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Melvyn Bragg: Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time, there's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter @BBCInOurTime. I hope you enjoy the programs.
Hello. In the fourth century AD, Roman missionaries converted the Ostrogoths to Christianity in the form known as Arianism, as a way of integrating them into the Roman Empire. Arianism spread to the Vandals and the Visigoths, who took it to Spain and North Africa, and the Ostrogoths who brought it deeper into Italy after the fall of Rome. Within 100 years, though, they learned that they had become heretics. As the Romans were now following the Nicene Creed, not the Arian and they faced persecution or converting again or finding common ground.
With me to discuss Arianism, are Robin Whelan, a lecturer in Mediterranean history at the University of Liverpool, Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Emeritus at King's College London, and Martin Palmer, visiting professor in religion, history, and nature, at the University of Winchester. Martin Palmer, what was changing for Christians in the early 4th century along with the changes in the Roman Empire?
Martin Palmer: The major change, of course, was the Edict of Tolerance issued in 313, by Constantine, and this gave Christians the right to be respected as a proper religion. It did not establish Christianity as their religion, that happened much later in the 4th century, but it did remove the yoke of persecution that had been placed upon them in the year 303 by Diocletian and had caused horrendous persecution and deaths and martyrdoms, and so forth. Suddenly, the Christian church finds itself legitimate and legitimate in the sense that it had never [00:02:00] really been before.
It also brought to that stage a very highly developed hierarchy of bishops and priests and deacons across the Roman world. Within a year of the Edict of Tolerance, there was the Council of Earl, at which over 300 bishops turned up, including three from Britain. It had the infrastructure in place to take advantage of suddenly being allowed to be much more public. Then, and of course, this is based on Constantine's claim that he had a very special relationship with God, that God had guided his military undertakings. Then you have this schism within the Roman Empire where you had two Emperors, two Caesars as well. The Roman Empire begins to fragment into east and to west. You have a--
Melvyn: Which date are we talking about now?
Martin: We're talking here about, well, this is following on from Diocletian's own division of the Roman Empire. Essentially what Constantine does is that he has to reunite the Empire from feuding emperors and Caesars. This is running really from about 300 through till about 323. By 323, Constantine has managed to unite the Emperor, he is the Emperor, he's pretty much crushed everybody else, there's been a period of civil war and unrest and destruction.
Then there is a period in which suddenly there is peace, and in that peace, the church thrives. It thrives particularly because Constantine, having got one Emperor, one Empire, now wants one church. That's the real problem for him because what he encounters is not that there is one church, but that there are many, many churches, many theologies, many different types of Christian belief.
Melvyn: Thank you. I think it becomes a political issue inside the Empire as well as a theological issue. [00:04:00] Judith Herrin, we're talking about Arianism, so who was Arius?
Judith Herrin: Arius we know was a deacon and later priest of the Church of Alexandria. We know also that he was born in Libya, in North Africa, and that he died in 336 in Constantinople, but his life is very poorly documented because after he'd been condemned as a heretic, and his theology dismissed, and his writings were all burned, evidence about him disappeared.
Although, fortunately, some of his writings were quoted by those who opposed him, and so we do have fragments of his Thalia, which were clearly very important writings and stray references indicate that he was a man of ascetic principles, gentle moral standing. He attracted people, he wrote hymns for people to sing so that there was a sense of collective support that he generated.
He had 70 dedicated women living in a convent, nunnery. I'm sure they were all dedicated to him as a person. He must have been charismatic, and he certainly had a very clear notion in his own theology of what was wrong with various definitions of Christianity. He wrote a creed, which is slightly different from the creed that was adopted at the Council of Nicaea when Christianity was officially recognized at the meeting that Constantine I presided over, but his was only one of many creeds, everybody was discussing how to define exactly what the Christians believed.
