Sandy Curnow Reflection

Lent and the Creeds

Image: The Council of Nicaea in 325 as depicted in a fresco in Salone Sistino at the Vatican (Giovanni Guerra (1544-1618), Cesare Nebbia (1534-1614))

Exactly seventeen hundred years ago, in late spring of 325 AD, some 318 bishops from around the Roman world made their way to the Imperial Summer Palace in Nicaea in north-west Turkey.  It was an impressive gathering, and the meeting had far reaching results.

The Roman Emperor, Constantine, had only recently legalised Christianity after his victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge north of Rome – with his famous vision of the CHI RHO symbol – Christ -emblazoned on his soldiers’ shields. 

The Christian God had given him victory to rule the Roman Empire.

It may have been piety, or it may have been political sensitivity, but he waited until he was dying before actually becoming a baptised Christian.  The peoples of the Roman Empire worshipped too many different gods, all of whom were accepted as part of Rome’s governing structures, for him to safely accept monotheism – which by definition, of course, rejected other people’s multiple deities. 

The Empire that Constantine now governed stretched from as far as York in Britain, where his soldiers had first proclaimed him emperor, to east as far as Albania and the Caspian Sea.  Even today this is an unimaginably large area of the world to hold together in one political unit. 

In order to reduce differences in the Empire, Constantine promoted as many unifying forces as he could manage.  And that’s where the church came in as politically as well as spiritually important.

Image: Council of Nicaea in 325, depicted in a Byzantine fresco in the basilica of St Nicholas in Demre, Turkey (source: Britannica)

In the several hundred years since the apostles, questions about the exact nature of the Trinity and the exact relationship between Christ and the Father, (questions that had not troubled the earliest fathers), began to divide the first Christian group.  Arius, and a number of his followers, held that the Son, as we know Him from the Gospels, was created by the Father and therefore, of course, the two were not co-equal.  What had been a unified group at the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem was now divided into differing and sometimes bitterly opposing communities.  The emperor and most leading churchmen sought a resolution of differences that would promote unity for both church and state. 

While emperor Constantine lived the rest of his life as a ‘catechumen’, being baptised only on his deathbed, (even then by an Arian bishop), he sincerely worked to solve some of the acrimonious debates that were undermining the Church.  And so, he set in train this meeting of bishops from all parts of the Empire to an Ecumenical Council to settle doctrinal differences. 

At this first Ecumenical Council Pope Sylvester 1 was too old to travel from Rome to Turkey, and sent two delegates to represent him.  Before his recent illness, Pope Francis had plans to visit Turkey for the 1,700th anniversary of the Council, to meet Bartholomew 1 the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople.  “I plan to go there,” Pope Francis told members of the International Theological Commission during their plenary gathering last year at the Vatican.  He said how important it was that the commission’s meeting should include a document about “the current meaning of the faith (that was) first professed at Nicaea”.

Image: Pope Francis meets the International Theological Commission (source: CNS Vatican Media)

Back to those early Church heresies, Constantine was not a man to be trifled with.

Image: Colossus of Constantine (source: Wikipedia)

In order to encourage the bishops, his tactics were as practical as they were persuasive.  He undertook to pay for all transport costs to the conference, and then provided accommodation in his own palace free of charge.  It was an invitation they could hardly refuse. 

The meeting room was the huge council chamber in the palace, and while he never apparently intervened in the outcome of debates, the Emperor could and did attend freely, and Constantine’s hopes for a settled theology must never have been far from the bishops’ minds.  To put this council into context, the brutal persecution of Diocletian’s reign was only 20 years before Constantine and memory of their slaughter must have left their mark.  Christianity’s place in the pagan world of the Roman Empire was not yet totally secure.  The Vatican mural (first, above) although a thousand years later, imagines the balance of the conference nicely: the churchmen and the bible hold the floor, but Constantine with crown and sceptre in front cannot be ignored.  

After lengthy discussions the most significant achievement of the Council was to produce a new Creed which reflected the recently settled Church theologies.  The Nicaean Creed is  a very specifically worded document, a remarkable accomplishment which we take for granted every Sunday when we say it.  It spends so much of a fairly short prayer explaining that Jesus ‘was consubstantial with the Father’ and deals so briefly with His birth, death and resurrection – and indeed so much of his teachings.  They were not at issue at the time. 

As it drafted the Creed the Council condemned the Arian heresy and clearly established the teaching of the Trinity.  However, it failed to settle the date for Easter, which at the time was considered a question of great concern.  Even today we find that Easter dates vary across the whole of the Christian world, but the difference is much less of a worry than it was 1,700 years ago. 

One of the least controversial teachings of the Council of Nicaea is the practice of Lent.

Image: Icon of the Crucifixion by Theophanes the Cretan, Stavronikita Monastery, Mouth Athos (source: Wikipedia)

Fasting and penance is as old as the Jewish Testament and the thought of such a preparation for this central feast of Crucifixion and Easter Resurrection was a very early practice in the church.  Forty was an ancient biblical length of days or years.  Think of Moses waiting on the mountain for 40 days for the Ten Commandments, or Noah’s Flood for 40 days in the Ark.  The Israelites were in the desert for 40 years and in the New Testament Jesus fasted for 40 days in the desert in preparation for his public life.  And so Lent became a 40 day time of prayer and penance, as well as a time for intense training for Catechumens before baptism.

The question arose ‘how do you allocate these 40 days?’  The answer became six days’ fast and Sunday rested, as it were.  That meant that Lent started on a special day marked Ash Wednesday, with all its symbolism, and finished in time to mark the last days of Christ’s life from Holy Thursday onward.  Actual fasting was pretty severe.  One meal per day only, sometime after 3.00 pm and that without meat or dairy products.  Gradually a ‘snack’ in the morning and one in the evening for physical labourers was allowed, but within living memory Ash Wednesday and Good Friday were ‘black fast‘ days – no milk, butter, eggs or cheese, no meat, so for those mornings it was pale black tea and slice of dry toast, which lasted to an evening meal of a piece of fish and an unappetising steamed vegetable.  Meat was banned for every Friday of the year; a special hardship for bush Catholics in the early days.

The practice of Lent ends with the drama of the Triduum.  From the evening of Holy Thursday through darkness to the marvellous light of Easter Saturday night, the ceremonies flow without a break.

From grief to joy; from the drama of the disciples’ desertion at Gethsemane to the fidelity and courage of the women meeting the Resurrected Christ.

Image: Women at the Empty Tomb by Fra Angelico, 1442, fresco in San Marco, Florence (source: Wikimedia Commons)

May we once again gather together at Easter to pray the Creed as a joyfully united community in the Parish of Our Lady of Pentecost.

By Sandy Curnow