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

included) is a collection of a very wide variety of different types of literature -
poems, stories, letters, histories, biographies, lists of ritual requirements,
meditations on the meaning of life, and so on. Any writing that had been
incorporated into the canon was seen by Christians as the inspired word of God,
but there was no systematic theology that could easily be drawn from the texts.
If one took the gospels, it was quite clear that Jesus abhorred violence, yet the
God of the Old Testament often seemed to revel in it. As seen above, it was
verses from the Old Testament that were produced to justify the Christian
emperors’ assault on their enemies. So where did this leave those who wished to
focus their beliefs on the teachings of Jesus?
Many Christians were learned in Greek philosophy, and inevitably they used it
as a tool for achieving systematic statements about Christian theology. In any
debate, however, there proved to be little stable ground on which any argument
could be based. Quite apart from the difficulties in interpreting the broad
spectrum of scripture, there were too many varied sources and too many
philosophical traditions, some very sophisticated and always in a state of
development. This was the nature of the Greek intellectual world. It proved
extraordinarily difficult to define the parameters of a theological issue and find
ways of resolving it. Consensus was always unlikely. The bitterness, mutual
recriminations and nit-picking that was so often a feature of fourth-and fifthcentury
theology arose not because Christians were any less intelligent or more
disputatious than their pagan counterparts but because the central debate over the
divinity of Christ was, as one contemporary historian, Socrates, noted, ‘a battle
fought at night, for neither party appeared to understand distinctly the grounds
on which they calumniated one another’. 16
Such was the background to the ‘Arian’ debate. Although he was about sixty
in 325, Arius had proved himself a determined man. Summoned before
Alexander, he had stood up for himself in person and continued to recruit
supporters in the city even after he had been excommunicated by his bishop. He
was adept at suggesting that he was only drawing on the wisdom of his
predecessors and was prepared to suffer in its defence ‘for the glory of God’.
More ominously for Alexander, Arius had then gone off to seek support, notably
from the bishop of the important imperial city of Nicomedia, Eusebius, a wellrespected
scholar and supporter of similar ideas to those of Arius. Eusebius
sensibly advised Arius to clarify his views and then arranged to have them
endorsed by a council of local bishops. Arius found further support from another
Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, the future biographer of Constantine.