The more Christian history I have studied, the more I’ve been surprised by how most Protestants seem to treat Nicaea and the other “ecumenical councils” as reflexively authoritative, for lack of a better description. What’s odd is that there clearly more formal and theoretically nuanced theologies that have worked out what the councils’ exact status is and why. In my own limited experience, however, these almost never come up—certainly not in proportion to the number of times the councils are flatly invoked as (somehow) definitive and binding theologically de facto, if not de iure. As a recent example of this reflex put it, one “won’t find the phrase ‘hypostatic union’ in Scripture, and it isn’t terribly easy to describe to a five-year-old,” with the implication that the doctrine is still obligatory all the same.
This traditionalism—which is what I think it mostly amounts to—isn’t wholly a bad thing; part of me respects it. But to the contrarian historian inside me who likes to pick such scabs, it has always seemed a little at odds with the spirit of sola scriptura and the whole getting-back-to-fundamentals ethos.
On the other hand, I’m increasingly persuaded that many pre-Nicene Christians writers and intellectuals themselves would have been rather put off by the Christological discourses of the fourth and fifth centuries, though as a matter of dogmatic principle rather than theological particulars.[1] Let me use two orthodox writers to illustrate what I mean.
I’ve written before on Irenaeus’ notion of the rule of faith: how it is necessarily and deliberately minimalist to keep out new and binding credenda. Without rehashing every point, Irenaeus
- emphasizes the “rule of faith” handed down by the apostles, a small collection of beliefs that closely resembles the Apostles’ Creed (AH 1.10.1);
- explains that even the more intellectually and rhetorically gifted among the Church’s officers will still be teaching these items as binding dogma and not adding to them, so that they hold to the same fundamental beliefs as their less intellectually gifted counterparts (AH 1.10.2);
- asserts that even barbarian Christians (i.e., non-Greeks including Romans) ascribe to the same fundamental beliefs, despite their being a step removed from Christianity’s main cultural current as expressed in Hellenism (1.10.2 and 3.4.2).
In short, what the real Church teaches is relatively circumscribed and universally shared across the Christian world, language notwithstanding.
Now jump forward about two centuries. The Roman empire is increasingly Christianizing, and since the reign of Constantine, Christological definitions have been near the center of ecclesiastical disputes, sparking remarkable institutional turmoil and long-term schisms in many churches, such as Antioch.
Historically, Basil of Caesarea has been seen as one of the more prominent churchmen and theological architects of the later “Nicene” settlement. He thought, for instance, that the difference between hypostasis and ousia—not intuitively distinct in everyday Greek, by the way—was a crucial one for describing how the One was also Three. In a letter to a Roman official (a certain Terentius) who is having to deal with the messy Christological fallout at Antioch, Basil makes this interesting remark near his conclusion:
And concerning the matter that hypostasis and ousia are not the same: I think even our brethren from the West indicate this among themselves. Being suspicious of the thinness of their own tongue [i.e., Latin], they have handed on the noun “ousia” in the Greek language so that, if there some difference in sense, it might be saved by a clear and un-muddled distinction of the nouns.[2]
In other words, to get this all-important theology right, Latin simply isn’t up to the task, and one must not confuse the distinction in Greek either. And Basil has to point this out to an educated member of the Roman administration, whose command of upper-register Greek would be pretty decent if he’s working in Antioch, probably well above the typical Hellenic Christian on the Antiochene street, let alone the average Latin-speaker in the West.
It’s worth pointing out that, even with the preservation of the original Greek terms, most historians don’t think the technical Greek language itself was particularly well understood in the West. This linguistic gap created serious problems when, for instance, Pope Leo attempted to set the record straight with his Tome. When Leo’s declaration struck his Greek interlocutors as muddled (at best), he had to walk back some of his assertiveness, blaming his apparent missteps on a poor understanding of the Greek terminology, which seems to confirm what Basil had once said about the necessity of Greek.[3] Leo even remarked that one’s own language barely sufficed to explain such “subtle and difficult matters” (Epist. 124.1), and there are other indications that he had little knowledge of Greek at all.
To me, this dynamic—that essential doctrine hangs on highly specific and often untranslatable terminology—is remarkable, somewhat reminiscent of the insistence in Islam that the Quran is only properly studied in Arabic.
Leaving aside any intriguing implications for the papacy qua authority, apparently, not even the pope himself can attain a requisite command of the theological concepts. What does that mean for a contemporary lay Latin Christian? Or even a Greek who is not especially well-versed in theological jargon? What does it mean for laity in the twenty-first century who don’t speak any of the original languages?
If understanding this dogma is somehow essential for Christian belief, it would seem that a large segment of the late ancient Christian community is, in a word, sunk—and probably most of the faithful since then as well. To my mind anyway, the contrast with Irenaeus is striking (though this is not to imply that we should take Irenaeus’ position unreservedly, as I think he is at least open to the charge of an undertheorized frame of dogma).
In any case, I think it is likely that Irenaeus would have found Basil’s notions of Christology distasteful, not necessarily in substance but in principle: it was overly technical, inaccessible, institutionally divisive, and (worst of all) accretionary, going well beyond the apostolic tradition as constituted in the rule of faith and as elaborated in Scripture.
There are, it should be said, also reasons to think there would have been objections from some pre-Nicenes against the technical substance of what became Christological orthodoxy. ↑
Epist. 214.4. My translation.
↑See Christopher A. Beeley, The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition (Yale University Press, 2012), 272–6. ↑