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

discussions about the way in which the Son might be like the Father without
sharing a substance with him. In the west, there is very little surviving evidence
of the debate, but many of the western bishops appeared happy to accept the text
of the creed formulated at Nicaea, apparently as a reaction to the vagueness of
the Homoian creed Constantius was trying to impose. 10 This was a setback for
the emperor. He could hardly have the majority of Greek Christians rejecting
homoousios and the Roman Christians retaining it! When the westerners sent a
delegation to report to him, Constantius forced it to accept an Homoian creed.
Eventually it was possible for there to be a joint declaration by both councils of a
creed in which Jesus was ‘the one only begotten God who before all ages and
before all beginning and before all conceivable time and before all conceivable
substance was begotten impassably through God’ (in other words, created, but at
the beginning of time) and ‘like to the Father who begot him’, which, it was
claimed, was ‘as the scriptures taught’. It ended, ‘The word ousia [substance]
because it was naively inserted by the fathers [at Nicaea], though not familiar to
the masses, caused disturbance, and because the scriptures do not contain it, we
have decided that it should be removed.’ 11
As with any conceivable formulation, the creed had its critics. The supporters
of Nicaea felt bullied and manipulated. The Eunomians went so far as to set up
their own group of bishops covering territory in a sweep from Constantinople
around the eastern Mediterranean and as far west as Libya. Within the Homoian
community, those who had accepted Constantius’ formula, there was a mass of
different interpretations of ‘like the Father’. Some suggested that he was
homoiousios, not ‘of the same substance’; but ‘like in substance’; others saw a
likeness in the ‘image’ rather than the ‘substance’ of the two. The theologian
Gregory of Nazianzus, whose sermons on the Nicene Trinity will be discussed
later, complained that ‘homoios was a figure seeming to look in the direction of
all who passed by, a boot fitting either foot, a winnowing with every wind’. 12
A long-term settlement would have required Constantius to enforce
commitment to the homoios formula for several years until it was accepted as the
norm. Yet he died the very next year, 361, and was succeeded by the pagan
Julian, who, as we have suggested, expressed himself horrified by the infighting
between Christian groups, believing, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, that if
left to themselves the bishops would tear the Church apart: ‘No wild beasts are
such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of
each other.’ 13 Julian’s early death meant that Christianity was soon restored, by