Constantine and the Council of Nicaea (8 of 8)

More nonsense is written about this than about any other episode in early Christian history.

The actual story is more interesting than the conspiracy version, and it starts with two accounts of the same vision that do not match.

What Did Lactantius Say About the Vision?

That Constantine had a dream before the battle telling him to mark his soldiers’ shields.

Lactantius tutored Constantine’s sons and had closer access to the emperor than Eusebius did. His account is simple: a dream, an instruction, and the chi-rho, formed by superimposing the Greek letters chi and rho, the first two letters of Christ.

Marking shields on the eve of a battle is a plausible thing to do. It requires no workshop and no delay.

What Did Eusebius Say?

Something considerably larger.

In his version Constantine saw a cross of light in the sky above the sun, bearing the words conquer by this, and the whole army saw it and stood amazed. Then, the daytime vision having left him uncertain, Christ appeared to him at night and told him to make a standard, the labarum, worked in gold and precious stones.

Where Do the Two Accounts Differ?

At nearly every point that matters.

Eusebius records no dream. Lactantius does not say where the sign came from. In Lactantius the experience could have been entirely private; in Eusebius the entire army witnesses it. And a jewelled banner is a different order of undertaking from marking shields overnight.

Eusebius appears to have compressed the events, making the conversion more dramatic and tying it more tightly to the defeat of Maxentius.

The common scholarly reading is that the cross in the sky was originally part of the dream, and that it acquired the character of an outward apparition somewhere between the event and the writing, without anyone intending fraud.

What is well supported, including by hostile and pagan sources, is that something extraordinary preceded the victory in October 312. Lactantius wrote in 314 and pagan panegyrists refer to it by 321. The event has corroboration. The details do not.

The chi-rho itself appears on coinage as a subsidiary motif through the fourth century, including a clear example struck at Constantinople in 327 showing the labarum surmounted by the monogram, its shaft piercing a serpent.

Did Constantine Make Christianity the State Religion?

No. The Edict of Milan in February 313 made the empire religiously neutral.

He and Licinius granted freedom of worship to everyone, Christians included, and ordered confiscated property returned. That is toleration, not establishment.

Christianity became the state religion under Theodosius in 380, sixty-seven years later. Constantine favoured the church, funded it, and involved himself in its disputes, and none of that is the same as the claim usually made.

What Did Arius Actually Teach?

That there was once when the Son was not.

That sentence is the whole controversy. Arius held that the Son was the Father’s first and greatest creation, made from nothing, through whom everything else was created, possessing free will and therefore capable in principle of vice or virtue.

His motive was to protect the Father. He believed that saying the Son was coeternal implied two unoriginate principles, and that generation language attributed something like physical procreation to God.

He was not saying Jesus did not matter. Within his scheme the Son retains real divinity, ranked within gradations of divine life. That is what made it dangerous rather than absurd.

How Did the Dispute Reach a Council?

Through escalation, letters, and imperial connections.

Alexander of Alexandria, with his young secretary Athanasius, judged that diminishing the Son undermined both Christian devotion to him and his work as redeemer. Alexander examined the teaching and expelled Arius.

Arius was then reinstated by a synod in Palestine and gathered support from senior bishops connected to Lucian of Antioch, including Eusebius of Nicomedia, who had access at court and ran a letter campaign on his behalf. Alexander responded with letters of his own and a synod at Alexandria that condemned Arius and issued an encyclical.

With bishops aligning on both sides across the empire, Constantine convened the council at Nicaea in 325.

What Does Homoousios Mean and Why Was It Contested?

Of the same substance, and the trouble is that the phrase has two possible senses.

It can mean of numerically one substance, or of the same kind of substance. That ambiguity is not a modern discovery; it was live at the time, and it is why the term was contested even among bishops who had no sympathy for Arius.

The council used it less as a positive description of divine being than as a fence. Its function was to rule out the claim that the Son was created from nothing.

It was not initially central to the debates that followed the council. Athanasius made it central later, insisting on the numerically-one-substance reading, and the Cappadocians followed him.

What Did Nicaea Decide and What Did It Leave Open?

It excluded Arius and settled less than people assume.

The council persuaded a majority that the Son is only-begotten, of the nature of the Father and of the same nature as the Father, and produced a creed saying so.

Three things were left unresolved.

Bishops who signed the formula did not all agree on what it meant, which is why the fourth century is a long argument rather than a settlement.

The creed professed belief in the Holy Spirit and said nothing further, which required another council to address.

And within a few years Arius was recalled from exile and readmitted to communion, with Athanasius refusing to acknowledge it and finding himself opposing the emperor.

That last point is the one that undoes the conspiracy version. If Constantine had imposed an outcome and enforced it, Athanasius would not have spent decades in and out of exile fighting emperors who kept siding against him. The dispute continued precisely because the council had not ended it.

Part of a series on the Ante-Nicene age, following the Ante-Nicene timeline.

Footnotes2

1. Lactantius is the better-placed witness and gives the smaller account. Eusebius is further from the emperor and gives the larger one. That is the opposite of what one would expect if the story were shrinking as it travelled, and it is a reason to prefer Lactantius on the details.
2. The ambiguity in homoousios is not a flaw in the creed so much as a description of what a council can do. It ruled out a position. It did not thereby define the one it left standing, and the next fifty years were spent discovering that.

Sources

Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors. The dream account and the instruction to mark shields. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine. The vision in the sky and the labarum.

Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine (IVP Academic, 2010), 70-72. Supports the comparison of the two accounts and the point about private versus public witness.

Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea (Baker Academic, 2011), 18. Supports the reading of homoousios as an apophatic exclusion rather than a positive description.

M. Ovey, "Nicaea, Council Of," in New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic (IVP, 2016), 619. Supports the ambiguity of the term and its later centrality under Athanasius.

Alexander Irving, We Believe: Exploring the Nicene Faith (Apollos, 2021), 84. Supports the sequence of events from Alexander's expulsion of Arius to the convening of the council.

Where the sourcing stops: the relationship between the Lactantius and Eusebius accounts is described here as the common scholarly reading rather than a demonstrated result, and no reconstruction of what Constantine actually experienced is offered. The argument that Athanasius's later career disproves the imposed-outcome reading of Nicaea is my own.