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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It's setting rules that you, as a deacon and priest, you have to follow the direction of your particular bishop in your area, that if you're exiled or anathematized in one area of the church, one province, one bishopric, you can't just move next door, right, and then carry on being a priest over there. So a lot of that is laid down as that canon law. You know, I mentioned our celibacy of priests.
I mean, it's decided that priests can remain married there. They just can't live with any woman that they want to live with. Always an upright character, I think, is how they put it. Also about whether eunuchs can be priests, and it's decided they can be, but you can't castrate yourself, you know, you can't do that.
But if you've already gone through that process, you can become a priest and so on. So those are some of the other things that come out of Nicaea and laid down and sent round to churches. And that's why we have those to survive, right? They're sort of gathered together, and they're the things that are sent out and laid down and kept. I mean, we talk about this as the first ecumenical council.
And Eusebius of Caesars describes it in those terms. But so after this, and even before this, there were so many synods. And I've mentioned Constantius, the son of Constant. He tries to have lots of his own councils to go in a more Aryan direction, to reject a Nicaea. They're not then classed anymore as ecumenical councils, right?
Because they don't fit this list of what's decided as what is orthodox. But no, the Nicaea is doing a lot of different things. And You can see there this laying down of, maybe centralization isn't necessarily the right word, but the churches, what has the Christian church been?
I mean, the earliest churches that survive are from the 230s, these house churches, more informal churches, private gatherings. But now we've got Constantinus building churches, a visible display of of Christianity. You can see already there's this huge network of bishops. I mean, staggering really how Christianity was already organized in this way, even before Constantine's conversion.
And so really the structure was already in place, but now it's being more formularized, right? There's a sort of formal idea of what can be done. You know, once there's a rule, once the rule is decided, you can say, well, look, you're disobeying this rule. We all agreed this, right? We got together, we agreed it. And so let's all follow it.
It doesn't disappear. No, it doesn't disappear. I mean, it has immediate afterlife in that it becomes more successful in the short term because Constantius, Constantine's son, was educated by Eusebius of Nicomedea, who was the great Arian defender at Nicaea. And he's greatly embedded in the imperial court. And it's part, really, of exiling all sorts of Nicene people.
Athanasius goes, Eustathius of Antioch goes, you know, Marcellus of Ancyra, all these figures who are pro-Nicene figures actually get into trouble and lose their seas for a while. And so actually the Aryans gain ground. And it seems that Constantius is more interested in. And so Jerome has this line later on. He says, the world groaned to wake up and find itself Arian.
But really, Arianism was this short-term successor for a while. Then, of course, you've got Julian the Apostate and that sort of falls apart. And then we go back to Nicene, Empress Jovian, and then finally, Theodosius. I mean, also, Arianism has an interesting afterlife in two very different contexts. One, I always find really interesting,
is that through, I'm going to get his name wrong now, but it's Ulfila, a priest ordained by this Eusebius of Nicomedia. He is the apostle to the Goths. And so the Visigoths and the Vandals who sack Rome are actually Aryans. They're Aryan Christians at that time. But Arianism survives. And of course, you know, some great figures are in. The most famous Arian really is Isaac Newton.
So Isaac Newton is Arian. And he despises Athanasius. He thinks Athanasius was the Antichrist, that Nicaea, and obviously this was the beginning of the end of Christianity, has been destroyed from being a pure biblical religion where you look at this scripture, what it's conveying to you, to something that is corrupted by an immoral murderer and power-seeking Athanasius away from it.
And of course, you know, He wasn't public about that because of the Test and Cooperation Acts.
You know, in Britain, from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century, the Test and Cooperation Acts, which meant you had to sign up to not being an Aryan, to believing in the Trinity in the Nicene Way, to go to university, well, in Oxford and Cambridge, to have political office, to join the church. And this was to get rid of sort of variant of Aryanism, Unitarianism.
We just don't believe in the Trinity at all. I mean, Samuel Clarke is called Sir Isaac Newton's bulldog because of his argument with Gottfried Leibniz. He's called Arian or semi-Arian. Again, it's this interesting Arianism. We say it's called anti-Trinitarianism. That's what we now call things like Arianism. But of course, they do believe in the Trinity.
It's just they don't believe in the equality of the divine figures in the Trinity. That's the thing. They're not radical modalists or whatever that don't believe in it, or Unitarians who weren't of the Trinity. They're a particular type of Christian. So Aaronism, yeah, thrives for a little bit. But of course, Nicaea really has its great victory
at what's now known as Second Ecumenical Council, which is the one called by Theodosius in Constantinople in 381. And that's why the Nicene Creed that we have is the Niceno-Constantinople Creed, because that then goes further into the language of the Son, but also adds in the Holy Spirit and settles that. It's a slightly longer creed, but that's the Nicene Orthodoxies combined with that.
Now, of course, one last thing I should just mention, what then happens after all this is that a clause is added, which is called the philoque clause, which is to say the Holy Spirit doesn't just proceed from the Father, it proceeds from the Father and the Son. Because again, it emphasizes the equality, right? The Father and the Son are equal, so the Holy Spirit must come from both.
Now, the Eastern Church doesn't like that. So what becomes the schism between East and West where they finally divide in 1054? The schism is over the clause that is added to the same creed about whether or not the equality of the Father and the Son is such that the Holy Ghost also proceeds from both Father and Son rather than just the Father.
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