Arius centered his own definition [00:06:00] of the distinction that he wanted to draw between God the Father, who was the only God, the source, the unique source of divinity, and the son, who he said, had been begotten. This strange word that we use in the creed today the only begotten Son. It is an indication that the father had in some way created the Son, which, of course, is what people normally considered fathers did. It, therefore, meant that the son- he did not exist from the same time before all time, before the creation of the world, when God existed.
Melvyn: Would it be true to say that the center of it might be whether Christ could be divine and human, at the same time?
Judith: That was not so much the problem that Arius perceived, which was that the Son was naturally obedient to the Father. That was a question of hierarchy, more than a discussion about his divine and human natures. I think it was recognized that as the representation of God on earth, He was a very divine figure, but of course, he took human form. What Arius was concerned to show was that he was in some way, inferior, subordinate to the Father. By the same token, the Holy Spirit was in some way, subordinate to Christ, the Son of God.
It was this Trinitarian problem of three aspects of the Godhead that worried Arius.
Melvyn: Thank you. Robin Whelan, we've gone somewhere along the line there with Judith. What was the distinction between the ideas of Arius and his opponents and so on?
Robin Whelan: The key and distinction between Arius and his main opponent in the church of Alexandria, which is Bishop Alexander, later, Alexander's successor, Athanasius, [00:08:00] was over this precise relationship between God the Father and God the Son. For Alexander, God the Father, and God the Son, and this is where we get further into some theological terminology, were consubstantial, homoousion in Greek that just basically means they're made of the same stuff, and co-eternal, they'd always existed together.
Whereas for Arius, the oneness of God, the one true God of the Bible, was the Father who was, as Jesus said, was unbegotten, he'd not been born, whereas the Son had been born and created ant, therefore, came after him. For Arius, the problem with Alexander's views is that if the Son has always existed with the Father, and is made of exactly the same stuff, then how is he a son? Sons are different from fathers and have to come after them. On the other hand, for Alexander, what Arius is doing is making the son a lesser God.
Melvyn: Why was there value in defining the status of father and son rather than leaving it vague?
Robin: The fundamental problem in many ways for early Christians, this goes back centrically to what Martin was saying before, in terms of really defining their religion as a separate religion from, on the one hand, the Judaism which it sprung out of, and which in many ways it was still very much entangled with. On the other hand, what they would see as the paganism of traditional Roman religion, which is often polytheistic.
There is this central issue of how you can have one God who is multiple without ending up potentially with multiple gods and this is something that they hadn't just started worrying about now, they'd been worrying about this all along. That will keep being a problem in the decades to come. This tension between including and excluding.
Melvyn: Thank you very much. [00:10:00] Back to Martin. I'd like to get, looseness, have some idea of how important this was. The Christians were a small group really we're told in the sum total of the empire. There was this conference at Nicaea. How important was it? Was it something that was going to shake the empire? Was it something that was going to shape the empire?
Martin: The heft of it was going back to this quest by Constantine who had struggled for 20 years to basically unite the empire again to make himself the sole ruler. He nailed his colors to the master or to the Cross of Christ which he claimed to have seen before his victorious battle in 312. For him, the [unintelligible 00:10:45] was he sensed that his authority came from this God. Therefore, it was important that he should be the agent of that God upon earth. At one level, you are quite right about it. It was not of huge importance to the vast majority of people and in fact, the Council of Nicaea in 325 really has almost no impact initially on the western half of the empire.
It's very much a Greek debate about can you philosophically define the infinite? Out of that comes this great angst that Robin so beautifully captured of the sense of, well, what are we? Who are we? Its impact was initially for Constantine and he sends a letter in the year 324. A year before Nicaea, and sends it to Alexander of Alexandria, the bishop. He sends it to Arius and they were absolutely, as Judith has said, they were miles apart. Arius was a popular preacher, and Alexander was a bit of a pompous bishop. Constantine just simply says, "For goodness sake. Really? Is this of the slightest importance? This tiny little theological difference?
