What Constantine Brought to the Nicene Council

Pier Franco Beatrice, as a professor in the department of Early Christian Literature at the University of Padua, Italy, wrote an article titled The Word "homoousios" from Hellenism to Christianity, Church History (June 1, 2002). In it we read the following excerpts I present in bolded text below.

"Neither before nor during Constantine's time is there any evidence of a normal, well-established Christian use of the term homoousios in its strictly Trinitarian meaning. Having once excluded any relationship of the Nicene homoousios with Christian tradition, it becomes legitimate to propose a new explanation . . ."

And so that is what Beatrice proceeded to do in his article. But before I go into any of that, I would like to comment on something Beatrice has written as respects Constantine himself. On page 13 of my printout of Beatrice's article, he has this to say about Constantine:

"Constantine's involvement with the theological traditions of Egyptian paganism is again confirmed by a disconcerting document, the letter to the Church of Nicomedia written just a few months after the [Nicene] council. After having claimed that the Christ, who is Lord, God, and Savior, is at the same time Father and Son, he adds that Christ is called Father as he eternally begets his Aion, and that he is called the Will of the Father. Aion is also the name of the Son of the virgin Kore, whose birth was celebrated in the Egyptian ritual mentioned by Epiphanius. It is also interesting to note that in the Hermetic tradition Aion (Lat. Aeternitas) always accompanies God as his eternal offspring and is the perfect image . . . of God. Moreover, for Constantine the Son is the consubstantial Will of the Father, the creator and administrator of the universe, the guide to immortality. The notion of the creative will . . . of God is, for example, found again in the Poimandres and in the Asclepius."

Constantine's meaning for the word homoousios was not like that which Athanasius, in post-Nicene years, came to champion. No, but it was Hermetic. Says Beatrice:

"In Constantine's view homoousios was a pregnant technical term, with its own precise, traditional Hermetic meaning. In his thought the word homoousios did not contradict the distinction of two divine ousiai [(substances, hypostases)], precisely because it was the heritage of the ancient Egyptian theology and of the revelation of Hermes Trismegistus, and had therefore nothing to do with the Sabellian or monarchian identification -- theology of the one hypostasis. Hermetism forms the conceptual background of the emperor's theology."

Imagine the consternation of the anti-Arian bishops, who, not only at Nicaea, according to Eusebius, but also on another occasion, too, had to hear words that, as we deduce, were inspired by Constantine's own stripe of Neoplatonism, a philosophical theology received from his attachment to Hermeticism. His Hermeticism got reinforcement from the Christ-subordinating cleric Lactantius, and from another of his favorite advisers, the Neoplatonist philosopher Sopater of Nicomedia. So, Constantine's philosophy was not that Platonism as filtered through the mind either of Ossius or of Athanasius. Writes Beatrice:

"Constantine enunciated his "philosophy" in a more extensive way [ -- than did he at Nicaea -- ] in the so-called Speech to the Assembly of the Saints . . . Constantine praises Plato for having said many true things about God: (Plato) describes the one who is above being, rightly so doing, and subordinated to this one also a second [(god)], and distinguished the two beings numerically, the perfection of both being one, but the substance of the second receiving its subsistence from the first. For the first God is the Demiurge and governor, being clearly above the universe, while the other, in obedience to his mandates, brings back to him the cause of the constitution of the universe."

Beatrice easily defeats the thought that the Oration to the Saints as we have it is not a true record of what Constantine said.

In the Oration to the Saints, Constantine (falsely) claims that Plato was an exponent of orthodox theology that he (Constantine) claims that he had accepted; however, Constantine had actually come to accept  Egyptian Hermeticism, the same theology that had informed the Gnostic (Valentinian) heretics' theology. He was probably aping the teaching of Lucius Lactantius, a professed Christian and confidant of Constantine. Lactantius' theology was heavily imbued with Hermeticism via its first tractate Poimandres. Lactantius says that "Plato spoke about the first god and the second god," and he says that Plato was himself a disciple of Hermeticism. Hermeticism envisioned a transcendent God, yet describable in terms that suit a material nature for its transcendent, supreme being. This high god was called "the Nous of the Supreme," and "Poimandres," which is to say that Divine Mind shepherds the noblest men. This Nous generated a second god (the Son, the Logos).

Now, Hermeticism used the term homoousios ("same substance"), and it was used by the Gnostic Manichaeans, by certain Christian modalists in Libya, by Paul of Samosata, by Lactantius, and then by Constantine. It was, however, a term condemned by the Council of Antioch in 268 C.E. The problem facing the bishops convened by Constantine at Nicaea in 325 C.E. was how they might go along with Constantine's insistence on use of the Hermetic term homoousios, but to do so without their seeming to have capitulated either to Gnosticism, modalism, or Hermeticism. The solution was that the bishops could have each his own definition of the term in accordance with his own theological predilection. So, by word magic the word was pressed into service in a way that was foreign to Constantine's usage; the bishops, however, could yet say that the word was not intended to present a material concept for God, not a theology that had God's substance as something that was divisible or diminishable, but whose substance was wholly intellectual, spiritual. The one thing that pleased the bishops at Nicaea was that the term allowed them to stand ostensibly with Constantine in his primary concern, which was to force an end to disunity in the Church by ridding the clerics of the dissenters Arius and company, because it was known that Arius would not consent that homoousios should ever find any kind of currency in orthodoxy. The term was subsequently dropped in creeds adopted shortly after the deaths of Constantine and Eusebius of Caesarea. It reentered orthodoxy when Emperor Theodosius in 380 C.E. demanded usage of the term by all professing Christianity.

Those professing a non-modalistic Christology prior to Nicaea had an essentially subordinationist Christology for their presentation of the Logos/Son. This Christology was thrown into chaos by the Council of Nicaea until there eventually emerged a Christology built on the word magic of the so-called Cappodocian "Fathers," which gave Christendom a trinitarian consensus, yet without a consensus among all Christendom's theologians as respects the historical nature of Jesus of Nazareth.