Three hundred bishops in one room
The Council of Nicaea opens
Nothing like this has ever happened before.
Constantine has summoned every bishop in the empire to a city on the shores of a lake in northwestern Asia Minor. He has paid their travel expenses from the imperial treasury. He has provided housing and food. Three hundred and eighteen bishops arrive — the number remembered, handed down for seventeen centuries, has carried symbolic weight since antiquity, though the exact count is uncertain and ancient estimates vary. Everyone in that room understood that they were present at something singular.
The faces in that room are extraordinary. Some are old enough to remember the persecution of Decius. Several have been in Diocletian's prisons. Paphnutius of Egypt walks with a limp — his hamstring was cut in the mines. His eye socket is empty. Ossius of Cordoba has faced death and found it less frightening than capitulation. Paul of Neocaesarea has useless hands — the tendons were severed by red-hot irons.
These are not men who became bishops because it was a comfortable career. Every scar in that room is a credential.
And yet into this room also walks an emperor in cloth of gold, who bows to the bishops before he sits, who calls them his brothers, who has never himself been baptized, and who will shape the outcome of their proceedings in ways that will take centuries to fully assess.
Constantine opens the session. The bishops reply with words of thanksgiving. And then they get to work on the hardest question the church has ever faced: is the Son truly God?
The faith of two thousand years will be shaped in the next few weeks by what happens in this room.
Volume 2 opens tomorrow.
“I call you together not as a general or a ruler, but as the servant of God. For to God alone belongs the kingdom of our faith.”
— Constantine at Nicaea, c. 325 AD, as recorded by Eusebius
“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as you also were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in us all.”
The Council of Nicaea is often remembered as a political event — Constantine's council, the emperor's theology. And politics were certainly present.
But look at the faces. Look at the hands of Paul of Neocaesarea. Look at the empty eye socket of Paphnutius. These men did not come to Nicaea because an emperor paid their way. They came because they had given everything for the question being decided in that room.
The creed that emerged from Nicaea was not handed down from a throne. It was hammered out by people who had paid for it in their bodies.
The faith you inherited was not free. Somebody bled for the words you say on Sunday morning.
It is worth knowing their names.