The Council of Nicaea at 1,700 Years Old

Perchance, you haven’t noticed. But for the past sixty years or so a pitched battle has been waged in the Church, something close to Jacobin revolution. Of course, its birth was simultaneous with a most prominent event. But even mentioning it would earn immediate censure, so, I will not. (So much for Synodal listening. I suspect Orwell was correct in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) 

On the one side, there are heroic Catholics who treasure the riches of their Church, from its metaphysical foundations, its infallible teachings, and its ancient liturgy and piety. On the other, we have a coterie of zealots bent on redefining the Faith, leaving it barely a shadow of its former self. Faithful Catholics have suffered greatly for over a half-century beneath the heavy jackboot of this band of agitators. Their project was a grand redesign of the Nicene Creed, if not casting it whole and entire into the dustbin of history. Need proof? Watch Cardinal Tagle only recently spinning about a stage in dance garb chanting John Lennon’s “Imagine.”   Faithful Catholics have suffered greatly for over a half-century beneath the heavy jackboot of this band of agitators. Their project was a grand redesign of the Nicene Creed, if not casting it whole and entire into the dustbin of history.Tweet This

This is the denouement of the Modernist project.

Nicaea is a decisive blow to this fey counterfeit of Faith. Its articles stand like a mighty Alpine range, each peak more imposing and elegant than the next. How many parishes this year will celebrate this auspicious anniversary? Rejoice in its muscularity? Celebrate its summons to heroic struggle to defend it? Stand in rapt awe of the saints of millennia who embraced unspeakable deaths to defend it? Eagerly imitate St. Nicholas in coming to blows with Arius, the archenemy of the salvific Nicaean Catholic Faith?

If they will not, we must! 

Raise your fiery torches and lift your voices till they grow hoarse. All in gratitude for the Nicaean articles which are the sure steps of our ladder to Paradise.

If you were present at Nicaea in May of 325, you likely would have shed tears.  

Standing with throngs of other Catholics, you would have witnessed lines of regally clad bishops filing into the great Cathedral of Nicaea. Eusebius of Caesarea estimates that 318 bishops solemnly processed into the principal Church and central Hall of Emperor Constantine where the Council would transpire.

That, however, would not have been quite the cause of your tears. It was the sight of bishops who had suffered sadistic brutalities for the Holy Faith at the hands of the Roman Imperium of Maximin and Licinius. Many of them limped, their limbs having been torn out by the torturers. Your stare would have been frozen as you witnessed Bishop Paphnutius from Upper Thebes, whose eye sockets were hollow, his eyes having been torn out by the Roman soldiers of the Praetorian Guard because he refused to deny the Holy Faith.

This procession into the Church in Nicaea was the march of spiritual titans. They cared little for the approval of the world or secure positions. The only security they coveted was the comfort of Christ.  

Long deliberations ensued. Very long deliberations. For the Council Fathers appreciated that the salvation of the human race hung upon the absolute precision of each and every word of their doctrinal formulations. These singular bishops understood that their holy obligation was simply to pass on “what they had received” (in the Latin construal traditio; cf. 1 Corinthians 4:7; 15:1; Philippians 4:9; 2 Thessalonians 3:6). They would not dare change it, add to it, subtract from it, dilute it, or mute it. 

This solemn obligation clung to their conscience with terrifying consequence, lest the priceless treasure of the Faith be obscured. They recognized that the doctrinal formulae were chiseled into what would forever be the foundation of the Catholic Faith. This held all of them in frightful thrall.

Paul Claudel gives memorable, poetic expression to the earth-moving gravity of what these Nicaean bishops accomplished:

When in my village church I hear the Credo being recited, one article after another, by the harsh voice of the soloist, to which the naive whine of the little girls’ response, I tremble with an inner ecstasy: it seems to me that I am present at the creation of the world. I know the cost of each one of those formulae printed in eternal truth. With what rending of heaven and earth, what rivers of blood, by what effort, what mental travail, and with what overflowing grace they came to be born. 

I see those great masses of dogma emerge and take form before my eyes one after the other; I see man struggling painfully and finally succeeding in tearing out of his own heart the final affirmation. It is like a cathedral, immovable and yet advancing with all its columns from porch to choir.

Claudel is only to be outdone by Chesterton. Here are his soaring words in Orthodoxy. Every Catholic has likely read these sentences over and over, causing their hearts to race. His prose is so beautiful, so electrifying, that they not only deserve repetition but memorization:

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or word. It was only a matter of an inch: but an inch is everything when you are balancing. 

The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once, let one idea become less powerful, and some other idea would become too powerful. 

It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn into a false religion and lay waste the world.

Remember that the Church went on specifically for dangerous ideas: she was a lion tamer.

The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which, anyone can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.

He continues with historical and theological precision wedded to arresting insight:

The smallest link was let drop by the artifices of the Mediterranean and the lion of ancestral pessimism would burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. 

…It is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders would be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances: might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. 

Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. 

Then he concludes with bombastic crescendo, like the clanging of cymbals:

This is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit, of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe.  There was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. 

It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. 

It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. 

…She left on the one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving in to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions: the orthodox Church was never respectable. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head: the difficult thing is to keep one’s own

To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure: and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresy sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

As we heartily celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of this epoch-making Council, let us repel the silliness that has struggled to replace doctrinal Catholicism. The Nicaean Fathers arrived at the Council maimed, trophies of their heroic defense of the Faith.  

Contrast that with too many of our hierarchy today who wear the sunny smile of compromise, hoping the world will love them, even as they show no love for the truth.

Not us. Never us.