Dr. Dafydd Daniel
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Dafydd Daniel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So it's been a period of unrest for the Empire Amateur Church and persecution for Christians, which does feed into Nicaea, because part of the struggle, sort of internal politics of the church, and part of Constantine's concern, is the fact that after those periods of persecution, you have certain Christian groups coming. are claiming to be the true church.
And this is most famously with the Donatists in Africa. I mean, one of Constantine's first acts in 314, so even before he's in towards Nicaea, is to have the Council of Arles, which is to try and quiet these Donatists. So the Donatists oppose people who apostatized during the persecution. They surrendered the Bible, surrendered their faith. Now they want to come back into the church.
and the Donatists refusing. And the same thing is happening in Egypt with a chap called Militius. And so the Militians are also this group that don't necessarily seem suspect in their orthodoxy, unlike Arius and others that we'll come to, but they are claiming to be the real church of the spiritual church, the church of saints. So again, there's a threat of schism and separation.
Yes. Yeah, exactly right. No, exactly right. I mean, the status of Christianity, even as a religion in the empire, has been much debated, right? It's only in that Edict of Milan that Christianity actually becomes officially recognized as a religion. I mean, that's part of a significant stage, right? It's not even viewed as religion at that point.
And yes, as you say, there's unrest about the status of the church, the status of Christianity. Is it a suspect cult? Is it something serious or not? Even before this point, You've had the persecution of Decius in 250s. After that is what's known as the little piece of the church, the sort of 40 years or so between that persecution and the great persecution.
And then we've got this, the Emperor Aurelian, and he is already asked to try and decide a controversy about another heresy, which is still being debated at the time of the Nicene Church.
which is known as Sibelianism, with this extraordinary character, Paul of Samosata, who's a bishop of Antioch, who claims the privilege of the Queen Zenobia, who's sort of a next part of Egypt and Syria from the empire. So yeah, already the empire has been involved in trying to decide what's going on.
And of course, like it was back, you know, the earliest record that we have of Christianity even being discussed is Pliny with Trajan, you know, saying he's found these odd people, you know, I've tortured them anyway. Now what should I do with them now?
That's right.
It's an extraordinary story, isn't it? And, you know, much debated how much truth there is in this and how it relates to wider sort of political motivations for Christian conversion as well as anything else. But Constantine is about to fight this battle against Maxentius and has this vision of a sign in the sky and this line, in this sign, conquer.
and later has a dream, a dream of Christ coming to him. This is how it's relayed by Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea, both of whom knew Constantine personally. The sign in question is the Cairo symbol. The Cairo symbol is just the first two letters of Christos in Greek. It's an X with a big P sticking out the top of the X. And Constantine makes this his symbol, right?
He puts it on his standards, on his shield, and fights with this and wins an extraordinary victory. It's not clear why Maxentius comes out to fight even at such an exposed area and so wins. And so because that Constantine thanks the Christian God, you know, dedicates the victory to it, thinks it's come from that, and carries on using this symbol.
It's said that Licinius lived in great fear of it, you know, at this later battle, Chrysopolis 324. It's sort of pagan symbols of Licinius against this symbol Cairo symbol. So what's his real view of Christianity? I mean, it's clearly, it seems to have been a monotheist, right?
So it seems to have believed in one God and seems like a lot of people in the ancient world too, and not least Christians themselves, have had the view that you may have sort of natural revelation of God and then further revelation of him. So there's no inconsistent to say, well, the sun God is revealed as actually being this other one God, this Christian God.
And then you take Christianity very seriously. As I mentioned, the Council of Isles very early on when he's deciding about Donatist, but St. Peter's Basilica right in Rome, that's 318, starts to build that. Then 330 establishes Constantinople as a new capital. That's sort of festooned with all those Christian buildings. It's a vibrant pluralist sense of religion, isn't it?
That religion can appear in different forms, as long as it's peaceful. The particular religion that you worship in this case, Christianity for Constantine, he doesn't have to repeal the Edict of Milan, which is about freedom of religious worship and convert to a Christian. That's sort of what I'm trying to get across, I suppose.
Yes, so he does call the council and seems to preside over it in some form, interjecting the debate, so far as we can tell. He feels bound to call it, as far as we can tell from the documents we have from the time. It's not that he's very interested in going back to your point about hedging the bets. No, he's very interested in the theological question. that's at issue.
In fact, he thinks it's ridiculous as far as we tell that, you know, we should stop messing around and introducing disorder debates over this sort of minute and obscure, you know, theologians of any age, I suppose, can find something to disagree over. They need to not to bother with that sort of stuff just to keep peace in the church. So His interest definitely in peaceableness, in order.
I mean, Eusebius dubs him bishop of those outside the church. So he's not an official churchman, not baptized, of course, as he isn't until he's just before he dies. But he's responsible for those who are believers. Another way of putting it, I suppose, is that what Constantine represents is the laity, right? The voice of the laity coming into Christian affairs. They should be represented.
They should have a sense of it because you can't allow... theologians to entangle things in endless debates, especially when those debates spill over into civic disorder.
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