For goodness, let's get together, and let's unite. [00:12:00] Let's get on with the job of being the religion that's jolly useful to everybody." His council in 325 is essentially Constantine saying, "Right, I think you'll all agree I'm right, won't you?" They all go, "Well, sort of, maybe." Then he really brings the pressure down. In the end out of all these bishops, only two oppose, and they are sent off into exile. In other words, it's a compromise as Robin has said.
It lays the foundations for schisms, for debates, for arguments that run really for about another 300 years. There were various attempts, Nicaea is the first council. It eventually comes to one in Constantinople in 381 in which it said, "Right folks, this is it, this is what you've got to believe." En route, you had councils like the Council of Tyre in the year 335. Which completely, throws out the Nicene creed and says, "No, Arius was right." Brings Arius back.
Then you have other great conflicts around 357 where Constantius II who was an Arian basically says, "Look, I've got an even better definition." You have this period of enormous difference, but the roots of this are there really was no unity anyway.
Melvyn: Into this confusion, Martin, I'm now talking to Judith, came the Visigoths came, pushed to the west by what was happening in China and wanting to convert to Rome for the wealth and power that would give them. How did that mix in with what Martin's been talking about?
Judith: The Germanic tribes and all these different peoples as you say are being pushed further and further west came against the boundaries of the Roman empire which were very firmly defended. At that point, they were interested in the different ways of doing things, that highly civilized organization, use of money, various other things that [00:14:00] typified the Roman world. As Christianity was spreading within the Roman empire, they understood that there was this new religion.
We learn that Wulfila, Ulphila, Ulfilas, differently spelled in English, but of course, it was a Gothic name, was sent on an embassy from his people to Constantinople where he arrived in 336 and met Constantine I and learned about the definitions of Christianity and he wished to learn more. In a way, he is a person who became the prophet, the leader of the Gothic Christians. Over many years because he lived a very long life, he converted many of them.
What he did specifically was to invent a Gothic script and then translate the Old and New Testament into Gothic so that the Goths could celebrate Christianity in their own language. That of course gave them a fantastically important entry point to Christianity. Because they could sing the Psalms, they could listen to the liturgy, they could hear the sermons in Gothic and they could understand their conversion to Christianity in their own terms.
Melvyn: Were the Goths Arians?
Judith: Ulfilas was introduced to different forms of Christianity. Back to Constantinople in 341. Constantius was emperor and he supported Arian Christianity and Arius had been summoned back from exile and supported in Constantinople. The emperors after Constantine I supported the Arius definitions of Christianity. Therefore Ulfilus when he became Consecrated bishop, he was consecrated as an Arian bishop. That is why the Goths became Arians. [00:16:00]
Robin: One of the real issues that we have in reconstructing this period is that most of the accounts that we have are written by those who supported what eventually triumphed, that is the Nicean Creed, for whom all of those creeds and councils, the Middle Decades, the Fourth Century that Martin's already mentioned. They were all Arian, but another way of looking at this period is as if one on which you get various factions within the imperial church trying to come up with a better solution than Nicaeatinite people especially under Constantius II.
These people, although they in some ways might map onto what Arius really cared about because they introduced some level of subordination between Father and Son. They did not think they were Arians. Athanasius of Alexandria, who's the person who really popularizes the term Arian as a heresy. He thinks they are but they would deny that they deny that they followed Arius, they wouldn't use the label for themselves.
A later anonymous text, later in the fourth century said we Christians who the false name of Arian has been imposed upon. There is a sense in which we often use Arian just as the easiest term to use for all these different Christian bishops and theologians who come up with alternatives to Nicaea. They would just say we are the orthodox and they are the heretics.
Martin: What Arius was promulgating, was preaching had been considered basically orthodoxy up until the beginning of the fourth century. Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, these great theologians all basically had a subordinate theology. A theology that Christ was not equal to God. Very much what Arius was saying. In one level Arius was simply saying, [00:18:00] "Look, this is what I was brought up with." Exactly as Robin says, many of the bishops also thought that's what they had been brought up with and this was perfectly all right. They didn't need to identify it as Arian.
