A FB meme included this phrase, which needs an answer on itself, so, I didn't comment, I ran over here:
In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite the divergent Christian streams and create a unique religion at the service of the Empire.*
Nope.
What about:
In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and create a unique religion at the service of the Empire.
Nope.
How about:
In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and reunite this unique religion at the service of the Empire.
No.
Here is the actual truth. Or close enough:
In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and reunite this unique religion.
Nothing about "in the service of the Empire", nothing about creating a new religion, nothing about uniting many different divergent streams.
Actually, the very fact that he gathered bishops and that they were in communion with each other up to the point where some (by this time) non-bishops were condemned, should be a give-away.
Constantine didn't create the Communion, it existed. The penalty of excommunication also existed.
It has often been applied "mutually" if both sides had bishops. This is how Novatians and Cornelians treated each other some decades earlier. Cornelians are the ones known as Catholics (but the Orthodox are also Cornelians), while Novatians died out.
No, they didn't die out because Constantine had them banned. They didn't die out because they were invited to Nicea and got banned by other bishops. They were too unimportant by 325 for Nicaea to deal with them in any way. In a few decades, Cornelians had won the day. By 325, the Novatians were no longer a serious threat to Christian unity. Montanists had died out even earlier.
How about Sabellians? Let's check wiki:
Hippolytus of Rome knew Sabellius personally, writing how he and others had admonished Sabellius in Refutation of All Heresies. He knew Sabellius opposed Trinitarian theology, yet he called Modal Monarchism the heresy of Noetus, not that of Sabellius.
The point is, Sabellianism was already condemned. Arius and Athanasius agreed that Sabellianism was wrong. Arius even would seem to have considered Sabellianism are wronger than Athanasius did.
Simonetti sees Arianism "as an extreme reaction against a Sabellianism which was at the time rife in the East."[10]: 95 Arianism advocated three hypostases. The Trinitarian view also presents three distinct persons within the Godhead,[11] but while Arianism taught three distinct substances, the Trinity doctrine asserts that the three Persons exist in one substance.**
And the fact that Arius and Athanasius, while going to Nicaea in 325 to advocate each his views, were both relying on a condemnation older than Nicaea and its canons is proof enough that the unity was not imposed by Constantine, it was already there. His sole innovation was asking that bishops of all the Church should decide, not just the local ones in Alexandria or the central one in Rome. As the Apostles had already had a council in Acts 15, and the Apostles were the very first bishops, this was not a total novum and could therefore be accepted by the Church.
And here is how one can give a really correct statement:
In year 325, during the Council of Nicea, Constantine the Great gathered bishops to unite two Christian streams and reunite this unique religion. But the bishops, knowing the unity had not been broken by Arius stepping out of doctrine, simply did what they always had done, condemned the heretic.
Constantine so spectacularly failed to "unite" Orthodox (a k a Catholics) with Arians, that the latter took some time persecuting Catholics, once Constantine and his respect for the decision of Nicaea were gone, in 337. For instance, St. Athanasius, the star of Nicaea, was deprived of his episcopal see in Alexandria in favour of the intruder George.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8.XII.2025
Conceptio Immaculata gloriosae semper Virginis Genitricis Dei Mariae, quam fuisse praeservatam, singulari Dei privilegio, ab omni originalis culpae labe immunem, Pius Nonus, Pontifex Maximus, hac ipsa recurrente die, solemniter definivit.
* Only the first version is the actual quote. The rest are my modifications, to arrive at a statement that's describing the same historic reality, but in accurate terms. ** Footnotes 10 and 11 are: 10) Hanson, Richard Patrick Crosland (1988). The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318-381. T. & T. Clark. ISBN 978-0-567-09485-8. 11) G. T. Stokes, "Sabellianism", ed. William Smith and Henry Wace, A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines (London: John Murray, 1877–1887), 567.
