A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

majority of the Nicene bishops by backing Gregory. There was some wider
sympathy for Gregory in the city itself, where the intrusions of foreign bishops
were always resented, but after a final oration on the Trinity in the Church of the
Holy Apostles, which the emperor himself attended, Gregory left the city in June
for his native Cappadocia. He later wrote that he had ‘never seen a good
outcome to any synod, or a synod which produced deliverance from evils rather
than the addition to them... rivalries and manoeuvres always prevail over
reason’. 6 Gregory died in 391.
The combination of a Nicene emperor who had already put in place a Nicene
Church and a council that in genesis was Nicene in temperament should have led
to a Nicene appointee as Gregory’s successor to this prestigious see. In the event,
this could not be risked. As yet Constantinople’s population had shown no
enthusiasm for the Nicene cause, and it made more political sense to appoint a
man who was well known within the city and who had not compromised himself
through support for any one faction. So it was that one Nectarius, an elderly city
senator who had been a popular prefect in the city as a result of his patronage of
the games, but who was still not a baptised Christian, was selected. One
historian, Sozomen, perhaps the better source, claims he was chosen by the
emperor himself; another, Socrates, says it was by the acclaim of the
population. 7 Technically, his appointment before baptism was contrary to a rule
passed at Nicaea, but this had not prevented a similar elevation for Ambrose in
Milan a few years earlier. Nectarius appeared to know no theology, and he had to
be initiated into the required faith before being baptised and consecrated. It was
clear that he was being used to defuse potential unrest among the mass of the
city’s population in response to the imposition of the Nicene faith, but doubtless
the bishops also saw him as an effective way of binding together the secular and
ecclesiastical elites of the eastern empire, and he was given their unanimous
approval.
There is another indication of the assembly’s relative impotence within the
city. Its proceedings went on into July and it must at some point have agreed on
a revised Nicene Creed, perhaps even before the resignation of Gregory. Yet
there is no record that the creed was ever promulgated, and presumably this is
because it would have been deeply unpopular among the Homoians, who still
appear to have made up the majority of the local population. In fact there is no
mention of it anywhere until it was read out at the Council of Chalcedon in 451,
seventy years later where it was accredited to the council of 381. The creed was