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

his ideas on the Trinity, but then had come across the writings of Athanasius
when these began to permeate the west. As an outspoken champion of the
controversial bishop, he was exiled by the subordinationist emperor Constantius
II to the east, to Phrygia, where, unusually for a westerner in this period, he
learned Greek and became acquainted with Greek theology. By now he was a
fully converted Nicene supporter. 5 After Constantius had promulgated his
Homoian creed in Constantinople in 360, Hilary travelled to the capital in the
hope of persuading the emperor to allow him to debate the Nicene alternative in
public. He was unsuccessful, but the emperor allowed him to return to Gaul, and
the years before his death in 367 were devoted to networking among the western
bishops. Most of his work On the Trinity was written during his exile and draws
on ideas he must have encountered there and added to his reading of Tertullian.
Hilary was not an original philosopher, but he seems to have been struggling
valiantly to create a Latin terminology for the understanding of the Nicene
doctrine of God. But when he tried to tackle the problem of how Jesus could
suffer as a human being while not losing his full divinity, he got himself into a
terrible tangle, largely through his belief that Jesus could not feel pain even in
his human form. ‘Though the blow struck or the wound fell upon him or the
knots tightened or the ropes raised him, they brought to him the force of
suffering but not the pain of suffering.’ 6 But if Jesus did not suffer at all, what
was the nature of the sacrifice on which the salvation of mankind depended?
Western support of Nicaea centred on the idea that there was a single unified
Godhead within which God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit related
to each other as equals. Some fragments of theological texts that have survived
describe God as a light from which Jesus emanated as rays, or a ‘flowing’ of the
Son from the Father. When Theodosius in his edict of 380 decreed the single
deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost under the concept of equal
majesty, this would appear to be a fair summing up of what he may have been
brought up to believe in the Spain of the 360s and 370s. It is interesting that the
Holy Spirit was given a much higher status in these western formulations than it
received in the Nicene Creed of 325, but the boundaries between the three
members of the Trinity were not clearly defined.
The western Church too was vulnerable to factions inspired by personal
rivalry or theological differences. The status and patronage available to bishops
was immense and the underlying tensions were exposed as soon as a bishopric
fell vacant. In Rome in 366, over a hundred were killed in the street fighting that