Melvyn: Martin, what was so compelling about Arianism? It's been described once or twice, but it seems to have struck home, but we are still talking about minorities, aren't we? It seems to have struck home very deeply with people who were prepared to die for it, be persecuted for it. Be exiled for it.
Martin: It had been orthodoxy. It had been basically what Christians thought. You get this very strange process in the later fourth and fifth centuries whereby some of the greatest theologians who'd given their lives for the Gospel like Origen were then denounced as heretics because they didn't fit into this new consubstantial notion that the Godhead was complete and absolute and everybody was equal and all ascended from being God.
At the second level, and I think this particularly applies to the Goths. It offered a model that made a great deal of sense to any structure, any society that had a very hierarchical view of leadership. If you are a tribal leader, if you had been leading your people through the central Asian steps and down into the Roman empire, you've been in charge and you've had everybody doing what you've said. Then frankly, the Arian view or the traditional view, the view that Ulfilas was promulgating of a supreme God who has basically two really good helpers, that makes a lot more sense.
Again, it's this issue of there are trinities in every major religion. That's not a great problem if you are not trying to claim that there is [00:20:00] only one God. When you come from a pluralistic, polytheistic faith, you don't have that much of a problem of believing there's a kind of supreme god who bestows some of his powers down to other ones. I think it basically made a lot of sense to people as a model of leadership of hierarchy of where power lay. In a sense, what you have is this remote god and then this personal experience of God, which is Jesus, and then the sense of a spirit moving amongst you. Frankly, for most people, that was all they really needed to know.
Melvin: Judith.
Judith: With the culture of the Virgin Mary, you also have another aspect of Christianity, which becomes very important and is very much written up and appreciated, particularly by the 50% of Christians who are female. Because she's got to be the virgin who conceives and brings forth a son, according to the gospel, it's quite useful that the Holy Spirit is here employed as the helper that brings the Holy Spirit to her. She then gives birth to a human called Jesus, who is the Christ, because he has been conceived by the Holy Spirit.
This in a way it brings the three elements of the Trinity and the role of the Virgin Mary, Theotokos in the Orthodox tradition, together in a family organization. That again is something that people found quite reassuring, and it made sense of what they read in the gospel stories. I think that attracted them very much.
Melvyn: I'd like to come back to the Arians though, here. Starting with you, Judith. We have Theodoric, he marched into Italy in the 5th century, an Arian, he's still powerful, trying to keep some hold on the political [00:22:00] effect these religious movements had. Were there discussions to the side, or did they employ a central and defining pace in the way the empire behaved, changed? How did Theodoric make a difference?
Judith: Theodoric is a very curious figure because he'd been sent as a young boy as a hostage to the court of Constantinople. He'd spent a decade of his life being the prisoner who was going to be held for the good behavior of his father. In that experience, he witnessed the Goths in Constantinople who were very powerful militarily, but were excluded from the churches and had to go outside the city to their own churches, where they celebrated according to the Arian right.
Theodoric remained very devoted and essentially linked to this Gothic identity as an Arian Christian, as opposed to the other Christians. He led his people after some negotiations, which he assumed gave him the right to lead them through the Balkans across the Hungarian Plain over the Julian Alps into Italy. Where he conquered Ravenna and set himself up as the king, under the authority of the emperor in Constantinople, but as a Gothic king in a very much larger area populated almost entirely by those who were Catholic Christians who were not Arian Christians.
He brought with him a very strong identity, both ethnically as a Goth and religiously as an Arian Christian. This double minority status meant that he had to be very careful in his dealings, for example, with the Bishop of Rome, who was a very firmly Orthodox Catholic and follower of the Council of Nicaea and all [00:24:00] the official Christianity of the East. Therefore, the Goths when they arrived, brought with them their own priest who had looked after the soldiers on the way.
Theodoric then built churches for them in Ravenna, which are some of the very few that have survived, which is how we know a little bit more about Arian veneration in the early 6th century.
