GOD FROM GOD, LIGHT FROM LIGHT - Deacon Ray
Happy Anniversary! Two weeks ago St. Victoria celebrated the 20th Anniversary of our New Church. But this week the worldwide Church celebrates a rather longer anniversary: the 17th-Centennial anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. Okay, okay … some of you just groaned inwardly, wondering what ancient church history has to do with us here and now. It turns out, quite a lot. For starters, the Council of Nicaea gave us the heart of the Nicene Creed that we recite every week — the statement of belief that unites nearly all Christian believers, at the core of which is what we believe about Jesus’ divinity:
God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God,
Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father,
through Whom all things were made.
To a large degree, we Catholics now take it for granted as a matter of doctrine that Jesus is truly God — equal in glory and majesty with the Father. But it was not always so. In the 4th Century the Church had a major crisis that threatened to split it apart. It started, more or less, with a priest, named Arius, who insisted that Jesus was created in time by God as the first act of creation, and that as such, Jesus does not share the same divine nature as the Father. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because the same ancient heresy lies at the heart of what modern day Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. In effect, Arianism relegated Jesus to second-class status — a demigod, who achieved a sort of divinity by heroic deeds and by progressing toward perfection. And who thereby became a sort of model for how we humans might strive for something similar by following his example.
Arianism spread quickly in the early Church because it was easier to believe a linear-sequential idea of Father and then Son rather than grapple with the mystery of One God in Three Co-Eternal and Co-Equal Persons. The implications of the Incarnation also were a stumbling block to classical Platonic philosophy, which thought of matter and flesh as inferior to Form and Spirit, even to the point of assigning matter negative moral worth, like shadow opposed to light. Arianism neatly solved this problem: it avoided tarnishing God’s transcendent divinity by assigning Jesus’ humanity to a lesser demigod.
But in 325 along came Emperor Constantine. Constantine had just conquered the whole Roman Empire, by fighting under the banner of the Holy Cross — and he meant to consolidate his Empire with the unifying influence of a united Church, not risk division from a Church wracked by schism. So he convened a Council, with 300+ bishops, at Nicaea on May 20, 325, to resolve the issue once and for all.
Nicaea thus became the First Ecumenical Council. In many ways it was patterned after the Council of Jerusalem, recorded in our First Reading today, taken from the 15th chapter of the Book of Acts, where the Apostles gathered together to decide once and for all the heated dispute in the First Century Church regarding whether Gentiles first had to become circumcised Jews before they could become Christians. (The Council decided that they did not.) Indeed, so successful was the Council of Nicaea in unifying the Church in troubled times, that it became a pattern for the 20 succeeding ecumenical councils since then.
Now to the heart of the matter — what did the Council of Nicaea decide? The bishops decided that Arius was wrong, and they separated Arius and his followers from the Church (and by extension, separated them from the protection of the Emperor). More positively, the Church articulated the truths of the Creed that we now have. Jesus is eternally begotten by the Father, not created or made in time. Jesus is not merely godlike, but rather Jesus IS God. Nor is Jesus a lesser God than the Father, but rather He is True God from True God, enjoying the same divinity, the same God-essence, and the same metaphysical substance as God the Father. And Jesus is equal in glory to the Father: there is no hint of Platonic darkness or moral ambiguity about Jesus, His incarnation notwithstanding, because He is Light from Light! If you’ve been taking note, you will recall that these creedal affirmations flow naturally from John’s Gospel these past three weeks, in which Jesus declared: “The Father and I are one,” that the Father is glorified in the Son and the Son is glorified in the Father, and that “the word you hear is not mine but that of the Father who sent me.”
So now, what do all of these theological truths mean for us? Well, it turns out that we cannot formulate a true anthropology of Man without building it upon the foundation of Jesus Christ. The Church teaches that through faith we receive by grace, by gift, that which Jesus is in His nature. If he were only a demigod, then that’s all we could ever become; if he were only a godly hero, then the highest we could aspire to would be heroism for God. But we know from Nicaea that that is NOT the case! By grace, through faith in Christ Jesus, we come to share the same divinity by gift that He enjoys by nature. Not some cheap or inferior quality demigodliness, but a divinity that is somehow and entirely mysteriously on par with the divinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit such that we are made real participants in the divine life of the Most Holy Trinity, who come to us and in us and make Their dwelling with us.
Further, the true divinity of Christ articulated at Nicaea elevates the sacramental reality of Christ who is present in the Eucharist. What we receive, what we consume and assimilate into ourselves, is nothing less than a share in the same glorious divinity of the One Who made all that is, Who is Life and Light itself, and Who exists eternally from everlasting to everlasting. Moreover, the Ascended Christ, Who also bears our Humanity, sits not merely beside the Throne of God in heaven, but UPON the Throne of God in heaven!
Today, the lure of ancient Arianism takes more subtle forms. As a theological construct it still exists in some religions. But it also subsists in the guise of a false humanism that takes man as the measure of all things and suggests that the material world is all there is. This is a cheat, however, and a cheap substitute for the divinity that God offers to us in Christ. In the false light of humanism, moreover, our beliefs about Jesus can quickly become fuzzy and cloud our true destiny, which is nothing less than eternal union with God Himself. Awareness of Eternity necessarily changes the way that we live in the present. And awareness of our divine destiny necessarily changes the way that we encounter God now. We also begin to understand how infinitely precious are our brothers and sisters, who are given the same share of God’s divinity, by grace, that we are given: to be bearers of God’s Holy Light. Yes, what we do in these material bodies matters, but it matters principally by how what we do in time belongs to Christ and so persists into Eternity. What that means, we are all still trying to understand, but one thing is certain: it begins with faith and then manifests itself in love.
