The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY

The delegates to the council assembled in the first instance in one of the chief buildings of Nicæa, apparently for the purpose of a thanksgiving and a religious reunion. Whether it was an actual church may be questioned. Christians, no doubt, there had been in Bithynia for some generations. Already in the second century Pliny had found them in such numbers that the temples were deserted and the sacrifices neglected. But it would seem that on this occasion a secular building was fitted up as a temporary house of prayer. At least the traditional account of the place where their concluding prayers were held exactly agrees with Strabo's account of the ancient gymnasium of Nicæa.

It was a large building, shaped like a basilica, with an apsis at one end, planted in the centre of the town, and thus commanding down each of the four streets a view of the four gates, and therefore called Mesomphalos, the "Navel" of the city. Whether, however, this edifice actually was a church or not, its use as such on this occasion served as a precedent for most of the later councils. From the time of the Council of Chalcedon, they have usually been held within the walls of churches. But for this the first council, the church, so far as it was a church, was only used as the beginning and the end. After these thanksgivings were over, the members of the assembly must have been collected according to the divisions which shall now be described.

The group which, above the rest, attracts our attention, is the deputation from the Church of Egypt. Shrill above all other voices, vehement above all other disputants, "brandishing their arguments," as it was described by one who knew them well, "like spears, against those who sate under the same roof and ate off the same table as themselves," were the combatants from Alexandria, who had brought to its present pass the question which the council was called to decide. Foremost in the group in dignity, though not in importance or in energy, was the aged Alexander, whose imprudent sermon had provoked the quarrel, and whose subsequent vacillation had encouraged it. He was the bishop, not indeed of the first, but of the most learned, see of Christendom. He was known by a title which he alone officially bore in that assembly. He was "the Pope." "The Pope of Rome" was a phrase which had not yet emerged in history. But "Pope of Alexandria" was a well-known dignity. Papa, that strange and universal mixture of familiar endearment and of reverential awe, extended in a general sense to all Greek presbyters and all Latin bishops, was the special address which, long before the name of patriarch or of archbishop, was given to the head of the Alexandrian Church.

In the Patriarchal Treasury at Moscow is a very ancient scarf or omophorion, said to have been given by the bishop of Nicæa in the seventeenth century to the czar Alexis, and to have been left to the Church of Nicæa by Alexander of Alexandria. It is white, and is rudely worked with a representation of the Ascension; possibly an allusion to the first Sunday of their meeting. This relic, true or false, is the nearest approach we can now make to the bodily presence of the old theologian. The shadow of death is already upon him; in a few months he will be beyond the reach of controversy.

But close beside the pope Alexander is a small insignificant young man, of hardly twenty-five years of age, of lively manners and speech, and of bright, serene countenance. Though he is but the deacon, the chief deacon, or archdeacon, of Alexander, he has closely riveted the attention of the assembly by the vehemence of his arguments. He is already taking the words out of the bishop's mouth, and briefly acting in reality the part he had before, as a child, acted in name, and that in a few months he will be called to act both in name and in reality. In some of the conventional pictures of the council his humble rank as a deacon does not allow of his appearance. But his activity and prominence behind the scenes made enemies for him there, who will never leave him through life. Anyone who had read his passionate invectives afterward may form some notion of what he was when in the thick of his youthful battles. That small, insignificant deacon is the great Athanasius.