Melvyn: Robin Whelan, what about the Vandals, they'd moved into North Africa earlier? How did they wear their Arianism? Again, how did it affect the power play among the religious sects?
Robin: What the Vandal kings, Gaiseric and Hunric in particular, but also to an extent their successors seemed to seek to do is effectively to make their form of Christianity the orthodoxy of their kingdom in North Africa. They looked back to one of the councils that I mentioned in the middle decades, the 4th century, under Constantius II at Rimini and Seleucia and say, "Well, that formula that was propounded then is the correct one."
The Nicene Creed that the pre-existing churches in North Africa adhere to is heresy. What they then seek to do is basically to apply the methods that late Roman emperors had used against heresies, including against Arianism to the [unintelligible 00:25:32] heretics, the Nicenes, by exiling bishops, by on occasion seeking to convert sometimes forcibly, the Nicene Romano-African population.
That's one way in which you can see that this is not simply a question, or doesn't even seem to be a question of ethnic identity here, is that these Vandal kings want all their subjects, Vandal and Romano-African to [00:26:00] agree with their form of orthodoxy. It's an interesting experiment, what happens if what's seen to be a really settled question from the end of the 4th century that actually no, orthodoxy is the Nicene Creed, these other options that they are Arian heresy.
What happens if the people in power are convinced that the opposite is true and are willing to use the coercive mechanisms of the state to try to bring this about?
Melvyn: Can I come back to you, Martin, for a second? The idea of heresy grew at this time as well. What was important about it? Again, I'm getting back to the connection between these divisions and the deeper unrest and power.
Martin: The issue around heresy is the whole thing. A family feud is often far more vicious, far more horrible than a feud with other people because you're so close that any betrayal of that closeness is essentially a betrayal of you and of your family relationships if you like. Within the issue of heresy, the issue was this, why had Christ not returned? Why had the Second Coming not happened? He said that some of the people He was speaking to would still be here when He came back. He hadn't come back.
There was this great desire for the return of Christ for the breaking out of universal piece and so forth. This was linked also to the question of, well, if this isn't true, does it mean I don't get to heaven? That was one of the very powerful attractions of the Christian message. You have the whole notion that this is what is going to take you, carry you beyond this world into the next world.
Justin Martyr, for example, in the 2nd century says, "This is it. This is our promise. We can open the gates of heaven for you." [00:28:00] There was this real risk that if you were with the wrong gang, if you were with the wrong tradition, you would not get to heaven. Moreover, these wrong groups were stopping the return of Christ. It was a huge issue. Given the links that were then emerging between the church and the state, and very often the state was an abysmal disappointment to the church, because it did not achieve the kind of morality and virtues that it was supposed to have. Equally, the state felt that about the church.
You have this real struggle for absolute power. If I am true and I am in touch with the truth, I can therefore have the right to be in charge.
Melvyn: When you say huge issues, are people changing their policies because of this, is this having an effect on the way the state operates in terms of its laws and decisions?
Martin: Well, exactly. As Robin just mentioned, vis-a-vis North Africa, the Christian Roman state, the Byzantine, and others had created a very, very sophisticated method of dealing with heretics. It also inspired horrendous riots. When, Arius was supposed to be coming back to Alexandria, and the emperor said, "You could take him back," the great founder of monasticism, Saint Anthony, aged about 83, comes into Alexandria with a gang of monks. They riot. They burn things down. They destroy churches. They attack people.
Yes, in terms of civil disobedience, if there is no one truth and all truths are in a sense in competition, then where does truth lie in order that you can establish order? Although it doesn't happen a lot, when it does happen, when you do get the riots, when you do get the heretical groups saying, "No, we're not heretical, we actually have much right to exist as you." It threatens civil order.
Melvin: Judith, you've talked about the Theodoric in Ravenna. It seems like a Utopia of tolerance compared to what Martin's been saying.
