nazareth asks his disciples “whom do you say that I am?” Almost 300 years later, the West answered at Nicaea that Christ is none other than God begotten of God — “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God…of one being with the Father.” After that, nothing could ever be the same again. There could be no dimension of human life and activity immune to the ramifications of that confession.
Without going so far as to say that the Council of Nicaea spoke the final word on how we reconcile Christ’s apparent humanity to his divinity — it certainly did not — every subsequent society calling itself Christian has had to wrestle with the impossibly high standards set forth by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount. Since Nicaea, the subsequent endeavors of the West at government, on the battlefield, in bed, and at market have been complicated by the Beatitudes. Nothing could ever be the same again.
The complication of involving Christ-God in politics did not stem from any kind of Roman opposition to religion — Roman statecraft had always been imbued with divinity — but from Christ’s apparent aloofness to politics. Though, according to Nicaea, Christ was of one essence with Almighty God, during his earthly ministry he had apparently disavowed any Godlike ambitions to rule. His disciples annoyed him by jockeying with each other for prestigious positions at his right hand (Matt. 20:21), pestered him about the restoration of the Davidic Kingdom (Acts 1:6), and expressed shock at the example of self-abasement he provided them when stooping to wash their feet (John 13:8). Domination was a fine thing for the heathens, Christ told his followers, but among you let your leadership consist in service (Matt. 20:25-28). Of what use could this be for an emperor, who instinctively raised his eyes to heaven to find a heavenly paradigm for his rule, and whose job description amounted to … domination? But this problem provided the grist for the subsequent political theory of the West, where a new paradigm of government as Christ-imitating servant-leadership was developed and political power was articulated and justified in analogy to Christ who is God and Man, King and Servant.
The implications of Christ’s divinity surely complicated the business of warfare, an existential imperative for the survival of any civilization. The destruction of mortal foes was not on Christ’s agenda, and his injunction of turning the other cheek did not seem to provide much comfort for the Christian soldier. It is not that the post-Nicene Romans seriously considered pacifism — at least not as a matter of imperial policy — but it is difficult to imagine them acquiring their Empire in the first place had the Council happened one thousand years earlier. For Augustine of Hippo (c. 354-430), the extent of the Empire was nothing for a Christian to brag about: it sprawled over centuries of human suffering and bloodshed. And yet, that did not mean it should be abandoned to its enemies. As Augustine knew, political society was necessary in a fallen world and must sometimes be defended from the wicked. Some Christian writers even developed a more sanguine view of the Roman achievement based on military power. According to the Christian poet Prudentius (c. 348-413), Rome’s rise to world supremacy had been from the beginning a divine conspiracy aiming at the pacification of the world in preparation for its reception of the Gospel. The Empire provided the context for Christians to live out their lives in tranquility and the natural conclusion was that it was the Christian’s duty to support this civilization. Such efforts to chart a course between the example of Christ and the imperative of the sword gave rise to “just war theory,” and if subsequent history provides any insight, this kind of introspection hardly impeded Christian Roman civilization, which endured for another millennium. But every modern briefing that invokes “proportionality” or “last resort” still draws on the theological brake Nicaea applied to the chariot of empire.
By defining Jesus Christ as God, Nicaea also opened the door for the intrusion of the Gospel into the hustle-bustle of everyday life constituting the very substance of civilization, the level where normal everyday people strive to live and get along. Now that God had been revealed among men in Christ, the door was open for mortal men to meet God in the market-place, at the judge’s bench, in the camp, and even in the corridors of the imperial palace. And it is these meetings–where the world and all its splendor are suddenly brought to proper dimensions in the perspective of eternity–that made the West as we know it still. Current western debates over wage theft, payday loans, or refugee policy, where Gospel values are not seldom invoked, reflect the retreat of the old gods and their intuitive morality (“harm enemies and help friends”) from commerce and court-room in favor of the utterly inconvenient morality of the Beatitudes—a feat only worth attempting so long as the man who preached those Beatitudes was God himself, as this fourth-century council had declared.
The intervention of the Council of Nicaea is sometimes presented as a corruption of Christianity by public institutions and its transmutation into a mere prop for powerful men. But perhaps we should blame Christ for this. Had he not insinuated that he was something more than a mere man — as he does, coyly and provocatively, throughout the Gospels — then perhaps his personality and message would never have become the concern of emperors, judges, and generals who have always looked to the heavens for the source of their authority. And if these exalted persons remained aloof, what hope would there have been ever after of a West where businessmen, police, and soldiers can be confronted by the specter of Christ?
Seventeen centuries on, the legacy of the Council of Nicaea continues to complicate our lives. It calls upon every ruler to justify power through service, every general to square bloodshed with the Beatitudes, and every merchant to weigh profits against love of neighbor. In view of the Council’s 1,700-year anniversary, we should pay greater heed to the tensions and seeming contradictions it unleashed on the West. Reflecting on the implications of that Council should serve to undermine facile and superficial notions of “Western morality” and to unveil the creative tensions at the heart of our Western heritage. But one thing is sure: negotiations did not end with the statement of those bishops gathered 1,700 years ago in Nicaea, by the shore of Lake Iznik. Of course, they had defined the faith — no small feat. But a time-traveling observer might have suggested to them that, now they had succeeded in declaring a crucified man “true God from true God,” the true negotiation — in our governments, families, and lives — was only beginning.
Charles Yost is an assistant professor of Medieval History at Hillsdale College.
