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

a very large selection of alternatives to one only’ with the result that ‘when
Western man today says “God” he means the one, sole exclusive [Trinitarian]
God and nothing else’. 14 If Hanson is right, then there can have been few more
important moments in the history of European thought. The freedom to speculate
on what might or might not exist beyond this material world had been an
intrinsic part of philosophical debate for centuries, and God, ‘the gods’,
Aristotle’s ‘the Unmoved Mover’ and Plato’s ‘the Good’ had been among the
many alternative ways of describing this ultimate reality. These alternatives were
now being erased or subsumed into a composite ‘Christian’ God embedded in
the Nicaea formula. Even today, studies of the philosophy of religion all too
often start with definitions of ‘God’ as if there were no other way of conceiving
the supernatural. This is surely the result of the narrowing of perspectives after
381.
It is not difficult to understand why Theodosius himself supported Nicaea.
The formula of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit being of equal
majesty appears to have represented the majority belief in Spain at this period
and it was accepted by the conservative emperor. His court had been filled with
officials from Spain and Gaul who would have held similar views and who had
already shown that they were prepared to enforce them with violence. His beliefs
would have been reinforced by Bishop Acholius of Thessalonika and possibly
strengthened by Nicene bishops who had come to his court after the death of
Valens. As a Latin-speaking Roman suddenly thrust into the Greek world, there
is no reason why Theodosius should have known of the continuing debate within
the eastern Church.
But there are two other reasons why he may have been drawn to the Nicene
cause. The first is that the elevation of Jesus into full divinity fitted better with
the current authoritarian zeitgeist. There were immense difficulties in finding a
place within the ideology of the empire for a Jesus who was executed as a rebel
against Rome. Second, the Goths and other tribes that Theodosius was fighting
had been converted to Christianity at a time when the Homoian faith of
Constantius had been in the ascendant, and they were to cling to this faith for
decades to come. By creating a religious barrier between Homoian Goth and
Nicene Roman, Theodosius could define a fault line along which he could rally
his own troops against ‘the barbarians’. In the west, in these same years,
Ambrose of Milan was stressing the relationship between support for the Nicene
faith and the success of the empire in war.
It is important to remember that Theodosius had no theological background of