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At first sight the reaction which followed the Nicene council is one of the strangest scenes in history. The decision was clear and all but unanimous. Arianism seemed crushed for ever by the universal reprobation of the Christian world. Yet it instantly renewed the contest, and fought its conquerors on equal terms for more than half a century.
The moderation of Jovian, who recommended concord and charity, and referred the disputants to the sentence of a future council, was interpreted as a symptom of indifference: but his attachment to the Nicene creed was at length discovered and declared, by the reverence which he expressed for the celestial virtues of the great Athanasius.
There is a passage in the address of the eastern bishops to Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople, quoted in the Second Nicene Council of 789, the Seventh General, which cites the words of Justinian given above in one of his laws.
Therefore superior powers may convocate councils. 3. Christian magistrates called the four general councils: Constantine the first Nicene council; Theodosius, senior, the first council of Constantinople; Theodosius, junior, the first Ephesian council; Marcian Emperor, the Chalcedon council; and, 4. Hereunto antiquity subscribes, as Dr. Whitaker observes.
It marks for us on the one hand the victory of Christianity over paganism in the Roman empire, and on the other the ominous admixture of foreign, political, and military interests with it. We need not be surprised that in the Nicene age so great a revolution and transition should have been clothed with a supernatural character.
Therefore he produced by degrees a series of hymns, which he described as designed to be sung between the Nicene Creed and the Sermon, and to be connected in some degree with the Collects and Gospels for the day.
I was shut up to obey and believe God rather than man, and from the nature of the case, the profoundest respect for my brother's judgment could not in itself alter mine. As to the whole Church being against me, I did not know what that meant: I was willing to accept the Nicene Creed, and this I thought ought to be a sufficient defensive argument against the Church.
Sect. 14. Those who speak out more plainly than Bishop Lindsey, do here object to us, that reverence is due to the sacrament, and that we ourselves do reverence it when we sit uncovered at the receiving of it. But Didoclavius doth well distinguish betwixt veneration and adoration, because in civility we use to be uncovered, even to inferiors and equals, for the regard which we bear to them, yet do we not worship them as we worship the king, on our knees. As, then, in civility, there is a respect and reverence different from adoration, so it is in religion also. Yea, Bellarmine himself distinguisheth the reverence which is due to holy things from adoration. Paybody and Dr Burges will by no means admit this distinction betwixt veneration and adoration. But since neither of them hath alleged any reason against it, I hope they will be weighed down by the authority of the Archbishop of Spalato, and the Bishop of Edinburgh, both of whom agree to this distinction. So, then, we give no adoration at all to the sacrament, because neither by any outward or inward action do we perform any worship for the honour of the same. Burges himself hath noted to us, that the first Nicene council exhorteth that men should not be humiliter intenti to the things before them. We neither submit our minds nor humble our bodies to the sacrament, yet do we render to it veneration, forasmuch as we esteem highly of it, as a most holy thing, and meddle reverently with it, without all contempt or unworthy usage. Res profecto inanimatae, saith the Archbishop of Spalato, sint sacrae quantum placet, alium honorem
A Nicene policy might answer in the West, but it was not likely to find much support in the East outside Egypt. The only alternative was to favour the Semiarians; and even that was full of difficulties. After all, the Homoeans were still the strongest party in 365.
It was not the Logos of the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and adored; and thus he instituted a separation between nature and revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ, is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ.
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