Judith: Not necessarily. It was a very, very large part of the Western Roman empire that he controlled and therefore his Gothic Arian priests were in charge of a very small population and had to keep on good relations with everyone else. I think the key feature for Theodoric's toleration is his much fairer treatment of the jews, which had often been persecuted and were to be persecuted by the Visigoths, particularly in 7th-century Spain.
Theodoric's principle was they write to say, "Please, can we rebuild our synagogue because we've lost the roof or it blew off or something." He says, "Yes, you may rebuild your synagogue to the same size. No bigger. I agree that you may carry on with your faith, although I don't prove it at all, I cannot impose my own faith on you. Every man must follow his own faith."
That principle was the one that was so frequently cited in the reformation because it seemed to allow that there were different definitions and that people should worship in their own way and respect other people. I think it's a very interesting notion that in Ravenna, Theodoric built new churches partly because of course, he wanted to compete with the already beautiful churches that have been put up by the Catholics, by the non-Arians. In addition, he wanted to provide for his people the most splendid places where they could worship.
We do have this extraordinary example in the Church of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo which was his palace chapel, huge, enormous basilica, very beautifully decorated in mosaic and in the baptistery [00:32:00] attached to his cathedral, which again follows very much the traditional pattern of baptistery decoration. It is a little bit specific to Arian, where it was just for Arians. There were two communities in Ravenna.
The big difference there between Ravenna and Africa, for example, is that the Vandals actually took over a lot of Catholic churches and converted them into Arian use. This control over property and wealth and resources was one of the competitive things which made the situation in Africa so tense because of course, very major churches which had their own resources in form of estates and taxes and wealth that was given to them, those were resources which were taken away from the Catholics and given to the Arians.
Melvin: Thank you very much. Robin Whelan, why and when did Ariansm decline?
Robin: In the first place, it's after the Council of Constantinople in 381, where first phase of anyone considered Arian increasingly being ejected from Episcopal sees and excluded from the mainstream church. Obviously, with these barbarian groups coming into the Empire and establishing their own churches, either in parallel or taking over. In the 5th and 6th centuries, they've re-established themselves in a more significant way.
It's then in the mid to late sixth century, through a series of either military conquests or conversions of rulers, that these churches lose their political backers in Vandal-African, Ostrogothic-Italy, it's the reconquest under Justinian, which means that old anti-Arian laws are reapplied and the property that Judith's already mentioned of these churches confiscated and it becomes a much more difficult proposition to remain part of these communities. [00:34:00]
In Burgundian goal, we get the conversion of the King Sigismund, and then shortly after the kingdom is any case taken over by the Franks. Whereas in Visigothic Spain, you actually see the ceremonial conversion of the Goths under their King Recared at the Council of Toledo in 589, something which results in a series of revolts against his rule, but which hold and again means that being a non-Nicene Christian in this way starts being a problem.
You can really see how at the very least we stopped being able to see these communities persisting in the textual material record whether or not they totally ceased to exist, they are not sufficiently presents that we continue to see them in surviving sources beyond the end of the sixth century in those areas.
Melvin: Martin, how did Arius come to be presented in later years, say, after the sixth century?
Martin: As the quintessential bogeyman. Robin's already referred to this, he becomes the archetype of rebellion against God, of pollution of the true church, of a dangerous pit of wickedness. He really becomes the image of everything that is wrong about heretics. In a sense, as Judith's pointed out, it has very little resemblance to the actual man himself who was this other wonderful charismatic poet, songwriter. Somebody who could be poetic about the imminent when others were trying to be philosophical about the infinite and was therefore actually someone people like to be with.
He becomes this not quite a satanic figure, but it kept quite close to that. He's also right up, I mean, Hilaire Belloc writes a book in the [00:36:00] last century called the Great Heresies and he opens with Arius and he actually claims that if Arius' description of vision or understanding of the subordinate nature of Christ and therefore the subordinate nature of the human had triumphed instead of orthodoxy, it would have led to social disintegration.
