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

VIII
AMBROSE AND THE POLITICS OF CONTROL
‘You will not find that any one of the western nations have any great inclination
for philosophy or geometry or studies of that sort, although the Roman empire
has now been so long paramount there.‘ 1 This was the emperor Julian’s own
view of intellectual life in the western empire, where he had commanded the
Roman armies on the Rhine. Even though this bleak assessment may have
reflected the prejudices of a highly educated Greek, it is certainly true that the
Latin world was not buzzing with theological speculation in the same way as the
east. In his exhaustive commentary on the evolution of Nicene thought, the
scholar Lewis Ayres has almost nothing to say on the western empire. ‘Our
knowledge of Latin Christology and Trinitarian theology [in the west] between
250 and 360 is extremely limited and certainly not that we can make certain
judgements about its overall character.‘ 2 This suggests that the sweeping
assertions of some commentators that the west was overwhelmingly Nicene need
to be taken with caution. One particular problem was that the early Latin
translations of the Greek scriptures were so clumsy that educated readers were
put off by their crudeness. Gregory of Nazianzus himself complained of ‘the
narrowness of the [Latin] language and the paucity of their vocabulary’, which
in his view made ‘the Italians’ incapable of distinguishing between the terms
used of the Trinity. 3
It is hardly surprising that the Nicene Creed was largely unknown in the west
as the Council of Nicaea had been made up of Greek-speaking bishops from the
east. Western participation had been virtually nonexistent, and the Bishop of
Rome was represented only by an observer. The earliest recorded awareness of
Nicene thought appears to date from 359, when Constantius’ determination to
impose his subordinationist creed prompted a reaction by the western bishops
meeting at Rimini; they seemed to have been attracted to the Nicene Creed as a
bulwark against subordinationism. 4
The most thoughtful of the western pro-Nicenes was Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers
in Gaul from 353. He had read widely in the works of Tertullian and absorbed