Within orthodoxy the great icon of the Nicene Council, and of course in orthodoxy you do not look at icons, icons look at you. The perspective is from the icon and the icon of the Council of Nicene shows this horseshoe shape council table around which are gathered all the great and the good presided over by Constantine and in a sense what it says to you is are you Orthodox? Are you Arius? Are you being judged? It's very much Arius becomes this warning of what happens when you deviate, you become the bogeyman, you lose heaven.
Judith: I'd just like to point out one very nice element of Arius' fate.
Melvin: Oh yes.
Judith: After a very checkered life of being exiled and being recalled and being supported and then being condemned. He was in Constantinople in 336 and he was being supported by Constantine the Great. The great emperor who died one year later. Arius was ill or he was perhaps made ill, poisoned perhaps. He was caught in the forum of Constantine and had to go into the public latrines where he died. Of course, his enemies said, "There you are there. There you see. That is God's judgment on him. He was a real heretic."
About 150 years later, Theodosius II set up statues of the heretics, Arius, and three of his consorts. [00:38:00] These were statues put up in the forum so that people could go and spit at them. I think that shows that the notion that Arius had released some terrible heresy that was spreading and multiplying and had all these went on living through the years that it had to be visualized in that way because I think there were always worries about the trinity, always worries about the relationship of God to the other holy people.
That was a constant in Christianity and of course is still problematic for people who think they want to worship correctly in order to get to heaven and ordered to be without sin. Therefore there are very, very, very fundamental things that afflict individuals and need to be resolved which are still with us.
Melvin: Robin Whelan, finally, what Arian ideas have persisted, where can we look for them?
Robin: There's a wonderful finding of a survey of American Evangelicals from 2018, a few years ago, the State of Theology survey, where they asked the Evangelical Christian surveyed whether they agreed with the statement, Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God, and 78% of the respondents agreed strongly or somewhat with this statement, which is one which I think if Athanasius was reading it would look rather a lot like Arianism.
It's not to accuse those American Evangelicals of that heresy, I'm not in the business of being a heresiologist, but it is to show that there's a fundamental tension, as Jesus already said. How you might think about the status of Jesus. The way in which Athanasius and subsequent Nicene theologians try to deal with this is by attributing certain passages to [00:40:00] Jesus being human and certain to him being divine, depending on which bit you're looking at.
There's always the worry if you overemphasize one or other of these that you might fall into Arian heresy, and you only have to think about the kind of nativity services that many people attend every year where there's such a stress on Jesus as a baby being little, weak, and helpless. The degree to which that might jar with a sense of a fully divine Christ, the true God equal with the Father consubstantial with Him.
Again, it can be obviously explained just as easily by those who supported the Council of Nicea which has continued to be the orthodoxy of the major world churches to this day. If you're coming at it in a heresiologal way, you might be able to see problems in something as banal and benign as the sorts of hymns that we sing at nativity services.
Martin: Can I just add another--
Melvin: Please do, please do.
Martin: There was a survey to follow on Robin's survey. It was a survey about 20 years ago of Anglican Churchwardens who were asked a not dissimilar question. This was with regards exactly to the nativity and to the crucifixion. Something like 35% of Anglican Churchwardens thought that the Jesus of the nativity story was a different person from the Christ on the cross. I think the ambiguities and the complexities of the Trinity will be with us forever.
Melvin: Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Martin Palmer, Judith Herrin, and Robin Whelan, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's a Franco-American Alliance of 1778 when [00:42:00] the French helped the Americans with their revolution, a favor that wasn't returned. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: The In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvyn and his guests.
Melvin: What do you think was unsaid that should have been said?
Judith: Oh, I feel very strongly that we didn't make quite clear what Nicea stands for and the Nicene Creed coming out of the Council of Nicea of 325. We got distracted by other aspects of Arius. He was [inaudible 00:42:36] and he was condemned. I think Martin mentioned that two bishops were sent into exile, Arius with them. He was only a priest, so he couldn't vote, but he was sent off into exile. That's the first.
Martin: Yes, that is a good point. Nicea, it is this issue that essentially it is a political deal forced through fairly vigorously by Constantine, but it does create if you like the fundamental language of the Trinity. Particularly if you compare it with what's called the Athanasian Creed, which is not written by him. Athanasian Creed is this, basically, an essay on Greek philosophy on how you try and define absolutely everything that you can possibly define about the infinite. Whereas the Nicene Creed does actually capture the core elements of relationship within the Trinity, and relationship of the Trinity to salvation.
Although it didn't crush all the issues, it did set out language that on the whole, still broadly works for most people who call themselves Christian, even if they would be slightly amazed to know what it was supposed to be also not saying. Can I ask you, Judith, because [00:44:00] I'm always fascinated by this figure of Ulfilas, however, we pronounce him? Is it true that he, when translating the Old Testament into Gothic, he dropped the Book of Kings, the two Books of Kings because that was just full of dreadful warfares and stuff. His people were quite warlike anyway and the last thing they needed was a faith that encouraged that, or is that a myth?
Judith: No, I think it is correct. There isn't a complete Bible in Gothic that we could read to tell us exactly how it was done, but certainly the two Books of Kings were not translated, and people read them in Latin translation, or in Greek original. Yes, it would have been the Greek of the Septuagint Because the Goths were already very warlike and they needed to learn the roads of peace. They did need to read about salvation and sinfulness and not being so murderous perhaps.
Martin: I love that story. I have to say I just think that's a wonderful story in that sense. In terms of the impact that he had on the very nature of Gothic tribes, is there any evidence that the coming of Christianity made them less warlike? Was that more a phenomenon of being part of the Roman Empire and settling down to having births and going to schools and trading?
Judith: No, I think in the fourth century there was absolutely no way they could stop fighting. If they weren't fighting the Romans they were fighting each other. There were several different Gothic tribes and different Germanic groups that were not in total agreement about who was going to have that bit of land, or who was going to have that cattle, those flocks, or whatever. They were fighting each other as much as the Romans.
They did press constantly on the frontiers of the Roman Empire [00:46:00] because they wanted to occupy more fertile land. They wanted to get into the sunny south of Italy, who wouldn't if you've been stuck north of the Danu for centuries. You had seen what civilization-- they knew from visits, they knew from trading, they knew from embassies what great cities there were and they wanted those facilities births and all. Yes.
Robin: Also there's a certain degree I don't think we should be expecting Christianity to make anybody necessarily less warlike in the fourth century. When you got to remember that Christianity increasingly over time becomes part of the culture of the Roman army, and of the victory ideology of the late Roman State. Constantine of course has the Labarum put on the shields of his soldiers, and increasingly there's a sense that imperial victory is tied to Christianity. There's no particular reason why the adoption of Christianity should make anyone any less inclined to military activity, shall we say.
Martin: Yes. You see that also with the Genghis Khan Horde of which was about a quarter to a third were Church of the East or the west calls and their story and Christians, and they went into battle in their massacres with crosses on their helmets. Some of which you can still see in Japan from the force that tried to invade Japan. I suppose I was just hoping that there might be some sign that this had had some moderating effect. I think it goes back to my sense that this was a very good version of a religion that gave a sense of power and hierarchy to those who were in power in like hierarchies.
Judith: Yes, that's true. Of course, there was the Christian morality, and the notion of monogamy and marriage for [00:48:00] not having many wives or not having like Attila the Hun, polygamous. There was a great impact in that respect, and I suppose the Arian priests who are documented as those who accompanied the forces as they marched and went on the campaign with the troops. Nonetheless, they were there to give sustenance, to inspire, to give sermons and prayers, and then to bury the dead, because it was very important to bury people properly. As they were Christian, they were hoping very much that they were going to heaven.
Martin: Yes. That's a very interesting point that there was that sort of social impact in terms of the end of polygamy. I hadn't fully appreciated that point before.
Melvin: Well, thank you very much.
Speaker: In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.
Speaker: If you'd like to hear the, In Our Time on the Nicene Creed, you can search for it on BBC Sounds.
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